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Daily Search Forum Recap: November 18, 2008

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 10:00pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Forum Recap

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Video: Google Launches Mobile iPhone Voice Application

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 4:13pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Guess what, iPhone owners? The Google Mobile Blog has some great news for you. Google has released an iPhone application with voice recognition that will return searches formatted for your phone. This eliminates the need for you to have to type any queries.

Barry has illustrated how this works:

Cool, isn't it? Most people do think so. One defines this move as "cutting edge technology," though I'd have to attribute that to Apple's superior iPhone rather than Google. Jill Whalen is looking for an iPhone application that does voice recognition dialing; you'd think Google would have thought of that!

All in all, the application has been very well-received.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

Google AdWords Tip on Negative Keywords

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 3:54pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Google AdWords

AdWordsPro Sarah is not done giving Google AdWords subscribers great tips. In yesterday's tip #8 on Google Groups, Sarah tells us about how to take advantage of negative keywords.

She explains that if you are using a negative keyword like -fast blue, any keyword iteration that utilizes both words will not show up, including terms like "blue fast". Essentially, consider an "AND" operation. Therefore, if you use a key phrase like "fast car mercedes," and there's no mention of "blue," an ad will show. But with the inclusion of "fast car mercedes blue," the ad will not show because both terms are included in the negative keyword.

On the other hand, if you had a negative keyword like "-fast blue", which is a negative phrase match, you won't get ads that show "fast blue" in the actual keyword list. But if you had an ad like "fast green blue", it would show up.

Sarah goes through examples for negative exact match also.

Understanding negative keywords and how they are applied in different scenarios should help you get an understanding of how to maximize your campaign and make sure to generate the most targeted impressions.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Is Yelp.com Paying for Positive Comments?

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 3:32pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Social Search

Yelp.com, the review site, is reported to have been engaging in some shady activity with business owners. In one example quoted by the linked article, a business owner was told by telemarketers that if she paid $300, reviews can be rearranged where the negative reviews would be essentially placed "below the fold." However, Yelp doesn't actually allow that.

At Cre8asite Forums, it's suspected that Yelp.com's employees may even have a hand in writing bad reviews for local businesses to encourage them to purchase into the paid program. A pretty shady operation, don't you think?

In fact, if telemarkers engage in a practice that Yelp obviously approves of (they're reading from a script, after all) and Yelp gets a negative review by business owners for actually engaging in these shady operations, is it legitimate for Yelp to remove those negative reviews? In another article, a business owner states that her negative review about Yelp itself was removed by Yelp.com. (But wait, she can't remove her own negative reviews, so why doesn't it work both ways?)

Is this practice extortion? Is Yelp.com legit? Is it time for a new company to take over and do it better and ethically without greed of money being on the mind?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Yes, Google Will Index & Rank Your XML Sitemap File

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 2:22pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Every day that goes by, I become a bigger fan of setting up an XML Sitemap file for Google and the other search engines to chew on. I think Sitemap files are important for sites to take full advantage of being indexed in Google. Clearly, submitting a Sitemap file is just one small step you need to do to enjoy ranking well in Google. You can often submit a sitemap file and Google won't index all your pages. We discussed this topic yesterday with My Pages Are Dropping Out of Google: What Do I Do?

What I find interesting is not only does a Sitemap help you tell Google about your pages, it also gives Google another document to index and include in their search results. Yes, Google may index your XML sitemap file and rank it in the search results. For example, a search on inurl:sitemap.xml returns Google's XML Sitemap towards the top of the search results for me:

That being said, hundreds of Sitemap files are indexed and in the search results. They typically only come up for very specific searches, that likely won't impact the normal searcher.

Two Google Group threads are discussing this. One, JohnMu of Google replied to, saying:

It does look like we have some of your Sitemap files indexed. It's possible that there is a link to them somewhere (or perhaps to the Sitemaps Index file). At any rate, I wouldn't worry about this since these are generally not URLs that will come up in the search results, so apart from people like you who look at the details, nobody will really be seeing them.

If you really don't want them to show up in the Google results, you have a way out. Here is how according to JohnMu:

If you do want to have them removed from the index, you could have your server send a "x-robots-tag" HTTP header tag with the contents of the file. Since they all appear to be originating from a single script, I imagine adding this would be fairly easy. For more information on the "x-robots-tag", please see our blog post.

Is Google indexing your Sitemap file? Do you care?

Forum discussion at Google Group.

Google Maps for Mobile Working On Preloading Maps

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 2:12pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Google Topics

Google Maps for Mobile has become an essential tool for maybe mobile warriors. I have spotted a Google Groups thread that asks Google if they would be willing to allow users to download maps to the application and then use those maps while being offline or not connected to the Internet.

This comes in handy when you:

Don't have a data plan but have wifi
Your internet connection is in a dead zone
When you are on an airplane with airplane mode on

Google Maps Tom, an official Google Maps representative has almost confirmed Google is working on it. He said:

There have been a number of posts in this group specifically requesting this functionality, and we're working to meet your needs - but for now, Google Maps for mobile requires a data connection for use.

How soon? Who knows, but it does seem like Google is working on this.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google Promises They Don't Cap AdSense Earnings

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 2:07pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdSense

We have questioned if Google limits how much an AdSense publisher can earn in the past. We even ran a poll where the majority of publishers felt Google did not have a glass ceiling for AdSense earnings.

Now, a WebmasterWorld thread pulls out a quote from the new AdSenseAdvisor that Google does not cap publishers. Let me quote you:

I 100% guarantee that there are no earnings caps on AdSense accounts. I will swear it on a big stack of Google search results. No earnings caps.

That is believable to me. Do you believe it?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Jerry Does What Is Best For Yahoo By Stepping Down From CEO Role

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 1:59pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Other Yahoo Topics

Jerry Yang, from what I hear about him, is a kind, gentle, caring and giving person. To see the news that he is stepping down form the CEO role, for the betterment of the company, is sad but yet necessary. It is sad, cause he is a good guy, but if it was anyone else, I don't think I would be upset about it. Don't get me wrong, Yahoo needs a new CEO to step in and get the company back on track.

Between all the back and forth with Microsoft and Google, all leading to failure, it is a necessary step. Jerry Yang replaced Terry Semel as CEO in June 2007.

I like Mack's take at the WebmasterWorld thread, where he said, "I think Jerry's main problem was he was to attatched. In business you realy need to think with the head, not the heart. Yahoo! was clearly his "baby"."

Overall, I don't think anyone is surprised. Most wonder what took so long and many are not too confident about Yahoo's future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 17, 2008

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 10:00pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Forum Recap

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google Tests "Skip Intro" Link in the SERPs

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 4:32pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Google Search Engine

Today, gabs spotted a new feature in Google.co.uk that lets you skip through the splash screen of sites. Using this query, you can see a similar result to this:

Search Engine Land spotted this in June, and it looks like Google isn't done testing this out yet. Further, the "Skip Intro" link isn't very visible, so it'd be interesting to note how many people actually have seen this but never actually clicked on it (probably because they overlooked it).

It's a nice addition, but indeed, I think the "Skip Intro" link would need to be more prominent to be useful.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

State of Washington Sues Search Engine Optimization Firm

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 4:14pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Legal Issues in Search

NetworkWorld reports that the State of Washington has sued an SEO firm for a variety of infractions, including making claims that they can increase traffic to clients' websites, falsely claiming affiliations with other marketers, making claims that customer service representatives are available for any calls (though they never returned calls), failing to provide refunds, continuing to bill credit cards of customers who have canceled, and failing to register with the Department of Licensing as a commercial telephone solicitor.

In the past four years, 90 complaints have been lodged against the company, which uses the name Visible.net.

Is this lawsuit a good thing? A few people are a bit worried. How many SEOs promise a lot but deliver below expectations because competitors overdeliver and the algorithm changes [drastically], despite all that you've done? It can happen. While some say that this is a plea aimed at snake oil sellers, if a client is unhappy with legitimate SEO work, what's to say they won't consider you a snake oil salesman?

On another note, how come nobody has sued those companies that send you mailers claiming to be your domain registrar and wanting to renew your domain for a few years (at least to my knowledge)? Like these guys. Seriously -- I'm sure there are more than 90 complaints against those people.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Is Social Media Marketing a Productive Use of Your Time?

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 3:43pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Social Search

Peter Da Vanzo poses a question on SEOBook asking if social media marketing is a waste of time. In it, he adds a few qualifiers including traffic (is the traffic to your page to see a monkey riding a bicycle worth it?), an uncontrolled message, a concern about the ability not to measure branding, the level of interaction isn't clear, it takes time, it's stupid and is a useless distraction, and it's difficult to scale.

This all may be true to an extent. EGOL recounts his own experience being Dugg: when the page was submitted to Digg, it had no inbound links. Within a few weeks, though, it had several hundred. Three years later, it's still on the top of the Google SERPs.

That said, it's not completely a waste of time.

I should add that this industry is very focused on Social Media Marketing as getting Dugg on the front page. That's not all there is to SMM.

One important thing to note, as shared by forum member glyn:

The thing with Social Media is the moment you get too specific with your advertising you scare the user base away.

Forum discussion continues at Crea8site Forums.

Yahoo Search Marketing Now Lets You Block 500 Domains

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 3:27pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Yahoo Search Marketing

The Yahoo Search Marketing blog has announced that those utilizing the Sponsored Search account functionality can now block 500 domains instead of the standard 250.

While this is helpful--after all, the number of blocked domains has now doubled--there's a concern that Yahoo is still sending "garbage traffic" to YSM users (from Yahoo search partners). One mentions that 500 blocked domains is not nearly enough. One mentions that he wants to block all non Yahoo domains.

On the other hand, one forum member says that he hopes that Google sees this as a challenge and also ups the number of domains that can be blocked.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Search Engine Watch Forums

Google Video Ads Take About 48 Hours to be Approved

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 2:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdWords

Google's video ads can be an interesting way to drive more traffic to your site. But if you expect video ads to be approved immediately or as quickly as your text ads, don't bank on it.

A Google AdWords Group thread has one advertiser who posted his video yesterday and got impatient. He then asked how long it will take for approval and AdWordsPro Sarah said it takes about 48 hours but can take longer depending on the "volume of submissions."

This answer really does not correspond to the answer at the FAQ, where Google wrote:

Your video ad will begin running as soon as it is processed and passes through our editorial review. This process usually takes a few hours, but it may take as long as a day.

I guess Sarah is right?

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Group.

My Pages Are Dropping Out of Google: What Do I Do?

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 1:58pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

Over the course of the past few months, I have hearing buzz from the forums and from people in the SEO industry that Google is dropping pages out of their index. How do these people know? Well, when they do a site:www.domain.com command, i.e. in my case, site:www.seroundtable.com, Google is showing less results then they have a few months ago. Personally, I do not track these things, so I am not sure. In fact, the last time I documented that number seems to be in June, when I had 7,990 results, today this domain has 14,000 results.

But that doesn't stop the fact that many many webmasters and SEOs are noticing a huge decline in the number of pages indexed by Google for their site. Or at least, the site command is returning less and less results over time for a site command. Is it a reporting thing or is it really Google dropping pages out of the index due to quality or other issues?

There is a new but largish WebmasterWorld thread with several webmasters complaining about this happening on their sites. Even moderators are noticing it and trying to reverse the results. What actions are they trying?

The most obvious is to get more links to your inner pages
The next thing I would do is control what Google removes by 301ing or noindexing pages that are not critical to your success
Some are trying using the nofollow to, again, control what Google removes.

Overall, in my humble opinion, Google is getting picker about what content to show and what not to show. I believe it is a hybrid effect of both link popularity and duplicate content filter in play, in these cases.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Now Showing Sitelinks for Some Sub-Directories

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 1:36pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

As Googler, Matt Cutts Twittered, he now has Sitelinks under his domain for a search on [matt cutts]. Why did it take Matt over two years to get Sitelinks for his domain when it is such an authoritative source?

The answer might be that his content was on a sub-directory. Yes, right now, there is no substantial content on www.mattcutts.com, all or most the content is on www.mattcutts.com/blog/. And it seems like Google is now giving sub directories Sitelink love.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the topic, noting that Matt Cutts is not the only query returning a sub directory listed with Google Sitelinks. I'll just guess a few right now and show you that others work, such as:

* iPhone:

* Apple:

* MacBook Pro:

What does this show to us? That you can have different Sitelinks for different queries, if your site is authoritative enough. Google told us this fact in the past, but we were all skeptical, including myself, that this is possible. I guess I have yet to see Sitelinks for the same URL change based on query but it can change for different URLs on the same root domain.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

How Google Wants You To Use Alt Tags & Title Tags on Images

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 1:24pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

A Google Groups thread has discussion around how to properly use the alt attribute and title attribute for your web page images. Of course, Google recommends that you make sure to make them as useful for the end users. So use them as per W3C recommendations but let's hear from Google on what they expect.

JohnMu from Google explained how to use both the alt and title attribute:

alt attribute should be used to describe the image. So if you have an image of a big blue pineapple chair you should use the alt tag that best describes it, which is alt="big blue pineapple chair."
title attribute should be used when the image is a hyperlink to a specific page. The title attribute should contain information about what will happen when you click on the image. For example, if the image will get larger, it should read something like, title="View a larger version of the big blue pineapple chair image."

I'll quote John from Google now:

As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the "alt" attribute. Feel free to supplement the "alt" attribute with "title" and other attributes if they provide value to your users!
So for example, if you have an image of a puppy (these seem popular at the moment :-)) playing with a ball, you could use something like "My puppy Betsy playing with a bowling ball" as the alt-attribute for the image. If you also have a link around the image, pointing a large version of the same photo, you could use "View this image in high-resolution" as the title attribute for the link.

There is a Google blog post on using alt attributes as well.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 14, 2008

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 10:00pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Forum Recap

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Weekly Search Buzz RoundUp - 11/14/08: Great PubCon Keynotes, Liveblogging Dispute & Veteran's Day

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 6:30pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Forum Recap

Guess what? The "con" part of PubCon is over and the guys are preparing to head to the pub later today. But alas, I'm back in New York -- like Barry, I took the red-eye. It's 11AM EDT (or 8AM, whatever) and I'm all confused about where I am and how I got here. But moving on...

PubCon Keynotes Rocked
I had the pleasure to liveblog the George Wright keynote at Pubcon. He talks about how, with a $50 budget, he made a viral phenomenon. It's pretty impressive to hear that kind of reinforcement when you have business objectives, don't you think?

The following day, we liveblogged Satya Nadella of Microsoft. They launched Project Silk Road, an API that looks pretty promising.

I'm Not Giving Up Liveblogging, Even if Barry Says I Should
There's a jerk on the Internet who wanted to get attention, so he blogged that we should stop liveblogging because our reporting is inaccurate. Then he says that he's upset because he has "liveblogged erroneously." Well, sorry that you suck at liveblogging, John, but that doesn't mean you have to attack two of the greatest livebloggers this industry has ever had. Meanwhile, the blog post that this John dude wrote evoked some heavy emotions and Barry is running a poll. Should we stop liveblogging? Answer us. And if you say "yes," identify yourself with a comment on the thread so that we livebloggers can burn you in effigy.

Why is Google Using Blog Comments--and Not Public Forums--to Communicate with Webmasters?
Do you find it annoying when you report a problem on a blog post and Google chooses to respond on the blog and not in an "official" channel? Does it irk you that Google doesn't appear to use its own internal blogs to communicate these "bugs" or observations with the rest of the community? To some, it does. But for Google, it makes a lot of sense. Why should they worry an entire webmaster community if only some people are being impacted? What does this mean for you? Keep being active in the blogs, baby!

Google
Finally, after all this time, Google has finally released an SEO guide. It's a 22-page PDF with all this useful information, or so I hear (no, I didn't read it yet either). Now when is Google going to talk about linking?

Googlebot Won't Answer Your Calls if You Ignore Him
I have no idea why someone would block Googlebot and then realize later that this was a stupid decision and try to reinvite Googlebot back into his life. However, some guy does want to do that. How do you tell Googlebot to crawl your site again? The idea is to send signals to Google that you're interested in reigniting that flame: get more links, submit a sitemap, and whatever else you can do to call your site to Google's attention.

YouTube Sponsored Ads Broken
Isn't it nice when YouTube launches a new feature but it doesn't actually, erm, work? Barry tried to play with YouTube sponsored ads and got an internal error. What gives? (I think it has something to do with a Mac.)

Deleting Your Google Sitelinks May Not Remove them from Google
Apparently, a webmaster has discovered a bug in Google. When deleting his sitelinks, a webmaster realized that Google kept them intact. Five days later, the deleted sitelinks are still listed on the search engine. Hrm.

Argentina Doesn't Honor Free Speech
It sucks if you're living in Argentina and want to learn about a prominent figure. It seems that Argentina prefers censorship rather than allowing content to be discovered. Search engines were forced to comply with this legal measure, and well, I'm glad I live in America.

Veteran's Day Comes and Goes
With PubCon in our faces, many forgot that we celebrated Veteran's Day on Tuesday. Google forgot to honor people in the Coast Guard and eventually updated their logo. Dogpile and Yahoo joined in the fun too. Of course, so did we!

No Video on Sunday
Barry got a new MacBook Pro and I think he wants to play with it instead of making our video for Sunday. You'll just have to wait for him next week (sorry Sam!)

Is it Worthwhile to Buy a High PageRank Domain and 301ing it?

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 3:13pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Engine Optimization

What happens if you want some good link juice to your domain? You may engage in the practice of buying a site and 301ing it to your old domain. In yesterday's PubCon session, we even talked about buying sites for maximum exposure and minimum risk. But the question is really: will you get juice by doing this?

At a High Rankings Forum post, member Randy claims that Googlers say that the "trust" of the site gets reset upon a domain transfer and that you won't get the PR value. At the same time, how is Google to know that you have bought a domain for this purpose? That said, Randy says it's 50/50.

If you have experience in this area, the comments area of this post is waiting for your insights.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Do You Need Enrollment in the Google AdWords Professional Program to take the AdWords Exam?

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 3:11pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Google AdWords

Google has a requirement -- at least, the site says so -- that you need to be enrolled in the Google Professional Program to be considered for the AdWords exam. But is it really required?

AdWordsPro thinks so (but unfortunately isn't 100% sure). I think that if it says it's required, it probably is.

The question is: is Google really strictly enforcing this requirement? Search Engine Roundtable readers: do you know? Have any of you ever tried to register for the exam (which is paid) and had the course enrollment requirement be an obstacle?

Let us know in the comments.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Gmail Adds Video and Voice Chat

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 2:56pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Other Google Topics

Want to see who you're talking to over your IM? You may want to use iChat or Skype, but now, Google Talk can support voice and IM chat. You can find out more.

For those who are dependent on Skype (and perhaps 3-5% of my friends actually use the service consistently), it's nice to know that Gmail will probably fill the void for the remaining 95-97%. Many forum members found that Skype's functionality was limited (you needed XP SP2, for example), so the Gmail solution should work pretty well.

That said, the actual integration of these new features hasn't come without its criticisms. One person expressed his disappointment that Google has not installed a folders system and he considers that important. (I see the point and I agree that Labels alone are NOT the suitable replacement. A future Gmail Labs feature, perhaps?) Other tweaks have been requested within Gmail that would make the *mail* experience a more productive one.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums

I'm Insulted But Should We Give Up Live Blogging?

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 2:45pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Engine Conferences

It is now 8am, I am at my desk, in my office in New York. I landed this morning at about 5:20am in Newark, NJ, after flying all night (the red eye) back from PubCon Vegas 2008. It was an exhausting three days. Between live blogging, keeping up with the forum news, writing at Search Engine Land, speaking on panels, meeting with people and search companies, running my daily business and being married - it is just exhausting.

So, about 30 minutes ago, I notice a Sphinn thread, which links to a blog post (which I won't link to) that totally trashes our live blogging efforts. This guy calls live blogging, "useless" and "inaccurate." He goes on to say what we do is "selfish disregard for reporting integrity." To call live blogging "selfish," oh, that makes me mad. To call the 38+ conferences we've flown to, paid hotel costs, sometimes paid conference passes for, "selfish." To call the dumbing, incredibly tiring and exhausting work it is to sit there, session after session, to write down the words that come out of speakers mouths, no matter if you disagree with them or if you find them boring - or, even worse, love what they are saying, but are too consumed in typing down what they are saying to have the time to actually appreciate the words of wisdom - to call that "selfish" (long sentence, sorry, been up for over 24 hours).

I have often wanted to stop live blogging these conferences. Why? Simply because it is extremely taxing on the individuals who do the live blogging. It seems simple, but it really is not. But I have decided to continue live blogging because most people appreciate it and many tell me they "depend" on it.

So to read a "blogger" who has had a blog since September 30th, 2008 - yea, you got that, completely trash this effort. Well, I am totally disgusted and insulted. Not just for myself, but for all the volunteers who spend their own money and time to make this happen.

I have been on both sides of the coin. I speak and I live blog. It is true that live bloggers might get something wrong or hear it wrong or miss important parts. That is the nature of the game. But does that mean there is no value to it?

Danny Sullivan has often wanted people to stop live blogging and pull out the key elements of the sessions. I agree with that, 100%. But we invented live blogging in this industry, people, I think, expect it of us. If not, then I am more than happy to stop - because honestly, it would be a relief to not have that burden of responsibility. To not have to get up at 4am on a conference day to make sure to get all my work done prior to the sessions, so I can be at a session at 9am to live blog it for people who cannot make it to the session. So I would love to not have that burden.

Hence, I leave it up to you. Please take the poll below and tell me if you want us to stop live blogging:

Ditched GoogleBot But Now Want To Make Friends Again?

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 1:07pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Optimization

I found an interesting tidbit while reading a somewhat detailed thread at Google Groups. The scenario is as follows. You have blocked Googlebot from accessing your site for a 6 month period or so. Then you want to welcome Googlebot back into your site by removing the disallow from your robots.txt file. Will Googlebot bite? If so, how long will it take?

Yea, you ditched Googlebot and now you realize what a good friend Googlebot can be for you. So now you want to become friends with little old Googlebot again. Truth be told, the longer you ditched Googlebot, possibly the longer Googlebot will accept your renewed friendship. Just like real friends. Well, not really.

It is just a matter of how many times Google will recheck your robots.txt file. If you blocked Googlebot in your robots.txt recently, then I would expect Googlebot to check the robots.txt more often. If it is six month or longer, than likely less frequently. It just makes sense from an efficiency standpoint on both Google's side and for your server.

Susan Moskwa of Google has a great analogy in the thread, so let me quote her:

I sometimes use a telephone metaphor to explain this--imagine you called someone and their answering machine said "I can't come to the phone right now, please don't call me." If you called back an hour later and got the same message, and then called back the next day and got the same message, and then called back the next week and got the same message, you'd probably call less and less frequently, assuming the response would be the same, right?
The same is true of Googlebot; if your site consistently sends the message "Don't crawl me," we may wait longer and longer between the times when we attempt to crawl it again.

So what can you do to encourage Googlebot to come back quicker? Send it flowers and chocolate. Just kidding! But you do want to entice Googlebot to come back. How so? Submit a Sitemap file to Google, get more links, get buzz out about your site, write more content and so on. As Susan said, "once it starts being 'active' in the online ecosystem, it'll naturally end up in search results and start ranking accordingly."

I had fun with this post because it is pretty late now, been up really long with little sleep. In fact, I feel like I am going to fall asleep while typing this. In any event, hope you enjoyed this little tidbit, it will be posted in the AM.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google AdSense's Two Hour Reporting Outage

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 12:59pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google AdSense

Google AdSense had a two hour outage yesterday morning causing lots of concern amongst the publisher groups.

There are two long threads, one at Google Groups and another ad WebmasterWorld discussing the outage.

The first report came in at 4:09am (EST) Thursday morning and at about 6:44am, first reports came in that the statistics started to populate in the AdSense reports. At 1:05pm (EST), AdsenseAdvisor and AdSensePro Jennifer wrote the same message, a minute apart, at the respective forums:

There was a minor reporting issue for about 2 hours. This should be back to normal, and all data form that period will be restored.
Thanks for your patience.

Jennifer

All looks good now.

Forum discussion at Google Groups and another ad WebmasterWorld.

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 13, 2008

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 2:23am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Super Session : Search Engines and Webmasters - aka: The Search Engine Smackdown

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 2:11am CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

One of our most popular PubCon sessions, this event is also known as the Search Engine Smackdown.

Expect a "State of the Engines" address by the leading search engines of today. Yahoo, Google, Ask and Microsoft will all run down the current status, features, and fresh offerings of their respective search spaces.

Related blog entry from a few years back:
http://www.pubcon.com/blog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1156867200

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
Sean Suchter, VP, Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering, Yahoo!
Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

Nathan Buggia:
State of Live Search - what does it mean for publishers? We've talked about themes of live search - deliver best search results, simplify key tasks, and innovate in the business model.

Best search results: it's all about relevance. We've made a lot of progress. Does a query answer your question? We've been tracking this for 4 years. In the past year, we're in the same ballpark - not exactly like Yahoo/Google but very similar. Some queries we're better on but some aren't perfect. It's about freshness of content and depth of content.

Specific improvements: improving the crawling performance - compression and if-modified-since. We create less load on your server and do a more efficient job of crawling. If your resources are gzipped, we take less bandwidth.

Standardization of REP rules - these are a core set of rules for robots exclusion protocol. It's easier for publishers can specify the policies for searche engines. These rules are shared. MSNbot has adopted the common set of rules: now we support regular expressions.

We continue to invest in sitemaps. They can be hosted anywhere. There's a lot of flexibility for publishers. It also helps understand canonicalization issues.

There's a significant increase in crawling capacity.

We also realized that the best search results isn't about algorithmic improvements. It's also about providing tools: Webmaster Tools. We offer: troubleshooting tips. We took a list of the top issues that Live search encountered when crawling websites - 404 errors, too many parameters, blocked by robots, and unsupported content. There's reporting being provided around these and even filtering. Next week, we'll launch a new feature about malware. We scan every page and see what spawns a malicious process; those pages are flagged and cannot be clicked on in the user experience of Live search. Publishers can find their own links in the tools; they can also get a list of outbound links that are also infected.

We also provide a lot of tools around ranking. Information is provided on Static Rank, dynamic ranking within site, backlinks, and penalties.

There are also some issues on the community forums with a 3 day turnaround.

Another tool launched about a year ago is the adCenter Excel Keyword Research tool. It gives you access to an API that gives you keyword data for Live search - demographic and monetization information.

Simplify key tasks:
- The future of relevance? We found that there are many use cases for when people come to search engines. Sometimes they're doing navigational queries. Sometimes people come to search engines and don't know what they want. These are exploratory scenarios. We provide richer media in the search results in addition to 10 blue links. Also, deeper pages may not be related to the search experience but the topic. As a publisher, there's more surface area on how to reach customers with specific content. Some of this is video, structured content (products, reviews, and more information about your website). This is expanded into Hotmail and other properties as well.

Innovation in the business model:
We're talking about the Cashback/adCenter scenario.

We also have Project Silk Road that consolidates things to increase engagement (enhances the seite with Live search results/customizes 404 error pages with the error toolkit, and create rich user experience with Virtual Earth and silverlight), generate traffic (optimization of site with the tools, deep content partnerships that increase distribution, and enhanced ad format solutions), and drive insight (how your website performs and your customers. Rich site statistics, monitoring, and optimization)

Within that, there's the Live Search API. We asked a lot of our partners about what they needed in an API. Publishers wanted to be in control of the results of the API. Now, you can reorder the results, skin results and ads to match your website or application, and filter out 300 ad providers that don't make sense (competitors, aren't good for your audience, etc.)

The technical aspects of the API also needed to meet business needs:
- The query limit is removed - now unlimited
- Rich query language - site operators that you've seen in the past (e.g. site:). You can alter how dynamic ranking relevancy favors freshness, accuracy, or whatnot.
- Many types of content - web, news, images, encarta answers, spelling. Different corpuses in the backend are now accessible.
- Implements all standard protocols (REST, JSON, RSS, SOAP) - they can use the API any way that people develop.

Sean Suchter:

Yahoo is trying to get rid of the 10 blue links.

Limited choice: three players dominate the maket. Neither site owners or searcher can exert influence, so Yahoo is trying to address it.

Search Assist feature is being worked on to make the best possible search queries.

Right now, Yahoo is looking to move from "to do" to "done" - getting to the answer by reducing frustration, trying to structure information from the web directly, etc.

One example is the music player integration- "Play the web" in Yahoo Search

He shows a SERP that shows many initiatives: rich media modules (video and headlines), deep links, and news federation.

The other big area is about the ecosystem. We're really trying to create a community around search (think PubCon). We're trying to set up incentives for everyone - Yahoo and end users. A few ways to do that: opening search (SearchMonkey) - coming from outside in. What does this mean? Yahoo wants to move from a simple presentation to a more useful structured presentation when appropriate for the task the user is trying to accomplish (not uniformly, not for all queries, not for all users). For site owners, this helps the users get right to the answers. The traffic should increase in quality. It hasn't hurt clickthroughs to your site. It will increase loyalty and engagement.

There is a lot of success with the SearchMonkey ecosystem. A lot of properties, including People magazine, Wikipedia, Trulia, WebMD, and more are utilizing it.

Another innovation includes BOSS, a big initiative - build an open search service. The idea is to open the platform completely. Trying to be a principal search engine is a hard thing. You need hardware, data, and more. So the idea is to open it up completely so people can interact with the query handling and crawling and use it directly. The goal is to have high quality search experience to be relevant, comprehensive, fresh, and well-presented.

Some examples: 4 hoursearch - it was made in 4 hours by guy who said he paid $10 for pizza and beer. It's very straightforward and a different type of search presentation. Another one is PlayerSearch which is more specialized (like SportsCenter). NewsLine is another with a cool layout of how the news are presented. Finally, Tianamo is a 4th - it presents the data in this somewhat mountain format. It's a landscape of queries and things surrounding them in a visualization.

Matt Cutts: State of the Index.
What has happened in 2008 and what should we expect in 2009?
- Google Chrome is a wicked fast browser
- Google Android is an open source operating system

There's other stuff too - better machine translation, better voice recognition, Google Suggest, improving personalization and universal/blended search

There were a lot of small things: 2001 search index, video and voice chat in Gmail, ability to track the flu (by finding out who is searching for the flu/cough/cold symptoms on Google!) - it's really cool.
- Why is this interesting to webmasters? You don't have to do this with flu. You can look at Google trends in general and even check them for websites.

Google Ad Planner slices and dices by demographic.

Let's drill down: what have we done for the webmaster? We're taking PDFs that are images and are running OCR on them. We're crawling flash better - pulling out text of transitions of Flash files.

2008 Webmaster Launches. Look at pinkberry.com/mobile versus redmangousa.com/ on your iPhone. Only one works. Google is working to understand these flash files that aren't showing up on your phone.

Google has gotten better at keyword spam and gibberish. We have also provided some extra tools. For example, there's a tool that shows who is linking to you who is linking to a 404. You can also make your 404 better with 14 lines of JavaScript. This code by Google suggests pages that might be useful on that site.

There are a few other things:
- Adavanced segmentation of Google Analytics
- On demand indexing for Google Custom Search Engine - Google will reindex up to 10 pages within 24 hours.
- webmaster APIs for hosters and Gdata
- translation gadget for your website. If you have Chinese visitors and you write in English, the site can be translated into Chinese.

Webmaster Communication - it's huge so far. We've had 3 chats so far with 700 people dialing in on the most recent chat. We're blogging more, including more videos, and there are now blogs in different languages. If you register your site and you have malware or are caught for spam BEFORE you register, those messages will be waiting.
- Yesterday, Google came out with a 30 page guide on SEO 101. This means Google values SEO.

2009 Blackhat trends:
- jeevesretirement.com was bought by Ask.com. Ask forgot to renew it. Jeevesretirement.com was bought by porno people. People grab expired domain names and take advantage.
- Illegal hacking will become more common.
- Blackhat moves toward the outright illegal - DNS subdomain hijacking. Without getting DNS resolvers update, it can be hacked. Do we want to do stuff that gets people in jail?

Conclusions - blackhat SEOs will continue to veer toward the outright illegal, SEOs need to decide risk tolerance, Google will keep communicating efforts with webmasters, and Google will provide tools to help webmasters

Forums and Communities : Building, Management, and Optimization

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 1:25am CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix
Lawrence Coburn, President, RateItAll, Inc.
Roger B. Dooley, VP of Online Community Development, Hobsons U.S.
Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com

Chris Tolles of Topix begins:

Topix is a local news aggregator. Turned it into a community around news. 40,000 local forums, 150,000 comments a day. Only provider of ZIP code local news on the web. Largest local forum provider on the web. Participation from people in over 20,000 US localities monthly. 15 million uniques a month. Roughly the same traffic as Digg.

Two equally big problems
1) Getting participation
2) Dealing with it - running and managing it is a huge nightmare

Product management 101:

How do you build a community? Provide something people want to use. Build around the people you know. Build around what you know.
Build something no one else has. ODP was the first directory powered by people.

Has to be easy to use, easy to find. Obvious keyword optimization problems. Building a strategy for being found. Topix optimizes for news. Must be easy to understand. Some communities are not clear what the focus is. Easy to see the unique value. Are you another site talking about Toyotas? What is your unique value? Ease of participation. Maximizing engagement. Let people participate without registration. Make it easy for people to come back. Give them a reason to come back. Facebook is amazing that 15% of users come back daily. Let the audience virally build your business. Passion about your product / service is key.

Dealing with participation: Your users are all trying to "get you". Everyone on there is insane! Look for the attack on the system. A community is just another system. Assume people are out to get you. What's the experience like if they get your voicemail? Phone calls at 2am? Look for these issues, and build it to deal with this. Have functionality to deal with complaints. Ways of managing and moderating what potential problems are before they happen. Have to take a long view on things. Building tools and functionality with expected issues that will happen.

Security is policy. Topix powers the forums for a Hartford newspaper. Had an incident where someone was hit by a car. Lots of racist talk. Was there a policy on this? No. Hard to do anything with a community unless you've built a policy/rules and stick with it. Need policies! The efficiency of the organization depends on it.

Don't go down! If it's growing, it let it go down. Tech matters - have a solid setup. Think about the technology you use. Look at your growth. Look at other sites and look at their solutions. That's why Friendster probably went down.

Do as little as possible. If providing internet community services for free, limit your cost. If you are charging, people have expected value. Down drown in costs! But don't abandon your community.

Killing posts - need a balance. Have a policy, and enforce it.

Brett Tabke:

Talks about Steve Job's famous commencement address at Stanford. Main point is that you cannot connect the dots going forward, but can do it backwards. Brett is going to connect the dots in this presentation, of where he started, and where is today.

-WMW started in 1999. Before that, was SearchEngineWorld in 1997.
-Forum on ISP in 1996.
-Before that worked at Gateway 2000.
-In 85-89 was on BBSes.
-In 80's programmed in assembly. Very community oriented, all about speed.
-First BBS community went on in 1984.
-First computer was in 1976. First program was on a Commodore PET
-First computer owned was a Commodore 64 in college.
'
Grew up in the 60's - big Stark Trek fan. Dealt with social and cultural issues. If you run a forum, you must be culturally sensitive and must be PC. Built first search engine - JoeFarmer.com - an agriculture and farm search engine in '96. Went to lots of user groups, trade shows for Gateway.

Today, WMW focus is unique, easy to use. Required registration. No free email address registrations. Designed so that your words go high above the fold. Want members to feel important. Success = member on site time - member posts. More about relationships than content. Avoid visual distractions - visual noise. Avoided social networking stuff - but starting to add a few things this year. For WMW its all about the trust and long term relationship. Been the same site for 10 years. Standing on policy, even if meant losing friends. Subscription vs. advertisement model. Don't care about raw page views, clicks, or membership sign ups. Concern is quality, secondary is converting users to subscribers. Now, biggest day ever for WMW was 200,000 uniques and 1 million PV's during Florida update.

US accounts for about 46% of WMW. Big challenges are the spammers, link droppers, name droppers. #1 problem = rogue spiders and bots from cable modem ISP's.

One-offs - 4 days offline in 2005. Results? Uniques went up 15% and stayed up 15%.

Some problems in the blogosphere flat wrong about WMW and the bot issues.

3 rules of damage control 1) release early- tell your story. 2) release often - retell your story 3) tell the truth - never compound the problem. You can never correct and error that goes corrected and unchallenged.

Speed is key: When worked on a Commodore 64 speed was everything. WMW is consistently the fastest forum on the web.

Roger Dooley:

CollegeConfidential.com = A topical community - 1.7 million visits last month.

Why community? Nueromarketing - the intersection between brain science and marketing. Measurement of brain activity. Behavioral science. It's important because 95% of our behavior is subconscious. People need help and communities solve that. People looking for answers. Some communities are purely social.

Community participation. Why do people spend so much time helping others? Why answer questions? Why moderate? Human brain is programmed for altruism. We get a little reward for helping others. Helping makes you "hot". Members of the opposite sex rank helping others as a key desire.

Typical member cycle: Typically people start by needing help. Stumbled on the site perhaps on Google or through a friend. Then people start interacting. The same folks realize they can help others. Not everyone makes it that far, but very typical. With new arrivals - welcome if possible. Dumb questions are OK. Flaming is not away to build a strong community.

Long term members - recognize contributions, posting latitude, moderator status. Most important to community success.

Moderators - many thing of as TOS enforcers. In reality, they should be helpful, patient, tolerant, accepting.

Recruiting mods - long history in community. Mature behavior. Friendly, welcoming.

Rewarding volunteers - they are very important. Social norms vs. market norms. Market norms are doing a job for pay. Why do mods mod? They enjoy the community. Want to give something back. Experiments have shown that volunteers can be more productive.

Good rewards are anything that recognizes contributions.

Community death: Reasons for failure - emphasis on technology vs. members. Use of inexperienced community managers. Measuring the wrong metrics.

Last up is Lawrence Coburn, talking about "The social media river".

Definition: "A constantly updating news feed of content that be tuned and customized the by the user".

In the mid 90's there was the BBS. Mid 90's came the forum and message board. Still here to stay. 1999's blogs were the new format for growing communities. Then the profile via Friendster and Myspace became dominant for discovering content. The big leap forward was the concept of the river - don't have to go anywhere to find your content. Facebook was the big revolution in 2006. Aggregating friends activity. Twitter came along and took the concept of the river, and let people do it from any device. SMS, IM, etc. Reduced the concept to one single question. Friendfeed is the river for multiple sites - getting lots of buzz. Aggregates all the communities together.

Why the river works? Content comes to you. It's always fresh. You have control of what happens in the river. Relevant to you, and can adapt to changing tastes.

There are 3 primary sources of content:

1) People - you choose to follow people and see what they are up to.
2) Media type - photos, app activity, video, status updates. Total control. On Facebook, you can tune your feed - to get more relationship info, etc.
3) Topic - not subscribing to a person, but a topic. Want to hear all posts about social media for example.

River monetization - trying to find an ad format that works. Problem is making it relevant. Some revolutionary concepts emerging. Google doesn't have a format for this yet.

The river and widgets. This concept is a threat to widgets, because sidebar is becoming a distraction. Widgets need to find a way to get into the content.

Search vs. the river: MSN live is being revamped to go into the river. Yahoo! is working on this as well - called Yahoo! OS. If you are marketer, publisher, content provider - need to get it into the river.

Read more at sexywidget.com.

Live coverage provided by Avi A. Wilensky of Promediacorp, a Manhattan based online marketing agency.

The Wonderful World of Widgets

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 12:54am CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Jake Baillie

Speakers:
Lawrence Coburn, President, RateItAll, Inc.
Peter Adams, President, Matchpoint
Patrick Sexton, Search Engine Marketing Manager, We Build Pages
Will Price, CEO, Widgetbox
Peter Yared, CEO, iWidgets!

Description: With the Web 2.0 revolution, we have seen more and more sites offering widgets in all shapes and forms. Now, several years later, this session will examine how online publishers can take advantage of this trend to gain more distribution.

Session Notes:

First up is Lawrence Coburn...

Lawrence runs a blog called SexyWidget.com. He is going to talk about API strategies.

The four pillars of distributed web strategies:
1) Widgets but they are only downloaded one at a time
2) Toolbar extensions but the download is a barrier to success.
3) Platform Apps on Facebook, MySpace, etc actually a bit of a down turn in this sector
4) API like Yahoo Maps, Amazon AWS. This allow batch or mass distribution

He likes to think of APIs and widgets on steroids. It helps expand your footprint. Google rolled out the maps, got millions of downloads and now added ads to it for a great revenue model.

APIs can be used for branding, new business models, and internal content distribution.

Case Study: Netflix
Every single actor, movie, description, etc is available. Publishers are free to use this data as long as they use proper attribution. This is used to drive new subscribers to Netflix.

Case Study: RateItAll
Rolling out all content including ratings, reviews, etc. Using API to pull content back to home base. Using APi to spread brand, driver referrals, etc.

There are all sorts of business models for API launches. From free to pay per API call. You will need to decide what model meets your business goals.

Challenges and risks: limited number of developers, scaling, dupe content issues, fuel competitors, legal issues such as redistribution rights.

API resources include Mashery, Platform D, Swordfish and SexyWidget.com.

Next up is Patrick Sexton...

What are widgets? They are what is left when you remove all the headers, footers, sidebars and "phoophy stuff". For example just the YouTube video player.

Why use widgets?

Interaction. People must be pleased by what you are doing. Whether it movies, chat or even business applications.

Making money. Selling products, ad revenue and making things more efficient.

Traffic. Direct traffic is very important traffic (anything that does not come from a search engine). Widgets are not spread via search engines. They are spread by people. It is relativly easy to get ranked in major widget directories for keyword phrases.

SEO. Traffic and exposure can be big. Word of mouth communities will link to you. However his view on links is that links do not have credit cards, people do. Caution: your links need to be relevant!

Patrick believes in a cross platform approach to spreading your widgets. Your widgets should be tailored to the audience who will use it and the platform supporting it.

Put your widget in every widget directory possible. They will be found. Warning: viral installers do not not post your widget or brand in the directory. iGoogle has over 100 million users and most brands are not even listed.

Third presenter is Will Price...

Widgetbox is the #1 web widget provider with over 78 million uniques and 600 million widget views.

Web publishers are trying to reach new readers or visitors. They need to develop innovative content syndication programs. Widgets are ideal for this. Most sites offer content that can easily tranlate into a widget. RSS feeds, images, videos, slideshows, etc are all easy concepts to turn into a widget.

Widgets can be viral is you create galleries, use the invite feature or as feed updates on the social sites.

Next up is Peter Yared...

His first claim is that people are not going to websites any more. He gave a dozen example of major sites where the traffic is flat or decreasing. People are spending all of their time on social sites such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc. So the new model is to put your content where the users are!

There has been a big move from just widgets to SOCIAL widgets. People like to interact with engaging, social widgets. Polls or other actionable widgets are very powerful right now. Think of widgets as a great tool to reach your fans.

Rich media (video & widgets) is by far the fastest growing ad spend. Widget creation can now be a drag and drop creation process, so the entry process is pretty easy.

Last speaker of the last session of the day is Peter Adams!

Advertising is an essential ingredient of any content web site or strategy. Widgets can help you do that.

Widgets can generate income via the widget itself being an ad, an ad can be embedded in the widget, or the ads can be initiated by the widget. If you think about it, even the Google Adsense ads are just widgets. Now all the major players, like Amazon, AllPosters, eBay offer widgets through their affiliate programs.

There are also some in-page examples such as Snap that display an ad widget when you roll over an incontent text link.

Peter warns that you need to make widgets a seemless part of your user experience, not an appendage. So you need to be able to customize, customize, customize.

These session notes were written by Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures a link building services and website publicity company. Please excuse any typos or grammar issues, the session notes are written live and meant to be posted as soon as the session is over.

Community Hacking - 96 Baiting Strategies You Can Employ

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 12:50am CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Link-baiting is a topic that makes some people snicker when they hear it. However, the complexities and subtleties are a fascinating combination of clever copywriting and strategic placement. Did you know that there are 12 types of links? Moreover, there are eight types of link bait to get those 12 types of links? That means there are 96 different strategies to get links. This session will look at the eight and the twelve.

Moderator: Andy Beal
Speakers:
Todd Malicoat, Independent Marketing Consultant, Meta4creations, LLC
Ian Ring, Application Developer, IGLOO Inc.
Bill Hartzer, Search Engine Optimization Manager, Vizion Interactive
Jane Copland, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOMoz

Bill Hartzer:

Link baiting specific sectors: target a group in your sector/topic, tell them what they want and what they need to know. Point out the industry problem (e.g. my funniest PPC mistake)
- search for "keyword" at search engine. Find companies biddibng on word "keyword." Copy the list of keywords from the spreadsheet, paste into PPC program.

Target sites that link out - research those sites. Blogstorm tracker, Technorati, and more are good tools.

Find linkbait that worked. Don't always reinvent the wheel. Research your topic in social media, find URLs that have gone popular, create a unique twist for similar linkbait, write an update to the previous article (link to the previous with new developments), watch for press releases in your industy for studies, research, and other news. Set up Google and Yahoo alerts for news.

News works well as linkbait: be able to respond to breaking news (set up a blog or page ready for the article). Post quickly. Submit to social sites. Go back and edit/update Add pictures/photos/logos/screen captures. This strategy helps you get the market share of links and is good for organic search.

Linkbaiting Techniques: problogger.net - tools, quizzes, contests, be first, scoops, expose, awards, lists, humor, make someone famous, create belonging/community, design, rants, controvesy, attack, shock, research and statts, give something away, resourcefulness, cool factors

Social media, linkbait, and search are all coming together. Create new linkbait on your site consistently. Participation is key - daily voting, commenting, and submitting.
Linkbait + social media = market share of links and getting noticed
If you get links when being noticed, you'll be successful in organic search.

Jane Copland:

Everyone can publish content online. It's low cost, high visibility, and easily digestible content.
Blogs imitate familiar old media - the banner, the sidebar, and the lead article. Their success is partly a result of the familiar nature.

Different types of blogged content achieve different results: shes shows illustration for some sites that have 2500+ digs with 27 external links. One had 900 diggs and 131 external links. It varies.

These multiple types of blogged linkworthy content exists as:
- "The Gimmick" - it helps to be drunk
- Light content lists - footer post - it's easy
- The OMG ticket (URLs ending in 0 - see on seomoz.org) - it's harder, and it doesn't help to be drunk
- Heavier content lists - it doesn't help to be drunk
- In-depth articles and case studies - which shouldn't be launched on a blog.
It's not a good idea to decide which type you're working with before you start writing.

It's never a good idea to launch viral content that isn't in a visible area.

SEOmoz has rewritten blog posts and 301d past links over to the new page.

Enable comments, because sometimes your readers are more interesting than you are.
- However, disabling comments have its place where comments are inappropriate.

Link building achieves 3 main goals:
* it adheres to traditional ways that content is distributed
* it invites interaction
* it's easy to spread becasue people can subscribe to blogs.

Todd Malicoat: awareness, sales, and revenue

Quick Digg primer: a lot of people read Digg and they have the power to put links to your site. You can either get a consultant or build up your own account.
- Get an optimal name - alpha sort organization
- Adding the right friends - they digg upcoming a lot, submit a lot, digg your stories. But don't do more than 5-10 a day. You'll want to reevaluate your friends.
- Find good stories quickly
- Submit good stories and ask for help

Some linkbait will bomb!

Have a friend submit your story.

Linkbaiting hooks: attack, humor, contrarian, news, resource, etc.

When you launch, if it doesn't bomb and it hits Digg's frontpage, you don't want your server to melt. Cache your content, host images on another host, search for the Digg/slashdot effect (and fix your server). Email friends and allies. Use sites as "jump off" points for other sites.

Don't have 25 social media buttons on the bottom of your blog post.

Reddit is similar to Digg - gives you less traffic but it's valuable.
StumbleUpon has a toolbar and brings traffic.

Ian Ring: Optimizing Conversion using Genetics
CSS styling can affect the clickability of links. Testing and optimization will increase your site's reevenue. Do you know if your current stylesheet is eleiciting optimzal user behavior?

Optimization algorithms: trial and errots, multivariate testing, hill climbing, simulated annealing (e.g. making the font size bigger, smaller, incrementally changing things until optimized), genetic algorithms

Introduction to genetic algiorthms - some are more optiized for environments.
- Metaphor: the page is the ecosystem, the page elements are living organizsms, a hyperlink is a species, a well-adapted organism thrives in its ecosystem. A healthy ecosystem is comprised of fit organisms.

How do you do it? Survival of the fittest.
- What is fitness? It's anything you can measure: clicks, purchases, subscriptions, sales leads, registration - these are all measures of fitness.
- Fitness is easy to measure. It's the number of times something good happens.

In biology, chromosomes affect fitness. Brown eyes are better optimized than blue/green eyes. On your website, you probably want to optimize for brown eyes.
- The chromosome that determines this is the CSS stylesheet.

CSS is a link's DNA: it could be an image, a graph, a link.
You may have 3 bits for a font size or 24 bits - if you're testing another interface element, you may have another set of genes - hue/saturation/etc. Properties of CSS stylesheets can be turned into a binary string that can be stored, manipulated, and moved back into a CSS stylesheet.

CSS can be expressed as a binary string:
A chromosome is a string of 1s and 0s. Define the genome: it's the map of placement of the genes that appear in a chromosome. You'll need a table to assign positions of the DNA to the genes in the CSS.

Create a template: inject genetic values into the template. You need functions to transalte binary chromosomes into CSS. Replace variables in the template with values from the DNA.

onPageLoad(): choose an organism; convert into CSS; if user clicks, increase organism's fitness. Increment organism's age. Do this until the end. After that, it's time to mate, spawn, and die.

Genetic variance via mutation and crossover: flip from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0.

You need a lot of things - databases, web pages, server side languages, and more!

Conclusion: unpredictable successes, continuous optimization, and no maintenance.

Effective Domaining Strategies

Posted: November 13th, 2008, 11:41pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Michael Bonfils
Speakers:
Jeremy Wright, CEO, B5Media
Jeff Libert, CEO, DirectoryCompany.com
Grace Della, CEO, Ten Golden Rules
Victor Pitts, Vice President - Sales & Client Services, Moniker Online Services, LLC

Grace Della:

Strategy #1: Optimize sites for SEO. Select keyword rich domains. Develop a 5-10 page site at 250 words and build links.

Strategy #2: Buy domains with existing PR. Sometimes people are sitting on domains. Find one that fits your business strategy.

Aftermarket sites: Bido.com, Moniker, Snap Names, Grand Names, etc. Check trademark availability before buying an expensive domain.

Strategy #3: Domains as an investment. Investors are looking at domains for several reasons - a global commodity. Not based in debt. Internet is only growing.

Strategy #4: Develop a business on a domain. If you build it, they just wont come. Real value in domain is developing into a business, unless it has huge type in traffic. Build content, links, and functionality.

Strategy #5: Protect the domain by owning variations and the extensions. Countries, spellings, misspellings, etc.

Strategy #6: Stay current. DN Journal, ICANN, T.R.A.F.F.I.C, Domain Masters podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.

Victor Pitts:

Why domains matter? Growing to 168 million worldwide. Aftermarket sales have been increasing by 20% year after year. Even in down markets, they are increasing in value.

Domains are both collectibles, and revenue producing. Unique - no two alike. Direct navigation traffic accounts for 10-15% revenue in Yahoo and Google. It's your first impression online. Primary way of locating your site. Tells customers what your business is about. Helps define and reposition brand promises. Improve SEO and SMO.

Protect your brand, register typos and other TLDs.

Case studies:

ToddlerToys.com = Fisher Price.

CreamCheese.com = Kraft.

Underwear.com = Calvin Klein.

All things going equal, your domain name can be the tie breaker in SEO. Case Study: TropicalBirds.com is a new site with less than 6 months uptime. Ranks above highly competitive sites.

Aftermarket domains offer additional benefits - Age, PR, Links. Properly redirected, can give strength to other domains.

Do your research. Check if they have shady links. Can get you hurt.

Domain does have an impact on your CTR in the SERPs. Expands your ad message.

More than 70% of internet users type in a domain to get to their destination. Study by WebSideStory. At more than 4%, direct navigation converts at 2x regular search traffic.

Ways to use direct navigation - redirection. Books.com is redirected to BN.com. Baby.com redirects to J&J. TennisShoes.com redirects to KSwiss.com.

Rebrand your business using a new domain.

Case Study: Stocks.com. Monthly visitors = 10k / mo. CPC on Google is $4.63 according to Spyfu on 11/3/08 for "stocks". The SEO traffic from the term pays off in long run. Would take 5 years for a + ROI.

Ways to acquire domains: Most single and 2 word domains are gone. Aftermarkets are the new primary market. Live auctions. Online sales platforms such as Snapnames, SEDO, or Afternic. Expired and deleting domain services. Private brokerages.

Jeffrey Libert: Moderator for domain forum and WMW.

"Domain Creation, Acquisition and Sales"

Started in domaining to increase law practice. Has got clients through domains, one converted at over $100,000k!

Strategy:

Step 1: Start in your own backyard by scraping your own website for keywords. The products and services - want to pull out all the keywords - usually 2 - 3 words generic phrases. Pull from navigational or topical links. Drop them into a bulk domain checker, and see if they are available. Avoid hyphening. Scrape competitors sites for keywords. Check in Adwords tool if there is search volume, and see if there are high volume related terms. Look in trade journals for hot trends, register keywords that are emerging as buzzwords.

Step 2: Once you have your list, do a SERPs analysis. See how popular the keyword phrase is. Check your log files for phrases.

Step 3: ROI analysis. Converted sales lead analysis. Estimating type in traffic- search the phrase in Google with quotes. Trend analysis - might not get traffic this year because it's emerging - huge opportunity. Read journals to find trends. Check PPC costs versus annual domain renewal fees. Reserved potential (microsite, resale, other). Rinse, repeat.

A quick case study:

Site subject: Glues, adhesive, sealants site. Jeffrey scraped the site and found the keyword "flexible adhesives". Domain flexibleadhesives.com was available. CPC price is $1.68. Volume is about 210 according to Google. Got it to rank, redirects to the main site. High ROI.

Aftermarket strategies:

Expiring domains. Telephoned people. Often the single best strategy, expiring or not. For sale or not, had incredible results. Get ahead of the bidders.

Every auction has undervalued gems. Now is a good time to buy because of the economy. Geo or local domains are getting hotter. City + Service, etc.

Jeremy Wright: "1001 Domain Buying Tips"

Secret formula for the PERFECT domain = SEO + Data (traffic, kw information, age, typability - no .orgs, misspellings, etc.) X branding and likability.

One hyphen rarely hurts, two isn't pretty, 3+ is evil. Consider buying entire sites, not just domains, for SEO value. If you are buying within an industry, look for a common footprint "Powered by WordPress", or use an older version # to find older blogs. Don't be afraid to buy a half a dozen secondary descriptive domains and either 301 them or push to them using in--context links.

Avoid double letters. Don't misspell unless it helps with branding. Domain age matters. Older is better. Don't change the subject of the site. Don't change the URL structure. Don't change the registration information. Put it in a trust.

Have 2 domain name options is a challenge. Use math to solve the problem.

Domain mailing lists. Big buyers and sellers have private mailing lists that they sell. Judge the quality of the domains before buying them. When negotiating - lowball, but don't offend. Counter, counter, counter! Sometimes it's a matter of patience. Have contracts and such ready for when you get a deal - don't allow cold feet to set in. When transferring domains, use a trust to avoid triggering engines that look at WHOIS data.

Find a domain you are happy with! Follow Jeremy on Twitter @jeremywright.

Live coverage provided by Avi A. Wilensky of Promediacorp, a Manhattan based online marketing agency.

Real-World Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies

Posted: November 13th, 2008, 11:33pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

This is a follow up to last year's highly popular linking session.

The panelists in this session are experts on linking and will take a critical look at linking strategies including outbound link optimization, outsourcing link building, old-fashioned linking via directories, and hiring an in-house link developer.

Moderator: Chris Tolles
Speakers:
Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting
Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz
Roger Montti, Founder and Owner, martinibuster.com
Greg Hartnett, President, Best of The Web

Eric Enge: some ways to use social media as a link building strategy

Think big! Companies can be like Blendtec.

Social News Sites: the opportunity includes tens of thousands of visitors but the traffic sucks -- but there's also the opportunity for links

Match the Digg demographic
13-28 year old males
They like Google, Apple, novel technical thing, open source, Gmail..

Some other tips:
- Study what has worked before
- Write a compelling title
- Write an interesting description
- Vote for posts in front of you on the upcoming pages
- Make sure you stand out!

Case study: a website that has a restroom photo.
Was it successful?
2/3 of a year later, it has 159 links. It's prominent in Google results.
- But ask: is it helpful or relevant?

Authoritative content can win: for example, how to solve a Rubiks cube that was posted on a howto website.
Why did it go hot? It was relevant to the audience - Rubiks cube had a resurgence a year ago among high school/college males. There were other great articles that predated it. It was authoritative and unique.

Was it a success? Yes.
- Fits theme of site, content was credible, still has 147 links 2/3 years later, does rank for Rubiks cube related search terms, term gets 40-50 searches a day.

One more example - 45 excellent blog designs on the front page of Digg.
It was more successful and here's why: fit the theme, credible content, 1160 links more than 1 year later, it's relevant, authoritative, high rankings, and there are 645 searches per day!

Doing this for yourself - interest the audience, be authoritive, reflect well on your business, use titles targeted at BIG search terms - it needs to be in the article title and the Digg submission title (those are in anchor text)

Another case study:
Sports stock market - fantasy players would buy/sell players and see trends. They became social media powerhounds - how?
- They created great apps primarily on Facebook targeted to sports fans
- March Madness app with 150k users, Fantasy Football app with 350k users - there are apps for every sports team - 6m-7m users!
- They also succeeded by integrating ads into the environment.

Why is this link building?
- Got a link from mlb.com, a PR7 page; ESPN, TechCrunch, Google, Battelle Media

Success story: They built content that built their reputation - authoritative, right image for company, related to business. They matched the demographic.

Rebecca Kelley:
Traditionally, link building sucks! It's repetitive, time consuming, risky, and there is low ROI.

But we need links - links are votes, they give you better rankings. You will want high quality links, not low quality links. Links bring traffic.

Strategy #1: Find brand mentions - find people talking about you who don't link to you. Ask them for a link. Go to Yahoo SiteExplorer; do a search like "etsy.com" linkdomain:etsy.com -site:etsy.com

Strategy #2: Identify broken inbound links. Use Google's Webmaster Tools Crawl Error Sources, COntact linkers and ask them to fix the link.

Strategy #3: Take advantage of broken links to your competitors.
- Search for things that are "no longer available," or "no longer offered [keyword]"
- If the product is discontinued, contact the site's owner and see if they're willing to link to you instead. Contact sites linking to the broken page.

Strategy #4: Find out who is linking to your competitors. Try Yahoo! Hubfinder.
- Find out who is linking to one site and who isn't linking to other sites. Ask for that link!

Strategy #5: Take advantage of confirmation emails. Customers who like you will comply. Links are editorial and relevant. It's a scalable strategy.

Strategy #6: Embed links in widgets, badges, and banners. Create a quiz, poll, shareable content. Offer embeddable tools and programs. Include a link back to your site.

Strategy #7: Create some linkbait - brainstorm content ideas and host it on your site. Promote the content via social media sites, forums, blogs, etc. Profit!
- Identify linkbait opportunities - research your sector's link worthiness; discover the big players in your firled; target social media/social news sites.
- Analyze current trends
- Don't neglect your own industry.

Handy resources
- linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php
- seomoz.org/linkscape
- seomoz.org/backlink-analysis
- quarkbase.com
- siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
- google.com/webmasters/tools

Blog posts:
- seobook.com/art-pitching-email
- searchengineland.com/lands/link-week.php
- seomoz.org/blog/long-list-of-link-searches
- seomoz.org/blog/a-long-list-of-competitve-link-searches

Greg Hartnett: link building via directories
- A directory is not a paid link. A paid link successful transaction results in a link on the page. A successful transaction on a directory is a review.
- A directory is not just a link farm. Link farms are a collection of links that are on a page that are categorized haphazardly without editorial discretion. They're created to manipulate search results.
- How can I tell a directory from a "directory?" Good directories have a history, contain great resources, have populated categories, are designed for the user, add lots of sites and not paid submits.

What kind of traffic can you expect? Not the Digg effect.
Can I list my website multiple times? Yes, it's called deep linking.
Is the Yahoo Directory worth it? Yes - it's an aged, trusted domain and the primary hub for internet mapping.
Is the ODP corrupt? No.
Which directories are considered the most trustworthy? Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com, Librarians Internet Index

How do I ensure my site gets listed if I go and pay these review fees? Follow the rules. There's no guarantee of listing, read the direcotry guidelines, good titles and descriptions, and beef up your content.

Where can I submit my blog?
- Yahoo and DMOZ have categories
- BOTW blog directory - blogs.botw.org
- Search Engine Journal has a list
- Lee Odden has another list

Roger Montti:
- Traffic and links with pop.

.edu links are popular but they're not special.
- The page may not be authoritative, they may be link farms, and they may be poorly linked to.

Tips you can use:
- Industry heavyweight backlinks: check backlinks from the most important companies in your sector
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu [keyword]
- e.g. sponsors, donors, benefactors, events
Bronze sponsorships are cheaper than the diamond ones and you can get a good link regardless.

Use the following with your product/niche keywrods and .edu modifiers: hotlinks, bookmarks, links, directory, resources. Pay attention to what kind of sites the targets are linking to - if they're only liking to govs and edus, they may not want to link to a commercial site.

White Hat Black Hat strategies: almost every blackhat technique can be turned to white hat by using nofollow or rendering link with javascript. Blog widgets, counters, calculators, and wordpress themes.

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 12, 2008

Posted: November 13th, 2008, 3:33am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

26 Steps Revisited - 2008

Posted: November 13th, 2008, 2:40am CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Based on WebmasterWorld's most popular thread ever:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm

Brett Tabke's "26 Steps" has received nearly 25 million page views and 15 million unique visitors since it was first posted almost seven years ago, and has been used as a training manual by numerous Fortune 100 corporations.

Brett will look at the controversial issues the post raised and the potent strategy that so effectively builds Web sites.

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com

In this session, Brett starts with the stats the post has received to date:

• 29 million page views
• 5 million uniques
• 200 copies on the web
• 290 cease and desists issued so far
• First chapter in Google Hacks - the post owned by O'reily now.
• Total income = $500 paid by O'reily for Google Hacks Book.
• 10,000 thousands back links.

Brett goes over a lot of the points he wrote about in 2002, while opening up the discussion to the audience:

Prep work: The initial document stated to start with 100 pages of content before you throw it online. Back then that was good. Now you need probably 5x that to get to a real site.

Says the posts is not really about SEO. More about content, traffic, building a successful sustainable site. Mainly a content play, not an SEO play.

Asks the audience- What are your experiences? Most of the audience's experience with less than 100 pages aren't doing well. One guy here has a niche sites that is an exception. Another guy with a niche site says he does OK too. Another guy sells memberships in the real estate vertical and makes just under $200k.

Domain name: Wrote back then you don't want "mykeyword.com". Based on Web 2.0 names today, (demos a site that's a Web 2.0 name generator, pretty funny, audience laughs), it supports the original claim. Domain name game is more complicated than ever. Now you can make up your own TLD. That game is changing fast.

One guy talks about the volume of leads he generates from browser based traffic, over many different sites. Owns sites like kentuckyhomemortgages.com, etc. and lots of tail end query domain names like that.

Site design: Back then, the rule of thumb the simpler the better. New wild-card is the iPhone which validates that. iPhone users use the phone 5X as much as other mobile devices. Get into mobile as quick as possible. That is part of the design. Adapt your current template to the iPhone.

Asks if anyone has static sites still? Thought they were extinct. Talks to one guy, very curious. Wants to know why people still have them. Static sites are becoming extinct. One person wants to know if you can build the site in HTML, what's the point?

Google is still proof the easy, retro look is cool.

Content: Content is a complex thing. Not such the case that content for the sake of content is such a good idea. Big believer in quality targeting content. Smart content.

Matt Tuens takes the mic. States that the original SEO was content. That's why search engines were created. Stickiness - people are too busy to go to 20 sites. Creating one site that is the "go to" site is key.

Brett talks about user generated content. Now suspect, there's a lot of noise out there. Asks if people relying the same on UCG these days? On trusted sites, like TripAdvisor its less of an issue.

Outbound links was a controversial topic back then. Sites should be generous. Back then, you were who you link to. Search engines know you by who you link to. Now people talk about sharing the wealth. Suggested cross linking to offer PR to lesser value pages. Goal is the right balance.

Hosting: Now you can't even think about shared hosting. Everyone's got their own servers, costs have dropped dramatically. Asks who still has their site on shared hosting?
Polls the audience regarding regular log tracking software anymore? Brett says they use one they built themselves and compares against other analytics package. Incredible to see the wide variation. Try different analytics packages, will get a whole different view of the site.

Spiders: Lots of CMS's these days are still not spider friendly.

Directories: Still favorite. Lots of them out today Look for ones you should be in.

Gimmicks. Still a million. People much more web savvy today.

Rounding out the offerings: Add options like email a friend. Still valuable today.

Back to content. Still important, not as hot as used to be. Hot on targeted content. Talks about the sandbox. Built a few sites that are still taking a year to rank. Used to think it was be all end all, now its about smart content.

Matt Tuens elaborates on "smart content". when you think about the content, realize that everyone is going to criticize your content. Judging what you put out there. If you help your demographic - info that people are looking for vs. garbage just to rank for, your going to lose credibility, sales, customer based, business in the foot - just for a ranking.

Local Search Optimization

Posted: November 13th, 2008, 2:37am CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Larry Mersman

Speakers:
David Klein, Electron Wrangler & SEO, Purpose Inc
Joe Laratro, President, Tandem Interactive
William Leake, CEO, Apogee Search
Justin Sanger, Founder & President,LocalLaunch!

Description: It is not just for brick-and-mortars anymore. Many Web sites have discovered the power of local targeting. This session will focus on the marketing aspects of local search.

Session Notes:

The first speaker is William Leake...

Most searches have local intent -- eventually. Online search influenced $471 Billion in OFFline sales, while they influenced only 1/3 that in Online purchases. More than 80% of all purchases happen witin 50 miles of the buyers home.

Google does not always show local results even when location is specified in the search string. Creates a new, unique keyword research issue. What does and does not show local search results (the Google map with 10 listings).

Important to register ALL of your addresses (even get clever about where you might get additional addresses). Customize for your largest geo city center. Google tends to like the larger city centers.

Add your info to yellow page type websites too. ie. SuperPages, YellowPages, Local.com, etc. as they act as information aggregators. He also feels customer reviews are important. Figure out where Google is getting the reviews, then ask customers to provide real reviews.

Do not forget video for local. Tag the video for local searches and you will be surprised at the results. Many online profiles also accept videos.

Next up is Joe Laratro...

Joe says local keyword research is critical. Not only do you focus on the obvious state & local phrases, but think about local slang like "tri-city" or "triad" or "Valley". Then combine them with your vertical market or area of specialty. You will most likely have a large list of phrases that you will then need to create content around them.

Geo-centric Content creation ideas: client testimonials, client case studies or stories, blog and work logs, pictures with captions, and local resources & information pages. But do not use form pages (search engines will catch this). Always think GEO when writing your copy and remember to optimize!

Brainstorm to come up with our areas of specialty and then incorporate local keywords. For one of his clients, he hired writers to come up with local content in 30 different locations. They combined with keywords and 1 year later the website had 7X the traffic using 5X the keywords used to find the site.

Even though individually these terms generate small amounts of traffic, it is quality traffic and they all add up to lots of site visitors.

Next up is Justin Sanger...

He truly believes local search is only for brick & mortar companies, not pure web plays. With that said, it is a $1 Trillion dollar market. People will search online for local purchases and will find it without ever hitting the company's website.

Justin notes that both Google and Yahoo have incorporated proximity, user generated content (reviews), content accuracy and a local score into their algorithms.

Searchers now view mobile search as an indespensible utility. There are literally hundreds of ways for a consumer to find a business. Every piece of incremental content is a new opportunity to be found.

To win, you need to have your core business data online with the big aggregators - make sure it is accurate. For the next tier, you must submit your profiles to every place that you can. You need to get references for your site by looking at who Google is pulling reviews from. Seed social media and other site with ratings and reviews. Build links from your local associations, trade partners, etc. These are authority local links.

Last presenter is David Klein...

For your site to be #1 in organic you need content and links. So Mike spent his portion of the session uniting people from similar industries so that they could discuss trading links. There are now groups of peole all around the room swapping business cards and trading links. A great ending to this session.

These session notes were written by Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures a link building services and website publicity company. Please excuse any typos or grammar issues, the session notes are written live and meant to be posted as soon as the session is over.

International and European Site Optimization

Posted: November 13th, 2008, 12:48am CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

So get this, there is a break now. But the session also starts now, got that? The refreshments are until 3:30, but the session starts at 2:50. In any event, it is about 3pm and we have not started yet. This is an international track, so I suspect it is about URLs, subdomains, language issues, etc. I speak in the next session, Five Bloggers and a Microphone - What's The Worst That Can Happen? in Room C at 4:10, don't miss it. I doubt we will have coverage of it, since its an open panel.

Moderator: Dixon Jones

Andy Atkins-Krueger, Managing Director, Web Certain Europe Ltd is up first. He shows a chart at IP addresses used in the WWW excluding the US and you see UK, China, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, Korea, in that order... He then shows a similar chart in a tag cloud format.

The big forces in each area, i.e. how big is Google in UK, etc. Baidu in China, Yandex is Russia.

SEO Tips:
(10) UTF 8 encoding (unicode)
(9) Do not translate, use a native speaker
(8) Adopt a local PR strategy
(7) Manage 301s properly (big issue for some reason internationally)
(6) Keyword in URLs would help international SEO
(5) Links are important, local links
(4) Geo urself
(3) Use cit names in content
(2) Domain targeting with local domains or webmaster tool's geo tool
(1) Language and content presentation, manage duplicate content between multiple sites

Michael Bonfils, President, SEM International is up first and jokes about not making fun of his accent, which he doesnt have one. He is to talk about Asia.

Asia is important because 400 million users are in the Asia market place. He goes over the stats on why Asia is so important, trust me, he believes it is important.

E-commerce is Asia? Start with Japan, he suggests. Then move into Korea and then China. China is very under developed in e-commerce, so far.

Baidu: The average CPC is 20 cents, but it ranges. There is an implementation fee, like a deposit, and it is high. They dont take credit cards, they require wire. Baidu is very picky on the ads. Be aware of currency.

Google: It is easy to advertise in China. The CPCs and conversion rates are typically 2x higher than Baidu.

Yahoo: they have strong share in Asia. But they don't preform that well, 50% less effective than Baidu.

Chinese sound translations are hard.

Google looks mostly the same in China. Baidu is different, they mix paid and organic listings, but label them. The listings keep going dependent on advertisers.

Baidu SEO:
- Title and Meta Alt Tags
- Content, keyword density matters
- Linking, more quantity than quality
- Server and domain names, host in China and the domain is important for trust in searchers
- Localization and the market, use simplified Chinese
- Luck and connections matter

Yahoo is huge in Japan, followed by Google.

Korea has Naver, Daum (powered by Google) and Yahoo.

Competition: Your coming in from the US to compete locally. Monitor your local and global competitors.

Translation and Localization Tips:
- Use localized keywords, ad copy and landing pages
- Build trust in your ads and titles

Baidu has a very basic reporting system and they just added impression numbers, which he says don't work too well.

Ralf Schwoebel, Founder & CEO, Tradebit Inc. is next up. Might cut out soon, to go to the next session, where I speak in about 20 minutes.

He will focus on Germany and Europe. He first goes over basic SEO stuff. Translation is not enough. Ranking of a site is easier if it is locally hosted in that country.

Frank Watson, CEO, Kangamurra Media

Skipped out early, sorry, need to make it to my session and look somewhat awake.

Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 11:45pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

We are live blogging, this session from Salon B @ the Las Vegas Convention Center, PubCon 2008. Because it is live, there is no editorial or proofing process. The moderator is Joe Laratro.

PDFs, DOCs and feeds each have idiosyncrasies for optimization which can help your site rank. This session is going to dive deep into these formats to pass along best practices.

George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision, LLC is presenting, "optimizing PDFs for search engines." He wants us to seek rankings and more click-throughs from search engine result listings for .pdfs. He suggests that you create active links within .pdfs to increase the number of readers who visit your website or contact you while viewing your .pdfs online. Give search engines paths to find content on your website, which may help for internal inking.

Use mostly formatable text because search engines can't read text in images. Google can not create a meaningful description from an image. Optimize text in a .pdf documents according to SEO best practices. Pay special attention to the first headline. Google creates listings from text contained in the .pdf and the words and phrase being in bold, just like it does with HTML web pages. Tip: Rebuild old .pdfs if needed. Above all, update the document title, which is as important as the classic HTML title tag is for SEO.

If you don't have a title, Google extracts text from the .pdf's to create the listing, which it won't help "entice" people to click-through .There are many applications to create .pdf titles. Take note that Word 2003 usually adds "Microsoft Word" to the document title. It's best practices to update .pdfs in Adobe Acrobat. The document title usually becomes the headline in the organic Google listing.

If the .pdf is hosted on your site, link from pages that are already indexed. Add active hyperlinks to improve the likelihood that a visitor will click-through to other areas of your site.

Highlight your URLs, export/print as a .pdf and open in Acrobat. Menu commands in Acrobat: Advanced>Links>Create Links. Turn any text or image into an active link using Acrobat tools. Just draw a rectangle around the text or image and assign a URL. By adding these links in .pdf's, you're also giving search engines paths to reach pages on the site and may "very well help" in Google rankings. Promote your .pdf by linking to it from pages on your site and think about ways to get other websites to link to it as well. Inbound Google juice seems to have the same effect on .pdf's as on regular HTML pages.

Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com says the 30% of searches conducted on Google sites aren't web searches. He is going to discuss best tips, tools and techniques for non-traditional optimization that apply both to indexing and ranking support. He'll look at various file formats including DOCs, RSS feeds and video files.

GoogleNews examines recency, relevance and importance. If you're content is old, it's out after 30 days. Often corporate "news" is disseminated in a Word Doc. Greg is talking about optimizing a Word Doc. Newsforce offers an integrated suite of press release SEO tools. In the end, you export as an optimized Word document. He is showing five case studies of press releases that generated a measurable ROI including 88,00 entries into photo contents for "Parents," 200 million in CSAC leads for Symmetricon and $2.5 million in ticket sales for Southwest airlines.

GoogleBlogSearch examines a blog's title, content and popularity. Recency counts now. The older the ranking, the less important it is in Google Blog search. Try SEOSamba to optimize website and create RSS feeds. This can result in dramatic increases in visitors, visits and page views.

YouTube examines dozens of aspects, including hits and rating. YouTube's video view count is comparable to Yahoo! search count, which sheds light on the popularity of video search and YouTube. Comments are a part of the algorithm. "Once you start getting the views, you get the rankings. Once you start getting the rankings you get the views, but your must allow comments." Google's Universal search, means the presence of blog posts, videos and other channels in the SERPs. It takes up to 30% of the organic search results. It's crucial the SEOs optimize for that 30% or be left behind.

Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts is talking about his daughter's [famous] Neopets site. Here's the BIG SEO mistakes for bloggers.

leaving title tags to be auto-generated from the post name.

squander crawl equity by letting pages get indexed that don't deserve to be (email this,etc...)

Having multiple homes for your blog (http and http://www.)

not using unique "optional excerpt" WordPress feature to minimize duplicate content

not using rel-nofollow to direct PageRank flow

over-reliance on date base archives

no stability in keyword focus on category and tag pages

sub-optimal URLs (too long, too many words, too many directories)

only one RSS feed and it's un-optimized

hosting blog/feed URLs on a domain you don't own

using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally

Re-jig internal linking structure. Use tag clouds, tag pages and tag conjunction pages. Use related posts, top 10 posts, next and previous pagination. SEO Title Tag plug in for WordPress allows you to override the title tag with a custom title tag. It also allows for "thin slicing, " which means making quick decisions and don't over think. If you're an SEO expert, you can do the same concept by using the mass edit capabilities of SEO Title Tag. "Crank through" the pages on your site to make them more keyword rich.

A common overlooked tactic is to simply name your blog with keywords in the title. Optimize URLs, because it's been proven that short URLs get clicked on 2X more than longer URLs. Further, long URLs appear to act as a deterrent to clicking, causing users to click on the listings below it. Use sub domains, subdirectories, new domains. Don't be www.metlife.com/blog. Rather, be StayingFitBlog.com. Using free blogspot.com or wordpress.com URL? You benefit from their domain authority, but you're forever wedded to them.

Optimize anchor text. Make the post's title a link to the permalink page. Use SEOMoz Backlink Anchor Text Analysis tool or tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer) to look for opportunities to request previous to anchor text to inbound links. Sculpt your PageRank to really decide where you're going to send juice and where not. Stephan is particular fond of nofollowing calendar archive links, trackbacks, comments and where the link would be reciprocal.

Minimize duplicate content. Code your main index template to display "optional excerpts" on everything but the permalink page. For each post, write unique content. Don't just use the first couple of paragraphs. Improve the keyword focus using heading tags, bold, strong, and sticky posts.

Optimize your RSS feeds

full text, not summaries

20 or more items, not just 10

multiple fees by category, latest comments, comments by post

keyword rich item in the title

your band name in the title

your most important keyword in the title

compelling site description

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear, an Internet Focused advertising and public relations agency in Duluth, Minnesota.

SEO and Big Search

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 11:29pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Joseph Morin said they changed the title to making search work on many levels.

Melanie Mitchell, Vice President of Marketing, Foliofn Investments, Inc. is up first. She first worked at AOL earlier this year and left.

The consumer is in control of your content, that is why search is so good. The power of search is it is the marketers holy grail. Search is one part of the whole mix. She shows examples of how offline drives online sales. She gives a few case studies.

I totally was distracted on this panelist, I am sorry. Focusing now...

Dave Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc is now up. He is Yahoo the web side, not the search engine, i.e. he is an SEM.

They have tons of properties, and this is their main challenge, he will take you through it. Yahoo does SEM for the same reasons you and I do it, because it is a great marketing angle. They do paid, organic and affiliates across a lot of businesses. Specifically with SEO, they do talk to search product managers, they do benefit that search is part of their property, but they do not get to talk to the engineers, they don't know the algorithms, they don't know CTR by position algorithms.

They have a lot of properties. Lots of these businesses are different, some are subscriptions, some are downloads, some are e-commerce, some are lead gens and some are display ad revenue. To measure them all, they use a Life Time Value metric, what is the value a conversion for a subscription, referral, CPC/CPM? What is the net present value of that lifetime revenue stream? etc.

How much opportunity is there out there for me to get? What your trying to get is what is that opportunity that I can capture? They created a predictive model, based on click data, search data, etc. They want to figure out how they are doing against their competition. Then you can figure out how much a click is worth to me. Then you can do this for all businesses. They were able to see the competitive gap and they figured how much it is worth. Then they can show you the money, how much it is all worth, by business line using SEO/SEM.

Yahoo decided to stop fixing things that were broken. Instead, they try to make SEO part of the product development process (i.e. web site development process). You need to insert yourself into this process. They developed about 6 different check points.

Paid Search Execution is easier. The decisions he makes is to do it in house versus outsource, build or buy, leverage LTV model, measure everything, etc. They do both of everything.

They standardized a workflow document, which looked complex, but isnt.

Then they do a marketing scorecard for all their businesses. It helps them decide where to move money to and from. It helps them keep track of things and they do this weekly. They also do an SEO dashboard to keep track of things at the VP level.

Hit blog is IndustrialStrengthSEM.com, so check it out.

Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optmization Architect, Microsoft is now up. He does SEO at the lowest possible level, but there should be involved throughout.

Microsoft.com is one web site, but they treat it as hundreds of individual web sites. There is windows, there are micro sites, there are directories (microsoft.com/australia) and even that is not consistent. Optimization has been done on a site by site basis, which causes issues. They have at least 9 CMSs to deal with.

They work every day to make their site better for search engines. They have 100 billion plus URLs or so, it is a huge challenge. He said how Live has a ton of pages, Google has a lot less and Yahoo has very few. This shows them they have structural issues they need to fix.

Three levels of SEO:
(1) Sitewide SEO initiative
(2) Then individual web sites need to do SEO (he cant do it all for all sites)
(3) Page level SEO, he doesn't focus much on this

He said, Microsoft does not know how much traffic Microsoft.com gets from organic versus paid search. Can you believe it?! They are working on fixing this. Plus they are trying to standardize the metrics they use throughout sites. They are also doing a lot of training and travel all over the world. Some of the out of the box SEO tools don't work for Microsoft, they don't scale for it. So they built internal tools to manage this.

SEO Initiatives:
- Duplicate and undesirable pages (big issue for Microsoft)
- Excessive use of redirects
- Improper error handling
- Structure of subsidiary content
- Low quality page titles and meta tags

Good SEO is about structure, content and authority.

They built their own spider, not from Live search. They are crawling their web site, to figure out what a search engine is experiencing. So they can fix issues.

Site Level SEO's 6 Steps:
(1) Business Outcomes and Metrics
(2) Keyword Research and Selection
(3) Structural and Technical Audit
(4) Content editing for keyword integration
(5) Link building strategies and tactics
(6) Outgoing optimization

Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer, Google is last up. Search is part of webmaster central and tools.

YouTube gives each video a unique URL, they have titles and a real description. It has easy search and great navigation. It has a social aspect and embed URL. It has great features...

Created an SEO starter guide, it is now live at over here. This is the guide they used internally for best practices, and it is now available to everyone.

If you have an image link, they will use the alt tag as the anchor text. Interesting...

Make sure to provide value, act responsibly (yes, large sites can be penalized), and have fun - they also did the halloween joke in the robots.txt file.

Reputation Monitoring and Management

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 11:17pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

This session will look at methods for monitoring, managing, and influencing your reputation within the blogosphere and press. If you are not talking with your customer base, your customer base will be talking about you.

Moderator: Todd Friesen
Speakers:
Jessica Berlin, Social Media Manager, Cirque du Soleil
Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

First up is Lee Odden.

Why is online reputation management (ORM) important?
Your customers, prospects, and competitors are online. People pissed at you are online. The future of your company is online. There are comments, blogs, reviews, and more -- you need to be aware of this.

How important is knowing about dissatisfied customers, brand de-vangelists, brand champions and evangelists? You should know about these people -- brand evangelists can be armed with tools to talk more about you in a positive light.

How is it that your online reputation is influenced? One is through search. ORM is about "search engine results". Another influence is social media - you can ask people for advice and feedback about a particular location, business, or whatever. There's also mainstream media - are you getting press coverage that's positive and negative? Do you have a handle on the top people in these channels?

Search engines = reputation engines.

Lee shows several examples of PayPal, Walmart, and Target.

What's going on and how can you monitor your ORM?
- Free: Google Alerts, TweetBeep
- Small Biz: Trackur
- Enterprise: Radian6, BuzzLogic

Short term ORM: SEO and social media displace SERPs
- Make brand optimization a process in the organization
- Brand optimize all digital assets: text, images, audio, and video
- Optimize aross departments: PR, Marketing, HR, investor
- Result is more branded SERPs

Long term: identify, qualify, and engage dissenters
- Is there merit to the issue?
- If not, offer facts and ask for correction
- If yes, offer to discuss
- Be ready to respond via the blog
- Results can be loyal brand fans

Tactics:
- SEO
- Social media - listen to channels
- Encourage media relations results to get your company written about; online PR

Push messaging out - outreach via wire service, networking, pitching, RSS
Pull messaging - optimized via press release, newsroom, social media, and media coverage

91% of people use Google.com to get updates for subject matter experts. They also use social media.

Who is doing it right? eBay and Dell. Look at their results -- very clean. They're doing it with subdomains; blogs, Wikipedia, etc

Takeaways:
- Be proactive. Don't wait until it's too late. Monitor conversations, optimize content, do digital asset promotion, and watch analytics

"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas
...until somebody writes about it on Twitter."

Andy Beal is up next.

There are many components of reputation management and most people are concerned about what shows up on Google. Even if you're not ready to engage, you should monitor of what's being said about you so that you can build a reputation to fix product flaws and be ahead of the competition.

He wrote "Radically Transparent," an awesome book on ORM.

Why monitor? Product ideas, keywords for your campaign, news, articles, blog sentiment, product recalls, scandals, client opportunities, industry trends, customer comments

What to monitor: company name, product name, executive names, CEO, competitors, partners, industry, news, product launches, stocks, patents, services, customers, press releases, reviews

List of tools:

Industry news: moreover.com/categories/category_list_rss.html, Yahoo news

Mainstream news: news.google.com

News Buzz: digg.com

Upcoming news: google.com/trends

Blog posts: Technorati.com, blogsearch.google.com

Blog comments: backtype.com

Blog conversations: blogpulse.com/conversation - note: if you see people talk about you, follow that blog and the conversation as well.

Blog trends: blogpulse.com/trends

Bookmarks: delicious.com/popular

Photos: flickr.com

Videos: video.google.com

Tags: keotag.com

Forum posts: boardtracker.com

Twitter: search.twitter.com

Changing information: wikipedia.org

Customer reviews: epinions.com

Email updates: google.com/alerts

The untrackable: compernic.com, $50/year

One stop shop: trackur.com, $18/month

Last up is Jessica Berlin who works with Cirque de Soleil. They are always listening to customer discussion. Cirque was founded in 1984 by street performers. The mission statement is to evoke the imagination, to evoke the senses, and to evoke the emotions of people. There are 40k employees from 40 countries, 17 shows around the world. 80 million people have seen the show and close to 10m of those saw it last year. In Vegas, there are 6 production shows.

Customers talk a lot about the show - from the purchase of tickets until they leave the theatre.

What are they looking for online? People writing about the experience -- it could be anything (ticket purchase, concession stands, etc.) What do they like, dislike, and is the information accurate? Who are the evangelists and influencers? What else do fans want -- how can they remain connected to the brand?

Influence ripples: bloggers who write can get blogged about again - mainstream media can pick it up.

Regular monitoring: Google Alerts, Trends, TEchnorati, blogpulse, trendpedia, wikio, twing, twitter search, tweetstats, buzzlogic, youtube, and social networking sites

They just launched Criss Angel: in 2.5 years, they realized that things are completely different. People start writing about the show instantaneously. One local paper came out with an article about people who hated the show. They employed deiworldwide to generate buzz about the show and to spread information about the ticket purchases.

Shifting PR practices: things have changed. Beforehand, embargoes were honored for critics/journalists. But now, they don't use embargoes - everyone is a content producer. Bloggers are treated like members of regular press. They have a smaller readership, but it's a targeted readership.
They have social media releases. Make it easy for people to share information, builds community by allowing feedbakc, and SEO is link building.
A two way conversation build trust.
Newsworthy things are happening daily: Twitter, Facebook, etc.
EAsing of PR guidelines
Brings us closer to the journalist
Trust in employees - they are brand ambassadors and can spread news.

How fans can help: there are fan sites. Beforehand, they were afraid of these fan sites. Not anymore.
MySpace works very well. Artists have fan pages with 30k friends. They work with the people who run the page and give them information - having those accounts building the reputation for Cirque.

Encourage conversation: they give journlists, blogers, and consumers tools they can use. There are also exclusive content on branded channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook). They also have quizzes, widgets, and games (for example, getcirqued.com/quiz - how do you know which show you want to see?)

Build a good reputation:
- Transparency: customers appreciate when brands are open and hnest
- The better the relationship is, the easier it is to communicate problems/handle a crisis
- Listening improves communication

Ground-Up SEO Content Development as Pure Business Strategy

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 9:59pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Gillian Muessig  Speakers: Heather Lloyd-Martin, President, North American Division, SuccessWorks Matt Tuens, Founder & CEO,

Heather-LLoyd Martin:

• Today we will discuss SEO content through the sales cycle.
• Why build content?
• Why focus on content?
• Thinking about the budget.
• In House or Outsource?

Why should we care about content? The best SEO is good content. Not just enough to throw up articles. How text is written can have a tremendous impact on search positions and conversions. If you want links, has to be good content! Good brands don't want to link out to crap content. Good content helps get natural links.

A quote from 2006, that is still relevant, by DMNews: "Last year, marketers spent 8X more money on paid vs. organic search. In essence marketers spent $6 billion on a minority of their traffic while they nearly ignored the majority."

Case Study: AmsterdamEscape.com. Wanted to find a good hotel in Amsterdam. Company was banned from Google, and spent $4,000 a month on PPC. Hired a new SEO team and built out lots of content. Built around topics such as "do's and don'ts". Company ranks really well for many different key phrases, such as "Amsterdam apartments" and other high volume searches. Because they have so much good content, they get lots of long tail search traffic. Did really well, and saved them $48,000 a year in paid!

BusinessWeek is another case study. SuccessWorks helps with the titles, descriptions. Needed to push eyeballs to sell advertising. Goal was to increase page views, which = more ad revenue. Evangelize SEO concepts by optimizing templates, etc. After a few months, noticed huge spike in traffic. All they did was edit the copy - the title and key phrases.

Copywriting is about connecting with customers. Write in a tone that understands their pain. It's not about writing 250 words and shoving keywords in it. A lot of companies err by doing this.

Shows a slide with the sales cycle pyramid. Purchase, research, and awareness phases. The big opportunity - the research phases has huge opportunity. Use keyword research tools to help find topics / keyword phrases to write about. Build trust and confidence.

Use keywords in headlines and sub-headlines. In hyperlinks. Throughout the content. In the title. 2-3 key phrases per page. Longer copy.

Leveraging key phrase intelligence. Use site search to create new pages if search terms not represented. Create and/or edit new pages. Think of the buying cycle. Create pages around seasonal trends. "Ego" keywords. Be represented throughout the entire buying cycle.

A word about budget. Good content costs money. Can be most expensive part of SEO campaign. In house - need training. Can pay $100 - $1500 a page. Need to find the right balance. Get what you pay for. Don't fill in space with cheap content. Do your due diligence.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results" - Albert Einstein.

If your copywriter is writing sales related copy, look for direct response copywriting experience.
If your copywriter is writing informational copy, look for journalistic experience.

Companies that outsource, usually have no writing staff, no time, no editorial calendar, no clue. Solution: Outsource.

How to decide to keep it in house? Have existing writers on staff. The writing team has time for SEO content development and training. Or - writers create content, and outsource key-phrase editing.

Note: Some content may be missing or inaccurate due to the quick speed of this presentation.

Matt Tuens:

Focused on content side of online since 1997. Plan and implement full content solutions of all sizes. Develop entire information portals and content sites from the ground up.

Today:
• Changing perspective
• Building a helpful site that creates traffic
• Development in an ideal situation
• Development on a budget
• Measuring ROI

Goal is to tweak our perspective on how we think of content. Most people never take content far enough. Content is the original SEO. It's why search engines were built.

Wrong perspective #1:

Most people think of the minimum to just get buy. Do the least possible. You need to think the exact opposite to be successful.

The right perspective:

Become the ultimate resource - answer every question you can possibly have. Be that site. Lofty goals, but need to think this way. This is the right perspective.

Wrong perspective #2:

Making it all about you. Self promoting. If you sell Sony HDTV's - if you sound bias - people will smell a rat and you will lose credibility.

The right perspective:

Give the demographic what the want to know, not what YOU want them to know. Key is to think from their perspective at all times. Think of your site like a magazine. Every industry, no matter how obscure, has a magazine. Your site should be like that in your vertical. Editorial calendars, continuously updated.

Building a useful site that gets traffic:

Identify the segments in your demographic:
• single?
• married?
• young?
• old?
• working?
• retired?
• etc..

Write towards each demographic. For example - "mortgage refinance". Address the topic for each demographic. For each product type or product you have.

Identify the segments people are looking for:
• Why do people buy what you sell?
• What need are you filling?
• What are the main decision points?
• What will help inform them?
• What information will help them check off the points in their decision making process?
• What will help move them to action?

When people get deeper in research, looking for who to trust. Think about what will help move them to action.

After segment demographic, do your keyword research. No longer just terms and quantities. Different aspects, different demographics. Not term, but meaning. Especially important for content.

Keyword research: Primary terms should be broad and strong. Primary, secondary, tertiary, and long tail terms. Content topics at each level.

Primary level keyword: "refinance".
Secondary: "mortgage refinance".
Tertiary: "bad credit mortgage refinance".
Long tail: "getting mortgage refinancing in a bad market".

Content types:
• Articles?
• Blog posts?
• News?
• Video?
• Forums?

Structure:
• Like pages together - keep in same directories
• Structural categorization
• Virtual categorization

What happens when you have articles covering multiple topics? Pick one directory to classify. Keep a consistent structure.

Intelligent Structure:
• General theming
• Theme sculpting
• Internal linking
• PageRank sculpting - prevents diluting of categories

Types of content:
• Articles, blogs, news, video, UCG, forums, images, etc.
• What fits your situation?

Allocating content:
• Major keyword
• Secondary keyword
• Tertiary keyword
• Long tail keyword
• Topic based

Building on a budget:
• Better budget - close the ideal as possible
• Mid budget - try to follow Brett's rules - 100 articles before launch, and then one a day. 350 - 500 articles in first year - pretty healthy site.
• Less budget - At very least write one a day - easy to manage, but harder than appears. Tough to do it yourself. Easy to skip one day. Hard to keep up the momentum.

In-house: Cheap, control. But resources allocated elsewhere. Much more time and cost consuming.
Outsourcing: Conservative outsourcing more cost effective.

Writing must me managed. Editing is a must, but that is costly.

Measuring ROI:
• Set your goals - sales? downloads? page views? depends on business model.
• Set or note indirect metrics - page views, time on site, time on page, repeat visits.
• Points to watch for - increased numbers in your direct goals and indirect goals, entry pages, path, what pages are being viewed most, what is their exit page, analyze direct goal actions, analyze visitors

Conclusion:
• Planning
• Perspective
• Execution

Coverage provided by Avi A. Wilensky of Promediacorp, a Manhattan based online marketing agency.

How SMBs Can Use PR Campaigns To Grow Traffic

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 9:39pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Michael McDonald

Speakers:
Lisa Buyer, President/CEO, The Buyer Group
Robin Liss, Founder and President, CamcorderInfo.com
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Jiyan Wei, Product Manager,Vocus

Description: A well-seasoned panel of PR pros examine small and medium sized business campaigns.

Robin Liss will be talking about some of the PR work she has done over the past several years. As a veteran of CNN and dozens of other tech pieces on TV, Robin's real-world experience defies her youthful age.

Session Notes:

Lisa Buyer is the first presenter...

Lisa starts by highly recommending the book "PR Groundswell".

25% of Americans report reading a blog on a regular basis, 30%`watch user generated videos and 40% are using social media sites. Thus a huge PR groundswell.

You must need a strategy and be proactive. Can be very powerful in controlling your online reputation. The main tool is an online press release. However, you need to target journalists and editors to truly get exposure for your release.

Journalist have less and less time to hear pitches, instead they are looking online. 64% say they use Google news feeds and 75% say blogs are helpful in giving them story ideas. They are even looking for stories on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Journalist are looking for press releases that offer clarity, not those filled with jargon and keywords. They also use the web to research companies before calling them.

Another good source is people subscribing to Google Alerts so that releases are deliverd directly to them.

She recommends looking into newsforce.com as a good SEO friendly service. Lisa also recommends looking 12 months in advance for your PR campaign. Look at holidays and other events to see where you might fit with a good story.

Use online PR to own the search results.

Next up is Robin Liss...

She feel hiring a PR agency is not the best investment for all companies, especially small businesses. She feels small organizations should to it themselves.

She feels the press release for most journalists is dead, due to the oversaturation of press releases. It takes deep personal contact to get high quality pieces. They would rather hear directly from the business owner rather than the PR agency. You have the passion about your product or service and that will come through.

Pitches should be short (1 minute), easily understandable, have a hook or interesting angle, and be unique! A pitch should be a unique argument often tailored to a specific journalist. Look at local newspapers, business or trade magazineas, topical websites, etc. Use the phone - email just does not work! Practice with co-workers before making the calls.

Robin recommends taking the ego out of the PR plan and focus on ROI.

Third presenter is Jiyan Wei...

Jiyan is with PRWeb and his discussion is based on the framework they use with customers.

The make a distinction between a news release and a press release. Think about who is the target, is it the press or the consumer?

Craft a release geared towards your audience. Will it incorporate video, audio, images? Either way, quickly get to the point with an informal tone.

Optimize your release for the search engines. Standard SEO techniques based on keywords you have researched.

Then you want to propel you release. Once it is on the web, you want to push it even further with links, social media and bookmarking.

Lastly, evaluate the campaign, adjust and repeat.

Some ideas for good news releases: set up YouTube, Flickr, Delicious channels and use the content in the release. Once the release is out, work to get it Dugg, Stumbled, etc. Focusing a lot of attention on one release is better than shotgunning several releases.

Last presenter is Greg Jarboe...

Greg is going to go over a case study for a small business called Business Financial Publishing. Referring to him as "Ian the Publisher".

Ian has a dozen different websites and growing. They are optimizing releases and measuring all of the metrics. They measure how many people read the release, how many click through to the site, and once they are on the site are they converting.

One example was a release about the one year anniversary of the site smallcapinvestore.com. It was a me, me, me release. It got 1600 reads but only 1 registration on the website. They followed this up with a second release regarding a different site. It had 1400 reads, but managed to get 44 registrations.

The difference was the 2nd release was written about the customer rather than the company. Must provide a compelling offer or benefit to your customer. "We can tell you the top 5 companies to invest in".

Move beyond SEO copy and create a solid headline with a great story which is directed at your customer. Of course you will include links to your site for SEO, but what you need to focus on is selling right from the start.

Greg recommends looking at SEO Samba (seosamba.com) to make your release Google News compliant. The tool checks for compliant urls and sitemap XML creation. It even help place it in the right category.

These session notes were written by Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures a link building and website publicity company. Please excuse any typos or grammar issues, the session notes are written live and meant to be posted as soon as the session is over.

Competitive Intelligence : Know Thy Competitor Well

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 9:38pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

We are live blogging this session from Salon C @ the Las Vegas Convention Center, PubCon 2008. Because it is live, there is no editorial or proofing process.

The Internet allows marketers to gain unprecedented insight as to competitors' tactics and strategies. This panel is going to discuss competitive intelligence gathering tools and tactics. Bruce Clay is moderating. Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC is speaking first this morning. Spying on your competitors? Here's Andy's tool kit:

domaintools.com takes the WHOis information to a whole new level of detail. Get information past who owns the site, to what other websites are owned. Find what directories they're in and other great "snapshot" information. ranks.nl/tools/spider.html spiders keyword density. siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com reveals, in order of importance, backlinks to a site.

SEOmoz tools seomoz.org/tools offers free and paid-premium tools, which Andy Beal values a lot. soloseo.com/tools/indexRank.html puts Google information for your site, on a grid to view. copernic.com is a tool that costs about $50.00 (watchthispage.com free alt) to watch a page constantly. Set it up to spy on your competition. Keep an eye on their products, clients or any kind of content by RSS, email or dashboard.

Use technorati.com to watch competition to instantly get updates anytime a blog or video (or anything) mentions you in the blog universe. If you prefer simple email, GoogleAlerts will contact you anytime your like, on the keywords of your choice. These alerts can also be set up as feeds.

searchanalytics.compete.com reveals keywords that bring traffic to competitors. Paying for the service gets a comprehensive list of referrals. touchgraphic.com shows a graphic representation of a site's authority constellation. If your competitor is a public company, spy on their SEC filings at google.brand.edgar-online.com. For patents, seekingalpha.com/transcripts, google.com/patents.

Oodle.com offers competitive intelligence surrounding job placements. Keep an eye on your competitors' employees. It's amazing how much information they will freely give, especially on Twitter. He's showing a clever picture of one Matt Cutts. He joked that getting people "drunk at parties," always works.

Larry Mersman, Vice President, Trellian.The definition of competitive intelligence can mean many things, depending on the channel we are dealing with. For the most part it's gathering information on competition. HitWise, Trellian and ComScore offer competitive solutions. Target relevant keywords and see who is optimizing around it. Find out who is sending traffic to your competitor and being clicked on to get the user to your competitor. Sources include search engines, banner ads, links on a website, affiliate partner links, blogs, etc ...Optimize your site around the data.

William Atchison, Founder, Crawl Wall says while you're looking at them, they're looking at you. "Techniques for protecting your SEO investment from prying competitive eyes." Why let competitors use your hard work and paid research, as low hanging fruit, to launch their business. Competitors want the path of least resistance to encroach on your online business. They want to make easy money helping competitors rank by leveraging your information. Tool vendors want to steal you data for a profit and help those competing against you.

Bad guys gather data from Google, Yahoo and MSN's cache pages, which don't reveal the visitor. Eliminate search engine cacheing to stop covert researchers from gathering data on your meta tags, internal anchor text and outbound links. Use the NOARCHIVE BANS Cache. Check out www.noarchive.net. archive.org is used to covertly gather both historical and recent site data.

Remove clues about you, your administrative and technical contacts and how many domains you have. The whois data is easily blocked using proxy commands. Use robots.txt to tell well behaved 'bots whether they're allowed to crawl or not. Robots.txt is the VIP list at the night club. Badly behaved crawlers that won't honor robts.txt to get stopped at the server with .htaccess. Make sure the search engines ARE who they are who they claim, using full trip reverse DNS checking, avoid spoofing. Go to .ppt for examples of all code. There will still be crawlers gathering competitive information that don't want to get caught and pretend to be human browsers. Tools such as robots.txt and .htaccess can't stop those.

Remove competitive vulnerabilities Eliminate search engine cache pages, opt out of archive .org, opt in only allowed spiders, 'bot blocker scripts to catch hidden threats. Tighter controls on copyrighted content, improve search engine ranking after thwarting unwanted competition and better ser performance for visitors and legit search engine crawls.

Jake Baillie,Managing Director, STN Labs thinks Google is still the one of the best tools out there for competitive information. Do you know who your ISP is and are they trustworthy? ISPs are very weak points in the competitive intelligence chain, and usually picked based on who's cheapest. ISPs can feign being Googlebot so it's much better to do IP lookups to see who owns what. Disgruntled employees and ex-spouses can be a weak point as well. Get those NDAs out there. Don't use Robots.txt to block development sites. It telegraphs the project. Use strong passwords.

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear, an Internet Focused Advertising Agency and publisher of aimClear Blog.

The Big Dedicated Server Payoff

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 9:11pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Roger B. Dooley

The room is empty, maybe 20 people here, max.

Alexander Barbara, CEO, ReidBrown Enterprises, Inc. is up first.

There is a tipping point, maybe your site is slow, your having a lot of down time, or your resources are low. What matters is fast, uptime, great support and room for growth.

Virtual private servers are a low cost way to move towards to a dedicated. They might take 50 people and put them on a single dedicated, but you do have root access.

Dedicated give your 100% resources, 100% control but your a 100% responsible.

Do a speed check, how many backbones they have, do a traceroute to see how many pass throughs and do a download test of a test file.

Factors to consider include are you serving static or dynamic pages, pageviews requirements and who else is on your server.

Alternatives to a new server is to cut down on page size, you can host images elsewhere and optimize HTML.

Dedicated servers are not always necessary. They are not always more reliable than shared, they are not always needed for high traffic and they are not better for SEO.

Questions to ask:
(1) Do they backup? How often, size limits?
(2) SLAs?
(3) Are they in the data center?
(4) Is there site monitoring
(5) Ask for references
(6) How old are the servers?
(7) Cost and availability of the IPs and C-Blocks?
(8) How many backbones do they have?

Questions for Virtual Private Servers:
(1) How many VPS instances are on a box?
(2) Guaranteed RAM?
(3) Separate DNS server (off this server)?
(4) Money back guarantee?

Questions for Managed Hosting?
(1) Will they compile and install custom software?
(2) Support hours?
(3) Phone Support?

No one can guarantee your site will be 100% up.

Jeremy Wright, CEO, B5Media is next up. He shows his growth map, in a network map. From $7 a month hosting a account to a very large system, about 60 servers. But he still does have down time.

Share hosting principles:
- Quality is more important than price
- Get referrals (all hosts have upset customers)
- Know what you need vs what you want
- Dont switch to dedicated too soon
- Go with a larger shop over a smaller one

His biggest mistakes are that he didn't plan their growth. He also moved to a dedicated hosting company too soon. He stayed with bad providers too long. They overpaid for managed hosting, instead of hiring a full time tech resource. They didn't use RFPs to get the best pricing.

Beyond a Dedicated Box. Don't buy unless you have to (I made this mistake). Use "lease to own". Find similar clients at their data center. Consider combining forces with another similar sized company to save money and share resources.

David Driskill, Senior Engineer, Verio doesn't seem to be here, nope, he is not here.

So Roger B. Dooley, the moderator, has a few notes. Page load time is critical to webmasterworld.com, and is due to the page design and resources. Faster pages keep people on your site. Another question to ask a shared hosting place is to ask what their internal migration policy is - upgrades, new technology, etc. Will your sites be live during this? What if they discontinue a product?

Now Q&A time...

Real-World Winning Tactics for Content Creation

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 9:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

This panel of content creation gurus will look at how to keep the creativity flowing while managing the content process.   Moderator: Derrick Wheeler  Speakers: Rupali Shah, Organic Search Manager, GroupM Robin Liss, Founder and President, Camcorderinfo.com Ted Ulle, Partner, The MEWS Group

Ted Ulle, aka Tedster takes the floor. Tedster is an industry veteran since 1994, a WebmasterWorld administrator, and great guy to know.

What happens if you know that you are going to publish a lot of content? Don't build a "Frankensite". The main point is that business process or workflow must support your SEO. It must always be there.

Must be training for SEO in your content team. Must locate and educate everyone in the workflow. Can be a big pain, particularly in big enterprises. Pulls people from lots of channels, sometimes there's no communication. You need to locate and educate them. Should have analytics dedicated to each person in the workflow. Lets people know they are doing a good job. Makes a big difference to people. Hold regular team meetings to keep the team coordinated.

War story #1: Management must buy in. Major silicon valley firm. Had IT department, web designers, writers, and analytics people. Half of the team was reassigned, and the entire training went down the drain. Without exec level buy in, you have a big problem. The final product must support the business goal. It's always #1. Its at the top of the chain.

Marketing strategy: If you know your strategy, can rough out content on a conceptual level. If starting a new web site - need to look at CMS, server, back-end, analytics - folded in early. Start with the market strategy, then do keyword research. Next task is the IA, and menus. Most important part of the content. First shot at your site. Without this nailed down, your content will not get found well. At this point, after IA is set, you can pull in graphic designers and build your templates. Many companies do this right away. Happening less now. After you got your templates, you got your content. Point of the story is to take the business goal and make it penetrate the process. The most important thing to do is document each process. If team changes, can review the document. Need to document each decision.

War story #2: Beware of chasing trophy keywords. Niche market - "homeopathy software". Product was aimed at doctors. But the search term is the word a layman would use. B2C not B2B. This market had only one vendor. Tried to be the #2. Gained the number one and number two rankings. Launched lots of content. Sales went down. Got the trophy, and almost went under. Happy ending: web showed them what was wrong. Not just on the web but off the web. Marketed completely different. Content became easier to develop. Traffic became golden. Broke into the market, and became the leader. They don't rank anymore for their trophy term, and it doesn't matter.

Information Architecture: Before you make your menu decision - you need to find the right buckets to hold your content. This discipline is so intense, comes from library science. Often ignored, but so important. Recommends O'reilly's IA for the WWW. Not technical but incredible insightful.

Final web edit: Content interacts with layout. CSS is web typesetting. You can kill good content with bad layout and visa versa. Study print typography. You have centuries of learning about this subject. Study it. Read "Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringherst.

Simple and Seamless goal: For the end user, for the search engines, and for maintenance. Websites are incredibly complex. Need to eat the complication all the time and digest it.

Showing off: Someone shows off on the team. Bad for business goals, good for them. Often the graphics designer, could be the programmers touting AJAX. Or could be your IT folks writing content. They write content on SERPs, error messages, write auto responders which are a big part of the user experience.

Code geeks should never write content! Ever! Yahoo! directory - if you make a mistake with a credit card, you get the message "Invalid Payment Instrument Data".

Despite all planning, things will go wrong. Data queries re too slow. Content breaks the template.

When time to fix, though shalt not kludge! Better late than lousy. Expect to make trade-offs. Keep all priorities straight. How? Go back to your document! Refresh yourself with the business goals. Don't build a "Frankensite".

Robin Liss, of Reviewed.com is up next. Robin is one of the foremost industry experts on producing top quality content, and is a brilliant businesswoman. She started her company when she was 13 years old. Her network of review sites generates well over 1 million unique visitors a month.

"Producing high value content - a guide to creating content for non-spammers."

Just like a car maker, you manufacture a product - the written word. What can we learn from car manufacturers to create efficient processes?

Mr. Ford's assembly line rocks! Shows a slide with a basic pipeline of how content is produced at Reviewed.com. Look at every step, and refine each process. Steps come together to create a content pipeline. Who takes responsibility for what steps? How much time is needed? What steps are needed or not needed depending on the content? What can you outsource? What can you bring in house? This pipeline can scale across 10, 20, or even 100 people.

Create a first draft. Supplement with photos, video, etc. That goes into an edit. Could be you, or an editor. Next is production - "HTMLization". Copy editing, SEO editing, and final edit. Then take it live. Market it, and push it out to blogs. Go back and adjust and fix if necessary.

The most basic content pipeline is a blog. Blogs are efficient because there is a lot of front line content production. A newspaper or magazine might have 10-20% of payroll producing original words. Blogs have limited editing. Almost everyone involved in a blog is creating editorial products. It's highly efficient and productive. Modified pipeline for blog is simpler. Lacks the editing and oversight.

Examples of modified pipeline. You might have an editor and a writer. Sometimes it might be more efficient to add a third person to the process. A more complicated pipeline might have 6 people. An editor-in-chief, an editor, the writer, a photographer, a product tester, and a copy editor. It might be more efficient, but not cheap. Bigger payroll. Lots of quality control in this example. Reviewed.com syndicates to the Washington Post, so quality is mandatory. Her staff is producing an equivalent of a novel a month in text, and high quality text.

Tools: Good tools save money. WSIWYG tools (FCK Editor) save production time and money. Dreamweaver. MT. Own your CMS. Investing money in your CMS will reduce editorial costs in the long term.

Workflow management tools. Google Calendar, lots of spreadsheets.

Specialization = economic efficiency. Find the right writer for the right task. Is this short form content or long form? Journalistic vs. opinionated? Edgy vs. straight? Switching takes time. When doing large projects, different parts of the article might go to different people.

Find an online copy editor, and pay per word. Find a basic HTML guru to "HTMLize" your stuff. Everyone needs an editor, even the best writers. Everything should be edited. Hard to spot your own errors. Mandatory. Allows your writers to improve content. Making one person do everything is inefficient.

Destroy bottlenecks! If you want to get scientific, measure and quantify your workflow. Make a consistent pattern. Heavy focus on patterns at Reviewed.com. One review per week, for example. Even flow. Make sure that you find your inefficiencies. Error free content = creditability. Whether its grammar, or information. Measure everything! Measure your editors. Measure word count, time, deadlines. Measure number of articles that are producing. Measure articles' traffic. Increase efficiency makes better content at less of a cost.

Final tips: Hire contributors, but make sure you own the rights in the contract. Don't want to get into a plagiarism argument. Don't want to get into that mess. Protect yourself in contracts. Be specific.

You get what you pay for. Be original. Google likes content. Writing good reviews ranks well. Contribute to the world's information. Blogs are good way to get into original content creation. And focus on quality!

Rupali Shah is next, and talks about mobile content.

With the advent of iPhones and Blackberries have to think about how to present your company on these devices. Will cover stats about mobile usage, mobile SEO, tops for creating mobile content, good and bad examples.

Stats show that in January, 08 by M:Metrics majority of iPhone and smartphone users are reading news via the browser, accessing web search. The iPhone actually ran out of inventory a few months back. There is high demand for these products. More efficient for many tasks. 7 million + iPhone users. Potential viewers of your website!

Technology is no longer a barrier. Research has shown that people are having an OK experience visiting the web with smart phones. UK users showed a poor experience, but US users were satisfied, according to her slide.

Have you looked at your website on an iPhone or iPhone emulator? Does it look OK? Is the load speed good?

Mobile SEO. Use valid XHTML code. W3C compliance. www.w3.org/mobile. Keywords, meta data, linking and site maps.

Accessibility: Make it uncluttered. Less is more. Make the page sizes small. Look at user agent, and serve tailored content. Have a simple design, rich in text. Use mobile style sheets. Minimize images. Use DIV tags, not tables. Optimize your images with ALT tags.

Look at a check list of all the different screen widths. Shows a slide with the most common sizes. Pay attention to image formats GIFs and JPEGs. Character encoding. Maximum total page weight - 20kb. Limit your colors to 256. Limit your scripting - many devices cannot understand heavy scripting. Avoid lots of scrolling - keep pages short. Use a good navigation structure.

Other tips: Use Google Mobile Sitemaps. Feed the content to the engine. Yahoo has a similar product. Google Webmaster Tools shows what keywords mobile users are finding you.

Coverage provided by Avi A. Wilensky of Promediacorp, a Manhattan based online marketing agency.

Brand Reputation Monitoring & Management: Background & Tactics

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 8:13pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Good morning. We are live blogging, this session from Salon C @ the Las Vegas Convention Center, PubCon 2008. Because it is live, there is no editorial/proofing process and raw notes will be posted. Welcome to SEORoundTable's coverage.

Managing a brand on the Web can be a complicated rubrics cube of variables. It's a double edge sword. Factor in the peculiar Tao of social media, forums, blogs and chat--and your brand may be at risk or on the verge of massive success. These speakers are talking about migrating from the "traditional" brand management world, in this tricky marketing environment. The Moderator is Joe Laratro

Jessica L Bowman, Founder & President, SEOinhouse.com says you need a consistent customer experience. Physical stores, online customer support, local news, national news, Twitter, social media, Facebook, bloggers, user-generated content like YouTube and Flickr, branding is about controlling across all. messages.

Customers With Power and Knowledge
It's called a "halo" and traditional approaches don't deal with over half of the channels that comprise a customer's experience. Users are getting involved in your brand, like it or not. As an example, public complaints are now way too easy and customers' bad (and good) experiences reverberate all around the halo, banging off of every channel. With Yelp and a Blackberry, a public rant can now be posted real time, before a customer's anger has subsided.Virgin Atlantic fired 13 employees for using fake names on Facebook and indulging in (probably not malicious) "venting," which corporate obviously did not find acceptable.

Train all customer touch points on how to handle customers, especially those who will go post things online.
Establish the boundaries and rules by adding guidelines for online commenting and blogging to your employee handbook
Allow employees to access social media sites to monitor what's happening
Hate List For Really Pissed Off Consumers (if they had time and know-how) they could easily:

Make comments at Yahoo and Google
Comment at your blog
Twitter Updates, which push out to Facebook
Adwords ad with their complaint, where the primary purpose is to get the attention of a VP who can instill an actual change. If on a tight budget, they might geo-targeted the ad so it only appears in the city to executives of the company
---
Lauren Vaccarello, Director of Publishing, Forex Capital Markets LLC, will give tips for maintaining and defending your brand

Defensive Tactics (Best offense is a good defense)
Get the best players. Buy domains around your target keywords and brand name. Make sure to own www.myBrandSucks.com and yourCEOsname.com. Register your brand name on social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook Groups and a naymz profile. Know what your competitors are doing and if anyone is bidding on your branded keywords.

Keep an eye on your key players by creating competitor alerts on brand name and key personel. She endorsed Andy Beal's TrackUr a reputation monitoring tool. Monitor everything, Tiwtter is great place for people to connect and interact. It is also a great place for people to complain. She recommends TweetPro as and advanced build out for Twitter.

Companies like Verizon are finding customer dissatisfaction "opportunities," by quickly responding to public complaints on Twitter. The experience has resulted, not only in avoiding a PR problem, but turning the customer who originally levied the complaint to an advocate in a blog post. Respond to negative mentions quickly

Brian Combs, Senior VP & Chief Futurist, Apogee Search is talking about how to "handle" a Yahoo or Google problem. Before you have a problem, dedicate resources to online customer service. Monitor online conversations and use consistent naming conventions. Create and propagate multiple sites. Upon finding a problem, engage and attempt to diffuse. It's always possible to turn a detractor into a fan. Don't be defensive or attempt to strong arm, as you'll only make it worse.

Don't engage with trolls and Internet tough guys. Take it offline if possible. If all else fails, block the user. Scrub listings by "taking up more shelf space" in the SERPs. Use sub domains, product sites, international domains, social media, articles on third party sites, blended search or microsites. The content MUST be unique and the sites may require link building

Wikipedia is a risky technique as it can backfire if you violate TOS by submitting yourself.
Don't recommend evil tactics like Google Bowling.
Reputation problems are easier to prevent than to fix
Customer service 101: engage and don't be defensive. If you must scrub the listings, take a diversified approach in multiple channels.

Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMC
He is telling a story about Paris TX. It's about a gay elementary school Principal, a vindictive lover, hot-headed small town assistant District Attorney. Topix pulled the post down but could 't keep it down. The assistant DA was reprimanded for threatening violence and almost lost his job (probably should have). DA sought a reputation management specialist but didn't hire him because of cost. The post found a home on Topix and in the minds the voting public. The assistance DA lost her job.

Responding in an emotional way, can ruin an online reputation. Sometimes responding makes it worse. If you are an employer, you need to have policies in place to keep employees from responding inappropriately. Threatening violence on the Internet can be dangerous, but most of the time it makes you look like and idiot.

Reputation, Influence and Branding
Reputation, branding and influence are not the same thing, but are interconnected. Of the three, start working on reputation. The others will come if your reputation is good. Don't let good branding get in the way of a good reputation. Monitor your reputation. Create a formula for keeping your reputation solid. Deal with snags when they come.

Create a formula for online reputation. Consider, when evaluating threats, the reach of the venue, influence of the poster, tone of the content, follow-up on the post (watch for on-topic vs. off topic) and potential viral effects.

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear, an Internet-focused advertising agency, specializing in reputation management.

Local and Mobile Search

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 8:12pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Andy Beal

Speakers:
Shailesh Bhat, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo
Alex Porter, Vice President, Location3 Media
Bill Mongovan, VP SearchCenter, Omniture
Gregory Markel, Owner, InfuseCreative

Description: Local search now comes from a real convergence of local targeting and mobile device usage. It covers the entire spectrum from the desktop shopper to the casual "get-it-now" cellphone user. This panel will look at local search from the varying perspectives of search engines, wireless audiences, and SEO/SEM marketers.

Session Notes:
Andy's opening remarks include the fact the local and mobile has finally taken off. He believes in the future, these two topics will no longer be covered in the same session.

Shailesh Bhat is the first presenter...
Yahoo local has about 28 million visitors locally. Yahoo is working to provide instant answers regardless of the entry point whether it is local, the web, mobile, etc.

The find it critical to proactivly monitor listings information. They tend to get inaccurate very quickly. Looking for solid customer feedback to manage the vendors online reputation. Vendor descriptions must go beyond name & address.

Local searches are skyrocketing. Users are now educated in adding locality to their search queries. Search strings are getting longer and longer. For example "seattle coffee 24 hour wifi". So vendors need to build out their profiles accordingly.

Local search is evolving with web search. Yahoo has Search Monkey. Search MOnkey allows a publisher to structure the information that is being presented, providing a richer and more relevant experience for the searcher.

Local information and maps are in high demand on mobile devices. Grew almost 80% from 2007 to 2008. On mobile search people are usually looking for answers quickly - not web links. Yahoo is implementing oneSearch to meet this demand. Mobile search shows a high level of intent.

Next up is Alex Porter...

Campanies need to take advantage of the map listings for customers activley search for their business. ie. Yellow pages, search engines and even in-car GPS systems.

Nearly 50% of searchers who find the local vendor, reach out and interact with them.

Local is not just a 2 horse race. There are many local search providers from Yelp to Local to LocalSearch. Google is still the dominant player, so you need to be sure to show in the search results - the map listings.

Alex also recommends that you be very proactive to make sure your listing data is accurate. Go right to the sources and make your updates. Create a list of where you can be found and be sure to check it on a routine basis.

The main search engines often pull information from the local search engines like CitySearch, so this can help with your organic listings as well.

To measure this, he recommends call tracking, coupon tracking, in-store surveys and video views. Google Analytics has some data but you cannot track all local search. He also suggests implementing a KML sitemap.

To get ranked higher in Google and Yahoo you should create good content, link to your listings, get customer reviews, & place keywords in the title.

The third presenter is Bill Mongovan

He recommends creating individual landing pages for your local search results. Test content of the listing and landing page to increase conversations and conversions.

Mobile analytics are just starting to really evolve. Data available can be screen widths, device, image support, cookie support, device manufacturer, and so on. People are actually buying via their mobile devices... especially iPhones.

You may even consider creating specific apps for the mobile market. Many are available for you to take advantage of, but you might be able to brainstorm some ideas on how you can add value to mobile users.

The last presenter is Gregory Markel...

He will focus on the now and the future. He feels 3G and future tech are game changers. This includes apps, even location specific apps. GPS in these phones allow you to know exactly where the user is located.

Crital mass had finally arrived. All new devices have GPS, big screens and easy to use keypads. For example the iPhone uses three methods to determine where the user is located.

Google received 50X the number of iPhone searches compared with the 2nd highest device. The apps available and the browsing experience is making these devices mainstream. People are spending more time browsing on their devices.

Right now you have first mover advantage as these new devices are being adopted at a very fast pace. iPhone has the lead, but others are equally viable. The search engines are also starting to treat these devices seperately. An iPhone browser has its own, unique experience on Google.

He says that getting listed in Google, Yahoo and MSN local will help you address many of you optimization needs. The engines are good at using your listing to help the searcher.

PPC is also still found on mobile searches - right now it is just 2 listings at the top, but this is subject to change.

Gregory feel that traditional SEO keyword methods may no longer apply in the mobile world. Instead the smart apps, smart phone and location detector will find what the user is looking for with out keywords and clicking.

These session notes were written by Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures a link building services and website publicity company. Please excuse any typos or grammar issues, the session notes are written live and meant to be posted as soon as the session is over.

Analytics Vendors and Package Implementation

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 8:11pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas

Moderator: Melanie Mitchell

Brett Crosby, Group Manager Google Analytics, Google is replaced by Matt at Google (not Cutts). He begins talking about core concepts to using web analytics. Waiting for any new stuff... I.e. talks about how to install Google Analytics, I'll assume most readers know how to do that. Google has added custom reporting, as we reported in the past.

ugh, this is so basic, I am sorry. Then my computer froze, I am sorry for not covering his presentation.

Jamie Smith, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Engine Ready is next up.

Web Analytics Vendors including Yahoo (IndexTools), Google Analytics (Urchin), WebTrends, Lyris, ClickTracks, Coremetrics, Unica, Omniture.

You first need to think about your site's goals and then you can track it with analytics. You need to know how much each goal is worth. KPI (key performance indicators) should be an action.

There are a lot other people who use analytics now, not just web developers, but also marketing, designers, etc. Each user uses different types of reports.

He then explains how analytics works and what it tells you...

Originally, web analytics was basically your log file and all we knew was a "hit." 3rd party analytics came along to fill this void.

Analytics is based on patterns.

6 Mistakes with Installing Analytics:
- Version control issues
- Not setting up your conversions or goals
- Forgetting to tag every page
- Each code snippet not having the right path in the JS file
- Putting the code at the bottom of the page (yea, you want it at the top)
- Multiple accounts using same code

Top 3 Mistakes When Setting up Campaigns
- Not setting up your goals
- Make sure everything has a unique tracking campaign
- Not testing destination URLs

You should know your conversion rate like you know your social security number. You can cross reference your conversion data with your analytics. Conversion tracking only tells you half the story, you need both.

Everyone should have campaign summary at the tip of their fingers. Get in the shoes of your editors, show them what is going on with the analytics. Assist tracking is important, but most tools dont do a great job tracking it. Call tracking, what he calls is the X factor.

Richard Zwicky, CEO, Enquisite who is a really good guy is now up. They focus on just SEARCH analytics, not global analytics, but search.

He is making everyone stand up!

He asks a bunch of questions and his point in this standing contest is to explain what segmentation is.

The market place is becoming more sophisticated. You need to leverage the tools so you can understand your customers better and market better to them.

Ecosystem: Collect, analyze, report, optimize, and monetize.

You need to track the life cycle of that user.

SEO News » Search Engine Roundtable » November 2008

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Posted: November 18th, 2008, 10:00pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

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