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Category: Content Strategy
August 26, 2007
Last week at Search Engine Strategies, I spoke about SEO in a web 2.0 world. My other panelists spoke about CSS and Ajax specifically, so I covered the overall things to look out for as you take advantage of the latest and greatest. Previously, I’ve spoken at search conferences on behalf of a search engine — I’ve covered the guidelines, the best practices, what works. This time, I was speaking from the other side of things, from the perspective of the audience. What are the things we should all watch out for, and how can we best implement what we know we should do?
The web 2.0 world is great for startups because you can get going with very little money or resources. If you have a great idea and some great data, you can be up and running in no time. SEO can seem like a low priority compared to putting together a working product. After all, if the site doesn’t work, what’s the point of traffic?
I know I may cause my SEO friends to gasp in horror when I say this, but if you have to balance priorities, you’re probably right to relegate SEO to phase two of your product development plan. However, if you do that, there’s definitely one thing you need to factor in to phase one, and that’s the ability to implement SEO later.
If you’re operating from a position of few resources, SEO may become one of your best friends as you build your customer base. It’s free traffic. Free! And it’s targeted like few advertising solutions can be. Potential customers are typing in exactly what they are looking for. There’s really no down side. So what are you waiting for? Stop reading and go implement already!
Sorry, got a little carried away there. What I meant to say is make sure that you build a flexible system that lets you augment the basics and build from there. For instance, maybe you don’t have time to create keyword-rich unique title tags and descriptions right this very minute. Just make sure your CMS or home grown system lets you go in and easily add them later.
And save yourself some time by making sure you aren’t building something that hides you from everyone looking for you through search. Turn off images, Javascript, and Flash in your browser and make sure you can still access your navigational elements. If you can’t get past the home page with your browser in this state, neither can search engines (not to mention me on my mobile phone, and really, isn’t your site all about me?).
And for that matter, can you site be viewed at all? Look at this site. It may not be pretty, but it’s accessible.
Or is it? Take a look with Javascript and images turned off:
In a situation like this, the noscript tag is your friend.
Another time when the noscript tag can make all the difference? When you’re using Ajax. I used Sphinn as an example during my talk to let the audience know that every site is a work in progress and even the best of us don’t launch our sites with 100% perfect SEO from the start. Sphinn is Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land‘s social media site. Surely someone who’s been covering the industry since its inception has covered all the bases! Surely! Except that the comments on Sphinn are in Ajax, and with Javascript turned off, they’re invisible. Which means all of that great user-generated content is also invisible to search engines. Of course, he knows about this and it’s on the list of enhancements for the site.
Which brings me back to my earlier point. It’s OK to launch if the SEO on the site isn’t perfect. Just make sure evolving the SEO of the site is on the list and the infrastructure of the site is such that you can in fact evolve it and you don’t have to start from scratch later to make these kinds of changes.
Speaking of evolving sites, I also used Zillow as an example. Again, I didn’t want my talk to be about throwing stones when I’m in one of those new-fangled web 2.0 glass houses! Web 2.0 has somehow become not just about shiny new technologies, but also about shiny new words. Company names, domain names, and product names are all zany and crazy and have rounded corners. Oh wait, that last thing might be more about the logos.
In any case, it might be boring and web 1.0, but fun new words are no substitute for keyword research. I’m pretty sure that someone wanting to know the general housing prices of a particular neighborhood is not going to type “zindex” into a seach box. Which doesn’t mean you have to use boring names and give up on having a site since every domain name with real dictionary-style words is taken. It just means that you want to add a bit of explanation to the page and use things like title tags and headings to your full advantage in incorporating those keywords you’ve come up with using that old fashioned research. For instance, truemors.com has “breaking rumors, news” in its home page title tag. They just need to throw in the word “gossip” and they’ll be set.
Another web 2.0 component is user-generated content. Which is awesome in so many ways. You really build a community of your users who keep coming back, you beef up your site’s content, which helps new and old visitors alike, and you give search engines that much more to index. But if you’re planning to launch user-generated sections for your site, make sure you have a strategy first. Don’t just put the pages out there and expect people to come. User-generated content is not like a creepy baseball field in a corn field.
So, how do you get people to show up and contribute? Depending on the type of site and content, you might want to partner up with someone to get content you can prepopulate; you could engage with active bloggers or customers to seed your content areas; you might pay moderators or writers to get things going. There are all kinds of ways to kick start your content areas, but leaving them empty isn’t one of them. As someone I was talking to about this said, that’s like starting a blog with no posts and expecting to still get comments.
Now is a really exciting time to launch a site. The technology makes it so much easier than back when I started creating web sites in the mid-nineties, when we only had HTML 1.0 tables and the font tag for making things pretty. (And we walked uphill in the snow to churn our butter.) And search can funnel targeted traffic right where we want it. But make sure you’re making the technology work for you, and not against you.
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heh, couldn’t have agreed with your sentiments about how sometimes in the real world SEO is the last thing done to a site. like you said, what good is traffic if your site is crap? nothing like pissing off people right out the chute.
“If you have a great idea and some great data, you can be up and running in no time. SEO can seem like a low priority compared to putting together a working product. After all, if the site doesn’t work, what’s the point of traffic?”
I’d go a step further on that. If the user experience is bad enough that people are going to remember it and stay away in the future, you don’t want them to find you.
The problem with leaving SEO as the last thing done to a site is that it can take ‘forever’ to fix mistakes and get the site up to where searchers are finding it and traffic is coming in.
Yes, it is not a good plan to piss people off right out of the chute, but since people find the site over time, I would vote for making SEO an integral part of the plan from the start…
Brian, I definitely agree that you should devote resources to SEO initially if you can. But if you absolutely don’t have the resources to spare, then an alternate approach is to make sure that your infrastructure is flexible enough to allow you to easily do SEO later. Otherwise, you’re right — it’ll take forever and you’ll lose valuable traffic as time ticks by.
True, SEO shouldn’t be the goal of the site. SEO just helps you get to the goal: getting people to find out that your site exists and is that good place to go.
Nice post and presentation at SES.
I’m optimistic that “Web 2.0″, as a far richer social mechanism than earlier online environments, is going to bring a lot to the table in terms of making it easier for search engines to rank sites correctly and easier for good sites to rise quickly.
In an important sense the best of all search worlds is a ranking environment that does not require SEO at all.
SEO shouldn’t be the initial goal anyway. Create a good place for people to go and they’ll be there anyway. Think MySpace and Facebook.
i really appreciate this post and comments.
thank you vanessa
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Hey, VFN..how is it going?
Poor Danny getting your Vix?
Just joking…Yeap SEO is a bitch to conquer and the war never ends..but so is life I guess.
I am in China now doing a bit of traveling…feels nice to get a way from the treadmill.
There is a roumor floating that the PR green pixels are about to go…
See if you can dig something up on it!
Vanessa — thanks for pointing out the missing noscript tag, should be ok now (just in case anyone uses their browser without javascript turned on??) We focused our efforts on features that have resulted in our site becoming a real time-saver for stock market junkies – check out our ‘MediaBuzz’ section to see the response that InstantBull has received (despite not being ‘pretty’
)
- The InstantBull Team
Hi InstantBull team! You were the lucky recipients of my site review by virtue of winning the SEOMoz web. 2.0 award.
It is definitely the case that pretty is not as important as functional, particularly with the type of service you offer.
It looks like the noscript tag has helped make the navigational elements visible, but since all of the links are rendered in javascript, search engine bots still can’t access them (and I still can’t get stock quotes from my mobile phone).
If you take the navigational link elements out of javascript and put them in html (or use your noscript elements to provide the link navigation), you’ll have a better chance of more comprehensive indexing coverage in search engines and will likely get additional users, particularly those on mobile devices.
It looks like you’re using javascript in order to have drop-down menus, but there are ways of implementing that, that for instance, have static drop-downs in a non-javascript environment.
It looks like your site may also be in frames, which also is problematic for search engine indexing. For instance, note that your about us page is indexed (http://www.google.com/search?q=site:instantbull.com), but as the subframe, which means that anyone landing on that page by doing a search is unable to access the rest of the site:
http://www.instantbull.com/TopMenu/AboutUs/AboutUs.aspx
Vanessa – thanks for the excellent feedback! You’ve touched on a couple of points that from an SEO perspective would require a lot of reworking on our part – both javascript and frames can be a real pain from an SEO standpoint. No details yet, but we’ve now shifted our focus to a new aggregation service (that won’t be using frames) … if you could please send an email, I’ll be happy to add you to our beta preview list once we’re ready … cheers, Gal
Hi Vanessa, I guess I don’t understand a few things. If an owner OR a designer can build the site as you say to begin with; in other words; have the knowledge to use a good cms system and have the knowledge to know how to “fix” things,etc… why not go all the way? Why should an owner have to hire a separate “SEO” thang later? Why can’t the education start at the source, which is the actual designer? I’m not getting the mentality of the industry and that sites should have “SEO” later at all.
Of course; I don’t get the whole social media networking stuff either as it seems mighty unprofessional to me. I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I know you gave a good presentation and all, but I really think the industry is missing the big picture; and I also know that if the public were actually clued in on things, they would know to hire a designer to build the site fully ready to start with. No need to spend extra money later on for what people call this “seo” stuff. It’s about education, of which the industry does very little of IMO, but it’s because it’s really not in the best interest of SEO’s, right?
Just my little opinion that does not mean much, I know.
Doug, a company many understand that keyword-rich title tags are important, but may not have the resources initially to do a lot of keyword research. If they at least make sure their infrastructure enables them to easily change title tags later, they can do keyword research in phase two and create really compelling and helpful title tags later. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
There’s just not always time to do everything all at once, and you have to take an incremental approach. But it’s difficult to take an incremental approach if you’ve designed your infrastructure such that you have to rebuild from scratch to make changes.
As for not needing an SEO if you have a designer, SEO skills are quite different from design skills. That’s like saying you don’t need a designer and a programmer or a programmer and a tester or marketing manager and a sales person.
Yes, I understand the design being “ready” for good title tags later. I’m just not getting the mentality of having to hire a separate seo later. Why would a site owner want to pay a designer first; and then, oh btw; hire a seo later for more money? They don’t want to do so. Why not build it right the first time? That’s what I mean. It does not take “resources” to do good title tags, nor does it take resources to do keyphrase research. It simply takes education.
I also disagree with you that seo skills are different than design skills. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but am saying that SEO is not all cracked up to what it actually is. With a just a little knowledge, any designer can learn how to build a site right the first time. This is where I certainly agree with Jason Calcanis.
Having worked in software development for a long time, I can tell you that it’s absolutely the case that sometimes resources are tight and you have to make tradeoffs in what you launch in early versions. It does indeed take resources that aren’t always available (time, people, and money) to implement good SEO on a site.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on design skills being different than SEO skills. Enough has been written on the “is SEO rocket science?” debate that I couldn’t possibly add anything at this point.
http://searchengineland.com/070111-112236.php
However, the analogy I often give, when someone asks me why a company would hire an SEO rather than just educate themselves on good optimization techniques, is that if you want your house painted, you can either learn painting skills and do it yourself or you can hire a professional who is experienced in painting. Both are valid choices.
Vanessa; You are not understanding the angle I’m coming from. That’s okay though as not many in the seo industry understand it.
I understand.
We just don’t agree. But if we all agreed all the time, life would be way less interesting.
no no. It’s a far different angle than most “seo” types look at. I had the very same mind-set as you even as short as 2 to 3 years ago, that stemmed from when I started 10 years ago. That mindset is very, very different today.
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re sphinn: The comments are gathered and populated in php it’s just the way the content is ‘tabulised’ via js. Flatten it down and it’s fine – 2 minute fix. Thought that may help the pliggers.
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Better late then never – I attended your presentation at SES. It Rocked!
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