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RSSOver the past few years, since Google's "PageRank" started DAO by measuring a site's popularity -- counting every external link as a vote to determine its relevance -- the emphasis has shifted from "on-page elements" to a focus on off-site criteria.
DAO is all about moving the focus of optimization efforts from the page text to more relevant assets, such as images, audio and video. The goal is to help searchers find the most relevant site based on the criteria and content most important to them.
From a bottom-line vantage point, companies must figure out how to best adjust their Internet marketing strategies to maintain a competitive advantage. To find the right balance, they must decide the most opportune way to optimize standard text while also optimizing and promoting their other digital assets.
When is the right time to start making this shift? Now! Search engines already have systems in place to measure the relevance of a Web site's digital assets. And they are constantly focused on improving them so that they become a more prevalent part of the equation. The only question is how long it will take for users to fully realize that they have these resources readily at their disposal.
The growth of universal search means the kinds of search results SEO consultants have become accustomed to are history, or at least on the decline. So now they need to figure out new ways to optimize any electronic file that can be crawled, indexed, categorized and sorted. This is about much more than just optimizing social media but rather the entire Internet, making all content easier to find via search.
Consequently, businesses today are increasingly producing an array of content for search engines that can be indexed, leaving their success directly linked to their ability to adapt to a rapidly changing market.
To survive, those of us who use search engines to market Web sites must adapt. With such intense competition and money at stake, the leading search providers will continue to improve the user experience.
As long as billions of people continue to use search engines daily, there will be a progression in the modes of optimization we use to improve the visibility of Web sites and enhance their presence.
That makes it necessary for companies to consider all of their digital assets in producing formats that are responsive to search engine and costumer demands.
We can no longer afford to wait for the customer to find us through text optimization and impress them with our other digital assets. Now it is all about matching digital assets with channels of distribution to provide marketers with even more opportunity to reach customers. In this new world, each channel not only drives traffic independently, but improves a Web site's standard search visibility.
DAO is not just a better definition -- it is the future of search marketing.
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In theory it's as simple as making sure you go to market with everything you have that's promotable and understanding that if something is searchable, it can be optimized.
The challenge is in making it work in organizations that do not regularly produce content or those with more complex content management processes.
unless it's an RFID tag
That's just my opinion about what DAO is, although, I must admit, I'm not one to get held up on acronyms or naming. What I'm REALLY interested in, and what I think we as SEM professionals should be interested in is how to optimize digital formats. Do you optimize for a video with a description of the video, transcribing the video content, meta tags? are we back to meta tags??? For instance you can tag pdfs to make em more accessible and searchable by SE's (check out boagworld.com's podcast or Joe Clarks article on PDF's.)
So any ideas on optimizing digital assets? What would define as digital assets? Steve states the following as digital assets, "... PDFs, Videos, White Papers, blogs, Podcasts, LinkedIn Profiles, Plaxo Profiles, PowerPoint presentations, etc." Any others?
a company has digital assets like PDFs, Videos, White Papers, blogs, Podcasts, LinkedIn Profiles, Plaxo Profiles, PowerPoint presentations, etc.
These are ASSETS.. and yes, they are digital.
You are thinking it's SEO.. it's not.. well kinda.. the optimization of these websites is NOT for the SEO of the website.
It's the optimization of the digital asset itself, yes within a search engine for that particular format, be that a blog posting optimized for blog search on technorati or google blog search, a video search on google or youtube, a white paper search on a b2b technical engineering forum, or even a podcast on techology.. and yes.. I can pull firsts in iTunes, just like I can in google, except its for a podcast.... not a webpage.
I've been doing SEO from before it was seo... first it waqs BBS, you optimized you BBS posts to come up first, then it was news groups, and you had to optimize your group posting to make sure your items were seen first... then.. in 95 webcrawler and yahoo! came along... you optimized your HTML for webcrawler and you optimized your category description ON Yahoo! FOR Yahoo! and you just prayed they would accept it and if they didn't it was similar to trying to get a website listed in DMOZ these days... you waited and waited and waited.. but there are still business out there.. fortune 500 business that still don't have web metrics on their website...
SEO is getting (and keeping) your client's website first for their keyword.
DAO is getting that video on youtube first ON youtube for the keywords, it's getting that podcast to come up first for the search in iTunes. (because that can't be SEO, or is it? since there are search functions in both youtube and iTunes)
So what is a video that you optimized to come up first in google... the SEO of a digital asset?