November 16, 2006 Archives

With Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, Danny Sullivan and modded by Jake Baillie.

This is a site review forum, so my not taking won't be so great...

It is just funny how people trash on these sites. Matt Cutts of Google has his special tools, listing off dozens of domains for a site that he has with the same content...

Now Tim from Yahoo! is put up to the challenge, a different site is presented, it does well in Google but has only three pages indexed in Yahoo! Tim is typing away. Tim says they have 395 pages of the site. She replied that they have 5,000 pages or so. Finally, Greg Boser discovers tons of sitemap link pages, with hundreds and hundreds of links on those pages. Looks kinda spammy. Matt suggests breaking the sitemaps into chronological order.

Next site looks average but seems to have a link exchange issue.

Next guy wants to rank well for a specific keyword, but the keyword phrase is not in the title or content of the site. Very basic issues with this site. Danny tells him to focus on local engines, google local.

Ok, I am done with this. Going to catch the flight back to NY now, which, yea, is delayed - of course.

Vanessa Fox from Google to talk about bots... The basis is that major SEs bots behave well, they do not all use the same syntax, test your file to make sure you're blocking and allowing what you want and use webmaster tools to diagnose any problems with Googlebot. The standard at robotstxt.org info and at google.com/webmasters/. Google has good tools to help you out at Sitemaps. There is robots.txt, reobots meta tags, nofollow tag, password protect files, url removal tool and sitemap xml file. She then went through some of the tools out there. Sorry for lack of coverage here, something came up...

Dan Kramer was next up to whitelisting, cloaking and metrics on bots. Use your analytics to track your bot activity. He does custom scripting to set up a script that logs bot activity. They log if they have the http referrer header. You can selectively log certain requests based on footprints. Have the script email you reports. Even then there is manual work you need to do. Some people spoof good bots, so then you need to DNS reverse requests and whois info. Typically in the user agent info, there is a URL with more info. Bot detection strategy, search engines bots almost nver use an HTTP referer header, they use recognizable user agents. Search engine bots come from known IP ranges. Their IPs are normally registered to company. IPLists.coom, WMW has a good forum on it, fantomaster.com/fasvsspy01.html, jafsoft.com and others. What do you do with all this data? Bot control with robots.txt, mod_rewrite for handling, cloaking and banning bad bots. He explains what robots.txt is... He then gives some suggestions for these bots.

William Atchison from Crawl Wall is next up. Check out my past coverage from his presentation at SES San Jose over http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/004336.html. I love his presentation.

Brett Tabke was up next... WMW was knocked offline four times last year because of robots. There were dup content issues. They guess that 1 billion pages views by bots in 2005. WMW is a big target, so they get hit. He shows off the rogue access control system backend module for WMW, pretty cool. They require logins by agents, domains, IPS and referrers. They have a banned list on same criteria, they identify the search engines by domains, IPs and agent names. They also have whitelists by same criteria. The results were 90% reduction in rogue spider activity, 5 TB savings in bandwidth and average page generation time reduced by 50%.

Roger B. Dooley is up first. there are youth oriented communities, the challenges include population changes from yea tot year, behavior issues and generation caps. But they spend a lot of time online, they are a desirable demographic and they can benefit from it. He is sharing a youth community case study. The new site was to provide free info for kids and parents for college making decisions. The site features in 2001 were articles, advice column, and discussion forums. In 2006, it is the leading community in its space. 1.5 million pageviews per day and is constantly growing. What made it grow? They made clear rules for behavior and language. Impartial moderation is important. Treat all members as adults, even though they are kids. Member "moderation" where members moderate others, reporting features, etc. Provide areas of looser moderation, like cafe areas, etc. They have an adult membership of about 15% that help things from boiling over. There is a lot of turnover, because a student's life-span is only so long. To deal with turn over they have good word of mouth, ongoing link development, targeted forum topics to keep students on. Going beyond the forum is the next stage, look at myspace, how do you users want to react, he shows off tools to give your community for that community. The successes include lot of content, lots of work, real rewards to help people, make connections, change the world, and helping individuals.

Lawrence Coburn from RateItAll was next up. He runs a site named RateItAll.com. Why are online communities important? online community is disruptive, allows little guys to run with big guys, self sustaining, lightweight business model. Why do people participate in online communities? (1) recognition, (2) selfish interest and (3) the good samaritan. He gives examples of this. Characteristics of successful communities; common interest, communication, personal investment of users, relationships between users, online reps, minimal barriers to participation, user recruits other users, utilitarian vs. entertainment and offline presence. Community enhancing features; user pages, user to user messaging, widgets, publishing tools, alerts, user search, tagging, networking, reputation indicators, accreditation, editorial privileges, business blogs. Social Network theory: reed's law as nodes are added to a network, the value of that network will grow exponentially, why enable social networking? user acquisition. linking network growth to user experience is hard to do. Distributed Social Networks: widget mania, the aggregators and the edge feeders. The embedded flash player by YouTube helped them skyrocket. He also talked about StumbleUpon's toolbar, a way to rate sites you are on. Types of incentives; adsense integration so users can make money (but be careful with that), recognitions is still the foundation of it. User recognition include avatars, hall of fame, featured posts, moderato status, newsletters, etc. Reputation tracking by quantity, quality, etc. So what is next for it? Portable reputations, distributed social networks, implicit vs. explicit participation, niche social networks, and convergence of mobility and community.

Elisabeth Osmeloski from Search Engine Watch Forums. Keys to a good community include; passion about the subject, pay it forward by sharing knowledge, good vibes and opportunity to meet/network in person. He gave a background on SEW Forums... She goes over more stuff with history. She shows some stats on SEW's growth compared to other forums, comparing WMW, SEW, HighRankings, DigitalPoint Forums, and so on. SEW is fairly liberal on most parts but they have a 3 strike and your out rule. They do allow URLs to be posted, for the most part. Mods staff needs to help with guiding users. What does SEW have to do better? they need to make sure the rep remains solid, set the ton, be unbaised, attract new members, keep quality conversations up, crosslink content within network, upgrade vBulletin and add new features.

Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld explains that what works for some communities doesn't work for other communities. See what works within your industry and find your own niche. He got the idea from Steve Jobs about connecting the jobs at Apple, to start his own forum. He was born in 1962... Involved in community in 84 and WMW went live in 99 and goes back about his past computer history. WMW gets about 150M uniques per day, he said. Star Trek was hugely influential for him. He talks about his personal and computer historical past. Talks about his SEO stuff, infoseek, excite, alta vista. Then talks about early conferences. WebmaterWorld has unique software, easy to use, we focus on the members, site designed for member comments first, success is members on site time, it isnt about the content is is about the relationship. Stuff WMW avoids includes visual noise, social networking noise, and it is about relationships and interactions. The hardest thing they do is maintain the long term relationship with the members and moderators, not everyone thinks alike. They are a subscription based model over an advertising model. They dont care about signups, they care about quality posts. Professional forum spamming is much more advanced these days, it is a challenge. Rogue spiders are an issue also. Biggest challenge over past year was a press release stuff and PR stuff. Speed, size, community and cultural awareness sums it all up.

Moderator: Justin Sanger
Speakers:
Robin Liss, Founder and President, Camcorderinfo.com
Lee Odden, President, TopRank Online Marketing
Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com
David McInnis, Founder and CEO, PRWeb

Moderator is missing, so the speakers will do this on their own. Each speaker first introduces themselves. Robin Liss is up first.

Her company changed its name recently (camcorderinfo.com digitalcamerainfo.com). They do reviews of camcorders, and they do a lot of outreach to other media - helping them do a piece on the latest camcorders. Robin is one of the Inc top 30 entrepreneurs. She will talk specifically about how to do an interview. She sees a lot of bad interviews out there because of nerves, so she's got some rules to go by to do an interview better (either radio, print or tv).

Rule 1: Be Over Prepared.
You can't ask the interview what questions they are going to ask, but you can get a sense of the topics will be. So, find out as much info about the topic, and then research - prep, prep, prep. Figure out your opinion on the topic. Example: She went on CNN to discuss media coverage of Apple. She prepped a dense page of notes, and wrote out her opinion as to why the media is too in love with Apple.

She put the contact info of the reporter on her notes. You don't want to forget the interviewer's name!

Intertwine your company's mission/purpose with the topic that is being discussed. Wirte out 3-5 key one line message points to show your company strategy.

Research data and facts which back those points up and place them in your notes.

Add funny one liners that sound smart and clever which you can throw in.

Annotate the memo with boldings, highlighting and underlining so your eyes can easily jumpt to a part of document.

Keep these notes to just one page.

Rule 2: Practice

This is especially important if it's a tv or in-person interview, but also applies to print interviews.

Write down a few prospective questions you think you may get. Be prepared especially for zinger questions.

Practice with a family or staff member, and practice in front of a mirror.

A key skill is to be able to quickly look down at your notes, and then quickly look back up.

Learn how to fill space without "ums", "ahs", you knows", and "likes" - this is hard but important! Practice!

Rule 3: Develop a Relationship with the Reporter

This is easier for non-live segments such as newspaper interviews.

Berfore you start talking on-message, find a common subject you can connect with. She always opens by talking about journalism ethics, and it's something all reporters can relate to.

Rule 4: Give Straight Answers

If you're well-prepped, you can give good, succinct 30 second answers. Keep your answers to no more than 30 seconds, or they will tune out.

If you don't know the answer, say so. Don't just babble and make something up.

Always correct yourself. If you make a mistake, you want it on the record that you know you made a mistake and corrected it.

Rule 5: Message, Message, Message

Your business objective is important, so you need to artfully and subtly work in your business message. Don't just shout out your business message - give them an interesting interview, but get your message in ther subtly. "What we believe at mycompanyname.com is ..." Drop the url a couple of times, but not too many.

Rule 6: Be Cautious

Before you speak, think through what info you will make publicly available. Don't give out strategic info that you hadn't meant to give out. Reporters are experts at getting you to divulge info that you didn't mean to give out. Stick to the rules about what you're going to talk about and don't sway from that. Never say anything off the record that you wouldn't say to your wife, your mother, your boss or a judge.

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David McInnis is up next.

PRWeb is not about traditional uses for Press Releases (written for mainstream media and investor relations). But there are new opportunities for Press Releases.

Direct-to-Consumer PR
Puts the public back in public relations
written for the public/customer
leverages power of news search engines, news alerts, rss an social media tools

2 primary pillars of D2C PR (direct to consumer)
* seo soptimized distribution (pre-distribution)
* social media (post-distribution)

Why D2C?
bypass the meida filter
control your mesage - repuation management, expert status
increased online visibility - more traffic, content in context

2 components of seo press release

keyword optimization - prior to distribution. research keywords, build linking stragegies and write release.
Tools available - newsforce.com, and prweb seo wizard

distribution platform - once you've optimized the press release, need to choose the optimum platform for distribution.

PRWeb constantly tuned for SEO

EON, Billboard magazine are using PRWeb services.

Why Social Media?

Search engines are constantly evolving. Ongoing opportunity as things change. You could even specialize just in optimizing SEO press releases. Same thing with Social Media. Lots of opportunity to tap new social networks.

Blogs are the "human powered" search engines - provide access to an audience and encourages online discussion.

PRWeb wants to help users tap into this sphere. It's also faster and more complete response than normal media. Blogs are more times and are the bridge between mainstream media.

2 components of social media press release - distribution platform and post distirbution networking. The blogosphere can interact with your press release via technorati, digg, etc.

Once you distribute your PR, then you start your networking with the blogosphere.

Social Media Rules (he thinks these are crap, but he presents them anyway)

1. Do not seed your own conent. Do not expect your wire service to seed it for you.

2. The blogosphere rewards transparency. (he thinks this is crap)

3. Monitor and know your audience int he blogosphere.

4. Participate in the online dialogue before you need something from them.

5. Be respectful (use living room behavior).

Safe Bet: Adhere to WOMMA guidelines

Getting Started:

Find stuff to release, create news.

Optimize your headline, link your news to current events where possible.

Short titles are best.

Abstract and Summary is probably more important than the body of the release. Get some keywords in there and don't make it just a copy of your first paragraph.

Use Correct press release form.

Create a news image (400x400 pixels or smaller and square is best).

Body copy - include multiple quotes, anchor text (1 link per 100 words of copy), and don't forget who, what, when, where and why. Copy should be about 300 to 800 words.

Don't forget to SEO your attached files with filenames, tag your audio and video files, and your file titles and descriptions.

Something new for PRWeb: Trackback/Pingbacks. This closes the loop in the press release process. First you need a compelling news release. PRWeb responds automatically with Wordpress users. All of their services are trackback enabled.

Don't forget to use RSS feeds of your press releases. PRWeb does manage and include it in their distribution.

PRWeb editorially scores all releases. 1-3 doesn't get wide distribution, score of 5 (highest) gets wider distribution.

They also block trackback spam and has a human editor to catch trackback spam that makes it through their filter.

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Lee Odden is up next with Push and Pull Public Relations (Optimizing PR with Social Media) as the topic.

Gives some background info on TopRank Online Marketing. The quickest way to get into the media is to become the media, and a blog is the best way to do that.

The Time is Right:

There's a market opportunity with news search. It has a huge audience. So getting into something like Yahoo News via something like press release optimization is the way to go. Increasing use of social media such as blog and news search engines, social news, social bookmarks, podcasts, and video - all tied together via RSS - is what makes the timing right for expaning the distribution channels available for getting your message out.

Adding social media to online PR can have a multiplying effect.

Push and Pull PR:

Push PR means pitching - sending out press releases - contacting journalists and bloggers and pitching yourself.

Pull PR is making it easy for the media and your intended audience to find and pull themselves to your news. So you need to make yourself available in those places where they are searching for news.

Push - Wire Service, Pitching Journalists
Pull - News Search, RSS
Media Coverage - Once one or both of these gets you media coverage, you are pulling people to your message because they are reading about you, but you can also push it by sending out emails etc to mention the article that was written about you.

Blogger Relations Tips:

Be relevant, personalize, make it easy, schwag is good, be persistant.

Pitching bloggers is different than pitching journalists. Bloggers can be fickle, and not have time to deal with your pitches, so handle them differently than you would a journalist. Get an idea what they write about normally, and personalize your pitch to them, with relevant information. Make it easy - summarize and include a link to the full copy of the article. If you have a product or service, give the blogger a free trial, free products, etc. Be persistant, they may not have noticed you the first time - but don't be annoying.

Add social media to the mix:

A press release can be in a traditional format as well as in a Social Media format.

This format makes it easier for someone to write a story about it. It includes bulletized key points after the title and summary paragraph. Also gives contact info so they can get more information. Break out quotes into a separate section to make it easy for them to just grab quotes. Include links to a blog post that elaborates on the story. And of course, give them links to all the social bookmarking sites and RSS subscription links. Finally give them a link to a traditional pr format as well.

All of this is just to make it easy for the journalist or blogger to use your story. You can even give them additional resources to use (technorati tags for example).

Post news release on your blog.
Bookmark the release
Create a MS Word version of the release and optimize it with keywords and links. Do the same with a .pdf file.

Measure Success:
Wire service reporting, web analytics, google and yahoo alerts, and RSS feeds.

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Greg Jarboe is up last. Asks who in audience is with small/medium/big business. It's a good mix.

Almost 75% of search marketers are now optimizing press releases. A year ago, it was only about 31%.

Last year's message is "optimize press releases". This year's message is "advanced tips for optimizing press releases".

Interesting new trend is that media is starting to get this. The NY Times is training its reporters to optimize their news, which is a fundamental shift. We knew about it, but now we have to compete with the news media as well.

It also creates opportunities, when the news media hires search marketers to optimize their news releases! SEO-PR took on this challenge with the Jill Carroll Story.

Tip 1:

Add Images! Sure, optimize the text, but add an image too. Journalists are looking for visuals (90%) to go with the story.

Tip 2:

Add multimedia! (podcasts, video, etc.). Then take that video on places like YouTube. These videos can really drive lots of traffic.

Tip 3:

Distribute the release in various places (US, Canada, UK, etc).

Tip 4:

89% of journalists prefer to receive majority of info via email. Build relationships. If you make the journalist feel like he/she is the most important person in the world, you'll get their attention. Don't just put out a release and expect the journalists to find it. And the most important point - email the release to the reporters BEFORE you put it out on the wire. Make them feel special.

Tip 5:

Don't just pitch anchors at CNN.com. Pitch to the human editors of Yahoo! News. These editors don't get pitches often. They are lonely, and are happy to hear from you. They want some scoops before others. And they want video, audio, and ADVANCED ACCESS to the story. Give it to them!

Tip 6:

Matt Cutts says main benefit is NOT PageRank of links in press release and that he would zero out the link benefit from releases. So the links in releases are now valueless, but IF others pick that up and give you links, then those count.

So who gives links all day long? Blogs. The mainstream media might occasionally give you a link, but it's rare, and it's usually just to the home page. But bloggers will give you a deep link to the exact page relevant to the topic. Use Lee's tips (above) to contact key bloggers (even A-list bloggers). Offer them images, video links, excerpts and ADVANCE ACCESS. Bloggers love this and will usually happily post on the story.

So, THAT link juice WILL count, even if the press release link juice is taken away.

Greg shows stats on traffic generated by the story they pitched. Their efforts brought in tons of traffic.

They also realized that a small blog site (Huffington Post) generated 3.4 times more visitors than ABC News which also ran the piece. And the blog traffic was sticky! The users who came from the blog, read an entire 11-part series with 65% of the visitors finishing the entire piece.

They generated 4,081 new links from 763 additional blogs from this press release. These links took them from #65 ranking to #12 ranking in one week!

Things to have:

1. Original and unique content of genuine value
2. Pages designed primarily for humans - great story with graphics
3. Links intended to help people find more relevant information

Brett Tabke welcomes everyone. He recaps things and talks about the schedule for today... He blamed Danny for breaking the news about the new sitemap protocol. He then talks about Danny resigning from SEW and how he asked Danny to speak at PubCon and he agreed. He says Danny is and still is the authority on search. He thanks Danny.

Danny is now up.

He said he is a bit tired because he had to do a drug deal, with someone from Google. He passed along his medicine for her cold, Vanessa Fox, guys. He then makes a few more jokes, people laugh to be nice (playing with you Danny).

He explains that he hasn't come to PubCon in a while because of scheduling things. But timing works and it is Greg Boser's 40th bday this week. He explains how he came up with what he will say, while missing an exit driving his kids to soccer practice.

WebmasterWorld as an Institution
- Google Dance yearly, he thinks of it as WMW (WebmasterWorld) giving so much of Google's vocabulary, i.e. Google Dance came from WMW.
- GoogleGuy comes from WMW
- Florida - the big algo change was named by WMW and weather reports coming from WMW
- Canaries, your one of the people who know when things go wrong in SEs first
- Unification, they said that the SEs need to come together to come up with common standards, and a lot of it has come off of WMW
- Brett is sort of a rebel in some ways (banning all spiders, naming updates, using a robots.txt file as a blog)

Ten Years On...
- He said maybe search stuff has some legs
- But he still gets annoyed with articles that say "the lowly search ads.", now videos are getting this type of hype
- He then gives off some search stats on search growth

What's It All Mean
- People spend on search
- People are spending a lot more on search
-- some due to contextual pollution of figures
-- some due to click prices rising due to better conversion tracking, more competition, brand money flowing in
-- Some due to increasing search volume
- He explains the Google Network (ads on AOL, ads on newspapers, etc) Google Network is everyone and he wants Google to separate it out.

Get On the Googletrain!
- Everyone is copying Google
- Time Warner is trying to auction of TV spots
- Ogilvy trying to enable people to bid on video clips

AdWords Vs. AuctionWords
- Its search marketing not search auctioning...
- He explains you go to search when you need something

What is Search Marketing?
- Putting messages in front of someone who has overtly and explicitly express a desire
- SEO is the act of doing this by trying to influence unpaid listings, usually crawler-based ones
- Search advertising is the act of doing this through direct paid methods
- SEM is the combination of them both

Reverse Broadcasting
- Search is a reverse broadcasting medium
- Broad ad (tv,radio, print, contextual) is all to build desire
- Reverse Broadcasting is about listening to the millions broadcasting their immediate desires on search engines

What Search Marketers Do
- Identify the key broadcasting stations (google, etc.)
- Understand how to feed and optimize messages shown on these stations
- Scout the location, write the dialog &U deliver customized commercials
- A unique job, so be proud

What Search Marketing is Not
- Having an auction doesn't equal having it as SEM
- Nor does PPC pricing mean search
- Contextual is not search

Contextual Pollution
- Google & Yahoo just reported earnings but didn't break out contextual from search
- Lumping the two pollutes the data
- Especially worrisome as vertical search grows

Generation of Search
- Vertical Search part of 3rd gen jump
- Vertical is info, news, health, shopping, music, video, cars, etc, pieces of each
- Personal/Social Search you change results based on what you personally search for, or your network is searching for. Danny says it helps the spam problem.

How To Succeed in Gen 3?
- Watch the vertical search engines
- Have great content
- Especially great titles & descriptions

Going Beyond Search
- Search players are looking beyond search
-- contextual moves
-- Google doing print, radio, video, etc.
- They want to drag you and your money with them
- Do you go? Are you still a search marketer?

Metrics Marketer
- You market on really good metrics
- The medium doesn't matter

Search: Here To Stay
- Search is now a fundamental advertising medium, like TV, radio, print and outdoors
- Search marketing - demand filling, reverse broadcasting...
- Apprentice - Martha Stuart
- Google Pontiac
- Google Remax partnership
- Maxim Google Earth

Future: More Integration
- Search will be part of overall ad/pr campaign
- Campaign may even more and more seek to drive searches
- Search will pull money from other mediums and force those to be more accountable

Future: More Complications
- MSN demo, daypart, etc.
- Non search products
- Automation will remain important
- Search is job security

Future: Other Things
- More vertical and personal
- Perhaps more balance for paid and organic
- More lawsuits
- Privacy challenge
- Copyright challenges, Belgian story, Australia, book search. etc.

Leaving Search Engine Watch
- He explained the story
- He is doing shows in NY, transitioning off

Search Engine Land Site http://searchengineland.com/
- New site where Danny, Chris Sherman and I (Barry Schwartz)
-- Daily news blogging
-- Longer stuff
-- Etc.
- Daily Search Cast

Brett Tabke posted a thread at WebmasterWorld showing that the SiteMaps Protocol is backed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

This was announced at the WebmasterWorld PubCon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I was lucky enough to be invited to Yahoo!'s party last night at the Palms Hotel. Yahoo! rented out the Hugh Hefner's Sky Villa, which I hear goes for 40k per night. They had Chris Pierce performing live with his band during the event. The suite is absolutely cool. You walk in and to the left is a bar, with two bartenders, past that is a living room type of area with a fireplace, big TV, sofas. It all looks out to the Vegas skyline, seriously a sweet view. Then there is an outdoor mini pool that looks like the picture below.

On the right of the lower rooms is an other bar with more sofas. Then you can walk upstairs to the rooms. There was a photobooth on the left, past that on the left is the bathroom and shower, Rand decided to give it a try. Outside the bathroom is the revolving bed, you can see Andrew Goodman, Rand Fishkin and Myself on it at the same time. Outside of that room, top level, right side of the level, was Hef's room (wasn't allowed in), this massage room, and then some other bedrooms.

The invite list, I hear was small, when I left, I took a cab back with someone who was pretty upset he was turned away at the door.

Very cool party and tons of pics at Flickr. Thanks Yahoo!