November 14, 2006 Archives

Brett praises Opera....

Jon S Von Tetzchner is now up... They make browsers. They put the browser on anything out there. PC, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc. You can also run it on your mobile, nintendo, etc. all running the same source code. The product is the same, feature wise, on all devices, no matter what. 3 business units include, desktop, mobile and other. The browser is the glue between all devices (PC, tv, mobile, etc.) 39 millions downloads of Opera on desktop on 2006. More than 150 million downloads ever. More than 40 million phones shipped with Opera pre-installed. More than 7 million active Opera mini users. More than 500,000 my opera community members. Top 5 countries using Opera for desktop; Russia, Germany, USA, Poland and Japan. Top countries using Opera Mini; Russia, USA, Ukrain etc. They are a team of 350 people, including 250 engineers. They have been doing this for 10 years. Opera has spent more than 1 million dev hours and 2 million testing hours. Opera is innovative in many ways, tabs, etc. There can be only one web he said, but numerous devices are coming out, ready to connect to that web. They added widget support natively. Opera's commitment is to web standards; including the Acid2 test and they are working n 3D canvas support. They use fraud protection from TrustWatch and GeoTrust. They support cutting edge developer tools. Opera for Mobile, same code base - three products; Opera platform and Opera Widgets, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. He showed that the Nintendo Wii is coming pre-installed with Opera, he wants one for Christmas. Also the Ninentdo DS has Opera. Sonly Mylo has Opera, so does the Nokia 770, and the Dreampark Dreamgallery IPTV Solution.

Todd Friesen is modding.

Andrew Gerhart from Primedia was up first. They acquired an auto site with tons of strengths... The weaknesses of the site are that; entire site was built on a flat file CMS, code is a mess, majority of the content is not optimized, content is input manually, web site structure is not optimized, site links out to partner websites for content, and forum is on a different platform that is not SE friendly. The opportunity was that there was room for content expansion, minimal changes would product large returns, site does not currently rank for primary keywords, utilize established brand to gain rankings and links, traffic can be immediately monetized. The threats include; time, resources, political issues and pushback and multi-platform websites. Step 2 was planning, they needed to train people in SEO, optimize all the existing content, optimize the site templates and code, restructure the web sit, optimize the internal linking structure, build new content and build links. They made procedural changes which was communicated from the top, including SEO reviews, new URLs, one on one training, daily monitoring and weekly and monthly progress reports. SEO training includes; document content optimization guidelines, document seo best practices, basic seo training, review seo strategies and goals, review seo phases and current initiatives, work throughout content optimization examples and follow up with one o one meetings. SEO Phase 1: Seo team and interns optimize every page of every article, document of existing and new urls, set up 301 redirects. SEO Phase 2: optimize code of existing site, etc. SEO Phase 3: new content sections, use existing resources, replace link outs within site content, integrate links into existing CMS content, relaunch forums and launch blogs. SEO Phase 4: build links, etc. Results: 70% in search referrals.

Robert Carilli of Shop.com. He shows the shop.com timeline, starting off as catalogcity.com... He shows off their competitive advantage, all promo stuff for them so far. They have teams set up as; keyword review team, account management team, seo technology team, seo marketing team and analytics team. Keyword Review: keywords are the life blood of SEM, tens of millions of keywords are in the shop.com database, proprietary keyword review and classification tools, explore creative strategies for expanding the keywords and the keyword universe is constantly under review. Account Management: Daily ppc account review, regular account updates, constant creative testings, partner relationship management, regular reporting, invoice validation, international coordination and maintain subject matter expertise. Keyword landscape, plan for and react to seasonality, react to change in the bud market, stay up to date on the nuances of SEs, anticipate impact of current events, manage trademark budding practices, stay up to date on merchant changes, track ROI. BOT SEO: traffic driven via SE crawling and indexing pages, regular review and application of SEO practices, constant coordination with engineering dep. DATA FEED SEO: traffic driven via data feeds regularly sent to SEs, regular review and optimization to ensure max results, constant coordination with partners. MARKETING SEO: link building, content dev, social interaction, press release, reputation monitoring, close coordination with creative team and regular reporting and analysis. Phew, he spoke a mile a minute... hope I got everything.

Chris Boggs of Avenue A Razorfish and this blog here. Hey Chris. The little site that could, was his first slide. Type in "insert printing" in google and you will see a ton of PPC ads and the top result is from his old company, G3. He shows that that page only had 9 inlinks. Todd said it is a fluke, but Chris said he feels it is about the internal linking. He said, internal linking can be very powerful. Sample Site characteristics of a site from a fortune 500, with tens of thousands of pages. They found they had too many "Chefs" on this site. He then goes over Directory Folder Structure; avoid losing continuity in URL's. He shows some URL changes... Another big problem is client side redirects, avoid using them. META refresh does not allow spider to execute. Internal linking; a major issue is JavaScript linking, use CSS instead. Categorization and breadcrumb usage is good. Use your internal linking structure to capitalize on your landing pages. External links, relevance again is important. Current link popularity can be deceiving, a 100,000 inlinks can be worthless or pointing to the wrong place. You may have to increase your deep link ratio to internal pages. Business relationship building is like building links.

Aaron Shear from Shopping.com is next up, he did not have a presentation, but took the podium. He explains that highly trafficked sites that use load balancing can often run into problems with bad URL structures, with numerous URL "nodes." He said if your site performs very slowly, it normally wont do well in Google. He said focusing on the long tail is very difficult to make sure all those pages are fully indexed. If you have to click 30 clicks deep to get to a product, it is not good user experience, and Google will see that. He said, consider inserting multiple navigational paths to get to the same product or landing page. A good approach is to sell the optimization as a giant needle mover for the company, but make sure the engineers get credit for it, will make them work harder, quicker and more for your department.

Heather Lloyd-Martin, Jennifer Slegg, Ted Ulle, Byron White

Ted Ulle gives overview. Working with a team, problems with teams, and why workflow is a critical factor. How to avoid a Franken-site. Work flow must support your priorities. Final result must be simple and seamless. Getting to simplicity for end user is a challenge, but it will work well to keeping both people and spiders happy. Start with Clarity from the start. Business purpose is #1. Start with that web strategy before anything else. Add pile of content - rough drafts. Then make back end decisions and how are we going to measure things decisions. All this has to happen before you ever build a web page. Build an information architecture for your site. Very critical. Menu labels are important. Now its time to flesh out all the content. The graphic designer is now part of the process. Then its the final web edit in html. But the guiding light is always the business purpose. Every decision you make should be documented, so you will remember later why you made that decision.

Now he looks at each of these in detail:

Mine your market's language. Look at forums, email, keyword neighborhoods (LSI).
Research the Market's Concerns

Build a Process - not a product

Server Decisions - don't be naive. IT departments and isps dont care about search engines - you must care. There are choices for the backend. Dont just use the default when making backend and metrics decisions
Accurate HTTP headers and mime types must be set properly on the server.
One unique spiderable URL for each page (avoid duplicate content)
Custom 404 must return a 404 header! (not a 302 or 200, etc)
301/302 /framing/meta refresh/javascript - be careful to use the correct one

Build in the metrics
Already know the business goals
define the key metrics - too many blurs the picture
Logs - server logs are almost never enough
Build in what you need now

Menus and navigation
Menus are content. Getting menu list to be intelligable, gives users a sense of knowing that they are confident it is what they need.

Tell a story with your menu items with either Single Words or Longer phrases
Too many choices is no choice at all

Graphic Design
Now - only now - not before, can designer get to work
Graphics must NOT drive the process
Designer must respect the medium - he must at least know html

Final Web Edit
tweak calls to action
No time to be timid
Content interacts with layout
CSS - use it properly

you can kill good content with bad layout
or boost weak content with good layout
study print typography to learn how to put together a good web page

Where do "Seams" come from (if you've built this to be simple and seamless)?

Look out for someone showing off! Someone is showing off rather than thinking of business priorities. Who are the typical culprits? Look out for these things that take away from the simple and seamless and focus on something else.

Graphic designers, server side spaghetti, fancy features, IT folks writing copy
Keep your Balance - technology and aesthetics must both be in place for marketing results.
Accidents will happen. Full steam ahead and you drive off the road. Things that can go wrong - data queries are slow, copy breaks the template, seo mangles the message, cms mangles everything - things will go wrong!
When things go wrong, don't kludge! Better late than lousy. Do it right. Expect to make trade offs and keep priorities straight. You documented all those priorities in the first step, so refer back to that, and you won't end up with a franken-site.

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Jennifer Slegg (jensense) is up next on: Unique Content is a Budget Site's Best Friend

How to be a one or two person show rather than having a whole team.

Is unique content just a buzz phrase?
Never underestimate the value of unique content.
Duplicate content can be filtered out of the se's, causing you to lose referrals and visitors.

Why is it important?
Organic and free search traffic
If it's unique, people will come back to your site
Unique content is cost effective

Sources of unique content?
Do it yourself. This is the least expensive option for webmasters. Need to have writing and editing skills, must either know or research the subject. But if you write it, you know it is unique.

Hiring Writers
There are huge differences in pay scales for quality article writing
Must check that the content you purchase is unique
Make sure the articles' facts are correct

Don't forget to check uniqueness after a couple of months. Some writers will republish content you hired them to write, despite a contract you may have had with them.

Avoid these sources:

Free article sites - most of these will end up on spam sites, and you won't have unique content. Also most of these will be promoting something else.

Unknown submissions - research and check before publishing (these are people who submit content to your site - check them out)

Getting your content indexed well
Use descriptive and unique titles that clearly describes what the article about
When you add new articles to your site, feature them on your home page first to hasten the indexing process
add new articles on a regular basis

Considerations for product pages
when companies supply you with product feeds, don't use their descriptions and specs as these are not unique. rewriting those pages is crucial, and don't just do a find and replace on product name - it all needs to be rewritten

Checking if content is unique
Take a unique phrase from the second half of the article and check in Google for that phrase. Copyscape.com is a good tool also.

Forums as Original Content
Forums provide lots of original contnt quickly, and are great for generating new ideas for articles, and are great for long tail keyword referrals.

Blogs as Original Content
Comments do the same thing as forums for content, including new ideas for blog posts.

Last thoughts - good unique content is a cost effective method of buildingand promoting your site. Be original and not a copycat!

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Byron White, founder of lifetips.com, is up next. They provide clients with content and link popularity.

Focused on great content for last 7 years with lifetips.com. They do this with freelance writers. With what they've learned, they have 30 Tips for Web Writing.

Tips for web writers;
understand the new age expansion of choice
discover the rules for decision making
develop decision making map and process
create new methodology for bying decisions
forge simplicity into the art of content creation
get in tune with the vision
get under the skin of the target audience
inhabit the lives of the target audience
touch the heart of the audience
set the right course
add new meaning and distinction
create new confidence with your readers
create new energy for your sales team
create something that matters
learn to tell stories
great stories introduce great characters
great stories are contagious
great stories teach us to be smart
great stories surprise and delight
(tells a story of how he lost a testicle to cancer and created a golf event called Lost Ball Golf - something like that...)
Understand Web Readers
readers want to be able to find specific things
readers are in a hurry
readers love personilazation - it's all about "me"
readers want advice
readers want up to date, relevant, straightforward content
Map Out Your Readers Needs
readers want credibility, belief and logic
readers want exposure to new worlds
readers want to laugh and cry
readers want intimacy, mystery and bravery
readers want surprise and delight
Develop a Content Haiku
(3 line poem, 17 syllables)
create several different content Haiku
split test the conversions of each style
select the winners and apply rules
Keywords Without Compromise
harvest the rich search keywords
callenge is to pepper keywords without compromising the story
reader must come first

Find the positive story
Instead of saying We are not.....Cross out the negatives and build a story around the positives
Keep It Simple
Understand the Power of Links
link strategy is about validating content - the surrounding text is important - link internally as well.

Recognize the talent of good writers. Gives resources for freelance writers, such as craigslist, etc. Define the priority for the writer. be open to risks - make people talk, make them laugh, create buzz. Demand new data mining such as internal search boxes, and customer service centers to get new copy ideas. Develop a flawless process. Brainstorm, research, clarify call to action, manage the feedback. Agree on a sales funnel - writers can learn from the salespeople and the sales funnel.

He now just skims over a bunch of slides as he tries to give more time to the next presenter. Final - Hire the Pros.

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Heather Lloyd-Martin

Introduced as the pioneer woman of SEO copywriting.

Fun and profit with SEO copywriting best practices

going to give a very short presentation because running out of time...just the meat...

SEO copywriting is the same as conventional copywriting - copy is so convincing that the customer can't help but buy the product being offered. But SEO copywriting is keeping the search engines in mind as well. It is Not just throwing in some keywords into a 250 word text block.

Need to have a keyphrase focus (2 - 3 per page)
first thing to do is make sure your kwd phrase is on the page

Length of copy - you can control this - short stubby copy is not great for ranking. Need about 250 words per page (which is not set in stone). Some can get away with less, some need several pages of text. Splitting this into several pages can focus on several long-tail phrases.

Too many links on a page won't help you convert. Too many links confuses the user.

Titles are highly important. These are your first opportunity for conversion at the search engine results page. They are headlines that need to be tantalizing. Must be unique for each page and should be as compelling as possible for 50-75 characters. But writing good titles is very important.

If you dont have complete control over the content, do as much as you can. Know what to do when. Tweak the title and editing some pages that are NOT critical for conversions. This can be a quick and dirty way of dealing with not having complete control. Tip; try adding headlines and subheadlines and hyperlinks to text.

IT sometimes is the one that handles titles because it's considered code. Don't let that happen. Marketing should work it out with IT to let them include keyphrases in titles.

She repeats that you should rewrite any product descriptions that came from the manufacturerer. Create FAQ and tips pages for the product to add original content. Press releases, newsletters, etc. can work well too. Can help you find new ranking opportunities.

If a competitor is slamming you online, seo copywriting can help you overcome these reputation problems.

summary: smart seo copywriting closes the loop between the engines and your offer, so the right approach is crucial.

Jake Baillie is moderating this panel.

Elisabeth Archambault was first up, her aka is buckworks. She is not anyone's super affiliate. She pays more in taxes then what she earned teaching in a community college. Content for affiliates... Optimizing an affiliate site is not a whole lot different from optimizing a normal site. Good content is critical in affiliate marketing. You must do your home work, keyword research, market research. You need to know SEO. Content gives you something to work with. Site factors includes spiderable, PageRank flow and internal anchor text. Off page factors include inbound links, quality and quantity, anchor text and theme of linking pages. Design your site for accessibility; layouts and labels that make sense to an audible browser reader also tend to please spiders. Good content is a magnet for links. Content allows for easier link dev, more spontaneous links, more offline mentions and more spider food. Content is real info for real people, entertainment works, uniqueness count and quality counts. It is important to find ways to promote your site outside of the search engines. Good content makes this task easier. Often good content gets stolen, copyscape.com can be a huge article, and learn how the DMCA process works. She said it all boils down to targeting.

John Coronella is now up. He quotes the Wikipedia for what is an affiliate, he shortened it and said an affiliate is just a middle man. He shows his wife's typical recent purchase, and how she clicked on an affiliate link to go through there. Affiliate models for the purchase cycle make it go through more channels, i.e. the middle man. He is worried that they will squeeze out the middle people, including affiliates. he explains that online marketing is far from mature. As the market matures, the market will squeeze people out. He shows some inefficiencies in the current market (i.e. from one adsense site to an other). There will be vertical integration like CPA models. Blocking paths through the market with banning multiple affiliate in adwords and quality score updates. Good news is that it is massively inefficient, and there is risk but lots of opportunity. The bad news is it is not going to last. Long term strategy; make the market efficient in a way you can control it. Become the direct navigation with quality content and add value. Give the SE's reason not to cut you out and cut out the rest.

David Rivero from JoeBucks.com is next up. Difference between affiliate programs and affiliate networks. You want to leave out the different layers where the money is getting filtered, go directly to the merchant. Sign up with the affiliate programs that pay the most, someone who you can contact, companies that have a good track record, make sure they have products that sell, 800 numbers, call center, etc. Tried to get paid twice per month, build a relationship with your affiliate, make sure you have different payment methods, and make sure they dont have a minimum requirement. Make sure the affiliate lets you optimize your site, build a brand on your domain, don't just send directly to the affiliate link. Control your exit traffic. Make sure they have multiple payment options for the customer. Be careful where you buy traffic, beware of fraud protection, test the traffic. Test banner networks, email blast, adware traffic and by from the big three PPC engines. Build out product or service review sites. Info about a particular product or service. Compare different products or services. Rate them on a grading scale. Find your niche market. Sign up for multiple affiliate programs.

Matt Tuens from CKMG. He quickly summarizes what everyone said before starting his presentation. Key to success is the depth, breath and variety of your content. This will drive organic ranks, quality traffic and conversions. Super Affiliate secrets... Build your success, run the site like a business, tremendous number of articles and leverage your content. It is common sense, but many affiliates don't do that. You need to invest, strategize, market and brand with your site using content. The more content is better. Make your site a destination site, organic listings and targeted traffic. Encourage linking. Increase conversions. Differentiate your competitors. Fill your site with hundreds of short informational articles, longer detailed articles, landing pages, and make a blog. You want your content to help your visitors through the decision making process. Set up your navigation to help the visitor down the buying path. Get the word out about your site (press releases, etc.), grow every day, be customer centric. Leverage content on other sites, on industry sites, industry blogs and forums.

Link Development and Linking Optimization

Moderated by Greg Niland aka GoodROI. Introduces Rae Hoffman, who will talk about “Delegating Link Development.” Quality link building takes time, so how to get them without doing it yourself. Is speaking extremely fast… outsourcing link development can take on a variety of forms, including link exchange, triangular, etc. The right link firm can do good things, but the wrong one can cause irreparable damage. Suggests using highly recommended firms from friends and colleagues, recommended firms that appear at conferences, and last resort is jump in the water and see if sink or swim. Makes sure that you research choices very well…ask for references and actually talk to past clients, look at the companies own backlinks…lots of companies will say that they focus on clients and not their own site, but there should still be at least some decent links. Link dev has become actual marketing, no longer just sending out a templated email. Look at what factors they consider when evaluating link partners? Do they only focus on PR? Do they use automated programs? What is the cost per link or per hour? (goes over a long list of general questions at about a million miles and hour…good questions and I’ll try to get them later…)

Remember that you are who you hire…so be careful. Hiring and training a link dev is not a light task. Her experience is that the number of quality links from an in-house dev is greater than outsourcing, in most cases. Goes over a list of questions to ask when interviewing link developers. Asks questions that try to determine how they use the Internet/how well they know it. I.e.: what is your favorite SE? Do you know what a link is? (sometimes people overcomplicate these) Do you use IM? Do you use html? What email client do you use and why? (If they know what that means, then you probably have someone who is pretty Internet savvy. Ask them to do a product search for something they can buy. Through trial and errors, it is easier to train someone with Internet experience than a “marketing person that can’t check their email.” Give s a good overview of things to be included in your link dev manual, including: diff types of links. Tracking competitor backlinks info (this is the best thing you can teach – knowing competitor links are very effective. Links to own articles. A glossary of terms and definitions. Common link myths. A spreadsheet template for tracking. Example email templates and teach them how to customize them. A clear listing of expectations (her link developers have always worked on quotas). Set realistic expectations. Links to access SEO tools that are valuable, and make sure you give them a time for QA since they have had time to look over the manual.

Tasking a link developer…remember that if you choose to make a link dev as independent as possible, let them train on “less important” sites…let them tool around in the station wagon but keep a careful eye when driving the Porsche.” When evaluating performance: judge how the links are working towards gaining rankings. Outsourcing versus in-house will depend on a variety of factors…expectations of quality, ability to house employees, the value of the search rankings versus the cost, whether you have expertise to train and developer link manners, and whether you have the time. If you do not have time, consider outsourcing, but remember to get referrals, as mentioned earlier…and also task them in detail until they get their “link developer license.” Greg thanks her and jokes about how she crammed 30 minutes of info into 10 minutes.

Joel Lesser from linksmanager.com. He will speak about link exchange, aka reciprocal linking. Talks about the tarnished image of link exchange. The fact is most marketing methods have received bad press at one time or another. The reason for this bad press is due to “full duplex services” which are linking schemes which afford no editorial discretion on making links and create problems for SE’s. When abused, it has been frowned upon. Avoid sites that “guarantee” links. Asks if no reciprocal links in the WWW is a realistic picture? It is a give and take world, and most websites will not link to another site without money or and exchange. Link exchanges facilitate relevant knowledge transfer.

Compelling reason to use LE: provides relevant traffic independent of SE’s. Extremely cost efficient. Relevant links may increase performance in SE’s. Links provide users with knowledge gateways to alternative information. How to ID potential link partners: Look for sites that have an unusual amount of high quality content, sites that link to other high quality sites. Real world challenges: time consuming; small marketing budget; big business versus small entrepreneur – link exchange levels the playing field. Proper strategy: link to and obtain links from sites that benefit end users experience. Relevant links are typically obtained slowly (aka “naturally”) so avoid sudden high volume. Always maintain editorial discretions. Always use link exchange forms when available. Make linking decisions for the end users, not for the search engines. Link with related businesses that you already have an established relationship with.

He recommends watching out for link exchange misinformation such as the idea that listing a title and description does not work. Shows two quotes from Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny, and states that they have never come out and said that you should not use link exchanges. Talks about Google’s 2003 patent “Information Retrieval base don historical data.” And shows how they mentioned that you should gain links naturally. Wrap up: maintain editorial discretion. Keep “natural volume,” which he defines as one link one day, none for a few days, and then maybe a dozen in the next week, and so forth. Update content regularly – webmasters will not link to a junk site. Publish links even if not proactively looking…links beget links! Alternate publishing methods such as linking within content, sidebars, Linklets, and Linkblogs. Provide a link request form on your website to make it easy.

Don’ts: require links to be placed on specific page with specific PageRank. If not sure that user experience is benefited, don’t do it. Be careful which third parties are used to manage campaign. Remember that links allow you to have another source of traffic than Ses. Keep in mind that your competition is likely exchanging links. Another good thing is that link exchanges avoid click-fraud concerns. Remember that linking is the foundation of what makes the web a web.

Roger Montti (aka Martinibuster), VP of verticals at BOTW.org. Will talk about alternative link building strategies for most websites including from corporate to affiliates. Advertising and link buys: what should you look for? Relevance, no mention of PageRank in the sales process. No ads for non-relevant sites, and a year long purchase. He prefers smaller magazine sites that offer banners, even without the ext links, In some case, these small magazines give you a link for as little as $60 a year. How to find the opportunities? Use Ses with search queries like: [“advertise with us” –cpm] [“rate card” –cpm advertising] [allintitle:sponsors –cpm site:.org keyword].

Buying websites. This is also a good way to build links. Look for: inactive or underperforming websites. Search for: [“temporarily down for maintenance”] [allintitle: “site is offline”] Site of the month-type pages. Many sites will reward good sites with links that are free. Search for: [“site of the month” +keyword] . Look for site of the day and site of the week also. These are especially ideal if dedicated to a niche. Newsletters. He feels that these are an underutilized method of finding backlinks. Prices vary, and make sure that they are archived, unless they are at least sending good quality converting traffic. Searches: [“newsletter keyword sponsors”] [newsletter “advertising rates” keyword]. Sponsorships can also be good. Look for industry associations, charity groups. Sample searches to find them: [keyword sponsors site.org] Research competitor backlinks suing Y! Site Explorer. Look for Dot EDU job fairs and hope to get a link for participating. He emphasizes that he rarely researches links on G, mostly using Y!

Proxy sites: cultivate leads with informational websites. Create inbound links with satellite sites. Take advantage of the power of blogging through thoughtful comments, trackbacks, blogrolls, and even DMOZ listings. YouTube and Google Video…shows an example of getting link-backs from a PR5 page within YouTube. Also shows how to add your link to a Google Video. Sowed hoe expertvillage.com had over 1600 backlinks from Google Video alone. Covers other methods such as selling software. He is surprised that many people forget the Pad File which allows for submissions to software directories. What happens is that not only your site will show up, but other listings from favorable software directories will also show up for your keyword phrase. Charity site design…he isn’t that hot on this any more because it might not pass PR due to possibly being deprecated. If it is an org in your vertical space, then it makes more sense.

Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.com was up first. He shows a slide of news search, vertical search, local, blog and social search, as they are used more and more by agencies and marketers. MarketingSherpa tested the tactic known as SEO PR. They gave the task to his son, the college intern, to create an optimize versus not optimize release, and test it on different news service engines. That was the test. They made mistakes; optimized for one word, he also optimized for the singular version of plural releases (so he changed the test cases). the results turned out that the unoptimized released, ranked higher than the unoptimized. The publicity generated 8 times more visitors than the 2 releases themselves. The SherpaStore.com's unique visitors were 10.5% higher. The blog generated 30x more visitors than the article. Using the most popular keyword is not always the best strategy. Press and blog mentions can generate traffic also. It is your news that generates coverage. Do not be surprised if the traffic comes from blogs than news articles.

Amanda Walington from SearchingForProfit.com RSS can be seen in many places, including web sites, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, etc. Build your feeds right from the start... How many feeds are appropriate? How much content is needed to keep the feed fresh and attractive (she likes full content feeds). How much of each content should be included in the feed? Updating feeds, tracking stats of feeds. RSS is not just for blogs, affiliate communication, media and commercial distribution, syndicating content, new product announcements, job openings, press rooms, investors, etc. Who is using feeds creatively? She shows titlist.com. Target.com is using it. Optimize your feeds, use keywords, write descriptions as if your are writing it for a directory, use full paths on links, each feed should have a keyword theme, use images, etc. She explains you need to pay attention to details of the feed spec. Blog optimization: optimize the templates, use the plugins, write powerful keyword rich posts, socialize your blog, use tags and clouds, submit to blog search engines and make it easy to subscribe. SEO Tips for Podcasts; optimize the audio file, building landing pages, build accurate RSS, submit broadly, watch for changes. SEO Tips for Video; fill out all the info, use tags consistently, make sure that your feeds work if you include video back into your site, submit broadly, and create landing pages. MySpace, it is all about social networking, she shows examples of MySpace profiles. Second Life, when one life is not enough (very interesting), she shows optimization methods for second life.

Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl is now up. He starts with a story. The self-perpetuating buzz, links and traffic snowball. Link baiting via Netscape and Digg. Some link baiting will bomb. No matter how good your link bait is, it may fail. Digg is now in the top 100 sites, and these guys are thought leaders, he says (some may argue with that). You need about 30 - 50 votes within a 24 hour period to make it to the home page. Your title is incredibly important. After that, the content in the click through is important or else you will drop. Make sure you add friends on Digg. Vote on your friends stuff. Don't submit your own stories, ask your friends to submit it for you, and then make that push. Don't bash Steven Colbert, dont attempt to sell to diggers and dont post your own release. He said, one oh his stories he spent 3 days writing, got over a 1,000 diggs but over 1,500 links - which is huge. Netscape comes from the bottom up. You need less friends to help you out there. Smaller site but still pretty good. Top 6 quality indicator of link value are the theme value, power source, outbound links and so on. Social media for traffic include del.ico.us, technorarti, reddit, and stumbleupon. Del.ico.us you need about 30 bookmarks within 24 hours. With Technorarti use one or two very specific phrases and also one generic. Reddit is a cross between digg and del.iou.us. StumbleUpon is kinda random he said, it is a toolbar you download. Social media for reputation, based on Graywolf's post. You want your top 10 results for your name to all be positive. He shows LinkedIn also, then Naymz.com (they give you a free PPC listing), squido and technorati claim your blog.

Last up is Greg Hartnett from Best of Web. He does not have a PPT, which is ok. He explains it is import to submit to all popular directories but he wanted to present alternatives. He explains that you need to visualize your site a node on the net, part of something bigger. He loves Flickr, the photo sharing site. You can drive some interesting "juices" to your site from Flickr. He recommends joining Flickr groups, adding notes, and tags, and keywords. He shows a Google Video he uploaded of his son in a hockey fight, his son is so young, the move is JR hockey fight (so cute). The video was viewed almost a million times on various sites. He said that commenting on blogs in a meaningful and productive manner, you can piggy back on the blog's traffic. StumleUpon has an advertising product, that he uses and it drives nice traffic he said. You can not trick people into this...

SEO and Big Search

Moderated by Joe Morin. He welcomes everyone to Pubcon, says that it is officially the largest conference in their history.

Melanie Mitchell from AOL. Starts with a review of the “old AOL” versus the new AOL. Said it was a good 20 year ride. With BB, the writing was on the wall: change or die. Recently, their response was to give it all away. Trying to generate more of an audience on the web. Needs to gather new audience and grow revenues in advertising. Simply put, they have changed their entire business model. This includes SEO for their goals, since it is so important to their new strategy. Feels they will win with deeper content in longer tail of search. They want to market the plays, and not the theatre (AOL). They generate revenue through advertising and search and commerce by allowing people to navigate through their new areas.

One of the first things they needed to do was to establish an organization to succeed at SEO. They created channel leads for multiple areas, accountable for SEO. Created a core SEO group working towards common goals. First looked at indexing and rankings to determine problem areas. Needed to allocate resources from other areas of the business in order to support. ID’d issues and prioritized channels to support the program.

Next, they need to optimize assets. Increase number of indexed pages. Raised quality of rankings of AOL pages. Optimize existing pages to increase presence. Next, they needed to track metrics. By implementing consistent metrics with a consistent methodology, they were able to create an SEO dashboard to communicate results across the company. They need to track PV’s, search referrals, visits, and financial seo goals. Lastly, they needed to increase consistency of the SEO. They defined SEO-compliance standards and developed training. They drive a consistent approach to SEO strategy for products and programming. SEO needs to be a part of the company’s DNA.

They created a workflow which allowed for the requirements to be forwarded to the unified team and then onto the project teams, programming teams and other stakeholders. For paid search efforts, it is more centralized than SEO because they want to look at efforts across the company. They need to understand the quality of their traffic, recirculation, and lifetime value, and understand it better in order to generate revenue. They use a reporting system that provides tracking value, and then manage bids based on research. Once they ID the value of the visit they can define CPC and break even points and set daily budgets. Lastly, how do they work with partners, and how do they fit into the equation. Is it working? Yes. They continue to see growth wit the majority of traffic coming from non-members. Q3 results showed a 46% increase in revenue from paid search. She finished with a couple of short case studies which showed AOL sports having a 60% increase in traffic from organic search. This translated to 130% increase in page views from organic search. Finishes with a funny slide of a mockup NY Times cover saying “AOL is really serious.” (This answered the question “how do you know we are serious.?” (laughs)

Dave Roth, Director of SEM for Yahoo! Starts by thanking AOL for all the ideas they gave them for their new home page (laughs). He will focus more on organic search, although like Melanie he focuses on both paid and organic. Why does Yahoo! do search marketing. Made some jokes about is name and quitting “The Band” and hating Sammy Haggar. Is “an agency guy from way back.” Yahoo! has been doing SEM for some time. They need a central perspective to deal with Efficiencies, best practices, and Scale (3 billion page views a day). Needed to ask, like a lot of big companies, “why don’t we rank for a term like “search engine?” Feels that this is our time, regarding those who do SEO/SEM for a living. He advises to have fun if you have time. (Laughs)

Now, everyone knows that SEM is the best way to acquire customers, even if you are an SE. Refers to it as the holy trinity of performance marketing: Paid, SEO, and Affiliate. Y advertises on millions of keywords. Y! rolled out a central SEO program across all business units. Y has a corporate affiliate marketing program that works closely with paid. Lists a variety of areas across the org that participates in search marketing. Lots of different business models in play: subscriptions, conversion, transactional, lead generation, CPM revenue. God thing is that it’s just marketing, and we need to come up with one method to measure. For example, what is the lifetime value of a conversion? What is the net present value (NPV) of that lifetime revenue stream? What is an acceptable profit margin on NPV? Created a monthly “scorecard” across business units. Good news is that this scorecard works for SEO too. They can compare organic referral value versus paid, analyze differences in users behavior, and adjust accordingly. Offers some examples like what is branded versus non-branded value, and how they can track progress of how much of the opportunity can they realize?

Central group provides resources and expertise; training and education; standards and best practices; tools and technology; and acts as a product release gateway. The business units and properties needs to assign points of contact per property; coordinate a baseline SEO audit; build and execute the SEO plan; use their own scorecard metrics and related actions, and evangelize ongoing SEO implementation. This is important because you have to get it into everyone’s head that SEO is important. culture must be preserved and cultivated even through employee turnover. In terms of centralizing versus de-centralizing…business owners need to know their business. SEM’s know search. They have to manage the tradeoffs and manage against a single standard. Also important to allow budget mobility, in order to “keep people honest.” They struggled on “build versus buy.” They found that you want to build to core business, and buy the rest. Finishes with “it’s just marketing…no voodoo involved. They do SEM just like everyone else, but on a larger scale. SEO is mostly about training and trying. It is a game of tradeoffs…finishes with “I’m hiring!” (laughs)

Adam Lasnik from Google. Introduced by Joe as “works with some guy named Matt.” (laughs). He introduces himself as Google’s “Search Evangelist.” Will discuss what happens when “Google SEO’s Itself. fancy SEO tricks G has up it’s sleeve: (Page intentionally left blank). (laughs) When G sneezes, people notice. Sometimes this isn’t good, but others times it is. SNACC attack: Speed, Navigability, Accessibility, Clarity and Comfort. First: “speed really really counts.” People will notice and care if there is even a delay of a half second. Has two component: throughput (how fast can it be sent) and latency (how long until after someone clicks link until something happens. Navigability: where am I and how did I get here? Users should know where they are going. Anchor text is important…important for SEO and important for users. It is about the users (great he just used up two of the main points I’ll be presenting later today). You should be able to see the URL at the top, for example. AJAX does not allow bookmarking, for example. Back button should always go back…no two links on the page should link to the same thing.

Accessibility: need reasonable URLs, useful ALT Tags, and accessible search. He is the first to admit that google has it’s own problems with sometimes subdomains sometimes subfolders. They recently introduced audio capchtas, which can help with SEO. Feels that using these will lead to more links from blind people, for example. Clarity: makes links easy to find. Comfort: text easy to read. Black text is never a loser…pretty boring maybe but easy to read and appreciated by users. If you can’t read it or easily copy text, users may not come back. Also suggests that italics should be avoided, since they can be hard to read. Consistency: routine can be rewarded. Make sure that if you have notes, you print them out (talking about his presentation…laughs). Use consistency in fonts and colors.

Some of the prior speakers spoke about how they do SEO. At Google: what do we do? The answer is not much and I don’t do it. (laughs). They don’t worry about PageRank. They have user interface people that are fabulous and work with people across organization to make content more accessible, usable and intuitive. What about real SEM? Integration is being worked on, and content is being updated, for example tree like structure of Gmail. They try to keep pages simply, focusing more on text and “whiz bang” type of stuff. Use the same domain, for example “webhost.com” uses separate URL for “webhostsupport.com.” Having more content in one domain will serve better than lots of different domains. This also is better for user because it reduces the chances of Phishing and makes your site safer. For example if you use webhostrebates.com. web host specials.com, pretty soon phishers will pick up on this and try to get data from your clients.

Use “smart AJAX and Flash” to only support the other content on the page. Also, use 301’s…they once bought the website goggle.com and forgot to 301 it. He added during QA that 301’s will transfer link juice as long as you are linking from/to equivalent content. Sometimes we are not perfect, and sometimes we “cheat” by adding additional topics or content on a page simply to plug its own products. Conclusion: “yes, it really does come down to making the user happy.” “Your rankings will improve, your love life will improve, and you will make it on time for breakfast.”

Attend the next Pubcon or come out for the last three days and get all the QA.

A bit late to this panel, got caught talking outside in the lobby. Niall Kennedy is up on the stage, he is currently talking about wikipedia. He is now explaining web feeds as alternates. They are highly structured, discovery by Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and others. the user-facing in al modern browsers (he shows examples). He quickly goes through how to create a feed. The base vocabularies for RSS, include ATPM, IETF RFC or RSS 2.0. Extended vocabs; dubmin core meta data, comments, photo, audio, video, opensearch, creative commons, geo, item pricing, weather report, etc. You do not want to create a confusion, you need to use a structure and format that is standard. Popular parsing libs include python's universal feed parser, php's magpie, java's rome, perl's xml:rss and more. After you publish, you want to make sure to ping the engines. Always check your feeds for errors, validate it with feedvalidator.org. Also make sure to "claim your feed" in Technorati, in Google Sitemap, and in Yahoo! Site Explorer. Make sure to subscribe to your feed, populate the subscription search index, tag, add notes, view states and more. Watch out for "masked links" such as with feedburner, they now enable 302s. Watch out for false updates, such as Topix.net. Avoid reinvention, digg did this, and they made a digg:category name space. He then runs through some final things really quickly, nothing that crazy because most blog software apps handle this stuff automatically.

Rick Klau from FeedBurner. He gives the "who we are slide" you can learn about them at feedburner.com, they do rock, I use them. He shows a slop of feeds they manage, and you see the slope rocketing up. He explains that feeds are now not just about blog consumption but it is growing into podcasts, video blogs, print, online, news, retail, e-commerce, and web services. He explains the new IE7 and Firefox 2, then the social services like Digg, and Google Reader's shared posts, he shows TechMeme, FeedDemon and more. He shows of a new service named edgeio, a distributed classified service. He shows off sphere (I dislike that service, but maybe they changed since I reviewed it months ago). Full text vs. partial, the more content in the feed, the more these services can give back to you. Links matter. He then talks about "FeedFlare" which enables you to add functionality to your feeds, by leveraging 3rd part APIs. Examples include a digg this link, where it shows digged stories.

Owen Byrne the co-founder of Digg.com. The idea was user driven news. Went live on Dec. 1, 2004. They grew about 20% a month for the first few months. Paris Hilton hack on Feb. 2005 was a huge article that got digged and got them a ton of awareness. The server was crawling, load factor was at 100%, it took him 20 minutes just to login via SSH. Since then it took off. July 2005 they got some seed money and went from one server to three, they hired a designer, they added some cool features, added diggspy - that was version two. In June 2006, version 3.0 was released, they hired a DBA, finance people, got an office. It is a democratic process, no editors. Users are extremely vocal and motivated. They vote down spam, control home page, top stories are what are important to users. Passionate users - really passionate. They have over a 1/2M register users, 4,000+ stories submitted stories daily... They want to be a slashdot killer, and they sorta have done that, he said. There is a process for multiple developers, technical and management issues, avoid premature optimization, cache, cache and more cache. Hardware is cheap, but downtime is not. Lots of servers - spares, monitoring, testing and developing. They introduced a Digg API.

Chris Tolles from Topix.net. The team behind Topix created the ODP. He explains how it works, how many feeds they look at, etc. You can interact with the news on the Topix site by geographic location, http://www.topix.net/forum/geo. Topix provides fresh content for your site, local and topical content. Fresh content from your site, pull instead of push, rss feeds to increase distribution of content.

Guy Kawasaki from Garage Technology Ventures, worked at Apple in the past. He makes fun of PC's and then begins his keynote. He worked at Apple in the mid 90s and he was responsible for convincing companies to write software for the Mac. He is pretty funny and made a ton of jokes... Wow, he nailed Microsoft, love this guy. He explains he have done things wrong, many things wrong, in his life time. He recently started blogging, he loves blogging, and he spends about 4 hours per day blogging. He then asks the audience for help ranking higher in Technorati.

Are of Innovation:

(1) Make meaning... Make people more creative and more productive. End something bad (MSDOS) and make something more good. VCs are looking for people who want to make meaning... If you start your company to make money, then you will attract the wrong type of people.

(2) Make a mantra, innovators need to make a guiding light that always stays consistent. It needs to be two or three words about why you exist. MBAs learn that you have to create a mission statement. You always have to make your mission statement offsite for two days and a really expensive offsite location. He describes that making a mission statement is a lot like making a baby, you need to push it out. There was joking that lead up to that line. He shows a bland mission statement from Wendy's that says, they provide superior quality through leadership, innovation and partnerships. The manta of Wendy's should by "healthy fast food." Nike, "authentic athletic performance." FedEx says "Peace of Mind." eBay says "Democratize commerce." Forget the mission statement, it is about mantras.

(3) Jump to the next curve. Creating the next curve, not getting to it. He explains the Ice industry, you had ice harvesters, then you have ice factories and then ice machines. Not one of the harvesters moved to the next curve, they just tried improving their own business. Like, innovating through making Arial in five new font sizes.

(4) Roll the DICEE. People who keynote say, "create a great product." He makes fun of that, because who doesn't want to create a great product. Instead, make a deep product. He showed a deep product, a sandal that is a sandal and also opens beer bottles. He shows a flashlight that takes multiple sized batteries. Completeness, he shows a Lexus - the service, the pre-sales, after sales, all the support around it. Elegant; the nano is an example. Emotive, like the harley davidson.

(5) "Don't worry, be crappy." Technology works, "we ship and then we test." He says, welcome to Vista. She revolutionary stuff with elements that don't work, or else you wont ship.

(6) Polarize people. Two people who quite a PhD program to build a program that the two people will want to use themselves. That means some people will love it and some people will hate it. Apple, Harely Davidson, TiVo (he has four TiVos), Toyota Sian car.

(7) Let a hundred flowers blossom. The start of innovation, sometimes people who you did not anticipate, will buy your product or use your service. Something is wrong. He said don't panic, take the money. Go to your current customers and sell them more.

(8) Churn, baby, churn. It is not OK to ship bad stuff and keep it that way. You must keep improving and not stopping. To be an innovator, you need to be in denial. As soon as you ship, you need to listen to people, as they complain. But before that, you need to be in denial about "it can't be done." Version 1 to version 2.

(9) Niche thyself. He makes fun of the graph that shows a vertical access with "ability to provide unique product or service" and on the horizontal is "value to the customer." Bottom left corner is "Dotcom," right side and bottom is "price," and top left is "stupid," finally top right corner is "high and to the right." An example of that corner is Fandango.

(10) Follow the 10/20/30 rule of powerpoint presentations. Pitch. 10 slides is a ppt is the best number. Give the 10 slides in 20 minutes. Best font size is 30 points. Smaller than that means you are going to be reading your slides and that is bad.

(11) Don't let the bozos grind you down. If someone with a lot of money tells you it can't be done, don't listen. He gave so many examples. Even one where he was a bozo himself.

Excellent Keynote!

I walk down from the conference hotel across the street to the conference center. As I am slowly lifted via the escalator up to the conference area, I see this line forming. The line must have been hundreds of people long and I have no idea how they would register all those people within 30 minutes. Lucky me, I am on the speaker list, so I bypassed the line, and just waited about 5 minutes to get my badge. Why is it taking so long to register people? My guess, it has to do with only having three people man the stations, requiring them to print out badges on label printers and then stick them onto a conference badge, and assemble the badge there. Also they do not have a line for A-K, L - N, etc... it is just one line for normal attendees and one line for press, speakers, exhibitors and staff. I hope it all works out, because there is now 4 minutes until launch off and the room is only 25% filled.

Just had a quick chat with Brett, he said a ton of people just registered on site, which didn't help the issue of running late. We probably won't start until 9:15 here, and push all the other sessions back. But Brett gave out the wireless access code to everyone, sponsored by Ask.com. So some people are now happy. Guy Kawasaki just snapped of a picture of me, as he scans the conference room with his camera.

Brett is up speaking at 9:05, welcoming people, saying the conference is almost double of what it was last year. He explains that he started WebmasterWorld in 1999, and started back with forums in 1984 or so. He thanked the sponsors. He said most parties are private, but go to your reps and ask them.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread has tips on what things to look for when purchasing links. I thought I pull out 10 of them to make a top ten list:

1. Relevancy to your page
2. Alexa ranking
3. Site popularity in niche
4. PageRank
5. Site health in search engines
6. Location of links on page
7. Site rankings
8. Do they look bought?
9. Are your links useful?
10. Number of other links on that page

The list is in no order, just some highlights from the WebmasterWorld thread.

Today, we will be covering the WebmasterWorld PubCon conference. I will try to get some hot forum threads up as well, time permitting.

Check out our WebmasterWorld PubCon 2006 Coverage Schedule.