I just want to discuss one concept (mine) behind search engine optimization. There are still people out there who would opine that all efforts at search optimization are a form of trickery - although that number is certainly shrinking as the SEO community grows and matures.
A key element to SEO is the concept of the “perfect search result.” For my purposes, this is defined as the search result which:
- Provides access to the most relevant information pertaining to the search.
- Appears as the first or only result of its media type to a search.
- Satisfies the searcher’s needs for the search they performed.
There is hardly such a thing as a perfect search result. As the explicitness or uniqueness of the search increases, the perfection of the results increases — - but the challenge of constructing a search which will return perfect results is pretty significant. Once you accept that, the whole world of search optimization becomes much more clear. The goal of search optimization is to make your site the most perfect result for the broadest range of relevant searches. It’s a fuzzy definition, I know — - but it works for me.
Read more: Helping search engines provide better results
Well, I’ve finally managed to read the entirety of the Summer issue of Search Marketing Standard — and I must say that I found it to be a pleasant read. The articles were well-written and interesting, which certainly makes for an overall high-quality experience.
If I had to say there was anything missing for me, it would be that I felt the material didn’t necessarily challenge me much. The articles didn’t make me confront new ideas about how search marketing could work, or challenge my notions of the world of search. Granted, I’m pretty well plugged-in to the industry: The fact that I’ve read moderately extensively in the search marketing field MIGHT just have an impact…. I’m not viewing the subject from the perspective of the intermediate marketing manager or business-owner who really needs the information, after all.
Read more: Search Marketing Standard: Print News for Online Marketing
Shari Thurow, a regular on the search marketing speaking circuit, just published an article in the ClickZ network addressing three SEO Myths and Misconceptions. Although the article is generally pretty decent, I do take some issue with how she addresses one area — - the question of replacing images with text.
In fact, my complaint is with what I perceive to be the basic assumption she’s making in this SEO Myth: that web developers and marketers are recommending that web sites replace graphic images with CSS-styled text.
Read more: Replacing Images with Text
The links between accessibility and search marketing are frequently explored: creating a universally accessible website has a number of significant benefits for search marketing. After all, many of the features which make a website accessible (using text instead of images, ensuring the ability of non-visual tools to fully access content, etc.) are also characteristics of a website which has been optimized for search.
However, there’s a huge difference between search engine optimization and search engine friendly. What most accessible developers create are search engine friendly sites, not optimized sites.
Read more: Search Engine Friendly vs. Search Engine Optimized
Robert Nyman has questions he’d love to have answered about SEO. I’m not the person to answer these questions, certainly, but I can certainly provide commentary.
In particular, it’s nice to see people from the web standards community discussing search optimization. There’s no question that creating a website which applies web standards and the principles of accessibility also creates a nice landing spot for search engines. When you build accessibly, you remove barriers to access for search engines as well as users. Although accessibility and web standards are certainly not necessary for search engine success, they can be an excellent way to kickstart your campaign. New websites in particular are likely to benefit from the crawlability and easy navigation aided by conscientious construction.
Read more: Standards, Accessibility, and Search Engine Optimization
So, the general shape of blog posting around this time of the year is in the form of “my five predictions for 2007” and in discussing site statistics for the calendar year. I’m not going to bother with predictions; but I’m going to walk through my statistic through the year and talk about what I was doing in the way of marketing and how those activities impacted my site traffic.
It’s been an eventful year, as these statistics fairly clearly demonstrate:
Although any set of site statistics should be taken with a big fat grain of salt, these do seem to show a teensy trend towards more traffic. In the month of January: 156 unique visitors. In December: 4940 unique visitors. What caused this increase?
To be entirely honest, it was a bit of careful planning and intentional personal marketing. Let’s be honest: I’m in business doing accessibility consulting and web design, and I though that increasing traffic to this site might help me in pursuit of that goal.
Month by Month
January
In January, I received, as I mentioned, 156 unique visitors. This is generally along the vein of the traffic I’d receive during the previous year as well, based on, essentially, no marketing at all. I’ve been listed in DMOZ for quite a long time, but as of January that was the extent of my marketing activities.
February
In February, traffic doubled to 300 uniques. This was the result of my authoring a brief tutorial on Blogger. Using the interface, etc. Although most of this information can be found on Blogger’s help pages, this tutorial summarized things nicely. It also mentioned explicity information on uploading documents to Blogger: apparently, a very common question.
This was my first taste of search-based traffic, really: people finding what they want on your site.
March and April
March and April get grouped together because I didn’t really do much more with this site during that time. Instead, I started a second site: inter:digital strategies, a search marketing consultancy. I joined Cre8asite Forums and began to maintain a search marketing blog. Both of these things increased my overall industry profile, but didn’t directly associate with http://www.joedolson.com.
May
In May I authored a pair of articles on Boolean searching with PHP and MySQL, which accompanied a PHP script doing that very task. These were highly strategic: I knew full well that this was a highly specific search query which was currently lacking any valuable search results. I filled it. The articles were posted in mid May: my traffic doubled that month.
June, July and August
During the summer months, I continued to let things grow. I began a blog at JoeDolson.com and backfilled it with a few of my older announcements and articles. I continued posting heavily at Cre8asite Forums and in both blogs. I took a month’s vacation (all of July). I moved from Vienna, Austria to Saint Paul, MN. Traffic kept growing, a mixture of the greater search traffic spawned from my PHP/MySQL articles and the higher profile which was gaining valuable in bound links.
In August, I became a site grader for Accessites, an awesome accessible design showcase, thanks to the invitation of Mike Cherim.
September through December
Kept on writing. Ultimately, this is the key: find an article that needs to be written and write it. Overall, this technique caused my traffic to multiply 35-fold over the course of this year. I spent practically nothing on any other kind of marketing: a couple of quality directory submissions which were probably completely unnecessary, but otherwise my only expense was my own time.
And what has this meant?
At the beginning of the year, my job queries were very slow: I knew a few people who might need websites, and would talk to them and let them know I was available. Every once in a while, I’d receive a cold contact: 90% of this proved to be unqualified leads. This week, I’ve been contacted 7 times so far through my website. Two job proposals, four “thank you” notes for articles, and one offer to become a moderator at Cre8asite Forums. (Thanks, Kim!).
No question in my mind: business profile is the key to success on the web. In my industry, this has meant writing useful articles, helping people out through Cre8asite Forums, and letting people know I’m out here. The key has been writing with people in mind: being friendly, approachable, and responsive. Do I think that my writing alone has made this much of an impact? No, frankly. I think the fact that I’ve also made a concerted effort to respond to blog comments, to respond to every query I receive through my contact form, and that I’ve helped people is what’s ultimately been the most effective marketing tool I could wield.
When you’re at a major industry conference, there’s always the possibility you’ll find out some piece of information you didn’t already know. (Actually, that’s the whole point of a conference, as I understand it.) One thing I picked up on Monday is the news that Webmaster Radio, one of the top locations for web industry news and interviews, is in the process of launching their second generation website - which will include complete text transcriptions of their two years of audio archives.
Now, their motivation isn’t really accessibility. However, with audio files, as in live streaming audio sites or podcasting, text becomes a real problem from a search perspective. Do search spiders know what you’ve talked about? No - they’re as deaf as a POST. Adding an audio transcription provides access for the deaf as well as feeding the search crawler what they really want: text.
You can put gobs of text in ID3 tags which are prepended to your audio file. These tags are crawlable, since they are actually text documents attached to the audio file. They have their own problems, however - they can’t generally be separated from the audio file for a visual reading unless the user has software with ID3 tag editing capabilities, such as iTunes. Many people do have iTunes - but is it at all reasonable to expect somebody to download your file, import it to their audio editor or iTunes, and go to edit the tags on the off hand chance that this file has a transcription? Probably not.
Separate text transcriptions provide the easiest, most natural way for an audio file to be accessed by the deaf - this is a great move on the part of Webmaster Radio. Being deaf prevents you from doing very little on the web - but listening to talk radio is not an available option.
Filed under Search Engines by Joe Dolson