Using SEO to Your Benefit

Search. Engine. Optimization. Three words that can make or break your company’s online search engine results.

Wikipedia defines SEO as “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via search results.” This is important because the higher a site is listed in the search results the more searchers will visit that site.

The best description I could find of how Google works is here:

“Google indexes pages on the Web by using what are commonly known as “spiders”, ‘crawlers,’ or ‘robots.’ Google’s famous search engine spider, GoogleBot, uses links on web pages as a sort of freeway. It travels from site to site by following links. When Google finds a new web page, Google will “crawl” the code on the page and transport it back to its datacenter.”

The Web Developer’s Journal has these and other tips to help optimize your company’s search engine results:

1. Fine tune the TITLE tag to increase traffic to the site. Make sure it includes keywords that potential visitors will be search for on engines like Google.
2. Create gateway pages that are specific to the focus of each site.
3. Ensure that your web site technology won’t confuse the search engines.
4. Search the search engines to see where your web site is listed.
5. Learn more about how search engines work.

To get started and submit your web site to Google, go here.

The New Face of Politics

A large part of Public Relations 2.0 is the ability to surrender control.

Once information is released into social media outlets, it is out of our hands and we can’t control what may happen next. This is difficult to get used to for many public relations folks and organizations of all sizes.

Recently, the political realm joined public relations practitioners in letting go during the CNN/YouTube debate.

Democratic candidates for the presidency participated in a debate with questions provided by Average Joes (and Joannas) via YouTube. This new format stripped the formality from presidential debates and allowed the questioners to ask sharp questions and confront the candidates if they felt their questions were not answered.

The new format allowed greater participation and greater perceived access to presidential candidates (the questions were pre-chosen by CNN and the winning YouTube users flown to South Carolina for the debate).

Some candidates have already jumped on the social media bandwagon. For example, Barack Obama uses Twitter; John Edward has an avatar and election headquarters in Second Life; and many candidates have profiles on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.

This will be the first presidential election in which social media plays a large part. In the next year, social media will involve itself in different aspects of the election process and Verve can’t wait to see how it turns out! And what lessons we can learn for those clients who aren’t in the political realm.

Summertime & the Livin’ is Eas(ier)

Apologies all around for being a bit slow with the posts so far this month. I think with the rise in temperatures comes an stymied ability to multi-task effectively. And for some reason, that meant In Bloom fell off a bit.

Part of our summertime activities include revamping the Verve Web site. As such, I’ve been thinking about design and content and navigation and how to maximize our use of cyber real estate.

I will bring more discussion about how we make these decisions and maybe even some sneak peeks as we move through the process. If you have any ideas, speak up!