Archive for the ‘SEO CMS’ Category

How the Web’s Rich Get Richer

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

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.

Posted in Multi-Sites SEO, SEO CMS, SEO software, Search Industry | Comments Off

SEO friendly CMS meet blogs & feeds

Monday, March 9th, 2009
See Michel Leconte at SES New York

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.

Posted in SEM events, SEO CMS | Comments Off