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FEATURE: What You Need To Know From SMX Advancedby Virginia Nussey, June 13, 2008 Anyone following the industry may have noticed the overwhelming coverage of SMX Advanced earlier this month. A relative newcomer to the conference circuit, SMX has quickly become a sweetheart of show goers. Advanced was billed as an expert-level search engine marketing education and exhibition event, featuring sessions for fluent and experienced SEOs, SEMs and Web developers. The discussions following previous expert-level events have included criticisms that the info shared was not advanced enough, or perhaps, not advanced at all. Most marketers who attended this year’s event strayed from such criticisms, recognizing the new and innovative techniques presented by speakers – regardless of whether or not they would ever use those techniques on their own or their clients’ sites. On the Bruce Clay blog, writers Lisa Barone and I liveblogged 15 of those sessions across the four tracks: Organic Search, Paid Search, SEM Business and Developer Day. If you weren’t able to attend the conference, you may want to head over to the blog to see if anything catches your eye. However, there were several sessions that were considered highly-valuable. There were also sessions/topics that, since the publication of speakers’ PowerPoint presentations, can be expanded upon. I know that I frequently couldn’t record all of the info presented on longer slides or by fast talkers, so some of the topics deserve some additional coverage. For that reason, this recap of SMX Advanced is also a roundup and addendum. Analytics Every SEO Needs to Know Brian Klais’s presentation on the ten essential organic search KPIs began by listing those indicators: brand-to-non-brand ratio; unique pages; indexation rate; phrases per page; visitors per phrase; page placement; yielding pages; engine yield rate; ROI and brand reach; and missed opportunity cost. These indicators, which go beyond hits and rankings, will help business owners answer the questions:
For further reading, take a look at Brian’s blog and white paper. Jonah Stein’s presentation focused on “five forgotten metrics.” The final metric was to query all stats in Webmaster Central. The problem for most, however, is that the stats are presented in an unreadable format. For this problem, Jonah recommended a converter. Search Engine Roundtable also provided coverage of this analytics session. Amazing New PPC Tactics She started her presentation by defining some terms she uses. Account structure is the organization of accounts within a multi-account strategy. Inter-campaign structure is the organization across multiple campaigns of an account, and intra-campaign structure is the organization of ad groups within a campaign. She presented a graphic of keyword types to consider when developing an account structure. Relevant, behavioral and irrelevant keyword types align with immediate seekers, contextual finders and new interest, respectively. High traffic and low traffic align with head and long tail keywords, respectively. In terms of the search engine, along with the inter-campaign considerations to keep in mind, Addie also outlined intra-campaign considerations:
There doesn’t appear to be any alternate coverage of this session. Most likely, the other bloggers were at the Give It Up session that was going on at the same time. What You Should Be Measuring – But Aren’t
Additional coverage of the session can be found on Search Engine Roundtable. You&A With Matt Cutts Black Hat Tactics Represented at SMX Advanced For an additional collection of SMX Advanced 2008 coverage, check out Search Engine Land’s SMX Advanced ’08 – Day One Recap and SMX Advanced ‘08 – Day Two Recap. For permission to reprint or reuse any materials, please contact us. To learn more about our authors, please visit the Bruce Clay Authors page. Copyright 2008 Bruce Clay, Inc. |
BACK TO BASICS: What is a CMS and Do You Need One?By Danielle Sahiner, June 13, 2008 A Content Management System or CMS is a software product that companies use to manage the content of their Web sites. Some content management systems are complicated and quite expensive; others can be simple and quite reasonable. “Broadly speaking, Content Management describes a process that allows people to more easily create and update content, especially on their Web sites (Web Content Management).” Does your company need a CMS? Let’s explore your options. The first step in deciding whether or not you need a CMS is to take a look at the size of your site, and how often you update it. Generally speaking, if you have a small and static site you probably don’t need a CMS. However, if your site is composed of many content-rich pages and sections that change on a daily, weekly or bi-weekly basis, you might want to look into using a content management system to help you manage them. One site that I am intimately familiar with that uses a CMS is Customs and Border Protection. CBP began using a content management system about seven years ago. I worked there at the time and we had the huge task of migrating over 7,000 pages of static content to the CMS. It was a huge undertaking and took us over a year to get the project finished. However, it was worth it. The CBP site can change on a daily basis so the task of keeping the pages up to date was made infinitely easier with the use of a CMS. One of the first things we did before starting the content migration was to hire an information architect. She went through the whole site and conducted interviews with all the content owners to make sure that the content was up to date and necessary for the site. The next step we took was to make sure that we had a programmer on staff who was able to edit the backend (programming side) of the content management system we chose. That may not be necessary for your site but it’s something to keep in mind. After that, we had to make sure that our designer and Web developers were trained on how to use the CMS. Once this was completed, we were able to start moving the content. This took a long time but was worth the effort when complete. “A CMS is right and the features are real when your organization is using it every day. A CMS is only 20% purchased software and hardware. It is 80% the process of people using the tools to implement a content management strategy.” CMS Review. Using the right content management system can help you manage your content and reach your search engine optimization goals. But you won’t know if a CMS is right for you and which one to purchase until you take the time to do the research. Which CMS Will Work For Your SiteOnce you've made the decision to manage your content with a CMS, it's time to look at several factors that will help you narrow down your choices to the right one for you. You'll need to consider the number of hands you have working on your Web site. Most content management systems have a versioning system built into them. This means that a history of all the changes made to a page is kept. That way, if something is changed that shouldn’t have been or there a mistake has been made, the system will allow you to “roll back” to a previous version of the page. The versioning system also keeps track of who made the changes thereby giving you a record of who is updating the pages. Keeping track of who made changes and when, can be helpful for monitoring your site and making sure that mistakes don’t happen or can be corrected quickly when they do. If you do have many people working on your site, it may be a good idea to use a content management system to help you monitor who is making changes and when. If you don’t have many content writers, then you may not need this functionality. Another factor to take into account is how complicated your site layout is and how different or similar your pages are. If your site’s pages all use a similar layout then a CMS can easily be implemented. If not, it can get complicated because you’ll have to create many templates when setting it up. You also have to decide if the CMS will fit your needs right out of the box or if you are going to have to monkey with it to make it work the way you want. Some systems allow you to do this easily, others, not so much. If you have programmers on staff who can help you edit the software, this may be an option for you. When comparing potential solutions, look at whether or not the CMS you’re looking at will be search engine optimization-friendly. Your CMS should allow you to easily optimize your site. You have to make sure that the system has all the areas in your templates that you need in order to add Meta tags and that it is easy to modify them. This may be a problem if you use the same templates for all of your pages. You need to make sure that the pages that are used to enter the content into have Title, Description and Keyword tags in them and that the person who is entering your content into the pages adds the correct content to all those tags. A great site to look at for additional information on content management systems is CMS Review and their Best Practices in Content Management. They have broken down what they consider to be best practices into a graphic that accurately shows the steps that should be taken in organizing your content management set up.
The whole practice may seem overwhelming and confusing based on the graphic, but it doesn’t have to be. You just have to invest the time to accurately and effectively research the needs of your site and determine what you want it to accomplish. For permission to reprint or reuse any materials, please contact us. To learn more about our authors, please visit the Bruce Clay Authors page. Copyright 2008 Bruce Clay, Inc. |
