Happy Independence Day! And for those Canucks that have a long-weekend hangover, Happy Canada Day!
One of the great things about growing a company is hiring a talented staff that also has areas of expertise and keeps an eye on trends, etc. I still keep up on the trends, but now I have a bigger cache to draw on with the staff in the office as well.
One trend in particular gets a lot of attention, and yet so many companies have little understanding of it: search engine optimization.
For example, many readers of this column would know the value of proper page titles. However, so many organizations fail miserably in creating an effective page title so that their pages are ranked accordingly on the major search engines (namely Google). Just a quick search of some big name organizations that don’t have effective page titles include Hyundai, the Government of West Virginia, and National Car Rental to name a few. (Did you know that Hertz wouldn’t let me on their site because I didn’t have ‘cookies’ turned on? They won’t let me on the site. Can you imagine turning away business because your customer has their cookies turned off? Extraordinary!!!).
So we should all know by know that search engine optimization is the process and activities of ‘optimizing’ your web pages so that they’re effectively indexed and therefore retrieved and ranked as high as possible by not only your own search engine, but also the big search engines. The same goes for intranets.
Did you know… “62% of users click on first page search results with an accumulative 90% clicking on results from the first three pages of returns. And 87% of results clicked on were from the organic (non paid) portion of the search results – which are totally dependent on their ranking by ensuring they follow the optimization techniques.”
Prescient Digital Media Business Consultant Catherine Elder gives us a complete refresher with a look at the latest trends for search engine optimization in Get discovered – understanding search engine optimization.
ON A PERSONAL NOTE: A welcome aboard to our new client CANA Group! A congratulations to our consultant Claude Malaison who will be leading the project. I enjoyed the long weekend – and worked very little for a change! After logging almost 50,000 kms in the past 7-8 weeks I was just a little tired. We celebrated my Dad’s birthday (happy b’day!) with a day at the beach, took my daughter swimming in the ocean, and did a lot of gardening. Watching with great interest my five month-old daughter grow and evolve. I think she’s a bright one.
I did manage to watch only some of the soccer including the very last bit of the – Germany match. What a game – thrilling stuff! I must admit I’m one of the chronic under-believers in Italy but I’m a believer now! I’ve been watching with interest all the free agent hockey signings in the NHL. Wow. How interesting the ‘game’ has become… particularly with the big defensemen musical chairs. We’re gonna miss Ed Jovanoski here in Vancouver – and big Bert too… but am looking forward to seeing Roberto Luongo and Willie Mitchell in action!