Have you ever tried to create an interesting blog on a topic that people rarely interact with? Can you really build a thriving readership of loyal fans interested in a dry topic like root canals or debt consolidation? Most likely not.

It is far easier to go where the conversation is than it is to create demand from scratch. This is why so many forms of affiliate marketing (reviews, coupons, comparisons, etc.) thrive on arbitraging established brands. If part of your marketing strategy revolves around community, discussion, and citations (links) then it helps to build your business model around where the conversation already is and what is already interested in.

Topics like sports and baseball cards are easy to build communities around because there is a constant stream of new stats, lots of media coverage, and some billion-dollar brands people are interested in. The phrase armchair quarterback shows how much people love talking about football. And fantasy sports take it one step further by allowing people to compete against each other…further tying them into the game – often with some bets and/or pride on the line.

When I think of the other topics I read about a lot, they are also ones that are rapidly changing with lots of news and opinions and stats. DNJournal is a weekly score card for the domain industry. Every week, I look there and go “what was this person thinking?” and “wow they got a steal.” Domain names represent language, which is constantly changing. As the economy went to crap, bankruptcy.com increased in value.

The same patterns hold true for keyword rankings in SEO. There is always something new to talk about because the structure of the web keeps changing, and the search engines are forced to change along with it. With each algorithmic shift, the search engines make marketers look for more clever ways to exploit it for profit – looking for everything from how to rank for higher value keywords right on through to how to cheaply and reliably spam the longtail of search.

Stocks, finance, and macro-economics are the same way as well. Every day is a new set of stats, and media is skewed to represent the interests of existing business models. Most of the media is built off of constantly selling that now is the time to buy. If you are not that well known, are new to an industry, or have limited resources behind you, it is easy to view that as a disadvantage.

But sometimes those lack of ties give you the freedom to speak truth, which make you different and remarkable. Once markets become fairly established, many players become so conflicted that there is value in being different.

Wherever you see holes in competing models that represents an opportunity to be different. Niche contrarian investor blogs like The Big Picture, Market Ticker, and Zero Hedge have become so popular that they helped lead to the launch of the recently named SEO contrarian blog. So far it has been a great read, much like JohnOn.

Three thoughts from an SEO perspective:

• What keeps changing in your market that people love to talk about?
• What stats could you create that would be remarkable and mention-worthy?
• What prevents your competitors from being honest? What can’t they write about that you can?

And if you can’t answer those questions, then it’s worth subscribing to a few more feeds until you can.

A few years ago, I was attending a training session on brand guidelines for a large technology company. The products and services they provided were described by the presenter as the “plumbing” in the wall – something you don’t see, but it allows things to work properly, which makes your life easier. It’s tough to appreciate all the work that goes into a plumbing system, because it is not always visible.

Enterprise SEO has the same problem. There are many complexities of building and maintaining a world class SEO program, especially within a large organization. In order to be successful with SEO, it must be “baked” into the organization.

Many companies struggle with this concept because they are under the impression that SEO is a set of deliverables that can just be purchased with more and more budget. Building a good Enterprise SEO program can literally take years before it truly becomes successful and begins to yield a good ROI story.

It is actually very similar to instituting a new Content Management System (CMS) at a large company. A CMS can be purchased, but in order to customize it to meet the needs of a large organization, it takes time.

This is why it’s important to set proper expectations – that an enterprise CMS can realistically take 1-2 years before it gets implemented correctly, and only then will you start to see any real progress and success.

Think about the specific “plumbing” that needs to happen with a CMS. There are the technical requirements, design guidelines, template requirements, content definitions, error traps, localization, just to name a few. Then there is the organizational workflow. Who has access to the content? Who needs to be trained? What approval is required? How does it fit within production cycles? Who owns Quality Assurance and Testing? What is automated vs. what should be reviewed?

These issues may not be a big deal if you’re dealing with 20 employees. But when you have over 200 employees and many different departments and layers of management, it’s important to work through all of these issues to successfully use the CMS to define and publish web content.

The same “plumbing” needs to happen with Enterprise SEO. Similar to a CMS, the success of a good SEO program is also dependent on the company’s infrastructure and technical requirements, design guidelines, content development, localization – not to mention all of the specifics with the search engines themselves.

The organizational workflow also plays a pivotal role with SEO. Usually it begins with identifying who the important stakeholders will be – Multiple Business Units, Public Relations, Editors, Web Development/IT, Designers, Information Architects, Marcoms, Social Media, Producers, Marketing Directors and Executives, just to name a few.

All of these stakeholders will most likely need training and education on SEO as well as the ability to monitor progress provide input where necessary.

Then there is the process of getting SEO fully integrated into the production cycle, where it is considered a top priority and not an afterthought. Keyword research, content strategy, audits, and other SEO recommendations must be engrained into the overall production cycle, which require both resources and additional time to allow these recommendations to be implemented.Without the actual implementation, SEO is pointless.

Let’s not forget about the ability to track SEO and provide accurate metrics. This is usually one of the biggest challenges within enterprise organizations and it is rarely done successfully. Meeting with IT staff, purchasing analytics software, gathering requirements and making recommendations are just some of the things that must be done in order to establish accurate SEO metrics that will eventually lead to the ability to look at results, make modifications and enhancements, and tell an accurate ROI story.

Finally, there’s the fact that the search industry is so innovative and is constantly changing. Keeping up with the latest trends is yet another aspect of it all. As you can see, this “plumbing” is the work that sets the foundation for SEO success, but is rarely recognized as a “success metric” because there is not a number or a ranking position you can tie to it. It is important to communicate the importance of the plumbing, otherwise the building falls apart.

Keep this in mind the next time you are faced with a question like “where are we with SEO?”, or “are we ranking #1 yet?”. Being able to effectively communicate this will help you establish proper expectations on progress, and, ultimately, SEO success.

The Free Dictionary definition for optimize:

op·ti·mize:  To make as perfect or effective as possible.

My long-standing definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

“Making your site the best it can be for users and search engines.”

SEO is both as simple and as difficult that

Making something optimal by its very nature is going to be hard work. Being the best you can be at your job, your schoolwork, your relationships, or anything else is not easy. Very few people, if any, will ever be optimized, or perfect. The same is true for websites. But that shouldn’t stop you from attempting to be optimized.

Let’s step outside of the online world for a moment and look at a real life situation where it pays to be optimized. My hope is that this analogy will help you have a better sense of what it means to be optimized.

Now that my kids are older, my husband and I frequent a little pub down the street from us. During our time there, I’ve quietly watched how the bartenders work, as well as listened to what patrons say about them.

What I’ve noticed is that when it comes to bartending, the more you meet the exact needs of each customer, the more money you will make in tips. In other words, it pays for a bartender to be optimized. While most bartenders try to be the best they can be, some are better at it than others.

Rule #1: Optimization shouldn’t turn people off

As it applies to a bartender: Take the bartender who has a great sense of humor, but can be sarcastic at times. While thick-skinned patrons (like me) find her extremely witty and amusing, others don’t. These folks didn’t come to a bar to be teased, thus, making this bartender not truly optimized. Or take the bartender who can never quite pour a full beer and doesn’t notice that your glass is empty until 10 minutes later. He or she is far from being optimized.

As it applies to your website: Is your website stuffed full of keywords? Is it extremely slow-loading and/or all Flash? Is it optimized for search engines, but not people?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re turning people off and therefore, your website isn’t optimized.

Rule #2: You can’t fake optimization

As it applies to a bartender: Take the one who is super-duper nice to everyone. While you might think she is an optimal bartender, she’s not; her extreme niceness comes across as phony to many. While it does fool some, and may even be optimal for them, she’s not optimized because she’s only pleasing one segment of her clientele.

As it applies to your website: Are you creating doorway pages/domains? Are you writing about “the history of whatever”? Are you using automated software to scrape articles off others websites and then mixing up the words? Are you hiring someone to write hundreds or thousands of low quality articles?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you may be faking your optimization. While it may appeal to some search engines for a time, it’s certainly not optimal, nor will it provide you with long term results.

Rule #3: Optimization is hard work

As it applies to a bartender: The optimized bartender is not necessarily perfect, but she is authentic. Everything she does on the job is to be the best bartender she can be. She works her butt off to please each and every customer the way they want to be pleased, which is no easy feat. Every patron is different and what’s optimal for them won’t necessarily be what’s optimal for another. If a patron likes to be flirted with, she can do that, but not so much that they think she wants to date them. On the other hand, she would never dream of flirting with a guy who was with his wife or girlfriend.

The optimal bartender treats both genders equally, and quickly learns their drink preferences, where they like to sit, little tidbits about their family, etc. She also discloses bits of personal information about herself and family, but not so much as to be always talking about herself. She’s humorous and can be self-deprecating, but in good quantities. And by the end of her shift, you know she’s exhausted (it’s often exhausting just watching her!). You can bet that this level of optimization is hard work.

As it applies to your website: Like patrons at a bar, every website is different. While there are basic strategies and tactics most websites need, there’s no SEO formula that will work for each and every one. Are you spending time every day making your website better? Are you being authentic and putting yourself out there in your blog or newsletter? Are you thinking about each and every potential customer, client or user of your website and making sure your website has exactly what they need? And are you working your butt off to do all this?

If you answered yes to those questions, you are probably tired! But you’re also on your way to having a successful website and business online. Congratulations! But first, go take a nap–you deserve it, and will need it before the real work begins!

SEO is an art. (Hence, the name of my and my co-authors’ brand new book, The Art of SEO). Crafting copy that sells, as well as ranks, is an art. So is link baiting. But SEO is also a science. Crafting rewrite rules, robots.txt directives, and so forth is pretty geeky stuff. The science side of SEO is where I spend most of my time.

Another dichotomy is that SEO is both subjective and objective. The point at which a title tag, URL, or headline is “good enough” and thus moving on to the next task is warranted — that is certainly subjective. Also consider what might comprise the most optimal URL structure? Does it end in / (slash) or a file extension like .html? Again, subjective.

In my view, SEO for the most part is cut-and-dry, it’s objective. That’s because it can all be boiled down to an algorithm, and in fact, it already has. The algorithm I speak of, of course, is Google’s (or Yahoo’s, or Bing’s). The SEO practitioner’s challenge is to reverse-engineer that algorithm to the best of their ability. But it shouldn’t stop there. Why not write your own algorithm — an approximation of the search engine’s own algorithm, one that teases out the various signals and accurately assesses the quality, relevance and importance of these signals without human intervention/assistance?

Running algorithmic analysis on a site-by-site and a page-by-page basis will then allow you to ascertain a site’s SEO health, and more importantly, the subsequent actions required in this never-ending process known as optimization. That is data-driven decision-making, my friends, and it will be a key driver in the next stage in the evolution of SEO.

To be effective, SEO scoring has to get granular. Knowing you scored an 89 out of 100, or a B+, overall with your SEO may be reassuring, but there weren’t any next steps that followed from that knowledge. The same is true even if you individually score each of the major SEO areas of focus. In my SEO Report Card column for Practical Ecommerce, I (arbitrarily) chose the following areas of focus: Home Page Content, Inbound Links and PageRank, Indexation, Internal, Hierarchical Linking Structure, HTML Templates and CSS, Secondary Page Content, Keyword Choices, Title Tags, and URLs. I don’t claim that these are the best “buckets”. Nonetheless, scoring such broad areas is still not actionable, really.

Score the title tags, internal anchor text, keyword prominence, H1s, meta descriptions and so forth separately, and on a page-by-page basis, and now you’re talking!

SEO effectiveness can be deconstructed into its many components. It can be benchmarked against competitors. Inferences can be made, priorities can be set, content can be massaged, link juice can be directed. Consequently, the SEO practitioner relies less on their gut and more on the data to drive their actions.

One enterprise-level SEO scoring technology that supports such a data-driven approach to SEO is Covario’s Organic Search Insight — which gets so granular that components of navigation, URLs and so forth are assessed (as can be seen in the screenshot below). Craig MacDonald, VP of Marketing and Product Management told me “The impact analysis can also be statistically modeled, based on gathering data across many sites over time in order to ascertain the relationship between changes in factors and the impact of those relative factors on the various search engines – i.e., the science can be rigorously applied.” From that, specific recommendations are automatically made and prioritized.

(click to view full size)

SEO is a moving target, one that is heavily dependent on algorithm shifts, site changes/updates, the competitive landscape in which one operates, etc. As such, you must continuously monitor and evaluate, ideally with an automated tool. In fact, such a tool is mandatory if you have a large site and you want your SEO activities to be scalable. With this monitoring in place, a page element (like a meta description) that goes AWOL can be flagged and the issue addressed (e.g. internal resources deployed) much faster than would be otherwise possible. Even better if the webmaster can be flashed warnings prior to making site modifications that will be detrimental to SEO.

Enterprise Search Marketing programs face a multitude of challenges. Lack of resources, lack of accurate metrics, difficulty getting site changes implemented for organic optimization and so forth. Many of these challenges are more on the organizational side of things than anything else. For those of you in this camp, here’s a challenge that will sound familiar to you: “My business unit should be owning that Keyword instead of Business Unit X”.

Meaning, within the realm of products and solutions that a business offers, at times, there’s only so many keywords to go around for both natural and paid search marketing efforts. Since there’s so much opportunity with non-branded, “generic” keywords (typically those seen at the beginning of the buy cycle), many of these terms are so general that they realistically could be categorized under a variety of your products and solutions. These terms also tend to have huge monthly demand. What this means is that you probably have multiple business units fighting over “ownership” of this keyword.

This is a challenge that affects both Paid and Natural Search. Imagine a scenario where you search on a term and see your brand showing a listing in the Paid results for “Product A”, and a listing in the Organic results for “Product B”. Usually, this scenario arises when keywords are allocated based on data performance and budget rather than business objectives and searcher intent, resulting in multiple versions of the keyword being executed. It can also lead to confusion for searchers when they visit your site and see a word is used in a less than optimal way. And finally, there’s increased work to “explain” duplicate keyword situation to various stakeholders.

For the Search Marketing Managers out there, you’re tasked with managing these expectations and making sure that you don’t upset anyone from a political standpoint. For the Agencies out there – you’re frustrated because you can’t make organic content recommendations without a decision on keyword ownership.

So, how do you solve this? More meetings? No. You can’t keep everyone happy and you want to avoid numerous meetings that never solve anything. What you need is a Keyword Arbitration process. Here is a recommended approach:

Develop a “Score Card” for each Business Unit, containing the following questions that require a Yes/No answer:

1. Do you have a Relevant Landing Page? (Y/N)
2. Do you have Relevant Ad Copy? (Y/N)
3. Do you have Tracking Metrics in Place? (Y/N)
4. Are you currently running an Offline Campaign? (Y/N)
5. Does your Business Unit have a P&L Requirement? (Y/N)

The formula is simple – each “Yes” answer gets a 1 point. Winner takes home the Keyword. If there is a conflict over the “theme” of the Keyword, you can escalate it to a Senior Manager to make the final call. In case of a tie, develop a neutral search landing page to “share” the Keyword. Of course, you can modify this to fit your own needs, but the fundamental approach is similar and is aimed at coming to a consensus on keyword ownership for organic optimization versus paid programs.

I recently read an article by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, entitled “Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines” that could potentially set SEO back at least at decade, in my opinion.

In the article, he apologized to his audience of budding SEOs for having ever told them to do what’s right for their users. In fact, he called putting your users first, “utterly false and tragically misleading.”

If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go.

Here’s why I feel that the advice, thoughts and recommendations in that article could have set SEO back many years. It can all be summed up in a simple piece of SEO logic that goes like this:

• The goal of SEO is to bring targeted search engine visitors to your website and ideally convert them to take some action.

• The goal of the searcher is have their problems solved, needs filled, or questions answered.

• The goal of the search engine is to show the best, most relevant website to their users — the searchers.

Agreed?

Which leads us to the bottom line:

• The sites/pages that should win in the search engines are those that best solve the searcher’s (user’s) problem, fill their needs or provide them with the information they are seeking.

Granted, not all search engines are created equal, nor are they technically perfect or even close to being able to judge the best, most relevant websites–but that is their ultimate goal. Somewhere down the road, they will be able to do that despite the best efforts of search engine spammers. Google has come a long way in this regard which is why they are leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors.

Ignore the needs of the searchers at your own peril

If you ignore the needs of the searcher, you are (in reality) also ignoring the needs of the search engines. Do this at your own peril and only if you enjoy chasing your tail, as well as the latest algorithm of the day.

In fact, in Rand’s update to the article he said:

“My argument in this post centers specifically around the practice of search engine optimization and the idea that tactics which are engine-focused (like XML sitemaps, anchor text, link architecture, webmaster tools usage, etc.) can be ignored because they’re not “for the user.”

This is confusing at best!

Certainly descriptive anchor text is helpful to users, isn’t it? Which link is better for a user: the one that says, “click here” or the one that says “click here for more info on green widgets”?

The same can be said for link architecture. If you bury a specific page by making a user click 5 levels deep to find it, surely it can’t be a very important page of the website, right?

On the other hand, XML sitemaps and the use of Webmaster tools or nofollowing internal links for PR sculpting are indeed things that one would do just for a search engine, and offer no value to a human visitor. But guess what? They aren’t, in my opinion, any value to SEO either (other than as diagnostic tools). Imagine that!

Forget what search engines tell you to focus on

Rather than focusing on things that search engineers try to claim are important (so they can gain more of your website’s data) you should be ensuring that your websites keep on answering searcher questions and filling user needs so that the search engines have no choice but to show them to their users.

You should also make sure your websites convert those highly targeted visitors into customers; not by concerning yourself with how many times any particular keyword phrase is placed on the page regardless of whether it makes sense, but by remembering that real people will be reading your content.

You should be spending your time making sure that your website provides those searchers with exactly what they’re looking for.

In other words, make sure your website fits the searcher’s original search query (those pesky keyword phrases you researched) to a tee. After all, you’re not doing keyword research for search engines as Rand suggests, but because you need to get into the mind of your target audience.

As for link building, anyone who was in SEO before Google came around, spent plenty of time building links to their sites. Not for search engines, mind you, but because it’s how you market a website. Fancy that. It’s still the reason why you should be doing it today.

The holiday shopping season is coming up fast. Don’t worry, there’s still time to do some quick-turnaround SEO that can have an impact on your natural search traffic (and resulting revenue!) in time for Black Friday and CyberMonday.

For many online retailers, November and December are the busiest months of the year. Of course, this is one of the most nerve-racking times of the year as well, especially when a disproportionate amount of one’s business hinges on such a short time span.

As you gear up for the holiday season, search marketing underpins your overall online marketing. Don’t neglect “search”, invest in it. Building on these holiday SEM tips from Niraj Shah, here are a few more SEO-specific tips to help you on your merry way…

Escape the code freeze

A common IT practice among mid to large size online merchants is to institute a “code freeze,” or site lockdown, during the holiday shopping season to minimize the potential for catastrophic errors and downtime. If your organization institutes a code freeze, you may not be able to make changes to your site for months. This means your on-page SEO effectively stagnates for an entire quarter. It also means you must race against the clock to implement SEO initiatives of any significance; and if you don’t make it in time, you must wait until the new year.

One way around this stress-inducing time crunch is to implement an SEO proxy platform. Such a system allows you to implement optimizations via the proxy throughout the holidays, quickly and easily, without impacting your native site.

Perhaps your code freeze still allows you to add static landing pages during the holiday season. That’s better than nothing, but it can take several weeks for new pages to make it into the search engines — and during the holidays, time is of the essence. So, the sooner you can add links to these new pages, the better.

Audit time

If you haven’t already, now is the time to do a quick audit of your site. If a code freeze is or will soon be in place, you won’t be able to make sweeping changes, but hopefully there’s still the opportunity to fix anything that isn’t working right. Especially if you just underwent any major changes in the last few months, this is a critical time to find anything that slipped through the cracks.

If you aren’t under a regimented code freeze, it may not be a bad idea to implement a self-imposed one as this can be a dangerous time to make major changes to your site.

Double check your contact form, live chat or other mechanisms that are in place for customer contact.

Review the last couple months of log files or your site analytics, looking for any 404 errors for missing files, moved or removed pages, broken links on your site, or missing graphics.

Make note of your most active pages. While you probably won’t be making any major changes to these pages, they might be good targets for including links to other key site pages to route holiday traffic.

Reorganize your internal links

Your customers probably have different buying habits during the holiday season than they do at any other time of the year. Therefore, it’s common sense that you should modify your internal linking structure to reflect seasonality. Don’t trash your existing site’s navigation, simply augment it with additional links containing keyword-rich anchor text, to create shortcuts that pass PageRank to your popular holiday categories and products. For example, if all of your holiday ornaments are three clicks away from your home page, create a text link on your home page that reads “Christmas ornaments” or “holiday ornaments.” Don’t rely on links on your site map page or on footer links to achieve this; such links are less than ideal.

Since hundreds of thousands of people search for phrases that include “gifts,” you would do well to create a Gift Ideas page for your specific industry/market, then optimize it and place it one click away from your homepage to maximize its PageRank and give it the best opportunity to rank well.

Don’t go overboard in your internal linking. Keep in mind that Google advises that you to keep the number of links on a page to fewer than 100.

Merry meta descriptions

Are you promoting a holiday sale or specific items on your site? If so, don’t forget to polish your meta descriptions so that searchers will recognize the keywords they’re looking for. Last-minute holiday shoppers will be attracted to descriptions that speak to them, so remember to mention seasonal search phrases to encourage them to click through to your site.

Including calls-to-action and/or value propositions into these meta descriptions will help ensure these searchers react favorably and click on your listings.

Be sure to make a list of the pages you revised so you can change the meta descriptions back after your New Year’s Day sale.

Pareto principle of link building

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, says that 80 percent of the value/effects come from 20 percent of the causes. Arguably that concept could be applied to link building: 80% of your link authority (PageRank) comes from 20% of your back links. So your job is to focus on building more of those “vital few” links that deliver the bulk of your link authority.

Now is NOT the time to start some long, drawn-out link building initiatives to build these high-value links. There just aren’t enough weeks left in the 4th Quarter to do proper planning and execution for a complex and involved campaign, such as a music video creation contest. Focus on the “quick wins” – things like socially-seeded link bait articles hosted on your site, or single links that by themselves will have a measurable impact, acquired from sites where you have a relationship or some other “in”.

Have you been meaning to submit a guest article to a respected online publication that would love to publish your “thought leadership” and agrees to link to you from the byline/bio? No time like the present for that! One link from a trusted high PageRank authoritative source like that could boost your rankings in just weeks.

Also, use your influence with business partners and bloggers you know who already link to you, and try to get them to revise the anchor text of their links to you when the anchor text is less than ideal (e.g. “click here” or “visit site”). Again, focus on your most valuable links.

“Free” is a strong attractor

With giveaways like “free gift wrap” and “free shipping” you’ll attract holiday shoppers because you’re providing them with real value. Take advantage of this fact by incorporating powerful messaging (e.g. “free gift wrap,” free shipping”) into the title tags, body copy, and meta descriptions which will filter into the snippets of your search listings.

Even though it may not be free, another way to “give” during the holiday season is to offer gift certificates for the last-minute shopper. Feature gift certificates prominently on your site and cross-sell them on your “gifts” and “gift ideas” pages to achieve maximum visibility. Start optimizing for gift certificate related search terms through featuring your gift certificates immediately; don’t wait until the holiday season kicks into full swing.

Blog to attract customers and links

Hopefully you already have a blog. If not, then you’ve already found your New Year’s resolution. (What a relief to have that out of the way, eh!)

It should go without saying: make sure that your blog isn’t just another sales pitch. Your blog should be about connecting and communicating with your readers. Share some holiday stories, maybe your favorite recipes, or offer helpful packing and shipping tips. Any product mentions should be done carefully and subtly and in moderation. Blog with conviction and/or humor and/or personality. Offer real value. Be transparent, authentic.

If you don’t have time to blog yourself or with internal resource, you could try recruiting passionate customers as blog authors and run a group blog.

Map out your blogging for the season just like you map out your sales and advertising calendar. Plan posts now and start working on them for publishing later so that you can keep on top of them during the busy holiday season. Submit pre-written, post-dated blog content into your blog platform (e.g. WordPress) so you can maintain an active publishing schedule – even if you’re pressed for time and blogging seems daunting (if not impossible). That way, when you are inspired and free to generate a flurry of blog posts, all of these posts won’t be clumped together.

Always keep writing. Make sure posts are published regularly and frequently so that you have very few “gaps”.

Participate in the blogosphere

If all you do to engage with bloggers is to blog yourself, you’re really missing the mark. You should be spending as much time commenting on the blogs of important bloggers in your industry/segment/market as you spend writing for your own blog. That will help get you on the radar screen of these influencers. You can also generate positive buzz in the blogosphere by sending free product samples or review copies to these bloggers with “no strings attached” — it’s a bad idea to try to buy bloggers off by sending them useless kitsch. Remember that bloggers can wreak havoc on reputations, so tread carefully.

Get social

It is not too late to get out there, create viral content, and build your network of friends. You’ll need to work fast though. Whether it’s on YouTube, Facebook, Delicious, Flickr, Digg, etc. It can be as easy as publishing a killer list of gift suggestions and asking a power user friend to “seed” it into social sites like StumbleUpon and Kirtsy.

And remember, the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo, it’s YouTube. If you’ve been waiting for your film debut, here’s your chance: produce a light-hearted, or humorous, or helpful video and post it to YouTube. It could be just the thing for that extra boost. If you have products that require complicated assembly, some short instructional videos would almost certainly be well-received; who knows, maybe they could become unexpected holiday hits.

Connecting offline and online

If you live and breathe SEO, offline may be the furthest thing from your mind. Of course, there are other angles to the offline world. Hopefully you have the basic fundamentals covered, like making sure that your web address appears in all your mailings, advertisements, and anywhere else you may be marketing offline. If you have brick-and-mortar locations, it doesn’t hurt to remind people that you also have a website.

Don’t forget that many of the traditional offline entities now have online presences themselves. TV news, radio stations, and newspaper reporters are often looking for interesting holiday stories, from the “most unusual” gift ideas to how to entertain for the holidays. Come up with an interesting story idea and you may not only get valuable airtime or print mention, but a link from their site to yours.

Separate out, into “buckets,” those purchases that happened offline (e.g. phone orders) but that resulted from online marketing (i.e. were generated from natural search, from paid search, from print, etc.). You could even go more granular, beyond the referral source, and associate actual keywords (search terms) with these referral sources.

With some cleverness, creativity and a bit of “elbow grease”, this holiday season could be your most successful yet, recession or no recession. And there’s still time, if you act now.

Organic links – the ones that just happen are typically driven by things like public relations, brand awareness, unique content, existing exposure, and social networking. In competitive markets, some aspects of the evolving SEO field should be baked into the core of the company’s DNA. When you get interviewed, you have to know to ask for links. If you are in competitive markets and are operating at scale, it is unlikely that you will have your SEO be your contact point for all media relationships.

Profitable client projects

Some client projects are a slam dunk; where after a half hour of research, you see opportunities (including site structure, page titles, on page optimization, competitive research, and content ideas) that guarantee a multi-thousand percent ROI. SEO is the most explosive and has the highest returns when there is an already successful company that is in the game, but has not given a second thought to SEO.

All of the footprints (customers, customer interactions, customer lists, word of mouth marketing, organic links, a traffic stream outside of search, etc.) that comes along with having a successful company, works as a foundation which helps the SEO efforts boost the site even higher into the search results. As a bonus, those existing footprints on the web are also the hardest for competitors to clone. Once you have them, you have a lasting competitive advantage.

It is easier to take a website from page 2 or 3 of the search results to the top than it is to start building from scratch. In fact, many of the smartest SEO practitioners are willing to launch a site that is half done just so they can get it a few links and get it aging. Google likes old websites, so that is what we should give them.

Brutally ugly client projects

Conversely, the worst websites to work for (especially as client projects) are those which are not unique, those that are brand new, and those that tend to be thin on content. Why? These sites have no footprint on the web. And if they are to build one, it often requires aggressive push marketing, and is moving counter to the trend in search. Matt Cutts recently went so far as making a video recommending not trying to rank a thin ecommerce site.

Worse yet, many of the thin sites are to remain thin because the owner is a blow hard who is unwilling to change. These are the types of projects that have a less than 1% chance of being profitable and enjoyable. Any SEO who has taken on a dozen or more clients, should be able to spot the toxic client types and turn down those opportunities before they become headaches.

Building your own foundation

New businesses don’t have existing links and customer relationships and business partnerships to build off of. To put it bluntly, for these types of sites, often 100% of the marketing strategy is often driven by the SEO. Worse yet, because these sites have no cashflow and no rankings, they typically have a limited SEO budget. This is why it makes sense to do your own SEO from the start if you are short on capital. SEO can provide a competitive advantage, but if it is the only competitive advantage (and if you are trying to hire an external SEO) then you should be giving the SEO a large stake in the company – as they certainly earned it.

It is not that push marketing or new sites are bad, but in competitive markets, maybe the first $20,000 to $50,000 spent on building a solid SEO foundation has little returns, and real returns are six months to a year away. In those instances where a site is brand new, unremarkable, and built on limited budget, it often makes more sense for an SEO to clone the business model, but make it more unique.

If your site is brand new and does not have any competitive advantages, then you might want to consider letting it age a bit and doing a bit of your own SEO marketing before seeking professional help. If you ask for SEO help too early with too small of a budget, you might just create competition for yourself!

SEO is confusing to many. It’s shrouded in mystery, often has a bad reputation and is not generally understood by traditional marketers. Heck, it’s not even understood by website developers nor some who sell SEO as a service.

Yet SEO is nothing more or less than an additional marketing channel for your business. Let me explain, with a story.

We have a client who had not had any SEO work performed until they hired our company. They’re not in a hugely competitive space, but they do have competitors. We originally researched and found all the keyword phrases that people looking for the type of product this company manufactured would type into the search engines, and we optimized the website for those keywords. Within a few months, they began seeing search engine traffic for those keyword phrases (and numerous variations of them), and traffic continued to grow each month.

Since this company is a manufacturer and doesn’t sell their products directly, it’s difficult to measure conversions at the keyword level. For this site, a conversion would be a search for a local dealer and/or a phone call, rather than any direct contact with the manufacturing company. Over the next 2 years, however, targeted keyword traffic continued to go up, more phone calls were coming in, and the company’s dealers were getting more leads than ever before. Until they implemented a redesign.

We knew they were in the process of redesigning and provided them with information on what to watch out for during a redesign. We also asked to be kept in the loop during this critical stage. About a week before they were ready to go live, they showed us the new site.

Most of the SEO work we had done was gone!

Title tags were missing and the content had been completely rewritten without regard to the keyword phrases that had been carefully selected for each page.

We scheduled a call and gave them the bad news. They spoke to their developers and were able to retrieve the old Titles and Meta descriptions. In addition, they were keeping the same basic site structure and page URLs. But they were not keen on rewriting their content with keyword phrases in mind at this time. Unfortunately, most of their new content had been shortened from the previous version and was not as descriptive.

Would the lack of keyword phrases in the content really make a difference?

That’s a tough question because you can never be positive what the search engines will do with any particular page. They did now have the same Titles as before and we knew from experience that sometimes Title tags alone can work wonders with the search engines. So my answer to the client was that they would most likely lose targeted search engine traffic for the previously optimized keyword phrases since they were no longer in the content. I provided the caveat that I couldn’t be 100% sure of this, but I recommended that they didn’t risk it and that we re-optimize the content before going live.

They decided to move forward with the un-optimized content and take the risk.

We continued to monitor their analytics very closely to look for declines in traffic. After the first month, there didn’t seem to be much of a difference, and in fact, traffic overall was up. We were hopeful that perhaps the Title tags and their links would prevail and all would be fine.

But by the next month. targeted keyword phrase traffic was substantially down (even though all-around traffic was up). We provided them with a report on this and voiced our concern. The month after that, keyword traffic continued to decline, while traffic for their brand name was up.

Is brand traffic all you want?

We decided to meet with them to explain our concerns. While it’s great to have lots of traffic for your brand name because those people will be your best converters – you don’t need SEO to achieve that. Your other marketing channels should do that for you. They had been doing a great job of getting the word out about their company as a whole, thus, the increase in brand traffic.

But what they and others who don’t implement SEO on their sites are missing out on are those people who don’t already know their brand. That is, the people who know they want a product or a service that solves their problem or fills their need, but don’t know who offers it.

SEO is the marketing channel that brings potential customers to your site who want what you offer, but don’t know how to find you. These are people that will browse through the search engine listings of websites that show up for the product or service they’re looking for, and choose one to purchase from. If your site only shows up for your brand name, you’re not even in the game; the sale will likely go to one of your competitors who have an optimized website.

If you only want to serve the needs of people who already know your brand and aren’t interested in new customers, then you don’t need SEO. But if you want to use every marketing channel at your disposal, SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels to bring in people who don’t already know about you but want exactly what you offer.

(Hat tip to my High Rankings colleague Pauline Jakober who explained to our client this concept of SEO as being just another marketing channel, which inspired me to write this article.)

Nowadays, a great many websites  are powered by a content management system (CMS) along with a back-end database. And for good reason. It’s too unwieldy to code HTML on a page-by-page basis, as you expand your content offerings to the thousands or tens of thousands of pages (and beyond). Content managements systems to the rescue! But there can be downsides too.

My biggest gripe with the content management systems of today is their lack of SEO features. And I’m not talking about meta keywords, which are a complete waste of time.

I’m patiently waiting for the day when a CMS-based site can rival static HTML sites in SEO. No bones about it, hand-coded sites offer complete, granular control over each page, and every single tag contained within. That’s real flexibility. Too bad they don’t scale. Therefore, the SEO practitioner is going to need a CMS that will at least be cooperative.

Which SEO features should you be shopping for in a CMS? Glad you asked. Here’s my wish list of features, broken down into critical, important, desirable and optional…

Critical CMS features

• URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs — Sticking session or tracking information such as the user’s clickpath into the URL is deadly for SEO. It usually leads to incomplete indexation and duplicate content issues.
• H1 tags — No H1 tags on a given page is not desirable. Too many H1 tags on the page is not desirable. Low-value content (such as the publication date) marked up as an H1 is not desirable. The article title is typically the best content to have wrapped in an H1.
• Customizable URL structure — If the default URL structure of the CMS doesn’t suit your needs, you should be able to change it. For example, if you don’t want /archives/ in the URLs of all your archived articles, you should be able to remove it. Or if you want to reference the article name instead of the article’s database ID in the URL, you should be able to do it.
• 301 redirects to canonical URL — Duplicate content is the bane of the existence of many a dynamic website owner. Automatic handling of this by the CMS through the use of 301 redirects is a must.

Important CMS features

• Static-looking URLs — The most palatable URLs to spiders are the ones that look like they lead to static pages, i.e. no query strings.
• Keywords in URLs — Keywords in your URLs can help your rankings. It would be a shame to miss out on the opportunity this presents, if your CMS doesn’t support keyword-rich URLs (e.g. only article IDs in the URL).
• RSS feeds — RSS feeds are essential if you want to reach bloggers; email newsletters won’t cut it for the hip, Web 2.0 crowd. Hopefully this feature also comes integrated with Feedburner, for improved visibility on RSS feed consumption by your subscribers.
• Pings — This lets blog and feed search engines like Google Blog Search know you have published new content so they can come and grab your latest RSS feed.
• Tagging and tag clouds — This Web 2.0 feature is powerful for SEO, thanks in large part to the keyword-rich text links. This is your opportunity to rejig your internal linking structure and how you flow PageRank without having to completely gut your taxonomy/ontology.
• Individually customizable title tags and H1 tags — Each title tag should be decoupled from the post/article/product title. Same goes for H1 tags. That way anchor text can be varied from H1’s which can, in turn, be varied from the title tag. Thus, you can work in additional keywords (synonyms etc.) into the H1, and even more into the title tag — without spamming of course!
• Multi-level categorization structure — It’s awfully limiting to your site structure and internal hierarchical linking structure to have a CMS that doesn’t allow you to nest subcategories into categories, sub-subcategories into subcategories, and so on.
• Canonical tags — Although I don’t trust Google to always reliably obey this new tag, it is definitely worthwhile having it available as an option if the need arises (hopefully that need won’t arise if you have 301’s in all the right places).

Desirable CMS features

• Paraphrasable excerpts — Duplicate content issues are exacerbated on dynamic sites such as blogs when the same content is displayed on permalink pages, category pages, archives-by-date pages, tag pages, and the home page. Crafting unique content for the excerpt and having that content display on all locations except for the the permalink page will help strengthen your permalink page as unique content.
• Breadcrumb navigation — It reinforces the hierarchical nature of your internal linking structure using text links which are hopefully keyword-rich.
• Flexible rules for automatically generating title tags — If the title tag always has to start with your site name followed by a colon followed by your article title, you’re sunk — at least as far as your SEO is concerned. You should be able to revise the “recipes” used to generate the title tags across your site to make them more optimal for search.
• Page-specific meta descriptions — A cardinal sin of dynamic websites is using the same meta description across all the pages. This can be a contributor to duplicate content issues.
• Meta noindex for low-value pages — Even if you nofollow links to these pages, other people may still link to these and you run the risk of ranking those pages above some of your more valuable content.
• Keyword-rich intro copy on category-level pages and tag pages — Keyword-rich introductory copy helps set a stable keyword theme/focus for the page, rather than relying on the latest article, product, or blog post to be the most prominent text on the page.
• Granular control over nofollows on links — If your site allows the posting of user-generated content through “comments,” your site will be a spam-magnet if you don’t nofollow the links posted by commenters. Heck, you’ll probably be a spam magnet anyways, it’ll just be worse for you without the nofollows. Additionally, regardless of your stance on PageRank sculpting and its value for SEO, you should be able to selectively decide when and when not to pass PageRank to an internal page within your site.
• Customizable anchor text on navigational links — “Contact”, “About Us”, “Read More”, “Full Article” etc. all make for lousy anchor text — at least from an SEO standpoint. Hopefully your CMS allows you to improve such links to make the anchor text more keyword-rich.
• Mass Edit, or Bulk Upload (or both) — It’s not efficient to go to each page’s Edit screen. Instead, mass modify the titles, H1’s, filenames, and perhaps even meta descriptions, within Excel or a “mass edit” web interface (like the one provided by my SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress.
• Declared search term — When you decide on a page’s primary keyword focus, you should be able to tuck away that crucial bit of information somewhere where it will be safe from the prying eyes of competitors. That means it should not be parked anywhere in the HTML — including the meta keywords tag — since all a resourceful competitor would need to do is “View Page Source” within their web browser. There should be a field in the database, displayed and accessible to your editors/administrators within the admin interface of your CMS.
• Auto 301 redirect previous versions of URLs — Imagine updating a permalink or product page URL (e.g. “post slug”) multiple times. Each previous version of a URL could lead the search engines to discover duplicate pages if you’re not careful. Why worry about these old URLs and whether they will stop working or will create duplicate content; let the CMS “worry” about this instead and seamlessly 301 previous iterations to the latest version.
• Google Product Search feed — If your CMS is powering an online catalog site, then this feature is for you. It can be a real timesaver. And if you are an online retailer not submitting your products into Google Base, heed this warning: neglect Google Product Search (formerly Froogle) at your peril!

Optional CMS features

• XML Sitemaps generator — A XML sitemap can be submitted to the major engines to improve indexation, but it’s usually unnecessary if you have a search engine friendly CMS; the engines will usually do a good job crawling and discovering your site’s URLs on their own. Google will use your Sitemaps file as a canonicalization signal, but hopefully you don’t need it since your CMS isn’t generating duplicate pages.
• XHTML validation — When entering your content, it is desirable to have the CMS automatically check for malformed HTML, as search engines may end up “seeing” a page differently from how it renders on the screen and consider navigation to be part of the content or vice versa.
• Pingbacks, Trackbacks, Comments and Anti-spam mechanisms — The problem with comments/trackbacks/pingbacks is that they are vectors for spam, so if you have one (comments/trackbacks/pingbacks), you will have the other (spam). Therefore, effective spam prevention (e.g. Akismet, Defensio, Mollom) is a must.