Luring the Spiders

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—three words that have turned industry executives to every book, blog, e-newsletter, Web site and magazine article they can find that gives glimmers of hope on figuring it all out. By now we all know the Wikipedia definition of SEO—a subset of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines via natural (organic or algorithmic) search results. But this only scratches the surface of the potential opportunities for publishers. A study by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), called “The State of Search Engine Marketing 2006,” reported that 2006 organic-SEO spending in the United States and Canada totaled $1.1 billion. The study also indicated that SEO comprised 11.8 percent of 2006 overall North American SEM spending ($9.4 billion), which had increased 62 percent from 2005 to 2006. According to SEMPO, the growth is expected to continue, with SEM spending exceeding $18 billion by 2011. What does all of this mean for publishers, and how can they capitalize by getting all of their content indexed by search engine spiders and Web robots?Making sense of it allAdam Lasnik, search evangelist at Google, is focused primarily on sharing information about Google with webmasters and getting thoughtful feedback.“Offering original and compelling content, of course, is the necessary foundation … and taking a few, often simple steps can increase the chances of this content being found,” Lasnik says.Priyank Garg, product manager for Yahoo! Web Search, believes SEO is key for any publishing business.“As the Internet becomes a growing media experience for users, your Web site becomes a critical tool for capturing your piece of the consumer-attention pie,” Garg says.Tom Lynch, director of search engine marketing at ePublishing—a Chaffee Interactive Company in Chicago whose clients include North American Publishing Co., Consumer Guide Products Division, FDA News and Garden Plate magazine—says that with approximately 215 million searches a day on search engines, publishers can capitalize by utilizing their greatest asset––their content.“You really have to have deep, rich content to be able to do well on search engines,” he says. “You have to make sure that the content is visible to the search engines.”Lynch, who spoke about SEO at this year’s Publishing Executive Conference and Expo, says that if spiders and robots (or “bots”) can’t see your site, they can’t index your content. If the pages aren’t indexed, publishers will get no natural search traffic to their Web sites.“Don’t tell a spider to take cookies, session IDs or user name/password combos,” he says. “Spiders won’t do it and will ignore your site’s content where this is required.”Lynch suggests having your webmaster write code that identifies the spiders and allows them access to your content. He says the spiders should have a free pass. “Yahoo!’s Web crawlers (Yahoo! Slurp) crawl as much content as possible from the Web to make it available for the index,” Garg says. “We discover links and follow them to get good content.”Lynch explains that you could have a library of 100,000 documents, but it won’t matter if the spiders can’t see the pages. Boris Mordkovich—publisher of Search Marketing Standard, Brooklyn, N.Y., a quarterly print publication for business owners and marketers seeking to improve SEO and pay-per-click advertising efforts—says SEM is quickly branching out in a number of different directions, such as SEO, pay-per-click advertising and social media optimization, behavioral targeting and others.“Everybody knows that they need to rank well on the search engines, but very few actually understand how to do it,” he says.Mordkovich believes a publishing company’s goal is to disseminate information to its readers, and that is the essence of SEO.“Search engines are increasingly the way that people search for the information they need,” he says. “So, it’s a matter of putting these variables together and realizing just how well search can complement the publishing business.”These experts share their valuable experience in this special report on best practices in SEO and offer tips on how to ensure your content gets caught in the Web.Best practices from ePublishingLynch believes publishers should use HTML to their advantage. “Title every page with a unique descriptive title that leads with the keyword strategy and tags with the corporate ID,” he says. “Keep it under 70 characters so it all appears in the search engine result’s pages ….” Lynch recommends that publishing companies more advanced in SEO should research the keywords that people actually use to search, that best describe each page’s content, with tools like WordTracker.com. “Put [those words] in the page,” he says. [It’s a] pretty simple formula. Most don’t do it.”When it comes to indexing pages for SEO, he believes the use of proper wording is crucial. “Search engines are literal, not lateral,” Lynch says. “They don’t get the joke. They need it spelled out. So if you want to get traffic to your site … [the keyword] has to be in the page. Put it in the HTML title, the URL, the page header, and use that keyword phrase in the body copy no more than six times.” He says that more advanced companies also will want to integrate bookmarking and commenting on every article. “People use things like Digg [a community-based popularity Web site with emphasis on technology and science articles that combines social bookmarking, blogging and syndication] and Technorati [an Internet search engine for searching blogs] to bookmark and comment on articles,” Lynch says. “This creates a buzz in that bookmarking community. People start talking about it, and it can have a viral effect on traffic to the site as well as help increase the number of inbound links [links that point to your site].”Lynch, who does in-person SEO training for publishing companies, notes, “One publisher in particular invited all [of its] 20 publications to the session—everybody from the designers, to the writers, to the editors and the techies attended.” He says six months after the one-day SEO training session, the publisher saw a 10 percent to 40 percent increase in all the key Web metrics across the board. “It’s not rocket science, it’s just a different way of publishing,” Lynch says. “It’s another series of steps in the workflow process [that] if done correctly, pays off well with incremental visitors and subscribers.”Best practices from Search Marketing StandardIt may not be rocket science, but it can be confusing. According to Mordkovich, there is a ton of information circulating around the Web on SEM and specifically SEO, but some of it is outdated, some of it offers conflicting viewpoints, and some of it is just plain inaccurate. This is the exact reason why Search Marketing Standard magazine was created.He says SEO is extremely important, particularly for niche publications trying to reach their markets effectively. “If you can position your publication and its content to appear in search results when potential readers are looking for that information, you can tap into a new audience and subscribers more effectively than through any other promotional means,” he says. “You should not ignore this avenue of opportunity, nor should you waste time before beginning to take advantage of it.”Mordkovich recommends that publishers post feature articles from their magazines and expand on them online to encourage discussion within the community. “We have found that a lot of our articles get links from outside Web sites through this, which helps us tremendously with our rankings,” he says.Link building, in general, is a big part of Search Marketing Standard’s SEO strategy. “One thing that we do is offer a complimentary subscription to all of the bloggers in our industry,” Mordkovich says. “We try to establish a relationship with them, so when they receive a new issue, they may post a brief review and a link to our Web site. This strategy has proven very effective ….”He warns publishers to avoid engaging in “black-hat SEO.”“These are various tactics designed to attempt to mislead search engines about your Web site via shady means such as doorway pages [Web pages created for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending the viewer to a different page] and keyword stuffing [when a Web page is loaded with keywords in the metatags or in content to obtain maximum search engine ranking and visibility],” Mordkovich says. “More often than not, the use of black-hat SEO will result in your Web site being banned and taken completely off the search results.”If you are already familiar with SEO, he advises that you hire talented employees to work from within and invest heavily in their ongoing training. However, he says it is currently a big challenge to find qualified people, because there are more job openings in the field than people to fill them.Unfortunately, detailed information on the specifics of search behavior is not regularly disclosed by the major search engines. “One thing we do know, however, is the market share that each currently holds,” Mordkovich says. “According to HitWise.com, an intelligence service providing daily insights on how 25 million people interact online, as of April, Google’s piece of the pie is 65.26 percent to Yahoo!’s 20.73 percent, MSN’s 8.46 percent and Ask’s 3.69 percent. Google is still clearly the leader and will likely remain in that position for a long time.”Best practices from GoogleEvery day, millions of people search on Google for information, with the Google Network reaching more than 80 percent of worldwide Internet users, according to Lasnik. He says that with a little effort, publishers can capitalize on some of Google’s success.“For instance, just the act of making your pages’ title tags unique and descriptive can improve your pages’ presence in Google and even the number of click-throughs you get,” he says. “Better yet––like most good SEO––such changes also benefit users directly; in this case, better titles lead to better browser bookmarks, more effective sharing on social networks or social bookmark sites, and so on.” Lasnik says the most important thing to remember is that it’s about the quality, not quantity of links.“Publishers can often expedite this process by inviting online community participation; for instance, [by] adding comments, forums and, in general, making your users feel a part of the conversation on your site, not just a spectator, they’re more apt to share your site with others and potentially link to it as well,” he says. “Similarly, by thoughtfully participating on other blogs and forums, you can also encourage people to visit your site.”However, he explains that the key is authenticity. Finding a hundred blogs on your magazine’s subject and mass-posting (e.g., “Great post, check out our article”) will rightfully be perceived as spamming, and will most likely not result in natural links.“Web 2.0 sites––often noted for their robust communities––are a great place to learn about different demographics and what they feel about your magazine’s topic or even your magazine,” Lasnik says. “Even better, if you have the time and dedication to substantively contribute to these communities … you can increase the awareness and goodwill of your brand.” Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have come together to form a consortium for Sitemaps—XML files that list URLs for each site along with additional metadata about each URL—so that the search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. He explains that the three have combined resources at SiteMaps.org, which helps participating search engines more quickly and comprehensively see what pages Web sites have and how frequently they are updated.Best practices from Yahoo!Garg agrees that sitemaps are important for publishers looking to increase their exposure. Sitemaps allow webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was updated, how often it changes and its importance to other URLs within the site, allowing search engines to crawl a site more efficiently. “Sitemaps give webmasters a tool to augment the crawlers’ information by directly feeding the list of URLs on your site with additional metadata,” Garg says. “This allows us to discover more content and achieve better coverage of your site.”A key to increasing your Web site’s visibility is increasing your site’s search ranking by increasing the number of inbound links to your site, Garg says.“As the search box continues to become the starting point of users’ Web experience, having your Web site well-represented in search indexes through search engine-friendly design helps drive traffic and brand awareness for your media products,” he says. “Just like citations establish the credibility of research papers, and endorsements create awareness of all types of products, links from relevant and trusted sites give credibility, and thus, better visibility in search results to your Web site. Links from relevant and trusted sites are a critical part of search-quality evaluation.”Garg agrees that creating unique user-value propositions and content that others find useful and naturally reference, whether [within] personal Web sites or other trusted sites, is the most effective way to obtain good, trusted links. Mobile searchYahoo!’s expanding mobile network is also helping to increase the amount of search results companies are seeing.“Yahoo! has worked hard to bring to users Yahoo! Mobile oneSearch, a unique mobile search experience that gives consumers what they want—instant answers,” Garg says. “OneSearch is now available on 85 percent of mobile phones.”Google also offers many services via mobile Web browsers. “With an increasing number of people searching, browsing and even sharing sites with friends via portable devices … it makes sense to have your site both show up in mobile search results, and be viewable and usable on alternative platforms,” Lasnik says.Regardless of what platform brings in the spiders to view and index your pages, the importance of investing in SEO is unmistakable.“The fact of the matter is that search is here to stay, and it really does offer a lot of terrific opportunities,” Mordkovich says. “And it doesn’t even have to be that expensive to implement––you just have to be willing to dedicate time to it.” PE

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Luring the Spiders

Jim Calder

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Jim Calder