AgroKrag Graphic Design/Illustration, Web Design, Web Marketing

AgroKrag is based upon the principle that every aspect of graphic design and marketing is connected. Since a large portion of our work is web focused, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is no exception. With that said, I’d like to give an overview of how SEO (Search Engine Optimization – a segment of SEM) techniques are evolving.

Much of this post contains strategies from a SEM training session that I recently attended in Boston. This session was hosted by Search Engine Strategies, and presented by Jennifer Laycock, who is the owner of the blog/SEM company Search Engine Guide.

The training session was very intensive and informative and was based around the focal point that SEO has came a long way the birth of the term (1996) To the present. Search engine algorithms are being designed to think like humans do, and to replicate human judgment. More and more, SEO is based on common sense then it is on math and calculations.

META data

Keywords were very popular and used by search engines when they were less complex - in the eyes on the search engine, the more keywords, the more relevant the site had to be according to that phrase. Obviously this is no longer the case. SEO’s quickly learned how the algorithm worked and stuffed keywords everywhere. Now META data is not very important at all in terms of search results. The title tag still is very important, and the one and only place where you should make sure you have your keyword(s) (besides in the content, of course.) META keywords are obsolete (but in my eyes important to guide the developer and copywriter), META descriptions do not effect search results but they still are a good way to tell what the site is about in your own words rather then let the search engine do it by pulling copy from your site.

Links

As inbound linking became extremely important, SEO’s purchased, spammed, created link farms, etc. Search engines became aware of this and the importance of links evolved as follows:

1. Quantity
2. Text (anchor text)
3. Quality
4. Age
5. Buys

It now seems to be a combination of all of these, with the focus being on not over-doing it in a particular area. Google has stated that they will penalize you if you purchase links for improving your search engine results. They want the links to come naturally as in theory the site with the best content will gain the most inbound links. Reciprocal links have also been frowned upon in many occasions. They are great when two sites are related to each-other, but if not they do not help the user and Google is aware of that. Anchor text is also important, but should look natural and should not always just be keyword based in order to rank for long-tail keywords.

Content

As of now, content is the single most important piece to the puzzle. If you create quality content, based on keywords (no more then 2-3 per page), people will link to you naturally. There should be a “value-add” to every page and a reason why a user would choose your page versus a competitor’s.

Coming soon: Latent Semantic Indexing and tracking CTR

Apparently Google is beginning to include “Latent Semantic Indexing” in their algorithms. What this means is that the engine will scan the page for keywords and synonyms of that word, and the site can rank for those as well as a word that may be used to categorize a group of those words. For example, a site about running, jogging, biking and weight lifting may begin to rank for “exercising.” Google is also taking click-through rates into consideration. If a page has a horrible rate, it is less likely to rank as it is seen as less valuable to the user.

Again, be sure to check out Search Engine Guide. Jennifer was a big help and has enabled me to be a lot more confident in my own SEO techniques.

We at AgroKrag were recently commissioned to design a series of illustrations for the launch of GroupGain.com’s “Buzz Campaign.” The service offered is a means to buying goods at discount bulk prices. This gives buyers the power to lower the prices of the products they want. In order to drive traffic to the site GroupGain wanted to leverage their existing user base. The simple solution to this was offering a free MP3 player obviously! The campaign launched a couple months ago, but the big problem with it wasn’t the designs it was the fact that they didn’t have any existing users to leverage, thus the campaign is sitting in limbo on the site. The ides behind the project is solid it just needs further development, until then we have these pretty attractive ads on their site.

As a side note; GroupGain hired our designer Jesse Rand to put together a Flash animated tutorial video which can be viewed here. Clocking in at just under 8 minutes this thing was quite an undertaking and we are very proud of Jesse for all the hours put into this video.

If you like what you see on GroupGain.com or in Jesse’s Flash Tutorial please contact us as we are always open to Flash projects.