Objective:
Hearst Digital Media Group needed to educate its technical and editorial teams on SEO best practices in order to maximize the search engine visibility of its content. Training was required for a wide range of employees across 15+ sites including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Seventeen, Esquire and Popular Mechanics.

Strategy and Tactics:

Coordinating with Hearst’s in-house SEO team, Define established a training curriculum for both technical and editorial audiences. Ongoing training sessions were scheduled and opened up to all relevant staff. Trainings were repeated periodically to provide reinforcement and account for staff turnover, and over time more advanced topics were introduced.

Through technical trainings, the staff was given a solid understanding of search-friendly site architecture in order to facilitate effective crawling and indexing of the Hearst sites. This was important not only to make sure that current properties were properly optimized, but to ensure that SEO implications would be considered in the development of future sections and features.

In the editorial trainings, it was essential to bridge the gap with editors and producers who had natural concerns over how SEO might impact their process. The key was creating the understanding that editorial SEO is not about manipulating copy or stuffing in keywords. It is about helping search engines to understand what site content is about, so it can be matched with users looking for that information, which ultimately results in greater exposure and more readers.

With this in mind, the editorial staff at each property was taught best practices for optimizing key page elements without impacting editorial voice. Editors and producers were also shown how to use keyword research to gain insight into how users search for specific topics, and to use that information in editorial planning.

Results:

Equipping technical teams with a better understanding of SEO allowed them to better prioritize and execute the recommendations in Define’s SEO site audits, resulting in significant improvements in site architecture and template design. As importantly, SEO was incorporated into the development cycle, ensuring that new site features were search-friendly right from the start.

Concurrently, search-friendly practices were built into the daily editorial workflow. Hearst’s ability to clearly label its content, leverage internal linking and factor in searcher behavior while planning site features resulted in much greater search engine visibility over time.

Hearst’s success can be seen in these results from a select group of sites:

Good Housekeeping – Up 87% in Search Traffic in 2008
The Daily Green – Up 66% in Search Traffic in 2008
Esquire – Up 54% in Search Traffic in 2008
Popular Mechanics – Up 45% in Search Traffic in 2008

Objective:
Through social media marketing TVGuide.com wanted to reach new audiences and increase brand and content awareness, while increasing inbound links and driving traffic to the site.

Strategy and Tactics:

Define worked with TVGuide.com to evangelize the concept and value of social media marketing among company stakeholders. Once internal support was secured, Define helped TVGuide.com to identify opportunities, prioritize the communities to focus on and set their outreach strategy. TVGuide.com staff members were trained on effective and appropriate participation.

TVGuide.com’s approach included establishing a Brand Ambassador to interact with bloggers, fan sites and in social communities in support of related site content. All efforts were completely transparent, with the need for being a genuine member of the communities strongly emphasized. Once its credibility was established, TVGuide.com leveraged its access to exclusive content and information to make contributions of real value to the communities.

Results:

Over time, TVGuide.com was able to make strong connections in a variety of social media outlets. Through the outreach efforts of the Brand Ambassador, TVGuide.com established a network of avid fans that were happy to spread the word, unsolicited, about special content related to a particular TV show, film or celebrity in a variety of forums. This had an exponential effect that was much more effective than anything TVGuide.com could have done on its own.

One effort in support of online and print content around a new Disney film offers a good snapshot of their success:

• Film page received 2 times more traffic than any other film/show page in that period
• Photo gallery page views: 700% greater than site average
• Video viewing: 300% greater than average
• Time on page: 25% greater than average
• New visitors: 192% greater than average
• User ratings/votes: 1000% greater than average
• Print magazine sales: up 65%

Objective:
Open up the vast content archives of www.NYTimes.com to both users and search engines, by structuring the site architecture and page templates to be as search-friendly as possible.

Strategy and Tactics:

Capitalizing on the approach used to build SEO knowledge into the DNA of About.com, the strategy at NYTimes was to make sure every person who had a hand in content creation understood their role in the SEO process. This meant that editorial staff learned the basics of keyword markets and research, and how search engines create a ’shelf space’ for any given query. Technical staff was trained on how crawl barriers were currently inhibiting the search engines from effectively accessing NYTimes.com content, and how registration walls and shifting URLs can be problematic to search engines and users alike. The Marketing teams were versed in how the search engines process link popularity, and how to structure content that makes it easy for users to link to.

The challenge at NYTimes.com is the sheer volume of content that is created on a daily basis. A lot of people’s hard work goes into this content, and for it to be invisible in the search engines is a significant opportunity missed. By distilling SEO into a manageable effort for each person’s individual role, the SEO process could be tackled by many hands, and not just a small team of experts. This is the best way to manage SEO across large organizations: Dividing the responsibilities and training people on specific areas of search engine expertise. Some of the problem areas that were tackled:

• Crawl barriers mitigated with sitemaps and site architecture changes
• Editorial staff trained on how to write headlines for the web
• CMS altered to give people the ability to alter META tags
• Media assets structured and optimized to be more accessible to both users and search engines

Results:

Since inception of the SEO program at NYTimes.com in 2005:

• Search engine referral traffic has grown 300% from 2005-2008
• Yearly growth rate of search traffic averages 65%
• Better user engagement: A greater number of keywords drive traffic to the site, and time on site has significantly increased