Most event marketers overlook the tremendous potential their website has to promote events. Search engines, the overwhelming primary source of traffic to your site, depend on structured, exposed content yet event calendars are oftn the worst examples of this ideal (read: search friendly) format. Search engine optimization, the practice of improving the quality and design of content so that the engines index more than just your homepage, is easier than people think.

Think of a search engine as a library. Each page on your company’s website is a book in that library: some of the books are good, others popular, some miss covers or have been misplaced never again to be found by the librarian. Users are more likely to use a library if it is well organized and promotes the most popular books and greatest variety of books so they can easily be found. Obviously search engines want to promote you, your job is to ensure that your books, the event pages of your website, don’t have torn or missing pages and that the material is accessible, valuable and popular.

Unfortunately for you, search marketers and in all likelihood the SEOs (the person who provides suggestions to the web developers to ensure content is search friendly) at your company typically focus on improving the most important content on your site: the homepage, product or services information, and categories. In doing so, they quickly dismiss promotional content like online coupons, store event calendars, and store locators; namely, the content that draws foot traffic through the door of your local business.

Far too often, websites make an easy mistake by presenting in-store event calendars in a javascript application that allows them to easily update the content (just ask the developers if they use ‘Javascript’). Doing so ensures that search engines, the library, can’t index those pages; users will never find those pages and you miss out on the most significant source of traffic. Sure, customers who arrive at the homepage will see your prominent link to a “store event calendar” but most customers arriving online are there because they intend to interact online. You want to reach the offline customers using search engines to find your business.

To ensure that search engines such as Zvents and Google can index and promote your event details; forward this list of priorities to your in-house search marketing manager, the SEO, or take them directly to the web developers. Getting your event content designed and exposed with the following in mind helps helps your reach our millions of unique users searching for local things to do, in-store events, and sales:

• Most importantly, and to reiterate what we’ve just explained, do not use Javascript!
  • In fact, your developers should never use Javascript; tell them to avoid it like the plague
    • Are there uses for Javascript? Sure there are, but the lost search traffic outweigh any benefits you get from a feature that can be created in some other language (code)
  • Also avoid Flash and do not present the event details in an image or banner
  • Use text in simple HTML, dhtml, or CSS.
• Do not move your event calendar.
  • We should be able to find it at the same URL today and six months from now.Ensure a consistent layout of the event calendar and refrain from changing that design
• Design a simple template for the event calendar, use it to promote all events, and refrain from changing that design
• Clearly identify event details
  • Event name (just the event name, not your business)
  • Start time (with AM or PM)
  • Date
  • Short description and a link for more details
    • By the way, a link and short description aren’t necessary but they really help - the name, time, and date are critical (but that should be obvious)
• Location should be displayed separately and consistently
  • Business name (your event name is not Spring Sale at Macy’s Palo Alto - The business name is Macy’s Palo Alto and the event is the Spring Sale)
  • Address including city/state (it doesn’t hurt to use the abbreviation of the state and the full name)
  • Zip code

Think your calendar is ready to be crawled? Submit it to us and we’ll unleash the search bots to index the content. Know though that submission to a search crawler is no guarantee that you’ll get indexed. Engines may find problems with the calendar that prevent us from promoting it. To ensure you get indexed add your business listing directly then tell us about the events.

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We had a blast at SES San Jose, re-introducing Zvents as the local search engine for things to do. As we continue to reinvent local search around the store and business events rather than the business listing, Local SEO’s are quickly recognizing a tremendous opportunity to drive in-store and online traffic for their clients by promoting sales, in-store event, and grand openings. Instead of paying to advertise those opportunities, we’re helping them do so for free.

While there, we took the opportunity to give away a flip video camcorder. Netconcepts‘ P.J. Fusco won the drawing and we had a chance to chat with P.J. who shared that the most readily overlooked opportunity in SEO is simply targeting optimal search traffic: that which provides a serious ROI while not neglecting blogs and social media. Netconcepts is a full-service search engine optimization serving big brands and IR 500 ecommerce sites with intelligent search solutions. They deploy a remarkable technology called GravityStream which P.J. explains as an opportunity for local businesses, “Even if the native site cannot be optimized due to allocating resources, GravityStream, a cornerstone NSO platform, can do it for them.” As you might imagine, netconcepts is encouraging their clients to use Zvents to take advantage of those overlooked opportunities and to drive local traffic through our free business and event listings. Asked of her favorite discovery on Zvents? “Our clients’ events”

Next opportunity to engage with us? I’ll be in Seattle next week at AMA’s Hot Topic Series about Search Engine marketing. Visit MarketingPower.com to register. Then, though plans are still being made, on to SMX Local in Denver and SES Local in LA.

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