|
I. Introduction
To those of us whose passion for the growth of the World
Wide Web is exceeded only by the marketing possibilities
that emerge from that growth, the Internet has become a
playground for the imagination. There is a large number
of marketers, however, who are fascinated by the Web but
approach its marketing capabilities more out of
necessity than lifestyle. The Internet's capacity has
advanced in so many areas in the past few years that
marketers playing catch-up are at a significant
disadvantage. Marketing directors and account managers
with traditional media backgrounds need to expand their
breadth of knowledge in order to make informed decisions
in today's e-commerce. This article provides
clarification surrounding the fairly recent buzzword
"Web 2.0" and focuses on the evolution and future of the
search engine born occupation of Search Engine
Optimization (SEO). SEO and its implications are
expanding so fast and in so many directions that it has
never been more important for C level professionals and
traditionally oriented marketers to fully understand the
world of Internet search.
II. Search Engines: A Brief History
When the first search engines began cataloging the World
Wide Web in the mid-1990s, obtaining a high rank on
search engine results pages (SERP) was not particularly
difficult or secretive. It was the webmasters who
submitted URLs to the engines and communicated a page's
relevancy to a keyword search through keyword meta tags
in the HTML code. Early engines, like AltaVista,
struggled with providing relevant search results because
webmasters, who were paid on a cost-per-impression basis
at the time, wrote inaccurate meta tags using high
search volume keywords in order to increase visits to
their websites. It was Google who finally answered the
call for a more complex ranking algorithm that would
greatly improve the relevancy of SERPs. Sergey Brin and
Larry Page, the founders of Google, invented the concept
of PageRank, an algorithm which helps rank web pages
based on the probability that a random person surfing
the Internet will find a given page. The PageRank
algorithm assigns a numerical value to each web page by
analyzing the quantity and quality of the pages that
link back to a given page. Known as a backlink, each
link represents a vote for the page it links to by the
page on which the link appears. The significance of each
vote depends on how relevant the page giving the link is
to the page receiving the link, as well as the PageRank
of the linking page. Along with the changing search
engines continually trying to provide more relevant
search results to the user, the entire Web has been
evolving to meet the needs of the massive Internet
population. In conjunction with the growth of the
Internet and the popularity of search, a unique
profession known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was
born. SEO tactics and skills have evolved alongside the
changing Internet, but such changes have never been as
significant as the most recent. We have entered into a
second phase of the Internet, and as a result SEO is
taking on a new face. This second generation of the
Internet, often referred to as Web 2.0, has moved away
from the old model -- based on static websites, clicks,
and impressions -- and burst onto a cyber playing field
built around communities, participation and open
cooperation towards better products and services. An
unprecedented level of interaction between consumers,
businesses, and interest groups exists in this new Web.
Due to the existence of a new social presence, vehicles
for driving organic traffic to one's website have
expanded far beyond the major search engines. Many of
these new tactics also provide additional avenues of
incoming traffic, which has significantly expanded the
big picture view of the SEO professional. In order to
grasp the fundamental principles of the creativity and
perspective now required of SEO, it is important to get
a better understanding of the new Web 2.0 environment.
III. Web 2.0: The New Internet
Defining or labeling the new Internet is often met with
a considerable amount of critique due to the expansive
reach of such a description. There are so many different
things that have changed about the Internet in the past
several years; a concise definition is difficult to come
by. In addition, the term Web 2.0, while perhaps the
most accurate term, is typically scoffed at by the
skeptical industry veteran who is wary of a vendor or
brass employee attempting to sound Internet savvy. The
World Wide Web has existed for almost twenty years. What
is so significant about the changes in the last few
years that distinguish the current Web as an upgrade
from its previous omnipotent self? The simple answer to
this question is you. Web 2.0 represents the user's
needs, hopes, and desires finally manifesting into a
definable force of "voluntary motivation." The
blogosphere, social networks, wikis, and other new forms
of expression on the Internet have captured the Web
population by harnessing their goals, skills, and
interests onto a platform of collaborative creation and
production. Websites are reflecting an up-to-the-minute
common voice rather than a collection of static
informational documents. The Web has never before
experienced this level of effective interaction between
its users, and that reason alone warrants its 2.0
designation. Ease of self-expression, now apparent on
the Internet through the popularity of websites like
MySpace and YouTube, is generating massive amounts of
original content. Critics of this tremendous increase in
creativity and public opinion complain about the
dilution of reliable quality content on the Internet.
Many social networks, however, naturally weed out
undesirable content, and promote popular, well
referenced content to the top of searches. In Web 2.0,
popular content emerges via a user-generated ranking
system that determines the positioning of articles by
the number of user votes they receive. This model was
made most popular by Digg.com, which joins several
community-based popularity websites like Slashdot.com
and Reddit.com in providing a user-edited resource for
finding news stories, blog entries and other websites.
In Web 2.0, up-to-date, reliable content is produced by
the editing abilities of the wiki. Wikipedia, the
Internet's user-written and -edited encyclopedia, boasts
an accuracy level not far from the widely accepted
Encyclopedia Britannica. In a study that compared
forty-two science entries in both resources, Wikipedia
had only four inaccuracies per entry compared to
Britannica's three. Social network websites in the new
Internet also have a way of allowing like-minded people
to find each other's favorite content through a system
called social bookmarking. Del.icio.us.com is the most
popular example of a social bookmarking website. This
system of classification, known as folksonomy, involves
users assigning labels, or tags, in the form of
keywords, to content on the web. Through this
collaborative form of tagging, web content becomes
grouped by recognizable categories. Continuous tagging
and creation of categories by users increases the
content's ability to be searched by a wider range of
people. This social phenomenon happens "because stable
patterns emerge in tag proportions [allowing] minority
opinions [to] coexist alongside extremely popular ones
without disrupting the nearly stable consensus choices
made by many users." Such websites are considered
"social" because of the nature in which users' bookmarks
are publicly shared for other users to browse and
discover what people find interesting.
IV. SEO Linking Strategy in Web 2.0
The Blogosphere & RSS
The common SEO adage continues to be valid in the 2.0
world: content is king. It is the content boundaries and
means for dispatching content that have truly taken SEO
to another level. Since the inception of the blogosphere
-- a term that describes all blogs as a social network
of public opinion -- rumblings of the people's voice via
the Internet have quickly risen to a powerful roar.
Beginning in the form of an online diary in the mid 90s,
the blog has since developed into a simple vehicle of
communication for anyone who desires to send content
across the Web. The dissemination of information through
blogging has become so mainstream that one can find a
blog from an authority source on virtually any topic.
The blogosphere, centered on the concept of original
content, has provided a link rich venue for the SEO to
plan his or her linking strategy surrounding good
content. So what is "good content," and what does it
have to do with good linking strategy in Web 2.0? In
this new era of the Internet, good content is viral.
Whether this content is a written article, a homemade
video or a podcast, if it grabs, provokes or tickles the
user, it will travel, and it will travel fast. From the
content's eye-view, the Internet has become much easier
to navigate following the advent of Really Simple
Syndication (RSS). RSS allows for a program called an
aggregator (or feed reader) to notify users of new
content added to a website, retrieve that new content,
and present it to the user in an easy-to-use interface.
RSS and blogging go hand-in-hand because of the
constantly updating nature of the blog. As a result of
RSS, people are discovering new content on the Internet,
passing it along, and linking to it at an unprecedented
rate.
Baiting the Link The SEO practice of producing content
in hopes that people will link to it from their own
website is known as "link baiting." Good link bait has
the same qualities as good content. From a well written
controversial article to a video clip of a bulldog on a
skateboard, website owners will link to any and all
content as long as it is interesting and catches
people's attention. There are no boundaries surrounding
the types of content one can use to bait a link. In
fact, the very name of a new kind of link baiting
suggests an indefinable quality. This new link baiting
tactic is called "widget baiting." Nick Wilson, CEO and
senior strategist of the social media market agency
Clickinfluence, declared that "the holy grail of
linkbaiting in 2007 will be the widget." Creating a
popular widget could, in some cases, outweigh traffic
from the major search engines. One example of traffic
generated by a widget is a blog editor Firefox extension
created by the professional blogging company,
Performancing, that received close to half a million
downloads when it was first released. The brand
awareness that widgets can promote has also made
advertisers extremely enthusiastic. One would be hard
pressed to find a better method of exposure than a logo
attached to a button that sits in front of a user's eyes
daily. Widgets can be downloaded to the desktop, so the
user does not even have to have an internet browser open
to be exposed to the advertising. While all interactive
marketers will recognize the widget as an effective
marketing tactic, in most cases, due to the linking and
organic traffic potential, it will be the SEO who is
best suited to orchestrate the creation and
implementation of the widget. In Web 2.0, effective
linking strategy must include widget baiting.
V. Social Media Optimization: A Piece of the SEO Puzzle
In this new age of the Internet, people have been quick
to deviate from the title Search Engine Optimization
when describing the organic promotion of a website. In
August 2006, Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing
for Ogilvy Public Relations, coined the phrase Social
Media Optimization (SMO) and defined it as the
following:
[The act of implementing] changes to optimize a site so
that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in
social media searches on custom search engines (such as
Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant
posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.
On one hand, Bhargava's point is well taken. If the
tasks one is performing to drive traffic to a website
are not intended to do so by improving search engine
rankings, but rather by building a presence in social
networks, than perhaps SEO is not the appropriate
definition of their occupation. There is no doubt that
SEO has undergone, and will continue to undergo, a
certain level of compartmentalization. As different
areas of SEO continue to experience the growth of
specialized services, such as blogging, widget baiting
and social networking, the future SEO will spend a large
part of his or her time moderating and collaborating
with more outsourcing opportunities that are not, by
themselves, SEO related. In the end, however, SEO is a
sum of its parts, and from the perspective of a company
looking to pay for SEO services, all methods of driving
organic traffic will reside under the umbrella of Search
Engine Optimization. To read the last four sections of
this white paper -- Usability vs. Searchability: The RIA
Search Challenge, Google's Personalized Search: The End
of Traditional SEO?, Search Behavior R&D: Customized
Engines and Long Tail Keywords, and the Conclusion --
visit the following URL to download the PDF version of
the paper: http://www.bkv.com/search-engine-optimization.jsp
In light of the recent news floating around the web that
Internet Explorer's market share has reached an all-time
low (Techworld.com - Internet Explorer usage continues
to fall), I thought I would share with you my own highs
and lows as an SEO searching for the best browser
set-up.
Up until the first release of the Google toolbar, I had
always been a loyal Safari user. Safari's speed,
built-in RSS reader, and it's pop-up blocker were all
great selling points for me. But when the Google Toolbar
was released, I was less than pleased to learn that they
hadn't released a version for Safari users. I found my
way around it, as I outlined in Toolbars, Desktop Search
and Mac Users, and was pleased with my setup until
Google released the Toolbar for Firefox.
I downloaded and tried my hand with the Firefox browser.
It was very fast, Open Source and incredibly
customizeable with a myriad of add-ons, not just the
Google Toolbar. But as an avid Apple user - some even
refer to me as an Apple evangelist - it takes a lot more
than just a Toolbar and some fancy buttons to pull me
from my beloved Apple-made Safari. To me, it just wasn't
enough and I switched back to Safari.
Then, a couple of months ago, I read about a new
browser, Flock. It had features galore, and a library
full of add-ons to customize the application. As an avid
blogger, what caught my attention was the built-in blog
editor, so I downloaded the application and gave it a
whirl. I fell in love and wrote about it: Amazing New
Browser - Flock!
Soon enough I did realize there were some problems with
Flock, though, such as the fact that it was a RAM hog,
and because it is still in beta, it crashed often. But I
continued to use it for it's blogging features, Flickr
integration, and the built-in newsreader.
Until yesterday. As I sifted through my RSS feeds,
reading the latest in tech news, I saw a lot of people
talking about the latest Firefox release. I read a lot
of great reviews and decided to give Firefox another
try. So I updated my older version of Firefox and sifted
through the thousands upon thousands of add-ons and
extensions for the program and finally found a setup
that made my job as a blogger, an SEO and a business
owner a lot easier. Here's how I have it set-up:
1. I installed the extension called Performancing for
blogging. This blog editor is far more powerful than the
built-in blog tool for Flock and the Blogger button on
the Google Toolbar. It also allows for the addition of
technorati tags, saving posts as drafts or "notes". You
can blog with multiple blogs and multiple blogging
platforms. It supports technorati searching to find out
who links to your blog right in your editor. You can
also sign up for a Performancing Metrics account to
track your blog statistics and view them within your
editor as well. It has a del.ici.ous tab with which you
can post bookmarks to your del.ici.ous account. This
tool also saves your blogging history so you can go
back, read and make reference to previous articles you
posted with Performancing. This is absolutely invaluable
to an SEO, as any good search marketer knows how
fruitful blogging can be, especially with the addition
of technorati tags and del.ici.ous bookmarks.
For more info on Performancing, see the Firefox
extension page or the Performancing web site.
2. Of all the different news reading add-ons you can get
for Firefox, I find Sage to be, by far, the best. It is
closest to Flock's integrated newsreader, in that you
can organize your feeds into different folders, but it
exceeds it in it's sheer speed and layout.
I find that with a lot of newsreader extensions for
Firefox, they slow the application down. Sage seems to
make no difference whatsoever. Switching between feeds,
closing or opening the Sage sidebar, or navigating away
from your feeds are all done swiftly without even so
much as a second of delay. Sage's layout is easy-to-use,
clean and reminds me a bit of Apple's Mail application.
It's divided into 3 panels: one is a list of feeds, the
next a list of posts in the selected feed and the third
is either the actual feed page with descriptions of each
item, or any web page you have navigated to while Sage
is open. You can import any OPML file so you can keep
track of the same feeds you do in any other newsreader
without having to enter all the addresses again, and
with the feed search tool you can alos find new feeds to
add to your list - something that is quite dangerous for
me, being as I already devote much of my life to reading
RSS feeds. This tool helps me in the search engine
optimization industry by keeping me up-to-date with such
blogs as the Official Google Blog, MSN, Yahoo! and Matt
Cutts' blog about Google and search. It keeps me
informaed about where the industry is headed, what new
techniques people are using and it gives me one heck of
a lot of fodder to post to Gridlock or Groupthink about.
And as all good SEOs know, content is king.
For more information on Sage, visit the Sage extension
page or the Sage web site.
3. There are a lot of Firefox extensions out there to
help search engine marketers, and yes, I downloaded and
tried them all. Of course. But I find there are only two
SEO tools available for Firefox that are really worth
it. The first is, obviously, the Google Toolbar. MSN and
Yahoo! have released toolbars as well, but we all know
the search engine to conquer is Google being as it has a
majority market share that just keeps growing. The value
of seeing the Pagerank of every page you navigate to is
immeasureable.
The second tool I find useful is the SEOpen Toolbar.
This gives you drop-down menus with which you can view
the backlinks, the indexed pages, translation of the
page, the Pagerank and much much more, for Google, MSN,
Yahoo! and Alexa. It also allows you to check all of
this at once with the Mass Check tool. On top of this
there is another drop down menu that features other
tools such as a DMOZ check, a link analyzer, a keyword
density anlayzer, HTML Validator, Whois and a lot more.
While there are other extensions that let you do a lot
of this with even more, such as meta tag analyzers, etc.
they tend to take up a lot more valuable browsing real
estate, and/or they don't work entirely well.
For more info on the SEOpen Toolbar, please see the
SEOpen Toolbar extension page or the SEOpen web site.
4. This is an absolutely great tool. Called LinkChecker,
when selected, it checks the links on the page you're
viewing to see if they all work. Simple but incredibly
handy.
More info on the LinkChecker extension page or the
LinkChecker web site.
5. Many of you in the SEO industry know how tedious it
can be to submit your clients web sites to directory
after directory. Copy/paste, copy/paste and so on and so
forth. I have found a few tools in the past that has
help made this process a little faster such as the
Scribbler widget for the Yahoo! Widget Engine, Snippets
for Flock, and a few more that help with the copying of
multiple items. However, for Firefox there are two great
extensions that go above and beyond just simple copying
and pasting multiple items. InFormEnter is much like
autofill in that it will fill out entire forms for you,
but with a few extras. You can organize different form
information into different profiles - so useful for the
SEO who works with multiple clients, multiple web sites
and multiple submission details. You can also add your
own fields. In other words, unlike Autofill, InFormEnter
is not limited to name, phone, address and email. You
can add your web site descriptions, URLs, keywords, and
anything else under the sun you find yourself having to
enter repeatedly into web forms.
For more information on InFormEnter visit the
InFormEnter extension page or the InFormEnter web site.
A similar tool is called Clippings. It adds a small
button to your status bar in Firefox and allows you to
organize endless clippings into Folders. This can be
great for quoting other web sites, keeping notes, and
filling in the same form information over and over much
like InFormEnter.
For more information on Clippings, visit the Clippings
extension page or the Clippings web site.
6. The last few extensions are just for fun, but still
examples of how versataille Firefox really is. Pickup is
and extension that allows you to upload and tag photos
to your photo sharing account, such as Flickr, and
FoxyTunes is an extension that allows you to operate
iTunes from within your browser window.
More info on Pickup. More info on FoxyTunes.
There are a lot of other great things about Firefox,
such as the ability to change the look of the program
with different themes, it's lightning fast compared to
IE or Flock, it supports tabbed browsing, organization
of bookmarks and of course, it's Open Source. But as an
SEO, nothing at all compares to the tools available for
it. This setup in Firefox can literally shave my work
time in half. And all of it is available for both
Windows and Mac users.
|
