While there are plenty of panels at least broadly related to the world of SEM and Social Media at the Interactive portion of the 2012 SXSW Festival, there is only one panel that I marked as a ‘must see’ related to the SEO space.  That panel was Saturday’s “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!” with Danny Sullivan – editor of Search Engine Land, Matt Cutts – head of Google’s Webspam team, and Duane Forrester – Sr. Project Marketing Manager at Bing.  If you weren’t able to be a part of this panel, below is a quick recap of the bits that I found to be especially interesting/useful.

How do small businesses compete in the search results with large competitors spending thousands of dollars and spending huge numbers of man-hours on SEO?

Cutts pointed to the fact that Google wants to even the playing field somewhat and either has and will continue to address this topic or that they will be addressing this topic with upcoming updates to their algorithms.  Duane responded by saying that social indications were quite useful and important indicators of a site’s value.  And that it’s hard to argue with a site’s/company’s value if other people are indicating the site’s value.  My take:  In addition to agreeing that social cues are very important, I would add that user experience on the pages of the site plays an important role as well.  Especially when working with new clients that are not yet well established in the search engines, we often see that after our initial optimizations, our client’s rankings jump from nowhere-to-be-found to the first or second page of results rather quickly – even for highly competitive terms.  The staying power of the rankings, however, appears tied to how well searchers interact with the newly ranking site.  When the page new to ranking is highly relevant and user friendly, it tends to remain ranked well but if the page is not user friendly or is not providing something that other ranking sites offer, the page’s ranking falls significantly.  The search engines appear to test a site’s validity for ranking well before committing any sort of long-term high rankings.

Can buying links really help a site get ahead in the search results?

All three panelists agreed that buying links is a huge no-no that could have drastic consequences.  My take:  This, of course isn’t news.  This has been the ‘word on the street’ for years and has caused some SEOs to change their tactics to be in compliance.  Not so long ago, the SEO company hired by JC Penney was very publicly outed as having bought links on a large scale and there were consequences for JCP.  However, I can personally attest to the fact that paid links have worked in the past and that the sites that benefitted from them then are still benefitting from them now.  And we see that many of the top ranking sites for terms that our clients are seeking top rankings for are acquiring paid links on a continual basis.  They keep purchasing links and they continue to rank very well.  While we can compete without buying links, the sites that purchase links benefit more than Google and Bing like to admit.  Sure, in the long run, it’s probably not a good idea to throw money at links (which is a big part of why we avoid this practice) but it’s hard to prove that buying links isn’t at least somewhat beneficial in the short-term.

Follow your SEO’s advice and redirect error pages to valid pages of your site

All three panelists again agreed and were emphatic about recommending that error pages not be left untended to and that 301 redirects should be put in place.  My take:   I couldn’t agree more and I’d love to have the responses to this topic from all three panelists in a video that I could send to all of our clients who aren’t willing to push (generally) simple redirects through.  I think we on the SEO team at LMA are great about pushing for permanent redirects when necessary but if a client isn’t willing or able to implement redirects on their own, we need to push more for the second best solution which was pointed out by Matt Cutts:  using the canonical tag in a page’s meta data.  Placing a tag indicating which version of a page the search engines should pay attention to is a recommended practice especially for sites that do not have the ability, for whatever reason, to implement 301 redirects on their site.

This was a great panel with three well humored panelists that provided practical advice for common questions in the SEO space.  While there wasn’t anything particularly novel about the content covered, there were some great takeaways.  We’d love to hear from you if you attended or if you have any particular questions about SEO!

Thus far in our SEO gameplan for success we have discussed the types of goals you should have for your campaign and the types of information you should use to record baselines that you’ll build upon.  This article starts taking us past the prep work and gets us into the thick of things.  Obviously, a lot of what is done in SEO revolves around keywords.  One of the overarching goals of SEO is to improve your site’s visibility in the search engines for keywords that are going to bring you qualified traffic.  What constitutes a qualified visitor should have been tackled in “Determining goals and when to expect to achieve them” while taking a look into what types of keywords drive traffic to your site was referenced in “Determining and recording baselines”.  We’ll take this further and explore various ways to approach keyword research.

I would venture to say that there are basically two types of keywords in your future.  There are the general terms that have high search volume and there are the long-tail keywords that have low search volume.  With high search volume typically comes a big heaping helping of competiveness.  Reversely, the more specific a keyword phrase is, the less competition there will be.  As you would guess, these two types of keywords will also bring different types of visitors.  The general terms may bring a large quantity of visits but the quality of visitors could vary drastically.  Longtail keywords are more specific and will therefore typically bring a small amount of traffic but the traffic will be more qualified.  The final way I would recommend viewing these two types of keywords is related to how quickly you can expect to gain traction in the search engines for particular phrases.  Generally speaking, you’ll be able to affect your site’s ranking for the more specific keywords before you’ll ever make a dent in the broad terms.  This is why many times we will make two keyword groupings:  a short term goal based keyword set and a long term goal based keyword set.

When choosing keywords to target for search engine optimization for your site, I’d recommend considering at least the following:

• Estimated search volume – you can use Google’s Keyword Tool for a very rough estimate of monthly search volume
• Look into the competitiveness of each term – the number and quality of search results is a good place to start
• Dig into your paid search data if you have it – which keywords are converting well for you in PPC
• Dig into your web analytics data – which keywords bring qualified traffic to your site according to site metrics like bounce rate, average time on site, and probably most important, which provide conversions

• Which will be your short term keywords and which will be your long term

Be sure and attempt to view your products and services from the point of view of a prospective client.  What would you type into the search box if you were looking for something but were perhaps unfamiliar with the industry jargon?  Would you use qualifiers like geographic locations, color, size, or any other descriptions?

Choosing keywords sometimes appears cut and dry in the beginning but once you really start researching from different angles and using actual data, you may find that reality is a bit different than your initial expectations.  We often find that the “obvious keywords” aren’t the ones that convert well.  We also find that choosing keywords isn’t something that you do once.  Let your list of target keywords evolve as you receive new data.

The next step in this SEO gameplan discusses how and why you should work on PPC and SEO together on your site.

The next step I often take in working to create a successful SEO campaign is often a fun one for me.  The purpose of this step is to take inventory of what you have to begin with.  You’re likely to fall in or near one of the two following groupings:  You are fortunate enough to have a site ranking for some decent phrases, already have some traffic coming in from those rankings, and you might even have some conversions from SEO.  Or, you have a site but not much else…yet!  Either way, this step gets you to look at where you’re starting from and even if you’re starting with nearly nothing, the fun comes from knowing you will be able to improve.

What baselines are important to record early on?

Your first instinct may lead you to start by noting where your site ranks for certain keywords.  While this is an important metric that you can (and should) easily compare with over time, I would encourage you to spend your time finding where your starting point is from a web analytics perspective and save setting keyword ranking baselines until you are doing keyword research.

Whether you’re using a free web analytics platform (such as Google Analytics) or you’re using a paid option, you will have a lot of information available to you.  Starting out, dig up at least enough information to answer the following questions:

• how much traffic do you receive from organic, non-paid traffic

• what percentage of your organic traffic is from Google, Yahoo or Bing

• what keywords drive your natural search traffic
• how much referral traffic do you receive now

• what sites refer traffic to you

• what are your typical bounce rates
• how long do visitors typically spend on your main pages
• how many conversions come from natural search traffic

Feel free to give us a call if you have trouble gathering any of this information!

Note:  this information can typically be referenced in your analytics account at any time but I see a lot of benefit from pulling this information early on.  There are a lot of ways to manipulate this data to give you the information that you need.  For instance, you may want to compare data from December 2009 to December 2008.

Dig into your data early on and establish your baselines to get a better idea of where you’re starting and what you need to focus on to improve.

The next step in this SEO gameplan discusses what considerations you should move through when choosing what keywords to pursue with Search Engine Optimization.