SES Day 2 Session 2 - Digital Assets Optimisation

Anne Kennedy – how to supercharge your organic results

It’s really important to speak the IT and business language as DAO is a very broad term, ensure they know it’s about media files on your site.

DAO is the practise of optimising all your content into the search engines verticals particularly video and images
Eye tracking from 2006 is very different to the blended search heat map of 2010. Images in universal search grab the eye traffic. Show the business the heat map so you can get the commitment for resource for your universal projects.

On site DAO tips:

1. Audit your assets and their categorisations
2. Give your digital assets descriptive filenames and place them on their own URL. SE’s do check between jpeg images. She also mentions saving charts as bitmaps (not that id use that for load speed?)
3. Write alt attributes that actually describe the images. Add a title attribute if your picture is generic.
4. Fill the input firls of your database where you stash your digital assets
5. Fill the links with anchor text as an alt
6. Create digital assets xml sitemap and submit it
7. Enable enhance image search within webmaster tools
8. Embed your digital assets around keyword relevant text

Martin Sinner focused on data from universal search.

They conducted research on the trends within the universal search set. In January 09 there was very fast growth in the visibility of universal search results in Germany. In Jan 09 80% of the search results researched were free of universal search elements whereas in Jan 09 only 40% of them didn’t have universal search elements.

Not all verticals are growing the same way, shopping  has a stable visibility, news is growing and images is growing very strongly towards the middle of last year. Blog results conversely reduced last year due to quality issues. The US is showing a higher amount of universal search than Germany at this time so increases can be expected. In terms of long tail and short tail, the short tail has a far higher use of universal search results.

Jeff Ferguson from Local.com

Google has a bad habit of introducing things and not telling us how they work. He compared it to old charts they used to say “here be monsters” when places were not charted yet.

Don’t fear the 10/7 pack, (Google maps)
They are getting more complicated as they are testing new things all the time
Maps take a up a huge amount of real estate within the search making maps more crucial than ever.
New maps was tested in the US that was tied into click and call tracking.

Optimising for maps, the experts came up with 43 things which is a bit overdone. His top tips were:

1. Get your own address right…everwhere. Be consistent across all sites and citations. Address to be found on every page on your site. No PO boxes.
2. Phone numbers – there is some concern on toll free numbers in the mean time use call tracking
3. Register with various local business centers. Google, Yahoo and Bing
4. Citations are Locals link building
5. Some local tweaks, service and or product name in business name and description

a.    City name in the business and description
b.    Location close to the city
c.    Reviews and especially good ones tests between Google and Yelp to bring in star rating in the review

Jury is still out but nice anyway….

a.    Photos and videos
b.    Coupons

Keep an eye out for changes, new enhanced listings are being tested, lots of new development in maps as it

Crispin Sheridan – SAP

Why universal search is important

More recent enquiro study shows that in a universal search result the top listing does not pick up much eye traffic.

What was their response strategy

Evaluate their high value and volume keywords and cross reference them with the DAO strategy

Some results they have seen

They gave delegates to an event video cameras and asked them to take pictures and blog. They promoted the assets from there. The video views in 50k views with 8k enquiries. There was a lot of residual traffic post event. Maps spiked during the event and then sustained.

SAP also registered all 150 sales offices within the UK and that has been very successful.

Top 3 tips

1. Determine your business outcomes

2. Do your homework on the greatest areas of opportunity
•    Focus on most valueable keywords
•    Find and develop universal content
•    Post promote and optimise

3. Measure, test and promote your successes