This week at ad:Tech Chicago, Avenue A | Razorfish announced the results of testing of SiLC, the “Super-Intelligent Link Crawler” originally introduced in SMTrends Issue #31. The SiLC press release provided an introduction to work that was done with the U.S. News & World Report web site, explaining that the crawler was instrumental in identifying an issue that, once rectified, led to an increase in Organic traffic of 24%.

SEO Account Director Ray Rosti, who oversees the U.S. News project, offered the following additional thoughts while speaking of the growth of SiLC from concept and testing through fruition: “SiLC has become a powerful tool to help our engineers identify the severity of certain SEO Issues.” He went on to say that, “the great thing about SiLC is that it is flexible enough to crawl sites based on tasks identified through initial site analysis conducted by SEO engineers.” AA|RF has no immediate plans to release SiLC as a standalone offering to the general public. The tool is exclusively used by the SEO team at AA|RF to help provide analyses of client sites. 

VP Rob Aronson was interviewed today about the project, and the podcast is available at WebProNews.

It is a common assumption among those entering the online health space that the web sites dominating those rankings are impossible to beat. Additionally, there appears to be a feeling among some brand health marketers that their site will be ignored by the consumer. Many e-marketers believe that because of these two issues, they'll automatically need to settle for listings well below the top portals and information aggregators, as well as expect lower number of actual consumer visits coming from search engine results pages.

In the healthcare spectrum, consider WebMD as an example. The site is extremely trustworthy, ranks highly in search engines for many health terms, and has invaluable information. However, users don't necessarily rely on it for their source of endemic information and, according to JupiterResearch, only 19 percent have a favorite website in mind when searching health-based information. The remaining 81 percent is "up for grabs," and SEO can help. JupiterResearch also reports that about 65 percent of online health consumers click on search results because of the relevance of the title and description, while only 16 percent choose a result based on the trustworthiness of its source.

Proactively researching targeted keywords (based on commonly searched terms), creating enticing title and description tags, and optimizing web site copy will not only give a web site a chance to run with the big boys – it more importantly puts the emphasis back into the hands of those that matter most ... the consumer. This is especially true for branded terms; getting a branded site into the top 20 gives the consumer an option, and if the site’s title and description are more alluring and relevant to the search, chances are they’re clicking on that link instead of another.

Creative Meets SEO Series Launches - This week marks the launch of a new series of SMTrends Features.  This series will be a collaboration between Avenue A | Razorfish Creative and Search Engine Optimization team members.  The first edition of Creative Meets SEO provides an introduction, as well as an overview of the first “guinea pig” site, belonging to a major bicycle manufacturer and distributor.  Future editions will feature additional web sites and offer the opinions of other Creative and SEO team members.

VP of SEO Launches New Column – William Flaiz, the VP of SEO and Web Analytics, has published the first article in a series he will write for the online news site www.isedb.com.  His series will focus on the rewards and challenges of managing a world-class SEO team, and describe how his varied past experiences help him manage.  See the article: Technology Analyst to VP of SEO: What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Been.