From Wikipedia’s own website: “The greater the number and quality of Wikipedia articles, the greater the number of people will link to us, and therefore the higher the rankings (and numbers of listings) we’ll have on Google. Hence, on Wikipedia ‘the rich (will) get richer’; or ‘if we build it, they will come,’ and in greater and greater numbers.”

In March 2000, Nupedia was launch around articles written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. In January 2001, a feeder project with the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, and the supporting technology choice of using a wiki, gave birth to Wikipedia. By the end of 2001, with roughly 20,000 articles, Wikipedia gained serious ground with search engines and quickly overshadowed all but three websites in terms of SERP visibility.

Indeed, we already knew that collaborative writing can create vast amounts of information. However, Wikipedia’s organic search success is due to more than just content and built-in quality control processes.

1. Platform and automation: Highly search engine-optimized pages, navigation, technical readability, and linking structure are all vital. Two hundred and fifty million internally optimized links help Wikipedia’s SEO efforts tremendously. Search optimized internal links across related and high-quality pages make a world of difference, but manual coding is not an option to execute deep links consistently over time.

You also need additional flexibility because your websites and lead generation mini-sites are not geared towards being know-it-all encyclopedias. However, there is good news here because you will augment your clout with search engines by segmenting your content across a number of domains (links spread across root domains is a sign of quality). You need a platform that scales your efforts across multiple domains.

Wikipedia uses MediaWiki. What do you use?
Yes, we know Wordpress is a great blogging platform, but, no, it is not an option to scale search engine visibility across vast number of website properties.

2. Quality is key. Content should at least equal that of sites you wish to beat in SERPs. But that’s the only point I will include on that list that requires on-going thinking from your part in the absence of hundreds of thousands of Wikipedians. Interns or offshore writers might be good sources to cost-effectively meet the quality threshold.

3. Volume matters. Thirteen million articles filled with original and relevant content are bound to give you a good level of visibility: Wikipedia counts 165 million inbound links.

But what is less known is that pages start with a small nominal value in terms of page rank. As a result, the more pages you’ve got, the more page rank you create for yourself. And that’s page rank you can pass around throughout your own network of pages and websites. In short, you can keep mostly to yourself. That’s where the next point comes in.

4. Manage link equity. Wikipedia works as a vortex that sucks out inbound link equity (a.k.a. Google Juice) from outside the network (see opening statement) and never sends it back thanks to the systemic implementation of the infamous rel=”nofollow” tag. Follow links within your corpus of websites; follow contextual outbound links to authoritative websites, and use ‘no follow’ tag for others. You can automate most of this too.

Pick a technical framework built to scale and manage exceptions to the rules only. Then write any amount of quality content you can muster, and augment volume over time. For this, obviously I would not recommend any else than SEO Samba as the first multi-site SEO execution platform or SEO Software as a Service. Success breeds more success.

See Michel Leconte at SES New York

I’ll be speaking about SEO through the Blogs & Feeds panel at SES New York on March 26.  This follows a site clinic panel in SES London this past month where I answered some interesting questions along with Brett Tabke from PubCon and Jill Whalen of High Rankings. Thanks to Chris Sherman for moderating this session. I wanted to give a brief summary of information for a few members in the audience. One person was wondering about SEO-friendly content management systems (CMS). I did not quite feel at ease with the question due to the potential conflict of interest given my position at SEO Samba, so the final answer was more on the general principles that should guide one’s selection of a SEO friendly CMS.

1.  Segregate production from the actual publishing/serving of web pages. This is a must if you want to distinguish CMS-related issues from web site issues, which simplifies maintenance and maximizes availability. As a side benefit, you can maximize cross-linking value. Unfortunately, CMSs seldom let you do this.

2. Avoid duplicated content creation and links, or mitigate their potential negative effect by having some kind of canonical URL linking strategy in its place.

3. Stick to page-driven CMSs as opposed to assets-based systems if possible. Assets-based frameworks are harder to understand by end-users.

4. Pick an online solution. It just makes sense to minimize IT involvement as much as possible in these times, and this is where things are heading anyway. If you’re in IT, ride the wave, don’t fight it.

A more detailed review of execution factors can be found here:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/featured-articles/seo-and-cms-best-practices-during-deployment-part-2-001056.php

Now, this being said, at the time I would have loved to complete my answer with the following remark, so if the gentleman from London happens to read this post, this is for you.

I feel that CMSs are the right answer to the wrong question. Given the number of stakeholders in a typical decision process, I’ve seen many CMS-related projects stall, becoming overly complex, expensive, confusing and with no clear ROI for anyone. Between IT, brand and product marketing, sales, operations, and support, everyone has their say in such a project, which results in mentioning all the adjectives associated with the project above.

As a result, I believe the best path is to clearly pin a project’s ownership on a single area of the organization. In many instances, I have seen that the expressed or implied endgame is to generate sales leads. If that is the case in your organization, then sales should be in charge, period. This changes everything. Now you’re not looking for a CMS anymore, you’re looking for a sales generation engine. The priorities are clear: the return on investment can be easily measured and the execution time frame drastically cut down.  For that later reason only, pinning down the project on sales will make this approach ROI  much greater than the original alternative. While others are still planning, you’re already generating additional sales, or so the thinking goes.

It does not mean that all other departments can be forgotten and sacrificed. It just means you build a solid foundation to incrementally improve and better serve the needs of everyone else within the organization.

In a down economy, shorter, less complex projects with clear driving forces, accountability and ROI make sense to me. Does it make sense to you? Please let me know your thoughts.

At last, I can find enough time to update our blog with a few recent discussions I had with some fellow search engine optimization experts, thanks to Jody, John, and Motoko for their time and the opportunity. I’ve included the question I’d like best, and added a link for you to follow if you wish to read the rest of these interviews…

[John Myers] What advice would you give to a small business planning on developing SEO activity from scratch?

You came to right place J. OK, seriously, the first step is to clarify what you are trying to sell and to whom. Make sure you get it right because everything else depends on it, and I have seen many small business owners enlightened by having to go through the SEO process. In fact, I think it should be very much part of the value proposition coming from SEO experts, as there’s a chance that you’re the closest thing to a marketing agency they have ever hired. An excellent resource for this that we feature in the SEO Bootcamp at SEO Samba is Pragmatic

Marketing

Read the rest of the interview here with John here: http://jons-domain.blogspot.com/2009/02/rhythm-and-seo-combined-jon-myers.html

[Motoko Hunt] SEO is no longer just about the web site. Blog, video sharing and so many social media applications are out there. I am sure that it is getting to be very challenging to all the site owners especially to small-medium businesses with limited budget and manpower. Any advice on where to start?

A number of applications (.http://www.twhirl.org/, http://ping.fm, http://friendfeed.com/ ) have hit the marketplace recently that seek to aggregate social channels into a single broadcasting interface. While interesting and useful to their target users, most focus on building as large of a distribution network as possible for individual mass-market users.

We address this challenge differently with SEO Samba and focus on the needs of small and medium business web marketers and giving additional ammunition to our SEO firm partners. We see organic search as a field increasingly going beyond text results indeed. Social applications, news, blogs, video are all “free-to-play” marketing channels but are costly to research, select, manage and integrate with other marketing endeavors. And from a SERP standpoint, there is more to it. As Google puts it in their FAQ, “Social media is great! But there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.” At SEO Samba, we discriminate and prioritize channels to focus on the ones that have the potential to generate highest volume of direct traffic and business activity while improving your rankings in search engines. In addition, we address the manpower challenge faced by SMB by providing a high level of integration and minimizing web marketers’ content creation efforts. For example, our first universal search module (provided free of charge) is a news module that provides a Google News-ready structure, news articles that are search optimized according to your chosen best practices, search friendly scrollers, automated RSS feeds creation, integrated with email newsletter platforms such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response etc. You can publish news across all your sites with a single click then aggregate news items across web sites to create unique newsletters and market to a cross segment of your email list, and, finally, save these newsletters with one click to any of your web sites. Each of our upcoming modules will provide the same level of details to ensure web site visibility, while expanding the least time possible from a user, content writer, marketer and SEO experts’ perspectives.

Read the rest of the interview with Motoko here: http://ajpr.com/wordpress/conferences/michael-leconte

Read the rest of the interview with Jody here: http://www.marketing-jive.com/2009/02/interview-with-michel-leconte-ceo-of.html

Howdy folks, another historic radiophonic moment in history of your truly talking about the SEO Samba organic search management platform. It probably isn’t quite on par with Orson Welles’ war of the worlds broadcast, and the Hindenburg disaster live news broadcast, but it is a start anyway

	Webmaster Radio
SEO Samba SEO Automation Platform Michel Leconte, the CEO of the first Organic Search Management Platform SEO Samba, tells us about developing search engine marketing strategies.

As promised, here is a classic tune from Neil Young which we’ve enjoyed after a memorable day at the Search Engine Strategy 08 Chicago show. Now, it is your turn to enjoy; Thanks to Chris for the video.

What a day yesterday was. First on the floor, last to leave. We are very happy with the way SEO Samba’s concept and capabilities has been received by our fellow SEO experts, and Web marketers. The response has been tremendeous. I’ve included a video from the SES video channel below where Chris plays the good-looking guy while I’m trying not to choke on my gum:

After 10  hours on the floor, we decided that we should really make it to this Neil Young concert at the Rosemont Arena, we were exhausted by then, but work hard/play hard is the name of the game at SEO Samba, damn the snow (in chicago, when it does not snow, it rains anyway..), we went….and then got awed and shocked (a bit like when some of the folks who found out that you can make it to the top of Google Web search within 2 minutes of a publishing a web page using SEO Samba), what a finale…Neil was amazing, two hours long of a mixed plugged/acoustic but always electrifying concert . An incredible launch day at SES Chicago, and an umbelievable night out with Neil Young..truly an extra ordinary 24 hours…Oh did I forget to tell you, we’ve got a few video shots of Neil Young too …these are coming next as soon as I can get my hand on a decent upstream connection.

Arrival in the great city of Chicago today; snow, 20 F (that’s -7 Celsius for our European friends), pictures of president-elect Obama right outside the airport…conform to our expectations on all counts. Still, boarding in California, and landing in Chicago has a chilling feeling for warm blood animals.

We’ve checked the exhibit floor out, and it looks like a construction site at this stage. At any rate, our booth gear was waiting for us, which is a good start. Tomorrow is setup time. We can’t wait to demo the first Organic Search Management Platform to our fellow SEO professionals & marketers.

It’s a big world, and I’m just one man.

Finally, some time to publish some news, and what news….SEO Samba has completed its first  angel round of funding back in September, and went on to recruit talented people, upgraded its server infrastructure, and released a new version of SEO Samba, the first and only organic search management platform. Our Captain A. release includes better error prevention, with autosave of page drafts and ajax controls. It also builds upon our succesful news and newsletter module, by allowing single click publishing of all your news items across any number of sites you’re writing content for. It encourages communication from end-users with their SEM agencies with a ‘live help’ Skype button, and fixes a number of minor bugs.

We will introduce SEO Samba to our fellow search marketers at SES Chicago on December 9th and 10th. Following Chicago, you will be have a chance to meet with our business development team and get live demos at SMX Santa Clara in February, and SES New York in March.

SEO Samba is already bringing predictability to marketer’s SEO efforts. In the first quarter of 2009, we will bring further integration with standard industry players and tools facilitating optimization, indexation, measurements, and adjustments. And this with a minimum amount of time and clicks whether you manage a one  or one thousand websites. In the same quarter, we’ll start supporting a limited number of new languages for both our interface and our SEO intelligence engine (we now enjoy daily interaction with fellow marketers from Java, Iraq, Egypt, Romania, Thailand, Brazil, France, Italia, The Netherlands, and more…)

I think that sums it up, ah yes, a new corporate site is under way. It’s going to be organic…all the way :-)…stay tune for more news in the coming days as I’ll be reporting from SES Chicago…

Marketing satellite SEO websites is a valuable SEO tactic that can be used in a number of situations. It can allow for intensive positioning of a select group of competitive keyword phrases that would be impossible to effectively position within the main site. It can also overcome many of the problems presented by sites that use extensive Flash or database-driven content, and give more control over indexation and rankings.

The satellite websites or “mini-site” concept, therefore, is gaining ground as effective sales channels. But it faces three major problems in order to drive a critical number of search engine referrals. Specifically, satellite websites lack content, keywords and linkage. Coincidentally, these are three of the most wanted items on search engines’ checklists. But for those who know the ropes, building a universe of satellite websites can result in powerful brand vehicles and marketing tools.
 

Content is the key
No matter how cutting edge and well rounded your mini-site is, if you don’t offer original, up-to-date content, visitors will vanish. Your traffic will stay low and your rankings will follow suit. But even by simply broadcasting a small part of your staff’s combined knowledge you will provide useful information and gain opportunities to disseminate selected keywords within your content, reinforcing your chances of top ranking. Copywriting services, information swapping, content aggregation and email marketing will complement your content offering and provide you with a great platform for your industry, market, services or products.

Keyword concentration
Mini-sites, much more specific in scope, should be entirely built around a few efficient and related keywords, articulating a consistent theme throughout its few pages. Industry-oriented or informational sites are ideal candidates, as they can branch out to products or services presented on your main website. The main difference with larger sites is that mini-sites address a much more targeted niche. But they require going through the same optimization process as bigger sites, only on a much smaller scale, at least initially.

Link popularity
As you may know by now, a decisive factor in search engine positioning is the number of links pointing to you. For out-of-the-box satellite sites, this can be accomplished by first referencing the site in directories using fee-based submissions. However, the ideal situation is to have search engines find you, not the other way around. A link from a well-established site, even in an unrelated business, will do the trick for initial indexation.

Once your homepage makes it into the index – Google is fastest at this game – other pages will follow suit. In turn, optimized pages will generate top listings and traffic referrals. As a result, you will get many prominent links coming from well-known sites. Of course, as you build multiple properties, all of them will cross-link using appropriate keywords. Each page referenced in a search engine is an additional link. After a few months your site will be ranked as reasonably popular. In turn, it will be used as a launching pad for new networked sites and help search engines understand what niche they’re catering to.

 
Creating theme-based satellites or mini-sites can add great value to your existing presence by offering specific content to a more targeted audience. It is a cost-effective way to address precise market segments, enhancing both customer relationships and brand awareness while generating qualified sales referrals. It is also an excellent way of building business continuity into your online operations and more control over your search engine traffic.

 
In short, to take control of your SEO universe on any kind of scale, tools are needed to keep content fresh and cross-links updated while avoiding costly pitfalls such as same server or C-class hosting and many others.  The more sites you have, the more critical the system is.

Obviously, here I’d recommend using SEO Samba for this. SEO Samba is an excellent vehicle to develop and manage online properties and satellites by making it very efficient to maintain a large number of optimized sites over time.

An old friend came to dinner this week and mentioned that he was going to Las Vegas next month for the World Series of Poker. I knew he was playing cards online, but I did not know he was that good. It turned out he did not win a wild-card in a poker room. He won thanks to an essay he wrote and posted in a forum (watch out, it’s in French ) .

The owners of this forum, who also own a poker site, launched a contest asking community members to write essays: contestants had to pretend they had been hired by the site to cover the Vegas championship.  A winner was picked by a jury composed of community members, and took home a plane trip, hotel accommodations, and a cash money prize.

I thought it was a pretty nifty way of creating buzz around a forum. And judging by the volume of posts during that period, I can only conclude it worked pretty well for the site’s owner as well, since poker rooms usually take 10 percent of the house bets.

Another element came to light. Jo Mannix (his forum name) went to a championship in Monte Carlo in the preceding months (he lives nearby) and posted short essays in the forum about his sightings. This certainly gave him a leg up over other competitors. After all, he had done reporting on behalf of this community already. Hmmm, food for thought. A good deed is never lost and can always been leveraged in a connected world. I hope to meet many SEOsambaists through this blog, and I might stop by Vegas for the WSOP, just to check on Jo Mannix, of course.