SEO is alive and relevant | Network Solutions - Small business conversations and working together for small business success

Event review: Media Future Now hosts SEO panel

December 2, 2008 :: Jill Foster

SEO graphic

Here’s why I like the events hosted by Media Future Now: their events attract diverse crowds from business, nonprofit, and government sectors i.e. good networking! And they feature varied guest speakers on emerging media, what works for small biz or all biz sizes even, and what’s trending especially in the face of searching and archiving social media content. Their recent meetup with Quinn Gillespie & Associates as hosts stayed true to its track record with an overview to follow.

Media Future Now is dedicated to the idea that media-centric businesses must be agile, innovative and future-focused.

SEO: Is it dead?
Some say SEO is bound for a dead end in a few years. But November’s Media Future Now panel maintained SEO is alive and relevant. Perspectives came from AOL’s Search Engine Visibility Director Anthony Long, Discovery Communications‘ Senior Search Analyst in Rich Media SEO Eddie Mercado, and New Media Strategies‘ Senior SEO Manager Melanie Phung, who also writes for her own SEO blog All About Content.

The goal is to dominate first page search results as much as possible; it’s about being on offense vs defense with your SEO plan.

Revisited: SEO basics & the 3Cs
Remembering the 3Cs i.e. credibility, content, and crawlability were some of the key basics emphasized when it comes to optimized, searchable content. What’s ‘crawlability‘? It’s a pop tech term that refers to the degree which search engines can detect -or search- web content.

And don’t forget these (5) basics for small business SEO & website:

1. ensure site pages cater to people using web searches;
2. offer easy navigation i.e. provide a simple browse directory on your site;
3. make pages easy to read;
4. create quick downloads;
5. provide consistency in layout and design.

SEO metrics: rich media and diversifying entry points to content
Social Media Marketing and SEO compliment each other but they should both relate to an overall marketing and SEO strategy. Presenters and audience alike discussed different tactics with one being creating different entry points to rich media content dealing with the same subject. Discovery Communications shared their model that works around some inherent search limitations for rich media i.e. video, audio, etc.

To maximize SEO with rich media, break down articles on a given topic for your business into subtopics which all get their own page on your website.

For example, if the featured topic is hybrid cars then make that subject multiple articles broken into branched, related topics with each subtopic receiving its own web page i.e. gasoline vs electric power; hybrid car performance; domestic vs international models. This SEO content model especially works well for larger sites; and bottom line this type of approach creates multiple entry points to particular topics on your site.

Using this approach, Discovery increased video screenings for its Animal Planet site by 325% with between a 15% to 24% traffic increase for other rich media content like games and puzzles.

Link building, social media and SEO: the challenge
Panelists agreed that link building i.e. getting external, credible sites to link to your site’s content via social media will be an interesting challenge for future content producers — simply because competition will be greater. A lot of SEO and social media professionals are clever at leveraging search tactics; but future SEO emphasis will be on web surfers vs targeted searchers.

Good SEO practices will still be valuable especially as people start trusting Google search results more. People will start focusing on first page results vs scrolling thru multi pages of query findings so make sure the content produced by your business online can be found.

More resources: