Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

You know I’m getting a bit more into video production for CVBs and tourism organizations, and I want to ensure that you understand how important it is to optimize your video content for SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)

Great videos that are never found are just….nice.

The video below features Greg Jarboe telling you a little bit about how to increase your chances of being found – here’s a helpful article on press release and video SEO on Jarboe’s own site.

Hat tip to State of Search, who interviewed Jarboe at the International Search Summit in London this month.

Here’s the direct link to the video on YouTube, in case you can’t see the embedded box….

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While doing a live Tech in Twenty show last night on Blog Talk Radio (our topic was women in social media in 2010 and you can listen or download it here) I noticed that my fellow panelists Colleen Pence and Holly Hoffman both had the same answer when our hosts asked us to tell the audience where they could find us online:

“Just Google me.”

When you’ve worked long and hard and consistently to establish your Web site, blogs, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, Flickr photostream, Facebook profile, YouTube channel, etc….plus you’re talked about and linked to online….then it is easy to be confident that not only are you “at the top of Page One of Google,” you can FILL that page.

How broad and deep is your destination or attraction’s presence in search engine results, especially with all of the recent changes with Google and Bing?

Does your tourism organization’s material pop up at the top of Google search results, or is there some commercial site or savvy local blogger who trounces you with a better online presence?

How can I help you rise to the top?

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There have been some big changes in the world of search engines, and it’s important for the average CVB (Convention and Visitor’s Bureau) and tourism person to understand them, not just “the IT guy” or your hired gun marketing agency.

Google’s site ranking formula is a closely-guarded item, but fundamentally, to rank higher in search engine results you need lots of high-quality sites linking to your site.

Additionally, from Google’s Webmaster Central:

“One of the most important steps in improving your site’s ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.”

See how this works?

1. You create quality content, using the same words (called keywords) that visitors use to find you in search engines (i.e., “family vacation packages Toledo”) and….
2. Because your content is high quality and helpful, the humans who run the good sites eventually link to you.  Then….
3. When visitors search, your site comes up at the top of the search results because its content matches what they’re looking for AND your site is seen as having credibility and authority because others have linked to it.

Yep, that’s pretty much the big search “secret.”

It’s all still true, no question, but now there are new elements to consider.

Bing as a Google alternative

Microsoft’s Bing is now the third-largest search engine, behind Google and Yahoo. It’s gaining traction among users partly because of some extra marketing hype, and also because it is now Microsoft’s default search engine and even the default in some Blackberry smartphones.

So what if it’s the default?

Well, how many users change their computer software defaults, and how many take whatever they’re given out of the box?

In a move for more relevancy and cutting-edge “oomph,” Bing was also the first to cut a deal with Twitter and Facebook about featuring their previously-walled-off content in general search results.

There are deep pockets at Microsoft; I would never totally discount them.

Google featuring tweets and Facebook data

Hot on the heels of Bing, the 800-pound Google search gorilla is now also showing individual tweets in search results, and publicly-available Facebook data (meaning mostly Facebook Fan Pages) is coming soon.  You may hear it referred to as “real-time search.”

So what?

So tweets and Facebook chatter suddenly matter beyond simple community- and brand-building and “rainbow Skittles and unicorns.” They matter in how masses of people find information about your destination on Google.

So if you aren’t visible and participating on Twitter and Facebook, you’re missing a newly-significant way of being found by prospective visitors.

From the Tnooz post Twitter, Google and Bing: The Perfect Storm of travel search:

“In one quick stroke the search engines will be including the Zeitgeist of travel:  the here and now of the travel conversation or what the web community is saying about destinations, airlines, hotels, tour operators, agencies and, most importantly,  the reaction to it.

If this is the case, Twitter becomes a powerful channel for travel companies and can no longer be ignored.”

Plain-vanilla Google search isn’t so plain anymore

Until, oh, a month or so ago, you typed in your search terms and waited for the deluge. Anyone else who typed in those same search terms got the same deluge (with some small adjustments based on your geographic location.)

Then came this month’s Googlebomb.

Google now offers search results that are “personalized,” or tailored to your previous personal search patterns (back to about 180 days.) This technically means that 28 people typing in the same search terms might get 28 different search results, based on their previous usage patterns.  The user, by their own history, somewhat controls what he/she sees in search results, which are no longer “neutral” across all searchers. Users can turn off the pattern-tracking cookies or opt-out of this, but I defer to my point above about how many people ever change default settings on things.

So what?

So how do you achieve search engine prominence for your site when the search results are now fractured to match a gazillion different users in “the new normal?”

There is some skepticism that Google is as smart as it thinks it is.  Will the personalization/customization be helpful, or encase searchers in an echo chamber of their own making?  Will serendipity be lost?  Are all of these “helpful” initiatives making Google searches too complex and therefore possibly less trustworthy?  Does traditional SEO even matter in 2010?

So What?

So here’s my advice….

1. As always, produce interesting and helpful content for visitors to your destination or attraction, but don’t produce it just for a Web site.
2. You’ve got to be “out and about” – searchable and findable in more than one way (including mobile, where Google also made some significant search strides.)
3. You need to consider not only the customer relationships and awareness benefits of your Twitter stream, but also the use of keywords in your tweets. Yes, search engine optimization (SEO) has come to Twitter.
4. A Facebook Fan Page, which I recommended recently as a good first step into social media, has now become more than a nice-to-have.  The question should not be “do we need it,” but “why shouldn’t we have one?”

If I missed any significant issues or implications of the many recent changes in search engines, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been globe-trotting….well, more accurately, Continental-U.S.-hopping.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the action at state tourism conferences for Virginia, Ohio, Missouri and Texas, ESTO (Educational Seminar for Tourism) in Lake Tahoe, the Twitter-related 140 conference in Los Angeles, and BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas.  I’ve also physically attended the Association for Women in Communications (AWC) conference in Seattle and heard info from panels that I didn’t personally attend, and I’m already waving hello to people at the Oklahoma Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Tulsa, although it doesn’t really start until tomorrow.

Pretty cool, huh?

While I’d love to have unlimited funds, piles of frequent flyer miles and telepathic powers, I have to confess that I’m “attending” these conference by watching their Twitter hashtags, and you can, too.

Hashtags are simply a way of organizing all tweets that relate to one topic or event.  There is a central Web site for them, hashtags.org, but it’s not always terribly accurate or up-to-date. The assignment of a hashtag is often a rather informal, crowd-sourced event, announced in attendee tweets and thereafter appended by each interested person (if they remember) to every tweet that relates to the topic or event.

For example, as long as I remember to do it, every tweet that I send from or about the Oklahoma Governor’s tourism conference will have #OTIA09 in the body of the tweet – OTIA is the Oklahoma Travel Industry Association.

Look at the photo above to see what it looks like in one sample tweet, from central Oklahoma’s Frontier Country region.

At big conferences, individual panels or sessions will sometimes assign themselves a hashtag.  For example, tweets from the panels in the Travel Blogging Track at the 2009 BlogWorld Expo (hashtag #BWE09) had the hashtag #TTBWE09 (TT for “Travel Track.”)

If you attend an event and plan to tweet about it or from it, and there doesn’t seem to be a hashtag already in use, don’t be shy. Create one yourself and announce it in a tweet.

Do pick something that is as short as possible, since every character in your hashtag counts against the 140 character maximum in a tweet. If your event is an annual one by the same organization, simply change the year at the end.

To follow all the hashtagged tweets in action, I use three tools:

• For Twitter on the Web, go to http://search.twitter.com, type in the hashtag and click Search. All results will come up and when others come in, the Twitter search engine will tell you that and recommend that you refresh your screen.

• For a Twitter organizing application like TweetDeck or HootSuite, set up a column just for that hashtag along with your other columns for Mentions, Direct Messages, etc.  The column will refresh itself automatically and this is an easy way to watch the action in progress.

• Another service by my Round Rock-based friend and techno-whiz Brooks Bennett is TweetChat. It is like using Web-based Twitter Search, but it auto-refreshes and if you reply or retweet while in the hashtag’s “tweet room” the software automatically adds the hashtag for you.

Word of warning – Twitter search only works for a week or two back, so your stream of hashtagged tweets will “evaporate” after awhile. If you want to capture the action for posterity, take some screenshots.

(Update – a new deal between Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Twitter and Facebook was announced 21 October at the Web 2.0 Summit, so now you may want to also go to Bing at http://www.bing.com and see the search results for your hashtag of interest. I’m hoping they keep results around longer than Twitter so that I can “dig in the search engine closet” further back than a few weeks.)

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