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Attended an interesting meeting
in Ann Arbor tonight devoted to the hot topic of Search Engine Optimization
(SEO). One of the subjects covered was the use of corporate blogging as a means
of communicating with your audience and raising your search engine rankings at
the same time. Andy Seidl of MyST Technologies was in the audience. They are the
folks behind blogsite.com. (You may have
noticed that this site runs on their technology, and that I am a channel partner
- just being honest up front.)
Andy makes an excellent point
when he talks about the difficulty of trying to fashion a website for SEO - its
a never ending 'arms race' as Andy puts it. The search engines are always on the
lookout for tricks of the trade that developers use to game the system, and then
they figure out how to avoid them. The best way to handle SEO is with content,
good, honest content created the old-fashioned way, with a keyboard.
Alternatively you can create it the new-fashioned way - a podcast.
One question came up tonight which I thought was a good case study of how the
internet, blogging and SEO permeate modern business in ways that make
professionals in the business shake their heads. A gentleman from a marketing
firm talked about a current client with whom he's working. The idea that they
want to pitch is a corporate blogsite. It would a great way to raise the
client's internet visibility while also providing a forum for communication with
the client's clientele, current and prospective.
But the hitch, in the pitch as it were, is that the client, a consulting
firm, works with senior management of large companies, and the marketing firm is
not sure that a blogsite would ever reach this level. Are C-level executives of
Fortune 1000 firms reading blogs, or searching the internet? Well, probably not,
frankly. (Although I think this is changing, too, by the day)
But my response was that all large companies have a team of people whose job
it is to search the internet, and anywhere else humans communicate, to find
competitive intelligence and information important to the executives involved in
strategic planning. So if the marketing firm's client published useful
information - knowledge - pertinent to an executive's strategic function,
someone will find it and it will ultimately end up on the executive's inbox.
Maybe I'm a little optimistic here, but a corporate blogsite in concert
with an electronic newsletter , both with real and valuable content, is a great
way to communicate. Even to the C-level. |
