ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the governing body for internet domain names, recently approved the release of generic top level domains (gTLDs) from its current number of 22. Slated to be released in January of 2012, ICANN’s decision will allow the creation of TLDs in any language or script. So how does ICANN’s decision affect SEO? Probably not as much as we might think. Search engines like Google and Bing do not differentiate between a .com and a .net suffix, and certainly do not give a .com any additional ranking power because of it. Where there might be a bit of opportunity would be the use of keywords within the URL itself, however, keyword rich URLs is only one of many organic ranking factors and are less significant than in the past. SEO requires more than just a great domain name and more TLDs doesn’t necessarily equal more rankings.

Most people have a metric that they obsess over. Supermodels watch their weight and baseball pros watch their batting average. Saudi Arabia obsesses over the price of crude. For online marketers, it looks like one particular metric has overtaken all others. That metric is the bounce rate.

I have been in countless meetings, and on numerous calls, where the bounce rate was positioned as the be all and end all of success, the metric that supersedes all others.  In the religion of Web Analytics, everybody seems to worship at the altar of the Bounce Rate. Let’s play devil’s advocate, at least for the next five minutes.

Before diving in any deeper, let’s remind ourselves precisely how the bounce rate is calculated. I go on your site and arrive at a landing page, and instead of going to another page in your site, I leave.  There you go; I have just contributed to the bounce rate. According to most web marketers, your site has failed me. In a tiny way, my interaction will have contributed to a poorer performance. But did I have a horrible time on your site?

We all know that with SEO, content is king. The fact is that if it’s not explicit on your site, you don’t have a chance to rank for it.  That being said, creating a mass amount of content that is both engaging and central to your product is often a difficult, time consuming and expensive task.  A common content creation recommendation is to add a blog to your site, but again, blogging requires an ongoing commitment and leaves the burden of topic creation to one person or a small group. A great way to let your target audience help relieve this burden is to open a public onsite forum.

What is a Forum?

A forum allows people to hold conversations in the form of posted messages. Unlike a blog, where the blogger broadcasts a message and waits for comments, a forum lets users create the initial topic or thread. Then, moderators and participants alike can address the topic with answers or suggestions of their own. Allowing your customers to initiate interaction on your site essentially shifts the responsibility of content creation away from you and onto your most interested consumers. They can ask questions, request advice, post interesting ways they have used your product and get answers or comments from the company and from their peers.

Why are Forums Good for Search?

In most forum applications, each new thread expands the site by a page and all subsequent responses are added as content to that page. This expands the size of the site and gives each new page the opportunity to contain keyword-rich content in your consumers’ voice. Search engines also give merit to pages that are updated frequently. Without a forum or blog, this becomes a very difficult task. Google even recently started to call out these dynamic pages with a ‘Blogs’ and a ‘Discussions’ logo in their left navigation and within their search results pages. 

Welcome to Catalyst Online’s blog.  We have created this blog to share our thoughts on the ever changing world of search engine marketing.  Catalyst’s experts on search engine optimization (SEO), paid search marketing, and content strategy will be providing insights and points of views on issues that affect our industry.  Our objectives are to establish this blog as trusted resource of timely and actionable information, and to demonstrate the knowledge and experience that makes Catalyst a leading provider of search marketing services.

In the coming weeks we’ll be posting on many hot topics including the role of social media in search engine marketing, optimizing sites for mobile search, image and video optimization, optimizing Facebook pages, Google’s contextual targeting tool, and so much more.

Whether you are new to search marketing or a seasoned professional, we hope you’ll find valuable information on our blog.  We also hope you engage with your own comments on our postings and let us know what you want to see in future postings.  Happy reading!