Posted by Lee Odden on Jan 29th in Online Marketing, SEO, Business of SEO |

Explaining search engine optimization to newbies is something that anyone with sales or account support responsibilities at a search marketing or interactive agency is going to have to get good at. I used to spend a lot of time using the notion of “organic” and the whole “making fertile ground, planting seeds, nurturing, cultivating, watering, air, sun, bear fruit” kind of analogy but it gets old using the same description all the time.

The best way to explain the notion of optimizing web sites for search engines can vary depending on the starting point. For people stuck in 1999 SEO land, where it’s all about meta tags, submissions and SEO as a “one time” event, an explanation of the need for fresh, themed content and an ongoing pursuit of inbound links can become the focus.

On the other hand, if the company has been through 3 or 4 SEO overly aggressive SEO consultants, the situation may warrant some bad news about all the reciprocal links, third rate directory listings and keyword stuffed doorway pages that need to be cleaned up or dealt with before a reinclusion request can be filed.

The thing is, many of the companies that think they need SEO are in dire need of other process improvements first, such as a well defined conversion process, tracking and analytics. Sending a ton of qualified traffic to a site through relevant visibility on the major search engines, news search, blog search, social media and high profile links isn’t going to do you much good if there’s no accountability between the marketing and sales departments.

Many companies think they’re getting results from their online marketing, but do they REALLY know? In many cases, they don’t and need to spend some time on process and interdepartmental communication right along with their search marketing.

Search engines aren’t the only source of quality traffic either. The art and science of optimization can be extended to any document or file that can get crawled, indexed and ranked. Add to that the idea of social media and the effects of personalized search and explaining the variety of ways to optimize can become information overload.

The moniker, “search engine optimization” is a bit of a misnomer, since you’re not optimizing seach engines, you’re optimizing FOR search engines. SEO is fundamentally a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, include, categorize and rank your web content. That’s the starting point.

Because so many companies are in dire need of improvements with other matters related to marketing and business processes, many search marketing agencies that specialize in SEO provide a lot more than just keywords and links. That means the definition of what SEO “is”, means more as well.

So rather than spending a lot of time explaining algorithms, ranking and conversion analysis to someone who is very new to the idea of SEO, another explanation might have more to do with business marketing optimization. Or as an upcoming article I’m writing is titled, “Optimize Your Business for Search”.

This is a holistic approach to optimization that can affect a company from branding and communication to public relations, direct marketing and online marketing. For example, something as fundamental as including keyword research into corporate wide messaging can create many opportunities for search visibility as part of an ongoing process rather than individual “optimization” events.

How do you explain search engine optimization to newbies? Have you found clever analogies or metaphors?

Recruitment Tools

Tools are one of those things that job-seekers are increasingly frustrated by. I am the former owner of a recruiting website (actually I still own the domain name, www.GetWork.com but the company doesn’t exist anymore) so I have been exposed to hundreds of different recruiting tools. I am now a job-seeker and I have made a point of keeping notes on the recruitment tools that are easy and intuitive for applicants and those that are brutal and time-consuming.

Here, in my opinion, are the main issues that we applicants face:

1) Tools that ask for a Word version of a resume and then require one to fill out a long, cumbersome web form that includes everything already detailed in the Word resume. Applicants go to a lot of trouble to make résumés look nice and spend countless hours trying to make them stand out. I ask you; what is the point of having a tool that sorts, filters and qualifies applicants if good people are so frustrated by the redundancy and poor design of application tools that they quit half way through the process. Our time is valuable and filling out endless web forms with basic info is patently unnecessary. A tool that asks, "Do you fill these requirements?" then lists them, would be much easier. The only thing worse than that scenario is using a tool that parses info taken from your formatted résumé and places it into web forms incorrectly. This results in great candidates spending even more time correcting all of the mistakes that the form now contains and inevitably leads to a sloppy looking application.

2) I would guess that most HR people have never actually gone through the process of applying for a job using the online tools available to the public. Also, a great QA step would be to have 10 people who already work for the company, and preferably are managers that hire people, gather in a conference room with their laptops, go through the application process as if they were outside applicants, then write detailed notes about what they think of the efficiency of the process. Then compare and contrast this to ten people who have never worked for the company going through the same process. Especially take into account how long it takes to apply and what questions are asked that each group feel are absolutely necessary.

3) Almost all recruiting tools miss the mark when they do not enable one to ask pertinent questions about a position or contact someone to find out important details. In fact, I think the problem with all of these tools is that they have taken the human element out of the recruitment equation. For instance, if a position says it "requires" an MBA (as most of the jobs that I am interested in, and qualified for, do) I might want to ask if a M.A. in a similar discipline acceptable, or am I wasting my time even applying. I have a an advanced degree in organizational leadership, along with 12 years in marketing and strategic development, but if a company insists on limiting their applicant pool to those with a specific business degree, I would like to know if the degree that I have might be considered an equivalent or if I will DQ’d by the software that will see my résumé before any person does. The bottom line is that I only want to apply for jobs that I am qualified for so I do not look like I am just applying for every job posted on the site, but in many cases a tool might not recognize that I am qualified for a specific job due to fields which are too narrowly defined.

4) Many tools default to questions that are a little bit offensive and not pertinent to the recruitment process. A GREAT example is asking for specific salary details of past jobs. I completely understand the thought process behind this; figuring out whether someone who had a "director" level job title actually had a director level job. The problem is that some folks who choose to work at smaller companies might wear many hats and have titles and corresponding salaries, like Analyst or Manager, but may actually be doing Director or VP level jobs which would easily qualify them for that level position at a larger company. We are told that we should do what we love, but we are nearly forced into chasing dollars and titles by non-intuitive, "tools" that cannot take into account nuance, description and reason.

I think the best recruiting tool in use today is the telephone. Spend five minutes on the phone with just about anyone and you can tell whether he/she will fit your company's culture and if they are smart enough to do the job well. The details of the position might require a more thorough evaluation of their experience, skills and abilities, but for those applicants who might be on the bubble, based on their resume, talking to them can quickly provide the information needed to decide what the applicant’s future value to your recruitment efforts will be.

Finally, let me say that if companies did a better job of telling applicants exactly what they want to see on résumés submitted to them, they would likely get a much higher quality applicant pool. If there is a way to better sell myself to a company, without wasting their time with extraneous information, I would absolutely tailor my resume’ to their specific parameters. In the absence of this guidance, they get what I already have done and in some cases I feel like they miss important information and I miss out on jobs that are perfect for me.

White Paper - Connected/Disconnected Campuses

White Paper

“Connected Campuses” A disconnect between technology’s mission and technology use.

“Connecting” a campus is no longer purely a function of pulling wires, building dedicated computing facilities and buying switches. Today, a truly “connected” campus has less to do with hardware and more to do with how students, staff, faculty, administration, alumni and a university’s broad public constituencies “connect” with the most up-to-date information available from the university. Given the pure volume of web-content available on university websites, a “connected” campus must utilize the most ubiquitous delivery mechanism available to them, along with software that automatically recognizes content updates and manages the flow of information to ensure that only user-specified information is sent. This class of software must also allow the user, through a modern, intuitive, interface to control the content, frequency, delivery mechanism, and routing of such data by incorporating ubiquitous technologies, like electronic mail, and new technologies like RSS (XML, Atom, etc.) and wireless/short messages for cell phones, pagers, PDA’s and other mobile devices.

We have all experienced the difference between being “Connected” to an organization through their web site and being “Functionally Connected.” Universities must face facts; when a student, faculty or administrative professional begins her day, the first work or school-related task that she undertakes most often is: “Check E-mail/Voice-Mail.” Among administrative professionals, administrative staff, students and university faculty daily e-mail use is nearly 100%. Additionally, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project College Students Survey “The great majority (85%) of college students own their own computer, and two-thirds (66%) use at least two email addresses. The majority of students (89%) have a positive attitude toward the Internet and its communication tools.” With knowledge of this information, it is reasonable to expect universities to leverage the huge investments they have already made, in their zealous quest to get information to the web, by alerting users, via e-mail, or one of their other preferred communications channels about changes to the specific information that they are interested in.

Why did universities start building websites?

The most common strategic-communications mission for universities was to make more information easily accessible, answer common questions and reduce costs associated with human interaction for redundant tasks and common services. This was the promise of IT departments and vendors across the globe. The first major wave of web-development technology spending in higher education moved in a predictable and consistent pattern across the broad scope of academic institutions, cost millions of dollars and completely changed the way people interact with universities, regardless of their individual affiliations with a specific institution. This development-cycle followed a basic model: Building a complete website, migrating most important public information to the website, building/buying a content management system that allows anyone with basic computer skills to publish and update any part of the site regularly. The next phase involved a task-centered reorganization back to a pedagogically consistent publishing environment; from dedicated IT-centered publishing to a decentralized model, so each department may again control its own content publishing. Finally, a significant number of academic organizations have moved toward an online standard in which the answer to almost every common university-related question is somewhere on its website and the addition of new information is instantaneous and outside the realistic control of a single set of university standards.

Now what do we do with it?

With this model having been engaged far-and-wide, and most college websites living up to the standard of ability to do most of the things promised initially, the new direction of technology migration on American college campuses has begun to form in hopes of actually getting people to rely on the web functions (the way they rely on email) as a first option rather than as a supplementary support tool. Thus begins the process of integrating campus-wide portals with content management systems, web publishing tools, Customer Relationship Management tools, course management software, technology based instruction software and multiple business processes. This movement has led to ever more information becoming easily accessible via “single sign-on” authentication procedures. Having completed all of this costly integration work, a typical user can personalize views of many different types of university-sponsored information but still may not be the ultimate arbiter of exactly what information is forced upon him by the university. In step with this movement is a new wave of technology spending on more integration initiatives. Supporting the massive investment made in the previous wave of technological advancement is, in most cases, being forgotten and still does not take advantage of the easiest and most widely used technologies. In some cases, as with Blackboard and Web CT, the software enables, within itself, proactive communication via e-mail, with its users. Many of the other tools, systems and software only attempt to move information from one environment to another, albeit a more accessible and convenient environment.

What’s missing? -Or- I thought we could already do that.

Universities are missing one critical piece of the ever-expanding puzzle. Managing the information so that it is usable, easily retrievable and most importantly “personally subscribable.” E-mail list software, personal address books, and vast array of manual processes threaten to choke the use of new and, in most cases, better and more appropriate technology that is simple to integrate into the new wave of technological advances. While it may seem that the old standards like e-mail list software do “just enough” There is a more appropriate technology to tie the massive investment universities have already made into the major initiatives and, consequently, investments being made today. The answer is, simply: Subscription Management Systems.

E-mail list software Vs. Email Subscription Management Systems.

Most e-mail list software is built on technology developed in the 1980’s and does not allow for integration with the vast array of new, user-friendly, technology like campus-information portals without significant and costly customization. When new or updated information is published, a manual process must still be undertaken to get the same information, which now resides on the website, out, via e-mail, to its intended audience. Further, the same process must be repeated each time there is an update. There are several problems created by this type of antiquated solution.

The signup process is often cumbersome. In most cases while browsing a web page a user will come across a link that says, “Sign up for e-mail updates.” Upon clicking on this link the user is usually brought to a page that gives them an email script that they must then execute perfectly. If each part of the instructions are not followed exactly, the user will not be subscribed to the intended content item and, in most cases, will not be notified that there has been a problem.

The user-profile management is often more cumbersome than the signup process and inevitably requires human intervention. In many cases one only has the ability to sign up for a subscription item, though more frequently users may, if they again execute a complicated script perfectly, remove themselves from an e-mail list. Using standard e-mail list software, the user may not temporarily stop delivery, use alternate addresses for delivery of updates or view and manage a single user-profile that spans across multiple departments or list administrators.

Traditional e-mail list’s administrative abilities lack necessary options to integrate with new technology to reduce redundant processes. Fully automated integration of personalized e-mail communication with your organization’s content management processes and systems is not available with traditional e-mail list software. Notifications are not, and without major customization cannot be, distributed immediately when website content is updated. For this reason E-mail lists limit users to a small number of broad announcements such as newsletters and bulletins. E-mail lists also frequently require administrators to guess who would like to receive certain types of information. E-mail list software makes it likely that disparate kinds of information will be packed together in broad categories, reducing the likelihood of subscribers consistently reading messages sent because most of the message is seen as Spam and has nothing to do with the specific information that the user really wanted to be updated about.

Cost and resources needed to set up and maintain. Because “old-style” e-mail lists are based on extremely old code, there is rarely an easy way to set up and manage a list. The lack of an intuitive or modern Graphic User Interface means that building and maintaining a list using this old software most often requires a dedicated, experienced, technology/ software headcount just to manage the help-desk-operations related to this specific type of software.

There is a better way!

There is a class of software called E-mail Subscription Management (ESM) systems that allow universities to leverage and utilize all successful e-mail lists created-to-date as the first building block for the long-term, automated solution. ESM systems take a fraction of the time to set up and once in place can operate completely without intervention.

Benefits of E-mail Subscription Management:

1. Enables universities to offer every user an easy-to-manage, university-centric, profile.
2. Users have the ability to subscribe to content at a specific level as well as by content-categories and subcategories.
3. Users can view and manage a single user profile that spans across multiple departments and can easily be integrated with most major authentication procedures and “single user-sign-on” features included with today’s Enterprise Portal Software. (i.e., one-stop service)
4. Students, faculty, media, parents and other key stakeholders can subscribe to any or all website content at a specific level that matches individual interests.
5. Provides Web-User Focused Service: 10-30 times* more subscription options for interested parties.
6. Engages Users: 300-1,100%* more subscribers through greater availability of subscription options.
7. Increases Return on Investment: 20-50%* increase in website usage from subscribers returning to view new website content as well as proactively communicating revenue generating activities in real-time.
8. Offers fully automated integration of personalized e-mail communication with your organization’s content management processes and systems and is easily deployed to an unlimited number of administrators throughout a university.