Chance Spann Interactive Producer Suggestion 2/26/10 “The Acronyms 2”

The acronyms just seem to fly out of the air in the interactive world but its important to learn their meaning, least you be the only visitor to your site? Two important acronyms in this discussion are SEO and SEM. Quick story, after being in the biz a while I have had different supervisors over me usually in the VP status and truth be told... I've mentioned SEO in my early conversations with only to asked what it meant WHAT?... WOW! So Int. Producer... be sure you can define it and make sure you can assist your team in all the angles of integration. My good friend and UGC mecca Wikipedia defines it as:

"Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. "

There are currently industry standards of SEO, these include making the website "search engine friendly" via a few things: optimization of the content and the HTML, the relevance of the descriptions and keywords, including also a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt, site submission etc... these are all common and need to be done as a part of the last stages of development but... they are old news friends. If you want to get ranked these days according to the methodologies that the search engines are using, let just say seeing as Google holds the larger share of the market amongst them all, you need to do a few more things.

Without getting into "deep" detail, after you have done the common industry standard SEO moves, you must flood the "social networking world" with your information i.e. a link back to your site. Let me give you an example and we will use me, Chance Spann, I'm a brand? I'm trying to sell myself on the internet Right?, I'm doing it right now (Grin). I created a base site, I actually use www.linkedin.com/in/chancespann or www.naymz.com as a base site to lead users back to learn more about me, my expertise awards etc. These sites will be the sites I want ranked the highest and will contain the full information I want the user to engage in. Then I use all the other social networks to lead users back like: Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger etc. insert "tag clouds" and I get it into every one of them I can. My links get Dugg and Tweeted and clicked and passed around by users and it's just wonderful. The bots from the search engines are hitting my link from every source and then ranked and the whole process begins and as content gets updated daily by such methods as what you are reading now it keeps ranking and keeps me at the top of the search rankings. It takes a while for an "indirect" vs "direct" search terms to rank me on the first page of a search or higher, but at this point I'm doing quite well.

Here are some example search terms to look for me in Google, Yahoo Bing etc this is how is would work in any situation even with a big brand but that brand will probably rank highest simply due to the fact of the user base and competition:

Direct search terms: Chance Spann, Chance Spann Interactive Producer

You notice the page just fills with information on me. Hmmm so what Eh?

This is where the all the SEO work begins to show...

Indirect search terms (Google):

1. Interactive Producer Dallas Texas = ( Im ranking 2nd with this one under a job posting... this is good)

2.Addy awards dallas American airlines = ( with this just random search term the SEO kicks in, and along side a huge brand name like American Airlines and Addy ( Addy Awards) I rank an incredible 9th on the first page in a Google search. This is great!)

Same terms in Bing:

1. Interactive Producer Dallas Texas = ranking 3rd under paid search. Great!

2. Addy awards dallas American airlines = 3rd page in ) : needs work, actually needs clicks ( ;

Same terms in Yahoo!:

1. Interactive Producer Dallas Texas = 2nd page 6 down due to this blog I'm writing now. Getting better but I want on the first page!!! But remember its yahoo and remember I was on the first page on Google the master of the internet. LOL?

2. Addy awards dallas American airlines = not even worth mentioning. LOL hit and miss

All in all my work over the past couple of weeks I feel good about my tactics, just simply due to the Google ranks. Im going to leave with this thought, standard SEO practices are needed and please do them, but we now have the UGC model and Social Networking angles these are imperative and you must incorporate them into your "Organic" SEO strategy. SEM... more to come.

Just my two cents...