from MediaPost Search Insider

Flatter and more-responsive organizations. Working on SEO is like taking your Web site to the doctor: a good SEO consultant will tell you what you have to do, but the hard work is up to you. Companies that listen and respond will do better than companies that justify, finger-point and go on the defensive. Healthy companies look for ways to improve; dysfunctional companies offer reasons why improvement is impossible. Companies that refuse to do the heavy lifting required to whip their site into shape generally are equally negligent in other areas of their business.

Better communication channels. SEO is by nature a cross-functional exercise. It involves many different departments, all working together toward a common goal. This approach is well within the comfort zone of healthy organizations, but totally foreign to dysfunctional ones. An SEO initiative severely tests the communication and cooperative capabilities of an organization. It requires marketing, IT, product managers and often legal to all work together, and the faster they can do this, the more positive the results will be. SEO is not a one-shot tactic. In the most competitive categories, it’s a full-out and ongoing war. The companies that can respond and adapt quickly will win that war. The ones mired in bureaucracy and butt-covering will inevitably sink in the rankings.

Healthy community connections. The new era of digital communications requires companies to be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their community of customers. Great companies do this instinctively. Bad companies put up huge corporate communication barricades, keeping the angry hordes at bay. Because much of this dialogue happens online, these dialogues tend to generate reams of content and links. Raving customers generate link love; angry customers generate link hate and reputation management problems. A company that can effectively engage in conversations with customers will find a natural lift in organic rankings is often the result.

Efficient execution habits. Companies that keep a clean house do better organically than companies that keep skeletons in the closet. Both approaches are symptomatic of the company’s overall approach to business. Highly effective companies constantly upgrade systems and infrastructure, both in their organizations and their online presence. They invest in best of breed tools and technology. And they are able to quickly prioritize and executive as the landscape shifts. Again, a clean technical online infrastructure makes SEO much, much easier.

Executives that “get it.” C-level executives who make SEO a priority realize that the marketing landscape is shifting quickly. They’ve been paying attention to customer behavioral trends and have committed to being proactive rather than reactive. This usually indicates well-placed intelligence gathering “antennae” and feedback loops. It also indicates an executive who isn’t hopelessly mired in “old-boy” thinking and outdated command and control management models.

Corporate pride. Content might not be the sole king anymore (SEO is more of an oligarchy now) but it’s still part of the ruling class. Great cultures tend to engender pride that naturally precipitates an explosion of content. People blog about where they work, people tweet and product managers enthuse verbosely about what they’re working on. All of this generates great, searchable content online.

Companies get the SEO rankings they deserve. I’m guessing that if you asked any SEO consultant in the world, they’ll tell you their favorite clients are the ones that are the easiest to work with: clients who listen, are proactive and for whom continual improvement is a religion. Based on what I’ve seen in the past decade, this attitude extends beyond the SEO team (indeed, it has to) and permeates the entire culture. There are those who game the system and gain undeserved rankings, but more and more, “organic” rankings are just that: rankings that come from the very nature of the company and how they conduct themselves in the marketplace.

Google has made a slew of improvements within his past week such as including banner ads in search results and reading dynamic URL’s as reported last week.

One of the most important technical tools any SEO should use is the free Google Webmaster tools. This gives you a great deal of performance data to ensure Google is properly crawling and indexing your site. For those of you already familiar with the tool, you may have noticed a few improvements within the last day or so. The UI has been tweaked a bit but I noticed they removed the “date last crawled” feature in the overview section. This feature is critical to make sure Googlebot is visiting the site as often as possible. If a site hasn’t been crawled in a few weeks, changes can be made for the spiders to revisit but without knowing, myself and everyone else out there is in the dark.

That’s the downside to this update. As for the improvements, you can now use the tool to set a geographic location. Basically what this means is you can use the target tool to provide Google with information that will help determine how your site appears in Google’s country-specific search results, and also improves the search results for geographic queries. This is beneficial because once Google starts to understand your target audience, it can potentially optimize results to ensure you are reaching your intended audience. For instance I’m from a small town outside of Buffalo, NY called Angola. Well, there is a country called Angola as well which is a big geographical difference. If I create a site and all the info on the site just says, “Angola” including titles tags, meta info etc, Google is confused as to where I intent to target. Not to mention, there are most likely other Angola’s in the US. If someone goes to Google as types in “Angola” there could be numerous results in there. If I go into Webmaster tools and specify my geo-targeted location as Angola, NY, it will now that’s where my audience is. My take on this, is that it is very similar to the Adwords PPC side of things. Very similar but it’s bringing you geo-qualified traffic for free!

A few other additions are and updated to their GData API. This is for high-level programmers who can use the API key to create custom reporting functions across multiple clients. Great for an agency but again, a experience programmer is required!
Google Webmasters Blog highlights everything with a few explanations.

It appear that Google is testing ad placements but not geo or behaviroral  not targeting. They may also be examining the quality and nature of data that can be retrieved from an ad like this on a SERP.

The downside in moving forward with this for Google is twofold. Firstly, the non-intrusive clean interface and results are a big part of the Google experience for searchers.

Google is currently sitting on an enviably profitable search pie but as their share of the search market edges around the 70% mark they may be looking at places to wring more bucks out and continue their stellar growth. YouTube has been the obvious place for them to monetize but they know search the best and have been the most successful at finding dollars there. There’s an awful lot of room on those SERPs – filling some of it with lots of money…er…advertising must be very tempting even as it puts one of their strengths in jeopardy.

Ok, hopefully you got my terrible reference to the movie, Field of Dreams but what I’m trying to say is consult an SEO individual before you even consider a site build either from scratch or redesign. I’m sure many SEO experts think this is basic SEO 101 thinking but many companies or individuals do not.

The basic reasoning behind working with programmers, designers and SEO’ers is this. We assist them is determining how searchers are going to find their masterpiece of a site. More times than not, internet marketing agencies get in a stopped dead in their tracks when they work with web developmen/design companies because it’s always an ego thing. They think that flash is pretty and database driven sites are the new black (or pink? whatever) and don’t take search engine into account. Don’t get me wrong, those individuals are very gifted and creative. But the main purpose of any website is to be found in a search engine.

My first post, Basic SEO gives the foundation to start optimizing but this should be done at the same time as the site build and it is imperative that communication stay constant between the client (you) the web dev/design company and the SEO company. I’ll give on example. Recently, a client, a large home developer, which build million dollar homes had an old site that was built in Coldfusion (a database platform) and they needed something new and flash-y (see what I’m getting at). Before our engagement with them, they had a huge design firm build their site. It really did look nice with music, crisp clear images of the county side, blah, blah. So seeing it was so flash-y, all of the files were in one image, so if you went to yoursite.com and clicked on the about us tab, it would still go to yoursite.com. Ok, so I like a challenge but this was a no go. The reason why? If your unfamiliar with flash, you cannot modify anything because it is an image. If you mouse over a flash file and right click, you don’t see any selections, all you see if an about adobe flash player selection. If you mouse over a regular image, you can view the properties etc.

So back to my story about my dilemma. If there were separate pages created, such as yoursite.com/aboutus.html that was a basic html page that had flash in it, we could do a workaround and add text links so the page can be crawled, but with one image we were at a loss. After a few days of pondering, we explained this to the client. In the meantime, we figured we would take screenshots of the images, create images and overlay the text content next to it. We had a good developer so we banged it out in a few hours. Needless to say they weren’t pleased and got in touch with the design firm to either get it fixed, re-done, or a refund. I don’t know exactly what transpired but they severed ties with the design firm who then took back ALL of their flash files and left them with nothing. (hopefully they got a refund). They were left in the dark so they went back to the Coldfusion site. Why didn’t they use our .html site? haha, that’s the kicker because the design company that created the flash site owned all the images we took screen capture of. See my previous post on Read your contract before you sign a site build/redesign. The SEO has been put on hold pending the home developer figuring things out but hopefully this story is a lesson learned. More to come once I hear something…