Let's face it. Google is search. When we first started developing plug-ins to our content management system, we did what any other software company would do and attempted pre-maturely optimize our solution to support any search engine. But pretty soon that gave way to Google specific reporting, optimizations, and API integration.

Google now has 2 menu items in the i-Dialogue control panel. One for API integration and one for Webmaster reports... and as we start rolling out a new daily email reporting system, Google once again has it's own specific reporting module.

Some reports show that half of all Internet searches were done through Google in 2007, but I suspect it's closer to 60%.

From a relationship marketing software perspective the trend is clear. Generic SEO and PPC tracking features will start giving way to Google and Yahoo specific tools and reports as this becomes a 2 horse race that controls 80% of the search advertising market combined (but that's not to say there won't be plenty of opportunities in the Long Tail).

So as a Microsoft partner, what are my thoughts on MSN and Live? www.live.com market share is truly disappointing and perhaps somewhat undeserved. The image search feature is much better than any other search I've used and I like the fact that Live Maps makes a guess at my Geo location based on my IP address and defaults to my location.

But I still find myself using Google for text, news, and Blog searches, simply because I know Google's algorithms set the industry standard and anything else has a feeling of "also ran" when you use it.

Finally, www.ask.com is another dark horse search engine that probably deserves more market share than it has today. It's quite a comeback story and you can really see the passion that went into reinventing this 90's Internet bubble darling.

It's disappointing to see Google drop support for their Google API. I had (false) hopes that they would extend this API to allow Marketers to extract information like PageRank and AdWord statistics through the API.

This is a step backwards. Google, please follow Salesforce.com's lead and allow paying customers to access their own data. The goodwill of providing "free" access to applications in exchange for delivering ads is wearing thin in the business world.

i-Dialogue Site Maps were launched last year based on Google's Site Map specification (see an example site map here) as part of our SEO toolset.

Now Microsoft and Yahoo have announced support for the Site Map specification making it even easier to publish new landing/web pages that are immediately crawled and indexed by the leading search engines.

We'll likely update our i-Dialogue portal provisioning process to register each site's XML map with all the leading search engines at once. It's great to see Yahoo and MSFT leverage this existing specification instead of reinventing their own.

Problem: You need to create several personalized landing pages that have similar content, so you cut-and-paste the content from another page.

Google crawls your site, finds the duplicate content and penalizes your Page Rank because your site has the characteristics of a spam farm.

Background: Unscrupulous Search Engine Optimization specialists have in the past created hundreds and thousands of mock pages with nearly identical content in hopes of fooling the search engines into thinking their site is more focused on a particular keyword than the competition.

Therefore, Google bot has been modified to look for these "farms" of spam pages that contain duplicate content and remove them from the search results.

Solution: How does a honest Marketer go about creating several personalized landing pages that contain some overlapping or duplicate content? You simply tell Google bot to ignore the duplicate pages.

Here's how to do this in i-Dialogue:

1) Login as a site admin or publisher.
2) Create the personalized page with duplicate content.
3) Select Edit Page Content from the Tools menu
4) Un-Check the "Allow Robots to Index This Page" "Allow Robots to Follow Links on this Page" option and then click Finished (see screenshot below).

When Google, or any other META tag confirming robot, visits your landing page, the bot will simply ignore the duplicate content.

Here's a guick tip to help customers find what they're looking on your web site.


Problem: Customers searching your web site may misspell search terms, use outdated product names or variations on keywords.

Solution: Create "Best Bet" search results that intercept search terms and direct customers in the right direction.

How To Create a "Best Bet" in i-Dialogue.

1. Login as a site Administrator
2. Navigate to the Search/Best Bets tree menu.
3. Enter the search term keywords that you want to evaluate.
4. Create a relevant search result for the keyword with headline, abstract, and web link.



Test the keyword by clicking on the "Test" link and then review the results.

Sending an email to all your customers in the Pacific Northwest announcing a one-day training event may be simple enough, assuming you already have geographic data for your existing customers. But how do you present a geo-relevant web page to anonymous web leads and prospects?

Well, there are a couple options. There are database companies (like ip2location) that take a best guess at where anonymous web visitors are physically located based on their Internet Address. This is really the best option for public pages handling organic leads that cannot assume where the visit is coming from.

The other option is to utilize the geographic targeting capabilities of PPC advertising engines, such as Google's AdWords campaign manager (see screen shot below).

These tools allow marketers to target customers by location and direct them to geographically relevant web pages.

This is an extremely important facet of Internet marketing that must not be overlooked. It really pains me to do a Google search on something like "transmission repair" and see pay-per-click AdWords along the right side for businesses like "Bob's Transmission Repair Shop" in North Carolina.

Clearly Bob is not interested in attracting International business and will likely burn through his daily advertising budget is less than 2 hours unless the ad can be geographically targeted to only IP addresses in North Carolina.

While writing my previous post on SEO Fundamentals, it occurred to the me that it wouldn't take too much effort to automate an analysis of these best practices in i-Dialogue Customer Portal. About 2 hours later I came up with the following report, which is available in 6.01.

There are a number of other heuristics I'd like to add to this report, such as checking for the existence of <H1> and <H2> tags, and duplicate HTML content.

But for now, this is a great tool for quickly determining which best practices are not being enforced with convenient hyperlinks directly to the pages for on the spot correction.

Search Engine Optimization is really just good copywriting. That's all there is to it. Sure, some technical skills are useful, but 80%+ of effective SEO is about writing good copy.

For example, if a customer is interested in purchasing a "widget offset attenuator" (fictional bizarre example here) they are very likely to enter this term into a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!

Now, if you sell "widget offset attenuators" how do you ensure your web site gets listed towards the top of the search engine results page (SERP)? Simple, you write structured copy in a language that search engine bots understand. Bots are constantly crawling the web, visiting your web site, and recording the information they find on your site.

But having "widget offset attenuator" simply in the HTML of a web page is not enough. If the bot also sees that the name of the page URL is widgetOffsetAttenuators.aspx, the Title of the page is "Widget Offset Attenuators", and page description and keywords support this, then most bots are designed to conclude "Yep.... these folks are more serious about 'widget offset attenuators' than any other page I've visited. Let's rank them higher".

Here's a simple SEO page template that we use for all i-Dialogue marketing campaigns:

URL Name:
Title:
Description:
Keywords:
Heading 1:
Heading 2:

And a completed template might look something like this:

URL Name:
Title:
Description:	Provides attentuation and precise adjustment for Widget offset frequencies.
Keywords:
Heading 1:
Heading 2:

Each of these fields in an i-Dialogue web site is mapped to a structured tag in a page template that is guaranteed to be requested by each search engine bot and used in their evaluation of the web site.

So, you can see that the actual technical aspect of SEO, once the template is done and out of the way, is quite easy. i-Dialogue uses a database to store these values, but you can just as easily add them to your own HTML page template (See more on META Tags here).

The really difficult part of SEO is having the discipline to complete this template for every single public page in the web site, and writing effective, clear and concise copy. This is the only way to achieve organic and enduring search results and is fundamental to every successful web marketing campaign.

An SEO copywriter must have the ability, in this example, to think like the prospective customer and know several other alternative keywords and phrases the customer may be looking for. Instead of "widget offset attenuator", some customers might try "widget adjuster" or "widget attenuator".

Customers will search on both singular and plural variations of your products and services. They will often misspell them (and yes.... you should create pages dedicated to misspelled variations if you think the occurrence frequency is high enough).

Internet customers, as a whole, will tend to enter simpler keywords and phrases than more complex ones. Monitoring your own web sites search engine is a continuous, iterative activity that good SEO copywriters engage in to understand what customers are actually looking for.


Things not to do:
Some SE optimizers might think "If a few well placed keywords and META tags are good, then repeating the keywords several times must be very good!". No... this is actually very wrong and most bots will penalize your web site if they discover hidden text (white font color on white background or commented text) or duplicate keywords.

Duplicate copy on multiple pages is another thing to avoid. Bots believe that when this pattern occurs, that they are being lured into a "link farm", which is a common tactic to artificially create the illusion that a particular page or keyword is more popular than it actually is.

Your organization name should not appear in any of the template fields, except for the home page, about us, or contact us pages.


So remember... it all starts with good copywriting. In a future article, I'll discuss how to build on these SEO fundamentals and pursue some more advanced SEO activities.

Many businesses are in a dilemma when it comes to upgrading or migrating their web site. On one hand, several existing web pages may have a high Google Page Rank (or other search engine ranking) as a result of several in-bound links from several other sites.

On the other hand, this high ranking is useless because the web page is outdated (either the technology or the content) and does not contribute towards lead conversion or initiating a web dialogue.

There are basically 2 techniques that I use to help businesses migrate all or part of their web site to a new i-Dialogue customer portal. Note:

301 Redirects. This involves mapping existing web content to a new location and crafting some 301 status messages that instruct search engine crawlers and web browsers to visit the new site or page. These 301 redirectors may be maintained indefinitely, but usually 3-6 months is recommended.

Extension Mapping. Web pages developed in the 90's likely have file extensions that end in ".htm" or ".html". Newer web sites may use extensions like ".jsp", ".cf", ".asp", or ".aspx". While the ".aspx" is the default used for i-Dialogue portals, it is possible to map page extensions to any number of characters.

So instead of redirecting your existing productName.html page to productName.aspx, we simply map all requests for the ".html" extension to the newer ".aspx" extension and the page requester doesn't notice the difference.

Note that Google and other search engines use a wide variety of algorithms to rank pages, and a complete overhaul of a web site, regardless if the URLs are kept in tact, often leads to temporary reduction in page rank; but with (hopefully) a long term gain since the entire portal has been optimized for the search engine.

Definition of acronyms and terms used on this blog:

B2B = Business to Business
B2C = Business to Consumer
CRM = Customer Relationship Management
iCRM = Internet CRM
RSS = Really Simple Syndication
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
PPC = Pay Per Click
SERP = Search Engine Results Page
CPM = Cost Per Thousand (from Roman numeral "M")
WSS = Web Self-Service

The i-Dialogue web log analysis reports are starting to show referrals from search engines after 2-3 weeks of registering the i-dialogue.com sitemap on Google.

But alas, the page rank either has not been updated or the i-Dialogue domain has not been established long enough to be worthy of ranking :-( . This is to be expected since i-dialogue is still in early beta release and there have been no press releases or other inbound link activity to help establish what i-Dialogue is.

I suspect the search phrases that are refering people to our site are buried 10 pages deep and our PR of 0 on some phrases is at least relevant enough to be listed on Google or MSN.

But the spiders are very busy on our web site. Every page in the SiteMap gets a thorough crawl at least once a day by GoogleBot. MSN is able to crawl most pages using the human-friendly site map page, which is auto-generated by the i-dialogue content management system.

Next steps: i-dialogue.com is ready for a wider Beta launch. Press releases on prweb.com and various CRM sites are coming soon, which will improve the inbound link positioning.

Since Internet Marketing and web design are so closely intertwined, it makes sense to take a close look at the AJAX web application design trend and how it impacts your web site.  

AJAX is simply a way of creating more dynamic web sites that respond to user requests on the browser rather than going back to the server to refresh a page.

Alex Bosworth has a great list of AJAX Mistakes that warrant some consideration. The "Blocking Spidering" is the most pertinent mistake item when it comes to optimizing your web page for search engines.

With search engines, you very rarely get a second chance at first impressions. By this I mean that once a robot or spider has visited a page and stored its content, it typically expects links on that page to refer to other pages; not dynamically alter the current page as AJAX does.

i-Dialogue incorporates some AJAX techniques for the admin/design interface, but for the customer facing experience we prefer to leave as much the site as static as possible. Namely because robots and spiders want to know what your page offers when they visit, and if they must traverse through an infinite number of dynamic links they will most often give up and assume their first impression of your page is the best impression.

Exceptions to this rule might occur when providing a lead capture or profiling form to a user that can be asynchronously sent back to the server for processing while the user just sees an "Updating our records..." message. This lets the user continue contemplating what action to do next in the portal without disrupting the experience.

Since this site is brand new, it's a great opportunity to measure our Google PR on a nightly basis and create some time-series analysis graphs as we do SEO.

Having stabilized on PR5 with our parent company site, it's rather disconcerting to start from 0 on i-dialogue.com, but the goal is to organically grow some key i-dialogue pages to PR6 over the next several months.

So, how will we do that? There are a few basic areas we focus on when doing SEO:

Keyword identification: What are customers looking for when they're seeking a solution such as ours? Personalized email marketing, customer portal, and customer segmentation are just a few areas that we specialize in.

On Page Optimizations: Before worrying about inbound links, we first make sure we've done everything we can do to the pages themselves. Each page's META tags (Title, Description, and Keywords) get a couple passes at copy writing. H1 and H2 tags are built into the page template and force the copy writer to develop both pithy and verbose summaries of the page.

The sitemap link in the page footer is actually auto-generated by i-Dialogue Customer Portal. It's important that web crawlers have the ability to access any page within the site in 2 links.

All pages are accessible as top level pages; i.e. no pages are buried in sub-directories. This approach requires a naming convention that embeds any hierarchical or categorical structure into the page name itself.

Frequent Content Updates: Search engine love new content. The assumption being that if you are adding new content, your site is more worthy of being visited relative to one that is not changing.

Google SiteMap Integration: Google now supports XML sitemaps that they claim will not improve your PR, but will give GoogleBot a better understanding of your sites structure and frequency of change.

i-Dialogue portal auto generates a Google SiteMap. They last I checked, it appears GoogleBot is pulling this sitemap down 1-2 times a day.

Inbound Links: This is really the core of Google PR. If a site is authoritative for a particular topic then several other sites will link to it. Unfortunately, too many nefarious folks have attempted to artificially inflate their PR with link farms and a variety of other tricks which Google eventually figures out anyway.

Authoritativeness and the frequency of content changes are closely linked. The objective is to make real information available that others will find immediately useful. The more informative your site is, the more authoritative it becomes.

Brochure-ware web sites are difficult to optimize without at least 1 or 2 free white papers, a top 10 list, or some piece of information that prospects and customers will find useful.

Measure and Optimize: You won't know if you are improving unless you actually measure your page rank and make changes in response to real data.