Search Engine Marketing, VoIP And Other News From The Telecom Front

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Feb 2005 by Tehrani, Rich

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, or search engine optimization (SEM and SEO, respectively), are terms you're probably hearing a lot lately. It's a field that is brimming with activity these days. As with many tools, it's used well by some companies, and abused rampantly by others. On the one hand, most companies are working to legitimately increase their search engine rank to raise the profile of their companies. On the nefarious side, other companies and individuals are using unethical tactics to raise their own profiles - a practice known as search engine spam.

The complete picture of what constitutes search engine spam is beyond the scope of this column, but essentially it's a tactic to trick search engines into ranking your site higher than it would normally appear. Again, there is a gray area between what a search engine considers legitimate and what it considers spam. For example, in most cases, using tags and titles with intelligent naming conventions is a legitimate practice and won't get you in trouble. Deliberately using a certain few words over and over again on your site to artificially rank the site higher can be considered spamming, depending on the frequency of the practice, among other factors.

The goal of this column is to educate companies on what they should be doing to increase their search engine rank, while staying in the bounds of ethics, not to mention the law. I won't be teaching "tricks," but I will share observations about what works and what doesn't.

My first observation is that generally speaking, the sites that rank highest are news sites. Many blogs also rank very high. The reason for the high ranking has to do with the frequent updates that both these kinds of sites get.

Bearing this in mind, how do you leverage these ideas for your Web site that sells clothing? Without question, the most obvious way to do this is to keep your site updated with lots of apparel news and fashion tips.

Get creative in your thinking.

Let's consider that you are an apparel manufacturer and you launched a site that focuses on sales in the clothing business. Imagine having your site, or a spin-off site, become the most important site people visit when they are looking for clothing sales. In other words, you would have links to the Macy's Labor Day sales site and discuss what the best values are that week. Think of the marketing you can do to the people that depend on your site. You can offer coupons or promotions on this site for your own clothing line. The options are numerous.

Then there are blogs. Everyone seems to be blogging nowadays. Blogs are a great way to generate sticky content that gets virally communicated. Think of a blog in the same manner as you would sending speakers to industry events. Many companies like to have speakers at events because it creates excellent exposure for the company and, more important, helps the company attract new customers.

Blogging works like speaking, but without the travel expense. It's important to discover, within your company, who makes a good blogger and who doesn't, Job title doesn't guarantee success as a blogger: There are many CEO-level people who don't posses a tight enough grip on grammar to blog well without the aid of editing by another person. These people should be identified and filtered before they blog. It's also important to understand that the more you blog, the more people will read it. There is likely an exponential relationship to readers versus number of blog entries per day. Feel free to visit my blog at richtehram.com to see my latest thoughts.

One thing worth pointing out is the legal ramifications of blogging. Who owns the content, and what about copyrights and redistribution, etc.? You will want to decide who owns your blog content and determine a copyright strategy. The legal world is still grappling with the concept of blogs, including what should and shouldn't be posted on them. For example, a flight attendant was recently fired from Delta for posting questionable pictures of herself on her blog, and in a separate incident, a Google employee was asked (apparently, quite politely) to remove a blog entry because he divulged compensation details as well as minutes from an internal company meeting. This ordeal was recounted in a blog entry titled "Oops" (http://99zeros.blogspot.com/ 2005/01/oops.html).

Partnering

A quick way to further boost SEO is to partner with industry Web sites that can supply news to your site, or allow your blogs to be hosted on the partner's site. For example, going back to the apparel manufacturer example, you might approach Vogue and see if they will host your blog. Obviously, your blog will receive much more attention on such a prominent Web site than on your own. A magazine such as Vogue may charge you for this, but it would likely be worth the cost, depending on the fee and how important SEO is to your company.

Understand, though, that running news on your site gets tricky. On the one hand, it's a great way to generate traffic, but it's important that you establish controls on what runs on your site. If you are Saleforce.com, it's likely you don't want a Seibel news release boasting of their dominance in hosted CRM on your site. If you are Nike, you don't want to discover on your site that New Balance just shipped its ten millionth shoe.