Today’s Washington Post has an article (”For Ted Leonsis, a Quest to Find Himself Faster Online“) on Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL and owner of the Washington Capitals. It describes how he launched his personal blog, Ted’s Take, initially in an effort to control the results in Google on a search of his name (previously, results were “a hodgepodge of news stories”). It’s an interesting summary of using a blog and an intuitive SEO strategy to establish a specific reputation online. Here are the steps Ted followed:

1. Define the blog - he decided the blog would be both personal and professional, presumably to reach the widest audience.
2. Write often - Ted notes that frequency of updates is an important ranking factor, and often posts several times per day.
3. Link out - The article implies that outbound links help ranking, but that’s primarily because they help …
4. … Encourage Links In - By linking to other popular bloggers like fellow sports team owner Mark Cuban, Ted’s earned links back to his blog, which both drives direct traffic and represents “votes of approval” in Google’s indexing algorithm.
5. Name drop - Ted hints that his keyword strategy is to use the names of the famous people he deals with regularly in his posts and tags, presumably so that searches on those names will return his blog. That’s a challenging approach, though we’ve managed to make some good headway with a similar SEO strategy for ExecutiveBiz with their weekly “Executive Spotlight” feature.

With a Technorati rank of 12,390 as of today (compared to Cuban’s 107), Ted clearly has some room to make his blog more popular. That said, since Ted’s Take ranks #2 in Google search results for his name (behind AOL’s corporate bio), Ted’s primary objective has been achieved.

Ted told the story of launching his blog at an ExecutiveBiz event last May, where he described his motivation as more based on his curiosity and general interest in how Google works than any elaborate personal marketing strategy. During that talk he also gave a great overview of Web 2.0 and how it fits in at AOL. You can watch the entire Ted Leonsis / ExecutiveBiz Web 2.0 event video here.

Whether you know it or not, you have a web strategy. Newsflash: If you have a web site and you do not know what your web strategy is, that’s not a good thing.

So, what is “web strategy” and why should you have one? Those are great questions, thanks for asking. Here’s how I think about web strategy:

An organization’s web strategy is an actionable plan devised to achieve measurable results on the web. “Measurable results” require a web proprietor to have a specific goal (or set of goals) in mind for their web presence. The actionable plan provides recommendations based on these goals by analyzing web presence and web data in relation to effectiveness with all web stakeholders.

Let me boil it down a bit more simply: web strategy is your plan to achieve what you consider success on the web.

I think it is important to note that web strategy is not the end game. It is not the goal, but rather the means to it. Typical organizational goals include selling more widgets, increasing membership/donations, or achieving greater awareness of brand and messaging.

There is a silver lining. It is possible to turn the corner on a poorly executed or non-existent web strategy. A great place to start is to determine what’s currently happening on your site by analyzing your web data. Check out our series surrounding this exact subject.

Whenever you accept user-generated content, you run the risk of opening your system up to spammers. This is most well-known as a problem for blogs that allow comments; but, every relatively open site faces this challenge.

There are many potential solutions to this problem — you could write your own Bayesian filter, manually delete and blacklist IPs, or rely on an external service, for instance. For speed of development and ease of use, making use of an external service is by far the best way to go. For this post, we’re going to take a quick look at Akismet.

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