Last year in my hurry to get everything prepared, cooked and ready for our glorious Thanksgiving spread, I forgot to change the setting on my oven after roasting veggies from “broil” to “bake” and my turkey only cooked half way. The top of the turkey was juicy and a gorgeous golden brown, but the bottom was severely undercooked and I had 14 hungry turkey bird eaters ready to feast. And well, my turkey mishap got me thinking about similarities between SEO and Social Media.

Turkey Mishap teaches SEO

1. Due to appropriate preparation and continuous basting, the turkey browned nicely. It looked good from the outside but this was merely on the surface. Similar to optimizing your web site for search engines, optimizing your titles and metadata isn’t enough. Make sure all elements of your site are optimized, from site architecture to content and multimedia to alt tags. Some of these elements are proving to be more influential and are often overlooked by many so-called SEO practitioners.

2. Once the turkey was in, it was on the “set it and forget it” method. Like cooking a turkey, SEO is not a “set it and forget it” initiative. Just as I should have been monitoring the progress of the turkey, your SEO efforts need to be monitored continuously for progress and adjusted accordingly to achieve desired results.

Turkey Mishap teaches Social Media

1. Although I was mortified by my mistake, I assembled the appropriate team to help me deal with the situation and I didn’t hide from my mistake (although I wanted to). In your Social Media communication it is important to remember that your customers know you will make mistakes, but it is how you handle them that they will be watching. Remember, be human. People make mistakes and don’t be afraid to get others involved to help you solve the issue.

2. There was no mistaking that the turkey was undercooked when we cut into it. Same for your Social Media communication, people will see through the golden brown coating if you don’t have a well planned and executed social media strategy. A good product and great customer service are only two of the ingredients in a recipe for social media success.

3. If at first you don’t succeed, fail fast, and then re-evaluate how to resolve and respond to the situation. Then, move forward quickly, the side dishes are getting cold and people will start to leave if you are unable to respond to the situation or provide an adequate solution.

4. Don’t try to do too many things at once, but if you do, have a plan. Most importantly surround yourself with people who can help you implement and execute your plan seamlessly.

Gobble Gobble Lessons for SEO and Social Media

1. Track and monitor progress; adjust along the way. Don’t get to the end to find out only half the plan worked or yielded you half the results you were expecting.

2. Check to see if the oven is on. Review all elements and components of your Social Media Plan and on-site and off-site SEO. Sometimes it can be the most simple and obvious things that can foil your plan.

3. Share your experience. Mistakes create an opportunity…for content! Case studies, articles, contests, etc. How can you share your experience to benefit your customers or provide added value to others?

Happy to say this year the turkey was juicy and delicious…and cooked all the way through. Picture above. Happy Holidays.

Most of the time we are so excited to get something new and shiny that we forget that the old did provide value, holds history, and credibility.  This is the same for your Web site. Don’t we want to preserve those qualities and carry them over to the new? Of course. If you said no, stop reading.

Before you go launching your new Web site, ask your SEO and web development firm(s) if the following has been done before you flip that switch.  If your SEO or web development firm says no or “what are you talking about”, STOP RIGHT NOW. CALL US IMMEDIATELY AT 602-275-3935.

Checklist before you launch:

1. Tracking: Make sure all tracking codes are in place and have been tested on the new site. Missing a few days of tracking could mean missing a few days of knowing how the new Web site impacted visitor behavior and sales.

2. Redirect URLs: If your old site has a good history and has built up some good inbound links to interior pages, or even if it hasn’t and you just have a few inbound links – you still want to make sure you are preserving them when you move to the new site. Make sure old site URLs are mapped correctly so that search engines are notified and pages that are indexed can be appropriately redirected. If you don’t do this and the new site has a different URL structure, any old pages that were indexed in the search engines will send back a nice 404 error, not to mention you may have lost a few new customers.

3. Marketing: Do you have years of vanity domains that you used for marketing? Do you have landing pages that current online marketing or other offline marketing sends traffic too? Make sure these pages are not archived when the new site launches. Make a checklist (in addition to this one) that lists out all of these pages and domains, make sure you to notify your current SEO or web development company of these pages so that they can be moved seamlessly without worry of lost traffic or conversions.

4. Customer Database Management: Very very very very important. I remember when FoodTV and Allrecipes launched their new Web sites. I had my recipe box filled, sure I hadn’t been back in a couple of months but I used my profile and “favorite recipes” box a lot. I went back one day and they said my account didn’t exist. Imagine how upset I was, I had years of recipes that I had collected and without any regard for my feelings they just wiped them all away. They might as well have taken a baseball bat to their brand because that is how I felt about them. So “lesson learned” make sure you transfer all customer information over to any new databases, etc. Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Just because your data isn’t as clean as it should be, it is still data and you should hire someone or assign someone to take on that responsibility of organizing it. If your web development company says “let’s blow it up and start all over,” – DON’T LISTEN. Preserving customer information is vital and can save you from having to find a boat load of new customers because you decided to break up with your existing ones by changing the locks on the door. Your customer is your biggest asset, don’t forget that.

If you’d like consultation on any of the above, we are happy to help contact Liberty Interactive Marketing today.

As if explaining SEO to those unfamiliar with it isn’t hard enough,  Steve Rubel published an article in Adage complicating things even more and misinforming the mass media.  This action encourages the continued proliferation of misinformation by traditional agencies as many try to play in a space in which they are not equipped.

Every SEO expert out there would agree with me when I say Google’s PageRank is not the best way to rate online influence. And what exactly is Mr. Rubel referring to when he says “online influence”? Not to mention that there are an infinite number of ways categorize online influence, be it links, content, subject, history of site, bookmarks, etc.

Many discussions on Webmaster World and from Google themselves have been discussing for the past few years whether to remove PageRank from the toolbar and most recently they will start to pull back it’s presence with new toolbar releases.  The toolbar Pagerank is separate from the Pagerank number that Google incorporates into its search algorithm.  So the number we see has very little to do with rankings at all. It is merely a metric by which the uninformed will be unnecessarily impressed.

I’m not going to argue for or against what PageRank really is because there is no argument. PageRank is useless as two commenters on the original post would agree.  Additionally, I can’t believe that this article would have been posted as a linkbait mechanism because AdAge also chose to publish it in their print addition which is where I first read the article.

My real reason for responding to this article is to disperse any rumors out there and to let people know they should really check their sources and the facts before publishing anything SEO related. Just because you use the Internet doesn’t mean you are an expert on SEO.