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Loading ...This morning, I opened my Journal to B4 and there lay three articles after my own heart: Raising Your Profile: Beyond the Basics (organic SEO); Keyword Play: How an Acronym Helped Unlock Marketing Puzzle (organic SEO); and Paying for Online Reviews Can Fan Fame (paid blog posts). Eat well, all my readers. Since WSJ is stingy, I will excerpt.
Keyword Play: How an Acronym Helped Unlock Marketing Puzzle
Now, instead of relying on an outside expert who might be unfamiliar with the data-management industry, Mr. Pittman can manage his company’s needs. His breakthrough in decoding the SEO puzzle came when a colleague unknowingly clued him in to a pivotal keyword.
For companies without a big budget for online marketing, knowing what customers are searching for is paramount, says Rebecca Lieb, editor in chief of interactive-marketing portal ClickZ Network, a New York unit of U.K.-based Incisive Media PLC. “It’s about getting very descriptive and looking for the terms your customers use,” she says.
In the case of Initiate, a company with $45 million in revenue last year, Mr. Pittman had to figure out how to make the Web site stand out to potential customers like banks, hospitals and insurance companies that want to manage their databases better. But after several months, the site’s traffic showed little improvement. During a staff meeting, it dawned on Mr. Pittman that the keywords were garnering so few hits because he still didn’t know exactly what Initiate’s customers were searching for.
At that meeting, a company manager repeatedly used the acronym “RHIO,” short for regional health information organization, pronounced “ree-oh.”
“Most of us in the room were like, ‘Ree-who?’ ” Mr. Pittman recalls.
After the meeting, he asked salespeople at the 200-employee company if they were hearing that term in the field and at trade shows. They said they were.
He then sent a note to key customers asking what the most important industry terms were. “RHIO” came out close to the top.
Mr. Pittman’s marketing team altered the company Web site within weeks, using the phrase “regional health information organization” several times, including at the very top of a new Web page and in press releases.
After a month passed, 167 visitors had come to Initiate’s Web site after plugging “RHIO” into a search engine — up from five the previous month.
Mr. Pittman scrambled over the next few months to expand the use of RHIO throughout the site, in press releases and in research reports the company posts on its site for prospective clients.
“We fed the monster,” he says.
After nine months, the number of monthly RHIO-related visits rose to more than a thousand.
Mr. Pittman began to read trade publications and attend conferences about Web searching. Initiate’s Web-design agency revamped the site to allow Mr. Pittman to make updates himself.
[…]
Now he frequently presses salespeople for the latest industry buzzwords. RHIO, for its part, has taken a backseat in the industry and leads to fewer than 50 site visits a month.
Choosing keywords based only on software reports “doesn’t replace talking to people and getting the words directly out of their mouths,” Mr. Pittman says. Still, each month he also re-evaluates keywords using Web-traffic reports the company produces itself.
Optimizing a site “doesn’t require a huge budget. It doesn’t require whiz-bang technology,” he says. “We’re much more willing to try new things.”
Raising Your Profile: Beyond the Basics
Search-engine optimization, or SEO, makes a site more friendly, or “optimal,” for Internet search engines such as Google Inc.’s, Yahoo Inc.’s and others. SEO can improve a site’s listing in “natural” search results — the unpaid rankings on search engines that many people use to look for information online.
[…]
Focus each page on one theme. The keyword or keyword phrase you choose for a page should directly reflect the page’s content. Headlines, subheads and formatting, such as bold and italics, also should be related directly to this central subject. These indicators will signal to search-engine spiders that the keyword or keyword phrase is more prominent or prevalent than other words on the page, increasing the likelihood of a higher search ranking.
At Bankrate, Mr. De La Garza showed editorial employees that, for some articles, deciding on about 10 main keywords before writing could help increase their number of page views. Writers were already vying for bragging rights to the most popular articles. He told them: “You know what, guys? If we apply a few SEO tactics here, I can help you win the weekly battle,” he says.
They began to coordinate metatags — Web coding describing a page’s content to search engines — headlines, and keywords’ frequency, formatting and placement. Content that’s higher on a page, where spiders will read it soon after beginning to scan the page, tends to help get that information featured in search rankings.
“I would get one or two writers to take part, and it would slowly, over time, creep into the process with everyone, because they all wanted their stories to do well,” he says.
Resist the temptation to overload pages with keywords. Among other factors, search engines may look at keyword density — the percentage of words on a page that match the keywords — when determining whether a Web page is relevant to a search term or just “keyword stuffing.”
“You can out-optimize yourself,” he says. Bankrate’s target keyword density range is 2% to 9%, he says.
When writers don’t think about keywords, they can easily leave out the search terms that could help readers find their story online, he says, “but when you get people mindful of it, it’s not that hard to get it into the right range.”
Paying for Online Reviews Can Fan Fame
More than half of the traffic on Apogee’s Web site now comes from blogs, compared with about 10% before the paid-posts campaign began. The number of site visitors who complete online-inquiry forms is now in the low hundreds each month, the company says, up four- to fivefold.
The campaign costs in the “low thousands” per month, Mr. Combs says, a small chunk of the $20,000 monthly marketing budget. Apogee posted about $7.5 million in revenue last year.
Paying for reviews is like word-of-mouth marketing, says Mr. Leake. “I’m inviting people to a discussion.”
Filed under: Buzz Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Reputation Management, Search Engine Strategy, Search Engines
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Thanks for sharing these very public insights with the rest of us. We can only hope WSJ’s advertisers will encourage them to open the whole thing up and be less stingy soon.
It’s clear the medium and the messages are slowly being aligned - let’s just hope they’ll succumb to the inevitable soon.
Cheers!
Yeah… that might be the one good thing that Murdoch will bring the Journal: a much better web property!
You don’t really need or want that lifestyle, it might hurt y’all slowly more…….Just tell him you
don’t wanna repeat something your not too proud of z7uas.
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