The purpose of an SEO Audit is to paint an overall picture of what you’re doing right, what needs to be improved, and what issues may be hurting your rankings. If you’re familiar with SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats,) that’s exactly how you should approach the SEO Audit.

Ok. Let’s get on with it…

Start by signing up for a Webmaster Account with each of the major Search Engines

Google Webmaster Tools (free)

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools
2. Create a Google account if you don’t already have one
3. Verify your site
4. Set your correct geographical target
5. Set your preferred domain
6. Enable image search (may drive traffic, but will unlikely be useful)
7. Create and upload XML sitemaps
8. Identify issues
9. Look at your external links
10. Look at the GoogleBot crawl rate
11. Look at the search phrases
12. Be alerted to duplicate titles

Bing Webmaster Tools (free) Sign up and authenticate your site. You’ll need to sign up for a Windows Live ID if you don’t already have one.

Yahoo Site Explorer (free) Same deal; sign up and authenticate your site. You’ll need to sign up for a Yahoo! account if you don’t already have one.

Usability Review

1. Evaluate the visual design. Navigate your site through the eyes of a visitor. Is the site aesthetically appealing? What type of user experience does your site offer? Is there a logical hierarchy between pages and subpages? Is there a comfortable flow between content areas? Does your site look like it was made in 1999 or 2009?

If the visual design is driving visitors away, then no amount of SEO efforts will help increase traffic and conversions. If your web site is in rough shape or built entirely in Flash, now is the best time to redesign it.

2. Check browser compatibility. When designing and optimizing a site it’s important to see how your site renders in operating systems (e.g. Windows 7 or Mac OSX) and browsers (e.g. Firefox, Safari, or IE7) other than your own. Browser compatibility has a huge impact on usability. I suggest using Browser shots and/or NetRenderer.

3. Custom 404 page. Generally if a user reaches a 404 page (“page not found”) they’ll bounce off your site. Improve your visitor retention by customizing your 404 page. At the very least, it should include an apology, a prominent search box, a link to your sitemap, a link to your homepage, and your standard navigation bar. Add in a funny picture and some self-deprecating humor and you may just keep that visitor.

Accessibility / Spiderability Review

Image credit: CubicCompass

1. Look through the eyes of a SE spider. Run your site through the YellowPipe Lynx Viewer to see what your site looks like from a search engine spider’s perspective.

2. Turn off Flash, Javascript, and cookies on your browser and see if you can still navigate your site.

3. Look at the Robots.txt file. If you’re using a Robots.txt file make sure you aren’t excluding important sections of content. A misplaced Robots.txt file can prevent whole sections of your site from being indexed. Use the Robots.txt checker in Google’s Webmaster Tools.

4. Navigation location. Your primary navigation should be located at the top or top-left of your site and appear consistently at the same place on every page. Make sure your navigation links to all major content areas of your site and includes a link back to your homepage.

5. Javascript in navigation = Bad! When Javascript is embedded inside of navigation elements (e.g. to create a drop down menu) it renders the links in the menu invisible to search engine spiders. This is also a cross-browser compatibility issue, and your fancy drop down menu will likely break on some browsers. Don’t use any Javascript or Flash navigation, but if for some reason you need to (really?) then be sure to have the same menu elements appear in an HTML-only navigation bar in your footer.

6. Breadcrumbs. Use ‘em. Not only do breadcrumbs show visitors where in the site hierarchy the current page is located and provide a shortcut to other pages in the hierarchy, but optimizing your Breadcrumbs with keywords will help your SEO efforts.

7. Frames. Don’t use them.

8. Splash page. Don’t use one.

9. Flash. Flash is ok in small doses, but if the site built entirely in flash then just give up now; don’t even try to optimize the site. You won’t be able to rank competitively until you do a top-down redesign.

10. Clicks-from-homepage. Every page on the site should be accessibly from the homepage within 3 or 4 clicks, or it becomes harder to find for visitors and risks being ignored by Spiders.

11. Restricted access. Are there any pages on the site that (1) require a login or are accessible only via (2) a search box or (3) a select form + submit button? These pages will not be indexed by Spiders. That’s not a problem unless there’s restricted content that you want the spiders to index.

12. Broken Links. Use a tool such as the W3C Link Checker to check for broken links. Pages linked to by broken links might not be accessible to SE spiders, and search engines may penalize sites with an abundance of broken links.

Google Health Check

1. Site: command search. Do a Google search for “site:www.example.com” to see how many of your pages have been indexed by Google. This data is notoriously inaccurate, so don’t expect it to match up perfectly, but consider it a red flag if you know you have 2,000 pages of content and Google says you have 27. Record the number of indexed pages

2. Do a brand search. Google your company / website name. Even if you aren’t ranking well for keywords yet, you should rank #1 for your domain / brand.

URL Review

1. URLs should be succinct, descriptive, contain relevant keywords, and leave out non-essential words. For example, Matt Cutts (the head of Google’s WebSpam team) used the page title “best-iphone-application” for a post titled “What are the best iPhone applications.”

2. Drop Sessions ID’s from URLs They’re ugly, they create duplicate content issues, and pose security risks. Peconic SEOdiscusses your alternatives:

3. No more than 2 or 3 query parameters (e.g. “?” or “=” or “&”)

Bad = http://www.mysite.com/brands.php?object=1&type=2&kind=3&node=5&arg=6
Good = http://www.mysite.com/brands.php?nike

4. Directory depth: While the number of slashes in your URLs shouldn’t have a negative affect on your SEO ranking, best practice is to keep

Bad = http://www.mysite.com/people/places/things/noun/noah/car
Good = http://www.mysite.com/people/noah/

5. Use hyphens in page names, not underscores

Bad = www.thedailyanchor.com/this_is_my_post/
Good = www.thedailyanchor.com/this-is-my-post/

Redirect Review

Image credit: aonach.com

1. 302 Redirects. Do a server header check using the W3C Link Checker again or the Live HTTP Headers add-on for Firefox and look for any 302 redirects. If you find any, replace them with 301 redirects. 302 redirects won’t transfer link juice (PageRank) to the destination URL.

2. Canonical Homepage URL issues. The URL of your homepage might be displayed in any number of variations, which is fine for visitors but not for SE spiders; they’ll count each page separately. Part of the search engine ranking equation is calculating how many external links a given page has. If you have even 2 iterations of your homepage (e.g. http://site.com and http://www.site.com) then Google will count your homepage as two separate pages. Thus, if you have 1,000 inbound links to http://site.com and 2,000 links to http://www.site.com, Google will count those separately (effectively watering down your link juice) when you really want them to count it as 3,000 links for one page. What to do? Consolidate all versions or iterations of the homepage to one URL.

a.) Decide whether you want a www or non-www URL and then redirect the loser to your preferred choice. Thus, if you choose “http://www.site.com/” then create a 301 direct to that URL from “http://site.com/”

b.) Remove default file names at the end of your URLs. Below are some examples. You should create a 301 redirect to your preferred URL for any variation.

• • http://www.site.com/index.html
  • http://www.site.com/index.htm
  • http://www.site.com/index.php
  • http://www.site.com/default.html
  • http://www.site.com/default.php
  • http://www.site.com/home

c.) Consistently use your preferred URL in every internal link on your site. If you choose the www version, then all links should build off of http://www.site.com/

d.) Go to Google Webmasters Tools > Site Configuration > Setting and set your preferred domain.

Title Tag Review

1. DMOZ hijacking. If you’re listed in DMOZ, be sure to use <meta name=”robots” content=”noodpt”> to prevent DMOZ titles and description

2. Yahoo! hijacking. If you’re listed in the Yahoo! Directory, <meta name=”robots” content=”noydir”> to prevent Yahoo! titles and description

3. Look for missing/duplicate/long/short Title Tags by going to Google Webmaster Tools > Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions.

4. Run your site through the Yahoo! Site Explorer and do a Google Site: command search (search for “site:www.example.com”) and make sure Title Tags are:

a) Unique. Does every page have a unique Title Tag? Make sure Title tags aren’t missing or duplicated; 3.5 million web pages on Google have no title 80k have a title that says “insert title here.”

b) Descriptive. Title Tags should be descriptive and incorporate relevant keywords & the brand name (e.g. “Organic Cotton Sheets | Example Brand” or “keyword > category | brand”)

c) Relevant. Title Tags should reflect page content and uppermost page heading (H1.)

d) Succinct. Title Tags should be less than 65 characters long.

Meta Tag Review

1. Make sure Meta robots.txt isn’t blocking the whole site. JaneAndRobot offers a great guide for managing Robot’s access to your website.

2. Go to Google Webmaster Tools > Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions and look for duplicate/long/short Meta Descriptions.

3. Run your site through the Yahoo! Site Explorer and do a Google Site: command search (search for “site:www.example.com”) and make sure Meta Tags are:

a) Unique. Every page should have a unique Meta Description.

b) Descriptive. The Meta Description for each page should describe the page content succinctly and accurately.

c) Actionable. The Meta Description should be written as an “advertisement” for each page, encouraging users to click on the link in search results. Write with sizzle, but be honest, accurate, and descriptive. Don’t bait and switch!

d) Optimized. Meta Description and Keywords should display targeted keywords to indicate the content to visitors?

e) Succinct. Meta Descriptions should be less than 155 characters with spaces and Meta Keywords should be less than 250 characters with spaces.

Content Review

Image credit: TopDealerSEO

1. Quality content. Does the website contain high-quality, unique content? Unless your site’s content is better than your competitor’s, then you’re always going to be fighting an uphill battle. As I said in the SEO introduction article, you should only ever rank as high as you deserve to rank.

2. Human-focused. Content should be written for humans and not for search engines.

3. Heading Tags. Every page should contain an H1 tag that is optimized for relevant keywords.

4. Keyword optimized. Pages should be optimized for only one keyword per page, with the keywords used 4-5 times per 500 words.

5. Internal links. Pages should include links to other pages on the site using keyword-optimized anchor text.

6. Enough Content. Every page should contain 200+ words of HTML text.

Duplicate Content Review

If you have thousands or even hundreds of products on your site, you probably have at least some repetitive copy. Flag it.

1. Search for a content string (sentence) in Google… your search should return just one page on your site, not multiple.

2. Check the amount of content on each page. Pages with images but little content are seen as low-quality by the search engines, and may even be seen as duplicates of one another.

3. Use a tool like Copyscape to see if other websites are stealing your content.

4. Clean up duplicate URLs with the Canonical Link Element. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft support a link element to clean up duplicate URLs.

Let’s say you have a page about Organic Cotton Sheets that is accessible by multiple URLs (http://www.example.com/products/b335/?pkey=csheet-sets and http://www.example.com/products/b335/?cm_src=rel.) You can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/organic-cotton-sheets.html”/>

That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location) is http://example.com/organic-cotton-sheets.html instead of http://www.example.com/products/b335/?pkey=csheet-sets or http://www.example.com/products/b335/?cm_src=rel.

Image Review

1. Alt attributes should be used on all images <img alt=”…”>.

2. Image filenames should be short but descriptive and use targeted keywords. Don’t use long filenames or practice keyword stuffing.

Good = “organic-cotton-throw.jpg” or “spiked-eggnog-recipes.jpg”
Bad = “image27.jpg” or “eggnog.jpg”

3. Image files should be stored in one directory (e.g. “http://www.example.com/images/”)

Internal Link Review

1. # of Links. The general rule of thumb is that there should be fewer than 100 links on a page, mainly to 1) keep from souring user experience and 2) to keep from dividing PageRank to so many links that the links carry only a minuscule amount of linkjuice. That said, if you have a high PageRank page Google may spider up to 200 or 300 links.

2. Nofollow. Use the nofollow attribute ONLY when linking to sites you don’t necessarily trust (e.g. links in user comments) or to non-essential pages that wouldn’t be helpful to include in search results (e.g. “add-to-cart” links and the shopping cart page.) That said, Matt Cutts recently said, “given the way that Google works since this [PageRank sculpting] change, I would let PageRank flow even to your privacy and terms-of-service type pages. Even those sorts of pages can be useful for more searches than you would expect.”

3. Paid Links. Don’t buy or sell paid links that will flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s search results. Google is okay with some paid links (see quote below,) but be sure to use the nofollow attribute and clearly identify those links as being paid/sponsored.

If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines… For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute… The other best practice I’d advise is to provide human readable disclosure that a link/review/article is paid. You could put a badge on your site to disclose that some links, posts, or reviews are paid, but including the disclosure on a per-post level would better. Even something as simple as “This is a paid review” fulfills the human-readable aspect of disclosing a paid article.

- Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s WebSpam team.

4. Anchor text. All internal and external links should make good use of Anchor text (the clickable text in a link that is placed within the anchor tag <a href=”…”></a>.) Anchor text helps users and search engines understand what page you’re linking to is about, and should be short, descriptive and on-topic.

Bad = “click here” or “read more”
Good = “The previous article in this series gave an introduction to SEO.”

5. Link formatting. All links in body copy should be underlined and a different color than the body text to help users clearly identify links. Best practice is to use blue underlined text for hyperlinks, that turns to

Inbound Link Review

Image credit: SEOmoz

1. Measure the number of inbound links to the site using Yahoo! Site Explorer, the SEO for Firefox add-on, or Backlink Watch.

2. How many links are from .Edu sites?

3. How many links are from .Gov sites?

2. Directories. Has site been submitted to directories such as DMOZ (free,) Yahoo! Directory ($300/yr) or BOTW ($100/yr) to gain high quality backlinks.

3. Inbound anchor text. Just as links on your site should use optimized anchor text, links to your site should use optimized anchor text. If the majority of links to your site use inadequate anchor text (e.g. “click here”) then flag this for later. During the link building stage, as part of your relationship-building efforts, you should reach out to webmasters of sites that link to you and ask them to use certain anchor text for those links.

4. Is there a natural distribution of links on the site, or do 50% of the links directed to 1 page?

5. Is the site receiving any links from Free For All (FFA) sites or Link Farms? End the practice now, your site could (and should) be banned for this. Also be careful about link swapping…

6. Avoid excessive reciprocal links.

Geo-Location Review

1.If you want to appear in Local Search results or Google Maps, then make sure a local address and phone number appear on every page.

2. The top level domain (TLD) should reflect the primary country you’re targeting (e.g. “.com” for the US, “.co.uk” for England.)

3. The IP address of your web server should also reflect the geolocation you’re targeting.

Semantic HTML Review

1. Page file size should be less than 150kb before images, CSS, and other attachments.

2. Page load time should be less than 10 seconds on DSL. While you won’t be penalized for a load time of 11-16 seconds, long page load times provide for poor user experience and may prevent spiders from crawling your site. You can test page load time using URI Valet.

3. Check for poorly formatted code. You don’t have to have 100% valid code, but eliminate as many errors as possible to maximize user experience and crawlability.

a) Check the validation of your xHTML markup using the W3C Markup Validation Service.

b) Check your CSS using the W3C CSS Validator.

Back-End Review

1. Determine when the site underwent its last major redesign. Significant changes to navigation, content, and URLs can have an impact on SEO.

2. Evaluate the Content Management System. Is it up-to-date? Easy-to-use? Is it going to give your in-house team or SEO consultant a mental breakdown 4 weeks into the project?

3. Evaluate your host and server. Are you on a shared server, VPN, or dedicated server? If you’re going to increase the traffic to your site, can your server handle it? Slow servers not only drive visitors away, but also impact indexing of your content by search engine spiders. If your servers are slow, the spiders will stop indexing in order to keep from crashing your servers.

4. Domain age. When was the domain first registered?

5. Domain expiration date. Check with your host to see how long until your domain registration expires. Best practice is to keep your domain registered for 5+ years out. If your domain registry expires within the next 3 years, renew it now.

Establish Benchmarks

Create an SEO Spreadsheet and include the following information:

1. Inbound links according to each major search engine

2. Indexed pages on each major search engine

3. Visitor information compiled from your Web Analytics software

4.  The PageRank for your homepage and most popular pages. I recommend using Firefox and installing the following plugins: SearchStatus, SEO for Firefox, and RankChecker.

5. If you publish a blog, burn your RSS feed through Feedburner and keep track of your subscribers and reach.

6. How your site is currently performing in the SERPs.

• Google Local
• Google Main
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Maps
• Bing Local
• Bing Webmaster Central
• Yahoo Local
• Yahoo Main
• Yahoo Site Explorer

Sign up for Web Analytics Tools

1. Sign up for Google Analytics (it’s free.) Let it run for 2 weeks before executing any SEO. You’ll need to establish a baseline of how your current traffic in order to accurately measure your success later on.

Note: While Google Analytics is a great tool for user analysis, it has some serious deficiencies as an SEO tool. 1) It uses page-tagging technology that’s only capable of recording visits by browsers using Javascript, and thus doesn’t record visits by search engine spiders and 2) GA doesn’t allow you to view or upload log files, which include much more granular information. Solution? Invest in a log file analyzer such as Sawmill ($99+) or WebLog Expert ($75+)

2. You should also consider using other free analytics programs; it’s best not to rely on a lone data source. You can read this article on some of the best free web analytics tools, but looking at Piwik or Woopra would be a good place to start.

3. Now is also a good time to decide whether or not you have the budget to pay for a subscription-based web analytics or SEO service, such as Omniture SiteCatalyst, Mint.com, VisiStat ($30/mo or $270/yr,) or WebTrend’s Analytics 9. If you know you’re going to make a purchase, then do it now so that you can establish at least 2 weeks of benchmark data.

4. Also, if you have the budget to do so then I highly recommend you sign up for a SEOmoz Pro Account ($80-230/mo) to gain access to some incredible content and SEO tools.

5. Once your analytics software has been running for 2 weeks,

• How many visitors are you getting on a daily/weekly/monthly basis?
• Which search engines drive the most traffic?
• What other sites refer the most traffic?
• What keywords are you already ranking well for?
• What pages are the most popular?
• Least popular?
• What’s your bounce rate?
• What’s the average time on page?
• What are the average pageviews?
• Set up Goals on Google Analytics. What’s your conversion rate?
• What’s your average transaction amount?

Establish Objectives

1. Evaluate how increased traffic could affect your business. If you have an e-commerce site, your SEO efforts should prioritize keywords that will bring you traffic for 1) products with the highest profit margin, 2) new products and 3) underperforming products. Will dig deeper into this in Step 3: Keyword Research + Selection, but it’s important to start thinking about it now. If you have a traffic/destination site, how many additional visitors would it take for you to generate more revenue on advertising?

2. Set short-term and long-term goals. It’s not enough to execute SEO; you need to establish goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely (S.M.A.R.T.) Do you want to increase traffic? Sell more of a certain product? Be more popular? Increase newsletter subscriptions? Increase your RSS feed subscribers? Generate more revenue on advertising? A good S.M.A.R.T goal for SEO would be to “Generate __% more visitors in the next __ months in order to generate ___ more leads per week and increase sales by $__”

3. Establish a budget. Are you going to perform SEO in-house or hire an SEO consultant? (shameless self promotion: email me) If you’re doing it in-house, then you’ll want to consider purchasing subscriptions to the web analytics tools and keyword research and discovery tools. There are some free services available, but like all things in life, you get what you pay for. You don’t have to sign up now, but it’s important to establish a budget so you know what you have to work with when the time comes.

______________

What’s on your SEO Audit checklist? Have anything to add? Leave a comment below.

The Introduction to the Introduction

This post explores the elements of executing effective Search Engine Optimization. This series doesn’t aim to provide you with any “secrets” to ranking high in the search results, nor will executing every step contained herein guarantee you’ll rank above your competitors.

Think of this as a reference guide, not a manual. It’s a conversation with a chef, not a cook book.

Ask 20 Search Marketers to define SEO and you’ll get 20 different answers.

Here’s mine:

Search Engine Optimization is the process of creating or updating a website to improve the site’s ranking in organic search results, with the objective of increasing the volume of quality traffic. This must be done on-page (site architecture, link structure, content, keywords, title tags, etc.) and off page (link building.)

The most important word in that definition is “process.” SEO is an evolving marketing school of thought; a science and an art. SEO isn’t something you do once, it’s an ongoing series of small adjustments that don’t amount to much individually, but when combined with other optimizations can have a marked impact on both user experience and performance in organic search results.

SEO requires Time + Education + Resources

A Necessary Clarification between SEO and SEM

Be careful not to confuse Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Search Engine Marketing (SEM.) Search Engine Marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses both SEO and Paid Search Advertising.

SEM = A form of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) via both non-paid/natural methods (Search Engine Optimization) and paid methods (paid placement, contextual advertising and paid inclusion.) SEM can also be an acronym for Search Engine Marketer, or someone who performs SEM.

SEO = The branch of SEM that deals only with non-paid/organic/natural/algorithmic search rankings. Again, SEO is the process of creating or updating a website to improve the site’s ranking in organic search results, with the objective of increasing the volume of quality traffic. This must be done on-page (site architecture, link structure, content, keywords, title tags, etc.) and off page (link building.) SEO can also be an acronym for Search Engine Optimizer, or someone who performs SEO. While SEO is more time consuming and requires more upfront effort, it’s the most cost-effective method of SEM.

Paid Search Advertising = The branch of SEM that deals only with paid advertising, also known as Pay Per Click advertising. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) display these relevant text ads that link to a company page when a search engine user types in a specific word or phrase. A fee is charged every time a link is clicked, with the bid price, Click Through Rate (CTR) and Quality Score mainly determining its position. Paid Search Advertising may involve advertising through a content network of third-party sites. Google generates about $5 billion in paid search advertising revenue every quarter.

The following image of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) highlights the difference between SEO and SEM. The Yellow zone displays the free/organic/natural/algorithmic listings from SEO, and the Green zone displays the sponsored/paid listings from SEM.

While SEO is an art and a science, paid advertising is much like an eBay auction. With paid advertising, the higher your budget the more keywords you can target and the higher they’ll rank. With SEO, quality content and links win, not budget. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a mom and pop hardware store or a conglomerate with a $1 Million advertising budget; you can level the playing field if you execute effective SEO.

Now look at this next image. 86% of the clicks on a Search Engine Results Page are made on the organic listings produced by SEO, and only 14% of the clicks are made on paid search listings produced by SEM (Source: Beussery.) The top 2 organic search listings get 60% of the traffic. If you aren’t engaging in SEO or aren’t ranking highly in the SERPs, how much traffic are you missing out on?

The Value of Search Engine Optimization

Searchers are active shoppers:

37% of people have an incentive to buy when they search online. Of those people, 56% are conducting a local search; they’re looking to physically go to a local business. 80% of those people are going to call that resource, and 60% of those people are actually going to purchase that product online or in a store. (Source: Network Solutions)

These “active shoppers” come at a very low Cost Per Lead:

Source: SearchEngineLowDown.com

Search Engine Market Share:

Google has dominated the search engine market for the past decade, but now that Microsoft has relaunched and retooled MSN / Live Search as Bing, we may see the balance shift in the coming years. I may eat my words in the future, but I see Bing building most of it’s traffic from the Yahoo! market (Yahoo! is now powered by Bing) and I see it helping to euthanize Ask.com without taking much traffic away from Google.

Note: I’ll often use “Google” to refer to all search engines, but the vast majority of everything I say will hold true to the other major search engines as well. It’s like calling all soda “Coke” if you live in Mississippi. No, I’m not from Mississippi. I just drank a Coke there once. Or was it a Coke?

Here’s a snapshot of Search Engine market share as of August 2009:

Source: StatCounter

To broaden the context, here’s a look at the Search Engine market share over the past 3 years:

2009

2008

2007

Source: SEOConsultants.com

So what do all these numbers and pretty pictures mean?

Okay, those last 3 pictures weren’t very pretty, but the point is this: if you engage in effective Search Engine Optimization and get your website ranking in the top few search results for certain targeted keywords (more on keywords in Step 3,) then you create the potential to drive a higher volume of highly qualified visitors to your site. What happens when they get to your site depends on your service offerings, content quality, call to action, and web design more than anything else, but you’ve tackled the first step: getting your product/service in front prospects.

Despite the seemingly obvious benefits of SEO, only 17% of small businesses have an articulated online marketing plan, and 83% of website owners have the mentality “if I build it, they will come.” (Source: Network Solutions.) Wake up. If you market it, they will come.

Not engaging in SEO? Let’s put down some real numbers and calculate your missed opportunity for not ranking well in SERPs for your products and services:

We’ll calculate the # of people searching for your targeted keyword X that search engine’s market share X expected Click-Through-Rate (CTR) X average conversion rate X average transaction amount…

E.g.: 10,000 searches/day X 70% Google market share X 10% CTR X 5% conversion rate X $100 transaction amount = $3,500/day or around $1,280,000/year. Get it now?

Assuming you now have a basic understanding of what Search Engine Optimization is and why there’s huge value in it, let’s dig deeper…

How does Google Decide What Web Pages Rank the Highest?

The basic formula for search algorithms is this:

Relevance + Popularity + Trust = Healthy Search Engine Rankings

If your content (words on a web page) is relevant to a keyword (a word or phrase someone is searching for) and Google considers your web page to be popular (measured by inbound links to that page) and Google trusts your website (link weight, domain age, etc.) then you’re on the right track.

Relevance (aka Document Analysis) = The degree to which the content of a web page (document) returned in a search match the user’s search terms. Relevance increases if the search term appears multiple times on a page, particularly if it appears in the title of the page or heading tags (H1, H2, H3.)

Popularity (aka Link Analysis) = The relative importance of a web page determined by the number of links to that page from elsewhere on the web. Popularity increases with every new link. Search Engines measure not only who is linking to a certain site or page and how many links exist, but what the referring web pages say about that page (anchor text.)

Trust = The relative value of links and content. As we discussed with Popularity, the more websites that link to your content the more popular your content is determined to be. Well, if those links come from web sites that are popular themselves, then that “link juice” is more highly concentrated. E.g. just because I say you’re a rockstar employee doesn’t mean squat. If your CEO mentions it in a press release, it holds a little more weight, right? Links from trusted institutions a la education sites (.edu) or government sites (.gov) hold very high weight, as well as links from well-respected sites like NYTimes.com or WSJ.com. On the opposite side of the spectrum, if most of your inbound links come from 1-to-1 link exchanges, affiliate links, or sites that can’t be trusted (link farms and spam sites,) those links can hurt your trust factor.

All of this information is weighted in search engine algorithms that determine the positioning of every result in the SERPs. We’ll dig deeper into the weight and value of links (and things like PageRank) in Step 6: Link Building.

Content is King

I’m going to try to drill this into your head. Content is King. Quality content. I don’t care how high you want to rank in the SERPs, you should only rank as high as you deserve to rank. This can be a hard pill to swallow for people and companies new to SEO who just want to get to the top of the SERPs as quickly as possible without spending the time and effort to get there. If you want to take the easy route, forget SEO and go run an AdWords campaign. But remember, with a sponsored ad you’ll only be getting 14% of the traffic on any given Search Engine Results Page and you’ll be paying for every click. Trust me, SEO is worth the time and effort, you just have to be patient and play by the rules.

Nothing matters more, and nothing will affect your ranking more, than the quality of content on your website. Even if you have a staggering amount of links to a given page on your site, that page won’t rank high in search results unless the content on that page is 1) original 2) desirable and most importantly 3) contains keywords a consumer would enter in a related search.

Ignore Everything I say, Because Everything Changes

Well, kind of. Everything I say is relevant as of right now. Will it be relevant next month? Who knows. Algorithms change, keywords change, customers change, search behavior changes and strategies change. Many of the SEO principles that held true 10 years ago still hold true today, but MUCH has changed over the years, and things continue to change every few weeks and months.

Google updates its search algorithm more often than we know – every few months? – but this month Google gave us a rare glimpse to explore the latest release of their search algorithm (project name Caffeine) using a sandbox developer preview. The User Interface (UI) remains the same, but Google has done some work under the hood. You can try out Caffeine here, go to FaceSaerch.com/caffeine to see side-by-side results between the new and old Google, or just look at the image below to see how changing the search algorithm affects the SERPs. It’s nothing HUGE, but it would appear most sites ranked outside of the top 2 or 3 will experience a slight shift in ranking once Caffeine goes live, even if only by a ranking or two. My point? You can spend a year busting your butt and get the #1 ranking for a keyword, only to have the algorithm change and have Google bump you down a notch or two, event if nothing changes on your site. Again, SEO is a process. Keep on truckin’.

Note: Don’t ask me why the first thing I thought to Google was “Eggnog”… in August. I have no idea.

Search Engine Spiders

Search engines view web pages very differently than you or I do. The best way to describe it is to think of how a visually impaired person would process a website. They wouldn’t see your design or logo or branding or images, they’d only be able to read the copy on your website via screen-reading software. Search engine spiders/robots are computer programs (e.g. “GoogleBot”) that methodically browse/crawl/spider the internet. The spiders start with a seed list of URLs to visit, identify all the hyperlinks on those pages, and then add those links to a list of URLs to visit next. The information is then indexed into the search engines, and after running through the search engine algorithms, the links are displayed and ranked accordingly in relevant search results. Every search engine has its own spider.

If you want to play around with how search engine spiders view web pages, then use Yellowpipe’s LynxViewer tool and check it out for yourself.

Knowing how spiders process the information on a web page is exceedingly important to SEO. E.g. spiders can’t view images, so we use “alt tags” to describe what an image depicts. More on that later.

For now, just be aware of the major things that can confuse or kill a spider when it crawls your website. I’ll explore each of these further in later sessions, but this should help you get an idea of how spiders relate to SEO and help to raise any red flags for problems that will need to be addressed.

Things that will confuse a spider:

• URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; e.g. http://www.thedailyanchor.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (complex URLs like these often result in errors with non-human visitors, so spiders may be reluctant to crawl them.)
• Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each link.)
• Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (spiders will often ignore deep pages unless there are many other external links pointing to the site.)
• Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can.)
• Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Things that will kill a spider:

• Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button (spiders can’t exactly enter their contact info + click enter.)
• Pages requiring a drop down menu to access them (spiders can’t bypass javascript navigation.)
• Documents accessible only via a search box (spiders aren’t omniscient.)
• Documents blocked purposefully (via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file – we’ll discuss these later.)
• Pages requiring a login.
• Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic.)
• Having an excessively slow page load time. A few seconds won’t make a difference, but if it takes 20 seconds for your site to load the spider may bounce. They’re kind of a big deal.

The best way to ensure your content is fully crawlable is to provide direct HTML links to every page you want the spiders to index. In general, if a page can’t be accessed within a few clicks of the home page, it likely won’t be accessed by the search engines. Later on we’ll discuss site maps and how they can be a lifesaver in this area.

Don’t be Evil

This is Google’s self-professed mantra. In general, if you aren’t trying to pull a fast one on the search engine spiders and are offering relevant, high-quality content, you won’t have to worry about being penalized or blacklisted by a search engine.

• Avoid duplicate content. If you have a product page that can be accessed by multiple URLs, you’re in for it. Spiders interpret this as you having the same content in multiple places. When spiders start seeing duplicate content, they’ll bounce.

• Don’t copy content from other websites. If search engines don’t like finding your own duplicate content on your site, how do you think they feel about you plagiarizing other people’s content?

• Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods.” If you’re sending traffic to known spam sites, Google might take that association a step further than you’d like. You are the company you keep.

• Don’t try to hide images (tiny 1 x 1 pixel images) or text (making words the same color as the background) on your site. Doing things like hiding paragraphs of keywords in your footer that are the same color as your background – essentially making them invisible – was huge (and often successful) pre 1998. It’s 2009. Don’t do it.

Don’t be Stupid

• Before you go changing your URLs, learn about 301 redirects. You’ll need to create a redirect any time you kill a URL.

• Don’t confuse 301 redirects with 302 redirects. Matt Cutts – the head of Google’s webspam team – can bring you up to speed.

• Don’t build your site entirely in Flash. While engines are now able to index Flash, Flash sites contain no architectural framework and no individual pages can rank for keywords, only the site as a whole. Flash can work when embedded in small doses, but sites made entirely in Flash are to SEO what oil is to water.

• Don’t use the same Title tags for every page on your site.

• Frames (displaying multiple small pages on a single page.) There is absolutely no legitimate reason to use frames on your website, and since it makes it hard to deep link to content and can only hurt you, don’t do it.

• Javascript. Use it sparingly, and not in your navigation. Javascript menus can’t be accessed by search engine spiders, so if you insist on using a javascript menu, be sure to use an XML sitemap or HTML navigation on your footer

• Plan on going out of business in the next 12 months? Didn’t think so. Register your domain for 5+ years. Google may penalize sites if they’re set to expire in the near future. This applies mostly to newly registered sites (Spammers like to register a domain, launch barrages of spam from it, and ditch it.)

Don’t be a Sucker

Any “Search Marketer” who promises to get your site to such-and-such a rank on a Search Engine Results Page is trying to pull one over on you. So is anyone who guarantees they can get you ranking well within a certain time frame. Even if they were able to follow through on their promise, your website would be on a fast-track toward getting penalized by the search engines. If you’re lucky the search engines will dish out a simple ranking penalty for a certain period of time that will knock all of your links down 30 or 50 results, but what do you think the Click Through Rate is on the 4th result on the THIRD page of the SERPs? Not very high. If you’ve been really really bad, then Google may remove all your web pages from their index, and it can take over 1 year + a confession + an apology (no kidding) to get re-listed.

Remember the most important word in the definition of SEO? Process. SEO is a process. Try to cut corners and you’ll get burned.

The Conclusion to the Introduction

There you have it folks. A high-level introduction to Search Engine Optimization. In the next installment we’ll discuss how to perform The Ultimate SEO Audit. Look for it next week. From there we’ll dig into Keyword Research, Site Architecture, Content Writing, Link Building, Measuring Success, Generating Buzz, and SEO Maintenance.

Questions? Care to add your own 2 cents? Leave a comment below and impart your wisdom.

Have a rocking weekend, all, and remember: Don’t be Evil.

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Two weeks ago at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco I ran into Michael Näf, CEO of Doodle.com, one of the leading companies in the thriving Swiss start-up scene.

I caught up with Michael this week for a closer look at Doodle, and it took me about 2 seconds to see the light; there’s huge value here.

In short, Doodle.com makes it easy to find a date and time for a group event by using a poll-based scheduling system. It’s not a calendar. Want to schedule a Sales and Marketing meeting between 15 people, including some employees in the field? You can either do it the old fashioned way and send out an Outlook invite – and receive several “Decline to attend” responses – or you can set up a poll in Doodle to see what time works best for everyone, and then lock it in place.

Doodle is a relatively new player in the U.S. market, but in Switzerland 1 in 10 people use Doodle.com to schedule their meetings and events. Now that’s market penetration. They’ve recently hit 3 million monthly users, a 167% increase over 2008, and offer the service in 28 languages.

Without further adieu…

The Top 5 Reasons You Need to Use Doodle.com for Scheduling Meetings and Events

1. Doodle takes the pain out of scheduling events by replacing the human coordinator with a simple web application. No registration is required for organizers or attendees, unless you want to (you get access to a central dashboard.) They just click on the meeting link, select the time(s) they can attend, and the organizer sees a poll that clearly shows the most convenient time for everyone to meet.

2. It’s free! You can access all of Doodle’s functionality and co-brand your Doodle site with your logo without paying a dime, or you can upgrade to Branded Doodle, a white-label version, to replace the ad zones with your own images and encrypt your polls. (Flat monthly fee  [$22 USD], no volume charges)

3. It has a clean, simple, intuitive interface. Schedule a meeting in 3 steps in then email the link to attendees. That’s it. When it’s time for the organizer to tally the responses, Green boxes = someone can attend at that hour, Red = they can’t attend at that hour. A tally appears at the bottom of each date and time, and Doodle suggests the best time to meet. My six year old nephew could schedule a meeting using Doodle.

4. Doodle integrates with Outlook, iGoogle, Facebook, Google Calendar, iCal, Sunbird… There’s a plug-in for Outlook, an application for Facebook, and an ICS Calendar Feed that syncs your Doodle meetings across Google Calendar, iCal, and Sunbird.

5. You’ll find you can actually coordinate a meeting between countless people with disparate schedules, and they’ll love you for it. With Outlook, it’s actually kind of patronizing to just schedule a meeting at the time that’s best for you. Yes, in Outlook you can see when other people have meeting scheduled, but that doesn’t take into account events or tasks they haven’t put into their calendar. Doodle gives you a different psychological experience to meeting planning by letting you participate in the scheduling process.

The Steps to Scheduling a Meeting:

1. Choose a meeting title and description (optional.)

2. Add a couple of dates on which you’d like to hold the meeting.

3. Add a couple of possible meeting times for each date you selected in Step 2. That’s it. Poll created.

4. You’ll then receive 2 emails, one containing a link to send out to meeting invitees, and another admin link you can use to administer the event (pick a final time, invite more attendees, close the poll, delete an entry, etc.)

5. Attendees then access the site – no sign-in required – check a box for each time-period they can attend, and Doodle tallies up the responses.

6. At any time, the organizer can access the admin page, close the poll, and select a final time.

You can watch a demo of Doodle here.

Next New Network’s online programming model of “TV for the internet, not TV on the internet“ is a world apart from other programming platforms like Hulu TV and Slingbox.

Hulu and Slingbox make TV programs available online, but Next New Networks is TV for the internet, not TV on the internet, and instead of re-purposing Television shows for the web, they serve up micro-television networks made up of original short-form programming. NNN currently features a dozen distinct networks covering automotive, entertainment, humor, fashion, and lifestyle, with each showing 3 to 8 minute episodes, produced daily or weekly. All original. All free.

Revolutionary Advertising Opportunities

While Next New Network offers traditional web advertising opportunities – banner ads, pre-rolls, and commercial breaks – they’re also innovating the ad models of the future by developing programming around advertisers. The programming isn’t driven by the advertiser, per se, but it’s linked to their product. Case in point: when Warner Brother’s released Friday the 13th, NNN used their Backyard FX show to create 4 custom episodes that recreated effects from the movie using household materials. The value? Instead of Warner Brothers forcing their voice on consumers, the platform did it naturally. Consumers watching the Friday the 13th - inspired videos didn’t see the movie logo flashing on the screen, but were exposed to the movie in a much more organic setting.

Other advertising opportunities include custom brand integration (host mentions, sponsored segments, custom vignettes, product placement, and custom episodes) as well as companion banners and in-video media impressions.

The Networks

Remember when MTV used to play music videos? Next New Networks does, and seeing as one of their founders is a former MTV exec, it makes sense that their latest microtelevision network is $99 Music Videos, a program that brings together independent bands and up-and-coming filmmakers.

Every video must follow 4 rules:

1. It must be made for $99 or less.
2. It must be shot in one day.
3. It must be edited in one day.
4. It must be a collaboration between the band and the filmmaker.

$99 Music Video: “Whisky” by Lowry

$99 Music Video: The Making of “Whisky”

Targeted Pop Entertainment:

• $99 Music Videos (Original music videos made and edited in one day for under $99)

• Indy Mogul (DIY filmmaking network)

• Channel Frederator (The original online cartoon network)

Humor

• Barely Political (Smart, funny sexy political satire)

• Barely Digital (Satirizes tech news with irreverent humor)

Automotive:

• Fast Lane Daily (Network for car news, fast)

• VOD Cars (Network for speed, car fun)

• Garage419 (Network for auto enthusiasts)

Fashion & Lifestyle:

• Threadbanger (DIY fashion network)

• TMIweekly (DIY fashion network)

• Ultra Kawaii (“The insanely cute pet network”)

• Viropop (“Green” is the new pop culture network)

SAN FRANCISCO

The economy may be in a tailspin, but last week’s Web 2.0 Expo proved that some start-ups have enough wind in their sails to see it through to the other side. The secret sauce of rocking through this downturn – and the theme of the conference – is doing more with less.

Now in its third year, the Web 2.0 Expo played host to web designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists. Janetti Chon, Community Manager for Tech Web (expo co-sponsor, along with O’Reilly Media,) described the main theme of the conference a quest for, “not only for the hot new thing, but for the failures to learn from, the innovations and inspirations, the successes that will surprise you, and the practical applications of all of the above.”

In the tradition of embracing my Attention Deficit Disorder while blogging about something I could spend hours commenting on, here’s an unabashedly chaotic and subjective look at the conference and its high-points, low-points, and every scary mascot and Marketing Fail in between.

Over the Next Few Weeks The Daily Anchor Will be Featuring Some of the Hottest Companies and Products we Discovered at the W2E:

• Yola (formerly SynthaSite): Easy-to-use widget-based platform for creating websites
• Nomee: All-in-one social networking software
• Doodle: A free online coordination tool which makes it easy to find a date and time for a group event.
• Lunch: Social sharing network fueled by your curiosity
• SocialText: Enterprise social networking + collaboration
• Gawkk: Like Twitter for videos: discover, share, and discuss videos
• Super Rewards: Virtual currency monetization platform
• Goose Grade: Lets blog readers become copyeditors
• Zoho: A suite of productivity, collaboration, and business apps
• Wrike: integrated online project management solution that helps you manage projects, teams and businesses.
• And a few others

First Things First: Failures

(Because we learn the most from our mistakes)

- Mascot Fail: I’m still having nightmares about MindTouch’s mascot. I have no idea what a 5′5″ tall scary-looking rabbit has to do with social enterprise software. Actually, clarification, any company with a mascot automatically fails. Give that costume back to your local high school, you big bullies.

-WiFi Fail: If you were lucky enough to connect to the official “w2e” WiFi network at all, chances are that your browsing experience was akin to that of using a 56k dial-up modem back in 1994, except every 2-5 minutes you’d lose your connection, which I guess makes it even worse than dial-up. Conference organizers assured us it wasn’t a bandwidth issue, but the problems persisted for all 4 days, so what, pray tell, was the issue?  Shoddy internet at a Web 2.0 conference? Oh the irony.

- Electricity Fail: This one falls on Moscone. Conference organizers had the foresight to provide a “power-up” area with tables, chairs, and ample power strips for attendees to recharge during sessions, but with zero plugs to be found in the Keynote hall or seminar rooms and with sessions running anywhere from 90 minutes to 3.5 hours (with not much break time in between,) many an attendee ran their batteries to the ground. If Virgin Atlantic is able to provide electrical outlets beneath every seat, shouldn’t San Francisco’s largest convention center?

- Name Fail #1: “Web 2.0 Expo.” The concept of anything being “2.0″ is so 2004, which in tech-years is like the last ice age. Tim O’Reilly admits he loves and hates the term, and concedes it’s outdated.

- Name Fail #2: “Website Magazine” was a sponsor/vendor. Do I even need to comment? I mean, really? The fact that you’re handing out a print publication called “Website Magazine” at a Web conference is just too hilarious for words. I tried clicking on the subscribe button but nothing happened. My advice? Re-launch it online and call it “Website Website.”

- Name Fail #3: Is anybody else sick of the whole compound-word naming scheme?  (Think CoreMedia, ImageSpan, GooseGrade, KickFire, LogicWorks, MindTouch, OrangeSoda, etc.) Ugh.

- Name Fail #4: Speaking of the compound-word naming scheme, I was pretty amused to find two companies that combined the color “blue” with a type of fruit to name their company… BlueKiwi and BlueMango. On a related note, quick props to SynthaSite for rebranding itself as Yola last week. I like it. You’ve gotta hit the SEO hard (and fast) though: the #1 search result is Urban Dictionary, which defines Yola as “another slang term for cocaine.” …I don’t think those are the quite the customers you’re looking for.

- Etiquette Fail: To “hi, this is Paul” with the pony tail and black t-shirt in the Keynote hall – and plenty of others – what made you think it was acceptable to answer your cell phone during a Keynote and carry on a conversation? Not once, but twice! And you didn’t even try to talk in an indoor voice.

- Marketing Fail #1: This is a shout-out to every vendor with a vanilla logo and busy backdrop that failed to include any mention of what type of service you offer on your pop-up banners or at-a-glance marketing materials. Don’t expect attendees to walk up and ask what service you provide, expect them to approach you only if they’re attracted to the service you’re offering and are interested enough to bite.

- Marketing Fail #2: If you’re going to hand out a pocketed folder containing your “marketing” materials (the quotes are necessary, trust me,) then be sure that the cover displays YOUR brand name, not the brand name of the folder-maker and that, your brand name appears on at least one of the top pages inside. Also, spring for the folders with the little cutouts for a business card, instead of the ones with the temperature conversion chart and multiplication table. I’m not going to call you out; you know who you are.

- Lanyard Fail: They were so noisy! In seminars I felt like I was in a slot pit in Vegas. I’m sure it went down like this… Conference Organizer #1: “Let’s see how big and fancy we can make the clasps on the lanyards.” Organizer #2: “But won’t that be hella annoying every time someone shifts in their seat during a seminar?” Organizer #1: “omg, indb!”

- Market Saturation Fail: Exactly just how many companies were promoting their “enterprise wiki / social networking” platform at the W2E? Five? Fifty? Five hundred? So far SocialText is my fav but I think we’re going to have to do some head-to-head comparisons al la Chris Matthew’s HardBall.

- Pants Fail:

Blogger’s Roundtable

Now this was pretty cool. W2E blogging partners were given an opportunity to meet with Conference Chairs Tim O’Reilly, Brady Forrest, and Jennifer Pahlka in an intimate, 45-minute-long, invite-only, roundtable session. While the conversation strayed from the main themes at times – as conversations with bloggers are prone to do – there were some great questions and equally great answers. Here are a few of the highlights:

- Tim O’Reilly on what to say when someone chastises you for not remembering them: “It’s not that I don’t remember your name, I don’t remember your face.” Love it.

- On the plight of print media: “The jury is out. Print is a different kind of user interface, and sometimes it’s better. Magazines are a different tactile experience than a website; you don’t have to be worried about spilling something on it as you would be if it were an electronic device. There is still demand, and the demand is summed up by a quote of Seth Godin’s, ‘a book is a souvenir.’ The book as a souvenir is a driving force of print. There’s a lot of different drivers, and you have to really compose your thinking on what job you’re trying to accomplish. From a publisher’s perspective, it’s also a way of saying, ‘we have arrived.’” (Tim O’Reilly)

- On attending a conference vs. watching videos online and reading about it afterward:
Q: (Miguel Cavalcanti) “Does posting keynote videos and seminar presentations online weaken the point of physically attending a conference?“
A: (Brady Forest, O’Reilly Media) “No, there’s something about being there live; you want to see the person speak, say you were there, that’s your souvenir. Also, watching a video online at home is never going to replace the face-to-face meetings with people you meet in the hallways and the conversations you have, the deals that are made there…We don’t put up, actually, all the videos from the conference, it’s just the keynotes. The contents of the sessions don’t actually end up online.”
Q: (Ben Keppes, BizChat) “But if face-to-face is the most important, then aren’t coffee breaks more important than seminars? …Will Tweetups replace conferences?“
A: (Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media) “Well, I don’t know, I saw a session down the hall with people spilling out, standing in the hall. Every industry is changing, and some events won’t survive, but the point of going to conference is get my staff up to speed on the latest technologies, they’re not going to say, “oh yeah, go out and find a tweetup,” they’re going to say “hey, this is really worth doing, go spend 3 days at this event, come back, and use your skills.”
A: (Janetti Chon, TechWeb) “The original question came from a Micah, who is from Brazil, and Ben responded, who is from New Zealand, and one thing that Jen [Pahlka, TechWeb] and I talk about is that this is a once in a lifetime gathering of these people and that will never get replicated; you can’t get that from online content. I think the strength of our conference is that we curate and cut out the noise for people who are looking for great content.”
A: (Jennifer Pahlka, TechWeb) “I agree that curation is the focus, I think that essentially what we’re selling is the context. Twitter has greatly increased the demand for people to meet. The market for face-to-face interaction is just giant at this point, so there’s really not, in my mind, any competition between TweetUps and conferences, there’s just this insatiable desire for people to meet in real life once they’ve met over Twitter, and some of that will happen at conferences and some of that will happen at TweetUps. It’s not an ‘either-or’, it’s very much an ‘and.’”
A: (Micah Baldwin) “I think the future of all media – whether it be publishing or events or video – is that curation. Picking what you want to tweet, publish, blog about. It’s the curating of it, that reTweet, that adds value. It’s that structure; the shared context, the keynotes, the place that everyone’s at, the space, the framework that in turn gives you the structure to interact. “

Choice Keynote Presentations

“Web 2.0: 5 Years On” (Tim O’Reilly)

“Best Practices in Social Media Integration for Web Publishers and Content Providers” (Bob Buch, Digg)

“The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities” (Tara Hunt, Citizen Agency)

“Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation”(Katie Niederhoffer & Marc Smith)

You can see more Web 2.0 Expo Keynote videos here or see more conference photos here.

Workshop Presentation Files

| Get your Presentation Pack

Two things are for sure:

1. The only thing more tiring than attending a 4-day conference is attending a 4-day conference on crutches 10 days after knee surgery.

2. I’m absolutely planning to attend the Web 2.0 Expo next year, and you should too (or the W2E in New York this fall!)

…And then I found $10!

Photo credits: Duncan Davidson. Except for the scary mascot picture; thank Mike for that one.

The Web 2.0 Expo is coming to a close, and it’s been a heckuva conference.

I’ve met some great people and been introduced to some really awesome new products and companies, and of course have some thoughts to share on the conference as a whole. My fingers, wrists and back are already hurting in anticipation of all the writing I’ll be doing this weekend.

I’d love to share everything right now, but that’d mean missing the last few hours of the conference, which would kind of defeat the whole purpose, rt? That, and the internet connectivity here is so unreliable that I’d probably go insane in the process. If I’m able to access Wordpress long enough to get this piece up it’ll be a miracle.

Conference = Excellent

WiFi = Worse performance than 1994 dial-up

Coverage = Coming on Monday

Image credit: Duncan Davidson

We are all guilty of it. Getting too wordy when writing.

Example: The amount of total sales increased in the field of technology due to the utilization of blah blah blah…

I see it all the time on marketing materials, magazines, catalogs and websites. I’ve spent the past few years in real estate marketing. Many times I have had to sum up a 100+ unit, 10-story historical, live/work, luxury development with a million wonderful amenities and fantastic design into a postcard, including square footage, price points and photos. Not to mention a clean and easy to read layout. So, it was obviously important to write concisely to communicate my message. And it is not as easy as it looks.

The Importance of Brevity

The purpose of writing is to communicate a particular message. It is harder to be brief with this message than it is to write a lengthy piece. This is because we want to communicate all of our ideas into one spot. The point of brevity is not to say less, but to communicate a message more concisely. By deleting needless words or sentences and editing, this is possible.

Important questions to ask yourself are Can it be better? Can it make more sense? What details could I leave out? Can I restructure my sentences?

Trim the Fat

How do you turn all of the information you have gathered into a concise, focused piece? The tighter the message, the easier readers get roped in. So it is important to make every word tell part of the story. I took a class on writing for brevity through MediaBistro.com a few years back and picked up a few pointers that have helped write more concisely. Here are a few things I learned and use in my writing today:

Eliminate words

Superfluous nouns, verbs, articles, prepositions- that obscure meaning rather than clarify it. The Elements of Style, a classic reference book for clear and concise writing, says that “the fact that,” “who is” and “which was” are the most commonly used needless words. Here are a few more examples:

“the field of technology” and ”the technology industry” BECOME “technology”

“the amount of total sales increased” BECOMES “sales increased”

“the number of” CUT

“have a tendency to” BECOMES “tend to”

“are going to” BECOMES “will”

“some of the people” BECOMES “some people”

“I am writing in regards to” BECOMES “I’m writing about”

Choose your words carefully

Choose concrete, precise, everyday terms to those less specific and familiar is a way to do this. Here are some examples:

“organization” BECOMES “group”

“utilize” or “utilization” BECOMES “use”

“morbidity” or “mortality” BECOMES “illness” or “death”

“interface with each other” BECOMES “collaborate”

Use active voice

This helps to make every word tell, verses a passive voice, which is more verbose and less dynamic.

“The class was taught by me” BECOMES “I taught the class”

“This is the first time that USF has enrolled any female students” BECOMES “Women will attend USF for the first time this fall”

“There’s a lot of support of the proposition” BECOMES “Many people support the proposition”

Write First, Edit Later

Don’t worry about writing concisely on the first try. Go back later and make edits. Then have someone else read the piece and give feedback (ideally, someone who is of your target audience.) They will likely tell you words or sentences that sound redundant or don’t make sense. Then go back and make more edits. And while brevity is important, so is clarity. If your piece is brief, but not clear, then the purpose is defeated. When you get brevity right, you can say more with less words.

In the spirit of Ella’s article on the art of brevity I’ll keep this one short. That, and I’m typing this during a Keynote lecture at the Web 2.0 Expo. Bottom Line: Next April 1st, take a page out of Brenthaven’s playbook and leverage April Fools Day to launch a creative marketing campaign.

Example of a Bad April Fools joke:

Posting a Facebook status update saying you’re wondering how to “break the news” to your boyfriend.

Example of a good April Fools joke:

Sending an email to your customer base with the subject: “Today Only! Buy a Brenthaven – Get a FREE CAR!!!”

So what if the car is a HotWheels car? I live in San Francisco; HotWheels are infinitely more practical.

Brenthaven FTW.

Photo credit: Diego ilustração e design

Lately I’ve been a little disorganized. No – that’s an understatement. I’ve been an utterly chaotic tornado of inefficiency.

Today I almost went to lunch instead of leading a 12:15 web demonstration. Somehow I never managed to get it on to my calendar, and luckily another attendee emailed me a confirmation with about 5 minutes to spare, right as I was about to hop off for a $5 footlong.

My task list in Salesforce.com is 98% red, meaning OVERDUE, some of them months old. Sure, every time I look at them they don’t strike me as any level of priority… but some sick, sad, inner professional masochist will not allow me to delete them so I can start fresh with my latest tasks.

I’m flying to Houston Wednesday… and I just booked my flight on Saturday. You don’t want to know how much that cost. I still have marketing emails to send out in preparation for that, but somehow they elude me.

I have an enormously important demonstration at 1 PM tomorrow, part of an RFP process and it’s going to follow a 4 page demo script. I just realized it’s happening and looked at the script for the first time at about 3:30 PM today. I died a little on the inside.

I have this fantastic theoretical awareness of how I should be organizing myself, but my To Do lists are still scattered pieces of yellow notebook paper, etched with fierce cross-outs and giant bullet points. Business cards are strewn about, semi-prioritized in mini stacks under and around my keyboard. The amount of scrap paper cluttering my work area (and expanding beyond into 2 more work areas) would make Al Gore weep.

What’s the secret? Is it just me? I’m remarkably OCD about a lot of things. Maybe I’m just overworked and heading towards burnout and getting on top of things is simply impossible right now. I don’t think that’s it though. I’d love to hear some of our readers’ tips for handling work/information/stress overload…

First Healthcare and now, newspapers?

The New York Times recently reported on European newspapers finding creative ways to thrive in this economy. While many European newspapers are facing the same problems as those here in the States, there are a few standouts that have found creative ways to stay afloat and even profit, in what seems to be a dwindling industry.

What’s the Big Idea?

Making money on something other than newspapers!

Here is the jist of it: German publisher, Alex Springer, owner of Bild, the biggest newspaper in Europe, reported their highest profit in 62 years. And instead of looming talks on how to survive this recession, they are looking to expand by searching for acquisitions in Germany, Eastern Europe and possibly even here in the United States. Instead of trying to protect existing publications, they acquired or created new ones, some of which distribute the same content to different audiences.

In the online world, the top European performer is VG Nett, a Web site loosely affiliated with Verdens Gang, a tabloid newspaper that has reported a profit margin of more than 30 percent and rivals Google as the most popular Web site in Norway. VG Nett generates most of it’s revenue from advertisers but is now starting to raise money from it’s users. About 150,000 people pay up to 599 crowns (about $90), a year for a weight-loss club and they recently started charging up to 780 crowns a year for live streams of soccer matches. Additionally, a social network connected with VG Nett charges users to upgrade their profiles, but access to news on the website, remains free.

A Few Points That Stand Out

I am fairly fond of Alex Springer’s acquisitions and creations of new publications. As a culture, we always like ideas that are new and fresh. And this is an opportunity to break apart a large, failing publication, and give it an opportunity to recreate itself and reach out to new or different readers.

Selling added-value services to readers as VG Nett has done is a creative way to rework the standard business model. These don’t seem to be your typical added value services that are mostly for the benefit of advertisers. Instead, they are to benefit the reader. But during a recession are we willing to fork out the extra bucks for such trivial things?  Again, it is all about being creative and I like that the added value focus on the reader, the core of any newspaper, not the advertisers.

These points seem so simple and embracing of the fact that the industry has changed. Did the American publishing industry see this coming for a long time, but fail to recognize it? The American newspaper business model has been set it stone for so long, while digitalization has clearly been the stronger force over the past decade.

Thinking Out Loud

One major problem here in America is that we have already dug ourselves in a hole and need to figure a way out. The previously mentioned European publications were able to nip it in the bud in order to keep themselves out of the dilemma we see ourselves in, so will their business models do us any good?

As I write and research this topic, many thoughts come to mind…

How do Americans value newspapers verses Europeans?

What about branding? The most valuable thing that many Newspapers own is their brand. If they start branching out they could drive some profit from the use of it.

Should the government subsidize ailing media? Or does this vastly interfere with our freedom of press? French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, announced in January that €600million in emergency aid for his country’s troubled newspaper industry and declared that every 18-year-old in France would get a year’s free subscription to the paper of their choice to boost reading habits. Sarkozy instructed publications to improve the content of their articles, bring in younger readers and transform business models in exchange for emergency aid worth €600m over the next three years. Sounds like our government’s relationship with the car industry.

And what role does internet advertising play? While internet advertising is not growing as fast as it once did, it is still outpacing more traditional forms advertising channels. The newspaper industry saw its print ad revenues drop by 17.7 percent last year, while online advertising only dropped by 1.8 percent, according to a report by TechCrunch based on numbers from the Newspaper Association of America.  I realize that internet advertising does not make as much money as more traditional forms did in their heyday, but the numbers say it all. American publications did not seem to adjust to the internet as well as some of their European counterparts. The internet has always been secondary to the hardcopy, while it has clearly been the stronger force.

Again, these are all just thoughts, and I would love to hear yours.

Personally, I think that we need to stop dwelling on the fact that “print is dead” and restructure business models with that in mind, which I am sure (or rather, I HOPE) is what is going on behind closed doors. And just like any major change, it will take adjustment but I think that if we can take some of this into consideration, it will put us in an even better position 5-10 years down the road.