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Search Engine Roundtable

Daily Search Forum Recap: June 10, 2010

Posted: June 10th, 2010, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 Seattle

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
SMX Advanced Seattle 2010 Live Blog Recap:

Posted: June 10th, 2010, 1:04am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 Seattle
Here is our live blog coverage of the SMX Advanced 2010 show. This wasn't planned, but I did it anyway:
SMX Advanced 2010: Mega Session: SEO Vets Take All Comers

Posted: June 10th, 2010, 12:44am CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 Seattle
The last session at SMX Advanced 2010 is Mega Session: SEO Vets Take All Comers. The live blogging coverage will be real time and embedded below.

On this panel we have:
- Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
- Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal
- Greg Boser, President and CEO, 3 Dog Media
- Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
- Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
- Todd Friesen, VP of Search, Position Technologies
- Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
- Stephan Spencer, VP of SEO Strategies, Covario
Here is the live blog coverage:

Mega Session: SEO Vets Take All Comers
SMX Advanced 2010: Search Marketing In The Facebook Zone

Posted: June 9th, 2010, 11:13pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 Seattle
The next session for today at SMX Advanced 2010 is Search Marketing In The Facebook Zone. The live blogging coverage will be real time and embedded below.

On this panel we have:
- Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
- Ryan Lash, VP Search, ymarketing, LLC
- Bill Parkes, EVP, Chief Digital Officer, nFusion
- Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear
- Dennis Yu, CEO, BlitzLocal
Here is our live blog coverage:

Search Marketing In The Facebook Zone
SMX Advanced 2010: So You Want To Test SEO?

Posted: June 9th, 2010, 8:01pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 Seattle
The next session for today at SMX Advanced 2010 is So You Want To Test SEO? The live blogging coverage will be real time and embedded below.

On this panel we have:
- Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
- Q&A Moderator: Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal
- John Andrews, , Seattle SEO Consultant
- Jordan LeBaron, Senior Consultant, Omniture, An Adobe Company
- Branko Rihtman, R&D SEO Specialist, Whiteweb
- Conrad Saam, Marketing, Avvo
So You Want To Test SEO?
SMX Advanced 2010: Keynote Q&A: Yusuf Mehdi, SVP, Online Audience Business, Microsoft

Posted: June 9th, 2010, 6:49pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 Seattle

The first session for today at SMX Advanced 2010 I am covering live is Keynote Q&A: Yusuf Mehdi, SVP, Online Audience Business, Microsoft.

You can watch my live coverage in real time below:

Yusuf Mehdi, SVP, Online Audience Business, Microsoft
SMX Advanced 2010: Twitter, Real Time Search & Real Time SEO

Posted: June 8th, 2010, 8:28pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 Seattle
The next SMX Advanced 2010 session I am covering live is Twitter, Real Time Search & Real Time SEO. This panel has some great panelists including:
- Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
- Q&A Moderator: Todd Friesen, VP of Search, Position Technologies
- Stew Langille, Vice President, Marketing, Mint.com
- John Shehata, Director of SEO & Social Media, Advance Internet, Inc.
- Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance
- Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Follow the live blogging in real time here live between 11:00am-12:15pm PST or reply the event after below:

Twitter, Real Time Search & Real Time SEO
SMX Advanced 2010: SEO For Google Vs. Bing: How Different Are They?

Posted: June 8th, 2010, 6:26pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Search Marketing Expo 2010 Seattle
I wasn't planning on live blogging SMX Advanced 2010, but hey - I heard one live blogger hurt her toe nail and couldn't make it. So I decided, I'll dust off the keyboard and provide live blogging for SMX Advanced.

The first session is SEO for Google vs Bing. Yea, no need for Yahoo here and no need for Ask.com here either, so let's just focus on Google and Bing. On this panel:
- Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
- Q&A Moderator: Duane Forrester, Senior Program Manager SEO, Microsoft
- Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
- Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo
- Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
- Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Microsoft
Follow the live blogging in real time here:

SEO For Google Vs. Bing: How Different Are They?
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.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
1. 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.
2. 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
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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