If you doing SEO to any reasonable level you would understand the concept of theming and siloing developed by Bruce Clay. Theming and siloing at a simplistic level relates to grouping pages of similar content and passing PageRank to those pages you want the search engines to see as important. Simple, right.
Marriage has a lot of similarities to the theming and siloing for the following reasons, just think about it.
Here are the top 10 reasons website siloing for search engine optimisation is just like marriage:
- Linking outside your silo is not a good thing
- Bringing unrelated 3rd parties into your silo can result in relationship dilution and a loss of important rankings
- You may think a rel=nofollow will hide something, but trust me, someone will find out, somewhere and it will get indexed Read more…
Mixing up SEO and SEM. Logically these 2 should fit snugly together, practically the skills couldn’t be further apart. SEO is more business focused, strategic, innovative and technical. SEM or paid search requires focus where cost per conversion or acquisition is being targeted and is somewhat process driven with some creativity required for the ads. We have found staff fit into, and do well in 1 of these areas, seldomly do they excel at both.
Having established that, where do they converge and where is it important to have touch points:
- Keyword research and the use and identification of keywords in general is the obvious starting point, confirming focus, search volumes and usage between the 2 areas
- Campaigns, ensuring both teams understand what current and future campaigns are on the go and which are better served by SEO, medium term and SEM, short term etc.
- Links to the offline marketing team, to understand offline activities, branding efforts etc.
- Reporting, ensuring both the SEO and SEM teams work in tandem and are not dysfunctional
SEM Teams
Finding SEM staff is a little easier, finding SEM staff who have managed a provider/ agency relationship and who have managed large campaigns is a little more difficult. SEM is also also becoming increasingly competitive and software centric (Bid management software) so finding SEM staff with the above skills and with relevant bid management software experience can be even more difficult. Training outside of practical experience in a good SEM provider is hard to find.
Some considerations for the SEM Team
- Consider centralising SEM management, keeping expertise and liason with external providers through a single point of contact Read more…
The ongoing saga of firstly whether to build an in-house SEO team or outsource and then how to best structure this team to work across marketing, legal, sales and IT.
As always, onesize does not fit all and there are factors such as organisation size, geographic location, culture, maturity of the web presence and also the role the web presence plays in the marketing mix. Organisations whose website or sites are there key channel to market obviously would rate this a higher priority than say an offline retailer who does not sell online but merely provides information.
Approach it logically
Having said that, consider the following.
- If you are doing search engine optimisation (SEO), you are more than likely doing or considering doing paid search or search engine marketing (SEM).
- If you are doing either of these you are hopefully also running some form of Analytics
- SEO and SEM although different skill sets, SEO is specialised while SEM is more process driven, but still converge when it comes to landing pages, on-page content and quality scores and conversion
- Finally, these numbers all need to agree, the traffic numbers from SEO need to be reconciled with the numbers form SEM and SEM spend to other marketing campaigns.
- Marketing folk from all over the business need to give input on keywords, campaigns and initiatives. Make sense. Read on…
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Trusted sites are dead, or are they?
Past behaviour: Find a source that provides good service, good content and is credible. Return there whenever you need more information. You trust that it is the best.
New Behaviour: Loyalty is dead. When I need something I search. I cannot recall the sites visited. When I find what Im looking for I stop, use and move on.
Hypothesis: Your homepage is no longer the doorway to your website, the search engines are. They will deem the most appropriate page in your site to the search engine query and then deliver that page to the user, the user can drop in anywhere. Users don’t necessarily want a user experience they want specific information or knowledge, thus the query. A user process or experience also usually starts from the homepage and works ina logical manner, most users don’t, due to search.
Impact on design: Traditional design focuses on the homepage as the entry point, traditionally a clean splash type page and the usage or words, considered cool
The world has changed: When designing or building your new website consider the following, to
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