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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

SMX Boot Camp: Link Building Fundamentals

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn introduces the panel. He basically shows the age of the panelists, at least in web years. :) He describes link building as a "cat and mouse" game between search engines and SEOs.

Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link is first up.

Why are Links Valuable:
- They connect sites like threads in a web
- Links provide paths
- They are an indicator
- They are value indicators

She goes into how the internet came around. Soon after came search engines. Search engines use to just read content. Then came along Google who went beyond content and looked at link analysis (PageRank).

Link Popularity:
- It measures the quality and quantity of links pointing to a web site.
- All major engines use
- Off page factor
- Link love, juice, pop, rep

4 Components:
(1) Link Quantity
(2) Link Quality (authority of host sites) PageRank is a lot different than it was, it is more about quality over quantity.
(3) Anchor Text, it is a query ranking factor. This is the most powerful component in links.
(4) Link Relevancy. It helps establish where you belong. Search engines read text around links. Linking out and being linked to establish connections. Build links within your neighborhood. Links to and from contextually relevant or "thematically related" sites convey more authority

Authority Sites:
- Rank well
- Well known
- Have strong inbound links
- Are insulated against algorithmic fluctuations

Bottom Link Line... Focus on linking efforts on securing keyword rich anchors from authority sites.

Part Two: Ranking Influences...

Avoid:
- Control your rate of link acquisitions
- Repetitive anchor text
- Dont use the same tactic over and over again

Optimal Linking Success:
- Screen partner sites carefully
- Place links in content areas
- Understand all links have value
- Redirected links or links passing through third party sites will not pass link pop
- Avoid losing PageRank, be consistent in your links (www vs non, etc.)

Link Learning and News Sources
- She lists a bunch
- Link Harvester
- Hub Finder
- Langeriter.com
- GoogleGuy.de
- Quirk.biz/SearchStatus
- SoloSEO.com/tools/linkSearch.html
- bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.html
- google.com/alerts

What's Working?
- Everything still works but link building strategies using content generation tactics work best.
- Traditional, edus, wiki, content targeting, media, press releases, directories, reclamation, trust links, local links, article writing.
-- Create a media contacts database and then break out editorial and commercial sources.

-- Look at review sites and contact those people leaving reviews.
- Directory Submission, general, niche, rss, article, podcast, blog, wiki, local.
-- Avoid directories hosting excessive ads
-- Check pages for nofollow or robots.txt
-- Steer clear of directories with a lot of wite wides
-- Yahoo Directory worth it for newer sites
-- Niche directories tend to be less scrutinized such as Directory Big Board, ISEDB and Blog Catalog can give you some ideas.

Article Writing:
- Write a shorter version for syndication and write a longer version for your site.
- Answer questions in your article
- Add bio to your articles
- Add links within content if possible
- List of article directories given

Content Network:
- Publish content on any topic
- Distributes content to engaged audiences through its web site and content partners
- Some use nofollow

Guest Blogging
- Search for "looking for writers" + keywords etc...

Link Bait:
- Digg, Propeller, Mixx, SU

Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com

November 1st, will be his 15th year doing link building for pay. 15 years!

Link building is PR work, public relations...

In 1993, he had 10 places to submit to. He showed off the Netscape What's New page. That is where you built links. In 2008, it is endless - where you can submit links. Big change was Google and PageRank. You want click traffic and you want that helps you rank. Some links can do both. That is the holy grail.

Effective link building is PR, linkbait, link buying, etc.

The approach is to get trusted links, its not the link, its the author of the link. Find out where people care about your topic and reach them.

Link building has to vary based on content, focus and audience.

Your link tells a story about your site. Like a transcript or "rap sheet."

You don't need a lot of links to do well.

FYI, here is Eric's presentation: ericward.com/smx/.

Search and Reputation Management

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:22pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

What do people find when they search for you by name? Is it negative? If so, what do you do? What can you do? Depending on the situation, there are a range of tactics that may help. This session explores the issue.

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:
Veronica Fielding, President and CEO, Digital Brand Expressions
Jordan Glogau, Partner, Internet Reputation Management
Simon Heseltine, Director of Search, Serengeti Communications
Michael Jensen, Co-Founder, SoloSEO

First up is Veronica Fielding. She talks about proactive reputation management - how to fortify yor brand before there's an issue that arises. She recommends to develop a game plan before there are problems and having something in place if a problem were to arise. It may not prevent the information to trickle to the surface but it can help you address issues and leverage them for the issues that may be causing your brand a problem.

There are 3 essential considerations:
- Determine which content sets and chalnels you will use, in what combinations, and how often: SEO, social media, and paid search are part of this mix.
- Prepare your messaging and be consistent. Make it channel-appropriate. You don't want to be Digging information that doesn't wor. Weigh your options for Facebook elements. Your myspace page should be different from Facebook because of the different audiences.
- Determine how frequently you will check in and talk with your audiences.

Implementing your SEO portion of the plan gives the search engines time to find and index the relevant content on your site and on other sites that link to yours.
Having paid search ads gives you realtime placement if a problem arises and quick adjustments make the copy relevant for off-setting negative inforamtion.
Leveraging indexable social media adds to the numbero f quicj spidered sites that can be drawn upon to come to your brand's aid. It's also a forum for transparent dialogue with your brand's stakeolder.
Use Wikipedia prudently. There may already be an entry for your brand so don't get caught tinkering with the content. Address yur concerns on the article's "Talk" pages.

There are key social media sites to consider:
- Your brand's blog
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Facebook
- MySpace (for consumer, not B2B)
- YouTube
- Flickr
- Rollyo - create your own search engine
- ZoomInfo (name may exist, but you should claim it)

B2B strategies:
LinkedIn: consider making it for the company as well as for key exectives whose names may be searched in association with the company
Facebook also helps

Simon talks next about reputation management and what people look at. Some people don't always look for their name and they don't actually see that there are negative results. If you look at the SERPs for reviews, you may not even see everything -- think about reviews for products. Sometimes you may find things in blogs or forums, the latter which may not even be indexed.

From this, you can learn how people are talking about you and what they are saying. You need to analyze the sentiment and to see whether things are positive or negative. "The biggest disaster since Titanic" - is that positive or negative?

Who are the influencers? You need to find out where the discussions happen so that you can concentrate your resources. If the sentiment on Facebook, for example, is neutral, and the sentiment on MySpace are positive, you may want to contact MySpace fans to speak to your evangelists.

Find out what people are saying and where they are saying it. How do you do it?
1. The ghost of the recent past. Get Google and Yahoo alerts and check your email to find out about specific key phrases.
- Twitter is similar - do TweetBeeps, for example.
- RSS feeds are your friends.
- Digg and other social voting sites are similar.
- Sites like zevents
- Wikipedia lets you subscribe to RSS
- YouTube has RSS
Most social sites have RSS
2. The ghost of the actual past
- Top end - big brands - TNS Media Intelligence and Nielsen BuzzMetrics
- Open SOurce - Nonprofits - The BuzzMonitor

When you look at it, RSS feeds only deliver updates and new information.

Client study with a medical group -
- getting about 50-75 notifications per day
- historical buzz monitoring recovered over 150,000 listings, so use old data too!
Use a tool!

Monitor your buzz - get a baseline with a deep scan into the past and continually monitor to the recent present.

Michael Jensen talks about reputation management for local businesses.

Local is a unique space becasue of ratings and reviews, but beyond that, it's everywhere. It's in the SERPs, social media, there are search engines devoted to the local space (Yahoo), directories (Yelp), and more. There are also mobile apps (GoodRec is an iPhone application). There are also local niche sites (Andy's List for contractors).

Ratings and reviews; a customer's first impression. If you search for a dentist, who are you going to call and who aren't you going to call? Visual elements really do help with regards to choosing the desired local provider.

Art of persuasion: do you read reviews before you go somewhere? He asks the room and almost everyone raises their hand. Reviews can be very persuasive, both positive and negative. Enough positive outweighs the occasional negative. You need to push the right button with potential customers.

Every review helps as a vote of confidence. One negative review can have a huge impact if there are only few reviews.

In the future, features that are not necessarily check-boxed are in the terms and text of a review. Search engines said that they don't really use the text much for ranking factors and such.

For monitoring local, there are few things that are available so manual monitoring is helpful. SoloSEO will be working on tools soon!

Be defensive and proactive in the social space - get constant positive reviews in a lot of local sites. There are 2 main barriers: your customers are not motivated and they aren't technically savvy. You should motivate them with a coupon or free gift and make it easy for them to review - tell them where they can review. Check out leavefeedback.org, a tool that he created.

Local business should have a system for getting reviews. Have coupons or cards on hand, train employees to give out, get information or other information.

Be creative - give away free wifi at a local restaurant and when they access it, redirect them to your review site. Have a kiosk. When you're a restaurant, give them a handheld tablet so they can write the review then and there.

Get "recommended." It boils down to SEO. A link is a recommendation. Use the local chamber of commerce, professional associations, related businesses (realtor + loan officer), local events and sponsorships.

On the offense side, average out poor ratings with positive reviews. Create a system and get those reviews constantly. If you receive a poor snippet, surround that with positive reviews. Respond to critical reviews. Update your business listing to reflect changes and improvement in response to poor reviews.

Last up is Jordan Glogau. He talks about the Internet is the Truth Machine - it's a book from 1996 by Jams Halperin. Some invents the perfect lie detector. Once the machine has been invented, it's impossible to tell a lie. Over a period of time, the technology gets shrunken to the size of a wristband. To some extent, the internet has become the truth machine without having a lie detector.

That's not really accurate but it is part of everyday life. The results are not perfect - it's far from it. The results are fast and maybe too fast. It can effect your business like a heart attack.

OMG - Don't Google our name!
- Is it affecting business via sales?
- Can the root cause be addressed?
- Can it be fixed and will it stay fixed?

The first Immortals is another book by Halperin who says that we live forever. The metaphor is that this is like Google and the rest of the Internet.

Evaluate the problem: is it personal or is it about a business? Is it affecting a person or business? What kind of sites? Who is attacking who and why?

Types of sites that can be problematic: review sites, news sites, government, anti-whatever, Wikipedia, social media

How do you counteract and push this down?
- Link building
- Counter blog
- Controversial: link buys
- Wikipedia - build trust with your editor and don't think about it if not!

Active antagonists: what if you have a country club, for example, and you have a disgruntled ex-member? You may have to prepare for the long haul and get your staff involved. You may have to counter all the time.

General tricks and advice:
- Use unrelated links to move down bad links
- Interlink between blogs
- Collect information on links and build a link list on your sites for Google to find
- If the quality of the links/blogs is a concern, you shouldn't use the paid blogging services.

Bad for business - if you don't fix your problem it will never go away.
- Poor customer service will always plague you if you don't address it.

Rep-port: Simple to run, color coded, email reports, and free of charge.

Ad Agencies & Search Marketing

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 10:23pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

Do Traditional Advertising Agencies "Get Search?"

It's clear from this panel (and now the feel of SMX East 2008) that we're entering the third age of SEM, which is about the the entire big-agency world folding into search, social, paid and content. Holistic and effective integration, driven from top-down-creative-think, is becoming the norm more and more.

The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on West 34th Street center is teeming with folks at their first conference and seasoned vets' alike. The "Ad Agencies & Search Marketing" panel was a harbinger of the world to be, the world search already is, the big agency world. Search is taking its rightful place as the 800 LB gorilla at the marketing mix table. Each of the speakers shared lovely insight regarding their experience as search grows up.

Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist and SEMPO Board of Directors began by offering stark insight. Much as traditional search marketers would love to dis' agencies she feels times are changing. Sara pointed out that agencies DO "get it" on a massive scale now. This evolution comes a as a result of mergers, acquisitions and consolidation in the industry. The session comprised of Moderator-Sara interviewing the distinguished panel, with no .ppt presentation slides.

Her questions were insightful, probing and...you had to be here to totally appreciate the experience in the room. Here are a selection of concept-statements discussed in this rapid fire back and forth exchange amongst industry peers. Much of my impressions during this session embody actual quotes from speakers. Some not. I invite the speakers do climb in this thread and provide input and any notes they had coming in. Wish we had a recorder and transcriptions guys :).

Jason Clement, Director of Search, Wieden Kennedy
Do agencies get it? It depends who the agency is. Creative agencies who are holding overall strategy might not get it. However, this notion that agencies can't have successful search departments is completely false. We're hired because we make the best "media neutral decisions" surrounding the media planning process, so as to make best recommendations to serve clients. Unlike traditional SEMs who are "bound to the books" of the business they, do when it comes to how much they can spend, advertising agencies tend to have a broader base and a little bigger stage to grow campaigns financially and creatively.

One thing missed as agencies picked up search, is the creative. Mapping creative strategy back to search has been difficult, to have creative ideas to launch sites and applications that are truly search driven. You can take search and move it beyond the media buy and really start thinking search as a "communications tool."

Jason dismissed the varying price of similar deliverables, anecdotally proffered by an audience member. The questioner noted that, to his mind, in a stack of redundant estimates and analysis, the agency recommendations tended to be exponentially expensive. Jason basically said that he doubted that any of the agencies charging less,could bring execution, might not know the business they were pitching to and might not bring the overall value of a pitching-agency. Thanks for being cool about the question Jason :) .

Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search, The Americas
So Chris, do agencies get it? "I think it depends on what it is. "It = paid search = Google" is a known quantity for most agencies. I think they get, it there's a concern, there's attention. Agencies are more problem = solution rather than opportunity = solution." PPC has a cost and ROI association so agencies can relate. When it gets into organic search things "get more questionable for both the agency and their clients." "Let's understand how we ad value to the process and go from there."

You've got a 10 year industry, search. It's hard to transition client communications, from the perspective of traditional media. It's hard to teach traditional team members that search provides incredible insight into customers' behavior and is no longer a direct response medium. There's a massive change going on and at the end of the day, talk always comes around to Google and their "amazing nimbleness."

We as an industry have to evolve past gimicky practices and limited knowledge being a basis for a business. If you can deliver the strategic value of search then you can be well paid for it. What do you DO to earn the money? One of the nice things about agencies, is that there are people who have been in the industry and that's cool to have. When providing search services from inside an agency structure, the clients sign on they want an agency of record and everything kind of gets boiled into that. GroupM Search has kept the relationship direct with clients want integration in a different way, direct. Clients like the checks and balances by the search unit being a "watchdog" to keep their other players. He listed other compelling reason.

Aimee Reker, SVP, Global Director of Search, MRM Worldwide
Do agencies get it Aimee? "We as an agency get it to where our clients they're able to touch all parts of the opportunity." If you've got 250 different brands and products, you've got to really have a relationship with your clients and get them to execute search initiatives. There is "zero problem with senior management not getting search" in her shop. Sites that were not built perfectly are "part of an evolution we're all going through together."

Aimee says that they embed search specialists on every team, but it starts higher up when briefs are created. The search teams work with the designers as they're building out their comps. They work with the technical team on the requirements. It's a little "microcosm of glue," working across the media teams. This helps the search process be "better, brighter" and more effective at the overall agency level. All channels including social media, coding, PPC, SEO is all available to any project. Everybody's part of the "search" effort. We point out to our clients how does search fits in the big picture for your company in a 5 year plan.

MRM Worldwide has full transparency with all their clients. In some places they may not have solutions and bring in other partners. "We are an open agency model" and work with other media shops or other outsourcing when something is slightly out of their expertise.

MRM makes sure to mine compensation for strategic development, as a crucial link in the concept chain. "If you do search well, you spend less, so we have to be paid for strategic development." Also, MRM Worldwide demands relationships with all the other players at the table. "It's just that important."

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear, a search focused Minnesota advertising agency.

The Ten Truths Every CMO Must Know About Search Marketing

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 9:42pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

Whether you're a CMO - or someone who needs to educate, advise or influence one - this session will educate you on the 10 critical important concepts surrounding search marketing and its role within the entire marketing mix that CMOs must understand in order to be successful. A panel made up of senior level search marketers across a variety of industries, business models, and sizes will share their experiences, advice and perspective on these 10 critical truths and how understanding them has influenced their CMOs.

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Panelists:
Michelle Stern, Client Services Director, iProspect
Willie Fernandez Director of Marketing, World Travel Holidays
Jennifer Doss, eCommerce Marketing Manager, Hat World and Lids
Jill Nortman, SEO and Web Analytics Specialist, Allegis Group
Jen Miller, Manager, Delta.com Online Content and Marketing

This session is sponsored by iProspect.

1. SEO is an ongoing process.
Why do CMOs need to pay attention? Search marketing should be an integral part of an entire marketing strategy. It's difficult to communicate the right issues. Enable 360 degree communication.
Jill: SEO is really less of a function and more of a process. It's ongoing - you can't set it and forget it. You need to be involved because the Internet industry is constantly changing. Recently, social media sites are being indexed. Having a presence there is very important, especially to articulating that to your CMO. Blended results are also a new phenomenon - if you aren't keeping up with those changes, you're missing the boat.
Jen: SEM is an ongoing process. Delta marketing is separate from content production. When she manages paid search, she was working with the content group on how to optimize the website. But then they realized that content and marketing are one so both organizations have been combined. It's been a lot more beneficial for them. It's a front-end process. From an organizational standpoint, it was successful, but it took a long time.

2. Being #1 isn't everything and sometimes is not even possible.
Willie: Being in the cruise space today, the #1 term you would want to rank for is the term "cruise." However, from month to month, being #1 not only was causing them to reach their budget quickly but the word wasn't converting well. They decided to scale back and found terms that should have been #1 but weren't. They saw that their budgets were not being stretched out as much and they were finding those other words convert better. In a 4 month exercise, they analyzed 2,000 and scaled back to the point that there was a positive ROI on words that were losing money month to month.
Michelle: In paid search, revenue is really key. Being #1 is not always where it's at. Analyze your keywords and determine what value your keywords are based on ROI. That will allow you to afford the keywords that ought to be in position #1.
Jennifer: We have a very extensive keyword list and a dozen of those are the most efficient. We do rank on those keywords, but like cruises, hats is a keyword that can't necessarily be #1. Look at the multi-keyword phrases and you can rank higher. Because they are specific, they convert at a higher rate. 70% of all clicks come from the first page, so concentrate on getting on the first page and then work your way up. Being #1 isn't as profitable, so looking at where you're ranking and your spend and if you're meeting your ROI goals, maybe the lower positions are a better place.
Jen: You may want to optimize for a one-word phrase but it's too competitive. Think about the top converting/clickthrough keywords instead.

Chris: How much of a challenge do you find addressing ego - "we have to be #1!"?
Jen: It's about education, trying to share strategy and saying that it's about integration with other channels and how they play against each other.
Jill: With PPC, you have to pay to play. Being in position #2 can save you a lot of money. As long as you can remain on page 1 or above the fold, that's something you should also strive for.
Jennifer: Education is a primary element. Directors in our department will ask why we're not #1, but we have to explain budgets and resources to them.

3. The long tail is your friend.
Michelle: Long tail keywords give you more qualified traffic. Also, there's less competition and that increases chances of being visible on those terms. That feeds into the third benefit which is when there's less competition, that equals less costs.
Jen: Mine through the data to see what people are searching for and bid on them.
Willie: We expanded our keyword base by about 10,000 keywords, if not more. We saw that people are searching for something but then they've decided what they want. For example, "christmas cruises from New York" or "carnival cruises from miami" has proven to be very successful.
Michelle: You need to start broad and develop more long tail terms over time based on clickthroughs.
Jill: The importance of analytics is critical before you start bidding on keywords.

Chris: So it seems that analytics and tools are really key.

4. Both paid and natural SEM are crucial.
Jennifer: For us, we want to have as many listings as possible on the results page. 54% of our search revenue comes from our organic listings and 46% comes from paid. Visibility in both increases our brand awareness. In our paid listings, we can control the ad copy but you can't do that as easily with organic listings. We use that copy to promote special sales and offers. You can also control the landing page for these so you can go to higher-converting pages. She did a test and saw that depending on the destination URL, there were higher conversions. Try to find funds to do tests and how being listed might help your organic listings because of the increased visibility.
Michelle: In addition to what Jennifer said, you need to be in paid and organic listings. 70% will click on organic listings and 30% click on paid listings, according to research. You should be in both places becasue there are different types of people. If you're in 2 parts of the page, you'll probably get the click.
Chris: What about a brand lift for being in organic and both?
Jen: When Delta was not visible for brand in paid search, their visits went down. What does that show? There are different customers for different things, as Michelle said. To her point, we found that paid customers are must more shoppers and they're more ready to convert. It pays to be visible by brand. We knew we had to take the risk even though there is obviously a budget issue with this.
Jill: We have found that clicks in our paid advertising usually are those who are the first time visitors to our brand.

5. Customers hear their language, not yours.
Jill: She reads a quote that says that one of the biggest mistakes is that people campaign with the messaging that the company wants to push rather than what people want to hear. The messaging slogan will tie back into what happens online so don't just speak from the brand. Think about the users. She talks about the automotive industry and how in the past, it was about crash data, but now it's a big issue about going green and gas mileage. Why? That's what the people are looking for.
Willie: Sometimes we got in touch because we used industry terms in our ad copy. The bounce rate was through the roof. We couldn't understand why, so we ran a focus group and we started to understand that we were talking amongst ourselves and not to our site visitors. We toned it down and translated the industry terms to pain English and consumer friendly terms. We started to focus on some user-centric terms on other pages - e.g. cruise reviews. After a customer has purchased, they would want to review cruises before they purchase. They build up cruise reviews on product pages. The bounce rates dropped and they saw an increase of conversions by 45%.
Chris: I observed companies using thier own site search tool to identify holes.

6. Web pages aren't the only assets you need to optimize.
Jen: We interface with communications with users, so we need to get our content distributed. We launched a blog, and we use press releases and videos (YouTube channels). How do we optimize these areas? This is obviously important.
Jill: You want to take advantage of content beyond the landing pages, like video. Tag that video, make sure the title is in line with the message, etc. You also want to be there on a paid perspective. But even with branded and nonbranded search, you need to think about social. Those results are showing up. If someone does searches for this, you want to be in the landscape and you want your social ads to show up.

7. Integration is a must.
Michelle: It's really critical to share information so that you can benefit from your marketing campaign. Marketers who are responsible for media plans need to communicate to search marketers to capture demand through search. Search marketing should also communicate.
Jen: We recently had a campaign where we needed to talk to travelers based out of NY. We decided to bid locally and geotarget to NYers. We changed the language for these users. Paid search gives you the opportunity to supplement another campaign to a different audience.
Chris: we've been talking about search and online, but what about other marketing? Do you do any of that?
(Silence.... I guess they need to read the coverage I wrote earlier this morning on integration!)
Jennifer: We don't do much TV/radio, but when we do, it's in conjuction with our vendors. We do special promotions though occasionally.
Jill: There was another session this morning (yay!) that was basically about integration or die. The disconnect was that your message offline may not be the online for some people. 67% of people were motivated to search online for what they heard offline. Nearly 40% of those searchers ended up converting. Who wants a 39% conversion rate? We all do! (If you are a first time SERoundtable reader, go check my coverage from this morning.)

8. Tools simplify everything.
Willie: We have inhouse tools at our disposal that we built that indicated that newspaper ads are a dying breed. We wouldn't have known this without tools. We learn about the long tail keywords, so without those tools, we wouldn't know where to bid.
Jennifer: We have about 10,000 pages and our content is forever changing. We had to manually manage that beforehand, and it wasn't efficient. With the help of iProspect, we put a few things in place, like a Google sitemap, a template that helped us for dynamically generating site optimization tags, and more. Sometimes creating/building tools can take time and development can suck time, but in the long run, it makes us remain up-to-date and current. We don't necessarily have the resources inhouse but thinking about tools does help you become more efficient.

Chris: What do you do to demonstrate the value of ROI?
Jen: We tried to transform our site optimization from the backend to the frontend but transparency of tools and accessibility to those content producers so that people can be evangelists - we don't get guidance from the agency. They can mine the data themselves and find what's relevant. We have analytics tools that are self-service. We all become part of that process and share information.
Michelle: Case studies of what you've been able to do in the past helps to drive the momentum for going forward.

Chris: In this economy, is there new money or do you have to take money away from other marketing efforts?
Jill: Before shutting down offline altogether, in the state of the economy, we're seeing that the budgets are shifting. They're honing in on the return of over campaigns in the past year. There's more efficient spending by shifting funds.
Michelle: We're not seeing anyone reducing search spend and that's because search is so measurable. You have to keep it in an economy like this.
Jen: As long as you get rewarded, you should continue. It's easy to justify.

9. Don't bid solely on branded terms.
Michelle: I would definitely say this. You run the risk of your competitors benefitting. What I mean is that - think about someone searching on a non-branded term. Most people are still researching, so your competitor will get that customer.
Jen: At Delta, we talk a lot about incremental tickets. We don't have content on every single destination we're going to -- yet. In order to have a void, we bid on those unbranded terms so that we can capture that researcher who convert into an incremental ticket, a ticket that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Optimize for that unbranded term as much as possible.
Jennifer: Bidding on the unbranded term will help as much as possible. About half of our revenue comes from the unbranded term search. Sports fans search by their teams, not by the brand name, for example. We pay very close attention to those keywords. I read a retail study that said that 55% of traffic came from nonbranded and 49% of those who purchased clicked on a non-branded term and 12% clicked on both!
Jen: People usually search initially on nonbranded terms but then they actually search on the branded term when they are close to buying.
Jennifer: You need to look at your list and revise/develop the terms.

Chris: There has been in the past during recessions a move away from brands. That would play into this entire thing to have a mix going forward.
Jill: You can always get paid optimization to complement your organic efforts. Sometimes that offsets the cost.

10. You must set goals.
Jill: You need to focus on the goals and then focus on the tactics to get there. Then you need to get creative with your goals - of course everyone can agree on some conversion points but you need to think outside the box, for example, offsite optimization and social. Monitor the number of friends that you acquire each month. The same goes for video. Some videos increase 25% monthly for us even though they've been up for over 12 months. Case studies are another opportunity - keep track of that and make sure you're seeing regular growth. They are really good goals to have.

What's New With Video Search Marketing

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 9:42pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land who showed up late due to a technical issue with what people call "WiFi."

Michael Benedek, Vice President, AlmondNet is up first. Behavioral advertising is the delivery of ads based on their behavior online. There is lots of opportunity in behavioral ads.

Bringing in the video component...
- Linear video ads (prerolls)
- Non linear (overlays)
- Companion Ads (text, display, etc.)

67% of internet users are viewing video ads at least once per month (eMarketer).

Behavior and Post Search
- 5% of their time declaring purchase intent on search engines
- 95% of time browsing ad supported content on "other" sites
- Most searcher complete their purchase-related research two or more weeks before handing over their credit card

Implementation Challenges:
- Standardization is hard (too many video players)
- Scalability
- Video content categorization

IAB's Response:
- Introduced VAST
- It is an XML standard
- Designed to standardize

Gregory Markel, Founder & President, Infuse Creative is next up.

He explains why video optimization is important... Let's assume it is important, I wont go through all his valid reasons. Pew Internet released a study on what people are watching.

He showed that if you search corvette video on Google, up comes three video results.

Video on mobile is growing with iPhone and all the clones.

Submission:
(1) Video on your site
(2) Upload video
(3) RSS techniques

He shows how to upload at YouTube. He said they increased cap size from 100MB to 1GB but do not, there is currently still a 10 minute limit. It is not just about the title or text in the video description. It is not just about views. It is about the community around the video. I.e. ratings, comments, favored, inlinks and embedded videos.

Soon you can buy higher rankings in YouTube, he said.

He shows Yahoo Search, media RSS feed submission.

Tips:
(1) Define goals
(2) Analyze competition in YouTube and Google.com
(3) Research keywords and title/descriptions
(4) Add/Modify "in video" branding/call to action/URL (watemarks, speak your brand and annotations in YouTube)
(5) Decide submission strategy/type
(6) Spread the word, encourage community, remember mobile
(7) Monitor and track your progress and tune.

YouTube has search suggestions, so right there, it shows you what is popular. Just start typing. Also, type a search result and sort by view count. Submit beyond YouTube. YouTube by default gives you a mobile friendly channel. He then shows annotations. Piggy back off popular YouTube videos as a response video. Lead in your description of your YouTube video with a live URL to your site.

What's New?
- Google.com serving side by side video results
- YouTube adds quick list and duplicate video link
- YouTube bulk uploader
- Paid results in YouTube
- Paid search user interest targeting
- Trueveo and vSnax for iPhone video search apps

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search Optimization, Performics is next up.

The new Google audio indexing tool is being demoed. It basically does speech recognition. Right now, only for the political channel - as a beta. You can search for all videos in the political channel that match a keyword phrase. Plus you can skip to those points in those videos. Google will probably expand this to other videos.

How Does it Work?
- Google uses its own speech technology
- Ranked by spoken keyword relevance, youtube metadata and freshness

Speech to Text is still not perfect and she shows examples.

He then shows off the power of YouTube for Video SEO. Web results show video.

Tom Wilde, CEO, EveryZing is last up. He gets to go on stage as the down breaks below a - 700 point drop.

Objectives:
- Increase consumption of online media
- Create multimedia advertising inventory
- Control and protect content distribution

Challenges:
- Findable
- Navigable

Search engines dont do a good job with indexing videos. Text still drives discovery.

Publishers need to match supply and demand.

Publish across the curve from topic pages to landing page (too long tail). Organize your content into topics and publish them in a manner search engine can find it. Then make sure each content piece has a landing page.

Create a Good Target for Search Engines:
- Properly formatted page titles and URL structures
- Related topics link to additional topical pages
- Multimedia snippets derived from speech processing provide relevant text for GYM crawlers
- Dynamic media player with "Jump To" functionality
- Page populated with multimedia and articles relevant to topic/entity

Challenge #2: Multimedia Site Search & Navigation
- Goal of site search is to maximize content recall while optimizing precision and relevance.

The web search experience on your site, needs to be similar to how Google handles it with universal search.

Social Media Marketing for Newspapers and Magazines

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 7:08pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

Continuing on from how newspapers and magazines can tap into search, this session looks at how social media marketing offers some unique opportunities forthese publishers.

Moderator: Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street

Speakers:
Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Specialist, BrentCsutoras.com
Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies (The NewYork Times Co.)
Chris Winfield, President, 10e20

Chris speaks first. Why would you want to be involved in social media marketing? You can get recognition in a wider audience. You cna create new touch points - so many people can now discover your content. It can enhance your credibility especially with more delivery. You get "first mover" status if you break news soon. You cna get new Public Relations opportunities. Also, you get traffic. Links are really important. He shows some client changes that show increased views. It increased traffic 135% in a 6 month period with close to 3 million visitors from social networks and blogs. It had 12 million ad impressions, and increased natural inbound links by 2,666%.

How do you get there?
- Do research - where are your visitors coming from already? Where are they coming from - Facebook, forums, etc?
- Where are people talking about your stuff?
- Who is linking to you?
- What has worked so far?
- Where is the most potential for our growth?

Start making decisions. Find out where people are already - talk to your customers and readers and learn the demographics of the social networks that they are using. A lot of social networks have specific audiences and you don't want to force a square peg into a round hole.

Now make internal changes.
* Don't alienate your existing audience. You want to make your with pop-ups. You don't want to have all your content like that because it's a turn-off for social media users.
* You need to look for evergreen content.
* Make it easy for people to share your content. Don't have 80,000 little social bookmarking buttons. People won't use it.
* Get key employees and stakeholders on board.
* You also need to open up. Blogs have fresh content. Stay on top of the curve.
* Have a good RSS strategy.
* Microblogs such as Twitter are very useful. Don't just be a "feed." You want to gain new followers and new customers.
* Outreach - your links mean a lot to bloggers.

Social news and bookmarking sites are really important for publishers. You've gotten on the homepage and getting traffic is great but it's not the end-all. You have other bloggers that are coming on and looking for content. A lot of people go to social news sites and find content. Some people then share it in other communities. People are IMing it to people and then it gets down to the "mainstream press" and forums.
- What does this mean? Eyeballs.

What is good content?
- Breaking news: everyone knows about the bail-out plan and the BBC was the first publication to get it out there (which is ironic).
- Lists: they've been around forever. An example is the 10 commandments. They worked then and they work now.
- How-to's: how to do things.
- Surveys/Rankings: think about the US News Best Colleges
- Getting something that is extremely comprehensive. What content would someone want to bookmark or come back to at a later time?
- Controversial/Opinionated content.
- Best of's: Best movies ever made, etc.
- Calculators: life expectancy calculator, etc.
- Video
- Widgets etc.

Final tips:
- Promote great content
- Contribute to the communities
- Make the sites work together
- Don't have all your employees vote from the same IP ;)

Adam Sherk is up next.
Survey of magazine sites: - between Q1 and Q3 is that traffic from social media ranged betwene 0.6 and 18% of total site traffic. Among social media referrers - Digg, 24% average, high 52%, Stumbleupon 24/60, Facebook 4/7, Reddit 4/13, delicious .5/1, and Myspace 3/5.

He shows the conversation prism by Brian Solis (Google it - it's pretty). You need to interact with people. Discussion of content often happens off your site but it's okay - sure, you want people on your site but you want to get out there and engage in that conversation and those dialogues with them so they can come back to you looking for more information.

It's not enough: social media strategies are great but it's just a start. When you think about it, it's just one way. With social media marketing, you need to directly engage with your audience and build that up so that they can go back to your site. Active participation and real participation can bring them back.

Steps to social media success:
- Monitor and observe - learn the landscape
- Locate your audience and find opportunities
- Formulate a strategy
- Engage and participate
- Evaluate and adjust

Adam uses Plurk with me, and I feel good about that. He mentions that Plurk, a competitor to Twitter, has a large community of knitters. As for why, we both don't really know, but it's interesting to know that people leverage communities in such ways.

Tactics:
- You need a brand ambassador who drives the strategy and sees where the opportunities are.
- They officially represent your publication. It's a full-disclosure (corporate level SMM). Give them time and resources to develop strong profiles and relationships. For example, set 50% of their time for 6 months. Get a figure that will let someone specifically put in time towards these activities. In terms of doing this, you can jump into these communities and spam your stuff, but that won't work. This needs to be genuine. Social media experience helpful but personality traits are most important - you need to have a natural networker.
- Their efforts must be trsnparent. Do not hide company affiliation. Do not engage in activities that could be interpreted as manipulative.
- Remember: your brand ambassador won't be there forever, so plan for the transition.

Appropriate participation
- Be a genuine member of communities
- Be transparent
- Look before you leap
- Regularly and actively participate
- Build good relationships
- Engage in dialogues
- Share interesting, useful, relevant content

Avoid:
- Hiding your affiliation
- Being overly promotional (he has a 90 day moratorium where people can't share their own content until they have shared other content)
- One-way communication
- Poor quality content
- Off-topic content or comments
- Fake persons or comments
- Violating community rules/terms of service
- Spamming "friend" networks
- Paying for submissions

The brand ambassador drives it and that's one person but that person may leave too. Plan for that transition. It's not just your brand ambassador; it's your editorial staff too. The brand ambassador is great but you need to get your writers directly engaged as well.

Employee participatin: your employees are likely already active on their own. Capture that energy and let it work in your favor. You need a corporate social media policy - define clear guidelines for sharing content and discussing the publication, and emphasize etiquette to avoid inappropriate exchanges that can damage your reputation.

Encourage and empower your employees to represent you indirectly and (when appropriate) directly.

Don't forget the people who love you! You have fans and fan evangelists. What about taking advantage of current fans and telling them about exclusive features? They are specifically joining the communities because they love them (think Facebook product pages and Friendfeed rooms, among other areas).

Not everyone is going to like you and you have to remember that.
- Interactions, feedback, and comments will not always be good. Your comments may get buried.
- Turn negative situations into an opportunity to build relationships
- Sometimes you just can't win, but your attempts to reach out will be noticed and documented.

How do you measure this stuff?
- Social media traffic
- Inbound links
- Pageviews, time on site
- Actions taken on the site
You can do this today.

Also, not as important:
- Submissions, votes, bookmarks, tweets, etc.
- Comments
- Cross pollination, secondary coverage

- Qualitative, positive, neutral, or negative
- Speed of viral spread/lifetime of memes
- Brand visibility vs. competitors

It's gotta be two way communication and it's gotta be real.

Up last is Brent. He talks about the platforms that people should participate in.

Social media is broad. He talks about the sites that you get the most results out of for the time that you spend.

The first site is Reddit, a social news aggregation site. Reddit does not have the "popular" page like Digg. It's algorithmic throughout - the front page is the top 25 articles based on their algorithm and it updates every 1 minute. You can be promoted to a popular page that can guarantee you exposure (like Digg). You need to be consistent throughout your success.

He says that politics is a very powerful category on Reddit. Offbeat is also great - funny, WTF, and offbeat. Business/world news are also rather popular. Reddit has an algorithm on every page. You can get onto the Reddit front page within 2 minutes and then be gone right after that. You need to consistently participate to do well on Reddit - if you hit the front page, you can be gone a second later.

Reddit has an anti-spam/anti-marketers "algorithm" that prevents you from being able to consistently push your own content. If you submit something and it is always followed by your friend, you may be the only one seeing it.

When you are going to submit content, try to be in the top 10. It's pretty broad. Don't force it if it doesn't fit.

The most popular site is Digg, at least for marketers. Digg used to be more tech-centric but we're now seeing more business news and offbeat content. Pictures and videos are also very popular. In general, pics/videos are very popular because they don't require a lot of work on behalf of the "reader." Digg has power users and they can help a lot. Domain authority is also important.

The next site is StumbleUpon. You submit things in categories - people sign up and choose categories that they look. They can see one piece of content one time within that category. It's a wave of visitors (as Adam said previously, it's the gift that keeps on giving) that can occur consistently. StumbleUpon is coming out with a new launch for category popular pages.

It's very important on SU to know which categories have the most number of subscriptions. You used to be able to sign up for their paid program and on their backend, they will show you the subscription numbers (but you can see from the tag cloud on buzz.stumbleupon.com what the most popular categories are). They also have a very good spam mechanism - if you submit stuff way too often, it will not let you do it consistently anymore. Review other content regularly and submit other content as well.

Yahoo! Buzz is another social site that came out that has a similar premise. It's category driven that allows you to vote to get to the popular page. There are no power users. The big driving areas are politics, celebrity news, entertainment, and sports. Search trends are part of their algorithm - if you utilize their commonly-searched upon keywords, you're likely to get a boost.

Propeller is another social sites. If you submit news content and get to the top 5, you're featured on AOL's news page. Big categories include politics, tech, science, and love. Politics are important and groups are critical for value. Comments are a part of their algorithm (but they don't care what the content of the comments are).

Other sites:
- Meneame is the Spanish digg.
- Delicious: howto and resources do very well.
- Fark is for humor and offbeat.
- Newsvine is kind of fading but it has a strong userbase.

Social media tips
- Have a persona
- Submit to the right community
- Mix it up
- Don't dupe
- Submit at the right time
- Use focused titles and descriptions
- No spelling errors, jargon mistakes, or bad information
- Watch your stats
- Do it right or don't do it
- Be social

What's New With Local Search Marketing

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 6:53pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Local is Greg's baby. Greg explains that local is about tying online to offline. Greg will be posting Q&A from Google on Search Engine Land.

Mike Blumenthal, Partner, blumenthals.com is up first. I really respect this man, so I am excited. He first shows a Hitwise chart showing marketshare between Google, MapQuest, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google projects maps info into not just Maps, but also into web search, smartphones, sms, voice, iphone, desktop and so on.

He analyzed 25 data points in a hundred businesses to determine what factors influenced local search rankings. Here is his presentation from SMX Local. He goes through some of the patent, going through really technical stuff such as:
- distance from center
- business name
- business category
- content
- explicit anchor text
- score of web site
- # of links referring to business
- highest score of those links
- total # of web page citations
- geo references
- reviews

Location Prominence score is the new local PageRank.

Research contributors:
- David Mihm
- Miriam Ellis
- Tim Coleman
- Dave ORemland
- missed the rest of the names

Here is Mike's presentation.

Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMC is next up.

Predictions:
- 26% of small and med sized businesses plan to incorporate video on their web sites in the next 12 months
- 40% SMB respondents said they intend to add customer reviews to their sites
- 30% will add links or place ads on social sites or blogs.

He then showed the search heat map.

Watching for Source Consolidation:
- Industry consolidation cannot be at the cost of local relevancy
- There must be a consolidation in data providers. Implementation is too cumbersome in the current environment.
- Deal a day industry. The only thing harder than implementing on so many properties is keeping up.

Neat Things:
- Sekai Camera "Air Tagging" is very cool

Google's New e-Fluence Score:
- Talked about in Business Week
- Google rates social media users on their influential abilities
- HUGE impacts for local/mobile search
- Using manual tools like Trackur and other SEO techniques.

Review Nation:
- Everyone is reviewing everyone
- Reviews influence buying behavior
- Negative reviews can put you out of business
- Zillow, ServiceMagic, etc.
- Monitoring your reputation is more important for local businesses than anything

Craig Greenfield, Director, Local Search, Performics is next. He said the most significant change in this area is the AdWords policy change with the URL policy change. This impacts businesses with many locations.

Make sure your lead gen program is in line with your operators marketing abilities.

FYI, the whole time, his presentation is not being displayed on the projector. Someone should tell him... Or maybe he doesnt have a ppt?

Make sure your address information is clear on your web site and all up to date on the yellow page sites.

Steve Espinosa, Director of Product Development, eLocal Listing is next up. You are going to start seeing specific profile pages for each industry, so small businesses wont have to pay big bucks for a web site, they pay for a premade landing page.

Evolution of the Profile:
- A/B Testing for you on this site
- Complete conversion tracking
- SEO for both local and natural
- Evolve with current tracking

Yahoo Local Listing Tips:
- 5 Star Reviews
- Yahoo Enhanced Listings
- Keyword in Business Name

This will drive 1.8X more calls per month.

Trusted Sources:
- Link to your local listings
- Anchor text the link with key phrase matching the key phrase you placed in business name
- Google is more like to rank a source like Yahoo Local rather than your web site.

Video:
Enquiro showed companies received 2.2X more attention on the results page if they had both adwords and natural listings. They found that 3.34x with click through when a video is on the page.

Videos can be attributed as a web citation in Google Maps if properly linked and indirectly connected to Google Local.

Tips:
- Research your vertical and find out where Google looks for information
- Google pulls data from trusted sources
- InsiderPages.com, CitySearch.com and OpenList.com
- Yahoo Upcoming, Meetup.com and Google Coupon are good web references

The title tag of the web reference is getting a lot of weight put into it.

Bonus Tip:
Free phone tracking via Google. Create an audio campaign, get started and then stop. Then go to "call reporting" and then Google will log everything for you. Create tons of these numbers for free.

I love that tip! Wonder how long it will take to go bye-bye.

Eric Stein, Director, Local Markets, Google is last up.

Google will continue to open up maps. By providing those types of tools, they can help solve problems of search. He said he has to take away that audio trick, but they might open it up another way. Too many small local businesses dont have a web site. It is up to SEMs to help these small businesses market themselves.

Search Marketing For Newspapers & Magazine

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 5:55pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

Results Take TIme, Metrics Saves Jobs. Newspaper and magazine SEO is all about the fundamentals and often like turning a battleship around in bathtub. Achieving buy-in with executives, CMS managers, associating content with keywords, training and "excitement" were reoccurring themes among this storied panel of experts. After Danny Sullivan kicked off SMX East, New York 2008, today's Moderator was Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal.

Marshall Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, The New York Times
The New York Times is a big family, including About.com Seventeen.com, TV Guide, HP, Time.com and Sports Illustrated. They have extensive experience in China. The New York Times is 100% in house. For other properties they work with, NYT provides services range from consulting, strategy, execution and support.

Marshall asks, "What stage in the life cycle" is this site, in terms of SEO. To begin there is no one size fits all approach to SEO. The New York Times had a registration wall. It all began with "sitting people in a room and teaching them about SEO, helping them understand what their role is. "Establish a knowledge and expertise base for success. Achieve buy in, which happens at the executive level. Ask , who are you, what is your core strength. Find any kind of success that they've had in the past. Case studies of competitors success is a very useful tactic.

Create An SEO Culture
Research, Google Trends, Insights, Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Site stats, successful and unsuccessful searches. Know the CMS quirks and languages. "Best practices may not apply. Best practices apply as in any facet of SEO. "What we're trying to do is extend beyond the confines of the New York Times" CMS. "We like to ask the questions that readers should be asking." Marshall says to give everybody the tools including analytics. He likes to create "ah ha" moments in teaching SEO.

If you're not diagnosing what the CMS does or does not do, it's going to fail. If you don't give the team fields (SEO attributes like HTML Title Tag) that need to be adjusted then you won't be able to pick off the hanging fruit. Look for the small wins to where you can turn the tide in your favor so far as getting by at the basic levels. Where you have executive buy in, you may not have the ears of the CMS folks for technical integration.

Ad networks and commerce are great places to get data to achieve systemic buy in. Branding and popularity are also benefits. Remember that the results take time and metrics saves job. Customize analytics reports for the receiver. Ultimately every CEO is going to do ego searches on Sunday over coffee. Ranking is OK to talk about but not the "be all and end all" because users might not be digging in that place.

Julie Rutherford, Marketing Director, Washington Post posed the question: "SEO Evangelists vs. Formalized Project, which delivers better bag for the buck?" Julie helps with brands such as Budget Travel, Newsweek, Slate, Sprig and other brands. They have lots of opportunities to practices SEO. They first stared SEO back in 2003. They had done some basic testing, started link building with major directories, brought in consultant to do cross-company training and started regular meetings and updates. In 05' they moved to harder projects including topics index, site maps and site structure.

Then they had to move towards a business reality of justifying SEO as a "cross disciplinary" project that required departmental evangelists. SEO requires "executive/C-level buy-in to unlock resources for heavy duty projects. She stressed that SEO is not an exact science and good business justification is required to fully move SEO through your organization. Metrics and tracking are, as always, key.

"On the ground evangelism and formalized project processes, gaining evangelists among the design, editorial, production, marketing, technology, PR and product managers are roots for SEO Success. "Marketing in our case was really the central" part of SEO success for the Washington Post team. "We had a lot of success by "really really" working with our product management groups, as regard CMS and other aspects.

Establish council or SWAT Team, get a project manager, insist on accurate reporting, enable and empower evangelists to uncover their own metrics, regular company updates with winds and metrics and reward performers. Follow up on business justification with executive buy in and provide tools/incentives for self management.

Ulli Muenker, Search Marketing Manager, BusinessWeek, spoke about launching a new SEO program and winning over editorial. She spoke of empowering and "winning" the editors and content creation folks after achieving executive buy in. from the business perspective, this is about marketing and product development, which spawns SEO efforts. The variables are product management, analytics, user experience, partnerships, marketing, technology and web design.

The first step is to get the high level buy in from editorial. Show potential traffic increase compared with competitors' and search traffic. Comparing to competitors is usually a great way to achieve buy in. Then find an SEO champion with influence over various groups/departments in editorial.

Take the time to demonstrate "the importance" and effects os SEO before and after page optimization." Look for the eye opening "wow" (second wow in this post). Step 3 is to speak the "SEO excitement" in all editorial's groups and departments. This demonstrates how their individual articles get more exposure. Show them "what's in it for them." She kept referring to word of mouth SEO buy in as "SEO fungus," LOL.

Conduct training by running regular individual and small group sessions. Use metrics to illustrate competitors' rankings and traffic. Create peer relationships to overcome skepticism and make writers knowledgeable about SEO so they become evangelists.

SEO Techniques For Editorial
Priority #1 is headlines. Editorial doesn't always know that the article headline is the title tag and therefore the listing in Google. Online headlines are different than print headlines. Main points to edit include being straightforward: no puns, sarcasm, jokes, and abbreviations. Include keywords that you want to rank for and create headlines that are fully understood on their own, without sub-headline or image.

The second priority is creating a keyword rich sub headline and copy beginning. This can also be used as the meta description. Step 3 and 4 are about creating a good internal linking structure and keyword rich copy without making it "sound dumb." Gain the editorial teams trust. You can help them get more explore in Google. Try to understand their mindset, especially a print mindset. Build relationships, set up regular training session and create excitement and buzz around SEO.

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search Optimization. Erik preaches a "Two-Pronged SEO Approach for Publishers"
Static Optimization Strategy means long term optimization around static local keywords. Specific audience profiles are developer for users who interact with each of the site's landing pages.

Profiles if readers and their interests drive the content mapping process, which mates each page to a targeted query. Keywords are then categorized by audience interests For instance a "sports junkie profiles," uses phrases like Cleveland Indians and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A restaurant Seeker profiles uses "Cleveland dining and finds their property, "Cleveland.com"Ask, "what keywords do my audience profiles use on the engines?"Then drill down into the subcategories like, fine dining or other niche.

Let this drive your decisions on the type of content you'll like to have out there. Think of these as "Content Magnets," which can be created to attract a specially targeted profile. Think about your sweet-spot. "Make editorial decisions on what to write, research-based and without being "too clever." Optimize headlines and tags. Use search data to validate your keyword decision and increase the "search shelf-life" of the story. Use Google trends to show the ebb and flow of cultural news interest. If the keywords remain hot, write separate stories under different URLs optimized for those keywords. This can extend your shelf-life.

Get into Google News by having original content. Keyword optimize the URL, be literal with your headlines using H tags and write balanced copy. Optimize your images and captions and keep them near the articles. Supply a frequently updated Google news feed and monitor it. (Google. prefers inline HTML 4:3 images above 12K). Keep fresh, keep constant, separate your stories into new news, breaking news and other divisions. Finally he suggested that we "own our stories."

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear, a Duluth, Minnesota Search Marketing agency.

Quick correction, the NYT does not own "Seventeen.com, TV Guide, HP, Time.com and Sports Illustrated" those are client of our consulting group, Define Search Strategies. The New York Times does own About.com.

Search & The iPhone

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 4:56pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

The room is pretty empty, but I guess that is because this is an extremely specific session. Maybe 50 people? If I had to guess.

Cindy Krum, Director of New Media Strategy, Blue Moon Works, Inc. is first up. She will explain the "death of the dot mobi."

Mobile is Important:
- Mass Mobile Convergence (it can do so much more)
- Most personal marketing medium ever
- More interactive marketing possibilities
- Bridges the gap between online and offline

Mobile is Different:
- Mobile bots
- Mobile algorithms
- Smaller screens
- Simplified Rendering (on non iphones)
- More sophisticated searchers (they search differently, more long tail)
- Immediate intent

Why Now?
- Real mobile web browsing because of devices like the iPhone. It is easier and works well. Other devices are coming out that work like the iPhone.
- Flat rate data pricing
- Faster download speeds
- More processing power

dotMobi = Bad for SEO
- Bad for SEO
-- Splits traffic
-- Splits links
-- Splits index size
-- Doesnt benefit from history
-- Risks duplicate content
-- Confusing for users
- Not preferred in mobile search (the dot mobi ext)
- Limited useful life time span

Mobile Best Practices
- Basic SEO Best Practices
-- Blended search best practices
-- Local search best practices
- Avoid heavy code, flash and JavaScript (iPhone does support JS)
- Mobile search engine submission
- W3C Mobile compliance standards
-- XHTML & Accessibility Standards
-- External CSS
- Browser Detection or Self Selection
- Redirect the dot Mobi to your main site

3 Mobile Site Architecture Options

(1) Do nothing
- Look at mobile demand and traffic. Do people really need a mobile version of your site?
- Test Existing Site with transcoding, without transcoding, on true browsing phone and on mobile browsing phone.

Advantages:
- Easy,
- Cheap
- Forward Thinking cause phones will get better

Disadvantages:
- Transcoding only works through search
- Page urls and links are transcoded
- Mobile user experience hard to control
- Risky for the brand
- Gives your competitors an advantage

(2) Mobile Only Pages

- Create a mobile site on sub domain or sub folder

Advantages
- Just update existing code
- Adjust level of content

Disadvantages:
- Traditional home page must work on mobile
- Extra click from home page
- Duplicate effort
- Duplicate content risk
- Confusing if significantly different

Mobile Traditional Hybrid Pages:
- Multiple CSS sheets one for mobile one for normal
- Same content but different rendering instructions
- Rearrange content
- Display = none if you dont want to show it

Advantages:
- Just add a new stylesheet
- Same content
- No dup content
- CSS only has to download once

Disadvantages:
- Not 100% reliable
- iPhone wont always pull mobile version
- Hard if CSS not already in place
- Display none ...

Gregory Markel, Founder & President, Infuse Creative is next up. He will be focused on iPhone strategy.

He shows the Google Phone, new Blackberry and new Nokia all with touch screens, all GPS enabled and all "true web" enabled. This is why it is important. Location is also a reason, be the first to be there. He explains that iPhone GPS uses cell towers, GPS etc to get your location.

He said, keyword searching is dying on mobile. There are apps that replace this need, he said. He shows that there are a lot more searches on the iPhone then a normal mobile device.

iPhone App sales are growing twice the rate as iTunes music.

The browser experience on the iPhone is vastly superior than a traditional mobile browser.

iPhone users consume 6 times more data than the average mobile user.

Mobile Search has increased 68% in the US.

US consumers are more interested in the iPhone than any other phone, according to Google Trends.

The major search engines are detecting and offering iPhone specific experiencing. Google and Yahoo both have apps as well.

Apple is aggressively pursing business customers.

He then demos Google on the iPhone:
- Google detects your on the iPhone and knows where you are, and may serve up location specific results
- The search results are pretty much the same as a desktop experience, he said.
- iPhone browser will make phone numbers clickable (not google specific, but keep that in mind).
- Paid results are not the same, because on the iPhone they only show results at the top of the page, none on the right. So you better have top AdWords listings to show up.
- Google provides a free Google Search app. It offers search suggestions, pulls from your contacts, location specific by default.

It is important to note, the Google App uses the built in localization feature of the iPhone. While Google search, in Safari on iPhone, does not. Markel does not specifically say this, but Google is only showing localized results based on your IP information, but Google.com cannot do this by getting your GPS location (as far as I know). The Google App can and does do this, but not Google.com.

He then shows the UrbanSpoon app from the iTunes App store.

He mentions that Google does index iTunes links. I covered this a bit back, under the title Is Apple Cloaking Their iTunes Content, With Google Looking The Other Way? When Markel reads this, he will learn that this is really not an "SMX Exclusive." But this has been going on for a while now, even before the App Store. In fact, Matt Cutts of Google commented on it.

Tips:
- Check your clients web analytics to gauge current daily iPhone usage
- Remember the location specific nature of iPhone

Alex Muller, CEO, Slifter is last up. He will focus mostly on the App environment.

- Wide distribution
- Built in audience
- No specific iPhone web index
- Lower quality leads
- SEO and SEM Costs are higher
- Development cost to detect and display for iPhones

iPhone App Store:
- Advertisement
- Wide distribution
- Eager audience
- Consumer utility may be a detriment (depends)
- Longevity (how long will this last)
- Build, test, approve...
- It is expensive to build

Vertical Search
- Such as fandango
- Highly targeting
- Narrow audience

Downloadable Apps
- Loopt
- Highly engaged to end user
- More committed user
- How do you participate
- Major cost to developers

- 80% iPhone users use data
- iPhone users consist of about 7% of US market

Search Integration: Are We There Yet?

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 4:54pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

People have been talking about search being integrated with other types of marketing for ages. How's it going? Is search now second nature when creating an advertising campaign? If not, why not? Thoughts and examples of integration challenges will be shared in this panel.

Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist and SEMPO Board of Directors

Speakers:
Peter Hershberg, Managing Partner, Reprise Media
James Lamberti, Senior Vice PResident, Search and Media, comScore, Inc.
Robert Murray, President, iProspect
Don Steele, Vice President Digital Marketing, MTV Networks

Robert Murray is up first. He asks if we're soccer fans and if we've been to soccer games. In the game of soccer, integration is key. When you have 11 players on the field and they're all united for one common purpose, the results can be inspiring. He equates this with marketing online and offline.

Some background: search marketing does not exist in the backend. Unless you've been living under a rock, you have heard to "integrate or die." However it's packaged, the message is simple - integration matters. But what are marketers doing about that? What techniques are they using? If they're not, why not?

He found research from JupiterResearch in August 2007 where he pulled data from consumers - offline marketing on online behavior. 67% of polled individuals were driven to perform a search after they were exposed to some sort of offline messaging. Further, 39% of those people actually made a purchase of a product or service and not just from any company they found in the search results but from the initial company that exposed them to the offline messaging.

This year, they did more marketing between April and June of this year - 289 qualified search marketers completed the survey for 3 objectives:
- to uncover extent to which search efforts are integrated with offline marketing channels
- to reveal techniques used
- if there were any obstacles faced

The concept of integrating search with offline marketing channels is not new. Only 55% of the search marketers polled, however, did this. 34% of these actually integrated with direct mail, 29% integrated with newspaper or magazine ads. 12% integrate with television. However, that's odd - TV is one of the biggest influencers in online search behavior.

If people aren't integrating, why not? 19% said a lack of budget, 15% said lack of human resources, 13% didn't consider it, 11% lacked the senior management buyout. Others said that the offline marketing was separate from online marketing. Some also said that they just didn't do offline marketing.

What techniques are people using when you're integrating? 84% said that they're integrating a web address prominently in offline messaging. 66% said adding the company name. Robert says that this isn't integration - it's coordination. That should be a given. Only 26% are using the same keywords offline that they were using online, which he finds shocking.

What does this mean for you? Some people are put at a competitive disadvantage.

Like a soccer coach, the CMO is someone who works to build a strategic plan that drives towards coordination. CMO needs to make sure that data is shared continuously. You want to reward this behavior in your organization.

If you're a search marketer with a lot of great information, you should share that with your offline counterparts. The offline people should come to the table as well.

Testing is also important: this can save time and money.

The bottom line: we're all in this game to win but the marketers doing the best job integrating search with all other forms of offline marketing will most likely take the cup home.

James Lamberti of comScore is up next.

Are we there yet? He's going to talk about 3 things that are still missing - the all important consumer (and how they're left out of the conversation), measuring the full value of search (most people aren't), and search-driven planning and strategy.

Advertising a la "madman" - 1950-2001 RIP - you give them awareness, they go through the funnel, and they buy. Not anymore, he says. The world is complex - there's eyeballs, then offline media, online media, social media, and friends and family. In the center of this is search. All of this stuff that happens to the consumer and is simple for the marketers is search. comScore pulled up data to show that 17.1 billion US searches occurred. 194 million searchers searched about 8 times. Search is growing double digit numbers off the base of billions of billions of queries.

Most people search based on the brand trademark and brand communication, even graphically, he displays in a slide. As a desired outcome, you're getting people to search. How can I make sure my search marketing catches that activity?

He shows data that says that 55% of generic queries are undermeasured and undervalued. 45% are branded. Therefore, you need to think about the more generic searching. If you're just hanging on your trademarked terms and ignoring generic, you're missing a huge part of your addressible market.

Why are people searching? It's not seeking coupons, it's not navigational - they really want help and information for a purchase decision. Nonsearchers are often looking for promotions versus searchers. They're at a point of influence.

Measuring the full value -
It's not dead. We need data that's familiar to us to get the conversation going. He shows real data that was aggregated across 6 month and 9 million people hit a specific campaign with a reach of 6 million reach. He explains a computer search had a 69% reach because 6 million people were buying computers a month.

If you calculate your ROI compared to competition and you're getting less, you're at a huge disadvantage. Your competitor will have more paid impressions, more clicks, and they will gain share.

He shows multi-channels retailer actual results - multi-channeling - market mixed models. He says that you should provide the right data and the results will show that the organization will need to be spending more money on earch.

4 pieces of advice
1. Establish common ground. SEO marketers want to be talking to offline folks and the CEO - get the types of data that will get them interested.
2. Measuring full value is key. Know what the offline multiplier impact is.
3. Measure search as a desired outcome.
4. Treat organic and trademark as unique efforts: most organizations ignore generic through inappropriate comparisons to trademark. If you under emphasize generic, you ignore a huge part of the market.

Up next is Peter Hershberg about Microsoft as an enterprise brand. Microsoft is in dozens of businesses from Zune to Office to Live to XBOX to Small Business Servers. He is focusing on Vista and the work done with Vista. There are a lot of products associated with the Vista brand and there are also stakeholders. There are also a lot of goals that are conflicting.

How do you approach this problem and how do you deal with it? The first way to do that is through education - there are challenges because there are 5000 marketers with individual search budgets. Therefore, you need to create universal processes for budgeting, management, and reporting to measure success on an apples to apples basis. You also need to compaign metrics to marketing goals.

How do you do this? The strategy is to contribute to a Search Center of Excellence to sehare best practices and processes in search. It's like a forum for all the policies with campaign data and other information. There are training sessions (Search 101) tailored to the needs of each Microsoft department and its line managers. They are recorded and archived online. They also established a uniform 3-phased approach for taking fully integrated campaigns from concept to launch over a 5 week period.

Offline absolutely drives online behavior specifically in the area of search. As high as 80% of all internet sessions begin at a search engine, according to data. Something piqued their interest to perform that search.

Here's a Microsoft and their consumer campaign: some people are seeing the commercials with Seinfield, for example. People are going to start searching if they see the commercials. They need advanced knowledge about campaigns so it makes it possible to predict the unpredictable. They had access to the script so they bought the most obvious keywords including random (shoe circus, worm churro, etc.) If someone was searching for those, it was because they had seen the ad and wanted to know more about it. Keywords that are disconnected from Windows and Vista but resonated from the commercials were included in the campaign. Sometimes the least obvious things drive those searches.

Microsoft and Corporate Communications: active keywords that include Vista as part of a phrase. Close coordination of paid efforts and PR improved Vista caomapgin results - selected related keywords, aligned creative to increase response rates and conversion rates, and coordinated landing pages that linked to articles.

The whole idea of aligning goals with the channel has been mentioned, but the goals for Microsoft were related to reach and frequency to drive to site engagement. Where reach is concerned - how many of my customers saw my message? How often did they see it? For engagement, what did my customers do once they visited the site? This all ties into optimization.

The most interesting thing is that search is driving marketing intelligence. When we think of search, we're aggregating tons of data which is being used in the interest of improving results in the campaign. Search is a realtime focus group and you can analyzizesearch traffic and behavior to gain insite that can influence the entire mix: marketing messaging (emails, banners, onsite), media selection, communications strategy, and more.

How are we able to do this with Microsoft in Japan? Print was the biggest driver of traffic there. They found that this can optimize the banner campaign. The result was a 3x rise in the conversion rate.

The lessons learned
- Educate all stakeholders and understand their roles
- Repeatable rocesses for effectively shaping assets
- Measure success in the search channel - recalibrate goals to match strengths of the channel
- Repurpose search learnings to inform the overall marketing program

Last up is Don Steele of MTV.

Why we market: Branding, Awareness, Target, Interaction/Sampling.

How we market - there are some billboards that he shows that do brnading and targeting and awareness.

They use search for marketing.
* Branding: Search engine space is the new billboard for branding.
* Awareness: Search is awareness for visibility for shows.
* Target: Search also targets as it delivers a timely and fluid message to users who are expressing an interest in it.
* Interaction/sampling: Smart search campaigns should encourage interactive behavior whree a brand is delivering upon a user's expectation

He shows a search for "bill cosby" and how there's a paid ad that shows the Cosby Show on TV Land. It's the only paid link there.

He shows other examples with other related brands. When the Elliot Spitzer scandal came out, a big search was for spitzer jokes. They were able to do very well there.

How can you sell this internally? Well they are a media company and if they're not advertising, they're making a big mistake.
- Core audience
- Reporting
- Self selection
- Evangelism

The biggest challenge is that we can do billboards and search, but these tactics are not equal. You need to talk to people who are self-selectedness - giving people what they're looking for.

Sara asks a question about frequency reach.
Peter says that search is more measurable. But we only pay on a cost per click basis. We're dismissing the value of all the impressions. Back to his Microsoft example, in the Vista campaign, he served 5 billion impressions on MS's behalf. There is no meaningful way to show the reach of impressions.
Sara admits that it's a relatively new phenomenon.

We're Liveblogging SMX East Next Week

Posted: October 3rd, 2008, 4:57pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 East

In case you hadn't heard (or couldn't guess), Search Engine Roundtable is, as always, liveblogging Search Marketing Expo East 2008 which will start next Monday, October 6th, in NYC.

The conference coverage is not quite finalized just yet, but we're putting finishing touches on it as we speak.

We're also taking volunteer livebloggers, so contact us if you're interested. So far, we've got a helper in Marty Weintraub of aimClear (thanks much, Marty) and we'd love to have you join us too.

Don't forget, if you're not attending the event but will be in the area, you can always meet up with us at the charity event next week.

SES San Jose Roundtable Live Coverage Day Four Recap

Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 3:02am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Engine Strategies 2008 San

Here is the concise version of the live blogging coverage our volunteers put together at SES San Jose yesterday:

Again, a big thank you to our volunteer live bloggers, breaking their fingers on their keyboards. Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs, Sheara Wilensky & Avi Wilensky of Promedia Corp, Carolyn Shelby aka Cshel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, and Dave Rohrer.

Searching For Jobs in Search: Starting and Advancing Your Career in the Industry

Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 1:53am CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Engine Strategies 2008 San

This panel of experts will discuss the qualities they look for in candidates, as well as strategies for career advancement in the search industry. The discussion will include:

How have the criteria for a strong candidate evolved over the years? Are the sources that were relied on in the past different than they are today?

How can you break into the search industry as a marketer who doesn't have direct experience with the medium?

Can specific training jumpstart the experience necessary to enter into the search industry? What particular types of training are recommended?

How important is training and continuing education to career advancement? What are other recommendations for career advancement?

Moderator:

Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce

Speakers:

Frank Watson, CEO, Kangamurra Media

Katie Donovan, Business Development Manager, SEMPO Institute

Ken Clark, EVP & Co-founder, Onward Search

Search Jobs: Demand is High. Look at SEMPO Job Board. Salaries are still fairly high as well.

Hiring Criteria/Skills

KC: companies are focused on what is your experience within the industry or segment they operate in as opposed to just are you a good search marketer. They want proven success in that niche.

KD: Need people skills.

FW: Someone that is going to be outgoing. Need to have certain level of confidence.

KD is finding that training sales people in SEO helps, they have the people skills and can help understand what problems the customer is having.

Audience member: better to have someone with narrow and deep skills, or wide but shallow skills. Need to look at size of company. Job seekers need to look at where they find a place they might like and what matches their skill sets and what their area of comfort.

Amazon person in audience: looking for horsepower, analytics skills and creative ability. They ask lots and lots of questions to help determine if the candidate has these skills.

FW commented to audience member that it is great to have someone that has both the marketing knowledge and the IT knowledge and can sit in the middle. KC: Don’t think there’s a perfect background to be a search marketer.

For new people, is training a good thing? KD said previous training is a good thing, SEMPO and one other are only ones with certification programs, some employers do give everyone training when they come in. Ways to prove what you can do: take a charity and do things for them. SEM Cares. KC: feels training/course does give an advantage. Be able to demonstrate something to the employer that shows you have initiative, even if it is a small project.

Breaking In/Finding Jobs

SEMPO has an RFP section, often has people with small budgets, but you might be able to get experience from them. Look at Craigslist and other online places to find small things to build up portfolio. Come to conferences like this to network with people. Affiliate marketing might be another way to prove what you can do, but may be difficult. KC: take active part in managing your reputation online. Recruiters do their research. Make sure you’re on LinkedIn.

Don’t have to write about SEO on a blog. FW wants to see your passion for something, write about what you know and what you’re interested in. DT asks panel how to do lateral transfers. How do you keep your advancement going after you’ve gone past the entry level? KC: There is an executive trail. He doesn’t have numbers to quote, but there is job creation in those higher levels.

Training

Online Training, Certifications (online courses, search engines). It’s a nice to have, but not a must have. Not like on IT side where you need to have an MCSE to get a job. Probably a couple of years to figure out which certifications will be in the highly desired. They are more beneficial for someone just getting into the field.

Advancing Your Career

FW: Become more known in the space. Get a moderator job on one of the forums. KC: ask yourself where you want to be in five years. Do I want to be a generalist or specialist? Agency or inhouse? Manager or individual contributor?

KD: just because you know you’ve done well, others may not realize. You do have to let people know about your accomplishments.

Thanks to Keri for this!

Search Advertising Tools

Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 1:35am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Engine Strategies 2008 San

In order to get a leg up on the competition, successful Search Engine Marketers need to be armed with the latest tools of the trade. Join us as we explore a range of popular search engine advertising tools along with some important features you should be aware of. Whether you are looking for a free basic tool that will help you get started or a more advanced paid offering, our panel of experts will provide you with the insight and experience to zero in on the right solution.
Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
Yoav Izhar-Prato, Co-founder & CEO, Kenshoo LTD
Neeraj Kochhar, VP/Director of Search, SMG Search
Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
David S. Kidder, Co-Founder & CEO, Clickable

First up is Yoav from Kenshoo.

Keeping all the ingredients in place and correlation between them is the key factor. Must implement "quality management".

What is quality management? Understanding page content, behavior, and how conversions take place.

Under consumer behavior - takes 4-5 clicks on average for conversion to take place. Most of the systems in place today attribute the conversion to the last keyword used. You need to look at the whole path to the conversion. You need to be able to assign weights to first click, last click - weights needs to be allocated properly.

Another aspect is super structuring. Doesn't matter how many engines using, need one campaign management center. Use your structure across all campaigns.

Bid optimization - algorithmic and rule based. Believes in a combination of both.

Major aspect is path to conversion. Lots of keywords can contribute to the conversion. Again, assigning weights to them is critical.

Next up is Neeraj from SMG.

What is a holistic approach? Search in the context of broader cross channel communications. Looking at TV, and other channels collectively is key.

Talent - need search professionals with marketing mindsets that understand consumer behavior, ROAS, engagement and technology.

Innovation - we think of search as web based. Expanding beyond that to mobile. Agnostic to a particular device. Understand the motivation for mobile search. Understand the motivation for Google to present text results or image results.

Technology - generation efficiencies.

Methodology and approach - life cycle of a search campaign.

First piece is to understand consumers. Google Trends is a good tool for this. What other queries are consumers using? What are consumers thinking about your business? Mine search query data. Look at seasonality.

Connect - how to take the insights and build messaging, how do you target people? What mode are people in?

Measurement - key component - otherwise throwing dollars away.

Beauty of search is speed. Can do all this fairly quickly. All this happens in real time and in a dynamic way. Don't need to invest millions. Can invest small.

Holistic approach - two key components - paid and natural. With SEO there are no guarantees, but need to get all the work done. With paid search you can bid on keywords you can't rank for naturally. Want to maximize coverage on page 1. Drop off rate from Page 1 to 2 is 85%-88%. Page 1 is the true opportunity. Need to be there. Need to craft the right balance between SEO and paid.

Starts with KW list. Look at volume. Map keywords with content. Where do you need to supplement or get support from paid? Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, and other tools are great.

Must understand if search is always a meaningful platform. Can it help you if you are in the deodorant business?

Must look at entire cycle - the funnel. How are people moving on from keyword to keyword through the funnel and what do they do to prior to converting?

Finally, competitive analysis. What are you up against? What is the likelihood you will succeed?
What's your strategy relative to the competition? Always keep a holistic approach in mind.

Need a way to centrally manage all your keywords. How do you generate scale? May be running campaigns on 3 - 10 engines. Need to consolidate. Need to look at all the variables.

Measuring beyond the click. Are consumers completing the actions you want them to complete? Are they driving sales?

If doing something on TV, or radio, it's important to have search support.

That's all.

Last up is Thomas Bindl. Topic - "Tools that make SEM life easier".

Gives live demos of the following keyword tools:

Google Sets (great for generating keywords)
Digital Point keyword suggestion tool (Gives free access to WordTracker)
SEO Book keyword tool
Google Trends
Refine Labs keyword tool (pulls data from Google and shows competition and volume)
Spyfu
Keycompete

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Organic Listings Forum

Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 12:49am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Engine Strategies 2008 San

Pose questions to our panel of experts about free "organic" listing issues, plus participate in this session that allows the audience to share tips, tools, and techniques. There's no set agenda, so this is an ideal session to discuss any major recent changes with organic listings.

Moderator:
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media

Speakers:
Jerry West, Founder, Web Marketing Now
Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search
Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Google
Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Center, Live Search

It's the next to last session of four days at SES and it's a forum session with no set agenda, so this is a bit incomplete. My apologies in advance.

Singular vs. plural search phrases. How do they treat them different? Verma talks about search engines doing query rewriting. Buggia – sometimes will combine word into what they think is root word, sometimes they keep them separate. D'Souza also said that it shouldn't matter. Where it might be different is how much weight each term gets – should a stem get more weight? That's where you might get some variation, but not as vast as questioner found.

Variability of results among the engines. Missed explanation as to differences here. Each engine does have a different type of audience, they have different types of behaviors when they search.

Think about ranking about which types of pages to show for what pages. Indexing is what pages to index, but without any context. Try to figure out which pages are going to answers questions.

Question about searches / pages from different countries. Vanessa said it was good to set targeting for country in Webmaster Tools. There will be filtering in SERPs.

D'Souza Mentioned duplicating filtering at indexing level.

Grehan said ideal would be to have servers/host in country of target.

Buggia said top level domain is biggest clue. Having directory structure for each language does help

Vanessa: use meta language tag.

Title/keyword phrase combinations. Example of four words phrase, any subset of this would have a match, as would stems. Stuffing title tag less important than quality of content on site.

Displaying results on search engines. SERPs not showing meta descrptions. Meta descriptions are good to create a snippet when they can't easily find the text in the page (but have a lot of inlinks that talk about it).

Inbound links. Asks about page rank toolbar. Grehan says it's green fairy dust. D'Souza says it's not integers, much finer granularity.

Buggia all sites use page rank-type thing as initial base value, but so many more things go into ranking. Think of a search engine as a reputation engine.

Top five things you would focus on? You've got to be kidding if you're going to get a straight answer out of this panel for that.

Content.
Audience. Have a specific audience and people who want your content.
Internal linking
Do a site: search in Google using phrase in question, then adjust linking structure. Look at how other sites are doing this, make sure you also look natural in what you're doing with incoming anchor text links, etc.

Grehan asked what panel thought about PR sculpting.
Look at your problems, start fixing those first. Make sure you understand value to the business of things like page rank sculpting – how do you know that's what you should work on, vs. other things that would be better to work on.

Gerhan asked how important is an H tag. Diff't pieces of text on the page are rated differently. Other more important things though about content. Rainy day thing you may want to take care of, but again other stuff should fix at.

Be sure to use webmaster tools for each engine. You can get info from engines about problems they have, crawling info, and give them clues about what is going on.

Provided by Keri.

The Best Kept Secrets to Search

Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 12:32am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Engine Strategies 2008 San

Secrets of paid and organic search? Sure, they're out there. Join us for a no-holds-barred interactive session in which veteran search engine marketers disclose some of their favorite search engine optimization and marketing tips, tricks, and secrets. While there's no replacement for old-fashioned hard work, getting the inside scoop and shortcuts to search success never hurt.

Moderator:
· Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce

Speakers:
· Katee Crawford, Online & E-mail Marketing Specialist, California Chamber of Commerce
· Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting
· Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

Q&A Panelist:
· Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready

Dana: I am so psyched about this panel. We are going to take about red hat – revenge SEO!

First up is Katee Crawford, with her is Jamie Smith, they work hand in hand so Jamie may pop in with some comments. Please welcome Katee Crawford to the stage.

Katee: I am going to be speaking to you about what we do at the California Chamber of Commerce. We are NOT tourism, everyone thinks we are. We are large business advocates and we also provide affordable and easy to use services. We provide labor law compliance info, books and software. For marketing we use PPC campaigns and started SEO as well. We do catalogs, direct mails and email campaigns – about 30 in the past year.

I am going to give you some tips in how to improve your ROI.

Educate your SEM company on all your marketing materials and products.
Joint efforts produce better results so work together.
Rethink the norm: Integrate marketing with promotional offers.
The "I deserve it" tactic works. We gave away free Starbucks cards.
Track often and evaluate honestly.

Jamie: PPC Insider Tips:

- Don't change your bid more than once every couple of days – when you run the reports, it skews your conclusions when you change your bids, and it defeats the purpose of testing
- Test special characters in your ad creative, such as TM
- Exact match all combinations of exact matched terms
- Test no spaces between words in a multiple word phrase
- Test placing phone number in ad – we found that local numbers vs. 800 numbers improve the call in rate
- Test placing .com at the end of some keywords.

Katee: We are looking forward to 2009 to improve our marketing plan. Thank you!

Eric Enge: I have 5 quick tips for you.

Syndicating content is a great way to get links, lots of websites are starved for quality content, so it solves the problem for them, and you in turn can get links with good anchor text. The bad part is that when you do syndicate content, the engines see duplicate content, and they will almost always recognize the original author – but not always.

But the solution is simple. Take the article, get a writer to work with it, and give it a spin – and you might get a different result.

Local Search: Search engine challenge: obtaining accurate data. So they use many sources, such as yellow page sites, syndicators such as LocalEze and local news sites.

Give them the data directly. All 3 major search engines give you a way to give them authenticated data directly. Give them accurate data.

Google Local: They will allow you to submit locations individually or by feed. The feed is useful for large numbers of locations. Individual submissions are verified by Google.

More on KML – "Keyhole Markup Language" – language for geographical annotation. Search engines find the location of your KML using your sitemap file.

It's good to be listed in many places. It increases the data accuracy problem. Invest the time and effort to get this data right. Services help with this but cost money.

In summary: Quality data drives rankings!!!

Getting free links from Google Webmaster Tools:

- If you don't have an account, get one!
- Add to your .htaccess file a 301 redirect from the incorrect to the right one.
- Look for malformed URLs.
- Look for the Not Found Report in the Web Crawl Errors section.

Make sure you find lost links! Sometimes sites list URLs but don't like them. Media especially is bad at this. If you can discover these situations and ask people to fix them it would be very good.

MSN Search Funnels – shows what the users intent was when they do a search term, what they search on next. You can go the other way, and see also what they search on before. You can also use search funnels to isolate problems on your website.

Dana: Next up is Richard Zwicky,

Richard: I work at Enquisite. If you don't know what we do, look it up. I will share with you today some basics about what you should know and then go a little deeper.

If you don't know this, you are missing a huge opportunity: only 1.8% of traffic comes from page 2 of the search results. Everything else comes from page 1. So spend a little of time on the pages that are on page 2 and you will increase your traffic.

Build out what the customers are actually trying to get from your site. Don't just focus on getting the traffic, but what do to with that traffic.

Links are probably the most relevant, non-page factor you can build into your SEO. You need to understand what's coming to your own site and what's coming to your competition. Also, identify sites that are citing you but not linking to you.

MSN has some great linking tools. Use linkfromdomains:www.yoursite.com.

Regional links – they matter. Think of links geographically.

Learn, learn and learn some more. There is no magic. You're competitors are probably lazier than you are. Take an active interest in continuing education.

So – when to consider going black? I have found that anyone doing SEO properly knows how black hat works, so they don't cross the line and do anything bad.

What do you do? Someone is slandering you or your business. They do it anonymously so you don't know who it is. So if you want to get rid of a bad site, do it at your own risk. Be very careful. I don't do this, but I know how to do it. Here are the steps.

Go buy a domain. Don't touch your own. Don't use your own name! Get a UPS mailbox near your opponent's address.
Go buy another domain. Don't use your own name! Put your opponent's address on your site.
Go buy another domain name with your opponents address. Go to the post office and pay for a mail redirect to your mailbox!!
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Do it again, host your sites all over the place. Never use your name.
Make sure none of your sites link to each other.
Start optimizing these sites and get good links. Link out to the same sites as your opponent. Get yourself in the same neighborhood as far as the search engines are concerned.
Link to your opponent, ask them for a link. Get indexed. Do some SEO work.
Start showing up in the SERPs.
Add more content, however you can. Reprint PR from within the industry.
Have a bunch of orphaned pages in your sitemap.
Submit the site map.
Now go out and start messing with all of these sites. Do everything bad you can think of. Go copy your opponent's content! Do it as fast as possible as soon as the content is posted and submit it as fast as possible!
Start messing up. Start copying their sitemap into your own. Remember, you look like them according to your registration info. You kind of look them as a website. It's confusing to the engines.
Keep doing more black hat and work really hard to get your site banned.
Just after you have pulled every stunt you can, and you know these sites are going to get banned, redirect to your opponent!!!!!!!!!!
[This gets a lot of laughs]

Now your opponent will get thrown out. Everything you have done looks like them and now everything bad will happen to them. But of course they bashed your site in the first place so they deserve it. Now all of what they did is going to get looked at. And if they happened to do something wrong along the way, now they are facing review. And if they get resubmitted, and they mess up in the future, the threshold for error is really low.

So what have you done? You have forced the competition to clean up their act!!!!!!!!!

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

How to Choose a Search Vendor

Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 12:18am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Engine Strategies 2008 San

Marketers face a bewildering number of options in selecting their search marketing campaign tools and vendors, and making a decision will only become more difficult as the variety of players in the industry grows. Likewise, instead of just settling for the usual functionality, features, and pricing, search marketers are clamoring for more integrated tools and innovative solutions when they survey the various vendors. Join us for an enlightening discussion as industry veterans share insight into matching the best product offering to your company's individual search goals.
Moderator:
Jonathan Allen, Search Marketing Specialist, VNUnet.com
Speakers:
Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, DoubleClick Performics
Jeannie Moran, eCommerce Marketing Director, AutoNation

Eric from Doubleclick starts off.

Has an agency point of view. Will talk about natural and paid, and will give guidelines what to look for in a PPC provider. Also, guidelines for finding someone to bring pieces together.

8 Things to consider for hiring an SEO firm:

1- An understanding of your business, goals, and has a plan around that. Stay away from anything that feels canned, templated, or prepackaged. Need customization.

2- Alignment - someone with experience in your vertical. Need someone with expertise, or partners that have the expertise. Always question and test expertise and background.

3- Consider what your buying. Basically hiring a consultant when hiring an SEO or PPC firm. Looking for a partner to work with you in an integrated fashion. Look for someone with expertise in consulting. Find someone who is a taskmasker - will push you forward. Need to get recommendations implemented. Want someone who is pushy to get tasks and goals accomplished.

4- Equipped - Want to find a whole team that represents you. Folks that specialize in copy, keyword research, technical side - when you have that team - you get the best of both worlds. Good account management at the front end. Find a vendor that is balanced. Balance between technology and expertise is the sweet spot. Be wary of folks who tell you they have everything you need, but don't. Just like interviewing - ask for examples of work, tools they use and how they use them, and how they will help you move towards your goals.

5- Sound methodologies - SEO done right is an art and science. Need a good process, one that doesn't limit creativity. Find one methodology that is specific to SEO - like keyword methodology. Ask questions about it.

6- Leaders - you need an advocate for your goals. Having someone with the skills to understand how to talk to technologists, marketers, to digest this is important. Passion is very important. Need someone who can preach the benefits of SEO. Be careful that if they have these skills, they have the expertise to back it up. Good vision + good tool sets.

7- Education is vital. Good consultants share information. Need someone who is open about their knowledge in a simple manner. Someone who can speak in layman's terms and technically.

8- Trustworthiness. Hiring a partner, so honesty is so important. If you feel oversold or fabricated, try to trip up with questions. Get referrals. Find out the work they've done. Just like on a job interview - if you probe and ask the right questions, you will get to the right story. At the end of the day, you have to trust your gut. Have to feel good about it. Don't hire because someone is down the street. Need to find someone who matches your culture and can communicate well.

Choosing a paid search vendor:

Outsourcing is done for efficiency. Consider three things.

1- Are you going to get an account manager that will do everything? A generalist? Or will you get a specialist. Bid management is huge. Need someone with the skills.

2- Technology - need integrated API's with the engines. Frequency of reporting is close to real time. Want to know about tool sets. How do they do bid management? How do they structure campaigns?

3- Methodology - Ask what the typical launch time frame is? What goes into a launch? What is the process? Need to be as clear and organized as possible. Need consistent delivery on promises. Dig deep and ask tough questions.

How can we bring these together? There is a massive trend of clients looking for holistic search management. Old model was to find best in breed in SEO and PPC. If not working together - not thinking of it as one - leaving opportunity on the table. Need someone who an test rankings and ROI on both the SEO and PPC side.

Next up is Jeannie from AutoNation, Inc. AutoNation is the largest auto dealer group in the county.

Will present the opposite view - from the client side. What they look for. Goal is to share specifics of what worked for them.

The auto industry has been hit hard recently. There's a huge focus on where dollars are being spent.

Setting the stage. Has hired several vendors, and fired several. Can't settle.

Hiring a vendor is a partner. Going into a relationship.

5 Rules:
#1- Sign a prenup. A mutual NDA. Puts both parties at ease.
#2- Don't disrespect the family. Need to be aligned.
#3- Build trust. Set reasonable expectations. It's a two way street. Client has to build trust with agency. Need to trust what vendor is sharing. Lots of ways data can be manipulated.
#4- Be honest about dating others. Working with multiple partners can be tricky. They use multiple vendors, but they know what each other is doing.
#5- Keep everyone happy. Make sure it's worth the vendors time and your time.

Groundwork for Success.
Educate yourself in what you are buying. Need to be able to ask the right questions. Some players will guarantee positions. Must filter between pros and amateurs.

Purchasing considerations - never meet with the sales team only. Meet with someone who will be accountable with what will be done in proposal.

Make sure technology is compatible with applications already in use.

Confirm capabilities; Does the tool work on tier 1 and tier 2 engines?

Get all promises in writing.

Negotiate a trial period. A test pilot. Only do things that way now.

Always ask about hidden costs. How do you know what to ask for?

Technology is very important. Ensure that applications for tracking and reporting is not being duplicated or inflating.

Check if product works with foreign languages.

Verify API status to ensure that fees are included in contract, not additional.

Make sure you understand methodology for measurement.

Support - need a strong team. An available contact.

SEO Vendor Considerations:

1) Strong keyword research strategy. How will they determine KW's you will show up for?
2) Strong copywriting and link building.
3) Optimization plan for organic pages.
4) Measure organic conversion and ROI.
5) Proven results. Ask about failure, success, and referrals.

Paid Search Vendor Considerations:

1) PPC programs in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
2) Web traffic measurement tools to measure your precise ROI.
3) A/B testing of PPC ads and landing pages to identify the most effective campaigns.
4) Account managers that are Google Adwords Certified and Yahoo Ambassadors.

Social Media Vendor Considerations:

1) What channels are you currently active in for clients? (Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon)
2) Give examples of how channels might be used to bolster the overall SEM effort.
3) Proven results, failures, success, and referrals.

Key Takeaways:

1) Educate yourself to ask the right questions!
2) Invest time to find the right partner!
3) Agree and document billing model!
4) Start small - test vendor on small scale!
5) Monitor, measure, and optimize!

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

SMX Advanced 2008 Conference Coverage Recap

Posted: June 5th, 2008, 4:51pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

What an outstanding two days of search marketing. SMX Advanced Seattle 2008 is now complete. The sessions were awesome, the food was delicious and the networking was excellent.

I am proud to say we were able to cover twenty sessions between Tamar, David Wallace, Justin Davy and myself. Thank you for your help guys, I personally appreciate it and I know the industry appreciates it also.

Here is the coverage recap:
Day One:

Day Two:

Yes, we have blogged the Give It Up Session, but it won't be posted until the embargo lifts.

Expert Technical Review of Your Website

Posted: June 5th, 2008, 2:37am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

Session Intro: This session will bring together experts who will use all of the information and tactics learned throughout the day and apply them to detailed site reviews of the code and infrastructure of sites submitted in advance by the audience.

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include Evan Roseman, Software Engineer at Google, Mohit Srivastava, Co-Founder of Faves.com, Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft Webmaster Center, and Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect of Microsoft.com at Microsoft.

This session will include actual case studies. First example is Faves.com. Wanted to capture long tail keyword searches so distributed long tail content across many linkable pages. Tried to make sure not to have duplicate content but some fallover is okay.

They used enhanced image search within Google Webmaster Central which help to drive additional long tail traffic. Include a relevant image on each page to take advantage of this.

They also had a branding problem Was called bluedot.us in which users were confused over the .us name. Faves.com is more in line with what they actually offer. They 301 redirected every URL to its counterpart of new domain. They made sure old and new site maps were verified with Google. They also attempted to reclaim links that were pointing to old domain.

The effect of domain/brand name change initially was drop in traffic and rankings but eventually came back. No drop in pages indexed though. Some of the things they did was to contact Google employee through a friend, posted to Google Webmaster Central, implemented SEO best practices and then waited 100 days (time it took to rebound).

Now Vanessa is going to go through some live sites. I am going to try to post some nuggets out of what was discovered to improve/fix the sites that were represented.

1. HealtheCareers Network - long URLs, incomplete parameters, required cookies, half cold fusion/half asp, no site map, and lots of 500 internal server errors were just some of the problems with this site.

2. Disney.com - Flash site so when disabling Flash and JavaScript, you see nothing. No content and no links to any html content. Google cache shows nothing but title. Also seem to be cloaking, not showing ads to Goglebot. Remedies - provide indexable content, submit site map to indexable content. Also don't use "all Flash" but CSS, DHTML and Flash elements.

3. BodyWork U - Two primary audiences with no call to action items. Site also looks like directory from home page. Way too many links on home page. Also blog is irrelevant. Looks more related to SEOs than bodywork and massage. Site also has duplicate title tags as well as title tags that are very similar. There are lots of internal server errors. Panelists claimed crawling site was very slow like server is lagging. Panelists praised their 404 error page.

While this session was more of a live review of sites then "presentation style," you can easily see that there are many problems that can plague sites, even ones of the caliber of Disney. It truly demonstrates that there is a bright future for SEO and SEM services!

Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues

Posted: June 5th, 2008, 1:37am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

Session Intro: Provides a checklist and workflow for diagnosing your web sites for SEO obstacles using freely available diagnostic tools.

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include David Golightly, User Experience Developer Lead at Zillow, Jonathan Hochman, President of Hochman Consultants and Chris Silver Smith, Lead Strategist at GravityStream / Netconcepts.

Vanessa starts off with the question of "what really matters?" Accessibility, discoverability and conversions are the big stuff that matters. The place to really start in investigating potential problems is the search results themselves. Is problem related to indexing, ranking or crawling? Identify problem first.

Chris is then introduced as first speaker. Diagnosing problems involves a wide range of criteria. Most issues are basic and easy to diagnose - things like mis-using robots.txt tag, inadvertently blocking spiders and the like. First question to ask is "are pages actually indexed?" If not, there is a problem! Does site URLs have sessionIDs and if so, are they doing anything to resolve that? Google Webmaster Central is useful to get a bird's eye view of what Googlebot sees when visiting your site. The title tag and meta tag data they show can be quite revealing and interesting.

Chris uses www.web-snifer.net to check server header status codes to ensure pages are reporting the proper codes. He uses www.seebot.org to view web pages like a search engine would. You can also use a Firefox Developer toolbar as well. Firefox Link Counter Extension provides useful link data. Chris makes reference to SEOmoz's SEO Toolbox as a good source of tools for diagnosing problems. One such tool shows other sites that are resting on your IP address. Use Google Sets to ID your competitors. You can also see sites that Google thinks are related to yours.

Jonathan is up next who will dive into some diagnostic stuff. Using a NoScripts add-on, Jonathan can turn scripts off and discover problems. He shows a problem with the SMX site when scripts are turned off as well as Gillette. He recommends the Googlebar (not Toolbar) which is a Firefox plug-in. It has a one-click button that shows you Google's cache. Another Firefox add-on he mentions is Live HTTP Headers which shows header status codes.

With regards to rich media applications, you need to be able to feed the bots content they can understand. Replace html content with rich media content by manipulating Document Object Model (DOM). For Silverlight, create SEO-friendly insertion code or better yet, bug Microsoft to provide a solution.

Xenu's Link Sleuth will crawl href links just as a search engine bot would. It makes it easy to find and fix broken links. It will also help you to create a site map. Firefox Web Developer Add-on has multiple functions that are valuable.

Watch out for problems with frames, iframes, Flash and Silverlight. Each object is treated as a separate thing and not as a part of the host page. Ajax as well can be problematic and it may use iFrames frequently.

Finally David is up to show some problems they found at Zillow. One problem they had with old database is that it was not highly configurable for multiple data sets. They also wanted it to be responsive to a wide range of user options. One problem they had was that many of the functions Zillow had were dependant on Java Script. With JS turned off, users (and search engines) were not able to use site. As of 2/08 only 200,000 out of 80,000,000 homes were actually indexed. They also did not rank well.

They also improved navigation to help bots find pages. Using breadcrumbs, they help bots find very interior pages. Ajax on the top, not the bottom. In other words, AJAX should be built on top of functioning web page and not other way around. SEO should work in concert with great UX.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and answered.

Is there any automated tools that check to see that redirects are working correctly after they have been set up?

Jonathan recommends Xenu's Link Sleuth and Vanessa recommends using Google Webmaster Central.
What are nofollows for?

Chris answers to control flow of PageRank (PageRank sculpting) and to stop flow of link juice to undesirable pages. Also to control blog comment spam.
Does private WHOIS put you at disadvantage?

Chris says probably not. Vanessa says so long as you are not spamming, should not be a problem.
To optimize or not optimize pop-ups?

Do you want it as separate page? It may not be good entry page. If JavaScript, is not going to be indexable anyway.

Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Bid Management Today

Posted: June 5th, 2008, 12:47am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster
Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Director, Search Strategies

Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Did-It is up first.

Does Bid / Campaign Management Matter?
- Maximize the campaign's opportunity
- Manage Complexity
- Reduce HR time required to manage campaigns
- Provide actionable reporting while taking its own
- Provide a platform for hypothesis

Auction pressure creates a winner's curse. By that he means, half the top there is a brilliant marketer and the other half the time you are the idiot. You may be competing against marketers who are acting irrationally.

Bid Management Overviews:
1996 - 2001: SEO evolves, paid bid alerts, did it, go to, google
missed rest...

APIs were originally used for just managing bids. Overtime, the engines made commitments to make the features of the GUI available directly in the api.

If bid management is going to make an intelligent decision on your behalf it has to predict the best move. The objective is to figure out which clicks are the most valuable. You can do personalized click routing, profiling and so on.

Bid management technology has to react to real time markets. Bid landscape is changing, inventory fluctuations, changes in elasticity, delta between bid and billed CPC. changes in conversion due to a variety of causes, changes in conversion value/quality, inventory levels, and budget changes.

How do these technologies evolve?
- Engine level tools, self service, full service
- High volume data and low data volumes
- Levels of control
- Sensitivity adjustments
- Utility to use blended success metrics
- Testing suites / click routing and variable appending

Never-ending optimization concept. The feedback loops and constant testing starting at the high volume segments.

You need to decide which metrics you will use. Think also about segmentation levers such as geographic, dayparting, day of week, network source, demographics and so on.

Chris Zaharias, VP Search Sales, Omniture is next up. He first shows some cool equations of bid management examples. Point is, he as a marketer doesn't understand all the crazy math...

Bid management is aggregating data, data modeling that data, optimization based on it and bid changes. Behind this are the user interfaces with forecasts. The reporting interfaces have a way to go. Good bid management systems should show you a forecast of what you need to do and spend. What would you get from position one versus position two or three and so on.

What data signals do bid management tools have?
- Impressions
- CTR
- Clicks
- Conversins
- Orders
- ROAS
- CPA

What we are missing in this includes:
- Micro metrics, micro conversions such as
- Product Views
- Carts
- Cart Adds
- Cart Removals
- Checkouts
- Average order value
- Cost Per Step Metrics
- Step By Step Conversion Rates

Data Limitations / Uncertainties
- Traffic Estimation
-- 30-50% off, 70% of the time
-- Solution is to leverage your data
- Revenue Forecasting
-- Impressions clicks
- Recency

Types of Bid Management
- Rules based lets you control things but lack of certainty and time issues
- Portfolio
- Algorithmic

Don't buy on price alone. Know what model you want before going on. He mentions the Yahoo thing today and Google's auto-matching.

George Michie, Principal, Search Marketing, Rimm-Kaufman Group is next up.

Requirement #1:
- Proprietary, Sound Statistical Foundation
-- Bid based on observation value, not position
-- Bid as granularly as statistically possible
-- Variable balance btw recency and volume
-- Smart mechanism for folding in ancient history
-- Treats low CR/high AOV terms differently than the converse

Requirement #2:
- Robust and Flexible Tracking
-- Redirect or JavaScript
-- Item level tracking
-- Sales, Margin, Leads or Hybrids
-- Variable cookie windows
-- Support internal analytics systems
-- Smart Brand, Non-Brand Allocation

Requirement #3:
- Atomic bidding

Requirement #4:
- Back-feed capability
-- Frauds and Cancels
-- Margin
-- New to file vs house file
-- Business vs Consumer vs Government
-- Order Allocation
-- Account funding / lead valuation

Requirement #5:
- API Integration

Analytics Imperatives #1
- Right balance between human and machines
-- Anticipatory bidding

Analytics Imperatives #2
- Day parting with brains

Analytics Imperatives #3
- Match type, syndication and geo targeting
-- bidding needs to handle differences in traffic quality

Analytics Imperatives #4
- Flexible keyword attribute definitions

Analytics Imperatives #5
- Deep, Flexible Filtering Field
- Granular level
- Very deep as possible

David Rodnitzky, CEO and Founder, PPCAdBuying.com is last up.

Bid management is one piece of the pie. There is ad text optimization, there is keyword selection, landing page optimization and much more. Bid management software is also not magic.

There are lot of considerations around bid management software. Am I qualified to evaluate these software? What do I want to do internally, what do I want my bid management company to handle? Can I absorb the additional cost of bid management and still meet my business objectives. Do I have engineering resources available to integrate the software? How will I define success? Will I be able to benchmark success.

Questions to Ask: How difficult is integration and disintegration? What do you offer beyond bid management? Do you offer a free trial? Are there additional feeds? Who pays if your system/team makes an error? How do you handle returns/offline transactions/other special needs? Who will be my day to day contact? Does your system support my specific business objectives?

More questions: Can you get a short contract our out clause? Keep up to date on vendors? Where you wowed by a powerpoint? Do you really need to vie your head keywords? Have you considered performance pricing alternatives? How reliable are vendor references?

Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know

Posted: June 5th, 2008, 12:29am CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know - It's more than just rankings and traffic reports to measure the health of SEO efforts. This session focuses on analytics that SEOs should be considering.

Moderator: Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz

Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee, the rockin smallbusinesssem.com dude

Speakers:

Brian Klais, Executive Vice President, Search, Netconcepts
Laura Lippay, Group Program Manager, Search Strategy, Yahoo
Jonah Stein, Founder, ItsTheROI
Richard Zwicky, President, Enquisite

The first speaker is Brian Klais.
10 Essential Natural Search KPIs.

There's more to search success than measureing ego term hits and rankings.
- How do we evaluate channel performance?
- What's the missed opportunity cost?
- How do you identify pages and markets to focus on?
- How to prioritize further investment
- etc.

The metrics include:
- Brand to non brand ratio, unique pages, missed opportunity cost, ROI and brand reach, page placement, yielding pages, visitors per phase, indexation rate, and more.

Case study data of an anonymous merchant which gets 73% of traffic from Google, 12% from Yahoo, 4% from Google Images, etc.

Brand to non brand ratio - a lot of people get traffic from their own brand name. They're happy with that, but he says that you should really focus on the long tail instead.
- Long tail search = 40x brand search
- There's remaining opportunity
The non brand queries dominate.

How big is your site?
- You can't answer that if your site is database driven. Look at how many pages the bots see. Non-duplicate pages crawled by your favorite bot.
- Look at the size of your site. That forms the top of the funnel. Think: email sent. It gives color to...

Indexation rate:
- Pages crawled vs. indexed
* Your advertising inventory
Why aren't some pages that are crawled not in the index?

Yielding pages is a critical concept. Of all pages in the index, how many drive traffic? How many aren't?
- Identify those "free loading pages" - title tags, etc.

If you know what pages drive traffic, at what rate are they not driving traffic? How many vistors do they not get? Visitors per phrase roll up into a metric.

Page placement - inequality equals opportunity. Identify those opportunities to get them from page 2 to page 1 becasue you can get a 3x increase in traffic (in this particular situation)

Engine Yield Rate - ROI of the engine's crawl.
- Google is returning 3.6 visitors for every page that it crawls. Yahoo returns 0.3 visitors for every pag.e MSN live is 0.1 visitors.

ROI and brand reach are critical metrics but it's difficult to calculate the cost of this especially internally - labor cost, expertise, etc. He advocates focusing on brand, don't discount it. You're winning unbranded keyword searchers to your site - how do you measure that?

Missed opportunity cost? How you calculate it - there are 50,000 pages on this site. 20% are generating traffic at a rate of 11 visitors per page. Every order is a 2.8% conversion. It''s $34 per page. Think, though: what more can I get? What if the market size is 5x more? 50000 unique pages x $34 per page - $1.6m/month = $15m/year

Laura Lippay is the most important person at Yahoo. Prove your worth. Do what most SEO's can't. Dazzle your boss by proving how your SEO is better - wow your boss with the grid which is inspired by Bill Hunt's opportunity matrix (Craig Hordlow's balancing paid and organic listings session).

What is it?
- Keyword based data -
- Balance SEO/PPC and paid inclusion -0 what channels perform best
- Referral Gap - where do we have content but aren't performing well
- SEO content opportunities - what search terms do we not have content for?
- Make SEO traffic and value projections - if we ranked #10, what is the dollar amount?

What do you need?
- Use a graph for all these projections. Graph looks like this.

She shows a grid of how you can measure this data.
- Gather keywords
- Add keyword data for performance comparisons
- Just see the performance of one channel
- With search volume and CTR byposition, make projections.
On a big set of terms, when you have this, you can see the worth of it if you put effort into it.

What is the worth of a #5 ranking, or a #2 ranking? You still need to be realistic.

Showcase your skills: add demographic data, ranking data, and use those to create reports.

Jonah Stein is here!!!!!!!!!!! He's cool.
- Five forgotten metrics:
1. Customer lifetime value. Most people don't track this. We spend time looking at analytics package but we forget to look at the big picture. About a year ago, Eric Enge and he did an analytics study and they realized that the AdWords conversion tracker was getting more data than ever - becasue of cookies even if ROI is stolen from your SEO campaign.
- Stolen ROI: keyword revolution (brand claims ROI on the short tail, long tail, and brand); campaigns steal ROI - email blast, coupons, internal promotions.

What you really need to do is - customer relationship manager - real ROI and LTV.
- write permanent cookie on first touch - capture source, keyword, and date
- write first touch data to CRM on conversion event
- capture missing data at every touch point (order surveys and support interactions like chat, phone, and email)

Once you have that info, you get more accurate LTV and ROI -
- Captures cancelations, adjustments, and reorders

Crawl frequency tracker from blogstorm.co.uk - he gets about 100k visitors a month. He shows how much times he's visited by each spider. Crawl frequency turns out to be a meaningful statistic that you can find out on-page.
- Toolbar Pagerank is deliberately misleading - Google doesn't want us to know.
- Crawl frequency, however, is useful for you. Obfuscating this will lower the quality of the index.
- Relative CF is great for diagnostics - shows canonical URL, replaces supplemental index

What governs crawl frequency?
- Numer and quality of inbound links
- Sitemap settings
- Server data
- Content update frequency

How often crawler visits, crawl depth, saturation, etc.

Measure crawl rate - seometer.com, crawl rate tracker from Patrick Altoft, log file analysis, custom solutions, etc. It's really a simple PHP script to see when spiders arrive. If you have developer resources, do it yourself.

Pageviews to conversion metric - send them to the right page. When we say the number of pageviews per user, that doesn't mean it's good or bad. It could be that your SEO was done really well (you took them to the right page. Or you abandoned people).

External links - we don't look at how many links we give out. The number of external links per page - it's great to have a wide footprint of pages. As SEOs, we need to pay attention to how many links we're putting out and to what pages.

He had to cut his presentation short but it was very good.

Robert Zwicky is next! He's cool also. I met him in a cab in NYC, I think.

We're all SEOs and our work is undervalued. Chart on the board links to the pages on the SERPs that people click through on your site. He pulls down data with 3 million queries - text based, image based, etc. Referral traffic from page 1 is at 90%. Most people don't go beyond page 1.
He says that Rand Fishkin is a traffic whore. Anyway, he wants to figure out how to do better because not many people are signing up for Pro memberships (and you all really should. I wrote a guide for them). Anyway, he wants to know what drives traffic from page 2 to his site. Using the Enquisite data, you can tell where the links need to come from in order to bump up that traffic. Drill in and focus on terms that you want to to drive converting traffic - you'll win every time. You may not have to optimize on page. You need to figure out what's not performing in your target market. Use your analytics to let you win everytime.

Platform Considerations for the Microsoft Stack and LAMP Stack

Posted: June 4th, 2008, 11:20pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

Session Intro: Practical tips, tricks, and workarounds for search-friendly architecture.

Microsoft Stack
Including IIS, ASP.Net, Silverlight, Microsoft SQL Server
LAMP Stack
Including Apache, PHP, Ruby, Flash/Flex, mySQL
CMS Considerations (such as .NET Blog Engine, AxCMS, Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla)

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include Colin Cochrane, SEO Analyst and Web Developer at Metamend Search Engine Marketing, Thomas Deml, Senior Program Manager at Internet Information Services at Microsoft, Nikhil Kothari, Principal Architect at Microsoft, Duane Nickull, Senior Standards Strategist at Adobe Systems and Jeff Pollard, Chief Technology Officer at SEOmoz.

Jeff is up first. He talks about SEO tweaks for Apache:

URL Canonicalization - need to decide on 'non-www' or 'www' and then redirect to main. Jeff shows some Apache code to accomplish this which you would add to the .htaccess file.
301 Redirects - he shows some code to accomplish 301 redirects in Apache, again in the .htaccess file.
SEO Friendly URLs - clear concise URLS. Easiest method to employ is CakePHP format.

For more info on this, check Apache documentation.

Next, Jeff talks about PHP which has been around since 1997. It is extremely popular and easy to code. One SEO tweak Jeff provides is a method to remove the PHPSessionID where a long session ID may be inserted in the actual URL or pages. Another tweak has to do with 404 error pages. Make sure it returns a 404 header instead of 200.

He moves on to MySQL which has been around since 1995. Only SEO tweak you can really accomplish is related to performance. He says you can do lots to optimize MySQL performance for quicker crawling by search engines so in the end they can crawl more pages.

Finally he provides a quick overview on web frameworks which are typically very good for SEO. CakePHP, Symfony, Zend, and Ruby on Rails are good web frameworks to use.

Next up is Colin who will talk about ASP.net. Issues with ASP.net are similar to what Jeff talked about - URL canonicalization, custom error pages, meta data management, performance and crawlability.

Colin shows actual screenshots of how to deal with all these issues in IIS 6. While I cannot reproduce those here, you can very likely find resources and screenshots online. One thing to keep in mind include making sure error pages are set up correctly or they could return a 200 header response to search engines, meaning they are okay when in reality they are not there.

Next up is Duane who will talk about Adobe Systems. He shows us how search engines are doing a better job diving into Flash. However, you can't really force search engines to adopt technologies sites use, so what is one to do? He talked about using MVCs to deliver multiple data to various sources (i.e. users, bots, etc.). Adobe is working to help search engines index their technologies.

Next up is Nikhil. He is going to focus on indexability. This is crucial when building rich web applications where you have single pages that fetch additional data using XMLHTTP based on user actions. You therefore have to add indexable content back into the page. He is not endorsing serving up different content than what a user would see but rather content a search engine can understand. Using site maps and strategic navigation will help in the discoverability of content.

He shows us how to use the div tag and the "display=none" to place alternate content in the html in a media rich application. The only way a user will see it is if they don't have the rich media plug-in. For example, if the application is Flash and a user does not have a Flash plug-in, they will see static content. If they do have Flash plug-in, they will never see static content but a search engine will.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and answered.

With alternate content in html, should you also build in a link structure?

Duane advises that it is best to have one set of data and to avoid having duplicate sets of data.
Does offering alternate views as discussed in the session label you as a cloaker? Will you get dinged?

Duane won't answer for engines but says in his experience, he has not had any problems with it. Vanessa pointed out that if you are serving content specifically to bots such as Googlebot, you could get dinged. Better to serve content for users like in Flash example above. In other words, okay to serve search friendly content but I think IP delivery would raise a red flag.

Note: In this session, a lot of screenshots of actual code were shown which is almost impossible to capture in a live blogging environment. You might be able to get those from the speakers themselves. PowerPoint presentations are also available to SMX Advanced conference attendees.

Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

What You Should Be Measuring -- But Aren't!

Posted: June 4th, 2008, 9:45pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

Moderator:
Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Akin Arikan, Senior Manager, Internet Marketing, Unica Corporation
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Rich Devine, Director of Search, ZAAZ
Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, Rimm-Kaufman Group

Christine:

63% of purchases by consumers who conducted online searches for various product categories occur offline - Source: Google - Comscore Study March 2006

Why Offline?
- In many cases some industries push for phone calls because their able to close the sale.
- In some cases the sales process is complicated with a high dollar product so the power of the voice pushing to an offline area is effective.
- People want to physically see the item at a local store.

Simple:
Make an assumption based on sales
Anecdotal data. Ask the salespeople or call center people to ask customers where they learned about the item. Many times this is very inaccurate.
In-store surveys. Surveys ask customers how they found the product

Intermediate:
SWAG it from limited pilot tests
Use a unique phone number in ads from pilot campaign
Determine an online-offline ratio
Extrapolate to future sales

Offer coupons or special offer codes

Unique Pricing. Place unique pricing on a search landing page

Advanced:
Customer Tagging - Tie in online cookie with the offline customer number or credit care data of offline purchase

Use of Unique Phone Numbers
- Simple javascript that will tag the customer
- Cookie that serves the same number across the site
- Tracking that ties back to your keyword in your campaigns (recommended) Singular vs. Plural can make bid differences

Pay per Call
Keyword Driven Traffic

Ryan:

Typical Measurements:
- A/S: Ad Spend to Sales
- ROAS: Return on Ad Spend
- ROI: Return on Investment
- CPO/CPA: Cost per Order/ Acquisition

A/S = (1-COGS - Variable Costs) /2
ROAS = 1 / (A/S)
Roughly target 1/2 of Margin

Track your order level info, tied to the keyword

Rich:

What is your level of success besides your conversion. Look at specific events or "microconversions" before the final conversion.

Build a monetization model that assigns dollar values to particular actions on the site level.

It's imporant to look at the values of certain site behaviors that lead to later conversions.
Example: Orders through Call Center, Local Retailer, Locate Online Dealer, Product Showcase/Detail Visit

Building a Monetization Model:
Confirm Business Goals
Align site goals to business goals
Establish accurate key site metrics
Identify key site behaviors or "micro-conversions"
Assign value to key site behaviors

Discover and use all available data sources

Typical Metrics:
Monetized return on ad spend
Monetized revenue per click
Monetized revenue per referral

Akin:

Search is not alone: Social, Online Ads, Offline Ads, Direct Marketing and Relationship Marketing. These all impact the success of search

An Atlas study found that for 8 out 10 advertisers, running online banner ads in parallel to search increased their results greatly.
In one example, when online ads that were running in parallel to search were turned off they had to pay 10% more per conversion.

With microsites you can cookie your visitors and watch what their doing at a later time. Example of doing this is the whiteboard.ups.com

In the blogosphere you can't turn things on and off. There is blog monitoring software available to track your brand in the blogosphere.

Q&A:

What method do you use to find the value of your microconversions?

First you need to look at your analytics and identify core site behavior. Focus on what your core business objective is and value that activity. If your looking at leads get your revenue data and divide that by your

number of leads or key site behaviors and that would be your first step. You can then back into your other key site behaviors.

Identify your measures of success and those should be your microconversions.

Are the microconverions happening in other channels offline? What would they cost there and back into your values that way.

What keywords should get the credit for the sale, the first or the last?

It's recommended to reach a conclusion and then apply a rule. That means either splitting the credit or choosing one or the other.

Many times people come in through a non brand click and then come back to the site via a brand click.

Contirbuted by Justin Davy.

International SEO

Posted: June 4th, 2008, 9:43pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget
Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Director, Search Strategies

Ian McAnerin, CEO, McAnerin International Inc is first up. Geolocation is the identification of a web page as belonging to or being relevant for a particular country. ccTLD, IP address and link analysis are ways search engines identify your site or page belonging to a particular country. ccTLD is the first place they will typically look. If you have www.domain.com, domain.com and domain.ca all pointing to the same page, it will associate the site as being a Canadian site. If you don't have a ccTLD, the spider will look at the location of your host IP, if the server is in Canada, then your page might be associated to Canada.

When would you want to not use a 301 redirect, and show a 202 response? If you want to show the .com URL but also want to show up in a local engine, then there is a tactic you can use. Hard to write, email Ian if you want more info. ;-)

Language and Culture:
- Local terms (football)
- Different types of spelling
- Popular culture references
- Translation issues
- Cultural Issue

Semantic Expression Equivalency Document:
Original English -> English SEED -> Chinese SEED -> Chinese Document
EN --------> EN -------> EN-ZH --------> ZH

In summary, you take your original english page and you bullet point your points of the marketing speak. You express how you want it expressed, the emotion in that document. It is now a soulless document that says what you want it to say. Then you have that document translated into the other language. Then you give it to a real copyrighter in that language and have them write it well.

Linking Issues:
- Too many links - big problem with asian sites
- Nofollow, First anchor text counts (not sure if this is still true)
- Strategic internal linking is excellent way to deal with multiple languages
- Language switching:
-- No surprises
-- Clear indication of target, same page, different language, not the home page of the site, but the page.

Andy Atkins-Kruger, Managing Director, WebCertain is next up. He is a linguistic marketer.

(10) Use UTF-8 character encoding. Google calls it unicode.
(9) Don't translate the metatags and page titles. Be careful with that translation.
(8) Adopt a global PR strategy. He lists a number of PR companies.
(7) Manage 301s. There are hundreds of links going to page not found on international sites.
(6) Keyword URLs
(5) Source local links from local sites and sources.
(4) Use smart geo-selector. IBM has a geo-selector on their web site. A way for people to find the localized version that suits them. Flags at the top. Page to Page links.
(3) Expert keyword research
(2) ccTLDs or Local Hosting
(1) Language and content presentation

Kristjan Mar Hauksson, Director of Internet Marketing, Nordic eMarketing is now up.

- ccTLD and it has a huge impact (buy them at Eurperegistry.com)
- IP address makes a difference also, he has seen the results
- Language and Culture is often overlooked. He gives examples of funny translation issues.
- Inbound links, they are really important.

Case Study:
- Strategy, localized languages, ccTLD
- 6 to 30% rise in relevant traffic, 4% more sales, etc.

Sorry for not covering his presentation in that much detail. I am very bad with understanding accents.

Cindy Krum, Sr. SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works, Inc is last up. She is focusing on site architecture.

Different web issues:
- Multiple languages, currencies, measurements and seasonalities
- Different search engines
- Different e-commerce laws
- Inconsisrtent marketing aesthetics

Three Approaches:
- One Site
- Multiple Sites
- Blended

Things to Consider:
- Design, development and maintenance cost
- Server configuration and location
- CMS and order fulfillment
- Email, direct marketing, affiliates and PPC
- Traditional advertising
- SEO

One Site: Everyone goes to a .com and then send people to subdomains or subfolders. You can do it by country, by language or by keyword translated.

Pros: easy to set up, links and traffic all point to one domain, more pages in the index, flexible with messaging, grouping by language prevents dup content, country specific hosting option as subdomain
Cons: home page is wrong language, home page only ranks in one language, grouping by country risks duplicate content

Tips:
- Use webmaster tools as much as you can. Target country feature.
- Redirect country specific domains to subdomain or subfolder
- Internal and external links
- Language meta tag, HTML language and local address

Multiple Sites: ccTLDs

Pros: incrementally low start up costs, can add sites one at a time, rank well in multiple country specific engines, country specific hosting
Cons: More sites equals more sites to update, multiple sites is multiple SEO efforts and harder to rank in .com, forced to target countries instead of languages

Tips:
- Target country in webmaster tools
- Use external links correctly
- Link your multiple country sites carefully and logically
- Language meta tags, html language and local address

Blended: both subs and ccTLDs. People go to .com and then send people from there to international sites.

Pros: most realistic approach, can start with .com and build country specific sites as needed
Cons: most costly to create and maintain and update

Tips:
- Specify your country in webmaster tools, but not the .com
- Link your multiple country sites carefully and logically
- External links should be logical
- Let users know you are taking them to another site
- Use Java translation and IP sniffing on home page

Permalink for 'Search_Engine_Roundtable/2008/06/04/Search_Marketing__amp__Surviving_A_Recession'

Search Marketing & Surviving A Recession

Posted: June 4th, 2008, 8:13pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle

Session Intro: Many expect a recession to hit and no one knows how search will weather it. This session looks at strategies and tactics for those who want to prepare in advance for a worse case scenario.

Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President Marketing at ExactTarget is moderating this session along with Jessica Bowman, SEO Strategist at SEM In House doing the Q&A moderating. Speakers include Andrew Beckman, President of Location3 Media, Dave Davies, CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Russ Mann, CEO of Covario and Jon Miller, Vice President Marketing at Marketo.

After speaker introductions, Jeffrey polls the audience whether they think we are in a recession or not. Most agreed that we are in a recession. Looks like this is going to be more Q&A than presentation so I am going to try to do my best to capture what is being asked.

1. What worries you and/or your clients that are driving marketing decisions?

Russ says the fear of national recession. CFOs are tightening up, scrutinizing purchases and the like. Jon says larger companies with larger pockets may increase budget to take advantage of smaller competitors. So more spending from big companies and less from smaller which creates opportunity. In recession, people are more concerned over bottom line results as opposed to branding efforts.

2. With regards to larger companies spending more, will we see price spiking in paid search?

Andrew says it would be a good time to take advantage of SEO and link building instead of going after high priced PPC keywords. He is in fact trying to get clients to move money away from traditional media. Dave says that analytics are key as they can prove whether adverting is successful of not, unlike other types of traditional advertising.

3. In our current environment, where do you place your first advertising dollar?

Andrew thinks people will get back to the fundamentals (i.e. targeting the right phrases, SEO, etc.). He goes on to say that businesses should do a better job analyzing post click results such as using heat maps and the like. Dave agrees, saying that companies need to make sure they have basic SEO covered. Russ thinks first dollar should go towards customer research to define strategy. We can't just be search experts but need to be business experts as well. It revolves around understanding the customer. Jon says when budgets are tight, you get fewer leads so optimizing those leads is crucial. Improving conversions becomes more important than ever as you have less money to burn. Try to get more out of what you already have.

4. Do you expect expect the consolidations of industries to be impacted by this so-called recession?

Russ thinks we will see a polarization. You'll see big players with big pockets trying to gobble up smaller companies but at the same time there will be fragmentation as well as new companies staring up. Dave thinks we will see some degree of consolidation but that is not contingent on whether we are in a recession of not. It has already been happening and will continue to do so.

5. Jon asks his own question regarding SEO - "How do you show clients that you are getting value out of SEO?"

Andrew says with good analytics, he can show whether good rankings are producing conversions or not. He sees SEO as much more cost effective and can prove that to clients with analytical reporting. It is a struggle however but doable.

6. Jeffrey polls search marketers in audience what they are prioritizing as far as marketing for clients.

One audience member says SEO. Andrew points out that it is cheaper to do SEO from the beginning than to do it after-the-fact (i.e. PPC campaign, site redesign, etc.). Dave says one of the most overlooked things is titles and meta description tags - something that is so easy and cost effective to adjust.

7. Any other tactics besides what has already been discussed?

Jon says it is more important than ever to really track the marketing campaign. Define what is working so you can feed it as well as what is not working so you can kill it. Andrew says the metric that we really need to focus on is the conversion percentage. He also talks about affiliate marketing, saying that search marketing and affiliate marketing can work hand in hand.

8. How do you deal with prospects who have interest in SEO but in an environment where positioning cannot be guaranteed?

Dave says they do guarantee rankings so question cannot really apply to him. Andrew says it is more of a time process, showing them the growth of keyword saturation by developing content and increasing inbound links. Russ shows new prospects case studies to prove the possibility of getting results for them. While you cannot guarantee 1s place results, you can educate clients that SEO is a process and constantly evolves.

9. Because economy is worse in some places than others, how can marketers deal with this?

Andrew says you can use geo-targeting (PPC) to avoid bad areas. Russ jokes to go East (Asia), in other words take advantage of developing and evolving countries.

10. How do you get clients to not cut ad dollars and where are they currently squandering?

Dave says we all waste money in different ways. He then reminds us once again to analyze what is effective. Jon thinks biggest area where people waste money is where they are simply "shouting" to the market.

So, the key takeaways from this Q&A style of session are as follows:

SEO is the most cost effective thing you can do so utilize it as a foundational search marketing tactic.
Take advantage of good analytic programs because you can show clients how effective search marketing is.
Measure very closely to define what is working and what is not so you can concentrate efforts on what 'is' working.

Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

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