Content Strategy: Key Step for SEO and Site Development
Have you ever heard your agency use the phrase “content strategy”? If you answered no, you should probably be asking yourself why right about now. Creating an efficient, fluid content strategy is arguably one of the most important phases of defining and designing your website. This is by far more important the the look and feel or the technology used to make the site…because content is what users are coming for at the end of the day. If you don’t have high quality content that informs and helps users, the fancy flashy things and innovative technological implementations don’t mean a thing. Users demand content. That being said, what’s involved in developing a content strategy?
Content Strategy Process
This checklist is a high level view of the things that should be considered when developing your site’s content strategy. Read more
Video SEO Basics
Today I wanted to talk a little bit about video SEO and what you need to keep in mind when thinking about generating video content for your pharma sites. The first premise of SEO is still very much the key – relevant content is king. Find the information people are looking for and create video content around it. Don’t just develop a video because you “need to have video” on your site. It’s still about creating content that engages and drives users to engage further with your site and with your content.
Why is Video SEO Important?
Video is content like any other, and it is by far one of the fastest growing and highest engaged pieces of content by users. If you go out to Youtube, you can find thousands of videos about any topic you could possibly be interested in – whether you are trying to find a guide for injecting your medication or looking for chemotherapy side effects. Video content is one of those areas that everyone in pharma wants to do, but from my experience looking around the web not many pharma sites are doing it well for search purposes. Video SEO requires optimization of many of the same factors you would talk about with a traditional static HTML page – you need a good keyword emphasis, and you need to use the selected term throughout key areas of your page. What are some of those key areas?
- Page URL
- HTML Title
- Meta Description
- Page headline
- Body copy
Below, I have embedded a SEO music video (mostly to test out a new plugin I found), but also to illustrate a few things.
Music Video: SEO Song by Creare
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z9rP7CBs_Y
Consider this page as a whole when you think about the basics I listed above.
- Page URL: This page is about “Video SEO Basics” and I have thus accordingly assigned http://www.pharmasem.com/video-seo-basics as the page URL.
- HTML Title: Again, knowing that my keyword for this page is “Video SEO Basics”, I plugged in “Video SEO Basics | pharmaSEM.com” as the page title
- Meta Description: While the description may not directly impact SEO algorithms with Google, that does not mean all engines ignore this tag. At the very least, the meta description impacts CTR from organic search. Accordingly, I provided a brief description, incorporating my keywords.
- Page Headline: My primary page headline for this page again is “Video SEO Basics”.
- Body Copy: Throughout this tutorial, I’ve been incorporating “video SEO basics” within the copy. This emphasizes my primary keyword. The video I’ve embedded, while not entirely relevant to the topic, was included mostly to provide a visual example.
Incidentally, this wordpress plugin is VERY easy to use so I may start including more video examples when appropriate.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of Intouch Solutions.
3 Important Facts About Mobile SEO
In an article on PC World entitled Google Betting Big on Mobile, Executive Says, a Google executive says that mobile search volume has increased by over 5 times. Keyword research I have done recently supports the increased volume of searches, but my example is not quite 5 times higher. For an example, I took a very broad keyword “diabetes” and found a historical trend of the top 50 keywords associated with this term. I pulled the search volume estimates specifically for Google mobile search volume.
Going back to March 2009 and running through February 2010, we see a nearly 2x higher volume (84K searches in March 2009 compared to 135K in February 2010). Perhaps the growth of search for pharmaceutical and health-related searches is not growing as rapidly as other industries, but the growth is significant. A point made by the Google executive in this article was the fact that these are for the most part completely new searches.
So, what are the three facts I wanted to point out?
Fact 1: Mobile Search Is A Whole New Searcher
What do I mean by this? Well, as mentioned above the Google executive is quoted as saying searches occurring in Google mobile are largely searches that did not previously exist. Specifically, typical times where you would see desktop search decline (lunch breaks, dinner)…those are the times where mobile search spikes. So Google, Yahoo, and Bing, with their mobile search engines are capturing a whole new type of searcher.
Fact 2: Mobile Search Advertising is Hugely Important
If you have any hope of capturing mobile users when they are looking, you have to consider the various mobile advertising opportunities. Google has invested largely in this niche advertising area. Their mobile search ad targeting is simple and intuitive to capture mobile users at the right time. They have developed their own “in-app” advertising service for Android and iPhone applications. Their recent acquisition of AdMob shows that Google is serious about developing a top-tier mobile advertising channel.
Fact 3: Mobile SEO is a Wide Open Opportunity for Pharma SEO
Mobile versions of pharmaceutical websites are few and far between from what I have been able to discover. The faith of heavy graphics and flash-intensive sites by many pharma sites has limited the ability for pharma SEO to be effective on mobile devices. The discussion around social media is extremely important, but the emerging media not being discussed is mobile websites. Plenty of pharma companies may be ready to build an iPhone application, but the piece of mobile they are missing is a mobile site. I would anticipate that anyone willing to invest the time in mobile site development and mobile SEO will see strong results from their mobile channel. While the volume of health-related searches is not growing as quickly as other industries, it is growing rapidly and will continue to do so.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of Intouch Solutions.
Top 5 Twitter SEO Strategies
By recently engaging in partnerships with the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing), Twitter SEO has effectively become something that should be tactically considered. As a search nerd, I think it is exciting that Twitter is feeding real-time results directly into Google (and Yahoo/Bing) search results now. Below is my initial list of the top 5 things I view as the most important aspects for Twitter SEO:
- Consider Your Handle/User Name: Your username is what will end up being in your twitter page (i.e., I chose semdave as my username so my Twitter URL is http://twitter.com/semdave). If your goal is to promote your brand (either your personal brand or your business brand), consider using this in your username. If you have a topic-specific purpose for your twitter page, do some keyword research and find out your best options (i.e., say you wanted to have a Twitter Account for the general topic of “american obesity”. Find a highly search keyword and use that as your username. In the screenshot here, I chose the phrase “American Obesity” as my Twitter username. There are around 18,000 monthly searches for this phrase. Seeing that the username is available, I’ll take that and move on).
- Optimize Your Bio: Once people click into your Twitter profile (or once a search engine navigates there), your bio is one of the first items that will be visible/read. There is limited space for this bio, so you need to make sure you are incorporating optimal keywords into this space to help improve opportunities for your Twitter Profile to be displayed in search results.
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Write Keyword Rich Tweets: The recent partnerships with search engines has enabled real-time display of what is being said in Twitter, directly from the search results. In the example seen here, I have highlighted the area that I am specifically talking about. This highlighted area shows a real-time feed of what people are saying on Twitter in relation to childhood obesity. As with any other level of SEO, Twitter SEO would require the engagement of some keyword research prior to writing your Tweet. From the pharma sphere of influence, this could be a large potential opportunity if you are able to optimize Tweets based on what people are searching for and what is a hot topic in Twitter.
- Include Shortened URL links to Your Content: While not imperative to all Tweets, including links to your site, article, or related content is one big key to the value of Twitter for business purposes. Using URL shorteners (like bit.ly or ow.ly) you can drive people directly to your content and hopefully engage the user almost immediately. This provides more opportunities for additional potential links driving users to your content that is ideally highly relevant and highly optimized.
- Make Your Tweet “Re-Tweetable”: Part of the value of Twitter is the ability to have other people “re-tweet” your message if they think it is important or relevant. This means that in addition to trying to use keywords people are searching on, its also important to keep it “re-tweet” friendly. Keep it a bit shorter so that if someone likes the message they can blast it out to their circle of friends without removing anything important.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of Intouch Solutions.
