Barbara Coll

Barbara “WebMama” Coll is an internationally recognized expert in search engine marketing (SEM) with a firm grasp on the industry’s offerings and their direction. Her knowledge extends to how search engines use and display fresh content; blogs, RSS, and video and she has strong beliefs on why her clients need to get involved in these marketing tactics.

Barbara has been active in the Silicon Valley world for 21 years including roles in product and program marketing. In 1996 she founded WebMama.com to provide strategic and tactical consulting in the world of online marketing. WebMama.com is now a multi-million dollar company with a number of brand name clients including HP, Guthy-Renker, VMware and Verisign. Barbara was founding President and Chair of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO).

Barbara has an computer systems engineering degree from Carleton University in Ottawa Canada. She lives in Menlo Park, CA with her patient family.

Title: CEO
Affiliation: WebMama.com Inc.
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Speaking
  • Thursday 03/26/2009 14:15 - 15:30
  • SES Mobile 2009 / Online Communities

  • An online community for your niche can be a welcoming place for current and future customers. Let your customers and prospects engage in conversation while they/you provide valuable information, give them a place to connect with others, and let them praise and vent. Of course you also make it easy for them to learn more about your product or service and help them purchase. You should also think about the fact that search engines LOVE this kind of content! It is relevant to the category and has lots of text and keywords. Search engines want to see more content that is customer-generated instead of the same old product pitches. But you need to make sure your community and review/rating environment is search-friendly as there are some potential issues that can take you unaware.

    All the basic SEO best practices should come into play when developing a community based site. This session will discuss techniques for getting your community and review sites indexed, including Google webmaster tools usage, minimizing duplicate content, technical issues that may arise, and tagging. Attendees will learn how to use communities and review sites as part of an internal linking campaign to help the engines understand what pages on your site are important for displaying in search results. Two case studies – 1 B2B and 1 consumer – will be used as examples of well-indexed, well-linked communities.