Optimized Outlook – Facilities can take
simple steps to boost search engine presence
Author: Dave Brooks
Date: October 01,2007
Search Engine Optimization is the new buzz phrase for
marketing professionals hoping to improve their Internet presence
on search engines like Yahoo and Google. While ticketing companies,
secondary markets and promoters have been spending thousands of
dollars to ensure links to their sites pop-up when a user searches
for an artist’s name in a given market, many facilities have
been slow to invest in optimization.
“It seems that the venues are leaving the search engine
marketing to the ticketing people and the promoters,” said
Matthew Battles, director of sales for Engine Works, a Portland
search engine optimization firm that has done consulting work for
the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo., and KeyArena in Seattle.
“In some ways, that makes sense not to have too much overlap
on the search engines, but there are simple steps that facilities
can take to improve their rankings and boost their Internet
presence.”
Venues, he said, have to find their niche in the search engine
world. As an example,
when a user searches on an act name like “Beyonce
concert” on Google, they’ll often be directed to
primary ticketing companies like Ticketmaster, or secondaries like
StubHub. It’s not typical for the user to be directed to the
venue that will be hosting the artist in the user’s
city.
“In a lot of ways, that makes sense because the ticketing
site is the point of sale, so it makes sense to direct them
there,” he said.
But what about when a user simply types in “Chicago
Events” or “Cleveland Basketball Games.” In this
instance, the user is conducting a broad search for entertainment
options in their regional market.
“That is the search you want your venue to be part of because
this is the search where the user is seeking
entertainment options and the first choices that pop up on his
screen are often going to be where he’ll spend
his money.”
But before a facility can improve their searchability, they have to
understand how search engines work. There are only four important
spidering search engines left: Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. The rest
of the search engines are getting results from either Google or
Yahoo or are no longer online.
The search engines use programs called spiders to scour the
Internet and search websites for relevant content. That content is
processed and ranked according to how much content a site contains,
how many different websites link to that website and how often
people click on that website when doing
searches.
“It’s an issue we’ve been working on for some
time,” said Amanda Wiess, marketing director of the Big Sandy
Superstore Arena in Huntington, W. Va. “We felt it was
important to boost our presence on all search engines because if we
drove traffic straight to our website, then we had a better chance
of capturing information about the client and market other
offerings back to them. You can track where people come into your
site and compare that with your Ticketmaster
reports.”
Weiss wouldn’t disclose how much the facility spent on the
optimization efforts, but added that the program was done almost
entirely in-house and required about “100 personnel hours of
tightening web copy and a lot of trial and
error.”
Kirk Rhinehart from the Arco Arena in Sacramento said his arena
unleashed its team of interns onto social networking sites like
MySpace and Facebook, as well as the hundreds of blogs dedicated to
the facility’s tenant Sacramento Kings of the National
Basketball Association.
“We had three college students from Sacramento State scour
the web looking for relevant content on either the team or bands
that were set to play the building,” he said. “If they
found a posting about a basketball player, say Mike Bibby for
example, the student would post a reply in his comment field with a
link to our site. The same for fan sites of bands that had upcoming
concerts at our building. Eventually we would build up enough links
and that would boost our search engine
presence.”
So how, do venues improve their online presence? Frederick
Vallaeys, product evangelist (yes, that’s his real title) at
Google said it just takes some simple tweaking to get sites
optimized.
Use the right keywords — Make sure the right words are
placed on the front page of your site, said Vallaeys. Think of
words that people will search when they’re on the
web.
“The secret is to not just slap a bunch of keywords on your
site, but to ease them in with readable content,” he said.
“Spread them throughout your site in paragraphs. Generally,
if a site is designed to be user-friendly, it will probably meet
search engine requirements as well.”
Make the site fast — Both search engine spiders and site
visitors prefer pages that load quickly. Avoid heavy and
unnecessary graphics on the web site. “If the site implements
Flash (web programming), consider creating a Flash-free alternative
for users who prefer not to wait for it to load,” Vallaeys
said.
Validate the HTML — Search engine spiders don’t
like broken HTML, so make sure the site’s code is clean.
Also, double-check the spelling. “Just like search engines
don’t like to see broken HTML, users shun poorly written
copy. Before publishing your site, make sure it doesn’t have
any spelling errors,” said Vallaeys. “And watch the
functionality. All links, registration forms, password-protected
sections and cookies should be working
properly.”
Use ALT tags for Images — ALT tags describe images to
users using text browsers and to the search engine spiders. Use ALT
tags for all important images, especially those that contain text
and appear at the top of the page.
Interviewed for this story: Matthew Battles, (503) 223-5700;
Frederick Vallaeys (650) 218-3849; Kirk Rhinehart, (916) 928-3604;
Amanda Weiss, (304) 696-5947