December 31, 2004

One thing I've learned from doing business with highly intelligent, technically savvy, opinionated people is that you need to:

1) have thick skin
2) be open to dialogues - because you might learn something!

In a most recent example, we sent our whitepaper "The Marketers' Guide to Search Engine Optimization" this week to our paid bloggers. And wow, did we hear back from them! (Check out the most recent posts here.)

One of the most scathing responses, from Robin Good, prompted me to send his blog to our SEO partners, Anvil Media.

I'm taking advantage of this immediate medium to post responses to his criticisms, and continue the dialogue.

As a marketer, this kind of immediate, public feedback is both exhilirating and terrifying. As a business person, what we do with the information gleaned can make our solutions (and marketing material to support them) much stronger, if we are willing to listen and talk...

So here's our opportunity to speak:

The following is from Kent Lewis at Anvil Media.

Overview
Many of Marqui's paid bloggers have shared their feedback on the SEO white paper developed by Anvil, for Marqui lead generation efforts. A response to specific posts from Robin Good and DL Byron is found below, which should address the reasoning behind, and the content within the white paper.

Target Audience for Whitepaper
The posts challenging the quality of the white paper fail to recognize the audience for which the paper is meant. The document was designed for marketers who are largely unfamiliar with blogs and other Web media. The paper abstract clearly states that the paper is an overview of fundamentals for anyone looking to optimize their existing site content, or someone evaluating CMS systems and interested in developing a process for optimizing new content. The audience is NOT early-adopter/technology pundit/bloggers.

Keyword Loading
Robin contends that keyword loading “is a term that is part of the SEO culture that heralds the high-density keyword principles and the need to work around tightly selected keywords/ keyphrases�. However he has taken this excerpt from the directory optimization section (pg. 5) of the paper where it specifically addresses optimizing for a directory listings, not search engines. As any SEO pro knows, that you can only put 5-10 words in your directory description; so yes, you would want to hand select a few of your top performing keywords for this listing.

Robin contends that keyword-loading is a mechanical process encouraged by SEO professionals to gain top placement in search engines, and we agree. The devil is in the detail here, whereas the target audience (marketers) typically do not tend to “state clearly what you are about� and tend to use marketing jargon, hence the need to introduce a process to reveal keywords their customers use and understand.

Pay-for-Inclusion
Our paragraph about the potential benefits of PFI is well documented within the industry, as are all of our recommended strategies and tactics. They have worked well for our clients in the past and present which is why we recommend it in the white paper. We agree with Robin that adding a free Google search capability to your Web site will benefit Google SEO efforts, but we have to question how that would benefit Yahoo SEO efforts?

Hyperlinks
Robin's refute about creating SEO-friendly links clearly misses the point and proves that he didn't read the paper from start to finish. By organizing your links, we meant (and go on to state later in the paper,) that hyperlinks should have keywords in the anchor tag of the link. This is a fundamental of good search engine optimization. In addition, a later comment about as many links as possible conflicts with blog industry arguments about the inherent value of blogs for SEO: tons of links.

Meta Tags – Misleading?
If the use of meta tags is outdated, then why does Robin use optimized tags on his site? It is a fact that Google uses meta description text as the results description if the keyword appears in the tag. So of course you would want to optimize your meta description tag. And we stand by our claim, backed by industry peers that SEO is about the title, HTML headers and hyperlinks.

Title Tags – Hype?
What we were trying to say, and what Robin missed, was that Marqui simply allows you to control the title tag copy, not magically creating the title tag for you. Not all CMS systems are as flexible.

PDFs
Robin states that PDFs can be indexed by all engines and without problems. On the fourth page of the document, we state that “PDF documents frequently appear within regular search results�. But we also stand by our claim that PDFs are not read and ranked highly by ALL search engines.

Optimizing Content
If every company out there had a “competent and engaging writer� this world would be a better place, and we'd be out of jobs. The simple fact is that a Web site (or blog) is a communications vehicle, and often times, the objective of the communication conflicts with the ability to get it seen by the target audience. That's where GOOD SEM professionals come in. We “guide� our clients or their writers to create content that is meaningful, well written and ALSO performs well in search. We didn't spend time hyping this in the white paper, because we felt it went without saying.

CMS System Editing
Robin's comment about recommending blog-oriented tools for development is irrelevant to our audience (marketers). They often have a corporate IT department and deep content that a blogging tool is not a good fit for.

Site Maps
Clearly, the engine should know you have a site map. And if they haven't indexed the site map, then you would want to submit that.

Credibility
We agree that links to specific content is of greater value than home page links.

Marqui SE Rankings
Robin points out that Marqui isn't ranking for the term “marqui cms review�. This is not a phrase that we've targeted for optimization and isn't included on the Marqui site anywhere. We could consider optimizing for this but wouldn't someone typing in that phrase be looking for a third-party, non-biased opinion and not a page from Marqui reviewing their own system?

Personal Information
After 10 years of marketing B2B technology companies, I can say with confidence that timely, content-rich white papers are an effective lead generation tool. By limiting the required information to name and address, Marqui lowing the barrier to nearly zero. Considering SEO and CMS are hot topics, I don't see the registration as a factor in this situation. In fact, bloggers like Robin Good, who link directly to the white paper so that readers don't have to go through the registration, are still helping more than hurting, as one-click downloads foster overall distribution.

Google Page Rank
We didn't mention Google's Page Rank in the white paper intentionally, because the rating is based primarily on off-page factors, like inbound links. If we'd taken the holistic approach and included factors like Page Rank, the paper would be 3 times as long and would be much less relevant to Marqui's solution. This doesn't mean we can't discuss a revised version of the current paper in the future, based on reader/customer feedback.

Google & Blogs
As experienced SEM professionals, we understand the benefits of blogging (links and freshness) in relation to search engine visibility, which is why we regularly recommend blogging to our clients. There are really two issues here: the art of blogging and the technology behind blogging.

The Art of Blogging
To Bryon's point, we do recommend considering a "How to optimize your blog for search engines" white paper in the future, which would be content-related but not technology related, but does tie in with your product, as you offer blogging capability.

Technology Behind Blogging
The technology behind blogging, while of great interest to the bloggers, and those interested in setting up an in house solution, is not as relevant to our white paper discussion. From our perspective, the benefits of blogging (from an SEO perspective) are driven primarily by the fact that setting up a web-based blog (on blogger/blogspot, owned by Google) is free, and thus performs well in Google. For companies interested in implementing an in-house solution, that is most likely an IT issue, not a marketing issue, even if Marqui is one of the options.

Marqui's CMS Being SEO-friendly
We agree that this claim needs more substance. Ultimately, the responsibility for the code being optimized (fewer lines, pure HTML, etc.) is Marqui's. Our perspective on the SEO-friendliness of Marqui's solution in particular is the static URL structure and ability to control META data. The source code could be cleaner, but it's elegant as CMS code goes.

I'm not a programmer or CMS expert, however. I do recommend that Marqui conduct some research to compare apples to apples in terms of lines of code (or code type and complexity) between Marqui's product and competitors.

Posted by at December 31, 2004

Comments

aaron wall email - www.seobook.com/

Some of the stuff Robin posted was a bit harsh, but some of the stuff had no point...like telling people that they need to submit their site maps.

I do agree w Robin that there should be some sources though. Mike Grehan interviewed Jon Glick (manager of Yahoo! Search) less than a year ago. Interviews like that would be good for sourcing accurate meta tag information, etc...

aaron wall email - www.seobook.com/

>but some of the stuff had no point

just to clarify I was saying that the stuff in the white paper about submitting a site map had no point... I think most of what Robin said is spot on.

-b- email - texturadesign.com

My response is here

texturadesign.com/archives/000583.htm

James Paden email - www.Xemion.com

"Robin points out that Marqui isn't ranking for the term “marqui cms review�. This is not a phrase that we've targeted for optimization and isn't included on the Marqui site anywhere."

Then um...what phrases have you targeted for optimization and how highly are you ranked on them?

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