Paul HylandI’d like to thank Aaron Kahlow and all the folks at Online Marketing for Marketers for giving me the opportunity to blog about online marketing. I’ve been a recent speaker at the Online Marketing Summit, participating on the brands panel — particularly contributing insights into social media marketing. I will be writing about my experience and impressions at OMS stops in New Jersey and Boston, but first I thought I would introduce myself and blog a little about this week’s topic, SEO. I previously blogged about this on my blog, listing SEO Resources, Events, Consultants, Blogs, Etc., but while that was a resource listing, this one strives to be a little more informative.

I run the web sites at edweek.org — overseeing the technology infrastructure and software development and integration, along with the content production and online editorial processes; I’ve been working in the Internet and online space for over 15 years. So I’m really more of an online, social media guy than anything to do with marketing per se, but I’ve been assuming a much larger role in marketing the ideas and content produced by Education Week and our other publications, since that is a major reason for social media anyway — our essential business justification for expending any resources on these technologies revolves around increasing the influence of our ideas and enhancing the engagement with our readers and others through conversation. Figuring out how to measure these attributes is one of my major tasks at the moment.

When I heard that the weekly topic of discussion was Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I decided to weigh in because we owe such a debt to the topic host, Ray (Catfish) Comstock. I attended a seminar he taught at a WebSideStory conference (now part of Omniture), and some of what I learned there formed the basis for our first SEO overhaul since I joined edweek.org — leading us to make many basic alterations to our site similar to those he outlined recently in SEO 101 - 5 Important Steps for the Novice SEO.

Jumping off from that entry, I want to discuss the specific case of a content site, particularly one engaged in journalism. These have special challenges, as they cannot as easily subordinate titles and content text to SEO imperitives, but the cool thing about SEO done right from our perspective is that you can make your content work better for search engines at the same time that you make it easier for humans to find, select, and understand — the goal of all good SEO should be to enhance usability at the same time, not to work at cross-purposes with human understanding.

First up, you need to make your page titles as SEO-friendly as possible. The <title>-tag title is really the most important single piece of content on your page, both for your audience and for search engine spiders. It should include as many keywords as appropriate while still conveying the subject covered, and they should work both in- and out-of-context — its meaning should be obvious to readers of a list of articles about a topic, seeing links posted by friends, in lists of popular content, and in search engine results. Remember that less human readers are encountering your articles via the home page or topic collection pages, and more are seeing them in search engine results, Digg or Facebook, emailed by a friend, etc. It should be easy for the reader to understand the subject matter without context. Also to be avoided are cutesy magazine-style headlines. Several of our editors and producers watched a great webinar held by the Poynter Institute’s News University entitled Writing Headlines for the Web — definitely worth the investment for anybody writing news headlines on a regular basis.

Other simple guidelines learned in Catfish’s class include ensuring that meta descriptions are included in all posts, and provide information useful to readers selecting from a list of links, whether in search results or on pages that list stories on our own site. On our site, the description/excerpt defaults to the first paragraph, but we are trying to rewrite these more often to ensure that they stand on their own as a story abstract. Also, you need to ensure that your stories’ semantic structure, conveyed through headings and subheads, is accurately parsed by the search engine spiders, which means that you need to use the proper <h1> <h2> etc. tags, rather then simply styling <div> or <p> text to look like headlines and subheads. Including as many keywords as possible in all of these semantically more important areas of the story will help, not only the search engine, but hopefully the human reader as well.

Finally, in an effort we’re still working on, we’re creating lists of 2-3 word phrases that are most-often searched for by our readers, both on our internal search engine and on Google and other outside searches. These keyword phrases need to be specialized enough that we attract readers truly interested in our content, and less likely to have lots of competition. We want to concentrate on “no child left behind,” “special education,” “school safety” rather than “education.” We have generated these lists, and now we’re working on creating landing pages full of articles and other related resources; we already have pages for some hot topics, but we need to concentrate on a standard design and reducing duplication, then expanding the list, and focusing on the SEO of these pages. Our home pages and individual articles already perform quite well in search rankings, but these potential landing pages could provide an even better gateway to our site — particularly from organic search, but also potentially for marketing to sites or blogs of interest to the narrow topics represented.