Asset Optimization

A couple of weeks ago I attended SearchFest here in Portland. There were a ton of great sessions on search engine marketing and social media. I learned a lot over the course of the day but my favorite session was the closing keynote that I talked about in a previous post.

Wil Reynolds spoke on the difference between what Google tells us will work for search and what actually works. Unfortunately, white hat SEO tactics don't always work the best and there are a lot of black hat SEO folks that are doing quite well with their rankings.

For me the most valuable tips that Wil shared were surrounding asset building. Working in-house as the only web person I don't have nearly as much time to spend on SEO as I would like. Typically the only way I am able to spend any time on SEO is if I can fit it into my existing workflow. This makes building on existing assets very important. Following are some thoughts on Wil's presentation, combined with my own input.

Written Content

For content this typically means optimizing for keywords. Keyword research (which can be as simple as looking at search terms that are bringing traffic to your site) and organizational goals can help identify where your focus should be. Typically you won't need to rewrite all of your content, just make sure that you're using keywords appropriately in the content and within the <h> tags as appropriate.

A great additional resource can be your offline content. Do you send out printed newsletters or do you have brochures content that could be added to your site? Since the content is already written it will require a lot less effort than creating new content from scratch.

Images

• Hopefully we've all got photos and other images on our site. Make sure that your alt text is appropriate to the image and uses your target keywords whenever possible.
• Use the same principles as above in the file names of your images.
• Use the Save for Web and Devices option in Photoshop when saving your web images. Google is placing increased emphasis on site load time in their rankings so optimizing images is more important than ever.

Video

Videos can be optimized in much the same way as images. Keywords should be used in the video titles, descriptions and tags. You can also add additional search value by placing a transcript of the video on the page. This can be helpful for people who may not watch the video but it's also a great way of making the content of the video indexable by the search engines.

You're probably already uploading your videos to YouTube so the optimization discussed above will be helpful for those searching on YouTube (the second most trafficked search engine).

It would be great if we could all hire SEO consultants or spend the time to optimize ourselves but that's not a reality for many people. By capitalizing on existing opportunities and working small amounts of SEO into our workflow those with limited resources can start to see a difference in search rankings.

Search Engine Middlemen

There was a really interesting post by Nicholas Carr on his blog a few days ago. The post was about the influence of Google, particularly as it relates to the news media. He basically points out that Google is a "very, very large middleman" that stands between us and the information or product we're searching for.

This got me thinking about how this relates to the rest of the online world, particularly commercial sites that sell a product or service. As Carr points out, the Internet was originally billed as an equalizer, something that put everyone on the same level. Living in a capitalistic society, I'm not sure that was ever a real possibility but it was a great promise. Now that the Internet has pervaded our everyday life (generally for the good) it's clear that it doesn't place everyone on a level field. Sure anyone can start up a website and start selling their wares, but without cooperating with the search engines that website will have a tough time drawing traffic.

I'm certainly not suggesting that the search engines are evil, they provide a very valuable service. There are millions of websites out there and we obviously can't sort through them all ourselves. However, I think we often forget that they are businesses and exist to make money. Often the best way for them to make money is to provide the most valuable search tools but that isn't what is necessarily driving them.

So what's the point of all this? Awareness. We should be aware that search engines are not as unbiased as we may think. We should be aware that just as in the physical world it's all to easy for the big guys to overwhelm the little ones. And, just as in the physical world, this often hurts the consumers.