SEO Hell Yeah! | Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing & Beyond

So tonight I had some friends over and we busted out the ole’ wireless guitar for some Guitar Hero 3 action.  After the game loaded up, we heard an extremely funky noise come from the DVD drive.  It sounded, literally, like something just scratched the bottom of the game disc violently.  After this sudden audio interruption, my system locked up with a weird green-tinted checkerboard display on the screen.  After a couple of restarts, it was toast.

Having been in the gaming space for so long, I knew this was going to happen.  In fact, due to this wide-spread hardware failure, Microsoft is in the dog house $1 billion due to this unfortunate hardware malfunction.  But imagine if I were to not know what this was… and when those dreaded red rings of death did indeed pop up, if I were to Google it, the search yields 167k results varying from using towels to “fix” the problem to an official support page from Microsoft.

So how does this pertain at all to search marketing… and more specifically, online reputation management of the Xbox 360’s brand?  This is one of the few cases where user opinion has been so negative that any form of online reputation simply couldn’t counteract the negativity & vast amount of opinions about the issue.  Sometimes you just can’t manage the reputation of a product of service due to an overwhelming response.  In this case, Microsoft had to opt out of any sort of Online Reputation, set up a service that costs them around $1 billion and handle it this way.

They should have known they were setting themselves up with this drastic “fix-up cost” when they decided to try to manufacture at a cheaper cost.  And unfortunately, no amount of Online Reputation work can wipe that away…

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Turns out I’m going to be attending SMX West in Santa Clara, California in February.  Gotta say, I’m pretty excited.  I’ve been to a couple of conferences (SearchFest and a couple of local Innotech conferences) but never one this big before.

I have yet to map out my plan of “session” attack… but I will post recaps of just about each session I’m going to attend.

Who else is attending?

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I’m not one to be really caught up in anything concerning politics; it’s just something I’ve never truly been interested in.  But I have to say, local candidate Steve Novick has a TV spot that I find fairly effective.  You can see the embedded Youtube video on his ‘Novick for Senate’ site.

I think the commercial does a good job of differentiating Novick from what everyone thinks a Politician should be.  In the same regard, I think on the national scale Barack Obama has the same thing going for him: he just doesn’t seem like a politician.

Sometimes this strategy works for websites as well.  Position your site a little differently from your competitors; don’t go for the typical sales approach.  Who knows - your target audience just may like seeing something a little bit different and fresh…

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I’m a big fan of lists. Though, not just a regular “top 5″ or “top 10″ - how about a list of the top 4 indications that your site needs some SEO help? Here we go:

1. Your home page’s title tag is “Home.” Well, that’s great and all… at least when I’m on that page I know where I am on your site. But let’s see some detail!
2. When asked if your site is in frames, you respond with a, “Well, duh of COURSE it is!” I remember a good friend’s personal site back in the day that actually looked kinda cool with frames. Unfortunately, frames has gone the way of the dodo bird… except that they aren’t extinct (I see them on a daily basis… still…)
3. You publish lots of articles for syndication purposes… but they don’t exist on your site. You’re already writing the content! Get an optimized resources section with high-level summary pages for each article and, if you choose to, get a registration form to capture leads if someone wants to read an article in its entirety!
4. You don’t have dedicated, standalone pages for specific products / services. Search engines <3 pages that are on topic, clear, and to the point. You don’t want to have a services page (well, maybe a higher level services page that talks in some fashion about what you currently offer) that talks about all three of the products you offer. Break it up to several pages that each talk about one specific product or service.

Of course there are many other indications… but these four are ones that you can quickly scan a site (hopefully not your own!) and tell if they’ve done a good job optimizing it.

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Seeing as how SEO Hell Yeah! is brand spanking new, I’ve been able to download and install plugins that I’ve tested and used before for other Wordpress installs I’ve made.  A couple that are my two go-to SEO plugins - Ultimate Tag Warrior and SEO Title Tag - either are obsolete (in UTW’s case, Wordpress 2.3 includes tagging) or don’t seem to play nice with the newest version of Wordpress (such is the case for SEO Title Tag).  So, due to this, I’m using Optimal Title, a nice alternative to SEO Title Tag.  While not… option-rich as SEO Title Tag, it does its title tag job nicely.

I’ve yet to install Share This, which is pretty slick.  I suppose I’ll get that done tomorrow at some point…

Any other plugins I’m missing?  Any you find to be useful?

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