Content Optimization - Lecture 9 for UCI Extension SEO

Hi, this is Mike Moran. Welcome to Lecture 9 of our UCI Extension series on search engine optimization. This lesson will be about optimizing your content. So you'll be looking at how to choose landing pages for each of the keywords You'll be looking at how to analyze your metrics to see how successful you are. You'll also be learning how to audit your landing pages and how you improve the content of those landing pages. You'll be looking at all of those things in this lecture. Now, I'm the author, or co-author actually, of your textbook. Search Engine Marketing Incorporated. And in the textbook, the kinds of content that we're going over in this lecture are mostly covered in Chapter 12. There's some concepts that we pull from other chapters just because they make sense in terms of optimizing your content. Chapter 12 is going to be the place you mostly want to spend your time. Now, when we look at how optimizing your content fits into the rest of what you do for organic search, you can see that we— the information for how to get pages indexed, we covered in Chapter 10. In Chapter 11, we looked at how you use keywords. So how do you know which things people are typing in where you'd want your pages to come up? We skip ahead to Chapter 13, that'll be about how you attract links to your site. But for this lecture, we're going to focus on Chapter 12 on optimizing content. So all of these things fit together, though. If you fail to do one of them, you're unlikely to get the results you want. So you need to get your pages in the search index. If they're not in there, those pages will never be found, no matter how much you optimize the content. You have to make sure you're using the right keywords. If you've optimized your content for the wrong keywords, you're unlikely to get the sales that you're looking for. You might have pages that even come up in the search results, But if they're not the right keywords for your business, it's not really going to matter. And even if you do all the content optimization in the world, but you don't focus on all of the other factors that search engines use to decide what the best pages are, of which the most important one is links, you might have all the right keywords on your pages. You might have optimized your content just beautifully. If a million other people have done the same thing, what's going to make your page rise to the top as opposed to theirs? That's where you need to attract links to your site and to those pages. And that's what we'll talk about when you look at the material for Chapter 13. So let's look at some of the basics about content optimization. And we'll do that in part by looking at the other steps in the process. So the first step of making sure your page is in the search index, how does that relate to content optimization? Well, let's review a little bit how the search index works and get that answer. So in Chapter 10, you looked at all the different kinds of ways that can keep pages out of the search index. And those things are really important. But let's look a little deeper into what's in the search index. So if you look first at the document table, you'll see that there's a document number that's given to every single page or document on the web. And so each document number refers to a specific URL which has a title, a description, And all the content would also be here as well. We just don't have room on the slide to show it. Then what the search engine does is it takes all the words that it has seen on any of these documents, on any of these pages on the internet, and what it does is it identifies what each unique word was that it's seen. So in this case, It might be looking at all the pages that have the word glaucoma on it. And so when it does that, it then creates a list in the keyword table of every document number that has the word glaucoma. When someone comes along to search for the word glaucoma, that's the first place it goes. It goes to that keyword table, looks up the word glaucoma, and then it— the first pass is to just take every page that has the word glaucoma on it and to use that as the set of search results. Now there's a lot more that it does in order to rank things so that the best pages show up at the top, but a very simple thing that you have to understand about content optimization is that you need to have the keyword on the page. So the first thing to think through is if you have keywords that you want to be found for, you need to make sure that those keywords are on the pages that you want to come up. And there's a lot more you have to do, but the very first thing to think about is to make sure those words are on the pages. I mean, you might think that's really simple and no one would ever overlook that, but it's not so. I remember when I worked at IBM and IBM sold personal computers, that there was a big debate about whether to call a ThinkPad personal computer a laptop or a notebook. Now, the word laptop was used by searchers a lot more frequently than the word notebook. And— but this was a problem because if people searched for laptop and the word notebook was actually the one on the page, those pages might not come up. And so it's critically important for you to think through how each of the pages that you want to come up for certain keywords, how do they have that word on the page? So let's take a look and see, once those pages start to come up, how does the search engine know which page is the correct one? So what it does is it looks for the keywords in the title, looks for them in headings, it looks for them in the body, and then it uses that to identify which pages seem to have the keywords in the best places. So pages that have keywords in the title or in headings are often considered to be more relevant than pages that don't have the keywords there. They might only have the keywords in the body. Pages that have multiple occurrences of the keywords are often considered to be more important than pages that have fewer. Sometimes pages that have the keywords more prominently mentioned, maybe they are near the beginning of the page rather than buried 30 paragraphs in. Those might be considered more relevant too. And so all of these things start to add up to what you need to do in order to optimize the content on your page. Now, you don't want to be just randomly stuffing keywords everywhere. I mean, first of all, the search engine will at some point say that all you're trying to do is to get a search ranking. The other thing that will happen is that it's something that readers would find to be obtrusive. But you can see that here is a fairly well-written page and you can read it. It doesn't feel like it's using— overusing the word glaucoma. And so this looks like a reasonable page to be brought up in the search results. Now there's a lot of other things that go into search ranking besides this, but when you think about optimizing your content First thing to understand is the word needs to be on the page at least once somewhere, or else you're not even in the game. To try and get a better ranking, your page needs to be optimized so that you're using those critical keywords in the title, in headings, and throughout the body. And you need to repeat them enough that it feels to the search engine like the page is actually about those words. But it's also important not for you to just throw lots of keywords onto the page so that it turns people off when they read it, or if the search engine thinks that you're trying to trick it. Now, another thing to think about when you're considering content optimization is to understand what is it that search engines see and what don't they see. So One of the things that they don't see is images or videos. What they basically see is text. And so when you see on the screen that there's an image, the search engine isn't actually seeing that image. What the search engine is seeing is the text of the file name and maybe the text that's in the alt attribute of the image. Image tag. So they call that the alt text. What the alt text is typically used for, what it was originally designed for, was to help people who were visually impaired be able to get some words to describe the image that they can't see. But search engines latched on to that because they realized that this would be a description of what was in the picture, so it helps them to identify what the picture is about too. And so there's nothing you can do with nicer pictures that's going to help your search results. But if you name your files using keywords, if you use alt text in the keywords, then you're going to find that the search engine will be noticing those images that you have. So keywords in your alt text, keywords in your file names. Those are the ways to optimize images and videos and other kinds of non-text objects. So let's take a step back and think through how a page gets to be the number one result. And there's really 2 different kinds of factors. The first one are called page ranking factors. What page ranking factors do is they are qualities of your page that have nothing to do with the query term or the keyword. Those mean the same thing. So the query term, the keyword, those page ranking factors have nothing to do with which keyword was used. In the search. Query ranking factors, on the other hand, they only affect the ranking of a page for searches that use that keyword in the query. So let's, let's think about this a little bit. So things like links to pages, if you have a page that has lots of links to it, That helps the page regardless of what the search is. Because all those links tell the search engine that that's a high-quality page. On the other hand, links to that page have certain words in the anchor text. The words that are on the screen that someone clicks on to go to that page. Those words have value. When they're the words that someone's searching for. So the links themselves are page ranking factors because regardless of what keywords people use, pages that have more high-quality links are considered to be quality pages and they'll in general rank higher. But when someone searches for a keyword, the search engines also look to see whether in those links those keywords are found. And if they are, those pages get an even bigger boost for those keywords that they wouldn't get if some other keywords were entered. And so for whatever kind of optimization you can do, whether it's content optimization or whether it's other kinds of optimization, you're always trying to affect one of these 2 factors. Either the page ranking factors or the query ranking factors. The page ones affect pages for all queries, and the query ranking factors only affect them when the particular keywords are used. So let's look at some examples of page ranking factors. So we, so we took a look at already. We already used link popularity as one of them. So if you have— so we talked about how if you have links to a page, that makes the page seem like it's higher quality. Another page ranking factor is the length and the depth of a URL. So URLs that are shorter and that have fewer directory names in them. So when you see a URL and it'll say so-and-so.com/directory1/directory2/directory3, ones that are closer to that homepage and have fewer of those directories in them, or URLs that are just shorter. If you have a URL that goes on and on and on, those URLs tend to be ones that the search engine thinks are for more specific queries and maybe for less popular queries. And so in general, URLs that are not as deep into the site and that are shorter are ones that cause higher rankings. For some kinds of keywords, freshness matters. And so this one's kind of difficult because freshness itself is about the page, right? It means how recently was the page updated. But freshness is only used for certain kinds of keywords. You can make an argument that freshness is one that is both a page ranking factor and a keyword ranking factor. Because there's some kinds of queries that are about things that are newsworthy, or they're about maybe high-tech products that are constantly being updated. And freshness matters a lot. But if someone's searching for information about Abraham Lincoln, that information is not likely to change a whole lot. So the fact that a page is fresher is probably not that important that kind of page style, site organization. All of these factors make sense as well. So pages that are organized in a better way, they have a cleaner HTML template, or the site has a much more easy-to-follow information architecture. And obviously the page is free of spam, so you haven't done all that kind of keyword stuffing we talked about earlier. You haven't violated the terms of service with any other things in the search engine. All of those things have to do with the page itself, and regardless of what keyword is used, you can, you can make your pages rank higher by following the rules of all these things. So let's look at some examples of query ranking factors. As we said, these are ones that are only in play for specific keywords. So we talked a little already about keyword prominence. If your keywords are found in the title, if they're found in headings, if they're found nearer the top of the page, those are more prominent placements of those keywords, and the search engine is more likely to think that your page is about that keyword, and so it tends to have a higher ranking. Now, The next one, content theme, is one that's been changing the last few years. It used to be that we would tell people to look at things like keyword density and keyword proximity. And those are still important. But they're actually being rolled into something bigger that search engines typically call a content theme. Let's talk about what those things are. So the The density of a keyword means that what percentage of the words on the page are actually that keyword. So if you had 100 words on the page and 7 of them were your keyword, then that would be a 7% density. And proximity is another one that comes into play for multi-word keywords. So the word digital cameras. If you see the word digital and cameras 3 paragraphs apart, that's not as strong a match as if digital and cameras are together. And so the closer those multiple words are to each other, the more the search engine thinks the page is actually about that subject. And that was the old way that things worked. They used to be a lot simpler. And what's happened in the last few years is search engines have gotten smarter. And they know that pages that are really about a certain subject, they tend to have other related words to that subject, not just the word digital cameras, but also perhaps the word megapixel or photography. And so the search engines start to look to see whether those words are there. Sometimes you'll hear this called lexical semantic analysis, or LSA, or lexical semantic indexing, LSI. And what those things mean is that there's been a statistical analysis that shows that keywords that are on certain subjects tend to be on pages with other keywords that are related to those subjects. And that's really what the content theme is. So while keyword density and proximity are still important, there's also other factors where you need to use related words on the pages as well. Next one's query intent. So query intent is actually a simple one where it says that if people are trying to buy something, you're going to show them commerce pages. Whereas if they're just looking for information, you might be showing them Wikipedia pages. And so depending on what the search engine thinks the intent of the searcher is, that's going to decide what kinds of pages might be shown a little more prominently. The last one we want to talk about is contextual relevancy. And what that one means is that Sometimes there's some personalization factors that can come in. So for example, if the search engine could detect where you're located when you're doing the search, you might be doing it from a mobile phone, or they might be able to look at your IP address of your computer and say that they know you're located in a certain city. If you just search for the word hardware store, they might just bring up a hardware store that's local to you. Because they know that. They might also say that they have information about what your gender is or other kinds of things, maybe because you've— you use Gmail and they have a profile about you and you're logged in when you're doing a search. So there's certain sites of contextual relevancy that searches— search engines take into account as well. Now we started to talk about this a little bit with the last slide when we talked about keyword proximity. Some of these query ranking factors are only for phrases. They're only for multi-word keywords. So we talked about how keyword proximity, they're looking for digital and cameras close to each other. And we needed to talk about that on the last slide to talk about content theme. But there's another one that's helpful as well, which is keyword rarity. You sometimes hear these things also called term rarity or term proximity. They all mean the same thing. Keywords, terms, they're all the same things. So let's explain what keyword rarity is. So if you have something like digital cameras, it could be that one of those words is a lot more rare than the other. So if you look across the entire internet, my guess would be that the word cameras is a lot less common than the word digital. I would think the word digital occurs many more times across the entire internet than the word cameras does. And so what that would tell you is that if you have a page that has digital cameras on it a bunch of times, but it also has many, many occurrences of the word cameras by itself, because cameras is a rarer word That's going to cause the search engine to think that that's a more interesting page than if you had a word, a page that had digital cameras on it several times. And then it kept repeating digital all over the place. That might lead you to think that that page isn't really about digital cameras so much as it mentions digital cameras, but it's about other, a larger form of digital technology, right? It might be talking about how digital technology affects many things and uses an example of cameras a few times. Whereas the other page might be really about digital cameras, but they just shortened it to say cameras instead of saying digital cameras over and over again. And so Google and other search engines look at keyword rarity so that they can identify pages. When you don't get all of the keywords together, the pages that have the rarest keywords are probably better than the ones that have the most common ones. When you don't have them all together. So now that we know a little bit about what search engines are looking for in content optimization, we want to spend some time talking about your philosophy of how you need to do this. Now, you'll get a lot of advice from people who can identify all those different technical factors that I just walked through and they'll talk a good game about term rarity and all these kinds of things. What they'll do is they'll tell you, you can fool the search engine, you can fool the searchers, you can fool everybody, and just craft your pages for exactly what the search engine is looking for. So you can do these things that are called black hat SEO techniques, and these people people who do these things are considered black hat SEO experts. And there are people out there like that. There are people who do know how to fool the search engines, and they work very hard at it. And my advice to you, though, is that if you're taking this course, you're probably not one of them. Those people have forgotten more about SEO than you'll probably ever know. And this is a full-time job. These are very smart people. These are people that take constant note of what trends are occurring in search engines, what things search engines are doing, how they're changing the algorithms. And they're constantly trying to stay ahead of them and come up with new tricks and techniques. And if that works for you, if that's something that you're able to do, that's great. But I would argue that for most of us, The vast majority of us, it's not a winning proposition. It's not what you need to do. You need to do something that's going to work for you without becoming a full-time job. But you might say to yourself, okay, but how about if I just hire one of these people? Well, you could do that, but I would argue against that as well. You might not be able to stand the publicity when you're found out. So if you're a large company and you can afford to hire one of these experts, eventually you might get caught. When you do, it could be a pretty ugly day. Here's an example of what happened a few years ago. I think this was in 2006 when BMW was actually banned from Google search engine because they were using a technique that is not allowed, something called doorway pages, where they've created all these pages for no other reason than just to rank highly in the search engine. They're not things that they ever expect normal people to see when they're navigating on their site. JCPenney recently was exposed in the New York Times because they had a— either they were doing it themselves or they had a search expert who was putting together all sorts of tricky techniques that would cause them to be ranked really highly because they seemed like they had a lot of links coming to the site. And so the question is, is this what you want to do? Do you want to use all these techniques to trick the search engines And in some cases to even trick your customers to try and get those high search rankings. So, because eventually you're likely to be found out. But there are even more problems with these types of techniques. What I think you need to ask yourself is whether you are optimizing or connecting. Now I know that there are a lot of people that all they think about is how to make things work better for them. And I can't stop you if that's what you want to do. And I know that even the words itself, search engine optimization or content optimization, those have the word optimizing in it. But I want you to think a little more broadly. I want to think— want you to think past the words. And I want you to have a different attitude about what you're trying to do. Because a lot of these things are very similar to each other, but if you have the right attitude, you're going to make better decisions than if you don't. So let's look at some examples of optimizing versus connecting. So do you want to research the most popular keywords, or do you want to figure out what your customers are looking for? Now they might sound the same to you, but they're not. If people are using keywords very heavily, they might be popular, but they might not be what your customers are looking for. And they might not really describe your company, even though they're popular. And so optimizers spend a lot of time looking at whether things are popular or not. People who are connecting are focused on whether those keywords are actually excellent matches for the content for the company and therefore for the customers. And so they're both doing keyword research, but they have a different outlook, and that outlook makes all the difference. Optimizers rewrite copy to use those same popular words. Connectors are using the same language that your clients are using, your customers are using to write copy. Now, those may seem like the same things, but they're actually using different keywords because of what they did in that first step. Instead of looking at the most popular keywords, they're looking at the ones that are the best descriptions of the site. Optimizers conduct link campaigns to boost PageRank in Google. So they, they're trying to have all these links coming into the site. Connectors, on the other hand, would create content that other people naturally link And so those might seem like they end up in the same place, and maybe they do. But those link campaigns are not really helpful to the customers, to the searchers, whereas the helpful content actually is. So let's look at an example of creating helpful content. So Home Depot gives away a lot of expertise. So it's posted hundreds of how-to videos on YouTube, and they explain how you install things, how you fix things, and they're trusting that you're going to come to them and buy some supplies from them or buy some tools. And it helps everybody. And that's, that's different from trying to put together content that is highly optimized and may show up in search But it might not be all that helpful to people. And so what I'm arguing is that what you need to decide is whether all you're out for is to get really high search rankings or whether what you're really out for is to help the searchers become your customers. And I would argue that that is really the approach that for most people is the right one. So giving away content is one example of a technique that works. And what I want you to focus on is whenever you're thinking about something to do in search marketing, the way to tell whether it's kind of an optimization trick or whether it's a real connection is whether this tactic helps all 3 parties in a search transaction. A lot of people do things that only help themselves. You, the search marketer. And so all of those black hat SEO people, all those people creating what Google would call spam techniques, they're people that are out to help themselves, but they're not out to help the searchers, and they're certainly not out to help Google. So what do you think Google does? Google works really hard to eliminate the effectiveness of those techniques. Now, the smarter spammers can do stuff that lasts a lot longer and they can stay ahead of Google sometimes, but most of us can't. And I would argue most of us shouldn't even be trying to do that. What we should be trying to do is to work on techniques and tactics that help all 3 parties in the transaction. They help you, obviously, as the search marketer, but they also help Google and they also help searchers. So giving away content the way Home Depot does, that's an example of one that helped everybody. It was good for Home Depot, it was good for Google because it was finding that content, and it was good for the searchers because they were using that content. So it helped everybody. So the fact that Home Depot might have gotten some sales out of that is great for everybody. Even the searchers are happy to buy from them. Google's happy to show that stuff because it made the searchers happy. So things that help everybody are things that will always work. Things that only help you will only work as long as Google can't figure out how to stop it. But the moment Google figures out how to stop it, then it will stop working. So this isn't just about spamming. It's not just about techniques that are against the terms of service. Because I would say that You know, of the people listening to this, maybe probably none of you are practicing black hat SEO. I mean, if you were smart enough to do that, you wouldn't need to take this course, right? So, but you might be thinking to yourself, well, let me see exactly what's against the rules. And I'll go right up until that line. I'll do everything right up until the line. And then I won't go over the line. But I'll do anything else, even no matter how tricky it seems. And so if you start examining the search engine's terms of service like it's some kind of legal document, then I think you're, you're going down a slippery slope. You're ending up in a position where you're working on things that are only good for you. They're not good for Google and the searchers. And eventually, I would argue, those techniques won't work. So you need to ask yourself if this is your style. If you are going to take the style that says, I'm going to do any sharp practice or technique I can, anything that gives me an edge I'm going to do. Because I would argue that those things are hard to maintain. So think about SEO the same way you think about investing. If you're a day trader, somebody who's going to do anything to get an edge, try anything they can, do— look at the short term, be willing to change their strategy every day based on what's working. Then you can do that. If you're following the way to stop pips, all those kinds of things are the kinds of things that you have to do if you're going to take this kind of really sharp-edged technique. But if you're more of a mutual fund person, if you're more the kind of person that says, well, let me try and make a decision, put my money there, rebalance every once in a while, then you probably need a different approach. And so the question to ask yourself is, are you somebody who's going to be intensely studying everything about search engines, getting so deep into it that you can be one of those smart people who can fool the search engines and stay ahead of them all the time? Or are you just trying to run your business and just trying to do a good job with SEO and trying to make sure that your pages come up? If you're the latter, you want to stay away from a lot of these techniques that only help one party rather than all 3 parties. So I can't tell you what your strategy ought to be. So if you engage in all those kinds of sharp practices elsewhere, then if you want to do that, you can. I would tell you that the chances of you being discovered, the chances of Google finding you and taking action against you, or the chances of some kind of rogue employee ratting you out because you fired them and they knew about this or whatever happens. The internet is a tremendous investigative journalism operation. And so if you're doing something that's working, the chances of somebody finding out about it is pretty high. So if everybody is doing this, if everybody is trying to have every last sharp technique in SEO and you're not the one fooling people, then it could be that you're going to attract your clients in a different way. You're going to attract different clients, maybe clients that are more loyal, and I think it has a way of differentiating you from other people, and you might want to think about that. So I'm not telling you that you should do this because it's the right thing to do. I happen to think it's the right thing to do. It's one of the reasons I do it that way. But you don't have to be a good scout. You don't have to be a saint. I'm saying you should do it because this is actually the way that it will work for you. Those black hat SEO people, they have to really be able to ride the wave. They have to be willing to live with the ups and downs. They have to be willing to deal with the fact that at any moment everything they're doing could come crashing down and they have to go do something else. And that's not really the way I work, and I think it's not the way most of us work. So if you can focus on things that work for all 3 parties in the transaction, those things, those techniques are going to live for a very long time. In fact, you might see that you'll do things that will start to work even though they didn't in the beginning. Because the search engines begin to reward those things even though they weren't things that they were doing at the time. The example we showed with Home Depot, in the beginning search engines didn't really show videos in the search results. And so Home Depot and lots of other companies that were doing the right thing for their customers by putting those videos out, they weren't getting any value in search because the videos didn't even show up. But eventually, the videos did show up. And so all those companies that were doing the right thing got a research reward out of it that they would never have gotten if they were just trying to figure out what the search engines want right now and feeding that to them, regardless of whether it was good for their customers or not. So enough philosophy. Let's take a look at what the steps are in actually producing your optimized pages. So step by step, what do you do to optimize your content? So let's start by choosing a landing page. For every keyword. Then what you do is you analyze that landing page's metrics. When you analyze the metrics, you're going to make a decision as to whether that page is performing the way you need it to perform. If it is, then you can go look at the next keyword in your list. So the assumption is you've picked a whole bunch of important keywords. And you're going to then go step by step to choose a page for it, look at its metrics. And when it's done, then you look at the next keyword and try and make that one better. The fun begins when you look at the metrics and you say, no, it's not performing. This is not very good. I can see that this landing page is showing up on page 37 of Google search results. That's not what I want. Then what you want to do is take a look at that landing page and decide what are the things about that page that's causing it to fail against all the other pages. And the metrics could be ranking. It could be that the page is ranking highly but no one's clicking on it. Or it could be that it's ranking highly, people are clicking on it, but nobody's buying. And so there are a number of different metrics, and we'll walk you through each of them. Right now, I just want to show you the process. Pick a page for every keyword. You analyze its metrics. Then, if you're seeing things that are less than what you're looking for, then you take a really strong look at what about that page is affecting those metrics badly. You improve the page's content by fixing those problems. And then you analyze the metrics again, and you continue that loop of analysis, audit, improvement until the page is performing the way you want it to. And then you move on to the next keyword. That's what the process is. So you said that you're going to look at your keyword list and you're going to pick a keyword and do it, but I wouldn't tell you to pick it randomly. Don't just pick any arbitrary keyword and go out and futz with it. What you need to do is to look at the most popular ones first. So that's usually an easy thing to get. Your web analytics system will tell you which pages— which keywords are the ones that are the most popular ones. They'll tell you which ones are the most popular for people coming to your site. The other thing you can look at is, when you look at your keyword list, which are the ones that are the most popular in terms of number of searches, regardless of whether you're doing well in them. And I would argue that's the way to focus on this. Now, the reason to start at the most popular ones is because that's what gives you the biggest improvement from a business point of view. The impact of fixing those is the most. So in this chart, we can show you that if you look at the top 1,000 keywords when I was working on IBM's site, those top 1,000 accounted for 27% of the volume, which doesn't sound like very much. You might think that it would be a lot more. But the truth is, as you look, as you move from 2,000 to 3,000 to 4,000, you move all the way up to 20,000, you've not even hit 60% of the volume. So you can't only just work on it keyword by keyword through the popular ones. There are other things you have to do too, which we'll talk about when— before we're done here. But the easiest thing to do is to focus on pages individually that are the most popular, because even looking at 1,000 pages in this case can affect 27% of the searches that you think you want to have come to your site. So let's go through this in detail. So when we said to choose a landing page for every keyword, how do you do that? Well, you might be tempted to choose a landing page that's where you want the customer to go. That's kind of a typical way to think about things in marketing, right? Right. What message do you want to send the customer? So if I have someone typing in a certain keyword, then I want to send them a certain message. And that's fine, but that doesn't really work that well in SEO. What's more important is for you to pick the page on your site that is where you think your customer, the searcher, wants to be. So that's a subtle distinction, but it's really important. It isn't which page you want them to see. It's which page you think they want to see. So as you think that through, one of the things that's likely to happen is you're going to discover that you do not have pages that customers want to see for every keyword that you want to rank for. And you'll be tempted to say we can use the same page for all those keywords. So when I was at IBM, we had something called Product Lifecycle Management. So that was an area of technology that people could buy. And there were different kinds of approaches for every industry. So if someone— so if you wanted to pick the same keyword for multiple keywords, it was perfectly fine to pick this page that's about product Product lifecycle management. You could pick this page and say, if people type in product lifecycle management, this page should come up. And also, if they pick the abbreviation for that, PLM, this page should show up too. Perfectly fine. Product lifecycle management, PLM, they both mean exactly the same thing. Fine to show them the same page. But suppose they typed in aerospace. PLM or automotive PLM or any other industry with the word PLM, it is not okay to show them this page. Why? Because they're not looking for PLM in general. They're looking for PLM pointed at their particular industry. And so if you think about it, There's no way that this generic PLM page could possibly be the number one result in Google or Bing or any of the search engines when someone types in aerospace PLM. It's not possible. There's got to be somebody out there that's doing a real page about aerospace PLM. There might be a whole site about aerospace PLM. So you need, if you want this to be one of your key keywords, if this is one of the ones that you want to get results for, you're going to have to deal with the fact that you need to create specific pages for many, many different kinds of terms. So if you want these deeper terms, you're going to have to create the content for it. You might not have a page on your site that does this. Already. So that kind of begs the question of if you want to pick the page that the searchers want, how do you know which page that is? Now for some of them, it's pretty easy. Like in that PLM example. I could show you, you know, if people type in PLM, we have a page about PLM, show it to So for many of them, especially the most popular ones, you'll know. There'll be some of them that you'll say, I kind of know what they want and we don't have it. I need to create a page. There might be other ones where you may not know what the right answer is. What is the right page for that? What is the kind of thing that people want? You have to understand that if you're going to get a high ranking for those pages. So your customers know what those pages are. And you can kind of test for it. If you're starting to get traffic to some of your pages from some of these keywords that you're not exactly sure whether it's the right answers for them or not, you can even put a survey on the page that says, did this answer your question? You can take a look at message boards where people are asking certain questions and see which pages the message boards link to. You can look at wikis. Because wikis often have sourcing for the things that they talk about. So if you're desperately trying to beat out Wikipedia for a search query and you look at the Wikipedia page and then you see all the places that page links to, that can give you a clue as to what kind of information you need to have. You can also take a vote. You can, you could ask your customers to tell you, you know, is this page better than this page? And as we said before, sometimes you'll need to create a new page. So what do you optimize landing pages for? What are the kinds of things that you have to, you have to look at those metrics? Or we talk about analyzing the metrics. What are the metrics that we're talking about? So there's basically 3 metrics you care about. And the reason you care about them is because they help you know what to do when they're wrong. So the first one, search rankings. So that one seems fairly obvious. If you have a keyword and the page that you want to come up is not coming up very high in the list, that's a problem because people are not going to be clicking on it, they're not going to be buying just because they're not seeing your message. Click-throughs is the next one. You might have a page that's ranking really highly. It might be the number 4 result of all these things, but nobody's clicking on it, or very few people are clicking on it, much fewer than you would expect for the number 4 result. So what do you do about that? The next one is conversions. So it could be that you have a high ranking, you have people clicking through, but people aren't buying. So if they're not buying, you're not really delivering any business value. Through that search because it's only when they buy things that the business value accrues. So these are the 3 things you want to look at. And the reason you look at these things is because depending on which one of them is out of whack, it gives you different things that you do in order to fix that situation. You also have to optimize your pages for speed. And this is relatively new. Google at least, and I think some of the other search engines are doing it too, are paying attention to how quickly your pages load as part of the ranking algorithm. Faster pages rank higher. The other reason you care about speed is that searchers often abandon pages that load slowly. So if you really take 2 or 3 seconds to load, you may think that's fast enough, But for— in certain situations, you're probably taking 8 or 10 seconds to load if you have a searcher who is connected over their cell phone, or there's a particular problem in the network that day, or something's going wrong. Those 2 or 3 seconds that you think are fine can actually be much, much more than that. And people tend to abandon when the page takes too long to come up. And so people are looking at really sub-second load times now more than ever before. Another thing you want to think about is to learn from display advertising, banner advertising it's also called. If you think about how people do banner advertising, here's an example of one here. Where there's an advertisement in InfoWorld, and then when people click on that, they go to an IBM page. And they don't have exactly the same picture, but you can see the same guy in the picture. You can see the style of the picture is the same, where the middle of it is in pretty good focus but the edges not so much. And so you can tell that you're in the right place because there's a kind of visual continuity. So when you have a display ad, all that's really there is a picture and some words, but you have to understand how you can tie the ad to the page you're going to so that when people get there, they don't, they don't say to themselves, oh, this is the wrong place, I'm abandoning, or this is not what I expected, or I don't think that worked. You want them to say, yes, I clicked on this, I wanted more information, now I'm getting the information that I expected. So how do you do content— continuity in search? So the way to do that is to use the same words. So if somebody is clicking on a search result and then when they get to the page they don't see in bold letters what their search query was, they may think they're in the wrong place. So you can also reinforce that choice by using not just the same words, but you can also make sure that those words are prominent and that you can think about what the answer was that the person was trying to get and make sure that answer is in the content. All of that shows your visitor, your searcher, that they're in the right place. And that's really important. Once— when they know they're in the right place, then they're going to actually read your message and then they'll possibly continue and eventually buy something. The trickiest part of the transition is when someone goes from Google to the first page on your site. That is the page they are most likely to abandon from because it wasn't what they were looking for. And so the more that you can reinforce that this is what they're looking for, the better chance you have to sell something. So What is the kind of consistency that we're talking about? What is that reinforcement that we're talking about? Here's an example. The keywords are reinforced and the title is reinforced. So you look at the search result and you can see that it is about— so you see that the keywords show up in the title and they show up in the snippet. And when you click through to that page, you get the company you were expecting, you get a very bold-looking red title that has your keywords in it, and that tells people they are in the right place. That's the best thing you can do when you're bringing them to that first page that showed up in the search results. So what are you doing when you're trying to make this happen? You're optimizing your Your title is the most important part of the entire page when it comes to content optimization. So there's 2 aspects of title optimization. The first one is that you need to optimize your title so that it has the keywords that the search engine is looking for and possibly some related words as well. So if you look at this one for the example that we go through in the textbook on the Snapshot Digital Cameras campaign, you can see the word digital cameras is in the title. You can also see the word photography is in the title. So that helps because it helps the search engine to know that this is really the right subject. Now, the That's the first way that you want to optimize is for the search engine. But you also want to optimize for the searcher. Make sure there's some kind of call to action in there or something that helps people understand this is the right place for them to go. Because it's not just— the title isn't just for getting search rankings. The title is also for getting people to click through. So here's a bunch of titles that Snap Snapshot digital cameras used. The first one was Snapshot homepage. Not so good, right? I mean, it might have the name of the company, doesn't have the word digital cameras in it. Next one was Snap digital cameras for you. That's a little better. Save on Snap digital cameras. Now we're starting to cook, right? This is better because this starts to show you that you have a call to action and you've got a brand name and you've got the digital cameras in it. Then they started to play with some other stuff. So Snap Electronics Snapshot Digital Cameras, and all the way down to the one at the very bottom where if you look at the— at a couple of them where they have the ellipses there, those are places where they started to get truncated. The title became so long that everything after the ellipsis was knocked out. And then if you look at the last one, the one they finally settled on, it was Snap Digital Cameras save on a snapshot digital camera. That had a couple different brand keywords in it, had the word digital camera in it a couple times, and it gave you a call to action. And that seemed to be the one that started to test the best. It gave them the highest search rankings and it also caused the highest click-through, which is what they're looking for. But it's not just your title. That you need to optimize. There's other places as well. You want to optimize your snippet as well. And you may not know where the snippet comes from. Typically, it comes from either the description or more often it comes from the body of the page. And it's the best location in the page's body that contains the query terms. Often it's the first location on the page. And so you can start to experiment and see which words Google, Bing, and the other search engines are pulling for the snippet. And you can then update your content by crafting the copy around those keywords so that you get a call to action out of it. So can you do something that's going to cause people to click through a little bit more? I mean, your page is already being found. Found the search. It doesn't matter from a search ranking point of view what shows up in that snippet. The page itself is being evaluated in totality, but that snippet might have a strong effect on whether people click through or not. Okay, we looked at titles, we looked at snippets. The biggest area to optimize is your body text. So there have been different studies that have been done at different times. Not everybody believes that putting keywords in headings really makes a big difference over the rest of the body text. I think it makes a difference in a couple of ways. First of all, I think that search engines probably will give more emphasis for a page where the keywords are in the headings. But the other thing that's important is that when those keywords are in the headings and a searcher sees that, that's going to be more likely to get them to say they're on the right page. So headings, subheadings, so those are the H1 tags, H2 tags, those types of tags, those are important areas. You might also put them in bold or underscored or italicized text. It once was that it was certain that search engines gave those higher rankings. Now it's not so much sure. We don't know if that's true or not. Some— there are different people who have done different studies that show maybe or maybe not it affects the rankings in a positive way. But it definitely affects the searcher in a positive way because when they get to that page, they're scanning the page and the more the keywords stand out to them, the better a chance you have of preventing them from abandoning and from actually going deeper and buying something. So optimizing your body text is really important. I think it probably still helps from a search ranking point of view, but it absolutely helps from a conversion point of view. So what are the kinds of things that you can do? So here's an example of something that we did when I was at IBM where there was this product lifecycle management page that we looked at before. So there were a bunch of problems with this. If you look at the title, all it had in it was the acronym. It had IBM PLM. It did not even have the words product lifecycle management spelled out. And what you look at is this nice gaudy title. That was actually an image rather than a heading. And as we saw before, the search engines don't see images. So it didn't know that this was a big title. By changing this to a head 1, that could really help us. If you look at the text that was on the page, it didn't have keywords in it about PLM. It had all sorts of kind of uninteresting marketing speak on it. And none of that really helped the page. And when you added it all up, this is a page from a market-leading vendor. IBM was one of the most important PLM vendors in the marketplace, but it was ranked 175 in Google. Okay. After we were done and we made those changes, we put the keywords in the title, we changed the title to text, we put lots of keywords in the title including the word PLM multiple times, then we immediately went to number 1 in ranking. Now, is that going to happen for you? Probably not. I mean, honestly, the reason this happened was because IBM should have had the number 1 page. They had the best product. They apparently had a million links to their pages with PLM on it. And so all they had to do was fix all this stuff so that Google could tell that this was the right page. And all of a sudden, it shot up to where it belonged all along. So if you have a page where you really should be ranking really highly and you're not, then fixing these things is likely to make that happen. But for most of us, we're going to see some improvement on the page. But there's a lot of other factors that go into ranking number 1 than that. So we talked about analyzing the metrics, and it kind of made it sound like you do that once. Look at the keyword, see what the metrics are, then you go to the next keyword. And that is how you go about optimizing. But once you've optimized the page, you want to constantly be checking the metrics. So one way to do this is with rank checking. So you could do this manually every day. You could type in digital cameras and see where your page is coming up, but it saves you a lot of effort to use automated rank checking programs where you can look at the changes in your ranking and your competitors' ranking. That can help you a great deal to have that automated, to look maybe once a week to just see whether there's sudden changes up or down. Because that might tell you, oh, something good is happening or something bad is happening. You might want to go look at that page again. Now, one thing that's making rank checking a little harder than it used to be is that personalization for search engines is really increasing. What personalization is, is it means that different people are getting different results for the same keywords. Time was that everybody typing in digital cameras got the exact same results. But in the last few years, Google Google and the other search engines have begun to implement things where they might know, for example, that in the past when you typed in digital cameras, you've always been looking at information about how to use digital cameras rather than how to buy them. And so that might change what pages you get as opposed to somebody else who maybe hasn't typed that in before. There's all sorts of information that Google might know about you and might know from your past and from your activity. From things that you've told them in profiles if you're logged in while you're searching. Bing even has a deal with Facebook where they actually can rank things higher or lower for you based on what your friends have done and what they think about certain products and services. And so personalization means that not everybody's getting the same rank. But if you use a rank checker to at least tell you where the generic rank is, that can give you an idea of whether things are changing in a good way or a bad way. And maybe that page might need a little more attention. Now even though this is an SEO course, I want you to really remember to optimize for more than just search. It's not enough to optimize so something gets a high ranking or even high click-through. Your goal is not to get a high ranking. Your goal is not to get more traffic to your site. Those are sub-goals. The big goal is to sell more. So remember that your website has a purchase. Remember that you have to persuade people to complete the conversion. Here's an example from ESPN where— what is their conversion? They have 2, right? One of their conversions is every time somebody comes to a page, they're getting ad revenue, and so that's helpful. They also want to have more brand awareness, maybe advertise their television programs. All those things are fine. But they also have a very specific conversion that they want you to sign up and pay some money to become an ESPN Insider. So on every page, they have something on there to get you to understand that you need to register. They might even preview some of that content and say, boy, you could see this all the time if you were an Insider. So remember that even though we're spending a lot of time talking about search optimization, of the page. It's really conversion optimization that's just as important as search optimization. You need to do the search optimization to get people to come to the page, but if all they do is come to the page and they don't buy, the search didn't have any value. You need to remember where the value is. So how do you analyze conversions? So you need to use some kind of web metrics or web analytics program. You may already have one on your site. If you do, fine, it'll work just fine for you. If you don't, that's the first order of business. Get Google Analytics. It's free. It's easy to put on your site. It works very well. You can set up all of your conversions. It will automatically tell you which words people typed in to get to your site, and it'll show you, of the people who searched for those words, how many of them actually converted. So that's how you count your conversions if you have an online commerce site. But what if you have offline conversions? Well, you can use the online stuff to track all the way up to the point that they've done the most they can do online and they're ready to switch channels to offline. So you have to track offline conversions by linking up that web activity with whatever the actual offline offline sales event is. So did you put a phone number on your site that's nowhere else so every time they call that phone number you know they came from the website? Car companies let you configure the car online, print it out, bring it into the dealer, and then the dealer checks off that you brought in that page from the website. And so they then know if they sell you a car that that gets credited back to the website. You might just have something simple like printing a coupon that they bring to the store. All of those kinds of things can work. You need to think your calls to action through so that you can connect the offline sale back to the web. That way you will know that all the things you did in search actually lead to sales. So think about how you are going to do this. So if you look at how customers do this with car companies, They can choose exactly what car they want, configure it, and then they have a set of different conversions, right? Where they could continue in other ways, right? They could print it out and go to the dealer, or they could search online inventory. They could look for quotes. They could locate a dealer. All of those things are kinds of conversions, and you need to get people to do that, and you need to be able to count that they did. So you never ever stop optimizing. Now what are the kinds of things that you need to think through when you're thinking about optimizing? So you want to think about which keywords result in the highest conversions because you'd want to focus more on those. So we start out saying, well, look at which keywords have the highest popularity. And that might be a good start. But you can also start by saying which ones convert the highest. They're the ones we really want to focus on. And so if you can track every keyword and you report on it, then you can start to really play with things. So if you're trying to optimize for conversions, now you can start really having some fun. Change the landing page copy and the images. Now when you do that, you need to be careful that you're not going to negatively affect its search ranking. But as long as you can retain its search ranking, then you want to start changing the copy so that people will then go further into the process. You can obviously change images whenever you want because they don't affect the search engines. You can change your offers, you can change your page design. You can also do all of these kinds of things in every other page in the conversion path. And you do this over and over and over again. You never ever stop. You continuously improve. You are constantly looking at your conversion metrics and you are making changes in order to get people more and more to buy. So here's an example where you might ask yourself, does this— is the shopping cart on the left or the right? This was a question that Amazon had to ask way back when, and now we know that the shopping cart's always on the right. But how did they know that in the beginning? The only way they knew is through a technique called A/B testing. The one on the left is A. The one on the right is B. What they did is they did something very simple. They ran the shopping cart on the left for a week and they ran the shopping cart on the right for a week. They found that the one on the right was 1% higher sales, and so they kept it there. So how would you have made this decision in your organization? I mean, you can't compromise this. You can't run it down the middle of the page. You can't put it on the left. On odd-number days, on the right on even-number days. You have to actually make a decision. It has to go somewhere and stay there. And so what Amazon does is let the customer decide, and that's what A/B testing lets you do. So sometimes it's not so simple. Sometimes there's way more than 2 choices. So you don't need A/B testing, you need A, B, C, D, E, F, all the way through the alphabet testing. In fact, sometimes you need thousands or even millions of different variations depending on how complex your situation is. So how do you set those things up? If you have the stomach to create all those different variations, you can afford the content cost to do it, then you can use something called multivariate testing in order to decide which was the best one. And Google gives you a free one of those too. So you've got the free Google Analytics, you can also get free Google Website Optimizer. So there are— and there are other website optimizers out there as well. And so what Google will do, or whatever the website optimizer you use will do, the multivariate testing program, it'll show all those different variations to real visitors, and it will keep track of which ones had the highest click-throughs and the highest conversions. And once you have run enough that you have a statistical statistically valid sample, you can then change so that that version of the page that tested the best is the one that you're using. So here's an example where the page on the right actually has 116% higher conversion than the page on the left. And honestly, from looking at that, would you know that? Probably wouldn't. I mean, they look— the pages look pretty similar, but there are apparently some major, major differences that causes over twice as many people to submit this form on the right than to submit the one on the left. And it's only after months of multivariate testing and changing one thing, changing another thing, trying all sorts sorts of different variations did they figure out which form was the better designed one. And you can do this for every page on your site if you have the time. And that's how you're going to optimize your conversions. You also want to optimize for social media. Think about it. If you have information that's really helpful, make it easy to pass on. You can use all sorts of little bookmarklets. You can use all these tiny little buttons that allow people to pass it on because they can tweet it, they can update their Facebook status. There's all sorts of ways that they can share information. They can bookmark it in Digg or Delicious or Reddit. All those sites show your content to other people. And that's what you, that's what you want to happen, because optimizing your page so it can be passed on to other people, that gets you more traffic as well. That gets you more sales. Another kind of optimization is to think about optimization for very specific kinds of people. So we mostly talk about optimizing for customers And that is the most important thing. But there are other kinds of audiences as well. So you could have audiences of shareholders that you might want to provide financial information to, maybe industry pundits. One of the ones that almost every company cares about is media. And so whether it's bloggers or whether it's mainstream media who are reporters in newspapers, papers or in television or radio, you usually, for a large enough company, you want to develop a media center that pulls all of your public relations assets into one place where you can put in videos, you can put in your public service ads, you can put in any stories in which your company has been mentioned in the media. You can put all sorts of information in there and have one place where that audience can come. You can do the same kind of thing for the other audiences. So if you should have a place on your site for shareholders, you should have a place on your site for people who do industry reporting as opposed to maybe the reporting that people do for the public. So any of those kinds of audiences, you can separate a specific audience, you want to have a particular place that's optimized for them. That will not only help you to connect with that audience better and have that audience bring your message along. But it's also going to help you in search because the search engine has one single place that appears to be the right place to bring them. So even though a lot of those deeper stories will be things that they bring up for more specific searches, this is a place that will get a lot of links to it and it will have a lot of value for your site. Okay, so we've talked a lot about what to do. What are all the different kinds of optimizations you need to, need to undertake? So you need to optimize for search so that you get rankings. You need to optimize for the searcher so that you get click-throughs and conversions. We've said do this, do that, do the other thing. But how do you do all these things? How do you get the people who have to do these things to do them? Because the problem is that when you are the person in charge of search marketing, you're not the one doing most of these things. I mean, if you're in a very small company, maybe you are, but one of the people that I think you're going to have to really persuade is your copywriter. So how do you persuade those people to do all these things that we're talking about? So first thing to do is to understand that there are really different kinds of writers. So we spend a lot of time thinking about the copywriter for maybe an e-commerce site or another kind of business site where you're selling things, but there are also writers you would think of as content writers. So if you have an online magazine or you have some other type of information-oriented company. You might be CNN or ESPN where most of what you're trying to do is to get people to just read your information. Those are content writers rather than copywriters who are trying to sell something. And you also have a different kind of writer, a translator. If you have a site that's being translated into many other languages, you might have the same products being sold around the world and you have to translate them so that that you have different country sites. They all are people who use search in their work and you can use that to help motivate them that these are the kinds of things they need in order for their writing to get seen. And so how do you motivate them? They all would be motivated by attention to their writing, but copywriters are going to be more motivated by sales, right? If they know their job is to push the product, if you can show them how these kinds of changes will get more sales and that will be— mean that what they did was more valuable, I think that's going to be a big motivator for them. Translators could be motivated by sales as well or by attention depending on the kind of content. So, translators are translating the content done by copywriters, they'll be motivated by sales. If they're translating content done by content writers, they'll be more motivated by attention. You want people to understand you're spending all this time doing the writing, you're working very hard, you're creating this tremendous message, this interesting content, this valuable content. By doing all these extra things, more people will see it and it will have a bigger impact. That's what you need to get them to understand in order to have their attention and persuade them to do this extra work for you. So if you have a global website that is translating all of this content into other languages, there are some specific things you need to think about in terms of content optimization for search. One thing that you might not think of is that you have to optimize your for search in the national languages, not in the original languages. So what does that mean? It means that if, for example, your original language was English and you did everything right, you figured out what kind of keywords people were searching for, you optimized all your English language pages with those keywords, And now you're ready to bring your products to France. And so you're going to translate the whole site to French. You're going to make sure that they're using euros instead of dollars in their commerce pages. You're going to do all these correct things. You're going to make sure that you're complying with French law. Everything is set. You're actually missing a step. Because what you have to do is once you translate it to French, the problem is that you will have a correct translation, but it won't necessarily be a search optimized translation. Most of the people who do translation are not trained in search marketing. They don't know the difference between a correct translation and an optimized translation. So you need to actually redo your keyword research for France and figure out which French words are the ones that you want to optimize for and make sure that the translation contains those words. So you have to make sure they know the exact variations of the words that you want them to copy, and you have to insist that they're using those words in the right density, as we talked about before, and that they're also using related words. All the things we talked about earlier. That made for an optimized English page, you have to repeat all those steps for French because otherwise you're going to get a correctly translated English page. You will not get one that gives you the correct results in search because it won't have been search optimized. Another thing that you need to focus on is to make sure that the languages are encoded properly. Now for most pages, this isn't that big a deal. Search engines usually can analyze your page and know which language it is. So they can look at a page and say, oh, that's in French. Oh, that one's in English. But for some search engines, especially the smaller ones, those pages need to be encoded properly because they're not as clever about analyzing the content. And there's 2 tags that are important. One is what's called the language meta tag, and the other is the character set meta tag. And so you need to make sure both of those are properly, properly coded on the page. One thing that often happens is that a page will be written for one country, and then you will take that page, translate it to a different language for another country, but forget to fix the meta tags. And if you do that, you're going to throw the search engines off. Especially for Asiatic languages, it's quite important to have the meta tags coded properly. So we talked before about how you have to analyze each landing page, and you do. But what happens when you you've worked through all of your top keywords and you're done. Well, the assessment and the tracking never really stops because even though you may have gone through and optimized them all once, things change. The keywords people use change, your competition changes, the things that people are looking for change. So they may find your page, but you may no longer have an offer they're looking for. And so on a constant basis, you need to be looking at your site's content, need to be checking your rankings, your referrals, which is the number of people who come to your site using that particular keyword, and as we talked about before, your conversions. And you want to be doing all this and reviewing your measurements with the other people on the team and even with executives on the team so that you'll be a constant focus for all those people that need to do the right thing for search to continuously keep that up. Because we talked about how all of those keywords, we couldn't go one by one through every blessed keyword because eventually you end up in the thousands and you can't work on every page. So what What you can do instead is focus on, on search as a whole. Focus on all the traffic coming in and whether there are conversions from that traffic, whether it's one of your most popular keywords or not. And so by focusing on these best practices, you'll raise search traffic across the whole site, even for those keywords you didn't explicitly go landing page by landing page for. So how do you ensure that your content is written for search. So the first thing to do is to make sure that your writers understand what they're supposed to do so that they have standards for how they do it and that they're trained in them. Then what you want to do is police it. You want to actually check to make sure they're following the standards. So you want them to use keywords in bodies and in titles. You also want them to, to use other words that are thematically related. So all the kinds of things we talked about earlier, you can, you can then put together some kind of automation that will check. So how would you do that? So if you use a content management system, you can actually put this in your workflow. So you can ask which keywords these pages are supposed to be found for. Then you can analyze to see whether those words and whether other thematically related words are coming up on those pages before that writer can ever put that page in production. Or if you're not using a content management system, you can come up with an automated content reporter and you can create a whole content pipeline that looks at your pages. It uses your own crawler. It has this its own way of identifying all the pages and analyzes the pages after they're in production. And the most important piece of this is whatever you come up with, whatever way you do that, you then put together a scorecard where you look at each unit's performance so that, so that they will understand what it is that they need to do. And you can actually go to executives in each unit and talk to them about what their unit's performance was. So what are the kinds of things that you need to do? Whether you have a content management system or not, it's easier with a content management system. You want to make sure that your HTML templates are done properly, that there aren't errors in them. You want to make sure that your authors know how to use those templates, whether in the content management system or not. You have to— if you set up your stuff to be search-friendly, then you won't have the problem of every author rolling their own HTML. You want to make sure that they have put the— that you have given them the bones that they can then put the flesh on. And so we talked about creating that kind of content reporter. Now you can buy programs that do things like this. But for most people, it's a little bit difficult. It could be that the programs that are available you have to piece together. And so one of the things— and so some people like to build them. And the first thing you have to do is understand what your key standards are. So you might want to make sure that they have titles. You might want to be checking to make sure every title is unique, that the description is unique. They're not just copying titles and descriptions from page to page to page. There are plenty of different standards that you can put into place that all have to do with how well search marketing can work for your site. And by using a mechanism that can automatically check each of these items, that's what helps you to understand which areas you're having problems with and which you're not. So if we use this Content Reporter, we can stay on top of whatever problems seem to occur in your organization. So if you're constantly dealing with malformed HTML, your Content Reporter can actually check to make sure that the HTML is compliant with the standards organization, W3C, that monitors how HTML is supposed to look. To work. And you can, you can look at that. If that's not a problem in your organization, then don't spend the time to automate it and look at it. If you're suffering from poor titles and descriptions, or you're finding that there are lots of redirects on the site that the search engines can't follow, or if you have these long bloated pages that search engines tend to give up on and not finish, or that load really slowly. Any of these kinds of problems that I have listed on this slide, any of these things could be a problem in your organization. If it is, that's what you want to automate the metrics for. So what you do is you create a program that automates checking these metrics for whatever the behaviors are that you want to change. So if people are constantly rolling their own HTML and it constantly has errors in it, and that's causing parts of the page to not be indexed or it's causing them to rank lower than they would need to, then that's what you want to automate. That's what you want to focus on. So for every particular situation, there's an automation that can help you identify that, and then you constantly go after it to make sure that each group is being held to that standard and that they're constantly working to find out what it is that they need to do better. And so by doing that, you will always be in a position of focusing on the things that affect the behavior that you want to change. Okay, so let's say that you've identified what the behaviors are in your organization that you need to change. Perhaps you need people to focus on creating better titles. Maybe they're copying titles around. Maybe they have really bad titles that have no keywords in them. Maybe they have no titles at all. So that's what you want to focus on. So you're going to write a little content reporter that will take a spider to output and it will identify and analyze all the titles on the pages in your company. So you've done all that. Now what do you do with it? So now you have the numbers. So one thing you can do is just put out an aggregate number that only 32% of our pages have proper titles on them. And everybody would say, oh boy, that's bad. We ought to go fix that. If you have a large enough organization, it would be better to say Product A has 42% correct. Product B has 28% correct. Product C has 17% correct. Because there becomes immense pressure pressure on Product C to kind of not be so bad. And if you can pit different pieces of the organization against each other and scorecard them, you then can start to come up with a system where you might say, okay, look, by the end of the year, I want us to have 90% of the pages have proper titles. And if you've reached that mark by the end of the year, you're green. Otherwise, if you maybe have over 80%, then you're yellow. If you have under 80%, you're red. And then each month you go to the executives of those organizations, and for each of the metrics that you're trying to show, you let them know where their team is, and you let them understand that this is a critical thing in order for us to get more search traffic and more sales. And so that's what the executives do. And so even though the executives may have no idea what the technical aspects is of what you're trying to get their teams to do, eventually they're going to go down and talk to them and say, I don't know what this person wants you to do, but please do it because I do not want to go to that meeting and be read again next month. And that's all that you're really trying to get to happen is to put it on the executive's radar to get them to make their group do that. And so And that's what scorecarding can do. Scorecarding can give you the option of bucketing things by internal organizations and pitting them against each other and how you rate them. And eventually everybody starts to improve. And what happens when you have them all green, when they've all reached 90%? That's easy. Then what you do is you change the rules. You say, okay, 90% is no longer green. 96, 97% is green, and 95% is yellow, and anything under 95 is red. And then you start it all over again. And when you get to the point that everybody is really doing what you need them to do, then you can stop tracking and you can move on to track something else. And so find the next thing that you need everybody to do and then start changing the scorecards to do that. So you can see that by using this kind of method, you can slowly change the organizational behavior. So once you get them in this cadence where they know the executives see once a month what the scorecard says, the executive will then go back and ask them why they didn't meet whatever the standards are. And as they start to meet it, then you can go ahead and change the rules. You can set new benchmarks. And then you begin the process again of reviewing those scorecards with the heads of the business units. You're constantly demanding improvement. You're constantly repeating the process. And what this does is it helps you to get the entire organization to change what they're doing. So you're not just fixing those top keywords. You're fixing search engine optimization for all the keywords across your entire site. And these things can be done within a country, they can be done globally, they can be done within just a product line, they can be done at any level of the organization that you operate. So business unit is whatever you want it to be. Business unit could be in a small company, it could be Jack's pages, Sally's pages, and Bill's pages. Those could be 3 business units because you're going to pit those 3 people against each other to see how they can compete against each other to really all become green. And so you can work this at whatever level of organization you have. It doesn't have to be some multinational company. But the point is the same. You measure what you want to affect and you constantly come back and show the leaders in those organizations how their unit is performing so that they will put pressure on people to make this a priority amidst all the other things that those busy people need to do. And that's really it for content optimization. So let's review what the really big points are from this entire lecture. So one of the first ones is that you have to think about your philosophy of how you're going to do this. You cannot just say to yourself, well, I'm going to find out whatever the search engines want, and whatever that is, then we're going to do that. I mean, there's part of that that you need to do. Obviously, you need to have enough understanding of what search engines are looking for that you do some of the things that they want. But the truth is that you really need to connect with the searchers. If you do a good job connecting with searchers, eventually the search engines will give you credit for it. And so focus on the searchers, not just the search engines. You also need to start with the top pages. So one by one, go through the things that have the biggest impact and give them special manual attention where you walk through that process of identifying a landing page for each top keyword, then you analyze the metrics, and then you decide what kinds of things an audit shows you have to be changed. And you go through that process until you're getting the results you need. And again, what is it that you're optimizing for? You're optimizing for search rankings. So how high do they come up in the search results. You're optimizing for click-throughs. So what percentage of the people click through on that page? What kind of search referral traffic are you getting to the site? And you're optimizing for conversions. It's useless if somebody clicks through and then they don't buy. That doesn't help you at all. So you need to focus on what the value is of search, not just trying to get high rankings or lots of traffic. Then what you need to do is to create a process to optimize all the other pages that aren't those top landing pages. Because you're not going to be able to manually go through that process for every blessed page. Instead, you could be looking at these kinds of metrics across the whole site. You could look at the average search ranking of all the pages on the site for your keyword list. You could look at what kinds of referral traffic you get across the whole site and can we make that go up? You can look at what the conversions are from people who come to the site from search and how can we make that go up? And you can also analyze all the other smaller behaviors that you're trying to get them to do. That's what we talked about at the end. We talked about creating an automated process that could help you identify all those little behaviors like optimizing titles and, and body content. How can you get that thing to be measured? And then how can you pit business units against each other so that that process causes the behavioral change you're looking for? So that's really it. That wraps up optimizing content. So you're optimizing content for people to buy more. And yes, in order to do that, you have to also optimize so that search engines will find it and that people will click through and get it. But never take your eye off the ball. always remember that the purpose is to optimize for higher sales. Thanks a lot.