Cdm? Never heard of it you say? That’s because I just made it up. Seo, in reality, is a technical thing. It starts with the way a site is put together and includes things like title tag management. Cdm is often confused with seo, but I think it’s completely different. Cdm is content distribution management. Often thought of as seo, but the traditional thinking on seo really has two parts…and I don’t think it’s right to lump them together. Seo involves prepping a site to be search friendly - all of the on page aspects. Cdm is making sure someone notices. Your site can be technically perfect from a search engine’s point of view, but that really doesn’t matter unless someone thinks your site is worth their time. People think a site is worth their time if they’ve heard about it. You’ll rarely hear about a site unless it engages in some cdm. Furthermore, as search engines become more refined, thee on page stuff matters less. In the end cdm is more important than seo (though your seo should be nearly flawless) and it’s going to be the next big web service market (especially as seo moves in-house or dies).
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Search engine optimization seems to always be done from a backwards-looking perspective. A client comes to an SEM firm and says “what can we do NOW to improve our search rankings?” The problem would be a lot easier to fix if the site had been built with SEO in mind. Yes, SEO starts with design; and if you’re lacking in smart design then you’re coming into the SEO process with at least one strike against you (probably more). The good news for those that start with smart design is that you’re already a few steps ahead. When you get to the heart of it, there are only so many things one can do to separate one site from another in terms of SEO. Search-minded design is a thing that so few sites have, that it really makes a difference after the keyword stuffing and link baiting is finished.
If it’s important why don’t more websites do this?
The problem in my opinion, is that design, development, and services (things like SEO) are usually very separate. In fact, I can only recall ever seeing one or two search marketing firms that also offer design services. Design on the web is different than design in print or anywhere else - design on the web has to be smarter. You start with a logical layout, without tables, user Header tags intelligently, include alt tags, and ensure that your site looks good naked. Naked websites? That’s right, you need to make sure your site makes sense when you look at it without any design elements. For this I like to use the web developer toolbar in firefox. Use the toolbar to disable css and images and you’ll get a much better picture of how Google, Yahoo, and other search engines will see your site. If it makes sense naked, then you’re on your way to better optimization.
That’s easy right? So, why isn’t it done? Because, for the most part, this is not taught to web designers. Web designers are designers, not search optimizers - so they think in terms of design not SEO. They need to become both. From header tags, to microformats, this stuff has to be done at the design level. If you’re designers aren’t doing this, they are hurting your site in the long run.
SEO is easy, if you start with it in mind. It’s not a matter of difficulty it’s a matter of consistency and of site-wide or company-wide efforts.
More on SEO:
JD Amer’s SEO bookmarks on del.icio.us
I’ve been thinking lately that the majority of SEO is accidental. Think about it, for all of the queries that you do, how many sites do think intended that they come up for that query? All of them want to come up for as many phrases / keywords as possible, but for the most part they don’t think of the query that you’re doing unless it is a popular one. The vast majority of search is for the uncommon query and increasingly for longer queries.
This makes the majority of SEO accidental.
What does this mean? To be honest, I’m not real sure. What I think it means is that most websites are beatable in the race for search rankings. If you focus on a greater number of queries with less competition, instead of a few queries with high competition, you should be able to match if not exceed the traffic you would get from the high volume queries. And for those big queries, you’re probably better off buying keywords via AdWords. Why? 1) cheaper than hiring an SEO firm (but you should do that anyway). 2) it makes you look reputable - you may disagree, but if you’re willing to pay to get someone to click that usually means you’ve invested in your business and you’re not just playing SEM games. Personally, I’ve sometimes found that paid links are more relevant for keywords with high SEM competition. 3) you don’t need to have perfect seo to pay more than the next guy for an ad. Easiest way to win a keyword: pay for it.
Twitter. MyBlogLog. MySpace. These sites all have a few things in common, but the one I’m concerned with is the ability of allowing users to link their own sites. Allowing users to link to their sites seems relatively unimportant (sometimes irrelevant) until you think about how the web has changed. Now nearly everyone has a website, and nearly everyone thinks people should go to their website. For people to get to your site, you generally need links to the site. That’s the basic rule of SEM. A smart user of a site that allows you to link to your website won’t just link to their website, they feverishly add friends to their account. The more friends they have, the more pages there are linking to their user page on the site. The more links to their user page, the more important search engines think the page is, and thus the more valuable the link back to the users own site becomes. My guess is that this easy type of linking is greatly facilitating the ability of a number of sites to “be viral.” This is just one of the numerous things one should consider when developing a social networking site (or any type of site requiring an account) and one that I’m considering as I prepare to redo and redefine how social aspects are handled on Lopico.