October 28, 2004 Archives

Found this way of a good thread at SEW forums. According to a JupiterResearch search engine marketing survey, marketers are widely "unsophisticated" when it comes to marketing campaigns. Don't know if I really follow all of what they findings say, like how do you really qualify an "unsophisticated marketer"? Some of what they said does appear to be true. The survey goes on to say that "Most search marketers aren't doing their homework", which should be good news for those that do. Their homework relates to the marketers ability to research keywords, bid, track, and report campaigns, a big part of measuring the success of the campaign. Many just put campaigns on auto-pilot, or pay someone to do the work for them. The article did mention that what was found was that "sophisticates have total marketing budgets that exceed $1 million", and tend to be larger companies. Well, probably common sense since they probably have the funds to hire someone to watch these campaigns daily.

Another interesting part I wanted to bring up, was that possibly search engines could use this "unsophistication" to help sell SEM to their prospective clients. Recently I was contacted by a Google Adwords rep about increasing my campaign and using a service called Jumpstart. The basis of jumpstart is for moderate to larger spending advertisers who will have their campaigns created for them and all ad groups written and organized neatly. Pretty nice huh? Give Google the links and they do it all for you with the promise you will spend a lot (base is $200-$300 a day), not exactly heavy spending, but not necessarily affordable for every "unsophisticate" out there. So Google appears to be targeting the "unsophisticate" crowd, and if the article is correct there sure is 3/4 more of a chance of finding one.

The Advanced Link Building Forum was the next session I attended. Dixon Jones from Receptional Internet Marketing (I think also a WMW moderator). He started off by answering a question asked in the basic session. How important is internal link structure? He feels internal link building is very important, including the anchor text. He explained an example of how links internally with specific anchor text can help your rankings for a keyword. The next question he answered was should you buy or sell links? He said, no, think of it as buying or selling traffic. Because, you will only buy "relevant" traffic as opposed to buying any type of link. He said not all links are treated equal, some links cant be read, some dont pass pagerank, some pass less pagerank then others, etc. How can you create incentives for people to link to a site? He put up a chart with a list of incentives one can offer, a few being; money, giving content, free downloads, etc. Is buying links wrong from a search engine's point of view? He said this is not the best question, buying PPC links is an example of buying links and directory listings is not wrong. But if you get irrelevant links, then that is wrong. You can get links from different 'channel' web sites, I think he means different communities. By that, he means that a link from a site sites that both talk about your topic can be good. Well, maybe you can consider that one big community but sub communities within that big community. How far is too far in link building your internal link structure? If you get de-listed, the more competitive a search phrase the more likely there is a filter, be careful with over optimization. Always look at internal link data, who clicks where on your site? Can natural interlinking be perceived as link spam? Yes, but its difficult to know for sure he says. "Tribal Linking" is how he named his summary slide.

Next up was Warren Cowan from Greenlight, whos first slide is named the "Wheat vs shaft." He discusses how links are no equal, just like the previous speaker. He says its important to look at the page relevance that is linking to you. The placement of the link on the page is important as well - he brings up the "block level analysis" topic. Anchor text is very important. And the document's authority level or expertise is important. He goes over which pages link to that page and is it the homepage or sub pages, he looks at the links of the pages that links to him. He then pulls up a "Radar Link Graph" where he plots the links to a page based on the types of characteristics of the link.

Paddy Bolger from Top-Pile says you should buy links, even Yahoo! directory, be choosy but buy. He is strongly against reciprocal links, not that he might hurt today but it will hurt in the future.

Google and Ask Jeeves gives the diplomatic speech on links.

Q & A:

Q: I asked Google (Magnus, new Google speaker and engineer at Google), why do you bother updating the link command if its not really statistically sound?
A: Google pretty much avoids the question, sorry. But then Danny backs me up and says, if you have the command, it should be 100% accurate - otherwise do not give it. Thanks Danny.

Once again, the backlinks over at Google are being updated, but does it matter? I don't think so.

See these servers:
216.239.57.105
216.239.57.104
216.239.57.99
216.239.57.98

And forum coverage at:

• Search Engine Watch
  
• WebmasterWorld Msg # 128
  
• SEO Chat
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• and others...
  

The next session I decided to attend is Search Term Research & Targeting, normally you would find Andy Beal and Dan Theis on this panel, but I bet this will be focused on European search term research.

First up was Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance, she is an admin over at Jill's HighRanking forum. She began to discuss what keyword research is and then described how too generic words are hard to compete on, and too specific words might not be searched on. She explained that logs files provide a good source of keywords for you to begin optimizing for. Instead of using company terms, try to think about how searchers will query your products, it often differs. She listed the adwords, overture and wordtracker tools as how she does keyword research, she cautions the audience that these numbers are inflated. She also recommends testing these keywords in a PPC campaign, its quick, and budgeted. SEO differs from PPC in that she targets more focused keywords for SEO whereas with PPC she goes broader.

Next up was Tomas Axelsson from Trellian to discuss there tool. I spoke with Tomas last night, he is an SEO who partnered with Trellian to resell the tool and represent them in Sweden. The tool he will discuss is Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com). He shows the keyword discover tool, then shows the KEI analysis, which was popularized by WordTracker. He then shows the real goodies within this tool, the season trend graphs - Trellian uses 12 months of historical data to graph this. In addition, they have a common misspelling tool, related terms tool, a keyword density report. He showed the regional breakdowns of searches based on country specific search, very useful here.

Tor Crockatt from Espotting was up next, who will focus on "user intent" as it relates to keyword research. She said, "always see keywords as question" - understanding the motivation behind the question. Multiple audience, meanings change over time, synonyms with differing user intent (vacation/holiday), related in theme but not in vertical (car/car insurance). Break down the meanings of the keywords you want to target. for example, "cheap web hosting" is 3 words with two meanings (cheap + web hosting). "Gebrauchtwagenleasing" is one German word with three meanings (used car leasing). Seven elements for keyword research; (1) Comparison/quality, (2) Adjective (price/product qualifiers), (3) intended use (4) product type (5) vendor (6) location and (7) action request.

Ola Svensson from Overture Nordics. Paid placement works because they drive traffic, quality traffic and converting traffic. He discusses the concept of "tail terms" with the overture keyword suggestion tool. He recommends segmenting through the buying cycle (information, shop, or purchase). Explore new opportunities/terms, experiment with new titles and descriptions, and optimize your efforts.

Q & A:
Q: Why not show search terms with 0 searches in the keyword research database?
A: They sometimes do, but often its not helpful for the Overture user. This happens with seasonality searches. They are moving to gathering more data towards storage of seasonal data. Espotting tries to predict search patterns before they hit main stream, most of it is seasonality but they change from year to year.

Q: Mike Grehan asks how skewed is the data based on the automated ranking tools being run 24/7 by SEO/SEMs?
A: Espotting said they are not too bad, Overture kind of agrees, Christine agrees with Mike and says you need to look at the keywords on a conversion/roi level. Trellian said every keyword is some what equally inflated, so it balances out.

Again, I have some time - so why not talk about my trip here and my thoughts on Sweden. I left NY via Newark to Copenhagen, then the Copenhagen to Sweden (Arlanda). The Copenhagen to Sweden flight was interesting, the pilot said he was late because he thought the flight was to leave 35 minutes after he planned. So he apologized and promised to make the time up in the air. I don't think you would hear an American pilot admit to that. The pilot's comment, about making the time up in the air, reminded me about a Seinfeld episode where he joked about how there are no cops in the sky. So why don't pilots go as fast as they can always? If they can "make the time up in the air" that means that they can always go faster. Anyway...

I took this clean "train" I would call it a subway, named Arlanda Express to Stockholm from Arlanda airport. Very convenient, thanks for the tip on that Chris Sherman. Saw some horses during the 20 minute trip to Stockholm. I will post them at a later date. I then got to the nice hotel, went to my room and hooked up to the net. I had 30 minutes until the second session began. Read the sessions for reports on that...

After the sessions, I had a discussion with Mikkel and Danny about some search related topics. Said hello to Mike Grehan, Heather Lloyd Martin, Shari Thurow, Chris Sherman, Joseph Morin, Jill Whalen, Christine Churchill, Bill Hunt from IBM, a guy from Trillian and others - it was nice because the conference was relatively small compared to the US shows. Then I went outside the hotel and walked around to check out some of the scenery of the city. Maybe it was the location of the hotel, but there was very few people walking around. I am from New York, and its almost impossible to walk down the street and not be brushed up against by a two or three people within a 5 second interval. It was peaceful, nice weather and the air felt clean. The hotel often had a stench of cigaret smoke, a European thing I guess - NYC hotels never smell like that (no one is allowed to smoke in NYC anymore anyway).

From a dress code perspective, I was the only one wearing a baseball like hat. It seems like corduroy sports jackets are popular here as well. If you're not wearing a corduroy sports jacket, then you must wear some sort of jacket. The US conference seem much more less formal, but maybe I am wrong.

I will be leaving Stockholm for a 6pm flight to London, to connect to my next destination. I might update this entry tomorrow with pictures and more information.

I have a few minutes between sessions and since its 4:30AM in New York, I can blog on this. First is a thread I started named New MSN Search Look???, which discusses Gary's post named Is This the New Look of MSN Search? which hints at what the new MSN search will look like when its released.

And, by way of email, a person sent me this link http://comcast.myway.com/ which is owned by Ask. Makes you think, what are these guys working on? And why did ASKJ drop so much!

The first session of the morning I have attended was a basic one, but I wanted to hear some of the speakers, the session is named Successful Site Architecture.

Alan Perkins was first up and he went through many of the common issues with Web sites that are not search friendly. Navigation issues, URL issues, domain issues, JavaScript and others. Very good summary.

Shari Thurow was next up and she will go through specific examples, as opposed to overall conceptual issues. She then discusses what she will discuss; your Web site directory, site nav, URL, types of pages, the page and some linkage. She then goes over what is the root level of a site, the search spiders look for your homepage or robot.txt file first. Exclude test pages in your robot.txt file, exclude scripts (cgi, java, etc.) and pop up windows, exclude redundant content pages. She then gets into the basics of the URL, and defines which URLs are the most search friendly and which are the least. She then goes over which pages are the most important to optimize, i.e. no need to optimize a privacy page but it is important to optimize category pages and product pages. She goes over the 404 page and discusses why Apple's 404 page, she loves it from a usability purpose. Then moves on to why a site map is so important and tells the audience that having short descriptions about what is found within each section under the link, as oppose to just having a link. Now she is discussing the breadcrumb trail, but keep in mind, she is showing screen shots of real sites - so this information is being communicated clearly (I think). Cross linking pages internally is very important, and using the correct anchor text relevant to the page is as important, she shows examples of a good way and bad way to do this.

Ask Jeeves, Michael Palka gives his quick presentation about the basics. And then Magnus Sandburg said hello and said will answer some Q & A.

Q & A:
Q: Any good tools for keywords?
A: Action Outline is what Chris Sherman uses.

We got off on a dynamic content question string of question, but that is covered in a different session.

Then moved onto a discussion about optimizing pages versus optimizing sites. Any questions on that, feel free to ask below.

Q: Tables versus CSS?
A: Google said tables are not better then CSS for ranking purposes. Shari Thurow agrees, but she takes the usability spin on it.