IMC: Search Optimization Panel

September 12, 2008

This afternoon’s session is on search engine optimization. Below is a quick recap of what the panelists say makes them tick or ticked.

Rodney Bartlett, Reachd, is our friendly moderator.

Gary R. Beal, Stickyeyes

Makes Him Ticked: Google trying to prevent us from engineering results.
Makes Him Tick: Gary is always looking for the next big thing. Where is search going. He’s keen on LSI (latent semantic indexing) and is always looking at ways to engineer the results.

Bill Barnes, Enquiro

Makes Him Tick: Knowing that the biggest mistake people make is looking for the next big thing. Like those who want to understand how to capitalize on social search without covering off the basics first: title tags, url structure and site structure.
Makes Him Ticked: He is vehemently opposed to manipulating results.

Makes Him Ticked: From an agency perspective, it’s that SEO gets tacked on at the end. Designers and marketers make a pretty site and then bolt on SEO after the fact. SEO needs to be at the beginning of the web development process. If you have legal, usability, designers at the beginning, then get the SEO person at the table.
Makes Him Tick: SEO is marketing, it’s net positive. You’re spending time developing your site. SEO brings traffic to your website so if you’re in business, you need SEO.

Lyn Wilson, 6S Marketing

Makes Her Tick: Semantic Indexing. In 2008 Google moved from basic page rank to a semantic indexing model. Search engines defining relevance by understanding the relevance between the content on the site and the links coming into the site. Lyn also mentioned one of my favourite tools: Google Insights. I love it because Insights gives you insights into keyword volumes and you can filter that geographically, by time, compared to other synonyms, etc.

Earthbound Media works to bring together IT and marketing.
Makes Him Ticked: CMS integrations without SEO friendly tactics and data migrations being the only time companies discover all their pages with little content and no reason to exist.

Makes Him Tick: Focussing on the basics. Alex tells a great story about once spending 2 hours in a training session talking only about formulating effective page titles.
Makes Him Ticked: Those who don’t stick with the basics!