Search Engine Friendly Fallacy
In November, I posted on the blog at work about how sites are not naturally search engine friendly. And though I’ve likely said that something can be naturally search engine friendly, when I think through it, I just don’t think a site or a blog can be search engine friendly right out of the box. Aspects of the CMS or blog engine may aid the search engine friendliness, but there are still a dozen ways to write and post content and organize links in a way that negates what is “naturally” search engine friendly.
Jennifer Osborne, in her first of a five part series on how to sell a client on a blog strategy states, “In addition to it being an opportunity to talk to your client in a different tone than the rest of your site, it’s a very Search Engine friendly, Social Media friendly infrastructure.”
Blogs are not very search engine friendly by default. I suppose it is an accurate statement for a search marketer to say the infrastructures are, because they create and refine them so they are, but as a general statement to a client, it’s just plain wrong. WordPress, my blogging tool of choice is generally considered to be a search engine friendly infrastructure. But by default, it creates posts that look like this: ?p=123, instead of /keyword-rich-title/. I don’t recall exactly what it does with Titles and Meta Tags out of the box, but I know I don’t start a blog without first installing the All-in-One SEO Pack and the Dofollow plugins.
And does a blog have a social media friendly infrastructure? In my post on blog improvement tips, one of my priorities was to make sure there were buttons on this blog for submission of my posts to social media sites. These buttons aren’t there naturally. The option to comment is certainly social, and is turned on by default, but to truly make a blog social requires more than a comment form.
So if you’re a potential client to a marketing agency, or are thinking of building a blog on your own, blogs are not necessarily search engine friendly or social media friendly until they’re modified.
Review Your Ad Placements.
I wrote in a previous post about Facebook ad targeting, and how I believed a handful of advertisers were focusing their ads on individuals with “engaged” as their status because of the wedding-related sites that were advertising which I had not previously seen ads for.
Today, I would like to remind everyone to check their search query placement report in Google’s AdWords program, as you never really know where your ads are showing unless you check! Why the reminder? Because a well-targeted(?) ad came into one of my Gmail accounts. I was perusing the spam folder for anything I might have missed recently, and at the top is the following ad:
Now perhaps a recipe site doesn’t much care that they’re showing up for “spam” in my spam folder. They may even like that. It certainly got my attention and gave me a chuckle. But still, do you know where your ads are showing?
Measuring Success of Selfless Social Media.
I was recently forwarded a quality blog post about a comment that Senator Obama made in a debate about disability. The comment and post were specifically about the Terri Schiavo matter. Though I made some minor changes to the title of the post on a couple of the social news sites I submitted the story to, I left it virtually untouched and basically pulled a quote from the body of the post as the description.
I submitted to:
Digg
Care2
Mixx
Propeller
Stumbleupon
Reddit
Now, with the political and election focus these days, and that Obama is arguably the frontrunner, I thought it would do decently well on Propeller and Digg. I figured the dark horses were Mixx and Care2. Now, because I have no access to analytics data on the site I submitted, I certainly don’t know which one drove the most traffic, or the most quality traffic, but the results are as follows:
6 Diggs.
18 Notes on Care2.
0 Votes on Mixx.
2 Votes on Propeller
0 Reviews on Stumbleupon.
0 Points (2 Comments) on Reddit.
This was submitted on a Friday evening, perhaps the worst time to submit to social news sites. Regardless, based solely on votes, it’s clear that you must submit content to sites that have a niche focus as well as to generalized sites. And why must we submit sites that we have no control over? Because if we don’t, social news site algorithms can de-emphasize the power of your submissions, and you’re less likely to gain friends and votes.
