Tag Archives: Written by Inga Petri

SEO goes beyond search engines

This is a snip from my Facebook page: A colleague posted my new website to their feed. The text used to describe my site comes from my site’s description meta tag. It’s a concise positioning statement. These words do not appear anywhere on my web site other than in code. However, being written for people my home page  does present my consulting business in 4 paragraphs that expand and explain this positioning further.

SEO: write for people, code for search engines

One way to get search engine optimization right is to think of SEO from the earliest stage of conception of a web site, or a web page. That means you’ll write the site for people and you’ll construct the code for search engines.

Writing for people includes

  • Starting with your keyword list
  • Using your most important keywords, rather than many variants, in title tags, urls, page’s description tag, headings, and body text
  • Be authentic and trustworthy
Construct code for search engines
  • Heed the power of the url
  • Create the most important Meta tags; title tag, description tag, keyword tag
  • Create image tags for each image on your site (this is also a good accessibility guideline)

You can optimize every page on your web site. If you have 40 pages that’s easier than if you have 40,000 pages. Simply triage the needs for improvement and invest where you’ll see the biggest return on your investment: for instance, home page, secondary landing pages, or key sections. 

New content should simply be conceived with these simple SEO concepts in mind, rather than be retrofitted later.

Intrinsic connections: SEO and Brand

In my recent SEO seminar I put search engine optimization firmly in the context of branding and building customer relationships. My premise:

  • Web users want: what they want, when they are ready, wherever they are, and in just the way they want it 
  • People don’t want to ‘search’, they want to ‘find’, so SEO must foster user-centred and brand-oriented keyword thinking and writing

Online Channels are about: Dialogue and Conversation

  • They work because of: Relevance and Timeliness
  • They demand: Authenticity

In that sense then, brand matters. Because trust can be won and lost in an instant. And search engines are often the first encounter a web user has with your brand; they might also be the last encounter when web users choose another listing over yours.

I used a simple three step process to explain the importance of SEO from a brand point of view.

  1. Search for company name, or important keyword relating to your company in a search engine (do this with the top 3 search engines and note the differences): What does the listing say? Is the headline and short description search engines use understandable and a meaningful communication about your brand? Does it leave the right impression?
  2. Look at your company’s homepage: Identify where each engine is getting the information it shows from? Typically search engines use title tags – that’s the text that shows up in the browser’s tab – and either words appearing on the site or the description meta tag, if you have one set up.
  3.  Title tags and meta tags: Anyone can, you included, look at the source code of your web site. Most likely its in a menu drop down like “View – Source”. Or look for developer in the page icon drop down. Title and meta tags should be easily found at the top of the page for each of your web pages.

This may well be the first step to making improvements to your web presence that are championed beyond the confines of the web team, or maybe the web and marketing teams.

Because, SEO is a way to ensure your brand is effectively communicated. It is also a way to be found by the right people in the online environment.

The Qualitative-Quantitative Divide

MRIA Ottawa held a fascinating panel discussion on qualitative-quantitative research approaches. The discussion explored combined focus group and survey methodology but touched only lightly on other methods of marketing research.

In my view the following merit consideration:

  • Marketing research is not merely doing focus groups and surveys. It includes the full gamut of research activities that contribute to better decision-making: from literature reviews to know what is already known, to web reviews to find out what others are doing and how, to communications audits and semiotic analysis, to customer data mining/behaviour modelling, to competitive branding assessments.
  • Opinion bias comes from ones own experience. A Survey house invariably discusses the marketing research business based on what they are so very good at. Other practitioners who offer another range of services will have a point of view that is informed by that. As a consultant I am not tied to a call centre or focus group facilities and I do not need to achieve any particular scale to amortize my hardware or infrastructure investments. I am free to build research methodologies to any budget and I can make sure that better information is used to make decisions.
  • Computers count, people measure. I heard this at a recent Third Tuesday meeting and was struck by how much it resonated with the audience. Technology is simply a tool, decisions are made by people supported by tools. As a researcher part of my job is to interpret data points relative to a business decision. That requires me to know enough about my clients’ business – without that I am liable to misinterpret data points and my recommendations may or may not be all that relevant.
  • Budget is important but it’s not everything. I can use research methods that fit nearly any budget and improve the situation. A marketing/communications materials audit may take as little as 1 or 2 days and can result in major transformative decisions that improve effective communications. An intelligent review of web traffic statistics can reveal important insights to improve a web site.
  • There is no qualitative-quantitative divide. What we call research (primary or secondary, qualitative or quantitative, statistically valid and reliable or directional), is not all that important. What is important is to choose the most effective methods possible within time and budget constraints that allow for a better decision.

Search Engine Optimization

I presented my new SEO webinar yesterday to a fine crowd of 40 connections, with several having multiple participants on the webinar. It went well and the feedback on the content was very good. My approach,not surprising, is strategic in nature: where does SEO fit in the marketing mix, where does it fit in the online mix and what does good SEO entail. I showed some neat examples of the power of code, some simple tricks and a few keyword tools.

Now, I will seek places to make this presentation again and again; it’ll last at least a few weeks maybe even months. This time it was presented by MRIA, which I am really pleased with.

Social media and PR

Here’s a worthwhile article on social media relations and how and why current PR is missing the boat.
Opinion: Why social media relations is more important than good PR

I think the developments in all manner of media mean that anyone with a vested interest, in particular infrastructure, that allowed them to make money in another era – like 10 years ago – needs to rapidly retool. That retooling needs to take place at the business model level. And it requires new skills and expertise and a whole different mind set about risk and managing risks to a business.

The financial crisis and global recession isn’t so much the cause of the demise of so many businesses, from banks to department stores to media empires. It simply accelerated a trend that began in the 1990s.

Economy and Strategy

What a time to be a strategist. As the level of uncertainty has risen to levels not seen in North America in some time, and the effects of the credit crunch and the global recession taking hold, all manner of organizations need to rethink their positions and monitor their own and related industries closely. This is when strategy is at its best – strategy as a comprehensive diagnosis of factors affecting an organziation, and readying multiple strategies each relevant to various best and worst case scenarios to respond flexibly and awarely to the challenges and opportunities.