Tynan's Anger

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A former colleague of mine with much more experience in offline marketing than I'll ever have posited this question to me awhile back:

I am noticing that...people who know SEO do not understand PR and the value of reported stories....

But maybe my universe is too small. Do you think it would be fair to say that in general, sports like you excepted, SEO experts just have no clue about the 4^th estate?

I dashed out a quick response, but in hindsight I actually was very happy with how it came out:

Well, I'm not sure I'd go that far. I don't know the statistics of it exactly, but I do know there are a significant portion of people, myself included, who became interested in SEO after a larger interest in the media and journalism. I think anyone who writes for a website, even if their job description is purely editorial, has to know about SEO. So I will say there is a general interest in the media.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if just as many or more people came into SEO after doing marketing for years. SEO is a form of PR, but it's only one side of publicity, and most people who do it now are utterly oblivious to pre-computer marketing tactics. In general, I think the value of persuasive and quality writing is underrated even when taking SEO into consideration—SEOers love to say "content is king," but when I've heard SEO-minded people saying that, they're definition of good content is websites with correct site architecture, keyword usage, and lots of backlinks.

While the former two make up the relatively easy part of SEO, the last part, getting quality backlinks, is the most volatile and misunderstood part of SEO. Getting listed in a bunch of directories or random blogs with PageRanks of 3 is nice, but if you really want to rake it, you need much bigger sites with much higher authority—and those are still dominated by strictly editorial-minded sites that more than likely have some basis in the old media world (newspaper websites, academic websites). Even the "newer generation" of sites that give the highest-stature backlinks, such as the Gawker Media Blogs, Yahoo Blogs, etc., are still dominated in editorial policy by older conventions, even if the format and style is drastically different. That's something most people who develop websites don't understand, and when they're told this, they usually dismiss it since everything's "long tail" and all it takes is one big link...

But in hindsight, a few questions came out of this that I'd like to pose to SEO'ers:
1) Was your pre-SEO background based in editorial, or marketing
2) Do you place any greater SEO value on a website with established editorial clout in the offline world?
3) What do you think the defines "good content," be it marketing or editorial content, in the SEO age?

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Image via WikipediaYesterday, the folks at findingDulcinea released SweetSearch, which combines Google algorithmic rankings with quality reviews by actual human beings. When playing around with it, I noticed that when you search for a specific business type in a specific location, rather than getting the results of any individual firm or company, your results are almost exclusively a listing of directories for that business type.

What interests me about this is what it says for the future of SEO: Jeff Jarvis and others have argued that when personalized and semantic search become more powerful, the SEO industry may cease to exist. I never really gave all that much credit to that argument, but after using Sweet Search I saw how that could eventually come to pass.

The reason the end of SEO as we know it today is a possibility, however remote, is the differences in priorities between the searcher (Google's customers) and the people working towards being found on search engines. On the one hand, a listing of a directory of businesses, rather than one or two individual businesses that happened to have gamed Google (or hired someone who has) is more useful to the searcher. While gaming the system is not inherently illegal or unethical, it does probably end up hurting the product for the searcher, even if everything is kept White Hat. On the other hand, the field of SEO is booming—it's one of the few tech fields that is still seeing growth, and the fact that Sweet Search produces search results that are all but useless for hired SEOs is a potentially devastating and portentous sign for anyone who makes their living in the industry. It's still unclear what exact mechanisms Sweet Search uses to get its results, but it may be the closest indication we currently have to what Google is striving for in the long run in terms of their search product.

Note that even if SEO were to decline as a result of this discrepancy, it would NOT mean the end of the SEM industry by any means. There's still a lot that can be accomplished by marketing through search engines without strictly looking to improve organic rankings, even if getting a high ranking is a much sexier and more noteworthy goal. Regardless of what happens to SEO with contextualized and semantic search, here are the two main conclusions I can draw from the future Sweet Search depicts:

1. SEO'ers should focus more extensively on directories—and for reasons other than backlinks alone. While backlinks are nice things to have for traffic and crucial for SEO, directories can also provide companies with clients without those clients even touching Google. If the categories are sufficiently specific, potential customers would be likely to convert at a higher rate through a directory rather than a general organic search. Of course, while most directories SEO marketers use now are independent of Google, and many exist purely for providing links, it's inevitable that Google will look to get a larger pie of the online directory business. This is why directory search marketing Google Local, which is already a rapidly growing priority for SEOers (especially for businesses that mainly operate locally), may become an expanded and someday even predmoniant form of search marketing.
2. Paid SEM like PPC, while not as immediately cost-effective in the short term, may have more endurance in the long term. I would never tell anyone to stop building skills and experience with SEO simply out of a general fear for where the industry is going. I'd be stupid to do it myself. But no matter what happens to SEO over the next 5 years or so, it's inevitable that industry standards will go through major changes rather frequently over this time. Volatility in SEO conventions means volatility in its usefulness, and hence, volatility in its potential to earn money. While PPC, AdWords, and other paid methods of search marketing may cost more and produce smaller ROI, paid search marketing has much more stable standards, and probably won't face all that many significant changes over the next 5 years, especially when compared to SEO. Hence, PPC and paid SEM are probably a more reliable bet in the long term. For yet another disclaimer, remember that the risks of SEO may be overrated. Of course, that's what they were saying about real estate derivatives 3 years ago, so one should keep in mind all the dangers that come with a higher risk/higher reward form of marketing, even if the risk is only slightly higher.

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Image via Wikipedia You Got Yr Link Bomb is meant as a cross between the Will Cordero Memorial Linkpunch and the Week in Review post of the Gawker Media blog of your choice. Hence: links featuring commentary with heavily regulated snark. These links did not get the full Tynan's Anger treatment, through no fault of their own.

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Double secret YGYLB probation means three days of YGYLB posts, starting right now.

• My good friend Pat at Albatross Hour, perhaps the most awkward person I know, recommends you watch this video if you feel deprived of Even Stevphen. Trust me: you do.

  The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
  10 F#@king Years - Even Stevphen
  www.thedailyshow.com
  Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

• While were on the subject of video trips down memory lane, see if you can name all the indie icons who graced Pete & Pete. Don't look at the cheat sheet! Via Idolator:
  
  Man, there's no way you can expect a kid to get the Dead Zone reference and not have serious mental problems. My major complaint with the vid is the .5 seconds allotted to Michael Stipe's cameo, despite being the musician who perhaps shaped Pete and Pete's spirit more than anyone else. Have you found your target yet?
• The annual rite of passage of BCS grumbling has started, and Bryan Curtis of the Daily Beast isn't having it, despite Obama's clamors. Or at least he wasn't having it. Bryan Curtis, as it turns out, is a die-hard Texas Longhorns fan. I'd be interested in seeing what he has to say about the BCS now (this is the benefit of having two weeks of YGYLB hindsight).
• According to Clyde Fitch, the excellent Pearl Theater Company is taking new steps to create affordable theater in dire times by eliminating the press comp. For a volunteer critic like me, this is devastating news, but the side of me that likes innovative theater solutions likes the move immensely. I just hope this is treated more as a method of innovation than as a sign of the death of theater criticism (though the Pearl's coverage may suffer as a result of the move).
• Is the NHL starting to take precedent over the NBA, like it supposedly did in 1994? You wouldn't know it from ESPN's coverage, but Puck Daddy's Greg Wyshynski thinks this may be happening. Yes, the NHL's ratings are crappy, but the NBA's ratings aren much better. Plus, at least the NHL still has devoted fans, which are dwindling rapidly in the NBA (Nick Friedell's description of an Orlando Magic game is pretty depressing). Even though the NBA has bigger stars, they're not seen as local stars. Does anyone in Cleveland really think Lebron is staying in 2010? It's starting to look like even Lebron doesn't think so.
• I once praised John Zogby's polling but dismissed his writing. Now it's starting to look like his polling is going sour too. Nate Silver reports that Zogby engaged in ridiculous, empirically-challenged push polling. All of a sudden, the Onion's analysis of Zogby seems more accurate.
• Finally, we have one of the best contrarian, anti-Google SEO articles I've ever read. Riddle me this: instead of fighting with each other over SEO strategies, why is no one calling out Google's leverage over an entire industry? John Andrews shows more courage in SEO writing than has been shown since some dude claimed that all SEO is Black Hat.
  

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Lately, a lot of my friends have been asking me to give them the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you want to work online in any context now, and especially in online content production, you can't go into a job interview clueless about what SEO is or how it works. No doubt if you work in online media, you have had to explain SEO to someone who has no idea about the workings of the web . I just pray you don't have to do it to your grandparents like I did. In any event, here's my quick, painless, bare-bones guide to how to optimize a website for search engines.

Basically, there are three points to keep in mind:

• Site structure: Make sure that your page is indexable (meaning that Google can read it). There are certain ways to tweak your page's code to make it rank higher on Google without even adjusting the content. You must also have new content posted regularly, or else your pages will dip in search rankings.
  
• Content/keywords. Research which terms would be best to target for search. Once you've picked your keywords, add them to the important areas of a page (such as the heading and description tags), and make them appear frequently in your text. A general rule of thumb is that the closer a keyword is to the beginning of a section, the higher the page will rank for that term. This works for titles and headers (Theater Review: Play X) and for body text (Play X is a good show). Putting keywords in bold and italics helps.
• Links. This is the bread and butter of SEO and the part that's truly variable. You should link internally at every relevant opportunity, and link out to other pages too to build connections. But the true sign of status of your website is how many external sites link to your page, and the reputation of the sites that link to you. The more links you get, the better you will rate on search engines. Of course, acquiring good links takes time, reputation, and dedication, and more than a little grassroots work on your part. But good content, good contacts, and persistence gets links, which gets traffic from Google.
  

Anyone who knows about SEO knows how simplistic this explanation is. But I hope this guide will help for those who are utterly clueless, or those who can't think of a right way of framing SEO to their clueless relatives (or employers).

Labels: 30 second guies, how-to, seo