My last posts about Flip the Media caught the attention of the faculty and students involved in running it as an independent study. After few emails back and forth I agreed to come back on board in an advisory capacity. Specifically, I’ve agreed to work on SEO (I’m thinking of it more broadly as “user acquisition” or SEO+), but it’s not possible to do effective SEO on a site that hasn’t defined a target audience or any success metrics. So I’m trying to help push in those directions as a precursor to any other work. That said, after the first meeting I attended, I spent less than 30 minutes with some very basic tools and learned some things about the site which I shared in an email, reproduced below.
The Flip the Media home page has a Google PageRank of 5/10. That’s actually quite a bit better than I would have expected. It suggests that FtM has some quality “trusted” sites linking to it.
It’s just a place to start, but the Google AdWords Keyword Generator will analyze a URL you give it, determine what the content of the page is about based on a text analysis, and suggest search terms you might want to bid on to place ads on that page, based on the search terms that return that page in the results. It’s an interested gut check to see if Google thinks your content is about what you think your content is about.
I ran it on http://flipthemedia.com, and found out these are the search terms Google thinks we would want to buy ads for based on the content on the home page:
audio editing equipment
sound editing equipment
best hd camera under 1000
professional video camera equipment
hd video equipment
audio and video editing software
sound and video editing software
all video editing softwareBy contrast, the 111 words on the about page (http://flipthemedia.com/index.php/about-2/) don’t include “social” but it’s the common element in long list of searches with that word in them. I’ve added that list to the bottom of this email for comparison.
With blogs, specific home page content is a transitory thing. There have been times when that AdWords list might have more accurately reflected the content on the home page, but it isn’t really accurate for much of what’s there now. So if we want to drive targeted traffic to the Flip the Media home page we need to think about what value the content we create has to the users. What sort of sites do we want voting up our PageRank? A super-quick look at the list of inbound links to the homepage suggests that being linked in the footer on Drew Keller’s “StoryLink” blog maybe having a strong influence on Google’s perception of the home page, and that’s where all the a/v strength is coming from. We once had a strong emphasis on a/v gear and software, so we got linked to as a source for that. What are we a source for now? What do we want to be a source for? Why haven’t the a/v site links been offset by links from sites that view us as a valuable source for other information? The content choices we make have a powerful and long-lasting impact on the visibility of the site to our target audiences. (Who are our target audiences?)
On the other hand maybe our strategic mission dictates that driving traffic to the home page isn’t the best tactic. Perhaps we want a long tail strategy relying on posts to act as link bait, or perhaps we want to create some sort of highly SEO optimized “Tools and Resources” landing page, or perhaps there’s some other tactic we want to use that would best support the strategic mission of the site if we knew what that mission was. If the strategic mission indicates that driving traffic to the home page isn’t the right tactic, then what do we want people to do when they enter via deeper pages? Do we want them to explore more posts in the category of the one they have landed on? Do we want them to learn more about FtM as an MCDM property? Dow we want them to to the home page?
When we know the internal traffic flow we want then we start to have a sense of the information architecture needs for supporting it. And we then populate that architecture with category labels that define the type of content we want to be know for based on our traffic acquisition plan. Once we get the IA nailed down, then we can start thinking about design because we are trying to encourage and benefit from specific user behaviors instead of just having a site that looks good. We then work the needs of SEO into the design and the coding of the template and write up SEO content guidelines that will help editors choose content that supports our mission, and strengthen the SEO value of that content once it’s written.
But then we need to find out if we actually improved things for FtM. What are our metrics, and what are our goals for those metrics? Do we value new visits more than we value pages per visit? Do we value time on site more than bounce rate? Without defining what goals support the strategic mission, analytics information is just Fun Facts.
As with everything else about running a website, Search Engine Optimization can’t really be improved until there’s an agreed upon purpose for the site to exist. It’s impossible to strive for an undefined goal.
-Brook
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