Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is a combination of efforts taken both behind the scenes and on the visible page to "stand out from the crowd" and be seen by search engines when they crawl the web for content. So by taking some of the steps I'll outline below you can help increase traffic to your blog. It doesn't matter what your focus is, the point is you can attract more people to your content just by looking out for the little guy, the web spider.

Why Is SEO Important?

  It just so happens that blogs due to their higher than normal output of content tend to be crawled more frequently than a normal webpage. This opens up a big opportunity to utilize SEO to climb up the page rankings on a given subject. So say you're blogging about a specific sport, so long as you're abiding by the rules that the search engines operate by you'll be getting traffic and gaining page rank above your competitors. Then before you know it you'll start getting comments, RSS subscribers, social media mentions, and be appearing on search engine results pages for your topic. Why you may even have a fully fledged blog on your hands.

Structure Is Important!

I'm going to bash myself here a little and say that I am in fact, doing it a little wrong. I don't have my blog set up to showcase my top articles, this isn't a magazine site so I don't have a "feature article". I'm also a naughty little blogger in that I don't concentrate on one topic, rather than stay strictly on course with Internet Marketing content I do from time to time express a thought or opinion on something that may bother me, don't do that… Says the hypocrite. Bring new readers into the fold who may not be keen on what it is you're all about, your style and the way you get a point across is to show them your hottest topics right off the bat. Make your biggest response getters your "call to action". In other words, place these posts in a place where they get a lot of emphasis and play to the least observant person in the room. Sometimes you really do have to shove things in your visitor's faces in order for them to take notice. Once these hot topics have been pillaged and plundered by your new readers perhaps they'll subscribe and now they'll be getting your new content. One thing I do that you should do is use that little break button. You don't need to have your entire article hanging in the breeze. Why it's down right indecent to do so! The reasoning behind this is that when you force a page break you create a new page just for that article which means more indexing for the web crawler, which is good! There's a reason behind this basic level of structuring. On the outside it seems very basic, you stay on topic and you get better rankings, but it's a little more complex than that. 

Think of your site like a flow chart and you'll start to see it like the search engines do. 

Shown above site map A shows an organized flow of content. Each part is easily accessible and all of the content fits in with its parent category.

Site map B shows a lack of structure. Their content is all over the place and if you look in the bottom right hand corner of the map you can see a section labeled, "News and Events" sounds like a blog could fit in there but what would they talk about and how would a search engine organize something with such a variety of content under one banner? The answer is it wouldn't, you can't talk about every facet of your life and then say you're a cooking expert, see the disconnect?

 There's still structuring to do. You're writing for the web so don't draw out the good stuff for the ending. You're not writing speculative fiction here so the audience wants to know who did it and how right away otherwise, they're going to high tail it back to Facebook. So get the good content out first, and don't forget to use those keywords!

Search engines like it when they see keywords right away so don't skimp and not do your research. SEO professionals will tell you to always make sure your page title is keyword rich, followed by your headers and subheaders, all this is important for search engines to discover you and show you to the world. Don't forget about humans though, SEO is all this stuff about writing for robots, there's even robots.txt to tell the web spiders not to crawl certain parts of your page! More on that in a minute but first things first. Although you need to tune your site and content for SEO and structure accordingly you're writing because you want humans, not robots, to read your material and share it with their friends on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and so on, so don't forget whose team your on.

"Robots"

Back to robots.txt. hang on to something cause this can get a little confusing. Here's a scenario… You have a blog and that blog has 3 writers. All three of you are writing about baseball and so your content category is baseball. Now you're writing about baseball and two of you are doing separate articles on the same game but from different angles. All Google is seeing is "baseball" and so now all of a sudden you've got duplicate content titles "Tampa Bay Rays Vs New York Yankees". Now Google thinks you're just padding your keywords and your rank sinks down because you didn't place your robots.txt on those separate authors sections. Robots.txt tells search engines (Yahoo! Bing, Blekko, who ever…) to stay out. Robots.txt is your older brother or sister and the search engine spider is you trying to get in their room when you were kids, it's just not going to happen and eventually you go off and find something else to do. Everybody walks away healthier for it. 

Keeping Your Blog Content Optimized For SEO

"Welcome to blogging for SEO boot camp! From now on you are SEO soldiers and you will use trending keywords in the body copy of your blog articles! Doooo you get me?!"

  As you go from the top of a blog to the bottom there's plenty of text and content to be optimized for search engines. Starting with the title tag, the title tag does not need to be the literal title of your blog. It can and should be keywords relevant to your article. Don't make it overly verbose, search engines prefer their meals to be brief and concise. 

Headers!

 No! Not those headers!

We all like to have fun with our headers and come up with witty little remarks that tantilize our readers but utilizing relevant keywords pays off.  Like I said before write for humans and write conversationally. No one wants to read "Beep-boop! I am a robot please index me search engine Beep!" Cover all of your bases use meta tags for description and keywords. 

"But Matt Google says bluh bluh bluh meh! Google!! Buh?!" 

Is Google the only search engine in existence? No they're not. They're big yes, and it's good to pander to them but if you're starting a new blog you want to do everything you possibly can to get eyes on your page and attract new readers, heck, any readers! Don't worry though you won't have to teach yourself multitudes of HTML to tweak your meta tags there are plenty of plugins to help navigate you through the confusing stuff. Most of the time they'll even do a lot of the grunt work for you especially when it comes to meta tags for descriptions and keywords. This is the SEO plugin I'm using currently I love it and it's still in beta. I can't give it a 100% run out and download and install it reccomendation yet but it is pretty good. 

Pictures, Videos, MEDIA! SEO?

Digital Asset Optimization is actually one of the more painless SEO operations you can do to get your site's content noticed. In my previous article, The Down Low on DAO I discussed ways to optimize the content you normally don't associate with optimization. Video is a great example. Say you've got a video of you making your famous rump roast that you made to teach your office workers your magical recipe and hey you also happen to be a foodie and a blogger. Why not take that video and tie it into an article? You've suddenly got social proof that you actually know what you're talking about not to mention you've got additional SEO mojo working for you. If you've got the video hosted on your blog site and Google that's twice the chances that you'll be indexed for a video on creating a great rump roast. Plus through YouTube you can also gain subscribers who can then spread your video for you and whom you can direct back to your blog for even more traffic! The same scenario applies to photos and using sites like Flickr.com. Host your photos on your site, tag them with relevant keywords relating to your subject, utilize the alt text for even more SEO mojo, and then upload to Flickr.com to increase the chances your blog will come up during an image search. For alternative media like podcasts meta descriptions are your friend and then don't forget to submit to iTunes for increased publicity for your blog site.

The More You Know!

It has been said it's not what you know but who and now more than ever that may be true. The prevailing wind has been to just throw your content out into the wilds of social media and the people will carry it to the fellows like Moses coming down from the mountain with his ten commandments. Yeah, that sounds good, in theory. In reality people aren't just relying on their friends for content on social networks, they're searching for it.

By tuning your shareable content that you publish to social networks and making it search friendly you dictate the tempo of the dance. You can find out what the trending keywords are that are in use to hammer out content that gets found by the audience your after. Years from now when everyone realizes that by using keywords to get to the people they want we may look back and wonder why we all relied on such grade school approaches to spreading a message, yet it works, so who am I to judge. We certainly cannot debate the power of social media and say that it's a fad and will go away. Not after the recent events in the middle east. 

Then there's Twitter, the Internet's mega phone. Did you make a new blog post? Tweet it! I will as soon as I finish this article. The great thing about Twitter is that it uses hash tags so you can bring SEO to the Twittersphere with you. Find out what the trending topics and keywords are that are in use RIGHT NOW for what it is you're posting about and jump on board. Use the hash tag that's apart of a conversation that matches your message, you're sure to find many kindred spirits that want to consume and share your material. 

Finally don't forget about the directories like Technorati and it's brethren. Directories still have a lot of pull and by following the SEO for text rules there you're sure to push your blog and your agenda towards the front of the line, if not the front. 

Closing Time…

 SEO is a lot like the song "Closing Time" in it there's a line that goes, "Open all the doors and let you out into the world…Turn all the lights on over every boy and every girl." There's a variety of ways to fine tune your SEO and get your blog noticed so open all the doors and let your blog out into the world, but be diligent because nothing happens overnight…. yet. 

As long as there is new techniques for things there will be new frightening words derived to strike fear and wonder in all those who hear them and don’t understand them. Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) can be viewed two ways. In one way it’s this new and exciting and potentially frightening form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) where everything is cataloged. In the second, more blue-collar take on the subject it’s what you should have been doing all along.

DAO is what you need to be doing to make sure you have the maximum “find-ability” for any and all content for your site and if you’re actively engaged in it you will most certainly generate more traffic for yourself and convert for whatever it is your targeting. It’s about appearing in search results, it’s about appearing in image search results, it’s about appearing anywhere and everywhere you possibly can in a given scenario on the web.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/60839649/librarian-the-original-google-bing

When you think about it we’re all librarians. We label, catalog and coordinate the information on our websites in a way that, hopefully, is the easiest to navigate to and find the information for our visitors. Now it’s 2011 don’t forget so our visitors aren’t just Suzie and Timmy looking around for something that piques their interest. Out scouting the informational wasteland ahead of us is a computerized version of Lewis and Clark, the search engine algorithms web crawling spiders. They’re not fully aware of the environment they navigate just yet so for the time being we have to tell them, “Hey this photo is a photo I took of a gift basket in South Carolina from Gift Baskets For All.”

In other words you should be using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) already. You should be doing, or you should have someone doing the following: monitor site traffic, identifies keywords, places keywords into site content, are you using trendy keywords in your blog posts? Does your webpage have anything other than the name of the website in the title bar all the way at the top of the browser? If no then you need to go back and reevaluate your SEO tactics before moving on any further.

The purpose being that when Suzie or Timmy types in “Myrtle beach” your image now has a chance of coming up in an image search, which potentially can lead to a visit to your site. The question you should be asking yourself about now is, “Should I be posting my images to sites like Flickr.com and my site?” Now you’re talking DAO. It’s more than just labeling the content on your site correctly so that search engines can find it. It’s making sure that you get it where it can be shared and making sure that it points back to you, like it should! Upload it to your site do all the tagging and meta tagging like you should for traditional SEO. Then, upload it to Flickr.com and tag it appropriately there.

http://giftbasketsideas.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/GiftBasket.jpg

What do I mean by that? Well when you label your “Gift Basket” image right now the alt text or even the file name may just be “Gift Basket”. This is incorrect; you should be more specific, use Fruit Gift Basket as a descriptor instead. Then when you post to Flickr.com you do all of these tags again in similar fashion, paying attention to keywords, but this time you make sure you link back to a targeted page on your site. Now the image has a purpose beyond it’s original intent. What once was just a useful image to draw attention to a product on your website can now do the same thing from across the Internet.

http://www.ere.net/2011/01/28/4-social-media-steps/

I can’t mention Flickr.com and not talk about social media and DAO. While SEO has been traditionally focused on getting your site to appear in a vertical search listing DAO is about getting it to the rest of the Web. Is “Gift Baskets For All” showing up when you do a Twitter search? How about a Facebook search or Youtube? DAO is the series of steps to ensure that happens.

So it works for photos and it applies to social media, but what about videos? Does it apply there as well? The answer is yes. The same way that it applies to photos DAO can be applied to video content. By using targeted words and by providing as much information as possible you can optimize your videos on your site and on video sharing sites such as YouTube.com.

Search engine optimization is evolving; it has to, because search engines are evolving. The Internet landscape is evolving, the people that use it are adapting to new technologies and trends, and they’re not searching in the ways they were just 3 years ago. Digital Asset Optimization is a way to address the information overload.

http://www.henrickborger.net/archives/789

Without applying a filter to the information that is under fire hose levels of pressure your information the information you want to be found will fly right under the radar of anyone who might be looking for it.

Without creativity your ideas and concepts and plans will never see fruition. Without concise, targeted tagging of that creative content no one will ever see your ideas and concepts.

Works Cited

Ashton, J. (2009, 2 26). SEO 3.0 = Digital Asset Optimization. Retrieved 2 4, 2011, from searchengineland.com: http://searchengineland.com/digital-asset-optimization-to-maximize-investment-in-multimedia-16678

Gold, H. (2010, 3 29). Digital Asset Optimization: Social Media Meets SEO. Retrieved 2 5, 2011, from clickz.com: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1717009/digital-asset-optimization-social-media-meets-seo

http://www.aniseo.com/. (2008, 10 10). Digital Asset Optimization. Retrieved 2 5, 2011, from Digital Asset Optimization: http://www.digitalassetoptimization.net/

Sannino, G. (2011, 1 31). Will Digital Asset Optimization Be the New SEO? . Retrieved 2 5, 2011, from search engine journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/will-digital-asset-optimization-be-the-new-seo/27508/

With me in my jammies and Sarah on couch
I sat at my computer and started to slouch,
when down came the stairs with a whine and "What's a matter?"
A child did come and excitedly did chatter
I can't sleep I can't sleep they both did exclaim!
but off to bed they soon went with threats of butt pain.

We got through the day with nary a scream or a fight
and now to all of you I say,
Merry Christmas and goodnight!

The great thing about marketing is how much it mirrors everything in life. There’s more than one way to market anything. It’s not always about television commercials or web site banner ads and I love all of the new ways to communicate from product to person without leaving people feeling like they got smacked in the face with a wet fish. I love how there’s something for everyone in this field. For the logic brains there’s the analytical side, the SEO, the metrics, the demographics, the polling. For the creative type there’s advertising, creative design, usability and it goes on and on for both sides.

The reason? Because we live in an evolving society. What’s useful and friendly today may not be so in a year. That newspaper that you grew up with, today isn’t so appealing for getting all the information about the world around you. Maybe you’ve even realized you’re not watching TV the same way anymore because you’ve found alternative methods that suit your lifestyle more. That is what Internet Marketing and marketing in general is. It’s an answer to the question of how do we reach out to people to tell them about what’s going on when they keep adopting new forms of entertainment and information gathering? Then how do we do that in a way where the people we’re trying to start a conversation with don’t feel like we’ve just interrupted them?

I love finding answers to these questions, I love monitoring technological and scientific trends and I love writing down new ideas for others to pick up, exam and process their own opinions on.

When Google launches new services, they often gets a lot of hype (see: Wave, Buzz). Unfortunately, they don't always live up to that hype (see: Wave, Buzz). But one service that Google launched last year definitely has: Google Voice. Sadly, it has only been open to those with invites. But starting today, it is open to all. Google Voice started as GrandCentral, a startup launched in 2006 to revolutionize phone management on the web. Google quickly … Read More

via TechCrunch

At Wired’s Business Conference in New York City, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz announced that the coffee giant is partnering with Yahoo to offer free Wifi to customers beginning July 1. Currently, you can connect to AT&T WiFi in Starbucks stores, which is free for two hours if you have a registered Starbucks card. And if you are an AT&T DSL customer, you can access connectivity in coffee shops for free. If you’re not a registered Starbucks or … Read More

via TechCrunch

Where do people go when you entice them with a viral video? You can send them aimlessly back to your homepage but that really doesn’t complete the experience you set them up for with good content. One possibility is the landing page. While it’s been around for awhile and designers tire of them it is a great way to tie in your brand story with a call to action to close the deal and complete your goal for the campaign.

Something that’s easy to understand and still reverberates the story of your video with a clear call to action button to complete the experience and push the sale, sign up or registration, whatever is required to achieve your conversion goal.

The company Laptops For All doesn’t exist, but if they did calling out the clear competitor in the mobile device industry (Apple) would be key. By creating a multicultural caricature Apple suddenly becomes understandable by all through their cartoon representations that their agenda may not be your agenda.

primitive brain is capable of perceiving. They have seen trends beyond trends and if you try to think outside of their design, they… will…

come for you!

Along Came A Viral Video Assignment

The following video is a “what if” viral video for a fictional company specializing in laptops (Laptops For All). Its purpose is not for you to think this is the greatest thing ever and show it to all of your friends, though if you do feel inclined please feel free to turn me into viral video’s own personal Spielberg. It’s purpose is to show that a viral video can be used for any company whether it’s a fortune 500 or a mom and pop down the street. You can capitalize off of the net through a variety of ways and a viral video is an affordable way to get your brand out there and create interest based around it where there probably wasn’t before.

The story here is simple, the “Macanites” a fictional intelligence living in your Apple products are continuously talking down to you not letting you get a word in edgewise all the while thinking how they’re doing everything right for you. It connects itself to the brand story of Laptops For All because the company is all about freedom and expressing yourself through your technology, designing it the way you want from the inside out.

As far as other story telling methods go it would connect to a landing page on the fictional company’s website which is all about the “Macanites” trying to persuade you to do things their way and it would allow you to try to customize one of their computers.

It connects with the majority of the brand demographic, pyschographic  and cultural groups because it tries to poke fun at the current leader of the pack when it comes to trendy technology and it does so with comedy. So rather than jumping up on a pedestal and pointing the finger at its rival’s failings it takes a light hearted approach, something which all groups can relate to.

It’s interactive in that it invites you to go to a website and find out more information about Laptops For All. Which is what the video hints to at the end of it as it lays out the URL before it finishes.

This video is important for this client and for any other business because it shows that with minimal effort you can get your brand out there even if it’s to a niche group of individuals. That niche group could be a large revenue source to your company, isn’t that worth sticking your neck out for?

The Macanites are coming! The Macanites are coming!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhFWNXG3XaQ]

The question is how?

Should be simple but the conundrum I’ve run into is that viral videos aren’t a simple music video, cartoon or crazy stunt. They don’t need some guy going berserk in his office or asking his girlfriend to marry him in front of thousands of people.

It’s something else, something more the equation or recipe is more akin to a great piece of music than a great story.

Here’s what I’ve discovered…

They have to have a hook, they have to build anticipation, they must entertain and in doing so they must captivate us as an audience. Yet, not all viral videos receive the kind of attention their creators were seeking when they planned them out. Some fall flat on their faces while others get more attention than the product they’re supposed to be representing.

If you look at any listing of viral videos what you’ll see right now is that most of them are music videos in the top 10. I blame MTV for abandoning the demographic that needs them most and those people are the teenagers and young adults but that’s neither here nor there. So what’s going on what is it that people want that drives them to covet what they find and then share it with others. It’s the fourth ingredient that allows a video to come out of nowhere and fixate us for awhile.

Connection, an emotional connection is necessary for a viewer to first be hooked and in being hooked have building anticipation about “what’s going to happen next?” sometimes they’ll have an idea what will happen but the emotional connection will drive them through to the inevitable conclusion. Connection is why amongst all of these music videos and clips of people injuring themselves doing stupid stunts you’ll have touching vignettes where there’s a message of hope, perseverance, love, outrage, any of the powerful emotions really. Why else would a video about a dead cat and its friend’s need to be with it have  well over 2 million views as of this writing? Because of the emotional connection the video as a whole creates with it’s audience.

So what are the emotions you can connect with as a potential viral video creator?

• Sadness
• Joy
• Anger
• Shock

Any combination of the above will do.

So knowing that you have to connect with your audience how do you accomplish that and still fit your message in there without becoming overly commercial? The problem with some viral videos is that the message is so overly subtle that it’s lost on its audience entirely.Watch the following.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sq-HYGfnIo&feature=related]

Did you know that was a viral video for the movie Wanted?

Quite different from the theatrical trailer for the film with over 8 million views across the various iterations of it isn’t it?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOKLiAfEH1g]

So it missed the mark and I’m back at my original problem. How do I connect, hook, generate anticipation/ anxiety and entertain about laptops while staying on message to encourage sharing? I was hoping writing this out would help flesh out some ideas but I think I’m back to where I began…. Puppets.

Does it work?

Unfortunately I’m a poor Blackberry Storm user, a phone which isn’t yet supported, so I’ll leave that up to you iPhone users to tell me but it sure looks like it has potential.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdxsBx_FzKI&hl=en_US&fs=1&hd=1]