SEM Glossary

Do what I say, not what I do. There is a recurrent idea that keeps coming back to me over the last few months about web marketing geeks preaching everywhere about what to do in the area of corporate blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media and so on, but are not following these best practices for their own site. I believe this does not bring much credibility in the long run and we need to clean up our act. Over the last few years, I have been observing how regular business people (non-geek) tend to isolate us in a silo and usually take everything we say with a grain of salt. We are used to see skepticism in discussions with potential clients. Maybe we are partially responsible for this. Potential clients would question our motives since we are not doing for our own sites what we want to do for them. The Association of Internet Marketing & Sales is a very good example.

I was browsing around today and I came across the Association of Internet Marketing & Sales website and notice how bad their page titles are.

Here is why:

Use of the word Home in the page title for their “Home Page” (Home is referred as a stop word)

All page titles are written backwards, with the more specific information & keywords about a page are at the end of the page title

Page titles length not optimized (66 characters)

Choice of keywords for each page title does not increase the likelihood of being found, based on the content of every page

Page titles are the easiest thing you can work on in a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan. It is also the fastest thing you can change and tweak in order to attract more visitors to your site from organic sources (free traffic). As I pointed out in one of my last posts on the impact of universal search on eye tracking & scanning patterns on a typical SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it shows how important it is to have the content of any page clearly labeled in the first few words on the vertical axis. That can easily be done by putting the keywords related to any given page of your site in the first few words of your page titles, followed by the common theme of your entire site. It this easy enough? This is the first rule in SEO and I can’t wait to see all web marketing professionals following it. 

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I came across this job posting which sounds interesting. I just want to share it around. I am always puzzled when I see acronyms like SEM and SEO side by side in a job title though because the SEM expression includes all the SEO initiatives. Therefore, SEM is not equivalent to Pay per Click (PPC) as most people might think. SEM includes all the search marketing initiatives: paid and non-paid search strategies.  Anyway, here is the job with the contact info:

Our client is a highly prestigious organization that is one of Canada’s top Advertising and Public Relations companies. They are currently seeking a Director of Search Engine Management/Search Engine Optimization. If you would like to join one of Canada’s leading firms, please contact The Personnel Department at 604-685-3530 or email your resume to permanent{at}goodstaff{dot}com

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I hate it when it happens. A question arises in a discussion or worse, in an article that needs to be written in no time, and yet, I don’t know the answer. I either shut up or research the topic enough to answer the question. What’s worse than barely understanding a question? It seems like a lot of people are quite comfortable with the concept, and talk freely about anything they don’t know, but I am not. So I turned to a few friends for help.

The question was: I heard someone say recently that search is out and tagging (folksonomies) are in .. What do you think about that?

Being a search expert, I needed to put tagging 101 in perspective with search. Not knowing enough about tagging, it was quite difficult to answer it. So I turn to my top geek friends Monique Trottier & James Sherrett from Work Industries for some help in the article I am about to write. The article is actually an interview about SEMPO Canada‘s role (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization in Canada) and how it contributes to the growth of Search Marketing, coast to coast.

So first of, Monique put the definitions down:
Tagging: tagging systems have, over the past couple of years, been increasingly more popular. Tagging is basically a way to enable users to add keywords (or tags) to their blog posts, webpages, images, videos. The thing about tags is, I as a user gets to decide how to tag my post. It’s not dependent on me selecting from a list of categories that someone else has provided.

Folksonomy vs Taxonomy: in folksonomies--regular humans get to pick keywords that make sense to them, instead of taxonomies--where scientists or experts decide on a hierarchy and set of terms and we are forced to use those terms.

To see examples of tags, we can look at Darren Barefoot’s flickr page:
http://flickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/817524718/
You’ll see in the right hand column a heading: Tags. He’s added in these keywords that help describe what the image is: raw, maple syrup, etc.

Here is another example:
You can see on Kate’s blog posts another example of tags:
http://www.mynameiskate.ca/2007/07/links-for-20-10.html
She’s got (tags: vancouver microsoft)

Blog search engines like Technorati use tags to improve search results. You can read more about tags here:
http://support.technorati.com/support/siteguide/tags

And then some explanation:
According to Monique Trottier, tagging systems have improved search, and in many cases, like on Flickr, I can add other tags to Darren’s tag list. So if I think the photo is also about “glass bottle”, I could add that tag. Then if I’m searching Flickr for “glass bottles”, Darren’s photo will show up in the search results. Tagging and search are thus highly related. In many ways, tagging helps increasing relevance in search results, which is what search is all about. So to respond to search is out and tagging is in: well, tagging is in because search is even more in. We can see from our webstats that 60-80% of the traffic comes from search engines. Tags allows us yet another way to optimize our blog posts, videos, images, etc.

The challenge is that although the tags are about folksonomies there are still standards about the correct way to use tags in order to reap the benefits of improved search. It works in places like Flickr where you enter tags and the tags are built into the search mechanism of that site. It’s more difficult in your own blog where you have to know the correct way to insert your tags.

I would say that tags are yet another way to optimize for search.

According to James Sherrett, President of Work Industries, the question of optimizing a website or webpage for search or tagging is setting up a false opposition. James would never recommend to someone that they optimize for search or for tagging or for voting on Digg, or for video indexing, if that ever arrives. Rather, he recommends that you build a strong website for people. That website should also cater to search engine bots and tagging systems, and anything that might come along. The point to remember is that in prioritizing all those different considerations, people have to come first.

Tagging is in fact very complimentary to search. It’s another way any one of us can enrich the information available about a website or webpage. That’s good for people and good for search bots. On the websites I see and manage, the new traffic continues to come from search. Tags can augment that traffic, but people love to search. And within search, people love to use Google.

For more on tagging, here is a really academic paper on tagging if you want more info.

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Every time I work on a site where traffic goes up seriously, I think it is a good practice to set up a Website Uptime Monitoring tool. In a nutshell, uptime can be defined as the time during which a web server is working without failure. If the server is down, it is called by contrast downtime. In the best case scenario, your site would be available 100% of the time but depending on where it is hosted (and how), this percentage can be of 99% or 95% or even lower. That’s why it is important to keep track of your site uptime by using an Uptime Website Monitoring tool.

Today I want to share with you a a great & free resource that does that. It is called InternetVista. The good thing about this tool is that there is no time limit to the free trial version account. Alternatively, the verification of the uptime of your site is done only every 60 minutes as opposed to a paid service where verifications can be done every 5 minutes and even with shorter time periods.

The free trial version of InternetVista Uptime Website Monitoring tool offers the following:

- Monitoring of 1 website (http)
- Verification every 60 minutes
- Email alerts
- Weekly reports by email
- Available free of charge with no time limit

I think every Search Marketer who manages a small or big daily pay per click budget money to promote a site on behalf of a client should have one of these Free Uptime Monitoring tools in place. Try it and let me know what you think.

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I came across a little article today called Six Newbie SEO Questions made by Jill Whalen which reminded me to add a few new SEM terms to my Search Marketing glossary arsenal such as KEI & 3-Way Link. You can find more about them and other Search Marketing terms in my SEM Glossary. It is helpful to know what we are talking about. 

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Every now and then, I like to focus my attention on Search Marketing terminology 101 and explain it in more details & provide examples. Today, I want to talk about Link Baiting. Simply put, link baiting refers to anything on a website that encourages links from other websites. This is especially important to understand when it comes to blogging as we write post titles very often. Link baiting can include content, online tools, downloads, or anything else that another site owner might find compelling enough to link to. Link bait is important because most search engines use backlinks as a major factor in determining ranking. 

So here is your link bait for the day: Microsoft is “Dead”. You can also found the original post on Microsoft is “Dead” here.

Of course it is not, the article refers to the difference in philosophy that Google, Yahoo & Microsoft has, which compromise its longterm survival since no one fears them anymore. Fear (or lack thereof) seemed to be the main factor that contributed to the emergence of new leaders. According to the author, Paul Graham, a few factors contributed to the death of Microsoft:

1- Google, of course
2- Gmail and “Ajax” & the decreasing need for a desktop
3- Broadband Internet
4- Apple

Le roi est mort, vive le roi.

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