TMN Internet Summit:
REO & SEO with RushmoreDrive.com
Kevin McFall
VP, Product & Content – BWE Inc. / An IAC Company
10.30.2008

What is RushmoreDrive.com?
The first online Discovery Destination for the Black community

An Overview of RushmoreDrive.com
• The world’s first of it’s kind true search
engine for the Black community
• An innovative online news search and
aggregation tool including original editorial
opinions from Black journalists covering
current and relevant topics affecting our
community
• Jobs search and social networking
platform focused on diverse talent
www.RushmoreDrive.com

The RushmoreDrive Value Prop
Advertisers / Agencies
• RushmoreDrive is uniquely positioned to
enable you to promote, influence and/or
persuade the brand engagement decisions
of Black consumers in a targeted manner
either in an online environment (i.e.,
search terms, innovative media, and/or
IAB std. units), offline environment, or both
www.RushmoreDrive.com

RushmoreDrive’s Representative Client List
www.RushmoreDrive.com

The RushmoreDrive Value Prop
Publishers
• RushmoreDrive.com is dedicated to
promoting and improving the visibility of
Black web content creators by enabling
users who are looking for the products and
services that you provide to find your
websites quickly and in a more relevant
context
www.RushmoreDrive.com

REO - RushmoreDrive Engine Optimization
• REO Tips & Best Practices
– Elevating the ranking of web pages with a
high propensity of being more relevant to the
Black / Urban community.
– Delivering a viable blend of accurate results
– Promote your site to geographically relevant
audiences
– Suggest a site; suggest your site
– Evangelization of your site to the RMD team
www.RushmoreDrive.com

REO at work
and the
opportunity to
optimize
www.RushmoreDrive.com

SEO - Search Engine Optimization
• Objectives of SEO:
A Tips & Best Practices Discussion
– RELEVANCE, QUALITY, FRESHNESS
– Identifying and influencing the Search
Engines crawling/indexing of your Site
– Tips for getting your pages to Rank higher.
– Additional ideas to Increase Traffic
– Tools to help improve your ranking
– RELEVANCE, QUALITY, FRESHNESS
www.RushmoreDrive.com

Driving Search Engines to See You
• Search Engines attempt to identify every good
page on the Internet!
• The vast majority of new sites and new pages;
however, are either spam or very low quality.
• Search Engines might initially be conservative
with crawling a new domain, especially with
dynamic content
• Give crawlers the best view of your sites by
shielding non-important pages using Robots.txt
(for instance, you should block internal search
and dynamic pages).
www.RushmoreDrive.com

Driving Search Engines to Rank You
• Having high enough quality to be selected for
the ‘high quality’ partition (search engines
partition their indexes into quality tiers).
• Matching text to the Search Engine
User’s Query
• External Links
– Anchor text that matches to a user’s query
– A large number of links from high quality sites
– Links within a query community
• Domain name text matching (to some extent)
• Being an established site (years on the web)
www.RushmoreDrive.com

Driving Ranking of Your Site
• In General:
– Look to high-ranking peers in your category for clues
on what to do to get better ranking.
– Don’t implement any of the techniques to the extreme
that the Spammers do!
– Try to link websites in a way that mimic natural
business relationships.
– Try to make sure you’re not linked to by lots of low
quality sites, i.e. don’t hang with a bad crowd.
– Try to use language on your page that is part of your
audience’s ‘normal’ vernacular.
www.RushmoreDrive.com

Other Best Practices:
Text in the HTML Page
• Text in the HTML Title and HTML Headings are
more important than HTML Body Text
• Text at the top of the document is more
important than text at the end of the document.
• Text in:
Meta Description
Meta Keywords
is less important (this area has been heavily
spammed)
www.RushmoreDrive.com

Other Best Practices:
Value of Anchor Text
• What is Anchor text?
– Anchor text is the visible text with a hyperlink.
– “Read more news…”
• A “community” of anchor text describes
the page naturally, and identifies its
importance
www.RushmoreDrive.com

Other Best Practices:
Expand External Anchor Text
• One way to expand external links is to generate
press releases that link back to important pages
on your site:
– Utilize the PRNewsWire releases that you already
send.
– Provide an RSS feed for the Press Release section of
your site. Go to Blog Engines and subscribe to the
feed.
• These Press releases will be syndicated across
the web, thereby creating more links.
www.RushmoreDrive.com

Other Best Practices:
Anchor Text to Avoid
• The worst Anchor Text is ‘Click Here’.
– It doesn’t contribute any text or meaning to
the page.
– It doesn’t provide any description for the
referred-to page.
www.RushmoreDrive.com

THANK YOU!
www.RushmoreDrive.com

Contact Information
Kevin McFall
Vice President, Products & Content
Email: Kevin.McFall@RushmoreDrive.com
Office: 212.915.3203
Susan Scott
Vice President, National Sales
Email: Susan.Scott@RushmoreDrive.com
Office: 212.915.3207
RushmoreDrive.com, an IAC Company
11215 Rushmore Drive
Suite 100
Charlotte, NC 28277
212.915.3200
feedback@RushmoreDrive.com
www.RushmoreDrive.com