SEO and SEM

Last week, Seth Earley blogged about the inefficacy of social tagging, but there's one scenario in which social tagging will breathe new life into an esoteric, 200-year industry: book indexing.

I've written hundreds of book indexes, presided over the American Society for Indexing, managed an international indexing partnership, taught courses, established standards, built tools, and consulted with a lot of influential folks, so trust me when I tell you that it pains me to see this happening. I believe with every fiber of my professional being that the human work of subject indexing is and will continue to be superior in quality to every alternative ever imagined. Oh well.

There is just too much information to index by hand, period. Books, periodicals, websites, blogs, messages, and documents are being produced or transformed too quickly for humans to keep pace, regardless of training and tools. Perhaps in response, the use of search algorithms becomes ever more popular, while overly optimistic expectations of retrieval quality grows increasingly preposterous. A more realistic response would be an increase in subject indexers' fees -- after all, demand is outpacing supply at an astounding rate -- but indexers haven't experienced a rate increase since the 1990s. The truth is that editorial indexing and all smart hands-on tagging is disappearing in favor of automatic approximations. And it is a reasonable argument that the substandard tagging of millions of pages and documents is better than leaving most of them without any subject metadata whatsoever.

Much has been written on this blog about the value of SEO when it comes to taxonomies.  As Stephanie mentions its’ a huge weapon in the battle against outdated legacy terminology and spur of the second marketing speak. Jeff’s posts on keyword research, taxonomy and SEO are indispensable primers on the topic. So what haven’t we talked about yet?

How about SEO as the enemy of navigation? 

Is there such a problem as too much of a good thing? When it comes to taxonomy navigation best practices and SEO, you bet.  Think about it this way: imagine you are meeting a friend for drinks after work and she tells you a story about something that happened to her during the day. 

“I was in my office, and I had just poured myself a fresh cup of coffee.  I was in my office and the phone rang but I was tempted to ignore it. I was in my office and picked up the phone and it was my husband calling, did I mention I was in my office? Anyways I was in my office and my husband told me to sit down because he had incredible news. I was in my office and I sat down. I was in my office and my husband told me that we had just won the lottery?

Right, so... where were you again?  In your office, ok we get it!  

Now have a look at the following taxonomy navigation suggested to us on a project for SEO purposes:

In my last post I discussed a process for putting together a broad list of keywords intended to act as the starting point for our keyword research. The purpose of this step was to give us the ability to cast as wide a net as possible in an effort to uncover as much of the language being used by our potential customers when searching for our content, products and/or services online. Doing so not only gives us the opportunity to wisely target the correct keywords, but also lets us craft our content in such a way as to tap into as much into the long tail as possible. To illustrate, I’ll use the following Top Content report from Google Analytics. As you can see this particular page, although targeted toward a specific set of keywords, generated traffic from an amazing 5,766 unique keyword combinations! This alone demonstrates the power of the long tail in driving significant amounts of traffic to your website.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to generate traffic just for traffic’s sake; you want these visitors to do something while on the site, whether it’s to buy your product, fill out a form or contact your company. Web analytics aside, now that we’ve done all the groundwork and assembled our master list of terms, we’re ready to tackle the research part of our keyword research.