Don’t let Nike try it (SEO, that is)

This past week I attended the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference & Expo, which is held in a number of cities worldwide every year. The event is full of enthusiastic geeks diving into the minutia that is search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing. In layman’s terms, if you’re working hard on your Web site, you want to make sure that (a) you’re designing and wording it in a way that Google will want index it on its first page in various keyword search results, leading to (b) an increase in the number of eyeballs on your site, hopefully leading to (c) more readers and more business.

Some Web sites do an excellent job of achieving good SEO, but the way to really learn about the subject is to see who out there is not exhibiting a best practice. One particular company that SES panelists like to take potshots at is Nike. (In fact, one of them suggested Wednesday that there be an entire panel devoted to what is wrong with Nike’s Web sites, an idea at which other speakers and attendees laughed in agreement.)

At last year’s AND this year’s SES, various speakers said that while the athletic apparel company’s online properties fare well in branded searches – the “Nike” in the www.nike.com URL certainly helps – they do very poorly for keyword results such as “running shoes.” (In Google, shoe retailer Zappos.com comes out on top for that, and according to WebProNews, a search for the keyword “shoes” gives Zappos 21 percent of the traffic for that word versus just 1 percent for Nike.) There are a number of reasons for this, the first and foremost being that search engines still can’t track Flash applications very well. Nike’s sites abuse Flash to the nth degree, so when Google and Yahoo! capture information to index, they see sites just as you would be looking at them in Lynx. (Oh, the horror. Does anyone else remember the MS DOS-like text on blue screen with [LINK] and [IMAGE] tags? To think I was once forced to surf the Web in this manner.)

So, using a handy online bot spoofer, here is a screenshot of how nike.com looks to the Yahoo! Slurp crawler:

No, I did not create this in Photoshop and paste it here; rather, the “404″ appears to show that bots can’t read images or Flash applications, so the entire Nike front page is a big blank to Yahoo! as well as Google. Now, Nike can probably get away with this since their brand is so well-known, but with more than 6 billion people on this planet, surely at least one person isn’t familiar with the company, so this is no way to draw in new customers. The easy thing to do would be to scrap the fancy Flash and go for a site that is easier on the eye, easier on your connection and easier on Google, right?

Well, Nike didn’t want to do that. When SES speaker Liana “Li” Evans, the director of Internet marketing at KeyRelevance, was going to go into the “Nike Story” at a panel, I was expecting the same song and dance that I just mentioned above. Instead, she retold a sordid tale that WebProNews broke earlier in the year. Nike, in an attempt to trick the search engines, kept constructing Web sites in Flash but fed HTML code to the engines so that keywords could be picked up. In other words, the Nike site that Google’s bots crawled did not resemble the coding in the actual online site, a practice called “cloaking.” Is Nike cheating? The panelists seemed to think so. What do you think?

“Endless Drama”: ESPN’s soap opera

Yes, a sports network has concocted an actual made-for-TV, er, computer soap opera on www.endlessdrama.com. Sound ambiguous? It’s actually the latest zany advertising campaign for ESPN. And it’s what you get when actors, baseball players and journalists collide in one big, super-duper uber “Endless Drama”…about fantasy baseball picks.

(Fantasy sports, for the uninitiated, are games where competitors choose athletes for a fictional roster, then use their chosen ones’ actual performance statistics throughout the season against other competitors for points and – in ESPN’s case – prizes.)

It’s wacky, it’s weird and it works. The Web site includes a trailer and four episodes (more are on the way) involving the usual soap opera plotlines of infidelity, betrayal and deceit, but in the context of mano-a-mano fantasy baseball combat with such lines as, “Don’t…trade…Prince…Fielder!!!” (Cue dramatic music, followed by horrified, drawn-out scream.)

ESPN press contact Alison Lazar told Sportsbiztech that the campaign, which launched Monday, was helmed by Boston-based advertising agency Arnold Worldwide. “One Life to Live” executive producer Frank Valentini directed and shot the episodes in New York on his actual set. Not surprisingly, the cast includes four actors from Valentini’s own show. Others include Cameron Mathison and Rebecca Budig from “All My Children;” ESPN’s own sports journos such as Buster Olney (ESPN The Magazine); and – the best part – baseball players Torii Hunter, Chase Utley, Jorge Posada and Hanley Ramirez. Posada’s wife even has a role, but in the series she’s not married to the Yankees catcher. Her character, Flora, is disclosing her fiancé Paulo’s fantasy picks to her boss, with whom she is having an affair, but she secretly pines for Jorge Posada’s character appropriately named Jorge. Will they end up together by the season finale?

Always known for its creative advertising campaigns, ESPN said that it “partnered with ABC Daytime and incorporated soap actors into the spots to bring some added “drama” to the commercials, since there is a shared “passion” between sports fans and soap fans.” Lazar says it’s too soon to check out the Web analytics to see if more visitors are registering for ESPN.com’s fantasy baseball leagues compared to last year. No matter. Whether you are a baseball fan or not, it’s definitely worth watching the series and sending “smack videos” while munching on an (evil) egg salad sandwich…