We here at StratiMind would like to welcome you to this issue of SEO Insights. Whether you are new to SEO or a seasoned expert, we hope that you find our newsletter useful. We would love to hear your feedback and ideas on how we can provide you even more value. And if you do find value here, then please link to us and tell a friend! - Jim Griffeth, Editor

Search’s Role in the Purchase Process – and the Implications for Marketing

Several recent surveys reveal the true role that search engines play in the B2B purchasing process and just how far behind we are as a marketing profession in understanding search marketing. Among the findings from a survey by Enquiro of B2B purchasers, fully 92% of their purchases begin online and of these, 72% begin with search engines (78% using Google). In addition, search engines were tied with word of mouth as the single biggest influence on purchases, both online and offline. Just as importantly, search is used at every stage of the purchase process – from awareness-building to research to negotiating and finally purchasing. In fact, fully 42% of respondent’s purchases start and end online.

So you would think that the marketing profession, whose role it is to understand and influence the purchasing process, would be all over this search engine marketing thing. Alas, you would be wrong. A survey by Coremetrics of marketing professionals measured both the importance of search to the marketing profession and the level of SEM proficiency. Coremetrics asked marketers to rank order a list of marketing skills and they found that 33% of respondents ranked SEM as the most important marketing skill and 73% said it was more important now than 2 years ago. So search engine marketing is indeed viewed as a vital skill set. The critical insight came when respondents were asked about their proficiency with SEM and web analytics.

• 50%: need to improve their analytical abilities
• 41%: SEM skills are in need of improvement
• 83%: tough to hire staff with these skills
• 71%: believe traditional training and education methods are not adequately geared to the needs of today's marketing organizations.

If we take this a little deeper, it focuses our attention as marketing professionals on how to make sure that our online content is both valuable to the user at some stage of the purchase process, and that it is visible in Google for search terms used by the prospective customer. I will concentrate here on the latter requirement for Google visibility and its implications - specifically the new and evolving skill sets needed by today’s marketing professionals.

Getting to the top of Google is no small achievement, and requires deep technical expertise in the 3 major areas of what we call the SEO Success Pyramid™: SEO, web development and web analytics. For effective SEO, for instance, knowledge of HTML, CSS and other web programming languages is required. The ability to understand the keyword landscape requires knowledge of keyword data collection tools and methods, and the ability to build a normalized dataset from diverse data sources. On-page optimization requires a disciplined analytical approach that embodies the knowledge of which page elements need to be modified and how they need to change. Site-wide optimization requires a knowledge of website architecture and how it can and cannot be changed to improve the site’s visibility in Google. Off-page SEO includes a growing array of activities and techniques to improve the inbound links to the website. Lastly, once the optimized website is uploaded, the search positions of your pages need to be systematically monitored over time and appropriate changes made as needed to both the on-page and off-page factors.

Since conversions and not mere traffic are the ultimate goal of SEO, web analytics plays a vital role in closing the feedback loop. Today’s sophisticated web analytics programs allow us to monitor individual user behavior at a level of detail never before possible. These tools require a great deal of thought and preparation in setting up effective monitoring and data collection.

Given this extraordinary array of required skills for the New Marketer, it is not surprising then that while marketers “get it” that search is now a huge part of marketing, few are equipped with the technical skills and knowledge of best practices to take advantage of it. There is a large training deficit with respect to SEO and SEM and it follows that the organizations investing in training (and consultants) are significantly outperforming those that are not. It also highlights an unprecedented need for more technical training and retraining of marketing professionals by higher education and by corporate internal development programs.

For more on this topic, be sure to attend the free SEMPO seminar on September 24, 2008 at Bentley College’s Center for Marketing Technology. > more information and registration

Best Practices for Optimizing Your Meta Tags

The meta tags on a page provide the search engines with important information about the page as a whole. Two of these tags, the meta description and the meta keywords tags are worth spending some time on when optimizing your pages for search. Relatively speaking, the best SEO practices for optimizing these tags are well defined so I will articulate them here.

The Meta Description Tag

First, the intended purpose of the meta description tag is to describe the content of the page. In HTML, this tag looks like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”put your meta description paragraph here”>

Google often uses this tag as the content when constructing the “snippet” – those 2 lines of text that follow the title in the search results. So this means that your meta description tag should contain a compelling reason for the searcher to click on your result. Ah, but if Google doesn’t find the user’s search term in your meta description content then Google will look elsewhere on your page for relevant snippet material. If you have seen the crazy snippets that Google comes up with when this happens, then you know why you don’t want to lose control of your snippet text. To avoid this, make sure that your top keywords for the page are all in the meta description tag.

So how to construct the meta description? Think of it as a well-formed human-readable paragraph with proper sentence construction and correct punctuation. How long should it be? The short answer is long enough to create a reason to click through that contains your top keywords. Google will show up to 255 characters in the snippet, truncating in the middle of a word. But since they will borrow text from anywhere in the meta description paragraph, your meta descriptions can be longer than this without causing a problem. For more information straight from Google on this subject, check out the following video from Matt Cutts Google’s head of “search quality”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS1Mw1Adrk0

The Meta Keywords Tag

The intended purpose of the meta keywords tag was to provide the search engines with keywords that help describe for which keywords the page should come up in the search results. It didn’t take very long for this tag to be completely abused by marketers who started “keyword stuffing” dozens or even hundreds of keywords into the meta keywords tag. The result is that today the meta keywords tag is totally ignored by Google and most other search engines. The big exception is Yahoo which still uses this tag. This is the only reason for us to be concerned with it at all.

At a recent Search Engine Strategies conference, Yahoo described the preferred syntax for this tag as the following (in HTML):

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword phase 1, keyword phrase 2, keyword phrase 3, …”>

You should put no more than 30 words total into your meta keywords tag content area as any more begins to look like keyword stuffing and will indentify you as a possible spammer.

How To Tell if a Link Is Passing PageRank

You’ve heard it before – inbound links are critical to high rankings in the search engines. And you spend a lot of time and energy to build quality inbound links. But how do you know if those links are passing PageRank, or “link juice” as some like to call it. In this article, I will detail the ins and outs of how to tell if a link is passing PR.

Check the rel=”nofollow” attribute

The first thing to check is whether the link in question contains a rel=”nofollow” attribute. If it does, then no PR is being passed. This can be accomplished by manual inspection of the link attributes in the HTML for the page. A link that uses the rel=nofollow attribute has this form in HTML:

<a href=”http://www.somesite.com“ rel=”nofollow” >Link Text</a>

You can identify these much more easily by configuring Firefox to flag these links for you. I use this approach. In Firefox 3.0, just go to Tools > AddOns and search for “nofollow” and you will find the NoDoFollow extension. The extension identifies nofollow links by automatically shading them with a pink background color.

Check the robots.txt directives

The next thing to check is the robots.txt file for directives that prevent the search engines from ever getting to the page with the link in question. You can view the robots.txt file for a website by typing the following URL in your browser:

http://www.somesite.com/robots.txt

If the robots.txt file exists, you will see a series of directives for (cooperating) robots like googlebot that identify sections of the website that the bots should not index – look for “disallow” directives followed by the file directory names. If the page in question is in one of these disallowed directories, then you won’t get any link juice from links on that page.

Carving Out A Place For SEO in the Marketing Budget

How much does your business spend on advertising every year? Much of that money would be better spent if you knew that it would result in sales, right?. If your website was ranked well in the search engines for your keywords, then some portion of the resulting traffic (which is measurable!) will end up buying. Yet many companies still don't allocate the necessary funds in their marketing budgets to optimize their web sites for better search engine rankings and increased web traffic. One reason may be that they simply don't know how much to budget for SEO.

How much should you budget for an SEO campaign? It depends on the magnitude of the optimization job required, of course, and each situation is different. To better suite the needs of each client, we offer two different types of client engagements - retainer-based and project-based.

The Retainer-Based SEO Engagement

Under the retainer model, the client chooses a number of hours of consulting services to reserve each month and pays monthly or quarterly. This approach allows the StratiMind SEO consultant to work with more flexibility than the project-based engagement by constantly adjusting the process and focus to the unique client situation as it changes over time. This is especially useful for clients that want to get a quick start, since the level of effort can be higher in the earlier months.

The Project-Based SEO Engagement

With the project-based engagement, a traditional project management approach is taken with specified detailed deliverables from both StratiMind and the client and a schedule with explicit interdependencies. This approach works well for the client who requires a specific sequence of tasks and deliverables according to a predefined schedule.

The Bottom Line

Whichever approach you choose, a rough rule of thumb is a quality SEO program will require about $10,000 to $50,000 in the first year for a complete SEO campaign, including link-building programs and regular search position reporting. Each year after that plan to spend $2-10K for on-going tuning and maintenance.

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