Define helps companies to develop an effective corporate social media strategy and to leverage social media marketing (SMM) to increase brand and content awareness, engage with target audiences, generate traffic and links and compliment SEO efforts.

As seen in our TV Guide case study, we help you to understand the landscape, locate audiences and discover opportunities, establish objectives and formulate a strategy. We provide ongoing guidance as you actively and appropriately engage with social media communities, then help to measure and evaluate the results and recommend adjustments as necessary.

Using the same strategy as our Enterprise SEO services, our approach with social media marketing is not to provide outsourced pitching or promotional activities.  We teach companies to bring these practices in-house and build an ongoing program that will be sustainable and pay dividends over the long-term. Ultimately SMM is about two-way communication with target audiences; to be truly effective that communication needs to come directly from you.

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%

Beyond Theory: SEO Tips for Survival

A site optimized for search is truly a moving target. On the agency side, there’s the thrill of landing clients, analyzing websites,  making recommendations, creating valuable content, securing relevant links, and waiting for implementation. In short, the thrill of the hunt. But in-house SEO is a different story.  It’s survival of the fittest.  Getting changes implemented,  finding the budget for content development, and being accountable for results – with failure and a potential job search always one budget cut away. Hear first hand some of the techniques and tactics used by leading experts in the field, including examples of real issues faced in house and how they were addressed, and propel your site to greatness.

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

Define believes that comprehensive SEO knowledge across all facets of an organization is the key to developing an SEO program that can capture search traffic over the long run. Search engine optimization training create search-proficient staff not only on the ‘front lines’ (IT and content creation teams), but also within marketing, product development, and strategy groups. Once all parties are educated, a search program can be executed across a company of any size. Here’s an overview of How Enterprise SEO was a part of the search success at NYTimes.com.

Define uses the same methodology with our clients. Using the best SEO practices we’ve learned, we comprehensively train your staff on best practices and provide recommendations on integrating those best practices into your daily workflow. No two Enterprise SEO programs work the same, so our trainings are customized to the business environment at hand. Our search engine optimization training is an exchange of ideas and information, and is geared to position you for optimal organic search traffic gains.

The ultimate goal of our search engine optimization training program is to alleviate long-term costs associated with hiring a third party SEO company. Our experience shows that bringing search in-house is the most efficient and effective strategy for the enterprise client. For an idea on how this is implemented and the kind of results it can bring, check out our SEO Training Case Study for Hearst Digital Media.

Define helps audience development teams to develop a fundamental understanding of SEO best practices, and how many of their activities have a direct impact on search engine visibility. We help you to understand the SEO implications of audience development initiatives including syndication and sponsorships, feeds, widgets and apps, e-mail marketing, advertising buys and on-site advertising.

We also work with marketing and PR teams to develop programs for link analysis and link building, and to help them synchronize SEO with social media marketing and other forms of online PR such as reputation management, blogger relations and reader/consumer outreach.