Full Transcript:

Benjamin Higginbotham: Benjamin Higginbotham and Ed Kohler with technologyevangelist.com. Today is Thursday and we are talking "Search" that’s SEO, SEM and I have no information on that topic what so ever, which is exactly why we have Ed Kohler, here. He is our resident Search guru. Hi Ed, how are you doing?

Ed Kohler: Hello, I am doing good, how are you doing?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Doing great. So, start us off, tell us a little bit about search and we are going to talk a little bit about the black magic, the black art that are Searc and  how that all pulls together and what are companies need to know?

Ed Kohler: Sure, well I think the one thing that a lot of companies haven’t yet grasped, companies who have done some work with search engine marketing, quickly becomes obvious then that its really powerful tool, because people are really turning themselves in to your business and they are based on what they type in the Google, they are saying I am looking for what you sell and I think once people understand that, they realize I want as much of that traffic, because I can possibly get, so…

Benjamin Higginbotham: When we say search engine marketing, are we talking about organic results or we are talking paper clippers that will sit at the top of Google or whatever search engine.

Ed Kohler: Well, I'll just define a couple of terms, search engine optimization is generally referring to ranking high in the natural search results, so that the main body of the page, for example on Google, search engine marketing is more of an umbrella term under which search engine optimization would be one of the tactics you could do use to get more traffic from search engines and another tactic under search engine marketing would be paper click advertising, where you are basically buying your way to the top, usually along the top of the page or along the right column of the page.

Benjamin Higginbotham: OK, why would I do that? Why would I buy my way at to the top? Why wouldn’t I just go for an organic search? You are trying to push my way to the top without paying for it, because it’s free?

Ed Kohler: Because, the traffic is valuable, so it is probably worth paying for it. Sure there is a limit on how much you are going to pay for any given search term, but if someone is searching for exactly what you are selling, there is a value you can put on that. So, one of the things that search engine marketers can do is track just how valuable those terms are to your business. So, for every 100 people, for example that click through on a given term, how many of them end up filling out a lead form, and making a purchase from you, so at that point you can actually put a real value on that term.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, I know, may be I am not normal, I know I am not normal in this regard and that is when I search, if I were going to use Google as probably the de-facto standard here, when I search Google and I get those paid for terms at top, I simply never click on them, I go straight to the organic searches every single time, how many users do that and how effective are the paid terms at the top of the page?

Ed Kohler: Well, it will vary a lot from one search term to the next. If someone searching on a say like product type term, they are searching for a specific DVD player they are looking to buy. They are lot more likely to click on the paid clicks, because their quality is usually pretty good., People are they really do have those products for sale. If you are doing an informational type search of, I don’t what a good example I give like, say here you are planning a trip somewhere, but you are not ready to buy your tickets on that trip, then the main body of the results may be better in those situations. So, they vary from in the next, but I don’t have hard numbers on it, but I think its around 10% of clicks are on the paid clicks and they are relevant. I mean people are paying for those positions so they generally buy terms that are relevant to their websites, so it is just another way of determining relevancy based on money, rather than Google’s magic formulas.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, so tell me a little bit about specific things company is going to hire an SEO consultant for?

Ed Kohler: Well search engine optimizers, they are in the business of getting websites to rank high in search results. So, the most important thing that I think is poorly understood about what a search engine optimizer does is they are very good at key word research and by that I mean they can figure out what terms people are actually searching for, they are relevant to your site and help you prioritize those terms. So, if your site is number one site on the Google for a term that’s actually never searched for, well it’s kind of fun, it is not going to drive a lot of business. So, determining what terms are really relevant to your business and ranking high for those terms is a big part of the puzzle. So, as far as what a search engine optimizer can do is help you find those terms, then help you improve your site by aligning it with those terms and doing with a lot of technical issues that can come up as well, at that point at least a search engine will figure out what your website is about, before that they might not have known, as well as they should.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, is this something that really requires outsourcing to someone who is specific SEO or is that something that you can just train people, your web developers in house to do or it is kind of that mysterious black art that no one really seems to truly understand and it changes from search engine to search engine, is that fairly correct statement?

Ed Kohler: I would say that each search engine has their own formulas that they have created on to make sites rank relevant. Try relevant sites appear in your top of the results, I mean a search engine, nobody will use a search engine, if when they run a search, the results that are on top don’t appear to be relevant to them. Every search engines gone about figured out how to create that experience slightly differently, but they have the same goal in mind and that it is to provide relevant search results to their users, because if the user stop coming back, they are going to stop clicking on the ads, right? So, search engine optimizers they are actually a lot of subcategories, there are lot of different specialized skills that fall underneath that umbrella. So, a search engine optimizer could be someone who is a very good copy writer, who can take the copy on your website and just make some small tweaks to it that both make it or enticing from a sale standpoint, but also integrate more search terms into the content, so you are going to rank better in the search engines. So, to pull off that dual purpose of that content is kind of trick, but there are people who are specialist of that. Another skill would be people who are very good at web analytics. So, they can say here are the terms that driving traffic into your website and of those terms here are the terms that are most effective that actually converting to leads you to sales. So, the mind sets of those two people are generally very-very different.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, so we were talking about, do you bring it in-house, or do you outsource it? Are more people starting to bring this in-house or are more people starting to understand that this is actually quite complex and there is lot to do here and outsourcing it? Or is it kind of an equal balance? In other words, is the SEO community growing or declining or stand same?

Ed Kohler: Well within the SEO community there are lot of different skills are applied and one area of SEO that I think has probably declined a bit over time is in just dealing with trouble shooting spidering issues. So, there used to be one content management systems are first really starting to become popular where websites were being, the content of the website was sitting in a data base and when you click down a web link within that site, it was actually querring the data base to create that page instead of just being how much a static pages are there in the Internet. The problem was some of the sites were not very search engine friendly, so search engines were getting lost within the websites for variety of reasons and so the search engines just bale on those websites, no other content would get indexed, there could be thousands and thousands of pages to that website, but it was basically invisible to Google, that’s the problem. So, the trouble shooting of that was something that you could make it ton of impact on a website with, because if all of a sudden a site had thousands of more pages indexed in Google its going to lead to a tons and tons of additional traffic, but today most content managerial systems and one popular type of content managerial system actually blogs, they are built with search engine in mind today. So, I think that is one area that is probably been on decline. So, but other areas are continuing to do well such as link building, where one of the biggest things, it could be a rank higher in search results as they have more links to your website from other websites. So, that’s going to continue to grow.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well lets talk about blogs for a moment and the importance of blog search sites, such as Technorati or even Google takes most of the blog searching, puts them on their own independent search site, so that’s the case. What is the importance of blogs in the market place then from a search engine marketing, search engine optimization standpoint? Or is it just as important as before, now that these results are getting off-loaded to these other sites or they more important?

Ed Kohler: Well a blog results you can find there are specific search engines for blogs, such as Technorati or Google’s Blog Search search engine, but they represent a very-very small fraction of all searches are conducting, but all of your blog content that you create through your blog, that’s going to show up in Google and Yahoo and everywhere else as well. So, that’s where the real power of it comes from, so for example, a business that has created a website that’s basically like their online brochure, it talks about what they do as their contact information pictures of executives or whatever it is, that is going to sit out in the web, people are going to be able to find it and the big problem is, it is not really creating anything news worthy or link worthy, now if you take that same site and you hang a blog off of it as they come out with new announcements as they just comment on the news of the day relative to their business, they are now creating content that people are going to find interesting and news worthy and they are going to link to that. So, that helps their whole site overall and plus it is also generating the ton more contents. So, there are more things that someone could search on where that will get them to their website and may be the front door to the website will be some page back deep within their blog and from there they work their way up to the home page and find out more about the company, because it sounds like they know what they are talking about.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, it sounds like than a blog is kind of like Trojan horse in a way. In that you have got all those great content, you will get pulled into Google and whatnot and then people will find that in possibly in organic search and then jump hopefully, jump into your main website. Of course you can’t control what the user is going to do, but at least you are increasing your brand awareness as it were?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, so it helps you from searching perspective. It is also place where it helps build your credibility, because you are putting out content all the time that shows you actually know what you are talking about. So, rather than just having a smiling picture that’s trying say “I know what I am talking about” you are actually proving it through your writing. So, that’s always advantage there. The other thing that search engine optimizers help with you are things like usability or email marketing, running different types of online add buys were each search engine market will have like a different set of skills that they kind of picked up over time, because once business is fine someone that they trust, they ask them for more and more and more help. So, each person will have a different expertise.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, so bloggers they tend to push the industry forward a little bit, they are little more in the bleeding edge than on the leading edge, from lets say an AJAX standpoint or from a single webpage application standpoint. You talked earlier about having thousands of web pages that Google could not index, because they were formed wrong and Google just couldn’t see them and ignore them, what about the opposite? What about single page applications? How does a search engine deal with that?

Ed Kohler: Well, today they can’t, so if your website is built entirely in AJAX where the content is just done through AJAX request where the URL never changes that is definitely a problem, so in the past this has been something that’s happened with Flash, where people would create basically one big flash applet and when people clicked on that, you can navigate through all the different content to the site, but there was not search engine friendly at all, so now AJAX is running in to the same type of issues for people. So, over time obviously the search engines they want to index all that content, but today they are just simply not capable of doing that. so, for example if your content can only be found by going through a map for example, there are just unlimited number things that could be done with that map to get to that content and it is just not something that’s realistically indexable through that format.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, are we going to have the search engines to fix this or do the coders need to fix this or both?

Ed Kohler: I think it is up to the responsibility of the coders to realize the limitations of search engines. So, if they want their content to be indexed, they need to provide it in the search engine friendly manner, so over time search engines will get there, but you are given up a lot of traffic in the mean time. So, that’s the trade off.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, Ed thank you so much for joining us today. We are going to be doing freestyle Friday tomorrow and we are going to be doing that at 12:00pm, actually that’s going to be the last day where we are going to be doing that 12 noon central time, that’s 1 o’clock – Eastern, 10 o’clock – Pacific. Next week we are going to be shifting the time backwards an hour. So, we are going to be doing it at 11:00am – Central, 12:00pm – Eastern and it would be 9:00am Pacific, had to do that in my head, that was hard and we will be talking on Monday we will still starting again with new media. So, if you any questions or comments for us on freestyle Friday, that is every things up and we could talk about anything we want, doesn’t even have to be technology related. How awesome is that? All right, hey thank you so much for joining us everyone. Thank you for joining us on TalkShoe and we will chat with everyone tomorrow.