Search Engine Optimization in Marketing News

April 06, 2005 | 11 Comments

So I finally did it. I got an article published for a large, non-geek audience. In this month’s Marketing News, a high circulation publication from the American Marketing Association, you’ll find a very down to earth, very practical article on Search Engine Optimization.

Most of my regular readers wouldn’t find much new in there, but for marketing folks all over I hope it’s an eye opener. I break down several simple things anyone can do to make their site perform better and rank higher. I talk about content, Web standards and other best practices and I try to do it in a way that’s easily grasped.

The feedback I’ve gotten so far has been good, so that’s nice. Regardless, I’m excited to have finally gotten something out to a different audience. It’s surprising how challenging that can be, not only in getting it published, but the actual writing!

If you’re interested, we’ve put a PDF version of the article up over at the PBDH site. While you’re there, stop by Open House and say hi. There are a few interesting posts over there.

Filed under: News

Comments

1. Jeremy Flint said:

Great article Keith. Although most of the content (as you said) wasn’t new to me, I did not know about the search engine spider simulator, so that will come in handy.

Posted on April 6, 2005 12:06 PM | #

2. Kevin Tamura said:

Damn, this is too funny. I’m currently working on a case study of a site that has no SEO what so ever (they don’t even show up when you search for their URL) and providing them with general guide lines on how to improve their ranking. I think your article will help me in-house with some who still think it’s appropriate to flood keywords into all image alt atributes.

Posted on April 6, 2005 12:07 PM | #

3. Brian Paulson said:

Perfect timing Keith! I have a client that was not listing to me about hiring consultants and that is should not take that much time to infiltrate the search engines. Now I can show them this and get them to relax a little and let it work.

Posted on April 6, 2005 01:40 PM | #

4. Rob Lewis said:

Keith, that’s a perfect introduction to SEO, nicely written and easy to understand.

Posted on April 6, 2005 02:29 PM | #

5. Mike said:

Great job man! I just read the article and it’s everything that I would have liked to have read, and a ton more. Maybe those SEO huxters will finally get the point. Congrats homie.

Posted on April 6, 2005 02:37 PM | #

6. Britt said:

Congrats, Keith. I’ll read it tomorrow at work and forward it to our marketing dept.

I’d be interested in hearing more about how you lined that up.

Posted on April 6, 2005 10:16 PM | #

7. Vincent Grouls said:

Hi Keith, great article. I wanted to let you know I have printed the article so I can show it to potential clients that may want to go for SEO consultancy.

You mention keywords don’t have that much PageRank(tm) weight anymore; I was under the impression they still have quite some weight as long as they are relevant to the content.

Posted on April 7, 2005 04:39 AM | #

8. Robert said:

What’s funny is that my former boss writes a column for Marketing News and wouldn’t you know it, that I brought up this very topic in regard to his site. His response wasn’t exactly enthusiastic (sometimes it’s hard to get through to non-tech folks), but I think what you’ve done is so straight-forward and easy to comprehend that I could point him to this and maybe he’ll get the point. That and it comes from what many consider to be an reliable industry source. Nice job!

What also gets me is that even though I’ve been aware of Marketing News for years in print, as far as I know, there’s never been any online presence for it. All I could find is the AMA website (which isn’t working at the moment). Maybe because it walks that line between newsletter and magazine? I don’t know. I DO know that there’s been some good stuff in there and it’s a shame that more people can’t see it online as well.

Posted on April 7, 2005 05:10 AM | #

9. Christian Watson said:

Keith, finally got a chance to read this - nice job! Not only is the content great, but I really like your writing style. Perhaps you can write about how you got this article published - for the benefit of other budding authors.

Although you mentioned using keywords in the alt attribute, I would suggest that making sure your internal links include your keywords is more important and would be a better point to mention. This has the added benefit of giving your client a good reason not to write “click here” for links.

This is also especially true for inbound links - for example, from an SEO standpoint, it’s much better to have an inbound link that says “Professional web design” than “Smiley Cat Web Design”.

Posted on April 8, 2005 08:20 AM | #

10. Angela Wilson said:

Great article… I think that I actually learned something today. Thanks.

Posted on April 9, 2005 03:15 AM | #

11. Mike Stenhouse said:

I’m a bit late on this one but I highly recommend giving An Ingenious Way to Use Wordtracker a read. The interesting part is “Let’s look at an example” - it helped to explain to me the place of SEO in modern marketing, something I’ve generally avoided as a web developer.

Posted on April 11, 2005 09:20 AM | #