Colin's Corner

Capturing Consumer Buzz

An industry colleague, Greg Jarboe who is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine promotion company that recently launched a News Blog focused on the top stories in search engine optimization and public relations has written an excellent report Blogs, Boards, and Posts: Capturing Consumer Buzz Online covering the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference held in NYC.

The importance of monitoring customer comments was clearly laid out by Gary Stein, senior analyst JupiterResearch who presented research that found when users search for companies, 26% of the results are content generated by consumers, 22% by experts, 18% by corporate sources, 12% by media, and 22% by other sources. In other words, when prospects search for your company, the top 10 listings are likely to include:

    •     3 listings from consumer posts to blogs, message boards, and opinion sites
    •     2 listings from experts
    •     2 listings from your own corporate site
    •     1 listing from an online publication
    •     2 listings from other sources

While virtually all SEO's monitor the ranking of the two corporate listings and most PR departments monitor their press clippings, very few marketers monitor what is being said by consumers on blogs, message boards and opinion sites. What is needed, said Stein, is a Dynamic Attitude Analysis Tool, a way of making opinions measurable and actionable for marketing.

SEO for CEOs

If SEO is bit of a mystery then make sure you check out this good primer on "Search engine optimization for CEOs".

The article concludes: It is highly unlikely that one person can create a website, select the proper keywords, prepare the copywriting and develop the statements that will convert visitors to buyers! It usually takes a team of people, and it is critical to follow the processes [outlined in the article] in order to secure high placement within search engine results. Your website must contain the right keyword phrases as they are the foundation of your online business model. These keyword phrases must be used in sentences that make sense and relate to the visitors as well as the search engine spiders that are reading, indexing and ranking your website. You have two “masters” to serve.

Relevant inbound links are extremely important. Quality and high-ranking sites pointing to your website will increase search engine ranking. Relevant sites linking to your web pages will result in a site [or page] that search engines feel deserves to be ranked high in the page results. You can never have too many quality inbound links. Finally, stay involved. Ask your team the hard questions. Make sure you don’t leave the creation and maintenance of web page content to chance.

If you are in NYC 28th February to March 3rd, check out the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2005.

SEO Guide

Search engines rank pages by varying formulas that are supposed to figure out which pages are the most relevant for the search at hand. Relevant and reciprocal cross linking helps improve the likelihood of improved rankings by the search engines. A basic introduction to Search Engine Optimization can be found at Pandia Search Central

Other recommended sites include:
SEO Best Practices
Search Engine Watch  
Search Engine Guide
High Rankings Advisor 
I Help You
About.com Search Guide

Given the importance of traffic being generated to the IDG websites by the search engines, it is strongly recommended that all business units that have a significant online component train up members of their web team to be SEO experts and consider using the resources of an outside specialist to ensure web pages are properly designed to be search engine friendly.

A lot of success can be achieved by ensuring your web pages are coded properly and that your web pages contain the appropriate keywords and phrases in the title, header tags, description meta tags (unique for each page) and body copy. Make important words stand out by using the <strong> rather than <bold> tag.

Search Engine Optimization needs to be a critical part of any web strategy.