Developing SEO strategies for big brands are some of the most coveted projects of agency SEO, especially brands that are willing to push the envelope and not adhere to vanilla SEO tactics. Whenever we pitch a new project or obtain a new client, often the first things we do is analyze the competition and make a baseline assessment of how well the site we are working with is positioned. Aside from that, it’s a lot of fun dissecting sites with the use of a few handy tools to see what’s good, bad or just plain awful.

Derek Chew posted a great article entitled “Big Brand Understands SEO” detailing the corporate automotive landscape and how Ford clearly “gets” SEO. While understanding how a search engine spider interacts with a website is fundamental, preparing and implementing correctly is a necessity for organic ranking success. When analyzing the majority of corporate OEM automotive websites, Ford’s use of SOFA (Search Optimized Flash Architecture) presents spiders with crawlable copy and relevant text links necessary for ensuring successful results. They get all the creative jazz and functionality of Flash while effectively serving content to search engine spiders.

There are many other big brands missing out on additional organic ranking and traffic volumes. Nike serves spiders a list of links for specific countries; Sean John presents a link to download Flash.

One might argue big brands don’t need to be optimized as they might rank regardless, but that also only applies to brand terms in many cases. Cast brand loyalty aside and unbranded organic search queries such as “hybrid suv” and “safest full size car” are up for grabs.

Article by Sean Stahlman

Did you ever want to own the URL www.dallascowboys.stinks or www.tonyromo.loser? Well lucky for you
ICANN has made a recent announcement that may allow you to do just that. ICANN has now approved offering of vanity TLDs (top level domains). TLDs are the extensions at the end of web addresses and are currently reserved for commerce (.com), education (.edu), government (.gov) and 18 other varieties including country TLDs (.de, .co.uk, .fr, etc.). This would allow for companies or individuals to host websites with their own “personalized” domain such as .aarf, .neutrogena or .yourname.

There is a great amount of speculation on what the influx of vanity TLDs will mean for organic search engine optimization. The main concerns are around the $100,000 application fee and how these vanity TLDs will impact rankings, traffic and brand recognition. The other question being asked is how will the search engines respond and what should marketer’s start to prepare for?

Branding
From a branding and reputation management perspective, vanity TLDs would likely open up the door to numerous opportunities for businesses to maintain brand awareness in a variety of forms. The options here include the creation of even more branded microsites. But more websites does not necessarily mean more traffic and organic rankings. This could be a useful avenue for driving paid search listings and media placement, but from an organic perspective these vanity TLDs would require optimization, link building and aging which are the basic components of SEO. Another aspect to consider is user behavior and direct type-in-traffic; it’s confusing enough with 21 TLDs and most users resort to .com when typing in URLs.

Optimization
From an optimization standpoint the current SEO strategies would still apply. How search engines will respond to vanity TLDs is the bigger concern. Commerce TLDs (.com) have always been king and are the most sought after from a branding and SEO benefit perspective. With the exception of country code TLDs which take priority for searches within specific countries, what weight if any will be applied to vanity TLDs? It is doubtful that search engines would devalue .com in favor of generic or branded vanity TLDs.
Corporations could always register vanity TLDs for brand protection and brand marketing, and then redirect them to their main website. The only value there is herding users to the right location. If the reverse action was taken and the main domain is redirected to a vanity TLD, all organic rankings and traffic could be jeopardized.

Maintenance
Maintaining numerous websites on vanity TLDs is another issue. The resources and costs required for building, hosting and marketing additional websites could be excessive. And what about offline marketing? Will companies shift advertizing models from promoting their .com in print and TV to their newly obtained vanity URL?

Cost
While ICANN is not "selling" new top level domain names there is no doubt they will be resold at escalated prices. ICANN's CEO, Paul Twomey stated the application process alone is upwards of $100,000. This price tag would eliminate a large majority of the population that might have the ability to capitalize on vanity TLDs. That’s a great financial risk for a lot of companies, especially when you’re not guaranteed the vanity TLD. There is also process in place to object to vanity TLDs based on the grounds of intellectual property. The initial clear winners in this new offering are ICANN, domain registrars and hosting companies that will profit from increased services.

Article by Sean Stahlman

NBC’s news, blog, and video site NBCOlympics.com is designed to play a significant part in the Olympic coverage offered by the network. With the expected popularity of the games, the folks at NBC do not seem to be missing the opportunity for obtaining online consumer viewing behavior knowledge. NBCOlympics.com is tagged with at least six web analytics platforms. Coverage of the Olympics will play out on seven television channels, and online viewer will be offered streaming and on demand video, along with loads of information. The coverage will total about 5,000 hours of video between television and online.

NBC is preparing for their Olympics broadcasting marathon, and they seem to simultaneously be reaching for a Web Analytics brass ring. The research department is utilizing a plethora of platforms to measure site usage. A recent New York Times article listed a few of the platforms used to measure performance and in the article NBC explains that they plan to use a variety of analytics to determine the total audience measurement index, or TAMI. Included in the analytics fusion that makes up TAMI is data from Omniture, Nielsen Media Research, Quantcast, Revenue Science, Insight Express, and Clearspring widget analysis. Analytics is also being utilized on the mobile version of the site. Together these platforms cover site side analytics, demographic research, behavioral targeting, survey analysis, and social/collaborative analytics. This would be a tall order for any analytics department.

There are a substantial amount of data and visitor segmentation points being passed to analytics systems. Including day parting, and regional specifics, NBC is even collecting NBC affiliate information is based on a question in their television form

The data collected through the Olympics coverage should provide NBC’s research groups with significant audience insights that can be used for years to come.

Article by Joel Collymore

In his latest SEW article, William Flaiz talks about how people don't go to Web sites anymore. Web sites come to them. This is, perhaps, the best way to explain the impact local search.

While Cuil is now starting to pick up a little steam, there are still some questions about their launch that Matt Greitzer discusses in Poor Cuil?