SES NY Series: Advanced Keyword Research for SEO and SEM, An Interview with Frederick Vallaeys from Google

Keyword research is a critical component to any search marketing initiative (for both SEO and SEM). Although most search marketers understand the importance of keyword research, many people outside of Search are not extremely familiar with the concept or the various tools at your disposal. I’m a firm believer that if you don’t perform extensive keyword research, you run the risk of missing key opportunities. Actually, you could end up basing your campaigns on guesswork and intuition versus actual data. Needless to say, that’s not a good thing.

I've written previous posts about the importance of keyword research, the power of the long tail, and how to get the most out of Keyword Discovery, and I always like to speak with other search marketers to share ideas. There's always something new you can learn (and then use immediately in your campaigns).

Why is keyword research so important?
In both paid and organic search, if you don’t target what people are actually searching for, you’re going to have a hard time succeeding. For example, if you target infant bedding, but people are searching for baby bedding, will they find you? If you target notebooks, but people are searching for laptops, will they end up finding your computers? Imagine you just launched a major SEO initiative and you spent a lot of time and resources optimizing your website…but for the wrong keywords. Will that yield adequate results? Will it yield ANY results? And beyond just finding the right keywords, you need to analyze how competitive those keywords are, how much they cost, and if you actually have supporting content. i.e. Are you providing answers to questions about your category, products, services, etc?

So if you can’t tell yet, I think keyword research if pretty darn important. :)

SES NY Session: Advanced Keyword Research
Based on what I wrote above, it should be no surprise that I’m very interested in the session at SES NY that covers Advanced Keyword Research. In order to find out more about the session, I decided to ask Frederick Vallaeys from Google about what he will be covering during the session. Frederick is Google’s AdWords Evangelist and he helps advertisers better understand which Google products can help them achieve their marketing goals. After interviewing Frederick, it was easy to tell that he is passionate about helping people maximize their AdWords campaigns! If you will be attending SES NY, the session will be held on Thursday, March 26th from 10:30 to 11:45. You can read more about the session on the SES NY website.

So without further ado, here is my interview with Frederick:

Glenn: What are some of the key points that people will learn at your session?

Frederick: The session should be fast-paced with myself and 5 other panelists. I will try to share as many ideas as possible for finding new keywords with Google tools like Insights for Search and the Search-based keyword tool and I'll also share some thoughts about how our different keyword matching options can be put to work for advertisers.

Glenn: I come across many marketers that aren’t familiar with keyword research, let alone how to organize the data, use it when building their content, landing pages, ads, etc. Will you be providing an overview of why keyword research is important and how it should be used in both organic search and paid search? Also, will you cover the core differences between using keyword research for paid search versus organic search?

Frederick: I won't go into keyword research for organic listings but you're right that there are different tools and methodologies for researching keywords for paid search. Users simply have different expectations for paid and organic listings. Google and Compete did a study in September 2008 with retail advertisers that showed that paid listings were up to 50% more likely to convert than organic listings. Selecting highly targeted keywords is a big component of driving conversions and because you're paying per click, you want to ensure your keywords attract the right type of users.

Glenn: With Quality Score becoming more and more important in Paid Search, will you explain how to use the keywords that you are targeting to achieve a stronger QS?

Frederick: I'll touch on a few best practices about Quality Score but I'm also doing an entire session on this topic at 2:15pm so I recommend you attend that one if you can. The gist of it is that ads should be useful information and if you choose highly targeted and relevant keywords, users will like your ad and this will help establish good Quality Score which in turn will improve your rank and decrease your cost.

Glenn: Will you be explaining advanced matching options? I know there is a lot of confusion with what they are, how to best use them, etc. (especially negative keywords…)

Frederick: Our keyword matching options are one of the most powerful ways of ensuring your ad reaches the right audience so I'll definitely touch on this. With negative keywords, you can tell Google which queries not to show your ad for and when you combine this with broad matched keywords, it's a great way to maximize your clicks while ensuring a high conversion rate.

Glenn: The long tail is incredibly important and powerful. Will you explain how to target long tail keywords, which can ultimately yield more targeted visitors from organic search and a lower CPC and a higher ROI from Paid Search? I think too many companies initially target just a few head terms, and completely miss the power of the long tail.

Frederick: Long tail keywords are extremely important when you consider that 1 in 5 queries on Google has not been seen in the past 90 days, if ever. Users search for keywords that are so diverse that any marketer would have a tough time predicting all the variations. Fortunately, Google's broad match keywords automatically capture any tail terms that are relevant to your ad. When you add them all up, queries that were captured with broad matches deliver roughly a third of all conversions for our advertisers.

Glenn: I’m sure you will be covering the Google Keyword Tool. :) Will you be explaining some advanced features and ways to maximize its use? If so, can you list some of the features you will cover?

Frederick: We have a brand new search-based keyword tool that generates a list of relevant historical Google.com search queries for which a particular site has no ad presence. For each keyword, it also suggests a landing page, bid, and ad group. It's a really great way to find missed opportunities in your existing campaigns. You can try the tool at http://www.google.com/sktool

Glenn: Analytics is obviously extremely important for tracking both organic search and paid search at a granular level. Will you be explaining how to glean insights from your reporting in order to target the right keywords?

Frederick: Analytics has a tremendous amount of data you can apply to your paid search campaigns. For example, you could use the "Keywords" report or the "Site Search" report to learn which keywords drive traffic to your site and what people search for once they're on your site. Combine that with data about conversions and you've got a powerful new source of potential keywords for your account.

Glenn: For Paid Search, will you be explaining how to estimate the cost for keywords and campaigns, once you have completed keyword research? I know the Traffic Estimator tool can be helpful in this situation… I’ve found that many marketers don’t know how much to spend on paid search, how much their initial budget should be, how to calculate that, and then what to do once their campaigns are running.

Frederick: Unfortunately I probably won't have time to cover this in my session but I'm happy to share some of my thoughts here. Because paid search is so measurable, we really hope that advertisers will analyze their results and tweak their targeting and other settings to ensure they are meeting their ROI goals. If you can show a positive ROI from placing paid ads on search, there should be no reason not to spend as much money on this as possible. Instead of thinking about paid ads as money that goes into a black hole, think about it as a cost of sales and use it to drive as many profitable conversions as you can possibly handle.

We have some tools and reports that provide guidance about how much potential traffic you could get and you can estimate your potential conversions from this. And once you've maxed out on search advertising, look for the next big opportunity such as ads on the content network or ads on new formats like mobile or video.

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To quickly summarize, there are many important aspects to consider while researching keywords to use in your campaigns. That includes using various tools and software to perform keyword research, estimating traffic, understanding the potential cost, increasing your quality score, conversion, and ultimately your ROI. To learn more about the Advanced Keyword Research session at SES, definitely check out the session details on the SES NY website. I’ll be attending the session and tweeting key points as they come up! I’ll also be recapping each day at SES NY here on my blog.

Are you new to keyword research and confused with where to start? Post your comments below. I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.

GG

SES NY Series: Key Points in Launching a Global Website and International SEO, My Interview with Motoko Hunt from AJPR

As companies start to develop global digital strategies, they begin to face new challenges and obstacles. This is often uncharted territory for many people. Sure, US-based online marketers feel comfortable when targeting US consumers, but what if they had to suddenly target consumers in Japan, England, France, or China? Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to assist several large companies and brands with building global website strategies, including international SEO. I have found that there is a lot of confusion with how to target multiple countries, as well as how to rank across country-specific search engines. Actually, I’ve spoken with several companies that were going down the wrong path...

Globalizing your website might sound easy at first, but unfortunately, it’s not as simple as setting up additional domains, pushing your content to local markets, and then ranking across country-specific search engines. And if you’re thinking about keeping just one website that will target multiple countries, you have another set of problems to deal with. There are several key items you need to work through before you can have a successful global presence.

Global Obstacles and International SEO
From an SEO perspective, you need to address several factors, such as performing keyword research across various languages, addressing cultural issues, understanding top search engines in other countries (yes, Google is not the top engine in every country), and how to adapt to unique market trends. You need to understand the optimal technical setup for your global website, including hosting, ccTLD’s, geotargeting, localized inbound links, etc. Actually, to understand more of the challenges that search marketers face, you should visit some country-specific search engines and start entering your queries. Chances are you will see some interesting results, to say the least. :)

SES NY Session: Key Points in Launching a Global Website
So, when I was reviewing the agenda for SES NY and saw a session about Key Points in Launching a Global Website, I was all over it! Since I know there are a lot of questions about global website strategy and international SEO, I decided to interview one of the panelists to find out more about the session. I tracked down Motoko Hunt, Founder and Search Marketing Strategist of AJPR. Motoko is a seasoned search marketer focused on helping clients enter the Japanese market. She has a thorough understanding of Asia and has helped some of the world’s top brands with their search marketing initiatives. By the way, the session is on Tuesday, March 24th at 11:45 in case you’ll be at SES NY.

Motoko was nice enough to answer some of my questions and I have included my interview with her below. Definitely feel free to post your comments after reading the interview. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Glenn: What are the top 4 or 5 things people will learn at your session?

Motoko: People will learn some important points that will help them better prepare for launching a global website. Often times, people experience these issues during or after the global website has been completed, and wish they'd known that at the beginning. Research indicates more companies will launch or relaunch global websites in 2009. I believe this session will have something for everyone, from agencies to in-house marketers, from small to large-sized corporations.

Some of the key issues I'll cover are:
- Language and cultural issues
- Geographical issues
- Cross-border management issues
- Leveraging standardized templates to develop global websites

Glenn: What trends are you seeing with regard to how clients and companies are approaching international SEO? For example, when clients begin speaking with you, what are you hearing, are they going down the wrong path, is there confusion, etc?

Motoko: Since most of my clients are in the US and Europe, the decisions often times come down from the HQ in Western market to receiving ends in Asia. I see that one of the biggest challenges is how to carry out the project that was planned by the HQ and dictated to each local market. The size of in-house teams in local markets are usually much smaller than what they have at the HQ. Also, they usually have less understanding of SEO, or have different challenges in doing SEO like different target search engines and different search user behavior.

I hear loud and clear that local teams are struggling to keep up with the globalization projects sent down from HQ, while trying to create and maintain the site that "works" for local markets. The companies who give some room for local teams to adopt the local trends seem to have greater success with their globalized website.

Glenn: What are a few core things you want people to know about launching a global website (or multiple websites targeting specific countries)?

Motoko: During my presentation, I'll try and identify the top issues. Some address the technical issues such as keyword research and content localization, CMS, hosting and geo issues. Some countries may have unique regulations about the products you can sell online, or keywords you can bid on. Some are the organizational issues such as manpower, budget, project management and education.

When companies consider "globalizing" their website, some of the benefits they expect to see include cost and time savings. However, by not taking these issues into consideration before they kick-off the globalization project, it ends up taking more time and costing more money.

Glenn: Are you going to touch upon some of the technical items that marketers should address for global SEO, like ccTLD’s, Google Webmaster Tools (geo targeting), inbound links, hosting, duplicate content, etc?

Motoko: These technical issues are often overlooked or unnoticed until it causes some problems after the website launches. I'd like to cover as much as I can within the given time limit. ;-)

Glenn: Should companies just focus on Google or understand more of the global search landscape? (OK, that was a leading question!) I know many marketers in the US understand that Google is dominant here, but there are a lot of people that don’t know the leading search engines in other countries. i.e. Yahoo Japan, Naver in Korea, Yandex in Russia, etc.

Motoko: You know, they shouldn't just focus on Google. Unless of course their "globalization" target markets are limited to those where Google is the dominant engine. When globalizing a website, you need to know each market you'd like to target to determine what types of adjustments are required. If you have an in-house team in a local market, talk to them, use their knowledge, and let them add what is needed to succeed in that market. If you are going to hire an agency, make sure that the agency really knows the market. Having native staff is a huge plus. You want to work with someone with globalization experience, and someone that understands the culture, including how consumers behave and how business is conducted there.

Glenn: I think keyword research is a big issue, including translation. Several tools only focus on certain languages and countries. What are you going to cover that will help people go down the right path? Also, once they find the right keywords and content, what’s the best way to have that content translated?

Motoko: Keywords are the starting point for both SEO and PPC campaigns. If you use the wrong keywords, the entire SEO program and PPC campaigns would fail. Simply translating keywords for other markets never works well. I'll talk about the process of keyword research that has worked really well for my clients. The content should not be simply translated, but localized for each market. I'm sure you understand that the translation tools are not perfect. In fact, they are far from perfect when it comes to Asian languages. You should invest in editing the content by an in-house team or local professionals. You'd want to avoid giving the impression that you are just pushing US-centric services to other markets, which will be viewed as you don't value the market enough to take it seriously.

Glenn: Are there any case studies you are going to provide (along with statistics) for companies that have successfully launched global websites or that are having success with international SEO?

Motoko: I've just finished a case study with Autodesk's Japan team. Maura Ginty will share the results of the case study in her presentation. Also, I will share some of the feedback I received from a client's in-house team in an Asian market about their globalization projects.

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As you can see from Motoko’s answers, launching a global website is no easy feat. :) To learn more about Motoko’s session at SES NY, check out the session details on the SES NY website. The session is being held on Tuesday, March 24th at 11:45 and is part of the Search and the Future Track. As you would guess, I’ll be attending the session and tweeting from the conference. I’ll also be recapping each day at SES NY here on my blog.

Are you launching a global website or focusing on international SEO? Definitely post your comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

GG

The Connection Between SEO and Accessibility Standards, Why Keyword Prominence is Important For More Than Just Search Engine Optimization

If you’ve ever had a hard time browsing a website, then I’m here to tell you that everything is relative. Let me explain. Maybe you couldn’t find your way on a website, had a hard time buying something online, or couldn’t find a solid search result. Well, if you were visually impaired, you would have a whole new set of obstacles to deal with, right? Accessibility is currently a big problem on the web. Ask someone who uses a screen reader how browsing their favorite e-commerce website is and I’m sure you’ll get an earful!

Unfortunately, many people developing and designing websites don’t even think about accessibility during the planning process. I’ll admit it, I didn’t think about it as much as I should have when I was developing websites and web applications. It wasn’t until I started developing digital marketing strategies for clients that accessibility became a bigger (and more important) focus. In addition, I heavily focus on SEO, and I began to notice how much of an overlap there was with accessibility standards. For example, if make sure that your site is accessible, you’re knocking out a lot of SEO best practices while you’re at (such as creating descriptive title tags, headings, using text links, mapping out a robust text navigation, using alt text, etc.)

A Quick Side Note: Learn from Target
If you don’t think accessibility is important, just ask Target. They were sued by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in 2006 and settled for $6 Million in 2008. Yes, $6 Million… You can read more about the lawsuit here, but needless to say, you don’t want that happening to your company, and especially if you’re in control of internet marketing.

SEO Overlapping Accessibility, Enter Keyword Prominence
In SEO, keyword prominence is extremely important. The definition of keyword prominence is placing the right keywords and text in the most important html elements (and areas) on the page. For accessibility purposes, that’s extremely important too! For example, if I created a webpage about a specific topic, I would want to make sure I used a descriptive title tag, meta description, heading tags to break up the content, a descriptive text navigation, and alt text for any images used on the page.

So, mapping out descriptive html elements is great for SEO, but it’s outstanding for accessibility too. You’ll find out why this is great for accessibility soon…

My Accessibility Experiment:
I decided to research what a visually impaired person would experience while browsing the web. I wanted to see how different types of websites held up while using a screen reader (or a screen reader simulator). I also wanted to see the connection between SEO best practices and accessibility. For example, I visited blogs, search engines, ecommerce websites, flash sites, websites using AJAX, etc. and tried to accomplish specific tasks. My guess was that webpages with strong use of keyword prominence would be easier to navigate and read.

I COULD NOT BELIEVE WHAT I EXPERIENCED!
After going through several websites, all I can say is that my findings were jaw-dropping. I was shocked to see how inaccessible most websites were. And just to clarify, it’s not because they were horrible websites run by mean people that don’t care about accessibility. It’s just that accessibility was overlooked during the planning and development process.

Meet Fire Vox, a Screen Reader Simulator
Fire Vox is a text to speech addon for Firefox and it basically simulates a screen reader. It’s an excellent addon to install and enables you to check how visually impaired visitors experience your website. You can learn more about Fire Vox and download the addon here. It’s worth noting that Fire Vox isn’t exactly the same as going through a website using JAWS® or Window-Eyes, which are popular screen readers. Unfortunately, they are relatively expensive and don’t have elaborate trials… I used the free trial for JAWS® for certain websites, but you are limited to 40 minutes per session (and then need to reboot). I would have loved to have used them more for this experiment, though. So, my simple disclaimer is that my experience with Fire Vox may be slightly different from using JAWS® or Window-Eyes. That said, it was close enough for my purposes. I visited several types of websites and tried to accomplish a task on each site. I’ve detailed each visit below along with my commentary. Let’s get started.

The Fire Vox Tutorial Webpage:
I started with the Fire Vox tutorial webpage, since I knew it would go well! And it did. When using Fire Vox, you can click Control and Shift L to bring up a list of all elements on the page (headings links, images, forms, etc.) Then you can select them as Fire Vox reads them to you using a simulated voice. Since the page used a descriptive title tag, descriptive headings, and descriptive links, I found it easy to find what I was looking for. This is a good example of why adding descriptive title tags, headings, and links is important! Yes, SEO and accessibility overlapping… It was a great example of a page that works accessibility-wise. See screenshot below.

Viewing all links on a webpage using Fire Vox:


Blogs
I checked out several top blogs (that obviously use full css layouts), and my experience overall was good. This shouldn’t be a shock, since blogs are text heavy, they frequently use headings to break up the page, have text links to each post, etc. I was able to navigate to various post pages, read the entire post and find my way back to the homepage. OK, two pretty good experiences. Let’s take a step further…

Google Search
This went relatively well, but I found sponsored search results mixed with organic results while using Fire Vox. For example, when I accessed all the headings and links on the page via Fire Vox, it was hard to decipher which ones were paid search ads and which ones were organic listings. I ended up following a paid search listing to the Apple Store when I was trying to find the specs for an ipod nano. I was able to at least find the links in each search result (and they were descriptive) and then I could link to each destination site. Finding the main Google search box was extremely easy by browsing the page’s form elements in Fire Vox. Then simply hitting Enter triggered the search. Other than the sponsored listing issue, my experience on Google was pretty good.

Finding the Google Search Box using Fire Vox:

Yahoo Search
Searching on Yahoo went very well. Unlike Google, sponsored listings did not have headings associated with them, so if I accessed the page’s headings in Fire Vox, I was guaranteed organic results. The sponsored links were mixed with organic results, but at least I could check the headings to find only organic listings. My experience was pretty smooth and I conducted a number of searches. Also like Google, finding the search box was easy (via browsing form elements in Fire Vox).

And the experiment goes down hill…

Full Flash Sites
I heard the proverbial, “crickets chirping”. Wow, this didn’t go very well. I knew my experience wouldn’t be great on full flash sites, but this was ridiculous! I’ve written before about SEO and Flash, but this takes it to a whole new level. The pages loaded and the title tags were ok (thank goodness there were at least title tags!) Then crickets chirped. Nothing. I opened up the elements on the page (Control Shift L in Fire Vox), including headings, links, form elements, images, etc. I all I heard was “There are no such elements on the page.”

Side Note: Using SWFObject to provide alternative content will provide crawlable html for the search engines, but Fire Vox would not pick it up. During my tests, JAWS® did not pick up that content either. Just keep this in mind as you use SWFObject with your flash projects.

I could write an entire post about my Fire Vox experience with flash, but I’ll move on for now. It’s just another reason you should only use flash where its power is needed. Hello hybrid website! Read the next section below.

Fire Vox showing no links for a full flash website:


Hybrid Site (a mix of flash and html content)
If you are going to use flash, a hybrid website is the way to go (for seo, accessibility, and usability.) After loading a hybrid website, l easily found the text navigation below the flash movie in the header, there were headings on the page, and some additional descriptive text links. My experience wasn’t as strong as being on a blog, but I was able to navigate around the site. I also was able to find the html sitemap, which provided headings and links to each page on the site (this was a 25 page website using a mixture of flash and html). But keep in mind that the content contained within each flash movie was not accessible (at least via Fire Vox). Compare this experience to a full flash site and you’ll see why a recommend hybrid websites.

Website With Heavy Use of AJAX
The first website I tested used AJAX extensively to provide content. This was almost as bad as the full flash site I mentioned earlier. Fire Vox read almost nothing…since the data was loaded via AJAX from the start. Then, content that was loaded on-demand wasn’t picked up by Fire Vox either! Now, this might have been due to the way the site was coded, but there were no headings, images, or links accessible. They also used a flash navigation! Yes, flash navigation and content loaded via AJAX. Holy smokes, the SEO in me almost melted down! ;-) Checking other sites that use AJAX yielded varying results. Some sites that used AJAX sparingly were ok. I was able to at least read the initial data on the page and then maneuver to the loaded content to catch some of it. It wasn’t a great experience, but better than then first example listed above. Also, the sites that used headings properly made it much easier for me to find my way. For example, if there was a heading for product information and that div loaded content via AJAX, I could at least maneuver to the content and read what was loaded. So, similar to flash, I recommend using AJAX only when needed. BTW, that’s the same recommendation I make for SEO.

Note, there are ways to ensure your AJAX is crawlable for SEO and I'll be doing more testing to see if that also impacts accessibility. Look for future posts on this topic.

e-Commerce Websites
I checked out several top e-commerce websites and found myself running in circles most of the time. My favorite example was finding an image linking to men’s clothing that actually took me to maternity clothing! I tried this several times and found the same result. Yes, this was ridiculous, to say the least... Other e-commerce sites were ok, enabling me to find some of the items I was looking for, but the end result was typically the same. One problem that kept rearing its ugly head involved the product detail page functionality. As retailers include robust functionality for selecting color, size, etc. in your shopping cart, the functionality unfortunately doesn’t work so well accessibility-wise. I literally could not select certain attributes for the items I was buying. I sat in a shopping cart for 10 minutes trying to select the length for my pants and it just wouldn’t let me. I finally gave up and ended up with a 38 length (which for me would be like a 3 year old putting on his dad’s pants!) Thanks, now I get to step on my pants all day as I remember tinkering with a form on your website! How’s that for branding? :)

News Websites
News websites that utilize full css layouts made it relatively easy to find what I needed. The only problem was the sheer amount of links on the page! That said, compared to other experiences listed in my post, I’ll take it! CNN, for example, was easy to navigate, easy to identify articles you wanted to read, etc. Once in an article, I could easily read the content and then move on to something else. However, other news sites weren’t as clean. I found myself scrolling through tons of links, some of which took me to weird places. Then I couldn’t find my way back. It wasn’t fun… Another thing that bothered me once I found an article was the placement of social bookmarking links. Depending on where these elements were located, it got really frustrating to get through them. I sometimes had to scroll through each one in Fire Vox before getting to the actual text of the article!

So What Should You Do About Accessibility?
I can picture those of you who are web designers and web developers right now. You are either scared to death, in denial, or you want to reach through the screen and strangle me. I understand, so I’m here to help. The first thing you should do is to download Fire Vox and test your site. Identify the problematic areas of your site from an accessibility standpoint and create a remediation plan. And while you’re at it, you can definitely make some changes for SEO too. That’s the great part about developing a site using accessibility standards, you can also knock out some SEO best practices while you’re at it (as mentioned earlier in the post). I highly recommend testing at intervals as you develop to ensure someone who is visually impaired can navigate your website. The interesting side effect is that you might make it easier for everyone to get through your site (including Googlebot!)

Sure Glenn, But What About Creative Backlash?
I know…your designers and developers might be gathering outside your office holding torches and pitchforks wanting to oust you from web marketing leadership. :) Here’s an idea. Challenge them. Hand them blindfolds and have them go through your website using Fire Vox. Give them specific tasks like I used for my experiment. If they don’t quickly understand the problems with your site accessibility-wise, then you either have the most accessible website in the world or you have designers and developers in denial. Unfortunately, this is just the way the web is right now.

Summary and Some Accessibility Links:
Quickly summarizing my blog post, my goal was to reveal a few core things about accessibility.

I wanted to:

1. Introduce the challenges with accessibility on the web today.
2. Explain what screen readers were and focus on a free Firefox addon called Fire Vox.
3. Make the connection between accessibility and SEO.
4. Provide you a quick look at how various types of websites held up while using Fire Vox and provide some recommendations for making changes.

OK, you’re only a 30 second download from trying Fire Vox and testing it out on your own website. So hold onto your hats, you’re about to be shocked (and probably not in a good way!) At least you’ll be able to find your way to the Firefox addon. I can’t say as much for your travels after you start using it... :)

GG

Related Links:
Section 508, The Road to Accessibility

Americans With Disabilities Act

JAWS® Screen Reader

Window-Eyes Screen Reader

The Critical Last Mile for SEO: Your Copywriters, Designers and Developers

As I’m mapping out a half day SEO training course for creative and technical employees, I started to think about the importance of the last mile in SEO. In the telecommunications industry, the last mile (or final mile) refers to the final connection to end users (usually referring to data connectivity to businesses and consumers). It’s often an area where issues can arise. In SEO, there’s also a last mile, although it’s slightly different. The last mile in SEO includes your copywriters, designers and developers. Let me give you a quick example. Let’s say you were hired to help a company with a large SEO project. Your job was to enhance the company’s SEO efforts by removing technical barriers, optimizing important categories of content, and increasing quality inbound links. You start by performing an extensive technical audit and you identify key barriers to indexation. Then you map out a full remediation plan. Your client is excited, you’ve built up some well-deserved credibility, and everyone involved believes that better rankings and targeted traffic are on their way. But hold on a second... Your changes still need to be implemented successfully. Enter the critical last mile for SEO, or your designers and developers that need to implement those changes. Needless to say, your technical and creative teams are extremely important to your SEO efforts.

Why The Last Mile In SEO Is So Important
It is critical that your creative and technical teams successfully implement your SEO changes. If they don’t, then your changes run the risk of having no impact at all (or worse, having a negative impact). That’s right, imagine you’re brought in to fix a problem and you end up making things worse! It’s definitely possible. Keep in mind that problems typically arise in the last mile of SEO when dealing with larger sites when there are more people involved. For example, a 500,000 page website with 75 people working on it. However, whether you hand off technical SEO changes to a single developer or a team of developers, you’re relying on them to implement something they might not be very familiar with. And you need to understand that without your designers and developers, it’s going to be extremely hard to get your SEO changes implemented swiftly and accurately. Like I said earlier, they encompass the critical last mile… That said, your designers and developers also need to understand that your SEO changes are important to the success of the website. It’s a symbiotic relationship and each party needs to understand the value that the other brings to the table.

Let’s take a look at some quick examples of last mile SEO breakdowns, and more importantly, how you can make sure this doesn’t happen in the future:
(Note, I’ve included just a few examples below and not an exhaustive list.)

Search Engine-Friendly Redirects
The Breakdown: Instead of search engine-friendly 301 redirects, 302 redirects or meta refresh redirects were implemented on the website. Both 302’s and meta refresh redirects are not search engine friendly and will not safely pass the link popularity from the old pages to the new ones. Needless to say, this is not good. If your redirects are implemented incorrectly, then you could waste thousands of inbound links and the search power they provide. In addition, you could have wasted countless hours of inbound link analysis.

XML Sitemaps Throwing Errors
The Breakdown: The database administrator generating your xml sitemap files didn’t know that each xml file cannot exceed 50,000 URL’s or 10MB in uncompressed file-size. The files released to the website exceeded those limits, and the engines wouldn’t process the files. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that the files were throwing errors until your SEO Coordinator received the errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

--I worked on a site with over 20 million webpages last year, and we definitely went through a few iterations of sitemap files before we settled on the final result.

Content Optimization, Keyword Research, and Wasted Opportunities
The Breakdown: Important new sections of content went live without being optimized based on keyword research. You’ve lost a great opportunity to provide optimized content and to possibly rank for target keywords. For example, a new product section goes live and it unfortunately contains generic title tags, non-descriptive links, no heading tags, a lack of target keywords, etc.

Canonicalization
As part of your technical audit, you might find URL canonicalization issues, which could cause duplicate content problems. For example, you might find URL’s that resolve using mixed case, querystring parameters, index files and root URL’s. 1 URL might look like 5 to the search engines (all with the same exact content).

For example:
www.yourwebsite.com
yourwebsite.com/
yourwebsite.com
yourwebsite.com/index.htm
yourwebsite.com/index.htm?value=duplicatecontent

The Breakdown: Your developers fix the most obvious problem, www and non-www versions of each page, but don’t tackle the other canonicalization problems, including trailing slashes and mixed case. You will unfortunately still have an issue although the action item might be checked off by project management.

Flash and AJAX
Let’s say you have a killer promotion going live along with campaign landing pages. There’s lot of good content to optimize and you have a feeling this promotion will gain some valuable inbound links. You hand off your content optimization spreadsheet, excited to see the pages go live.

The Breakdown: Your new campaign landing page goes live, but the entire page was developed in flash or using AJAX. If you’ve read my blog before, then you know I’m a big fan of using flash and AJAX, when needed. That said, entire webpages or applications should not be developed using flash or AJAX (at least at this point). They should only be used for elements that require their power. If you do use flash or AJAX for entire webpages, then you run the risk of essentially hiding a lot of your content from the search engines.

Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement
The Breakdown: User Experience wants to take 6 distinct sections of content on a product detail page and provide a tabbed structure instead (for usability). If the tabbed content launches without using Graceful Degradation or Progressive Enhancement, then you run the risk of hiding 5 out of 6 sections of content. For example, the search engines would only find the initial content on the page and not the additional five pieces of content. However, making sure your web developers use Graceful Degradation or Progressive Enhancement to expose the content would still put you in a good place SEO-wise.

So How Do You Prevent a Breakdown in the Last Mile of SEO?
Reading the examples above, you might think that SEO can be frustrating. It is sometimes, but there is a way to nip these last mile problems in the bud. Did you notice a common thread in the examples listed above. The common thread was simply a lack of information. So how do you make sure your designers and developers know about SEO best practices? The answer is training. SEO Training is critical to ensuring technical changes go live using SEO best practices.

In my experience, most designers and developers want to learn SEO best practices. Sure, there will be some push back (and I’m being nice with the term “push back”). But, it’s a great skill for your designers and developers to add to their skillset. They can still create killer applications and websites, but those sites will also launch using SEO best practices. SEO Training can also overcome conflict in the future by ensuring everyone developing a project understands SEO best practices. For example, there should be no surprises when reviewing projects if everyone understands how sites get crawled and indexed.

The Definition of Insanity
I’ll end this post with the definition of insanity. It’s doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Don’t become an insane SEO. :) Introduce SEO training, best practices, examples, etc. and you can make your life easier while helping everyone involved improve their skillset.

Now I need to get back to fleshing out my half day SEO training course. Actually, I think writing this post has helped me create a better training course. I’ll let you know how it goes.

GG