SES New York kicked off with an excellent keynote presentation by David Meerman Scott (interview) followed by a panel on Digital Asset Optimization including Mark Knowles, Chris Boggs and myself. Richard Zwicky moderated. The rising importance of optimizing one’s digital assets came out of Google and other search engines’ decision to start including information and file types from other sources that their main search index. Some queries trigger search results that go beyond web pages, MS Office docs and PDF files to include images, blog posts, news, video thumbnails, books and others. While many SEOs were responding to the changed landscape of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and optimizing for other file types, many others were already optimizing holistically under the premise of, “ What can be searched on can be optimized “. Most companies are not wired to create the variety of content that can achieve top visibility on search engines. In most cases, search engine optimization efforts are focused on content and digital assets that are currently in place. Being able to get more marketing impact out of existing content is as much a driver of digital asset optimization as it is a part of a holistic strategy that matches up with the opportunities presented by an ever changing search results page. In the DAO session I presented a historical perspective on DAO based on when we started writing about it in 2007 and the changed search landscape we face with personal, real-time, social and mobile search. I also discussed TopRank’s 10 Steps DAO Content Strategy: Search & Social Media Keyword Research Anticipating demand via search is traditionally handled by keyword research tools such Google’s tools, Bing or services like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. As advertising and media placements can drive search, so can social conversations. Social media monitoring tools can help marketers conduct social keyword research as a compliment to search based keyword research. Find out what key language and key topics are being discussed on the social web and you’ll have invaluable insight into content idea that provide value for social media marketing and search engine optimization. Analyze Search Results Landscape The output of Universal and real-time search results are not persistent. For example, a search for a particular phrase one day might yield news and image results and on another day display only web pages. It’s useful to monitor the search results landscape for keyword phrases that you’re after. Understanding the mix of data sources besides the main search engine index can help with the allocation of optimization resources. If News and real-time results are most common, it may make more sense to focus on content promotion there vs images or video. Define Buyer Personas & Buying Cycle Understanding the needs of your customer is marketing 101. Search marketers are becoming more sophisticated in their understanding of customer profiles and developing personas to represent who you’re trying to attract via search is an important step in a content strategy. Knowing what kind of content and what type of digital asset your customers will best respond to can improve effectivness at driving traffic from the search visibilyt you’ve achieved through SEO. The buying cycle is another dimension that warrants attention to make sure you’re creating, promoting and optimizing content that is relevant to where your customers are in their search/research process. Broad concepts usually represent early stages of research versus more specific phrases which often indicate a buyer is closer to purchase. Inventory Existing Content & Assets With a more holistic SEO effort, especially one that will incorporate digital assets, it’s important to have a baseline understanding of what you have to work with. Taking inventory of your content and digital assets is something we’ve been recommending for over 3 years and it’s an essential first step. Having an understanding of current content and digital assets can also uncover content that is ripe for re-purposing. A common example is video that can be deconstructed into multiple, short form videos, single images, transcribed into text or splitting the audio off into a podcast. Develop editorial plan for new content Understanding your search and social media keywords, buyer personas and the assets you have to work with will help identify what new content you’ll need to create. Adopting the perspective of a publisher, not just a marketer, will help resource allocation, planning and goals/measurement for content creation. For example, rather than just sending out a press release and publishing a blog post with a new product announcement, a company might, based on search/social keyword research and an understanding of their buyer personas, decide to create a resource page for journalists that includes links to relevant resources, standard press release, images, PowerPoint, video, past media coverage, executive interviews, audio snippets, demo and appropriate media relations contact info. It would be made easy to bookmark or share this resource page as well. The assets being linked to from the resource page would be hosted either on the corporate site, optimized of course, or hosted on 3rd party media sharing sites such as Flicrk, YouTube, SlideShare, DocStoc, PRWeb and others. This provides a richer experience as well as numerous options for interaction. It also offers multiple, potential entry points into the resource page via search, since the optimized digital assets can rank in search results on their own and link to the destination content on the corporate web site. Map Keywords to Content & Digital Assets The functional process of implementing search/social keyword research is to map those concepts to the content and assets you have. This helps manage the initial keyword optimization process. Mapping keywords to the editorial plan is also a useful guide for the future creation and optimization of content. Not only are web pages, images, video and other assets optimized for search, but optimized for customers. Operationalize Content & Digital Media Creation with SEO SEO and digital asset optimization are not one-time events. Keyword demand will change and of course, new content and media will be published. To ensure keyword optimization of new content, it’s important to incorporate SEO with established content creation and promotion processes. That might be updating the corporate styleguide with SEO and keyword usage rules or it might mean making programming changes to the web site’s content management system to prompt content creators with keyword cues when adding text or other media. Develop Off Page DAO Assets The beauty of social content is of course, that it’s social! Sharing should be easy and encouraged. Hosting some digital assets on social media sharing sites such as those mentioned above (Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, DocStoc) can introduce your optimized content to new audiences and attract both traffic and links. More relevant links mean better search engine visibility and web site visitors. Promote/Syndicate via Distribution Channels How will anyone know you have excellent content and digital assets if you don’t promote? Dedicate a fixed and persistent effort to developing social networks where your customers and influentials spend their time on the social web. Do the same with social media sharing web sites so that when you post a new video on YouTube for example, your network there can be notified. Developing distribution channels for content will significantly improve reach and the likelihood of your content being passed on, shared and made socially popular. Email newsletters, RSS, Ping.fm and TwitterFeed services are good examples of content distribution services that help promote content efficiently. Ongoing Measurement with Web, Social and Search Analytics Search marketing professionals are well aware of the value from web and search analytics that measure search visibility performance as well as web site interactions and conversions. The importance of social media monitoring and analytics is also essential for a DAO Content strategy. On the front end, social media monitoring tools can help you identify conversations and influentials that are meaningful to the topics and customers your marketing efforts are trying to reach. Social keyword research can in part, be accomplished by some social media monitoring tools. Those same tools are essential for measuring the social impact of your digital asset and social media optimization efforts. A simple cycle would be one where you’ve identified new keyword topics beginning to buzz on the social web and taking that cue to create content. Promote that content through your social networks and use social media monitoring to track the effects of your content contributions to the larger conversation on the topic. Use web analytics to measure any increase in search based traffic based on the growing popularity and awareness of the topic based in part, on your contributions and social interactions. With an Optimized Content Strategy, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that by following these 10 steps, a significant impact can be achieved in overall authority for the topics and keyword concepts focused on as well as the ability to attract new business, media coverage and employees. The bad news is that it’s not easy. Making the commitment to serving customers with content and media on an ongoing basis, indefinitely without the initial ability to forecast ROI will make many companies say, “Great idea and it makes sense, but not for us.” However, those companies that make the effort to really understand and implement these fundamental concepts are making an investment with a payoff that is very long term and with momentum, very signifcant. Some companies will be able to “come out of nowhere” and dominate their category by following these 10 guidelines for an optimized content marketing strategy. Live blogging coverage of the Digital Asset Optimization session at SES New York was provided by: SEM Geek Outspoken Media Search Engine Roundtable AimClear And this article on Holistic SEO with Digital Asset Optimization was recently posted on ClickZ
Posts Tagged: audio
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Feb 10
5 Ways to Show Digital Assets a Little Respect
Don't ignore digital assets in your optimization efforts Don’t fight it: Blended search results, and hence digital asset optimization , are here (at least for now). Text content may be your SEO poster child, but with images, video and audio content often appearing in standard search results, digital assets can no longer be treated as the ugly stepsister in the online marketing family. Many companies produce a variety of content and media that never make it to the public web. To this point, the majority of marketers have either overlooked or ignored optimization of non-text digital assets. In fact, a recent Forrester study found: Less than 20% of marketers insert keywords into the filenames of videos on their sites Even fewer marketers write keyword-rich captions or create online video libraries Yet video stands about a 50% greater chance of ranking on page one of Google If digital asset optimization isn’t on your radar at all or simply stuck on your back burner, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Show your digital assets a little respect with these 5 optimization tips. 1. Do your homework on the SERPs Be sure to become familiar with the types of files and media types that Google and other search engines are prone to display for the keyword phrases you’re targeting. Certain types of queries are more prone to show local, shopping or news results and if you can identify frequently used data sources, your time figuring out what digital assets to optimize can be a lot more efficient. In the example below, a search for “Apple iPad” shows search results from News, Twitter, Images and Video. Here, news sources range from mainstream media like CNN to ezinearticles. A savvy SEO would consider how they might leverage exposure in the news area, via social media such as blogs or Twitter as well as videos and images. Producing, optimizing and promoting relevant video and images provides an additional opportunity for visibility in addition to web pages. The display of blended results, especially where current news is involved, is dynamic. Be sure to revisit the search results page from time to time to uncover any new data sources for assets/media you may be able to focus on. 2. Repurpose content to get the most bang for your buck Think of innovative ways to reuse your digital assets to gain maximum search benefits. For example, if your CEO gives a presentation at an industry event: The presentation can often be recorded on video and audio The video can be optimized and promoted on both your website and numerous video hosting sites such as You Tube Multiple short video snippets can be created from one master video, all of which can be optimized A search-optimized podcast can be created from the audio, which can be placed on your website and promoted on podcast web aggregation sites Screenshots can be taken from the video, optimized, placed on your website and promoted on sites like Flickr (check out these tools for optimizing images from Six Revisions blog) The optimized images, podcast and video can all be used with social media press releases for even more exposure The PowerPoint from the presentation could be uploaded to Slideshare and turned into a video with voiceover for sharing on video hosting sites For even more ideas on re-purposing content, read “ Green Online Marketing: 5 Ways to Repurpose Content “. 3. Use keyword-rich file names and tags – but keep them clear and to the point An important element of digital asset optimization is using keyword-rich files names and tags for all images, video and audio, and ALT text for images. That said, an even more important element is ensuring files names and tags accurately and concisely describe the digital content being presented. As much as you’d like to fit the keyword phrase “circuit breaker” into the file name for an image of a pink elephant, it just might not work. Think of ALT text, file names and tags like this: If someone couldn’t see your image, watch your video or listen to your audio, would they know what it is from your description? Be sure to link to your digital assets using keyword anchor text. If you have a large number of videos, PDFs or Audio files, consider creating a sitemap file that links to each of them. Include descriptive text next to each link as well. You might even benefit from creating a video sitemaps file for Google . 4. Leverage optimized landing pages for digital assets Some poster children and ugly stepsisters might never find a way to live in harmony, but optimized text and digital assets don’t have to suffer the same fate. Include optimized on-page text a part of your optimization strategy for video and podcasts to get the best of both worlds and maximize search benefits. For example, place videos and podcasts on their own optimized landing pages on your website. Include either keyword-rich transcripts or summaries on the landing page, depending on the length of the video or podcast. Optimized landing pages help the search engines understand what the video or audio is all about. Plus, you’ll enhance the viewing or listening experience for visitors by giving them a high-level overview of the video or podcast. 5. Don’t forget other file types such as PDFs and MS Office Docs If you’ve got PDFs on your site, don’t overlook them in your search engine optimization strategy. True, you could convert PDFs to HTML pages. But particularly in the B2B world, customers are looking for case studies, whitepapers and technical articles — and PDFs can still be useful for content-heavy pieces. Keep in mind a few points for optimizing PDFs: Ensure PDFs are text-based (vs all image) Create a SEO friendly PDF template for use corporate-wide Include anchor text links where relevant Optimize the copy as you would a web page Complete all document properties, including author, subject, description and keyword This Search Engine Land post offers additional tips for optimizing PDFs for search. Any other document types that Google can crawl, index and rank are also opportunities for optimization. Are You Ready to Treat Digital Assets as One of the Family? Incorporating digital asset optimization into your overall content optimization plan doesn’t have to be difficult, but it can create an important advantage. If you’ve got the digital assets, why not optimize them? You’ll make it that much easier for the search engines to find and index your content – all of it. What results have you experienced from optimizing images, video, audio and the various document types now found in Google search results? Learn more about digital asset optimization at SES New York , where TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden will be presenting his insights into digital asset marketing strategy, process/workflow and measuring success.