Ok, so maybe very few are thinking about SEO today, but herein lies the problem.  It is often during these great moments of change that an organization’s disregard for search engine optimization (SEO) can result in devastating losses in the search equity they may have built up over many years.

In light of this there are a few lessons that all organizations can learn from the whitehouse.gov redesign and the importance of preparing for change from a search engine optimization perspective.

As Reprise Media’s Community Manager Austin Bryan pointed out to me, it was a wonderful symbolic gesture for the new White House web team to remove all of the robots.txt coding that had made much of the site invisible to search engines. It’s a dramatic change but was it one that the site had been fully prepared for?

In simply looking at links from Google to whitehouse.gov we can see that change has come, but not without a price. Out of the first 20 links on Google, there are 6 issues leading to either a broken page or 404 error page (this translates to a 30% rate of ineffective change management).

To be fair other parts of the site have been handled well with redirects up and running for the first lady and VP sections of the site.

Still, whether you are preparing to take the oath of office or redesign your website, here are two key points of advice:

Appoint a Transition Team:  Like all good online marketing strategies, having a team of qualified domain experts on your side developing and executing on the transition plan will ensure that you are taking advantage of the great awareness and traffic generating power of the web. This team will be on the look-out for all of the potential search marketing pitfalls of a redesigned site, such as lost links and duplicate content- both of which can significantly impact your ability to generate traffic from natural search.

Set up Your Change of Address: You don’t want Netflix to send The Departed to your old mailing address when you move into the White House. Similarly, when you remove pages from your website which were previously indexed by search engines, make sure to properly redirect those pages. A 301 redirect to the new content that most closely relates to those removed pages should do nicely. Much like a permanent change of address at the post office, this will automatically direct visitors to the new address for that page.

A good example of this missed opportunity was seen at www.whitehouse.gov/news. Though fixed now, this link redirected users to a 404 error page for much of today, which in addition to being a bad visitor experience means that all of the valuable links on other sites (which help natural search visibility) are being squandered.  Left as is, the search engines would just drop this page from their listings, meaning you have one less opportunity to direct that interested searcher to your site.

These are only two of the many considerations that site owners and marketers need to consider when renovating their online home. While most brands are starting to take notice of search engine optimization early in the redesign process, unfortunately what we see at whitehouse.gov is more the rule than the exception.

Ideally much of the work in SEO takes place long before your new site goes live and if done right, should be virtually invisible to the visitor. For marketers who are investing heavily in their digital properties, making SEO a priority from the outset will ensure many more visitors will be able to find your site through a search engine. Since search engines are the number one source of traffic on the Internet, that’s change we all can believe in.

In light of recent announcements, I’m surprised that no one has been discussing a more obvious and natural extension of Microsoft’s business and a huge potential revenue generator for Facebook: porting the Microsoft Office suite to Facebook applications.

Picture this; you are busy checking to see which of your “friends” has uploaded new photos from their office Halloween party when you are alerted to the fact that Joe Schmo just added the Microsoft Excel application. You click on Joe’s alert to install the Excel app onto your own Facebook profile, and see an invite to collaborate with Joe through Excel. Incidentally, you and Joe have been considering teaming up to start the next great web-based business, so both of you download the PowerPoint app and subsequently send an invitation to your developer friend who helps you hammer out a 10 slide pitch deck. The pitch deck then gets converted into a SlideShare presentation that is ready for distribution–perhaps as a “wall post”–to your venture capitalist friends.

For Facebook, of course, an MS Office suite of applications broadens the range of activities available to their 52 Million + user base, allowing them to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations, while increasing the time spent on site from today’s respectable 20 minutes a day to something orders of magnitude greater. The permission system already present in Facebook allows users to share these documents with fine grain control without ever having to attach anything to an E-mail.

As scary as this concept may be to the folks in Redmond, they must realize that their $16 billion dollar a year crown jewel is under attack. If you are a college student or a recent college grad, are you really willing to pay $150 – $500 to put MS Office on your machine? Google is banking on the fact that you might be interested in a less expensive albeit less feature rich, substitute for something along the lines of $0.

I would like to think that there is more to the Microsoft / Facebook partnership than just display ad inventory. I would also like to imagine that there is more to Facebook’s utility than playing scrabble and throwing food at your friends. The Office suite of products would certainly be a way to place Facebook squarely at the center of an increasing number of people’s everyday lives, which in turn would make the platform even more compelling to advertisers.

If Microsoft and Facebook played their cards right, this arrangement would clearly be a game changer. Microsoft could capitalize on the immense Facebook market, while monetizing this newly integrated software suite, and Facebook would increase user engagement. Regardless of the return on such a partnership, the real dilemma would be what to call this new Office suite… my money is on “Face-Off.”

“By observing the behavior of customers, employees and investors (do they or don’t they come back for more?), you can quite straightforwardly determine where value is being delivered and where it isn’t, and by extension, whether a business is succeeding or failing in its mission to create lasting value.”

Although written well before the advent of blogs, RSS or wikis, Reicheld’s message of retention and engagement as a measure of value has never been more relevant than in today’s hypercompetitive, technology-driven business environment. For companies both big and small, the stakes have never been higher, nor the opportunities more pervasive, as individuals are playing a vital role in evangelizing (or marginalizing) brands. But it’s up to companies to see themselves as collaborators – to have the courage to share their ideas with, and solicit unfiltered feedback from, their customers – or, I should say, co-creators. Social media can help companies both share and listen while accelerating growth and keeping stakeholder interests aligned. In short, social media makes the web a 24/7 focus group, or the world’s largest public suggestion box.

It all sounds good in theory, but when it comes to applying social media to your business, how do you actually weave together these dynamic communication platforms to engender loyalty from your customers, employees, and investors?

I think conversational communication is at the core of all of these strategies, and the findings released by Yahoo yesterday confirm this. Whether this communication means maintaining a blog that is open to honest feedback from customers, investors, and industry watchers, or engaging with an audience that has Facebook at the center of its online universe, companies engaged in social media are telling their stakeholders that they’re open to input and will be responsive to their comments. Their constituencies, in turn, will surface issues sooner, use social platforms for self-service (translating into a lower cost to serve), and will be more likely to act as brand advocates. The ultimate reward for these those companies is increased loyalty.

My hope is that, through a series of posts on the topic, the community will offer new perspectives and a critical examination of emerging best practices in this area.