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Optimizing an e-commerce website - Part 2

Published November 26th, 2006 in Online Marketing and E-commerce, Natural Search. 1 Comment

In the first part of this article, we discussed accessibility of all pages of a site in detail, one of the most important factors to affect search engine rankings. Yet accessibility is only the first step that will ensure that your site pages stand a chance to get ranked; actual rankings will be dictated by various other factors—some simple tips to increase the probability of getting ranked high are given below.

Provide adequate product & category content.
In numerous shopping sites that we have seen, the lack of detailed, descriptive content describing the products being sold is strikingly obvious. We’ve heard various reasons for this. Some examples: “well, the picture tells everything that the user needs to know”; “the products are too similar to write separate descriptions for each”; “these are very common, commodity products; there’s nothing much to really write home about”. While there may be some merit in each of the above reasons, a bit of additional effort and thought can make a world of difference to how search engine spiders read and rate those pages. Equally importantly, if not more, site visitors will appreciate the additional information that helps them make a decision in selecting a particular product.

Add the appropriate meta tags.
The debate on the value of meta tags rages on, but the simple fact is that incorporating the right meta tags can only benefit and certainly doesn’t hurt. Also, the prevailing wisdom is that the title tag continues to be extremely valuable in determining search engine rankings. However, we find innumerable cases where online retailers ignore optimizing the meta tags of the individual product pages. Just adding in customized title and description tags incorporating the most apt keywords for each of the product pages is bound to make a positive impact to SEO efforts for the site.

One reason for ignoring the meta tags for the inner pages could be that the store itself might be quite large with a catalog comprising hundreds or thousands of products. But this is a not an insurmountable problem— individual meta tags could automatically be generated by putting in a script. In such a case though one needs to ensure that a lot of thought is given beforehand as to how/ what the script will pull into to fill in the title and description tags.

Take advantage of the images.
Product images are often the underutilized element in SEO. Typical online shopping sites have lots of product images that offer great potential to be used in SEO efforts, with the best part being that it doesn’t take a lot of effort either. First, name the image appropriately, preferably with a keyword in the file name. Secondly, ensure that you have an Alt Text tag for every image again with an appropriate keyword. Obviously, care must be taken that there is no scope for these keywords to be deemed as keyword stuffing.

Besides adding to the keyword density within a page that have a bearing on regular search engine results, the image file names and Alt text descriptions contribute to better rankings in image search results. The significance of this is that some search engines (particularly Google) show results from its image search index at the top of the regular search results. Being found right at the top of those results increases the probability of driving traffic to the website.

Don’t bury the product content in a maze of code.
The main product-related content in many shopping sites tends to get buried in multiple tables. Even if the content of a page is dynamically generated from a database, the page can be made more search engine friendly by having some static content on the page with the right keywords as well ensuring that the dynamically-generated content is not buried deep in a maze of tables.

Leverage user-generated content.
This is the era of user participation and user-generated content and online retailers should take advantage of existing traffic to boost their SEO efforts. Probably no other site does it better than Amazon.com. Not only does user feedback on specific products help other users in their decision making process, comments added to a page serve to keep the page fresh and updated; if users include a couple of keywords in their reviews all the better.

Use Google Base.
Increasingly, Google is pulling up a couple of results from Google Base and displaying those right at the top of a search results page. Therefore marketers trying to get more search engine traffic from Google should create and upload an optimized feed to Google Base to maximize the probability of getting shown right at the top of Google’s search results. Imagine what that could mean in terms of meeting traffic generation objectives.

SEO is not a “do-it, forget-it” task

Published November 20th, 2006 in Natural Search and Online Marketing. 0 Comments

In the search engine marketing world, there has been considerable debate recently on how critical on-going SEO is. The genesis of the debate was a statement by the head of a search engine marketing firm that SEO is a one-time job unlike paid search engine marketing. The implication of this is that marketers should question the benefits of hiring a SEO firm on a regular basis.

To put it bluntly, the statement is way off the mark—I have no doubts that SEO is a continuous process, whose success will depend on sustained planning and execution of strategies. If it were only a one-time process, some of the biggest names in business in the world wouldn’t have dedicated SEO teams or agencies handling their optimization plans. If any marketer wants to risk testing out the veracity of the above statement, all they have to do is to ‘optimize’ a site once and then leave it absolutely untouched for a few weeks and then see the difference. More often than not, a site’s rankings will begin to suffer and consequently, so will the search engine-driven traffic.

Come to think of it, the reason for this is not too difficult to fathom. Being “static” at a certain “optimized” level means that we are assuming that other elements, be they search engine algorithms or competitors’ SEO and other marketing efforts, are static too. As a matter of fact, that is far from reality, so the risk of doing SEO and forgetting it is quite high, particularly if organic search engine traffic is vital to a company’s marketing objectives.

The long tail effect

There is another consideration too. When a SEO project is first executed by a search marketing agency, the initial project targets a limited number of the most important keywords that have been mutually agreed to by the SEO firm and the marketer. While prioritization of the keyword list is an integral part of the process, optimizing for a small number of keywords is tantamount to losing out on a lot of potential traffic.

Numerous studies have reiterated the importance of the “long tail” effect in search engine marketing, which refers to the phenomenon of a large number of keywords collectively contributing to a significant volume of traffic, while individually the traffic for each of these keywords will be miniscule. Part of the work that goes about in on-going SEO is really about identifying and maximizing additional opportunities such as these to get more visibility and additional traffic.

Content and organic link building constitute SEO “maintenance”

Granted that the initial SEO effort will involve revamping the technical and structural aspects of a site, which will require very little recurring effort. The major part of ongoing SEO work will be related to creating useful content that is designed to meet the overall purpose of a site and the needs of its target users as well as organically building inbound links to the site.

Marketers are led to believe that “routine” content creation and link building can be handled by anybody in-house and they do not have to bank on the expertise of an external SEO firm or consultants to meet those needs. Perhaps, yes, provided the in-house resource has all the requisite capabilities in evaluating what needs to be done and how, prioritizing those and executing them. While I find many marketers with the high-level knowledge and the apparent ability to think of how things need to be done, the planning and execution leaves a lot to be desired, which ultimately has a direct bearing on the cost. That is probably one of the biggest value additions that a SEO firm makes.

However, the question of whether on-going SEO needs to be outsourced or done in-house is secondary; marketers should recognize that in a world where search is playing such a dominant role, taking the foot of the SEO pedal can destroy all the momentum that is created with the initial optimization. And only if they are absolutely confident that continuing to do SEO in-house can generate similar or better results than by outsourcing it to a SEO firm, should they proceed with such a move. The biggest mistake that I find numerous marketers making is to severely underestimate the challenges with maintaining and improving organic search engine rankings after the initial optimization.

Top reasons to bid on your company name

Published November 17th, 2006 in Paid Search and Online Marketing. 0 Comments

So why bid on your company name? This question soften comes up a lot with our pay-per-click (PPC) clients. Cutting to the chase… Here’s what we tell them.

1. Basically, you need to take advantage of organic and paid listing locations. Currently, search traffic comes from about 70% organic and 30% paid. By not using a paid search campaign you are potentially losing 30% of your potential traffic. In addition, search engines usually place organic rankings below two or three paid ads plus other information (i.e. local search.)

2. You have more control over copy content, placement, destination URLs, landing pages, and optimization of ads than with natural listings.

3. Your search results page, even if highly ranked and optimized, is limited to the user’s query/page content and META description. This is why I still recommend adding meta tags to your site even if these tags are not as important as they once were.

4. With an AdWords placement, you “control the message”, meaning you can use it to promote specials, enforce branding and messaging, conduct A/B testing on copy, landing pages, and user interaction.

5. If you are using Google, your company or brand can appear in their content network. Obivously this has it’s ups and and downs, but can good for increasing your market reach.

6. You can use it as a defensive strategy against competitors biding on your name. Yep, fight back against those sneaky people trying to take your potential customers away with special offers, etc.

I’ll keep adding to this list so check back often.
What others are saying.

Per iMediaConnection:
“The initial report concluded that 92 percent of the brand names observed in Google and Yahoo! paid listings had third parties positioning against brand keywords. Further, an average of nearly 11 paid listings existed for each brand. The nastiest portion of this business is witnessed with third parties using the brand name in the listing itself.”

They go on to say…
“of the brands monitored, 45 percent had paid listings with competitive or unlicensed offerings while 23 percent had listings with related commercial service offerings, leaving only 7 percent of listings purchased by the brand owner. 25 percent of listings were concluded to be for “other” services which might include ubiquitous eBay and Amazon listings, among “other” third parties.”

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/4146.asp

Eyetracking Studies

People gravitate towards the top of the page where the sponsored ads are. This is known as the golden triangle. Enquiro does a great job demonstrating this concept with their eye tracking studies. You can read more here: http://www.enquiro.com/AllPrompted-sm.jpg

One thing to note. If we have access to a clients web analytics, we recommend comparing organic keyword conversions v. paid search keyword conversions. This will give you a good idea of what keywords and market niches you should be bidding on and exploring.

Addressing Canonical Issues

Published November 14th, 2006 in Natural Search and Tutorials. 2 Comments

Huh… what did you say? Take off your geek hat… just tell me what it means and how to fix it?

Ok. Ok. For our purposes, it simply helps you address duplicate content on your domain.

Canonical issues stem from duplicates of data existing on multiple URLs. For example, url.com and www.url.com and www.url.com/index.html all host the same content.

How to fix Canonical Hostnames on Apache-Based Servers

Create a file using any text editor and save it as “.htaccess.txt”

Next, copy and paste the below information into the file and save.
_________________________________________________
RewriteEngine On
rewritecond %{http_host} ^vonfelten.com
rewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.vonfelten.com/$1 [R=301,L]
_________________________________________________

That’s it… Your ready to test it.

Upload the new .htaccess file to the root directory of your server.
note: Be sure to remove the .txt extension from the file name. On some servers you might have to set the file permissions for the file. You can do this through the interface in most FTP programs. Set it to : chmod 644
Here is another example you might find useful.

How to fix Canonical URLs on Apache-Based Servers

In the example (which is shown on apache.org) we will replace /~user by the canonical /u/user and fix a missing trailing slash for /u/user

_________________________________________________
RewriteRule ^/~([^/]+)/?(.*) /u/$1/$2 [R]
RewriteRule ^/([uge])/([^/]+)$ /$1/$2/ [R]
_________________________________________________
If you need help understanding this in more detail please doesn’t hesitate to contact me or grab more information at apache.org

How to create a custom 404 error message

Published November 13th, 2006 in Natural Search and Tutorials. 0 Comments

Create a customized 404 error message using your .htaccess file.

Server errors are going to occur for one reason or another. Knowing this, you should take the time to create some custom error pages. These pages will not only keep your visitors engaged, but will give them options such as where to go next if the page was moved or didn’t exist.

One of the most common error messages is a 404 error. 404 errors are the result of broken links and mistyped URLs. See below for step-by-step instructions on how to create a customized 404 error message using the .htaccess file on an Apache-based server.

Here’s how you do it on an Apache-based server:

Create a file using any text editor and save it as “.htaccess.txt”

Next, copy and paste the below information into the file and save.

_________________________________________________

< Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
< /Files>

ErrorDocument 401 /errordocs/error401.html

________________________________________________

note: The first part is just for a little security and stops people from viewing your .htaccess file. The second part tells the Apache server to redirect any 404 errors to the file “error404.html”.

That’s it… Your ready to test it.

Upload the new .htaccess file to the root directory of your server.

note: Be sure to remove the .txt extension from the file name. On some servers you might have to set the file permissions for the file. You can do this through the interface in most FTP programs. Set it to : chmod 644

More information on how to set file permissions can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissions

There are several other error documents that you might wish to customize.

400 - Bad request
401 - Authorization Required
403 - Forbidden directory
404 - Page not found
500 - Internal Server Error

For each one you want to use, simply add a line to your .htaccess file and create the corresponding page.

_________________________________________________

< Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
< /Files>

ErrorDocument 400 /errordocs/error400.html
ErrorDocument 401 /errordocs/error401.html
ErrorDocument 403 /errordocs/error403.html
ErrorDocument 404 /errordocs/error404.html
ErrorDocument 500 /errordocs/error500.html
________________________________________________

More information on the types of server error messages can be found at:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_httpmessages.asp

Pandora - free web based music

Published November 11th, 2006 in web2.0. 0 Comments

Pandora and the Music Genone Project

The Music Genome Project has created an awesome free online music application called Pandora. The web site creates personalized radio stations based on your tastes.

It works like this… user creates a radio station by naming a band, a performer, or song title –say, the Black Crowes. Within seconds, a Black Crowes song will play, followed by bands that meet the Pandora search’s criteria in the genre. Each station you create is saved to your account. If you come back to your account later, each station will contain a whole new selection of songs–most likely by some of the same artists but in a different order. Additionally, your able to fast forward through songs or give songs a thumbs up or thumbs down which helps them fine tune radio stations based on your selection. It helps you discover new artists, songs, and albums. If your really curious, you can read each artists bio.

Of course, there is a small price to pay for the service, though it doesn’t directly affect your wallet. Graphical ads are pushed throughout your listening interface, though you can always minimize your window to avoid them (more on that later). Another option is to pay for Pandora’s ad-free premium service, which costs $12 for three months or $36 per year.

Works with both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

Optimizing an e-commerce website - Part 1

Published October 30th, 2006 in Online Marketing and E-commerce, Natural Search. 0 Comments

Fundamentals are key to optimizing an e-commerce website- Part 1

The busy October-December shopping season is a highly critical time for most online retailers, for whom a significant part of business happens during this time of the year. Invariably, this is the time when paid search marketing costs get higher as competition intensifies; keyword prices are known to even double in the weeks leading up to Christmas and New Year. Therefore it is all the more important for marketers to keep a very close watch on profitability of their paid search marketing in the rush to acquire traffic and boost sales.

One of the best ways for online retailers to ensure that they are making the most of the peak holiday shopping is to acquire high volumes of traffic from organic search results. But organic search engine traffic is not something that can be acquired overnight; it is the culmination of a lot of consistent effort keeping in view the ultimate goal.

Now this is something easier said than done because a large number of e-commerce sites are often so search “un-friendly”. We look at some of the most common problems we have observed with several of these online shopping websites and what can be done to make them search-engine friendly so that all the key pages on the site are indexed and will rank well as well. A lot of these observations apply as much to simple, static HTML sites as they do to the dynamic, catalog/database-driven ecommerce sites.

In this first part of a two-part series, we focus on making an e-commerce site accessible to the search engine spiders.

Ensure accessibility of all the database-driven product pages

The first and one of the most important criteria for web pages to be ranked well for appropriate keywords is to be found and indexed by the search engines. Very often, sites are programmed to be a function of so many variables and attributes (these can be easily spotted with those mile-long URLs with multiple question marks and other symbols in the URL string) that it becomes very difficult for search engine spiders to crawl deep into the site and index these pages.

Granted that all the search engines have become a lot smarter at indexing dynamic pages and things aren’t as bad as they used to be; in fact, the level of complexity that these engines can handle will only go up. But why take a chance when things could be planned for and done in a simpler fashion?

Ideally, the technical aspects that govern accessibility—for example, how the product catalog or database is queried and the information retrieved and displayed—are taken care of while the site is being planned and developed. If they are not, the subsequent SEO effort may also involve significant re-programming (depending on how complex the site is programmed to be), which is cumbersome, tricky and expensive.

Taking care of structure/ navigation

Besides the underlying technical foundation of the site, it is very important that a lot of thought is given to the structure/ navigation. The use of appropriately labeled “bread crumbs” (as the user interface specialists are wont to say), and cross linking to other categories and products will ensure that the search spiders manage to “deep crawl” the site. We’ve seen numerous e-commerce websites with absolutely no cross-linking of the various product categories. A little bit of advance planning, particularly with an eye on making the information architecture of the website scalable, will not only be immensely useful but imperative in the long run. The sooner marketers realize that SEO is a long term game, the better.

Site map

The importance of a site map in determining accessibility of a website for search engine spiders is quite well known. It becomes even more important for an e-commerce website that could pose its own set of accessibility problems. A very detailed site map that is linked from the home page of a website and literally includes all the links in the site is an absolute must.

External links to inner pages

Another way to get the inner pages of a new e-commerce site indexed quickly is to have some external inbound links pointing to some of the inner pages. Typically, we find that most link building efforts focus on getting links to the home page only, which is understandable; however, when it comes to getting dynamic pages crawled and indexed quickly, one should certainly consider getting links straight to the inner pages.

If you are building a new website, then it helps to set the specifications upfront for the dynamic pages to be created like static pages, with a well-ordered, linear URL structure.

Continue reading “Optimizing an e-commerce website”

Local search advertising grows

Published October 26th, 2006 in Local Search. 0 Comments

Local search advertising continues to grow
One of the fastest growing areas in the world of online advertising right now is that of local advertising, particularly that of local paid search. According to a recent report by Borrell Associates (www.borrell.biz), local online advertising will grow to be “a $7.7 billion category in 2007, reflecting a 31.6 percent growth over 2006.”

In a previous local search post, I mentioned that the three main search engines are driving this growth and accounting for almost two-thirds of the spend in this sector. In fact, up to 2004 almost the entire spend on online local advertising was driven by banner advertising or yellow pages’ listings, but there has been a marked shift in the past two years with search beginning to take a bigger share of this spend. In addition to paid local search advertising, local e-mail advertising is also expected to contribute to the overall pie in the next few years.

The buoyancy in this segment means that numerous media players have caught up on the immense potential of the local online advertising market and are expanding their sales force. Not unexpectedly, the real estate and automotive categories are witnessing the greatest amount of activity, garnering about one-third of all local online advertising spend in the US.

How online classifieds are shaping local advertising
In September, comScore released an analysis on the consumer activity in the area of online classified sites. The study highlights that traffic to these sites grew a phenomenal 47% in the past year to reach 37.4 million Internet users, reaching about 22% of the total Internet population. The leader of the pack, Craigslist.org registered a 99% growth in traffic during the year! According to a comScore analyst, it is clear that Internet users are now catching on the phenomenon of online classified advertising as this segment grows at a faster clip than many others and this is undoubtedly influencing the way traditional media companies are approaching the classifieds business.

What should be of interest to online marketers, beyond the obvious potential of the volume of traffic that this segment is recording, is the nature of the audience that is driving the traffic. The above-mentioned comScore study also highlights that young professionals in the age group of 25-34 and high-income households tend to visit the classified sites much more than the average.

So, if you are an online marketer trying to reach the demographic of the young, affluent professional, can you afford to ignore this particular advertising vehicle?

Preparing for mobile search
There is another very important reason for adding local search to your marketing mix, even though it may seem premature at this point. It is the inevitable proliferation of mobile search advertising, and when that happens, the most likely beneficiaries will be those who are advertising in local search.

Admittedly, mobile search is far from achieving critical mass. One of the main reasons for this is while today’s mobile phones have the capability to allow users to surf the Internet, the proportion of users knowing how to really set up and use them for this purpose is very small. A number of players are now engaged in making it a lot simpler for users to use their phones for surfing the Internet more, and we aren’t too far away from that happening.

While Google has been testing its pay-per-click ads on the mobile search network, Yahoo has also launched a beta test of its mobile search ads in the US, after a trial run in the UK and Japan. The rationale of these companies banking on mobile search is very simple: at any given time, there will be more mobile phone users than computer users. Imagine a mobile phone user on the road looking for a particular outlet or service in the neighborhood. His search is bound to be very local and he is interested in only the local results. Obviously, the odds are pretty much stacked in favor of companies/ advertisers that the user finds with such a search.

Big opportunities for smart marketers
As eMarketer wrote in an article recently, “there is nothing small about either the size or the growth rate of the local search market. The implications are very clear for marketers: local search offers large opportunities for marketers in terms of both high-precision targeting as well as their disposition to take action upon seeing a marketing message. There’s everything to gain in tapping into the local search and online advertising channel.

Yahoo Panama

Published October 21st, 2006 in Paid Search and Yahoo Search Marketing. 0 Comments

Yahoo’s revamped search advertising platform goes live:
Earlier this week, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly, Overture) announced that its Project Panama- a revamp of its paid search advertising platform- is finally going live. The changes will be rolled out progressively during the year and early next year, with advertisers in the US being invited to migrate to the new platform. The complete transition is expected to be completed in the first half of next year.

The latest announcement from Yahoo! has several implications for marketers, who are looking to distribute their search marketing spend across the main search engines. Over the past several years, Google’s Adwords program has established an almost unassailable lead over Yahoo! Search Marketing, as the pioneers of paid search marketing (Overture) remained almost static, with hardly any significant development that addressed the rapidly maturing search advertising community.

There were two main factors that we believe helped increase the gap between the two main platforms. One, Google Adwords is user friendly, not only from a functionality perspective but also from a user interface perspective, while one could say exactly the opposite about the Overture platform. Managing a campaign that is even a few hundred dollars in size and more than 50 keywords can become a nightmare for some marketers. Secondly, the popularity of Google and its significantly higher search traffic volume obviously makes it a more preferred option for marketers looking to acquire large volumes of traffic.

The changes:
Yahoo is launching a new Upgrade Center that will have all the information required to adapt to the new Sponsored Search. One of the important changes that the new platform will have is the manner in which the top 5 bids are listed. While currently each of the top 5 bids are listed, the new Sponsored Search will show only a range for the top positions, along with an estimate of an advertiser’s position for each bid.

The other big change that will be rolled out next year is how Yahoo ranks the ads. Until now, Yahoo has used a pure auction model where only the maximum bid price mattered in the ranking of the ads; however, next year will see the introduction of an Ad Quality score in addition to the maximum bid. The specific parameters that will go into determining the ad quality score are not known at this point, but based on my experience with Google Adwords, I presume it will include a combination of click through rates for an ad, the maximum cost per click that has been bid and the quality of the landing page.

If the above presumption is correct, then marketers have to pay much greater attention to various aspects of the campaign than just monitoring their bid prices. A couple of months ago when Google Adwords introduced changes to how it ranked ads with much greater emphasis on the quality of landing pages, paid search marketers were literally caught unawares, leading to quite a frenzy.

I’ve often noticed marketers devote all their attention to the traffic acquisition aspects ie. keyword research and bid management without considering the conversion aspect (the landing page quality at all). With traffic acquisition itself increasingly becoming dependent on how a site is set up for conversions, marketers are better advised to be prepared and devote resources to improve their landing pages.

It would like seem simple logic and common sense, since profitability of a marketing campaign is dependent on conversions and not merely traffic; yet, the frequency with which this aspect is ignored certainly warrants constant reiteration.

Leveraging user-generated content

Published October 18th, 2006 in Natural Search and Online Marketing. 0 Comments

Leveraging customers in your online marketing tactics

If the talk of Web2.0 has been going around for some time, the recent acquisition of YouTube by Google for a staggering sum of $1.65 billion or the exclusive advertising deal between Google and MySpace for about $900 is proof, if any were needed, of the convergence of consumers and the media, where the marketing channel is itself driven by the target market.

The era of consumer-created content (defined by Jupiter Research as “user-generated feedback disseminated via blogs, reviews, user groups and forums and is posted in such a public way that it can be viewed and influenced by other consumers”) is very much here and it is increasingly shaping how businesses fare online.

Four recent reports from JupiterResearch study this “pervasive consumer behavior, its often-disruptive impact on the consumer’s online purchasing process and how this wave of consumer feedback will impact the future of all online businesses.” Note the words: disruptive impact.

Below are some of the data from the aforementioned studies:

77 percent of online shoppers use consumer generated product reviews/ratings and those who find them useful are more loyal to stores with reviews/ratings featured.
Consumers who post feedback on forums, positive or negative, spend 22 percent more online than do consumers who have not posted on forums.
More than 90 percent of large companies believe that consumer recommendations are important in influencing other consumers’ purchase decisions.

77 percent of online shoppers use consumer generated product reviews/ratings and those who find them useful are more loyal to stores with reviews/ratings featured.Talk about living in an era of consumer power!

User generated content: A powerful bait for search engine marketing.

While the above findings seem to tie in more with e-commerce / online shopping outlets, they apply in equal measure to other business-to-business online marketing as well, particularly search engine marketing.

Blogging, one of the most prevalent forms of user-generated content is one way to create a two-way communication channel with your target audience. Today’s marketing is often about subtly engaging prospects and blogs provide a perfect platform for doing that.

Blogs also offer a very powerful bait for the search engines. There are two reasons for this: they offer search engines fresh (and hopefully relevant) content, something they are always very hungry for.

Secondly, due to the interactive nature of blogs wherein visitors/ readers add on to the content with their own comments, the amount of relevant content can increase in leaps and bounds without the marketer having to expend any additional effort. Moreover, well written blogs are extremely good at generating backlinks for a company website which, as any search engine optimization professional will tell you, are a critical and indispensable component of the SEO process.

Controlling the conversation: critical for PR & marketing.

Public relations has traditionally been seen as a separate discipline in itself that may have an indirect bearing on a company’s marketing. However, the Internet has changed all that, with these two disciplines becoming very closely intertwined.

A fundamental tenet of public relations is “control the conversation”. Today, with so much user-generated content circulating around the Internet which can be found by anyone at any time, it has become quite difficult for companies to control the conversation and preventing prospects from forming undesirable perceptions about them.

Therefore, marketers have to no choice but to take the bull by the horns and ensure that they are not only aware of what is happening in the user generated content space but also actively using blogs and forums to shape positive perceptions amongst the audience. They can (and often must) do this with their own blogs by proactively disseminating relevant information as well as by being vigilant and active enough to set the record straight through other blogs and forums where they are being discussed.

As I have repeatedly said, search engine optimization can no longer be viewed in isolation. Online marketers, whether big or small, have to not only consider the benefits of leveraging user-generated content in their marketing mix but also the cost of not doing it.

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