SEO Toys

I recently received an email from a colleague asking about the accuracy of Google link reports which reports so many less links than does Yahoo. My immediate question was about the quality of those links regardless of the number. It reminded me of the old antiwar slogan, "The one with the most toys, wins". Does the site with the most links, win?

It got me thinking about what Google is really looking for and I realized that Google takes a top down knowledge management approach to the internet and so should we. In short, Google gets it... must be the reason for their resounding success.

And so I concluded in my response "More important than the number of links, for Google is the quality of back links specifically in terms of relevancy. Bottom line, Google is looking for a network or community of links that contain relevant content. It’s not a test to see who has the most links but high quality links(although you will be rewarded for lots of high quality links) validating your site’s contribution to a particular body of knowledge on the internet through mutual recognition by sites with common interest or “Communities of Interest”. After all, search is in fact an exercise in knowledge management and Google recognizes that.

SEO

I am living and breathing SEO of late. I'm all for organic search for it remains one of the best and most inexpensive ways of marketing your information/business on the web. Once you understand how the spiders weave their way through your site and you design your site and content accordingly, your site will climb it's way to the top of the SERPs.

Optimizing your content for high rankings in a search is very much like conducting a search yourself. You use specific key terms and phrases as well as their synonyms to narrow your search to the most targeted and useful results. Likewise, when selecting keywords and phrases to include in your titles, tags, headlines and content you select terms that are specific to your industry and topic, using contextually common terms while avoiding “lingo”.

The crawler interprets meta tags and content in much the same way we read but it is not yet capable of conceptual interpretation. It is sensitive to keyword stuffing yet a natural flow or repetition of keywords throughout a page or article is not only acceptable but desired. Any given word or phrase however should not exceed over 2% of your content for the sake of Google algorithms. The crawler places particular emphasis on a keyword enriched title which appears as the first 64 characters in a search results placement of your URL.

The meta description also appears in the search results which enhances the opportunity for a click-through to your editorial content. A keyword rich meta description will not only increase the likelihood of click on your content but increases the ranking of your content for two of the major engines – Yahoo and MSN.

Also, crawlers read html and are incapable of reading content that appears as a gif, jpg or java file. This problem of unoptimizable content is overcome with the use of the alt tag which allows you, the editor, to provide a keyword rich text description of an image or script.

Personas

Identity marketing...it's the commercialization of ego...and it begins at an early age, you know Coke or Pepsi? Verizon or Sprint? PC or Mac? Prius or Humvee? Red Socks or Yankees? Red State or Blue State? As members of a consumer culture we closely align our identities to the brands (yes, even political brands) we use as well as define ourselves by the brands we reject. For instance, since I was a child, I was Coca Cola... it symbolized all that was right about life...including the 20th century Santa... and Pepsi? Well!Those who drank Pepsi might just as well have been worshippers of the devil. We(my family) didn't drink Pepsi...this further protected me from who I wasn't. You can imagine my shock when I discovered several years back that I preferred Pepsi!

In no way is the choice between Coke and Pepsi of the same import as the choice between Prius and Humvee; Coke/Pepsi is a question of taste with a broad socio-economic base, Prius/Humvee a choice with a more narrow economic base identifying with distinct social, cultural and political ideologies.These complexities in choice lead the marketer to the development of personas.

A new twist on electronic marketing...

On Thursday, February 1, a new form of electronic marketing was let loose on an unsuspecting world. 38 strange black panels with small lites depicting a cartoon character were strategically placed throughout Boston as they had in nine other US cities in the past two weeks. http://youtube.com/watch?v=J3xaZDWl51U

Arguably, this form of guerrilla marketing was in fact more successful in Boston than in the rest of the cities where the lit panels seem to go virtually unnoticed. But in Boston, there was quite an uproar complete with criminal charges and a demand that Turner Broadcasting reimburse the city for tying up the city's emergency personnel The performance artists hired to place the panels were questioned by the press and volunteered to take only questions about hair in the 70s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2fGzmphx4U&NR

Wow! You couldn't ask for better exposure. I had no idea who or what Aqua Teen Hunger Force was nor would I have cared but now...

Yes, the medium is the message!

The way of the dinosaur.????

What will become of printed media? Can electronic media replace it's forebearers? Have you been in a Barnes and Noble recently? The internet just can't replace the human tactile experience and the community of brick and mortar...the smell of coffee, the smell of books, the wonderful organic white noise of those around us, the feel of the paper, the weight, the shape of the volume. It's an experience not to be duplicated and users of all shapes and sizes and colors take part without the restrictions of dogma.

And this is true for marketing communications as well. Imagine a sales manager visiting a customer with nothing but a url. Not quite adding value to the relationship, eh? And trade shows... as much as we all love the bells and whistles, we're not happy until we fill our bags with information...full color, glossy...and lug it back to the office with us.

Don't get me wrong. As a practicing marketing professional, I'm very excited by all communications electronic and they are very effective...very. But I'm relieved that they co-exist and compliment and will not replace the printed piece...not into the foreseeable future.

Trust

Blogs have pulled the curtain on the Great Oz...the corporation has become somewhat transparent as a result. Hmmm... allow customers to tell their "story" about their use of your product or service, positive or negative. Is this marketing genius?

Look at it this way. Users have been dealing with software bugs and hardware glitches for well over a decade. A disgruntled user issuing a complaint in a public forum such as a blog is hardly revealing anything new...that the software or site or system had a problem (problems). But the curtain has come down and users are able to put faces to all levels of the organization. They are addressing a person with the complaint and a high level, empowered individual at that. Does it build trust? Yes! Can the trust be sustained? We'll see...

The Great Oz Complex

As marketers, how do we handle the communications directed toward our organization? And how do we assure that the stories told by our customers find their way into the daily operations of our organization? Blogs repesenting all levels of the corporation have certainly made a contribution in assuring our customers are heard and heeded. Prior to blogs, large corporations were seen as opaque and intractable.

HP's VP of Marketing worldwide, David Gee learned through experience the folly of not listening to his customer. Gee pulled a comment from his blog critical of upgrading ...here, I'll let Gee tell his story:
We’re learning more and more about our customers every single day. Since I started to blog back in March, I’ve received comments posted online and eMail directly to me. Some are positive and some are negative. Earlier this week, an HP customer posted a comment about his experience upgrading a media center PC. His experience was not good and he let us know. We pulled the comment. This was a bad decision and we have reversed it.
David Gee's blog - http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/gee

No longer has the Great OZ the last word. Our customers have learned a lesson or two from Toto.

But is it marketing?

Marketing has historically been about communications...a one directional communications highway with a few service roads. Companies would direct their message ( pitch without content) to their customers and prospects through all available media vehicles. The service roads allowed communications to the organization by chosen customers and primarily through those pesky dinnertime survey calls. And those consumers that took it upon themselves to communicate with the company via letters of complaint were usually rewarded (bought off?) with coupons and special offers to consume more of the product about which they complained. Companies were listening... but on their terms. In short, marketing communications dictated the demographic, the means, the message and the offering.

Enter the two way highway and all the avenues leading off it... blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, email, listservs, forums, podcasts, youtube. The communication now is from the self-selected consumer to the corporation and as marketers we've begun to listen making our heretofor audience the storyteller.