Barring a quantum leap in the ability of search algorithms to “understand” digital assets such as images, videos, audio and interactive design, our job as optimizers is to make sure that the search engines can understand the context in which these assets live. Let’s break down some of the issues as they pertain to optimization of digital assets.

Flash, AJAX and other cool interactivity

Enter the debate on Flash. Certainly Flash is indexable, and has been for years. But indexability does not top rankings make. For Flash content to be indexable, you have to build an HTML layer that represents the Flash content. Ideally use SWFObject to put both of these elements on the same URL and let the browser sort them out.

Add to that the fact that AJAX is pretty unfriendly too. The A in AJAX stands for asynchronous, so any content that the search engines need to see can’t be called by the script after the initial page load. Googlebot is not a browser and does not have a mouse to cause an additional call, so anything that you want Google to see has to be included in the initial page load. These issues are incredibly challenging for the big brand marketers that constantly require the best interactive experience and the most seamless design. Note, though, you can have your cake and eat it too with alternate HTML content that can easily be read by search engine crawlers.

Optimizing videos

With video that you have embedded in your site, be sure that there is a text wrapper that describes the video content in an optimized way. If you are syndicating video content be sure to get positive reviews and build views so that these assets will drive towards the top of search results. Be sure to optimize video titles and descriptions both on your site and on the the video sites. Build a dedicated Google Video Sitemap to help them find your assets. And point some links at your YouTube videos so that they might have a chance to gain placement in Google’s universal search results.

Optimizing audio assets

As with video, you need to be sure that there is text wrapped around your podcasts so that the search engines can see the context of the asset. Try a transcript of the first minute or two, or create a paragraph summary. Don’t put a dozen podcasts on one page and hope that the search engines will sort them out. Instead, build an architecture so that each asset has its own page and can be uniquely titled and tagged.

Optimizing images

It is interesting to note that image search is increasingly more important to drive meaningful traffic to sites. What better way to shop for a Led Zeppelin t-shirt than to go to Google Images and search there? Name your image files with keywords, place optimized text close to the images in your page code and don’t forget alt attributes. Also in Google Webmaster Tools be sure to enable permission for Google Image Labeler to access your images.

These are just a few thoughts for dealing with optimization issues with digital assets. We constantly struggle with big brand marketers to be sure that all of the effort they go through to produce digital content is as accessible as possible to end users: humans and crawlers alike.

The development of content seems like a straightforward thing, but for a large company there are so many stakeholders that inevitably have to read and edit any text that is going to appear on the site. Each of the various departments will need to create or at least vet their sections. Marketing and PR both want to contribute to maintain brand voice. And of course the ever-present legal department must pick through everything with a fine tooth comb.

Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes thinking about SEO certainly has pondered the ways that web content plays for search results. Following are a few challenges that large companies have with the development of relevant content for their websites:

The curse of industry jargon

It seems that the larger the organization, the more likely it is to make up words to describe who they are and what they do. Millions of dollars and countless hours are invested in branding and marketing efforts that result in the creation of product names, slogans and taglines that have nothing to do with the search terms that potential customers use through their favorite search engines. Engineers-turned-marketers use technical speak when they write product descriptions. These conventions gain momentum and a life of their own, and it is a constant challenge for the optimizer to help the organization to get its lexicon relevant to the search behavior of potential customers.

Who is responsible for developing content?

A simple question, but in large companies with lean marketing departments it can be a real challenge to create the right web content necessary for the success of the venture. Responsibility can range from a few individuals at corporate to hundreds of people in the field, each responsible for their own neck of the woods. And who in the world is going to keep the thing up to date? Whenever possible, we create content development guidelines that help the individuals tasked with this challenge to properly create page titles, meta descriptions and of course the text that is going to end up on the page.

Duplicate content

Having the same content on multiple URLs is certainly a detriment to the ability of a site to gain and keep top placement in search results. So many factors can come together for the large company to cause duplicate content. Content management systems can create multiple URLs or session IDs that confuse the search engines into thinking that there are multiple copies of your pages. Load balancing, bad analytics tracking mechanisms and improper domain redirecting all will create duplicate pages ore even copies of the entire site. Avoid duplicate content at all cost!

Internationalization

If creating content in one language is a challenge, how about in fifteen languages? In order for optimization to work in multiple countries, text must be at least translated, and at best created in the language of the country in which it will be consumed. Over the long run, all stakeholders must do their part and create content.

Digital assets and non-text content

If creating appropriate text is a challenge for the large company, perhaps one of their advantages is that they tend to create lots of videos, podcasts, rich media and other digital assets that support their marketing and communications goals. Investing in these assets is straightforward, but deploying them in such a way as to attract and keep good links is another thing entirely. Instead of building a microsite with a finite lifespan, be sure to deploy this content on the actual website so that any links it attracts will point to the place where the marketing proposition lives as well.

Before it was a place to make friends or watch TV or sell your used furniture, the web was all about providing meaningful relevant content to people sharing a common interest. It is easy for big site marketers to lose sight of that fact, and it is up to search engine optimizers to help them recall why it is so important to redouble the commitment to high quality, useful web content.

In today’s search environment, placement is completely dynamic and state-dependent. Everyone is looking at different data centers for starters. Add in search history, geotargeted results based on IP and universal search, and then compound that with Google’s SearchWiki, and pretty much everyone is going to get measurably different results when looking for the same terms.

Use site analytics to your advantage

For the most part, industrial strength websites have top-end analytics installed. As a rule, when negotiating an agreement with a new client, be certain that a part of the terms includes access to site analytics. If they don’t run (or pay attention to) site analytics, try to set up Google analytics. This will provide you with meaningful measurement and will allow for you to build a case for your success on a level playing field with other traffic channels. Once we get over the vanity of rankings, we need to be sure that our communications with the executive level marketers are rooted in tangible, conversion-based metrics.

Don’t simply track visitors from search engines or referring keywords. Build your case with key performance indicators that help to prove the quality of the visitors you are generating.Many brand sites don’t have ecommerce transactions to associate with success, so track white paper downloads or contact form completions or other “finish line” activities that prove the value of the visitors that are arriving. Don’t forget to benchmark everything at the beginning of the process so that you can clearly demonstrate where you have moved the needle.

Communicate, communicate, communicate!

The larger the organization, the more likely it is that there are managerial layers between you and the purse-string holders who will determine the longevity of your search marketing engagement. It is up to you to drive the conversation around the value of the services you provide. Even seasoned marketers don’t know the right questions to ask, and as a result, a passive approach to communications can spell disaster even if the work that you are doing is helping to push forward the client’s agenda.

Arrange for regular reporting to be generated and discussed on the phone. Prepare overview presentations on a quarterly basis and ask that you have the opportunity to present to the executive level decision-makers. Drive the initiative forward with the next generation of ideas, and be fully prepared when your client does ask “so what’s next?” Optimization is a never-ending process, but to those who do not fully appreciate this fact, it is your responsibility to be sure that you are making next steps clear.

Senior marketers are fundamentally curious about the “SEO thing,” so take full advantage of this opportunity to positively position your success stories in the organization. The bottom line is that you need to control aspects of your scorecard. SEO is not just about placement and traffic volume, it is about traffic quality and the measurement of successful engagements over time. Sure, placement reports are interesting in a recreational sense, but to make the case for that six-or-more figure budget next year, be certain that your report card is firmly rooted in meaningful onsite analytics.

Jonathan Ashton is Vice President of SEO and web analytics for Agency.com. The Industrial Strength column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

In anticipation of Cyber Monday and in preparation for the few weeks of consumer frenzy that follow, here are some of the global brand marketers strategies for making sure that ecommerce environments are ready to make the most out of the smaller opportunities that this season will inevitably afford.

Holiday specials content: launch it now. Although I cringe every time I get hit before Halloween by an ad for holiday shopping, now is the time to be launching your seasonal content. It is important to get your calls to action properly indexed and ranking in search results in anticipation of the interests of potential shoppers. Look back over last year’s analytics to see the seasonal search phrases that were driving high-conversion traffic to the site and build content to target that behavior. Get ready with your “holiday gift ideas” and plan ahead for people seeking “last minute holiday gifts” or looking for “gift ideas for mom.” Get this content featured on your home page so that you can contribute maximum link popularity to these specials as quickly as you can.

Offer free anything. Regardless of the economy, shoppers love to get something for free. Adjust your pricing, messaging and infrastructure now to put a little free shipping or holiday perk into the mix to sweeten the deal. Online shoppers are not just price sensitive, they are total-cost sensitive. If you can put together a better total deal than the competitor a notch down in the search results, you will have a better opportunity to make the sale.

Get ready to pay more for search marketing. Seems a bit of a no-brainer, but it is important to understand that from this point forward this year you will need to be paying more for search. For even the largest retailers, holiday shopping time is when they earn their bread, so it makes sense for online marketers to spend more in the hopes of making more. Just be sure that you are not spending blindly, and that your paid campaigns are tied into your ecommerce back end so that you can see what spending makes sense.

Optimize XML for feed-based shopping engines. If you have not jumped into comparison shopping, now is the time. Using your data feed (unfortunately only a few of the engines accept XML feeds) get into comparison shopping engines to compete for the cost-conscious consumer. As household budgets shrink, people are looking for the best deal they can find, and comparison shopping is projected to be one of the bright spots in the ecommerce mix this year.

And don’t forget the flavor of the month: social shopping. Although it accounts for a very small percentage of total ecommerce revenue, social shopping is emerging as a way for certain kinds of consumer products to accelerate into high-touch communities of influencers.

Take fullest advantage of that XML feed by creating a seasonal shopping widget or Facebook application or other externalization of your catalog so that you can give your customers and advocates the best possible opportunity to carry your proposition into their communities.

Do a thorough analytics review. Make sure that your site is ready to handle the increased number of visitors. Check your shopping cart and conversion funnels for holes and work to be sure that you get the most out of every customer. Remove barriers to transactions and increase the visibility of the calls to action.

Tweak your merchandising and cross-selling. If you are selling a printer, include an offer to buy replacement cartridges. If you are selling running shoes, why not merchandise a warm-up jacket in the same color? Perhaps the purchaser of that particular fragrance will also like to buy a scented candle? You have them in your shopping aisle, why not try to get another item or two into their shopping cart! Embed a layer of social shopping into your cart so that you can cross-sell by showing the other items that people have purchased in conjunction with the item that is currently being viewed.

Optimize for promo codes and coupons. Any large brand has a segment of their customer base searching for promo codes for use in an online store or for coupons to be transacted offline. Build a page specifically targeted to this search behavior and extend your ability to connect with brand loyalists that are just looking for a bit of a discount.

Santa has already taken the reindeer out on some training flights, and you too should be tuning up your ecommerce strategy to make the most out of the holiday shopping period. This year, more shoppers will be looking online for better deals and for ways to save the incremental costs like the fuel it takes to drive from mall to mall. Advance preparation will ensure you get the most out of this holiday shopping season.

Jonathan Ashton is the VP of SEO and Web Analytics for Agency.com a global interactive marketing firm based in New York with offices worldwide. He runs the company’s SEO practice which is centered in Chicago. Contact Jonathan and share networks through LinkedIn. The Industrial Strength column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.

Unscrupulous domainers register domains that contain trademarks and common misspellings so that they can take advantage of the monetization and parking programs that syndicate Google and Yahoo! pay per click ads. It is little skin off their noses to deploy hundreds of pages of advertising that just sit and wait for someone to mistype a domain.

So how can a brand owner of any size work to defend trademarks and copyrights? Here are some of the typical suggestions that we provide to help our clients maintain better control.

Domain acquisition strategy. Is there a plan in place to purchase domains? This is the first place to start. Variations of your trademarks can be practically infinite, particularly when you are a global marketer. It is important at the very least to have a strategy around which domains to buy. Proactively reserve domains for campaigns and taglines, even if you don’t plan to deploy them. Don’t forget international top level domains or negative variants such as “YourCompanySucks.com.”

Domain governance planning. Once you have the domains, what are you going to do with them? Parking them at your registrar will result in them setting up AdSense landing pages, which is a growing source of revenue for your registrar and Google – but not for you! Worse yet, the content matching of those ads could be sending traffic directly to your competitors. Most reputable registrars will respond to a letter requesting the removal of these ads. As well, improper handling of domains can result in inadvertent cloning of your site. Legacy domains that are no longer in service can either be a blessing or a curse – do you redirect them in perpetuity, or will someone snap them as soon as they expire? In support of Tony Wright’s posting last week about Three Rules For Search Marketing With Franchise Organizations it is important for any franchise business to have clear governance regarding how the individual franchisees can use the parent’s trademarks in their domains.

Anticipate misspellings. Misspellings are a favorite of the unscrupulous domainers. Secure common misspellings so that traffic that was meant for your brand doesn’t end up going to the competition through someone’s “make money on the Internet” get rich quick scheme.

Dealing with squatters. Is it worth it to pay the big bucks and go to the mattresses with these guys? It will cost at least $1,500 to go through the ICANN Uniform Domain Dispute Resolution Process which doesn’t include your lawyer’s time. Should you send them a cease and desist letter, or make a strongly worded argument with their host and registrar? Cost can quickly escalate, so pick your battles wisely and limit efforts to squatters that are actually in a position to do the brand harm.

Combating plagiarizers. Running parallel to the domain management issues are the sites that actively violate your copyrights. Some competitor or scraper has ripped off your content so what do you do? It took your marketing department nine months to write that page of perfect prose. A simple option is to file a claim with the major engines under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to have the offending page removed from search results. File your appeals with Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. If that doesn’t take, sic the lawyers on them and their hosting company.

It is important for global brand marketers to understand that this problem will never go away, particularly since the major search engines are well positioned to continue to profit from it. Many of these problems could be headed off at the pass through preventative domain registration. But if you are a major brand marketer, you may have to unleash your corporate counsel to defend your brand from this latest flavor of spam.

Jonathan Ashton is the VP of SEO and Web Analytics for Agency.com a global interactive marketing firm based in New York with offices worldwide. He runs the company’s SEO practice which is centered in Chicago. Contact Jonathan and share networks through LinkedIn. The Industrial Strength column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

In his Industrial Strength column post last week, Tony Wright talked about some of the structural issues that site managers and IT groups in large organizations face when doing things which on the surface appear to be straightforward or worth the effort. I would add that these challenges are significantly magnified by the issues of internationalization.

Global content management systems

The web initiatives of the parent firm are generally motivated towards efficiency in messaging and maintenance. We constantly struggle with embedded issues in content management systems that are designed to make it easy for local marketers to manage their web content. Some of the CMS deployments we have seen work well, others are complete train wrecks. If you are in really tight with your client, maybe you can be a part of the team that is tasked with choosing that content management system – there are so many critical issues that come with this decision.

Local domains

It is generally accepted that SEO best practices require you to put German content on YourDoman.de and Italian content on YourDomain.it. Depending on CMS and DNS and other back end issues, breaking content into country specific sites can end up being “effort prohibitive.” Analytics can also get challenging if the package you use is not properly configured to show both country-specific and global data. This can present a nightmare to your information architects when they are working on parsing shared versus unique content and infrastructure.

I think this is a battle worth trying to fight. As Yahoo’s David Roth discussed in Making The Business Case For SEO, this is a place to make that business case argument. If your core goal is to get your content to make top matches in Google.de or Google.it, you had better host that content on country specific TLDs.

Language issues

Generally speaking, translation issues are surmountable. How do we cope with mirroring content when there are dozens of versions of English or Spanish content that are country specific? The international brand marketer wants that content to be substantively similar, for ease of maintenance and clarity of brand message. The optimizer wants that content to be substantively dissimilar, so we don’t end up with the problems that cloned content inevitably creates. The right answer is the difficult one – content that is in the same language and is deployed across multiple URLs needs to be different. Or, your information architects and content developers need to be able to find a way to link to the same page of content from different points in the web property.

These are just some of the challenges that face global brand marketers looking for optimization. We could go on about country specific hosting, local link popularity development, language specific keyword research and so many other factors that enter into success. One thing is for certain, global marketers seeking top placement in search results must be flexible in their approach and must be prepared to go the extra mile to get the results they seek.

Jonathan Ashton is the VP of SEO and Web Analytics for Agency.com a global interactive marketing firm based in New York with offices worldwide. He runs the company’s SEO practice which is centered in Chicago. Contact Jonathan and share networks through LinkedIn. The Industrial Strength column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.