In the tradition of the SIIA Content Forum being a little more nuts-and-bolts, search engine optimization is a key how-to topic that this panel parameterized. What does SEO mean in the content world, what are its pitfalls and risks, what does SEO mean to publishers, vendors and SEO experts, how can it be deployed. Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay, Inc. noted that 87 percent of clicks on Google search pages are on items in the organic search results, hence SEO's importance. Google and other search engines looks at the search itself to determine if you're a shopper or a researcher and try to deliver appropriate content, for example, if I am researching a car I may put in just the name of a car, but if I say "Ford Mustang pricing" I may get another type of response. In Web 2.0 content comes to the user via feed aggregation and embedded content, providing new contexts beyond search engines. Most Web pages with research-oriented content have at least 500 words, so the length of an item will also be important. Edmunds was creating content that was optimized better by AOL's syndication of the content - and draw more visitors. This goes into the design of the content itself to make sure that editorial content is going to be optimized for search engines.
Jill Konieczko of U.S. News and World Report notes that they "got religion" on SEO when their editors noted that their bread-and-butter college rankings were not dominating Google search results. They have ten librarians who respond to internal corporate information support requests, but recently they have been taking their traditional skills and applying them to SEO for editorial content. They've focused on licensed content as well as optimization for optimizing their content for DoubleClick ads. They combined the traditional USNWR taxonomy with a customized taxonomy to create a folksonomy of sorts that is inserted into Web content metadata. In metadata they focused on both "site" and "zone" tags for use in Healthline.com's search engine to help drive up their rankings. [Very interesting use of traditional skills - we are going to see more information professionals helping their institutions to organize their own content more effectively.]
Paul Mouton of Thomson Gale sees multiple partners involved in SEO providing different perspectives on the same problems. They saw that Google was not going away and decided to take on the challenge of using Google to expand their footprint via coopetition. Experts will try to take your content and build more personal relationships with your content via search engines, working hand-in-hand with a few manageable expert relationships to help publishers. Publishers can assert themselves as being authoritative by proper SEO techniques and to optimize their preferred content landing point. Thomson Gale's
Goliath product developed with ECNext allows them to get exposure for content that also helps to have your content occupy other levels of ranking for your content - in other words, don't just get one page out there, dominate the rankings with your content.
Harlan Ratzky of Investors.com noted that they were one of the first publications to create a digital edition, but now see themselves as a crossroads. They have one of the highest levels of engagement for their audiences and they repurpose content extensively to make sure that they deliver content the way that their audiences want it. The big balancing act is to keep ad-supported content attractive while building subscription content that's valuable. Ultimately they don't see a conflict as long as you're constantly building up value on the subscriber side. Alongside these challenges is the "how much" of ad-supported content: is it all just extracts to drive traffic to full content or is it worth exposing full content. Their decision is not to dilute content quality just to improve SEO exposure.
Productive panel, good insights, and good comments from the attendees.
Labels: advertising, SEO, SIIA Content Forum 2007
