Sem Schipul-Evatt Barcamp Houston

Slide 1: Search Engine Marketing Boost your Presence, Build your Brand Search Engine Optimization Practical Application Steven Evatt, Chron.com & Ed Schipul, Schipul

Slide 2: Today we’ll cover: 1.Search Engine basics 2. SEM in the real world • Natural optimization (SEO) • Pay-Per-Click (PPC) 3. Building SEO Into your App

Slide 3: Research your target market! • Brainstorm: – How will your target market search for you? • Flowers, flower delivery, florist, special occasion flowers, birthday flowers, Valentine’s flowers, funeral flowers, bridal flowers, flower shop, etc. – Are you targeting a geographic area? Source: http://flickr.com/photos/cunisdiabolis/139234237/ • Houston Florist, Houston flower shop, Katy TX Florist, Victoria Florist, Austin Florist, Barton Springs Flower shop, etc.

Slide 4: How does a Search Engine work?

Slide 5: Keyword Density Are you writing what you mean to say? www.schipul.com/en/sem/keywords

Slide 6: Content is King • Lets talk about the News Business! 6

Slide 7: Newsroom Adoption  Top down ‘Buy-In’  Visionaries in VP and EVP of Online Editorial  Automation of SEO Basics  Provide tangible tracking and benchmarking results

Slide 8: Newsroom Editors: Their Role  Page Text  Education: SEO best practices to newsroom  Promo Graphics  Easy editing tools so both graphic and text changes are within content management system

Slide 9: Page Title Automation  Automatically insert Headline  Leads the Title  Includes metro area – “Houston”  Includes Site and Publication Name

Slide 10: Meta Keywords and Description  Refining to ensure primary keywords are included  Provide mechanism for editorial staff to avoid code editing

Slide 11: Cross Linking (Internal)  Site search results and resource tool links on story pages  Cross linking with Chron.com Blog posts

Slide 12: Research External Link back Opportunities! http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop Help file: http://www.tendenci.com/en/cms/?1470

Slide 13: Site Discoverability  File Structure Hierarchy and Taxonomy  Maintain Site Maps  Nav, Links, Story redirection on Error pgs  RSS throughout site

Slide 14: Back End Configurations  Robots.TXT  404 Error Page  Server Side Redirects  Configure multiple URLs to avoid returning the exact same content.  ie www.chron.com == www.houstonchronicle.com == chron.com == etc.

Slide 15: Tracking and Benchmarking Feb 2007: #7 Feb 2007: #6

Slide 16: Inspect what you expect with Web Analytics www.google.com/analytics

Slide 17: Care and Feeding of SEO  Use keyword-rich content,  Updated constantly with less graphical text  Topical Meta Data  meta descriptions  keywords  limited to six-to-eight

Slide 18: Paid Placement

Slide 19: PPC Step by Step 1. Choose terms: keyword research 2. Create a paid placement budget 3. Campaign Set-up 4. Monitor and tweak campaign

Slide 20: Keyword Research Suggestion Tools • Overture - www.overture.com (free) • Wordtracker - www.wordtracker.com (paid) www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com (free) • Keyword Discovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html (free) www.keyworddiscovery.com (paid)

Slide 21: Let’s Review! • Content is king – Keep it fresh – Keep it original • Links are powerful – be generous! • Keep a healthy SEO and PPC balance • Watch and tweak your campaign

Slide 22: Thanks  Steven Evatt  www.chron.com  Ed Schipul  www.brandtobedetermined.com

Slide 23: Web 2.0 in your SEM campaign

Slide 24: Social Media Optimization (SMO) • Web 2.0 = KEYWORDS!! • Optimize your Social Media content • Enable Social bookmarking and badging • Track the buzz 24

Slide 25: Technorati - a new kind of search www.technorati.com

Slide 26: Be a participant in the conversation • Flickr (www.flickr.com) • Facebook (www.facebook.com) • MySpace (www.myspace.com) • Twitter (www.twitter.com) • Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) • Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) • Ning (www.ning.com) – Look for online communities in your industry (or make your own...)