Our own Jean Bedord: Findability is a problem, Information Seeker - buyers are overwhelmed, they get irrelevant results. Search engines look at content differently than the human, its all about tags and metadata. Jean outlined a case project - focusing on the Web pages for the SIIA Content Forum pages. Initial examples shows "content forum" Google search results, not found. "SIIA" search results, not there. Jean shows the raw Web page, no metadata. A different conference page has much more metadata. Comes up in the top of Google search results. Search term comes up in page title, page address and summary. There are "basics gaps" that many publishers need to fill in.
Search originated with commercial database services, now services such as Factiva are moving over to commercial engines such as FAST: maintaining their own no longer offers commercial value. Searches require good content, indexing, ranking, query processing, and multiple link citations. Metadata is also key, especially in multimedia where tools such as ALT tags in HTML can define text that can act as metadata for non-text components. Different search engines have different specialties as well, so metadata may have to be tuned differently for different search engines. Rankings include alpha, chronological, popularity, algorithmic relevance - all of which adds up to "secret sauces" of ranking that are closely guarded formulas.
"White box" search dominates a la Google, but more sophisticated engine services play on more sophisticated metadata.
In Jean's teaching experience she discovers students that are just really starting to learn about how search really works. They do OK with mechanics, but not so well with semantics. On the SIIA home page, "events" is the taxonomy term on the site, but "conference" is the popular search term. Unexpected terminologies can also trip people up.
David Meerman Scott, Freshspot Marketing: Getting thousands or millions of search terms indexed is a challenge, yet marketing is increasingly a the key to success for publishers. David holds up a Dr. Scholl's shoe insert, also sells the same material in many different sizes and packages, generic versions and do-it-yourself cutout kit. This is what he believes that publishers should be doing, but few are doing it. The challenge is to get good terms on the "long tail" of content. One publishers has 45 million online pages to index - quite a challenge.
David recommends going to a "micro-content" strategy, getting premium content high on search terms, then capitalizing on that positioning.
Free content sells content: make the leap to offering something to have search engines drive content into the site. WSJ Online sold 700,000 print and online subscriptions at $79 and $39 a year, with lots of content exposed and indexed on their search engine.
Content markets content: Marketing 2.0 is thought leadership based, valuable, interesting and relevant. It's about understanding your buyers, participating in communities.
Blogging for publishers: Blog posts get great "Google juice," they know when it came out, lots make them, 1 in 5 at the conference blog. Joe Wikert of Wiley blogs. Charlene Li of Forrester returned $1m to Forrester based on her blog. Wikis do well also, Edmunds has a CarSpace Wiki, successful.
New Rules of PR: Old rules were press releases were for the press, new rules are that press releases drive online eyeballs to reach online buyers directly. Millions now read press releases directly online. The Concrete Network is a meat-and-potatoes site that does a press release a week, makes a high placement in Google News.
Search engine marketing via advertising: Unlike Dr. Scholl's publishers have a great asset for online marketing: content.
SEM for publishers: Create microcontent, keyword analysis is critical, don't be egotistical.
Keyword analysis and development: It's not about you, it's about your buyers. (COMMENT: We're going from a service economy to a servant economy.) Don't be egotistical, don't think about "business news," think about the content that your buyers want to get to.
Case studies: ECNext takes content from McGraw-Hill Construction, Wright, Freedonia on very specific terms.
Jeff Cutler noted that some aggregators are getting blacklisted in search engines, causes problems for the industry. Paul Gerbino of ThomasNet: needs to be a meeting of the minds between search engine industry and publishing industry. Pam Springer of ECNext, the "Big Daddy" Google search upgrade has changed the game, has penalized duplications. Paul: Big Daddy is not necessarily the issue, but more the placement of the content.
Very positive and constructive panel, my thanks to two great professionals (yes, that's log-rolling but they deserve it!)
