There are clear signs that the social media phenomenon is growing in popularity. Everyone talks about it lately, want to know a bit more about how to get involved, learn new techniques and see whether there is something really there for them and their business. The term ’social media’ is therefore being used a lot more in marketing conversations.

Social media growth US vs non-US

While there seems to be an increased buzz on social media Europe, I still do not perceive a huge deal of actual campaign work in such area.

In the following Emarketer article you can read: “In the coming years there will be even more changes, as social media marketing extends from the marketing department to nearly every aspect of a company’s business.” … but from the metrics chart on the right, it is clear that the US still takes the lead in implementing social media juding from the expenditure levels (48% vs 52% worldwide).

The article seems to focus on the importance of social media for organisations and the increased predominant role the consumer will play as their voice will be heard more widely. The interesting pick for me on this article is the perceived length of time that a trend, phenomenon or idea takes to influence, evolve and integrate with other cultures. Social media has consistently been on the agenda for about four to five years now, yet it seems to be taking some time to mature in non-US countries.

By now, you will have read or heard the news on the Internet: ‘SEO is dead’… the whole fad has made some people freak out a bit, particularly those who are not into SEO but directly touched by it: clients, friends who work in sales, affiliates, work colleagues: they have been asking me if they should stop writing good content and worrying about getting more links and concentrate on doing more social media.

They have heard that social media seems to be the new SEO. So SEO appears to be dying and social media seems to be taking over and therefore social media marketing is taking over search engine optimisation (seo)….

I have been hearing his ‘SEO is dead’ fad ever since before last summer. The rumour spreaded out quite quickly in the organisation where I work as someone sent out a link to the website that tells about the book you see on the left. The same day I had more than 10 colleagues asking me what I thought about it, whether SEO was really out of the game. My answer was no at the time, and it still is today. So I have written this post to send the link to those who ask me in future.

For as long as at least one of the three points below are true, there will always be SEO, in my opinion:

• Search engines are like disabled users in many ways
• websites exist and need to be promoted
• relevancy and importance are two key ranking factors in the search engine algorithms

SEO and social media are perfectly compatible and they work best when they are working together. SEO is still young, but social media is younger, therefore if I had to choose I would likely alway give priority to investing in SEO. Of course every business is different and there may be times when the nature of the business dictates a social media inclination.

I am listing a few blog posts here to provide some background into the ‘SEO is dead’ story, so that you can then make your own conclusions:

Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting and also co-author of one of the best SEO books written recently: The Art of SEO
posted an article on SEW a few weeks ago titled: Is SEO Dying? How will it Evolve?. Eric kicks off his post by saying that many people don’t understand what SEO really is. He also explains why social cannot be taken as a unique way of determining importance (social votes) at least for now, and he uses the Twitter example: ‘what’s best a tweet or an authoritative link?‘

Recently Peter Davanzo made the following comment on a post he wrote for the SEOBook blog:

“People have been predicting the death of SEO since, well, the beginning of SEO”

What is your preferred approach to information architecture…? assuming your are given the task to re-organise content on a considerably large site, you have to take your preferred approach to organising all the information, categorise it and present it in a logical manner. From experience, having worked on many complex web projects, it can make a big difference to get this right and offer your customers and easy way to understand how your content is organised. There are three standard approaches to IA that boast industry acceptance:

Information architecture

1. The SEO-friendly approach: if you work in ‘Search’, your approach will most definitely be this one, and the project will be led by the results of your initial keyword research for that website, so you will likely do the keyword research first and then model the data accordingly. If you are serious about it, you will probably run Pay-per-click campaigns too before you make keyword target decisions.  This is much my preferred approach, particularly if an ‘increase in sales’ is the ultimate goal for the project.

2. The product category-based approach: analysing the product range on offer and categorise it accorgingly. This is typically the product-based approach. It works in the same way when you offer services: organise your services and the information about those services logically and build the site architecture. A combination of the first and second approach can be quite a fire-sure way to end up with a strong and robust site architecture.

3.  The audience-targetting approach: imagine a situation where you would acknowledge your audiences at the beginning of the customer journey as what they are and who they are. You would segment your target audiences based on previous research and reflect the results of your audience knowledge on the website customer journeys, offers and navigation. You would address your visitors in a tailor way in order to be able to offer them customer journeys suited to who they are and what their actual needs are.

My practical, hands-on marketing experience on building Information Architecture started from working on Intranet development websites for a public sector organisation. I then moved onto development public websites. For many years, both my university tutors/lecturers and work colleagues and managers would think of option 3 as a big ‘no, no’. On another hand, option 1 was industry’s unknown territory  until about 2004, and it still is these days in many ways.

Therefore options 2 was the most common approach to IA. In fact. Number 3 would often be suggested by those colleagues who were non web savvy users as it would sound obvious to them to model content in a fashion where you would address your target audiences. But other teams (design, technical, business development, content architects) would pose strong opposition.  The main reason for this reaction would come in the form of something like this:

‘oh, we don’t really need to address our own audiences, they already know who they are, we just need to respond to their needs by offering in a compelling manner the products or services they are looking for‘….

For many years I bought in to that idea and for many years I preached on that too.

Today I still think Option 2 is a fairly good approach to IA, but not the only one and certainly not always the most effective from a marketing performance and customer-focused standpoint.

Suddently, a book I read made me stretch my mind and position on this whole paradigm to do with IA and content modelling. I read one of the most influential books in my online marketing career: ‘The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly‘. In this book, David Meerman Scott, the author explains how important it is to address your real customers once they step into your website. Much in the same way as you would acknowledge someone that comes in to buy in your shop with a ‘good morning’ or ‘good afternoon’.

Addressing target audiences

David challenges this whole myth about ‘product-based’ information organisation and prompts us to focus on the customer, who they are and their individual needs with the goal to tailor their search and offer them the exact products that are specific to their needs.

As I have only been doing consultancy outside my in-house SEO job for about two years, I have yet to see when I will be able to contemplate a client-based business model where I would be confortable offering such approach to Information Architecture. I am very keen on the idea that there has to be situations when a audience segmentation, customer-acknoledgement approach would beckon.

Only a few days ago,  I have learnt via Twitter about a conversion rate optimisation success story that highlights this IA methodology, the Voices.com success story by the guys at Conversion Rate Experts.

voices.com audience segmentation

Through online visitor surveys and other online user research techniques, these guys identified that the client website had two distinct type of visitors, which were segmented into separate conversion funnels.

I don’t mean to say that this approach can be applied to all sites, but that it is clever to try it and see what results it brings you. If we don’t test different approaches, we will not know what is the best one for our specific online business model.  If you have a website where customers/visitors are not converting, perhaps it is the moment to address this issue from the root and take the customer-centric, audience-segmentation approach.

Some of the common mistakes multinational companies make when deploying their search marketing strategies are translating keywords.  If you want your SEO strategies to work you should avoid translating keywords. Every language needs to be treated separately and specific keyword research needs to be carried out for every one of them. This point was made very clear at the International Search Summit when speakers like Andy Atkins-Krüger and Bill Hunt quite rightly pointed it out.

During this conference a lot of  lessons were taught. This post is just an overview of what I considered the best highlights for this one day annual event. If you however would like to know everything that happened during this event, you can find a detailed recap post I wrote for the Youmoz section of SEOMoz

Don’t’s

• Don’t use IP address country detection methods to redirect users to specific language versions of your site. You website could mistakenly take a search engine crawler for a real user and redirect it to the English US version of your website. The other versions of your site would then never get crawled.
• If a targeted keyword is an accented term, it needs to be considered as a different keyword than its non-accented version. This also applies for plural versions of the term. Eg: bus =NOT buses, impresión in Spanish is not the same as impresion
• ignore Yahoo if you plan to penetrate in Japan. It is the predominant search engine with a 53% market share, however, don’t completely ignore Google either as it takes up the remainder 47% market share.
• neglect doing the right research into Dutch culture and society if you plan to bring your product in the Netherlands.
• fall in the mistake to think that traditional Spanish can be applied to the Latin American context, particularly keywords. Every Latam country speaks a different Spanish. Eg: ‘renta autos’ in Mexico vs ‘alquiler autos’ en Argentina.
• ignore the great opportunities that Latam markets present at this moment:  SEO is easier than in Europe and NorthAmerica, paid search has very low CPC in Latam (€0.20 per click or even less), yet there is a fairly good average conversion rate.

Do’s

• use language meta tags : <html lang =”de”>  or <html lang =”en-gb”>
• enable “enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWMTs) area account
• embed your digital assets in text within your webpage copy for better ‘Universal Search’ results on the SERPs.
• Try MajesticSEO to gain an insight into your competitor’s link portfolio. These can be good sources to grab new links opportunities. Use the folders facility to keep up with the verticals, and use the Link Reclamation feature to get a list of the top pages in the domain.
• Produce two or three versions of the same press release if you plan to distribute it via different channels.
• Take into account that Japanese alphabet is made of four different alphabets and words are not separated by spaces as in the Western alphabets.
• Get hosted in China and choose the right host eg: China Host if you wnt to penetrate in the Chinese market
• Use ‘simplified Chinese’ as opposed to ‘traditional Chinese’
• translate your copy in other languages as this is fine so long as you don’t translate your target keywords
• use neutral Spanish to target Latam countries if you only have the resources to have a single websites
• consider ‘Machine translation’ (MT) as a solution with an element of human review if you are responsible for enterprise-level content production.

I thoroughly enjoyed this seminar, the presentations and the excellent tips I got on International Search. If you would like to read more, you can start with my detailed recap on the SEOMoz blog or the recap written on the official Web certain blog: Multilingual Search.

Dates: Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 October 2009

Wow, what a couple of action-packed days!

SEOMoz Pro training seminar is an annual advanced SEO training event organised by SEOMoz. The event ran in London for first time this year, in partnership with Distilled, a London-based search marketing agency.

I found this seminar very educational, the quality of the presentations were of high standard due to the topics chosen and the generous approach to give out actionable tips made this event unique. If I had to choose only one  SEM conference to attend every year, likely this one would stand a high chance.

I am not going to cover the event in detail because that’s already been done by SEOMoz, Distilled and plenty of other SEO bloggers that attended the seminar. Instead I am simply going to list my own top 10 learning points or tips that I took home after the seminar.

1. Invest time into mastering Excel for long term benefits: get on with Excel’s advanced features, including filters and pivot tables. It will help you enormously to organise your keyword/keyphrases terms lists, perform permutations of different kinds, mix data from other sources (eg: Linkscape reports from competitors sites, data from GA reports….). It will, in a nutshell, help you analyse data and make faster decisions to move onto other tasks, from Will Critchlow and Richard Baxter.

2. Microsoft has produced a Search Engine optimisation toolkit and is recommended by Dave Naylor.

3. If you do in-house SEO, Richard Baxter’s advice is to invest as much time as needed to justify the impact of an SEO investment to the management in order to win the business case for SEO. This learning point was complemented by Rand Fishkin’s presentation the following morning, packed with pretty charts and graphs, to help win the case for SEO to your management or clients. From a corporate SEO perspective I found these two contributions invaluable.

During this presentation, there was a very interesting piece of data that drew my attention: over a third of search engine users are still not aware of the existence of Google Adwords as an advertising scheme. Also, over half of all search engine users are unable to recognise PPC advertising on the SERPs (search engine result pages) meaning they probably click on them thinking they are part of the overall set of natural results.

4. Like SEO, social media should be part of an overall online strategy instead of being a standalone initiative (from Lucy Langdon)

5. Bad links can cause harm. When it comes to a situation where rankings have been lost, a lot of those so-called penalties are often just filters. Removing cloaking (eg: hidden links) and ‘bad neighbourhood’ inbound links, can greatly improve your rankings. (from Jane Copland).

6. Ben Hendrickson, the mastermind behind Linkscape gave a speech during the seminar. His conclusions based on SEOMoz Labs various tools being developed was that:

- Search engines are not placing as much importance on H tags as they used to. Keywords placed into H1 and H2 tags do not represent a strong signal to the search engines as those included in images ALT tags.

- Keywords on the domain name have considerable weight in the ranking algorithm, however, repeating the keyword on the path name doesn’t seem to have any positive effect on rankings.

- It is necessary to have more than one complex models for defining ranking factors. It is necessary to look at some other models.

7. The best strategy to be succesful at link building is to realise your site or your client site’s USP ( Unique selling proposition). Once you come to terms with this principle it becomes easier to earn links naturally (using tools like Linkscape or Back link analysis from SEOMoz to identify link opportunities from your competitor’s link portfolios) – from Tom Critchlow.

8. Without any doubt, Ben Jesson’s presentation provided excellent ideas on how to increase your CRO (conversion rate optimisation) :

- answering customer objections to your product (the main landing page has to be able to respond to those objections).
- use testimonials to highlight answers to some of those objections.
- perform A/B Testing via Google website optimiser or other tools

Ben already presented some of this material at the SMX London in May this year. The difference with this presentation is that a lot more detail was provided on how to actually get the job done.

9. If you are managing a big site, it is worth spending some time on improving page load time. As the web grows bigger, this is something that search engines are going to start considering more firmly as a factor for ranking sites. I cannot remember who I got this bit from.

10. Make better use of SEOmoz tools and use a combination of them to find out how your competitors do link building, what works best for them and where their linkbait is: Linkscape in conjunction with some of the best tools in SEOmoz Labs.

There was a great deal more of useful tips and advice that was given, such as dealing with scalable information architecture, online PR stuff, vertical search such as Google maps and local business listing optimisation, video sitemap strategies, content strategies, etc… of all, the points listed above were the most significant for me.

One other noticeable trend I noticed was the large number of SEOs I met that were involved in affiliation or running some form of affiliation marketing on their sites… there was a great deal of affiliate marketing discussion and buzz going on during the event itself and also during the evening social gatherings.

If you are interested in reading more about this event and other bloggers’ recaps, I suggest you google ‘SEOMoz Pro Training seminar 2009′ and you will find plenty of related material in different languages depending on the local version of Google you use. For example, this one from Fernando Maciá, in Spanish, was one of the first blogs out to be covering the event.

I had the chance to meet or catch up with some SEO peers : Dan Reynolds from Strategic TMC, David Jackson from Sixt, Kirsteen Fox from Iglu, Dan Barker from Baker Ross, Ian Bryce from Sony, Alec Kinnear from foliovision, Ari nahmani from Matan Media, Ashkan Parsa from Netgrade, Annabel Hodges.  As I didn’t exchange cards with everyone, apologies to those I do not mention, please drop me an email and I will add you to the list.

As usual, one of the best things about these SEO events is the networking during or after the sessions.

Despite the fact that keywords meta-tags have lost credibility as a search engine ranking factor quite some time ago, there is quite a bit of buzz on the subject lately. Matt Cutts, Head of web spam at Google has reiterated publicly once again, that the Googlebot ignores keywords embeded into the meta keywords elements of web pages and that they don’t use the meta area at all, at least as a ranking factor.

Such officially post confirms that the Googlebot ignores the keywords meta tag, but it is interesting to still see that everyone suddently starts a conversation about it on the various blogs:

• web pro news,
• search engine land
• search engine journal

So the clear message from google is keywords meta-tags are useless. However there other search engines, like Ask or Bing that may be still using the keywords metas to ascertain relevance. However, as far as Yahoo is concerned, about a couple of weeks later, they announced that Yahoo Search no longer uses meta keywords tag .

The interesting part of this story is that a few days later, Danny Sullivan, editor of Search engine land, posted an article stating that following a homepage test, he discovered that Yahoo still indexes the meta keywords tag. The experiment consisted of placing a unique word: ‘xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk’ in the meta keywords tag on the home page of Search Engine Land. He made a search for this word on yahoo search and Search engine land ranked clearly on top.

What’s the bottom point with this post? should you use the meta keywords tag or not? The consensus amongst SEO experts is :

• if you already have your meta tags fully populated with keywords leave them there as they are as long as they are relevant to the page topic.
• if you are starting a new page, you could do with jotting a keyword or two on the keywords meta tag just to be sure that you stand your chances with other search engines and in case, things change in future, and as they will be useful for other things that search engine rankings

My personal advice is not to obsess with on page and meta optimisation and not to spend more than a few seconds on that tag when doing development. Instead, focus on link building or creating good content that attracts links naturally.

This is my very first post.  I have been thinking about blogging for ages but was not quite sure if I would find enough reasons to spend time writing about one of the things I am passionate about: SEO and web marketing. So I am giving it a go.

I am going to do my best to make my readers engaged and interested in my stories. Rather than reinventing the wheel once again with another SEO blog, I will try and keep it ‘to the point’ and cover only practical topics, such as:

• the common issues I come across when starting new projects
• the basics of SEO and search engine marketing, I will do my best to keep it jargon free
• recaps of recent trends, developments in the SEM, SEO world and even on social media
• practical tips, hints and ideas that can help you move ahead with your SEO strategies.

The first point ocurred to me as I keep finding myself sometimes in repetitive situations where I ended writing long emails to explain an angle. It would be good to have those points explained in the form of blog posts so that I can refer my contacts to them where necessary.

Another one reason I started thinking about blogging was that I realised that I was actually quite passionate about certain areas of SEO and I actually wanted to write about it

The third reason was that wordpress has been talk of the town for quite a few years now, and I want to learn to use it inside out from my own hands, as it had become the de-facto blogging tool aimed to individuals, small and medium enterprises. I had used wordpress before when blogging about my past trips to China and Mongolia but only for limited periods. I had also been using Movable Type corporately on a blog that I set up custom-built for the British Council, but I had no real hands-on experience on the most exciting areas of wordpress blogging: plug-ins, multilingual support add-ons, blogging for SEO benefit, and actually feel that I was a blogger, despite not being good at writing.

At this point I have to mention that English not being my first language made me consider to actually blog in Spanish, my mother tongue. This is likely to be,  in the long term, my best option, but for the time being, I will stick to English, just to get started. Also because most of the client work I am doing at the moment is in English, so it makes sense to write for those that are more likely to be interested in reading my lines.