November 15, 2006 Archives

Tom Hughes from Sentient Services was up first. Brand positioning research presentation. While we are delivery web site performance, we are also delivering brand performance. Why should I care about brand experience? The web site is the front line for delivering the brand experience. It matters because optimal brand positioning can bring better positioning. It increases efficiency and consistency of marcom. It gets everyone on the same page. It drives strategy for SEO and it connects web site efforts to sustainable business performance. We need to measure what we can leverage.... Our strengths versus key competitors. What customers want from us. Research tools include 2ndary tools as syndicated studies and market data, primary research such as qualitative and quantitative. What can we do ourselves and what is the best left to experts? DIY: talk to customers, talk to employees, gather secondary research info. Get help with questionnaire design and analysis and interpretation of data. A useful positioning and messaging template: start with the position itself (why are you compelling different), then the identity (what business are you in?), then differentiation, the significance, and then the messaging support around all of that, finally emotional support. How do you use this info now? Deliver this experience on the home page. Incorporate pictures or taglines on site pages that resonate brand positioning. Define and audit search terms. Launch banner ad campaigns that resonate the brand positioning (brand, product and customer segment levels). He then gave a case study on Dell (ill omit it here, I am so tired). The formula for sustainable success is to have a line of sight on optimal brand position, use it to guide and deliver...

Gordon Hotchkiss from Enquiro was up next. Why is research important in search? Search marketing requires five things to work; you need to get the right message, right person, right place and right time, the right experience. He showed examples of PPC results... The golden triangle is not that simple, it depends on intent. Get into your customers mind. You need to research your customers to get the intent. Then you develop personas. He then gave examples, yes I am still tired. Intent should impact SERP scanning behavior. Researcher type queries should focus more on organic ads, but purchase type queries should focus more on sponsored listings. They tested this theory. Purchasers are more likely to look at sponsored results, more top heavy he said. Researchers also look at the top but concentrate more so on the bottom set (organic results) more than purchases. They also saw much heavier CTR on organic results for researcher type searchers. When they clicked through, he showed eye tracking maps of the landing page. Research group reads the whole page, but the purchases just looks for one link, a link to buy.

Glenn Alsup from Viewmark is now up. The area between the user and the object, showing a picture of a roulette wheel. How are people interacting with the game. There is a big difference between qualitative and quantitative data. User research prep; situation and background, then goals and objectives, and develop use cases. Then come the tactics, including, strategic (surveys and focus groups), models (observations, one on one and usability) and deployment (interviews). He then gives a case study on Agilent, yes, still tired, sorry. Traditional lab testing includes, a facilitator, observers and the participant. He also talks about remote usability, testing usability remotely.

Final one up is Dana Todd about SEMPO from SiteLab. She said she will be brief!!! SEMPO is in their 3rd year of tracking industry trends. They test over 100 data points. Primary interest in sizing market, pricing shifts, resource allocation, product demand, industry issues, click fraud, etc. The interesting data points from 2005, is that SEO has incredibly strong demand as an SEM tactic. SEM management is migrating in house. Click price elasticity is nearly capped out. Awareness and concern about click fraud is growing. All data points from 2005. Organic SEO most popular of SEM programs with advertisers respondents; 4 of 5 advertiser respondents engage in organic SEO, more than 76% engage in paid placement, and 2 of 5 advertisers engage in paid inclusion. Paid placement and organic SEO were offered by the vast majority of agency respondents, dollars are less in SEO then PPC. Majority of 2006 organic SEO spending will be managed in house, not outsourced to agencies. Most advertiser respondents could still tolerate further price increases at moderate levels. Agencies exhibit growing concern over click fraud. They have a new SEMPO survey, check it out at sempo.org.

Amanda Watlington was up first. The typical causes of duplicate content include many. Tools to detect dup content include your ability to search, take content of 10 words and search on it, also see cyberspyder or webbug, domain ownership info with whois to contact them. Multiple domains is a cause, it occurs when someone buys a domain, and other reasons as to why people have multiple domains... 2004, the monkbiz.com site acquired monkeybusiness.com, both domains are aliases to each other. Once you detect the issue, repair it with 301s, etc. An other cause of dup content is when you redesign your site, for example you change URL structure, or when you change from html to php, etc. She then gave an example. If you see more pages on the engine then in the site, that is a sign of dup content issues. You can 301 or 404 those pages. An other cause are content management systems, happens with e-commerce sites, also sites that have PPC campaigns, she shows examples as ways to get to the same product with two different URLs. Detect the issue, by seeing how the URLs look for products in multiple sections. Repair it by rearchitecture your URLs. She showed some examples... Landing page pages can have many URLs, with same content. You can 301 some of them or use a robots.txt exclusion protocol to tell spiders not to crawl. An other issue is with content syndication and scraping issues and she shows examples (lots of affiliates have this issue).

Bill Slawski is up ready to talk about dup content. He explains the fundamental issue is that the search engine wants on copy of the content, so which one do they choose. He talked about a site that had 3,500 pages, that had 95,000 pages indexed in Google. He noticed some weird patterns. He saw widgets that expanded and collapsed menus, each with different URLs, but the same content. They replaced the widgets with crawl-able JavaScript functions. The dup content dropped down. Dup content issue #1; reusing manufacturers product description is a common issue. Alternative print pages is issue #2, and there are ways around it. Issue #3 is that rss feeds are syndicated quickly, so you need to become the authoritative source. #4 are canonicalization issues. #5 is session IDs. #5 are multiple data variables. #7, pages with content that are just too similar (page titles, etc.). #8 copyright infringement can be an issue. #9 same pages on subdomains and different ltds. #10, article syndication may be an issue. #11 are mirrored sites. There is a white paper named DUST, Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text. It discusses ways identify dup content and how they may handle it. In the paper they use the word "dustbuster." The limitation of the DUST paper is that it doesnt detail which pages are kept and which are discarded. Collapsing Equivalent Results is MSN's patent app uses a query independent ranking component, a result analysis component, a navigational model selection mechanism, and more. He shows some results analysis factors such as extensions like the .com might be preferred over the .net, or shorter URLS may be better, or less redirects is better, and so on. It does not mean Microsoft is doing it, it is just a patent app. Searcher and site location or language may be a factor. Obviously, popularity may have an impact. Click throughs may be tracked also.

Tim Converse from Yahoo! he said he spends his days fighting off black hats. How do you spell a short version of duplicate. Dupe? Dup? Doop? etc. Why do search engines care about duplication? User experience, and they dont want to show the same content over and over again for the same query. An other issue is if they only crawl the dup content, they wont have any differentiate with other content (but this is less of an issue). The most important thing is to show the content of the originating source. Where does Yahoo! get rid of dups? At every point in the pipeline, including crawl time, index time, and query time, they prefer to remove dups at the time of the query. They try to limit two urls per host in the serps. Why does Yahoo! ever want to keep a duplicate page? Historically, they didnt want to, because of hard drive costs. If you are looking for news on a specific site, you want to show dup there, some times. They also want to show regional preferences. Also two docs may be similar but not exactly the same. Also, to have redundancy, just in case one site goes down. A legitimate reason to duplicate includes, alternate document formats, legitimate syndication, multiple languages and partial duup pages from boiler plate (nav, disclaimers, etc.). Accidental duplication includes session IDs, soft 404s (no 404 status code) these types are not abusive but can cause issues. Dodgy duplication includes replicating content over multiple domains unnecessarily, "aggregation" of content found elsewhere on the web," indenticla content repeated with minimal value. Others include scraper spammers, weaving/stitching (mix and match content), bulk cross domain apps, bulk dup with small changes. How can you help Yahoo with this issue is by avoiding bulk dup of your content over multiple domains, use the robots.txt to block bots, avoid accidental proliferation of dup content (session IDs, 404s, etc.), avoid dup of sites across many domains and when importing content from elsewhere ask do you own it and are you adding value.

Brian White from Google is last up, he was in the forums once, he works with Matt Cutts, in that group. He spotted on the other panelists. He said he will go quickly over stuf. Types of dup include multiple URLs going to same page, similar content on different pages, syndicated content, manufacturers' databases, printable pages, different languages or countries, different domains and scraped content. How do search engines handle this? they detect dup content throughout the pipeline like Yahoo! The goal is to serve one version of the content in the search results. What can you do to help? Use robots.txt, use 301s, block printable versions, Anchors (#) do not cause problems, minimize boilerplate, if two pages are really similar do you need both?, if you're importing a product database, create your own content. Same content in multiple languages are not dups, and geo tlds are not also. If you syndicate content from others, make sure to include an absolute link to the origin. Scrapers are working on it, let Google know at www.google.com/dmca.html, and more info on bots that are spoofing Google at google webmaster central blog at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-verify-googlebot.html

Purchasing Links

Moderated by Jake Baillie, he quickly introduces Andy.

Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads, and also “review ME” which launched last week. First most critical factor when looking at a link buy is the theme of the site. Theme’s are generally associated with the domain name, and he recommends looking at the site as a whole. The site will be associated with certain neighborhoods, and you want to make sure the site is the right theme. PageRank is often the most popular way of estimating the value of the link. Problem is that what Google shows you in the toolbar is not in sync with what is actually happening. So this is really not a solid metric, but a good “very quick brute force check” to determine what kind of juice it may have. He recommends doing a link search on Yahoo! Site Explorer to see who is linking to them. If they have authoritative sites linking to them, then it is good. Everything is about “Trust,” and there is no tool to really check a site’s trust. You have to have your own methodology for this, and generally for him it comes down to the neighborhood. If .gov’s, .edu’s and lots of authoritative sites are linking to them then they are probably trusted somewhat.

Third thin he looks for is Traffic. The reason for this is that it is hard to judge what kind of organic juice nay particular link is giving to you. If you are doing link buys also based on traffic, the ROI will come from the actual conversions, and SEO value would be “gravy.” Location is another hot topic. He is talking about the location of the link on the page, if it is in a footer then it will be unlikely to be seen. The best place is to be within the content…people are generally pretty blind to sidebars. He feels that SE’s are trying to devalue links that are outside of the editorial area. He also feels you should “trust but verify.” When you are buying links, eventually you will find people trying to scam you. View the page source and the actual code of the link. Want to see a “plain old-fashioned HTML link.” If within JavaScript, SE’s will unlikely follow. If there is a tag, you are not getting juice either.

Measuring results: very hard to do this. It is hard to measure ROI for SEO expenditures individually. Look at Traffic logs. What kind of traffic are you getting from the links? What would it cost you to replace that in terms of CPC? Look for search engine ranking…are you ranking higher on Google three months later? If not, the link probably isn’t helping you. There is no good way around the problem of trying to figure out which 30 of 1000 links are the ones that are helping you (paraphrased). Wrapping up: when buying links, think as naturally as possible. Acquire links over time, etc…

John Lessnau from Linkadage (sp?). He says there is no such thing as a free link. You can pay, trade, get one for a favor, or get links to great content or tools that cost a lot of money to develop. He started by relating the TV show “Survivorman,” saying that some webmasters need to be able to get a lot of links with few resources. So “What would Survivorman do to get links?” One thing that a new webmaster has is time. At ;east there is time to spend on researching competition, and to gain knowledge from seminars like this and by talking to other people.

He look at about 300K .net and .com domains and looked at how many were various PageRanks. He threw out the 210K that had 0 PR. Found almost no PR 9’s, only 18 PR 8’s (.027% of all sites. The majority of page had 1, 2, or 3 (23.5%, 27.4%, and 25.8%, respectively. Interesting. Link buying tips: buy keywords for your site imbedded in existing text within indexed sites. Do not worry about PR 0, as long as it’s indexed. Buy only permanent or year long links. Do not spend over $5/month on average per link…sounds cheap, but there are plenty like that available. Goes into an example of how to find keywords that might be relevant, and finding obscure websites that come up with the keywords. Approach the sites probably not making any money and buy links from them. Showed some cool examples of results of this type of research…finding some nice niche sites.

Beware of links that may fit into any of the following classifications: on home pages of very high PR sites. In long lists at the bottom or sides of pages. Links under “sponsored links” text. Links that are “run of site” (aka “site-wide links”). On sites designed to sell links. On an artificial networks of sites. He ends like Andy and says to keep your links natural.

Thomas Bindl of Thomasbindl.com. “How to avoid technical pitfalls” He shows an example of a fake PR…carl-bastam.de. Has a PR 9…he goes through and finds that there was a cache that shows that it was actually redirect spam. Often the toolbar PR is not real. Really emphasizes that you should check backlinks and cache to find the truth. Easy fakes: JavaScript redirects. Regular redirects. Rel=“nofollow”. META Tags such as noindex or nofollow. Robots.txt. Commented links: look for “commentized” area in source code. iFrame links. These are all bad things that can happen if you buy links online.

Harder fakes: User-agent cloaking. IP Cloaking. All other forms of cloaking. These are bad, and the Google cache can show you. If there is no cache, especially if everything else seems ok, then there is something wrong. If using a [site:domain.com “anchor text here”] command is unsuccessful, there is a problem. Also need to be wary of penalized sites. Use archive.org to see if there is the wrong PR passed to the next page. (PR should be one less than what the page coming from, in most cases). If this happens something is wrong. Also another flag can be a big rotation of “sponsors.” Why would someone stop buying links on a page if it’s working? Also stop if you don’t feel a boost after two weeks.

What can happen to me for buying links? Your site can get kicked out of the SE’s. Your ranking is approximately 30 positions worse…this is a new “minus thirty penalty” that apparently is related to buying links, according to recent forum and blog discussions. Also, if you are ranking for anything except the targeted term, then you may have beeen the victim of a penalty on a single terms. For example, if you are targeting “water bottles,” but do not have rankings for that but do rank fro “cheap water bottles.” He thanks everyone.

In QA, Thomas says that he feels that Google has directly penalized some sites including his own that used Text Link Ads. Andy says that typically what they see is that sites that have already gained a fair amount of trust prior to buying links can do very well doing this. However, sites that are newer may run into problems.

Search Blogger and Reporter Forum

Todd Friesen (aka Oilman) is moderator. This is an open forum format (more difficult to cover but I’ll try my best.” This is certainly an all-star panel, from the moderator on-down. Speakers are Lee Oden with TopRank Online Marketing; Rand Fishkin SEOMoz, Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim; Barry Schwartz from we all love him so much, Michael McDonald from WebProNews, and last guy Aaron Wall who wrote SEOBook.

Q: Wants to know if an online magazine writes an article about you, will the link always be valuable and crawlable. Andy: will have a lot to do with where the link ends up. If it is publicly accessible it will rank well. Has seen value lost when post drops off home page. Rand: suggests linking to it yourself by submitting to Digg, de.icio.us, etc. That way it gets a bunch of links from other sources that stay indexed. Lee also recommends using FURL which will archive. Aaron: Wikipedia page also would work. Michael recommends having a section on your site. Barry also says keep writing more articles and the links will stay fresh since they are newer?

Q: How to leverage social tools to get more “traditional links” back to site, especially if not so “interesting” industry? Rand: if you have a site and you know that you want to leverage Link Baiting, Web 2.0, consider that this is an different audience. They are like a news media, but obsessed with other thing. For example: Top ten ways to blow the 10 grand your parents gave you for college” may be a good article for the student loan industry. Andy: think of what their interests are, again, student loans people may have particular interest. Aaron: look for ways to accumulate the links. Barry suggests creating n a way to let them talk to each other in a community setting. Todd: where are the people “hanging out?” Maybe the Second Life areas would be something cool to do…”it is a real world, in sort of a weird way (laughs) where you can setup a virtual store.” Michael, also what kind of information can you offer in a very accessible manner?

Q: is it true that the “influencers” on DIGG have more to do with an article doing well? Resounding yes. Rand, half of them are good, the other half get “buried” due to the networks of influential friends. Is there a way to pay these people? Possibly. Todd would advocate this, but would say you could perhaps get a list of proxies and start say a few hundred DIGG accounts. Aaron actually kind of spammed an article on the homepage which was removed, but made it back through a more distributed network. Todd: certainly not a bad thing to DIGG your own stuff, but be careful. Says Rand is quite talented at “Self-digging.”

Q: About duplicate issues/other sites ranking for your content. Missed a couple responses, but Michael says that they (WebProNews) try to ensure that the links are there when they syndicate content. Barry says that sometimes when he covers the same topic at both SEW and SER, he makes sure to write different versions. Rand: try not to water down the quality and voice of the authors, because that is not a blog. A blog is supposed to be a personal conversation with a connection.

Q: About categorizing or highlighting content. Barry: Google blog does that with their multiple blogs and pushes interesting topics to the main blog. Michael: if you have lots of bloggers, you should have a page that covers whoever will be blogging that particular day and they are usually easy to categorize. For example they have a great writer about airplanes whose content wouldn’t be appropriate for the WebProNews property.

Q: About using Wordpress or trying to do something yourself. There are advantages and disadvantages. Barry talks about splogs and how they can be the right thing for some people.

Q: I asked a question regarding an article that keeps showing up in my Yahoo! News RSS daily feed for “internet marketing.” (it appears about once a week on average it seems) The title is “Podcasting: Revolutionizing the way we live and work.” They had not heard about it and laughed at me and I am crying inside right now. ;) Really though do a search and you will see this article was picked up a lot (I got 650 results for the title in quotes without the colon after Podcasting). Hopefully, this actual session coverage will crack the front page soon, but I am still curious as to how this particular article seems to be continuously “making the rounds” and getting picked up time after time. ****Please comment if you have an idea…

Q: About how to link to articles when it may be archived eventually. Barry always sues the article name to link to it so people can search if the link is no longer working. Andy Beal often searches for the article name. He says many of his readers do not complain about old links being no longer active.

Q: Corporate blogging: do you think the number of comments on the blog is an appropriate way to measure success of the blog? Rand: what it boils down to is the executive level willing to allow this, even though there may be relatively negative things said about the company or leaders. If not ready for this, you can simple turn of comments. Barry: if you let them comment on your blog about something, you can always go back in six months and delete it and they’ll “never know” (laughs). Rand says that you can leverage other discussion occurring to comment about your own blog to bring people. Release things never released before and talk about things that people do not usually hear about and people will come more. Andy compares Rand’s blog which draws more comments since the topics encourage that while his blog is more matter-of-fact and news style that doesn’t encourage commenting. Michael doesn’t feel #of comments can be used as a measure of success or failure. Barry talks about how Moderators are important in Forums in generating discussion – if they act like “they know it all,” there may be less commenting. He heard of forums that got rid of “best moderators” and their traffic went up dramatically since more discussion occurred. Rand likes to end posts with questions like “what do you guys think about this,” which leads to comments. Todd reminds that the comments will always be based on the content of the post, like others have said. He recommends zeroing in on your target and goal in order to get the results you want.

Q: about some bad publicity through Wikipedia. Rand says this is why you always write the Wikipedia article first. This is a reputation management topic as Todd reminds. Andy says this comes down to managing search results and try to push them down. Aaron has used sub domains to help push others down. Recommends making a corporate page at Squidoo as another way to get to those 8 or 9. Barry nicely asks Aaron to talk about the Traffic Power situation (nice Barry), since it relates to it. Aaron agrees that you can fight if needed, but you may not get much money out of it, as in his case. Rand talks about being contacted for reputation management. First question is always “did this really happen/was it true?” He wonders if it is acceptable to “suppress” real news and how many would take that work. He feels this is the morally right thing to do. Now if it isn’t true, I would imagine Rand would work for them. (Personally, I would take the money, because someone else would…) Todd also mentions that money is a great motivator, and sometimes $500 will work very well towards taking a blog post down. Aaron says you can always offer people that have written good things about you in the past. Todd also says that there are “poison links,” that can make things very bad for someone, but wouldn’t want to talk about that because it is clearly unethical.

Q: What Wordpress plug-ins can you guys not live without. Rand likes threaded comments, which made a big difference in participation. Todd uses the “Akismet” comment spam plug-in. Andy mentions the “Hello Dolly” one. Barry uses movable Type. Andy has actually posted all the ones he uses at Marketingpilgrim.com.

Q: how would you try to go into MySpace without a “web 2.0” type product? Todd says that he thinks that about half of all the MySpace pages are not even real, and that in fact there is someone in the audience that probably owns most of them (laughs). Andy and Rand says that if you research the industry, you may find that some already exist, or something similar.

Q: Who is the next big thing? Rand, maybe Facebook? There are some in China that do very well. You may see a portal network. Andy thinks that you may see it starting to get more fragmented because there becomes too much to control. People may feel the need to belong to a more vertical community. Ning.com allows you to create your own community, and he thinks you may see more of that happening. Michael thinks you may see ways created to connect people across the different communities.

Moderated by Christine Churchill of Key Relevance. She welcomes people to the second day and introduces the speakers.

Dixon Jones from Receptional Internet Marketing. Will speak from the POV that people are considering going to EU market. Starts with some facts about EU and the world.. USA 300 M pop, 200M Internet users versus EU 800 pop and 300 M Internet users. 90 million more Internet users now than in US, with an anticipated additional half billion coming online fast. Just in UK there are 40M online. Over 10% of all ad spend in both UK and Sweden was online in 2006. This makes Internet advertising more developed as an industry tan the US. Poland is the 5th fastest growing country on the Internet. Worldwide 1.2B people. Choose your message, either my market is 5X bigger than I thought, or “OMG, third world countries are going to sell to my clients.” He suggests looking at it the first way. G

Goes over some GDP per capita, per CIA figures. Next chart lists countries by GDP growth rate. Starts with Azerbaijan, Angola,….China at 10,,,Usa is #139. The American strategy: attack is the best form of defense. “Take the battle to the enemy to protect the homeland.” Biggest problem is language, which may be a barrier mentally, but is a boon for us in the industry. Discusses the advantage of SEO in targeting other-than-English words for SEO. IE there are only 4 M pages for the word “Londres” versus 50M for London at G. The Greek word is less than 1M. If it wasn’t for the language barrier, SEO is considerably easier in other languages.

He says there is no real easy way to do international SEO. Recommends employing language-specific operators to take calls from overseas. Either do SEO yourself in foreign language, outsource locally, or use affiliate tactics. If you do try yourself, buy a TLD for the right country. Or Host the site in the tgt country. Track link building in a way that regionally themes the site. Use local press release services. Use a native translator. Minimize legal issues and deploying ground troops until you are confident of success in the market.

Jessica Bowman from Business.com. is on second day on job for them, used to be with Enterprise Car rentals. Will speak about multi-lingual SEO. She will not deny, “you are in for a ride.” KW research: need to brainstorm with a native speaker. Go to the competition. Tools are a challenge, but says Trellian’s Keyword Discovery is good, for example for breaking out UK English. Also says that Hitwise has a few languages, but probably not enough, in her opinion. Since there aren’t many tools out there, there has been a study that showed that the volume of search results in English tends to correspond with other languages. Andy will speak more to this.

It is best to start the copy in the foreign language, versus translating, although unfortunately that isn’t always and option. Not many translation companies know seo. Recommends learning the translation process inside and out, because the process breakdown is inevitable. Found that they used automated translation tools, which are fine for non-SEO focused. Also found they had 2 different sets of translation data, one sort of a glossary of terms, and the other a collection of sentences (“Memory Bank”). She found the problem was that these were out of sync. They needed to separate them. Once the translation come back: check it. She has seen error messages that said you “are not allowed to log on.” This was bad because they were telling the customer they had no right to login to their store, even though it was actually and logon password error.

Using wrong words. Found that sometimes more than one translator worked on the same doc, and they used different words/phrases referencing the same thing on the same page. Sometimes content comes back very long and doesn’t fit in the space. Factor this iteration into the cost, and make sure that the translator knows that this will occasionally get “kicked back.” Also translators sometimes add or embellish to content, which can lead to serious legal ramifications (I would guess especially in an industry like Pharma). Bottom line: do not assume it is good-to-go when it comes back from translators.

Final thoughts: Train the translator on SEO, using their own work as examples if possible. Send them useful information such as screenshots to see how much space there is. There may be character limitations for spacing and/or database fields, as another example. Remember to send corrections back to the translation company. Also, remember that translations confuse people, and painted a scenario where they wanted to change “car rental” to “car hire,” in UK English, and then to French. Found issues existed.

What she has learned: German text comes back 3x the length of English text. German grammar is a killer – sometimes merges words depending on the context, and there are two forms of the German language, one more formal and one less. UK English: treat it like a different language! British tend to be more verbose, and again you need a native speaker to review the copy. Spanish: consider which region it will be translated to. Use “North American” Spanish for US Spanish speakers. Spain Spanish is extremely different than any American Spanishes.

Michael Bonfils of SEMInternational. “10 Steps to Cracking South East Asia” Starts with SE Asia stats. 300 M Internet users, majority in China at about 118M. Japan 86M, South Korea at 34M. Indonesia 18M, Vietnam 10M, and more… Shows an Internet Population rate chart that is very interesting: SK 67% while China is only 9%. If China had the same penetration rate as Taiwan, they would be looking at 784M users!

Ten steps are: Understand audience; understands Asian domain names, hosting, search engines, translation, keywords, paid search, organic search, reporting and analytics, red tape. Step 1: Understanding Asian customer: often what is funny and creative over there, is not in other places. For example they have little pictures that “follow you around” during a search in Korea. Remember to think about that, what works in Western EU and US may not work there. Internet is more often used for researching, while buying is often done “downstairs.” In China approx 50% of all Internet usage comes from cafes. Often no coffee served, and not really a “social environment.” Shows a funny picture of a floating Internet café.

Step 2 know the major search engines. In China, for example Baidu has 62% of the market versus 25.3% Google and 10% Yahoo!. In Taiwan, 90% Yahoo!, 5% G. Japan, 55% Y Japan, 35% G, 5% MSN. In South Korea: “Naver” 63%, 14% “Daum,” 11% Yahoo! Korea. Shows a funny relationship chart taking off from Bruce Clay’s that he calls the “Bruce Lee Chinese search engine relationship chart. There “Sogou” provides most paid results to other engines.

Ste 3 Asian Domain name. make sure it is pronounceable. For example, Google not pronounceable in China, where there call it “Goo-Goo,” due to inability to do the L. Look for proper domain extensions. There are a variety: China: .cn or .com.cn. Korea: .kr or .co.kr. Japan: .jp or .co.jp. Taiwan: .tw com.tw. Hong Kong: .hk or .com.hk

Ste 4: Get hosting: Us hosting option gives slow access due to a gateway. It is more economical than hosting in Asia. If using Chinese hosting option, keep in mind that the larger the hosting company, the more politically regulated it is. Gives a list of china’s top web hosting companies.

Step 5: translate well. Gives a couple of examples, and agrees that you have to double/triple check. Even recommends using one trans.. Uses “Pepsi brings you back to life” example of translation that went to “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.” Ad:tech Shanghai brochure even had a mistake that was “cost per lead” translated as “cost per leadership.”

Step 6: Develop keywords. Same expression in English can be translated up to 15 different expressions across china, HK, and Taiwan. Local translation and research matters!

Step 7: Implement paid search. Would reco starting with this over SEO which is much tougher. G and Y! Works pretty much the same in Asia as in US in terms of paid results placement. Baidu works a little differently, including paid listings within “organic listings.” Sometimes will be in the center of the result, and you may get more traffic and conversions from this.

Step 8: develop organic search. Similar issues as us such as content, structure, Meta and kw placement. Link pop also a factor. Think local! There is a strong local company favoritism in China…try to use local sites and TLDs.

Step 9: understanding reporting. Shows some Baidu reports and how the daily spending reporting and keyword Report differ slightly. Also shows the much cleaner looking (IMO) Yahoo report. Step 9.5: Implement analytics. They happen to use Google Analytics since they were in the process of translating Urchin at the time of G’s purchase.

Step 10: Understand the red tape and unusual business practices. People impatient on the phone or expect payment. There is no API, no CPM reporting, and it is commonplace to find kickbacks and discounts. Quite normal to have someone knock on your door in China and say (as an example) “we are from Baidu and could use some extra $ to give more favorable results.” Poor payment methods…probably will need to wire to companies that you are looking to run campaigns with. Remember Political favoritism, and that they are partnered with Chine Government, which is a formidable competition. “Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still” (Chinese proverb).

Barry Lloyd was unavailable due to being stuck in China. Andy Atkins-Kruger of WebCertain will replace him. Will be brief. Mentions blog: “Multilingual Search.” He starts by reminding people that SEO, Paid and other methods are closely related. Sows a chart of amazing growth that would happen if you applied NA adoption rates to the rest of the world. Prob of ranking+ internet audience+ market size must be measured. Uses example of “football boots” research (equivalent to football cleats in US) actually being most desirable as a target term in Spain, not the UK as one might have thought. Talks about different ways to operate overseas, similar to other speakers.

Recommended process: First: kw research then creation of glossary then translation then optimization. Feels that you do need a local domain, ideally. Things like local hosting and local links will come much easier. Beware of things such as duplication issues like same German content targeting Germany or Austria. Sometimes the wrong page can appear at the wrong time. Showed another study that showed that the Google results (number of pages), when compared to Yahoo suggestion tool (number of searches), showed an actual correlation in pattern. Looks at another example where there can be plurals and singular searches, as well as the use of prepositions in romance languages.

These do have an impact on the way results appear. People search with or without these prepositions, and you have to plan for both. Accents can also be a problem, but the search engines seem to have come up with a way to handle this. They do better with accents that have a distinct effect on meaning versus those that do not really affect the meaning. Also alternative characters. Also aggregation or not? Sometimes long words can be split into two, depending on how people are thinking when they search. Also a possible thing to look for are “declensions,” which many languages have. Ie: 16 different cases in Icelandic. Shows an example in Russian. SE’s don’t necessarily do well with non-Latin/romance languages, since algorithms are not written to cope with those issues. Do not use free online translation tools! Also gives a chart that shows a few of the top SE’s in other countries. Thanks everyone.

Ted Ulle gets up at the podium and welcomes every body.

Adam Young is first up, WMW PHP mod forum. He explains that you can do anything with scripting. It is more important to know what you want done, versus saying you need scripting. You can really do anything with scripting. What do you need to know first? First ask your host what they support. Figure out what is best for your server. Do you have someone working for you that knows this stuff? Figure out what you are trying to achieve. Look at available ready made scripts, also. Tips for better Scripts; you need a test environment, make sure to test everything, find the authoritative resources such as PHP.net, again - you need to understand the problem before writing the script, find scripts that do most of what you want to do and modify those, understand what those scripts do in detail (how they write, security issues, can they be hacked, XSS issues, etc.). Some common pitfalls, security (analyzing user input (SEL injection, XSS), auto form submission, research), misinformation, inadequate testing, not understanding that there are multiple ways to do the same thing. In summary, do the research and test.

Todd something was next, he seems to be a last minute addition. He said some notes from his note pad... Know how your servers work. With proper setup you can save a ton of development time. Look at Apache directives. It beats the RFCs he said. You can prevent duplicate content. He rarely uses mod_rewrite because you don't always need it. He said other solutions make it easier for your server. Server security.

Dan Kramer is next up to give a live demo of an install of WordPress. I cannot write this info, I am sorry. He then showed a PERL script off.

Brian Gmyrek from Traffic Programming is now up. To be a developer, you want to be a problem solvers. Then just get started using LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php, perl, python). A lot of webmasters are half way there. So then start solving smaller problems. Then install linux on a box. Also, make sure to read code and examples and resources. Most devs he said have a huge book library. Make sure to read the right books (use amazon reviews), PHP, PERL books, PHP & MySQL books, Orielly are good. If you are really serious, he said learn C. PHP is easy to integrate into web pages. He showed some code examples. Perl is not as plug as play like PHP. It is more mature and still very good for web applications. It is good for sysadmin tasks. It is also good for text processing. And there are tons of modules out there already. He showed a Perl script that makes a Froogle feed. Then he goes over Shell scripts, aka the linux command line. Showed some examples of that, including rsync. Then he moved over to MySQL, he uses phpMyAdmin, he uses Apache .htpasswd and ssl. He showed a shell script to do a quick back up of your db. He talks about database design. He then shows an example of MySQL an ad system database, showing a database design for a typical solution.

Final speaker is Ted Ulle who is not a scripter, he said. He is talking about .NET potholes. IIS knows corporate business systems. IIS is not case sensitive. Must be aware of duplicate URLs, just because of case sensitivity. Just try to always use lower case. HTTP Status Codes, a typical problem is that coders don't use an http header with a 404, instead they just make a custom page that shows 404 in the title. Microsoft hides 301 and 302 redirects, he said. ISAPI Rewrite is the savior for IIS, it is like mod_rewrite but designed for IIS. He shows resources like seoconsultants.com/tools/ and xoc.net.

Warren Kay, Director, Emerging Products, Yahoo!
Steven Stern, go2.com
Jake Baillie, President, TrueLocal.com
Doug Perlson, Chief Operating Officer, Seevast

Moderator: Justin Sanger

For 3 years, it was local search is hot. Last year, it turned to local search is now. Mobile local search is beginning as well.

Warren Kay is up first. Runs emerging products group of Yahoo marketing. Expand on yahoo local for consumers as well as focusing more on geotargeting for new advertising interface.

Yahoo from consumer perspective - largest local destination on web. 60k city pages, 80k zip codes and 600 neighborhoods. All populated by user generated content. Editors doesn't scale well, so user generated content is the way to scale.

Example of woman posting comment on a restaurant in Yahoo Local. Content can be seen via searches as well as in her 360 page to all her network of friends. Users can review local places and searchers can see these reviews. User tagged 11 different friends on his 360 page.

Flickr geo-targeting - yahoo local ties in geotargeting aspect to various properties, including Flickr. Can see all the places a user has visited because user tagged his photos with the area name. Can see actual street maps for bars that users have tagged as being on that street.

Y Labs: Geo-referenced photos - can tag photos that you take with your cell phone simply by using the cell tower's location. it will give you choices of places/landmarks to use as tags for that photo you just took with your cell phone. These tags will then be used when you upload the photo to Flickr.

Merchants - Adding services for the other 25 million merchants other than the US ecommerce 200k. reaching out to those merchants who aren't yet advertising via the web. yahoo local can develop a profile page for merchants even if the merchant doesn't have a website. Can upload lots of information about your business into this profile page. This info is fed into the listing level for the consumer.

Exciting feature of new search marketing platform is geotargeting. How the consumer mentions their location and how the advertiser targets that location is meshed together. ULM = universal location manager - a cookie that Yahoo captures to know the user location is very accurate. It leverages Yahoo's network-wide user location data for geo-location of Yahoo traffic (for things like movies, weather, etc)

IP address can also indicate user location.

Advertisers can target ads by market, region withing market or by city and surrounding area.

Key Differentiators:
Where On Earth : state of the art location recognition technology
Clear and distinct target areas: national, state and designated market areas
Yahoo Network: Universal Location Manager enables yahoo to increase listing relevancy through user defined locations on Y properties such as weather,maps and movies.

Mobile growth in the US is accelerating
Over 240 million mobile subscribers by 2010

Will have 80% mobile penetration by 2010. One in 5 mobile consumers use advanced mobile services. Increased adoption of wap-enabled phones is fueling growth. The demographic is young, which marketers covet.

yahoo online sponsored search is mirrored in mobile sponsored search. Works the same way as online sponsored search. User can either browse or peform a free form key word search. Yahoo Listing goes to the advertiser WAP site or a Y generated WAP site. If merchant doesn't have a WAP site, Yahoo can create one for the merchant.

Doug Perlson is up next from Seevast (including Kanoodle, Moniker, etc). He spends his time at Pubcon doing the contextual panel usually, because of Kanoodle. But in the last few years, he sees that context is only one way to target, and they see Local search as being another great way of targetting advertising.

Local Marketing
Huge growth in local search marketing
3.4 billion in 2005 growing to $13 billion in 2010 (kelsey group)
enormous opportunity for publishers and advertisers in local sponsored links

Local businesses use Valpack, Pennysavers, Yellow Pages
National Advertisers using online advertising but want to target at local level

Local search will be effective for both advertiser and publisher perspective.

Search Sites, Content Sites, and Navigation

Typical local search is user-defined such as "pizza in Las Vegas", but the advertiser may want to limit ot certain zip codes.

From content site perspective, use sponsored links to target local content and local users. If users are on a local content site, it will be easy to reach those local users, but you still want to geotarget, in case a user on the site isn't really within that locality.

You can geotarget content listings. Buying contextual listing will cost you more, but if you layer in a level of geotargeting (such as by zip code) it will be more effective.

Direct Navigation - finding a web site through a browser type-in. This is not referring to typos/traffic squatters, because these don't help the advertisers. But there is still an opportunity for direct type-ins. Parked pages are a great opportunity to run your sponsored links. (ex. a parked real estate site for a specific city). Track your direct navigation advertising separately.

Keys to success:

Advertisers - all local not the same - separate creative, bidding and tracking code for search, geo content and direct navigation

Publishers - should work with networks that have ability to charge premium for local content (i.e. should convert at higher rates for advertisers (up to 40% higher).

What's next in local? Mobile, pay per call, ISP, GPS

ISPs have lots of local data stored, so there may be local advertising opportunities with these ISPs - targetting down to a street address, since the ISPs have this kind of information.

Pitches Kanoodle, pulse360, and moniker.com. First to put sponsored links on pages, first to do lots of other things (goes too fast to get it all down here).

Jake Baillie (bakedjake) from TrueLocal is up next.

Local Search Ads - Helpful and not so helpful tips

Weird panel for him to do because 2 years ago Justin called him about doing local search, and Jake said he didn't believe in local search, and here he is running a local search engine. Wake up and get in the local game. Decided to teach people how to spam the search engines rather than giving a pretty speech.

These tactics apply just as well in organic, but they work in ad side and there's more money to be made in the ad side.

The best way to exploit local is keyword expansion. Obvious geo expansion - cities, zip codes, and states. These are the obvious local keywords to use (example Detroit real estate). Non-obvious expansion phrases include neighborhoods, area codes, counties, airport codes and metro areas. People in chicago dont look for a chicago restaurant. No, they type in a chicago neighborhood. In some markets, area codes imply a specific type of person. Seasoned traffic will look for airport codes, such as LAX and advertisers may serve visitors in the airport area.

Word expansion - product names, brand names, skus, slang/industry terms, government terms.

Government terms - a top local query is DMV. Some reasons a person might be going to the DMV is that they have a DUI. A DUI lawyer would want to target this term.

People Pitfalls - regional names for products (pop vs. soda), different names for localities depending on the user's perspectives (downtown chicago vs. the loop)

When targetting ads, use the language that the locals use.

The Tracking Problem
Online > Offline tracking - good for stores yet makes the PPC market look bad.

track, track, track: (i zoned out during this part, but I guess the idea is to track). :)

Some businesses are more suited local advertising:
anything service based
restaurants (sometimes)
golf courses
local b2b

Localize your CTR!

You should be expecting upwards of 10%!
Use localized ad copy - at least cities. 20-30% ctrs can be had with neighborhood names in ads. Of course you need a call to action on the page that speaks to that local targeting. If you mention the location in the ad, and you don't mention it on the landing page, they will leave and not come back.

Lots of choices to put local search ads: google, yahoo, msn, ask, online yellow pages, truelocal.com, local, com, newspaper and alt. magazine sites, vertical specific sites.

Local industry groups, local business development groups, hobbyists, geo-vertical directories are also good place to put your local ads.

Ran out of time, so he skipped the rest of the presentation.

Steven Stern is up next. Started in print yellow pages and went right to mobile from print. Will show trends in mobile.

Trends - shows lots of stats but the gist of it is that mobile usage is increasing, and lots of those people are the right target market for a lot of advertisers.

About go2: go2 has been a market leader in mobile, local search directories and movie guides. They launched go2 in 1999. Audience is mostly male for go2 - traveling businessmen, new home owners, etc. Great demographics for income and age. The key to driving traffic with mobile phones is being on all the major carriers (which go2 apparently is). go2 has lots of channels such as business, dining, directions, directory, entertainment, movies, search, shopping, travel, etc. You can do almost anything on mobile. The biggest barriers to mobile is that the carriers are still developing their ad and revenue models. Carriers are protective of their users. Must get a relationship with the carriers if you want to have a mobile site. Phones are all different, and carrier's all work on different networks, so new mobile sites need to be able to develop content so it shows on the majority of phones. Your site needs to have content that actually works on a mobile phone. You have to offer something compelling to the carriers, something they don't have, so they will put it on their decks. This is what will get you significant traffic.

Steven shows some examples of things that go2 has to offer (colleges, golf channel, premium directory listings, email captures, etc.)

Last time he spoke here was New Orleans and it was before FM and his book. He showed an industry narrative, and calls this the third wave of tech and culture. Between 1970 and 1980 they had Digitize Back Office where companies used computers (i.e. punch cards, fortran, etc.). Then between 80 and 2000, they digitized the front office (personal computer, etc.). The screen flips out, he blames it is an Intel Mac and it is confused as to where it wants to be. Then between 95 and now we digitized the customers with web 2.0 and Google etc. He believes search is our next interface on how we interact with technology, and he is upset he did not put that in his book. Remember DOS? Then after DOS came Mac and Windows. Then now we are in 1.0 of search. Search as an interface. What might the next search interface look like?

Scenario One:
He explains that when shopping for wine, you most likely will get ripped off. You pick out a $100 bottle and you then wand your phone over the product code or label or sku. You get back results for prices, stores, etc.

Before Search: Content as proxy for audience, content as packaged good.
After Search: Audience declared intent, then content finds audience.

Intent drives content and content disaggregates, content as conversation.

As intent becomes a proxy for audience.

Search drives audience towards social media sites, because they are well linked. Consumers expect all participants to understand the mores of those environment. They expect businesses to know what they want.

Now there is attention over distribution. Old media, you sent out in masses. Now it is about how much attention you can get from your audience.

Conversation Over Dictation:
In conversational mediums like blogs and forums, they are driven by conversation. The consumer is now in control. Let the people decide what to do with your brand. He showed some examples... MySpace, eBay, Amazon reviews, let people build your business for you. He gave a case study of Lenovo, they bought IBM's laptoo business. They were worried that the brand will be hurt when they took over the site. They made a big campaign, where you got to vote about if your laptop will be black or titanium. It is a start. He showed a Microsoft case study and a Symantec case study, etc. I'll leave this stuff uncovered for now. Symantec uses the FM network to promote their blog's RSS feed in the ads, they got Digged once... A Cisco case study, they wanted on to Wikipedia for a product, but started first at Wikia (a commercial Wiki). Dice Case study; they made a rant banner, a banner that allows you to type into the banner, anything you hate about your job, and it shows up on all banners in the network. A conversational; banner, pretty cool.

FM:
(1) Self service platform
(2) Big sales force

He showed a live demo, pretty impressive. He then gives more slides on the FM network...

They have a 100 sites now. They have more than 750MM ad impressions per month.

They are booking over a million dollars per month in business. They take 40%.

They have a sales force of 15 people, growing to 25, in NY, NE and SF. They have an engineering staff of 4, growing to 6. They have an author staff of 4, growing to 6. Nearly 1500 advertisers on self-service platform.

I reported this at SEW but yesterday I learned that no one was fired. Both of them got new jobs elsewhere. Bill Demas and Will Johnson supposedly both got some really good opportunities. So they moved on to take those jobs. Will I think is gone, Bill is leaving at the end of the month or so.

Where does that leave YPN? I am sure they have some bright people who can pick up where these guys left off.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Several folks over at WebmasterWorld reported that AdWords was down or extremely slow this morning. First reports came a few hours ago, about 3 hours after those reports, AdWordsAdvisor confirmed the issue and said they are working on it.

Thanks everyone, for the info. Engineering has been all over this as you'd expect - and things should be returning to normal for you soon, if they have not already.

AdWords seems to be working ok for me at the moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.