In April 2006, Condé Nast launched Brides.com to serve as a portal site for its three wedding magazines Brides, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride (yes, count them, three mags for something that hopefully only happens once for all of us). Rand was pleased about how well this site’s launch was handled as he covered the event in his post “How to Launch a New Site.”
Condé Nast has a new site and magazine in the works. It is Portfolio.com, which will serve as the site for a new magazine of the same name premiering in April 2007. Currently the magazine has some advertising and subscription information accompanied by some video interviews with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Imment with editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman and a snazy slide show live.
While the videos are link worthy and the inception of a new business magazine is garnering links from sources like the Talking Biz News, What’s Next: Innovations in Newspapers, MediaBistro FishbowlNY blogs — which are all media or business related links, what are other tactics that Condé Nast can employ to prepare this site SEO-wise for its official launch?
It is aiming for an audience that Fortune magazine arguably once focused on — the wealthy jet setters who want some help on how to spend their money and lives. Now, Fortune‘s website currently lists the following in as its meta keywords: business news, financial news, FORTUNE, FORTUNE magazine, finance, FORTUNE home, FORTUNE 500, Fortune.com, best companies, top employers, best employers, business research, business and finance, business profiles, company snapshots, financial trends, fortune list, and business list. Portfolio‘s site only lists: Portfolio, Conde Nast, business, and magazine. I know that meta keywords are rather passé now, but they do offer some insight into what keywords a site is aiming for.
If Portfolio would like to build some solid organic rankings and relevancy for cheaper SEM efforts from the get go, what should it do for keywords like those listed above? Some of my thoughts — other ensuring that it gets linked to from Condé Nast sites, which it does — include: launching some blogs authored by some of the editorial staffers, posting text transcripts and commentaries for its two video interviews on the site, include captions for pictures in its slide show, provide previews of upcoming articles, and repurpose related text content from sister sites like those for Condé Nast Traveler and Wired. Condé Nast did purchase the domain and post placeholder content awhile ago, which was a smart move as it allows the domain to age.
What else should Condé Nast do to boost Portfolio.com’s SEO components prior to its official launch? Should it even worry about doing this since it is such a big player in the media world?
