SEO Expertise

The news is out, Watson beat two of the most prolific champions on Jeopardy.  What really impressed me about this technology is how well it understood the subtleties of human language.   Computers are very good at process strict rules.  Riddles, rhymes and Jeopardy do not always follow simple rules.  I think there is a real parallel between answering Jeopardy questions and returning search results.  As good as they are today search results returned by Google and Bing have a lot of room for improvement.

One of the most important things I do is help my clients figure out the words a searcher is likely to enter when looking for what my client offers.  I often use the example of what we do with sensitive paper documents, most of us call that “paper shredding” but the people in the industry call it “document destruction”.    These phrases refer to the same thing but they results returned by Google are different.

The answers in my example are close but not exactly the same.  The difference gets larger for harder to describe problems.  Understanding what we mean versus what we say is a very complicated task.   Search engines have come a long way in helping us find the information we want but they aren’t good enough, yet.

I don’t disagree with what Danny Sullivan says in his blog – Could Google Play Jeopardy Like IBM’s Watson but I think he underestimates how Watson could impact search.  While they might be slightly biased the IBMers over at Writing for Digital wrote the 3 Ways Watson Manifests the Future of Search blog post.  Their post highlights how they think the Watson technology will help search.   I tend to agree with where they think it will go.

Watson isn’t about to replace Google anytime soon.  I do think the folks at Google and Bing will use this major PR win for IBM as incentive to make their search engines produce better results.

I recently worked on a project to launch a new website.  The previous site was actually at two web addresses, the main corporate site and a blog, hosted on Blogger.  Transitioning the corporate site was a fairly straightforward exercise even if it did take longer than planned (Don’t they all? ).   Transitioning the blog from Blogger was more of a problem.

Getting the content out of Blogger wasn’t hard.  There is an export feature that allows you to easily export all of your posts.    The new blog runs on WordPress which has an import feature.   After a couple of steps the data was in the new blog but what about the URLs?

Redirecting URLs from Blogger is essentially impossible and Blogger wants it that way.  Blogger isn’t trying to lock you in to their platform.  They make it easy enough to move to another platform but what they don’t want you to do is redirect your URLs.  Why not?  The short answer is spammers.   Blogger is a free platform so ANYONE can use it.  By anyone I mean honourable and not so honourable people.   The spammers of the world will set up thousands of free blogs only to redirect them to some less scrupulous site.   It is for that reason that Blogger doesn’t want you redirecting URLs from Blogger.   This is a problem for real businesses that started using Blogger because it was easy.

My recommendation to you is that you don’t start out with a Blogger blog for your business.  At some point in the future you WILL regret your decision to use Blogger for your corporate blog.    If you really want to use the blogger platform then make sure you use a custom domain from the outset.   With a custom domain you have more options in the future on what to do with your URLs.

There are many people that claim to offer SEO services.  Some consultants are better than others.  I actually had a client ask for my help after they had used another SEO consultant.  That consultant built my client a new website that is doing 1/3 the traffic and half as many leads as they were getting from their old, ugly site, that was optimized for the right keywords.

In talking to my client I explained what makes me different is my ability to think like a prospect.  I am not encumbered by the curse of knowledge that my clients seem to have when it comes to their business.  Many of my clients have forgotten what it’s like to not know that their product or service exists.  To deal with this I have use a process called Symptomeering.

Symptomeering (sym-to-meer-ing) is the process of identifying symptom based keywords that your target audience uses to explain the pain they are experiencing.  These symptom based keywords are then aligned with your offering in order to drive actionable traffic to your website.

The process looks like this:

Symptomeering Flow Diagram

I am going back to my roots a little now that I will be helping WatServ a hosted Microsoft Dynamics provider with their SEO.

I had one of the owners of WatServ as a subscriber to my SEO newsletter.  He liked the content and forwarded it to his partner.  This led to a first meeting and ultimately WatServ signing on as a client.   There new site is under construction.

There was a time when Yahoo was the best search site around.  They were quickly eclipsed by Google.  Google is now facing pressure not from what we traditionally think of as search engines but from large sites that incorporate their own search engine.

In 2007 Facebook had over 600 million internal searches per month.  According to Comscore and others Facebook has doubled in unique visits from this time in 2009.   Facebook is clearly a primary destination for many.   How are you taking advantage of people that are searching on Facebook?

YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social sites also have their own search engines.  Yes, some of the content from these sites can be found in the major search engines but do you want to rely on them to expose your content?   What if a visitor never goes to the search engine but rather uses the internal search engines?

In real estate the sales adage is: location, location, location.  This can also be applied to search marketing.  You must be found where people are searching.  You can’t tell some where to search.  All you can do is ensure they find you wherever they search.