SEO Is Hard

Have you ever felt like the world of search engine optimization is an uninviting one, the domain of the techie who bathes daily in a deep pool of seemingly arcane rules inscrutable to just about anyone except his or her fellow techies? Well, guess what: That's kind of true.

Sorry. You might have thought the turn of phrase was going to be that SEO is actually easy to master. But it's not. Maybe you were hoping that a few easily understood secrets would be all you needed to succeed, or that you could just sort of fix your SEO once and then be on your merry way. None of this is the case. SEO is hard.

But this is changing, and it's because search engines are getting smarter. At first, that might seem counterintuitive: If a search engine is smarter, wouldn't the need grow for ever–technically savvier SEO practitioners? Not necessarily—the smarter the search engine becomes, the better able it is interpret, catalogue and rank content without the aid of cues in the computer script.

Academics now freely flout SEO techies' expertise and even see SEO as primarily the domain not of the techie, but of the public relations practitioner, with reputation management and a focus on written content poised to eclipse technical SEO tweaks in their ability to influence search engine rankings. That's probably a bit of hyperbole—maybe even some PR for the PR profession—but the perennial importance of good content (of all kinds), which transcends all but perhaps the most technical of professions, remains one of the biggest factors in SEO.

Sourcing and retaining a long-term partner to develop content of various kinds (e.g. video, audio, written, etc.) is perhaps the single most important move an organization can take to make SEO a fruitful endeavor over the long haul. After all the hard work of technical SEO is conducted, and even as efforts continue not only to evolve a keyword strategy, but also to manage relationships and thus score backlinks from respected sources, the writing, video production, and more still needs to happen—and even if your internal team is strong and your organization's horsepower robust, it might not.

News Releases Cut Up The Dance Floor

The slow, inexorable decline of news continues. It's not that, really, but the decline of traditional news reporting as a single-play, profitable endeavor has been undeniable for a long time. That's what people think when they think news: conventional publishing, the advertising model to support it, and the ham-fisted attempts to migrate that model to the Web. Contributing to that decline has been the online environment created by search and social media, and some have surveyed the landscape and called for the death of the news release. But news and the news releases that give rise to it are very much alive, and on search engines and social media, news is cutting up the dance floor as we look for and share information.

What else can we make of the apparent trends reported in a Washington Post article last week looking at social media's impact on the sharing of news online? Google is the 800-pound gorilla on the Internet, sending around 30 percent of traffic to all news sites. And that gorilla has an up-and-coming competitor, Facebook. A large primate feeding every day, all day, on Muscle Milk™ and who knows what else, all in an effort to bulk up and match Google's fighting weight, Facebook sends as much as 8 percent of online traffic to some news sites.

These are all significant numbers, and let's focus on social media for a moment: Any casual or not-so-casual Facebook user can attest that news links are popular attractions. Look in the home feed at any time of the day, and a good half of all status updates come in the form of a comment about a link to some news story. These typically draw conversations, and you want people talking about your news.

Does this appetite for news mean people are hungry for news releases? Certainly not, if those news releases are stuffy, boring affairs intended solely for the press. But news releases aren't that anymore, and notice that lots of people now call it a news release, not a press release.

Business Wire says making news releases ready for social media and search engines goes a long way in helping to spread your news. The problem is that, even now, few folks are doing so. Applying SEO to a news release is a subject well covered, and yet, "Only 18 Percent of News Release Headlines Are Optimized For SEO," according to a study reported by Business Insider seven months ago, when mainstream efforts to capitalize on the combination of news releases and social media had just gotten underway -- e.g. PitchEngine's launch of an app to place newsrooms on Facebook.

News itself is all around, and just like rock 'n' roll, it will never die. That's a cliché worth repeating, and news, as a currency, remains the same. Make your news releases interesting, findable and shareable. We humans have a tendency to search for interesting information, and once we find it, we have a propensity to share.

Seed the Net and Await a Harvest

The following news clip features identity theft prevention expert Robert Siciliano, a longtime client of mine, discussing the dangers of identity theft posed by Skype.

By the way, did you notice, just above the clip, that I immediately preceded Robert's name with his primary keyword phrase? I did so purposely. Just now, I've again contributed to his natural search engine presence (a.k.a. organic SEO). And it's how Robert and I built his online identity (no pun intended...) over several years -- to the point that the print and television news media now call him when they need an expert on identity theft prevention. Because he's easy to find and highly relevant, there's no high-priced publicist making outgoing calls for Robert; he doesn't need one.

Last week, a SearchInsider article shared data revealing the power of natural search traffic. The full article is jam-packed with information, but if you don't have the time to read it, here's the most important piece of information: An iCrossing study on natural search has found that sites receive more than 95 percent "of all their non-branded natural search traffic from page-one results pages across all three major engines. The data included 8.9 million queries sampled over nine months, representing 10 enterprise-level Web sites in many different diverse verticals."

I'll translate that for you. They're talking about keyword phrases that is not necessarily tied to your brand language. Think of all the keyword phrases you would like people to see you associated with in the search engines. Some of it might overlap with your brand language, but there's no necessary linkage. These are the keyword phrases of yours that would have counted if your own website had been included in iCrossing's study.

Now, what if you took it a step further? What if you were to integrally and purposely associate your primary keyword phrase with your brand language? This is what Robert and I did, and we proceeded to seed the net relentlessly with this language. The harvests have been bountiful. The news media now reach out to Robert first, not the other way around.

Now that's pull-marketing. And you can do it, too.

Caffeine: Do You Really Need It?

Have you heard of caffeine? I know that I have.

Many of us think we need caffeine; some of us indeed do. That's why it's in coffee, that thing the jet-setting among us purchase for $2 or more every morning. For the same reasons, caffeine is in those carbonated beverages that some of us drink in the afternoon because we again need a caffeine fix and realize those funny ads about those kinds of drinks aren't too far off the mark.

But have you heard that Google thinks it needs Caffeine, too? (That, by the way, is Caffeine as a proper noun, baby.) In its continual effort to better itself by improving the accuracy of its search engine technology, Google is rolling out the biggest update to its indexing criteria since Jagger in 2007. Go here for a good rundown of the changes Caffeine apparently will bring. The Google Blog talks about Caffeine, too, and Google is even letting you test out Caffeine and provide feedback.

And I encourage SEO and SEM people everywhere to refrain from providing Google with any feedback. No, really. OK, that was meant to be humorous, but not at the expense of being at least partially serious. Don't help them figure out how to thwart organic SEO efforts.

Is that paranoid? Maybe. But how good is the organic search engine optimization industry for Google's Pay-Per-Click revenue stream? We don't really know. Even so, it's probably safe to say Google itself would be just as happy without this industry revolving around it. Sure, all the attention has played its role in making Google a household brand name, but the organic SEO industry hasn't exactly added to Google's bottom line. As more and more companies figure out that they can produce more and more content to please Google's spiders and thus appear in the first search engine results page (SERP), a major pillar of Google's revenue stream, premium placement on the first page of search for a premium price (i.e., PPC), begins to appear irrelevant. Not that PPC is entirely irrelevant -- but it's not like its essential, either.

Google has plenty of other reasons, of course, to evolve its search engine technology. I won't go into all those in this post except to say social media is a big one. But nobody should be surprised that one of the changes Caffeine brings, apparently, is a continuation of Google's efforts to individualize search engine result pages (SERPs) for every user. Taken to its logical conclusion, this march toward individualization fundamentally alters the dynamics and meaning of page rank, and the attendant conjecture within the search engine marketing community has been, well, spirited. Some suspect that Google may be gaming its own system to favor PPC. And why wouldn't Google do this? The potential attrition in PPC revenue because of SEM dollars instead going to organic SEO firms is a clear and present danger to Google.

Fortunately, spirited competition may be at hand among the major search engines, and it might yield viable alternatives that would be welcome any time now. This is the last thing Google probably wants, but the company may finally have brought this upon itself. I speak of Bing, which is already gaining traction among SEM types. In my next post, I'll share my thoughts on how Bing might take advantage of the growing discontent.