April 11, 2007 Archives

Successful Site Architecture Wed. April 11, 2007 Session 4:45pm
Fundamentals Track

Moderator: Alex Bennert

Speakers:
Matt Bailey, SiteLogic Marketing
Derrick Wheeler, Acxiom Digital

Walked into a busy room. The speakers from the talk beforehand are still here, meeting audience members and answering their questions. Quick visit with Matt Bailey, speaker. Says he has new stuff for this presentation. Alex Bennert came up to say hello. Waved to Anne Kennedy. A Cre8asiteforums member recognized me, walked up and introduced herself. That was fun. Another female SEO. It's so fun to have a face to go with a forums avatar or name. The room is again, absolutely packed. Chris Winfield and his new wife, Danielle, are here somewhere. Saw them come in and did the wave thing. The room is warm and alive with chatter.

Derrick leads off with what is successful site architecture? First, he talks about se spiders. A search engine spider requests pages from websites. It must be able to follow links to your pages. It takes them back and indexes them into an index, somebody searches for it and they come and buy something. Funny diagram. SE spiders discover URLs and adds to a Que. Collects content elements to use. A search engine Index is a scaled down database. They boil down your page to the smallest amount of info that is relevant. They use off page factors. Algorithm asks which page should I show from my index? There are different versions of indexes, depending on where you are and time of day. Always updating.

SE crawls entire site. Indexes entire site. Users perform targeted queries, se ranks appropriate pages. Users click on the ranked listings. Users take action or interact with the website. Any change will impact one of those things. These are the 6 steps to success. Balance between users and search engines. He asks how many have new site, or redesign or tweak existing.

Mastering the basics - figure out where you are today and measure over time to know impact. Keep a list of domains and sub domains you own and what they're doing. If you have other domains that are dupes, your SEO needs to know this. Monitor your log files. Not just analytics. Log files show what is making the request. You want to know what pages the SE's are requesting. You need to know if something is blocking you website from se's.

Track your rankings for business critical keywords at major SE's. Collect data from different sources, like Yahoo! Google, MSN. Use tools like Omniture, Wordtracker, etc. Webposition shows rankings. Keep monthly reports for your websites to spot problems earlier.

Internal cross linking - most sites have a global top nav and go down to other levels. Breadcrumbs are how you link back up. Go top down and bottom up. Side to side too. Make sure you have all these links. URL structure. Make them text links. Why? Its easy for se's to read URLS of text links. SE's don't execute JavaScript. Some JavaScript has the url in it and the SE may be able to see it. Don't trust it. If a section of your site is not being indexed, it could be the URL structure. Alt attributes don't get much weight for SE's. They are used behind images. SE's can't fill out forms. Forms are great for users, provide another path for SE's.

Footer links - recommends using them. Link to the most important pages on your site. Not all partner sites or links pages. Keep it short and simple. Less links equals more weight for each one on the page. Short URLs are less complex and easier to follow. Many levels down is interpreted as not being important on your site. The higher up the link, the most "important" you feel the page is.

Http request/response cycle - referring url user agent name, ip address, cookies for domain, more. http response is 3 digit status code (200, 301, 302, 404), html code, location of redirect, cookies or more. Every request is met with a response. Some URLS have moved, for example. There are cookie communications to and from.

200 ok code - all is well and here is your html. Don't put a custom error page with 200 ok code.

301 - permanent moving of page; redirect to appropriate page
]
302 - temp move

404 - custom error page

The circle of death - do not block entire site using robots.txt file. Don't permit a "Disallow://". Don't require anyone to require a cookie to access the site. SE's don't accept cookies. Don't force cookies to see a particular country. Can cause huge problems. Every URL should have unique content.

Breadcrumbs show paths. Related products and navigating them cause problems due to breadcrumb setup. Two products may end up on the same page but the URL is different. He's talking about spider traps. Shows T-mobile site. Clicks on View All results. Shows how clicking on two links extends the page URL with dis=true code. Session ids are another cause for accidental duplicate pages. Link and session ids have different urls linking to it. Duplicate pages can happen with http and https absolute urls. SE's will think its two different sites. Use relative links to be safe.

Alex introduces Matt Bailey.

Architecture. Thanks everyone for hanging in there. Wants to make it simple. Shows a picture of Prince, We're gonna party like its 1999. Looks at site architecture from an accessibility standpoint. Describes Target lawsuit. The site had no alt attributes. Made a lot of use of image maps that you had to see visually. Forced to use a mouse. This excludes keyboard and voice only users. SE's want to index your websites. Offer a sitemap. Use text links. Create a useful information style rich site. Google has suggestions for how to be ranked, but Target didn't want to follow those guidelines. If you make the site accessible, it is crawl able. SE's are handicapped. They can't see, or click, eat cookies. If site is accessible to special needs, SE's will get it too.

Alt attributes - Shows Target website without images. Empty pages. No content was visible. Screen readers can't use it. Selecting a country first? You have to hit a continue button, but SE's can't do that. Flash prevents SE's. Cluttered URLS are too long, force line breaks, rewrite it to make sense to the user. A recent test showed rewriting urls to make shorter increased se visits. It removes all the wild cards. People want to know location, directory and where they are. Favicons put your branding on someone's browser. When you redesign, carefully rewrite and redirect your pages and links. You have to redirect your traffic. Who is linking to your deep pages? You need to take time move and redirect to not lose traffic and links. Study your popular pages. Match keyword traffic that is unique or the primary url. Describes 301 redirect old directory to new directory. Does not recommend meta redirects. MSN will describe how to setup 301s.

CSS and standards. Can validated code rank better or do sites using CSS rank higher? CSS separates content from markup. It keeps it external. Reduces page clutter. CSS vs. tables. Shows an example. Shows how engine looks top to bottom. It stacks the page for easier reading. Stacks tables. Navigation always on top and content to the right. Tables aren't "bad". SE's see the code differently. CSS eliminates this stacking of tables. The focus is on the content. Validation can uncover coding errors. Assures spiders can index content. It's not about rank. It's about making pages accessible to SE's.

Mobile phones are another factor. You want the pages to gracefully degrade (graceful degradation). Sometimes there are different style sheets for different browsers. Progressive enhancement starts at the lowest common denominator. Anyone on any device can access the content. At the base, can be accessed at basic level. Additional functionality is adding in layers for increased experience and technologies. Use Webmaster Central by Google for "great reports" It's free. If you have accidentally disallowed your site, it will tell you. How many pages have been crawled? How often, what sections, what time? See external links to your site. Sitemaps.org accepted by MSN, Yahoo and Google.

This session allows the search teams at Ask, Live, Google, and Yahoo to provide input about various robots.txt files and asks the audience about how to improve upon the robots.txt standard. It is very discussion-based and representatives from the Big 4 ask for input in a variety of different areas related to robots.txt (and sitemaps).

Presented by:
Keith Hogan, Ask.com
Eytan Seidman, Live.com
Dan Crow from Google
Sean Suchter from Yahoo!

Moderated by Danny Sullivan

Keith Hogan first presents the Ask.com company profile. Less than 35% of servers have a robots.txt files. The majority of robots.tx files are compied from one found online that is very generic (2.5M hosts have this file). The robots.txt files vary in length to 1 character to over 256,000 characters.

He shows a histogram of the sizes - the peak is at 23 characters. 11% has this amount:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Robots format is not well understood. He shows a screenshot that has a funny comment saying "Please use during off-peak hours."

Recent addition to robots.txt where you can add a sitemap directive:
SITEMAP: http://www..xml

Both robots and sitemaps are kind of linked together. The accomplish similar goals. Sitemaps allow webmaster page level control to identify pages, etc.

Possible changes/additions to robots: is it time to change the format to XML? It would improve accuracy control, perhaps: crawler allow groups/disallow groups, allow paths, disallow paths.

Another possibility is to have peaks during daytimes, valleys at nighttimes, etc. Should webmasters be able to stop/slow crawling of the site during differnet times?

Perhaps it is better to specify a start crawl time and end time.

Some sites have hosts/IPs that are dedicated to crawlers and tell them to visit certain sites.

HTML provides meta directives - noindex, nofollow, nocache, noarchive. Should this be added to robots?

Another thing is spider traps or duplicate content for crawlers even though there are plenty of heuristics to identify these problems - session IDs, affiliate IDs. Should robots add hints for this so that sites don't end up with duplicate pages and smaller link credits?

You can find the Ask crawler information from the About page.

Question for audience: If you had your own machine and website, what is your interaction with your hosting company and how can you control crawling your site?

Eytan Seidman from Live.com presents next. He asks how many people use robots.txt. He shows us the hilton.com robots.txt file that says "Do not crawl the site during the day!"

A big part about websites to search engines is communication. Search engines have no good way of communicating with websits through robots.txt. There should be a protocol to facilitate this communication in robots.txt.

Robots.txt's protocol is very complex. Engines don't support a common set of control. There is some commonality but it's not as good as it could be.

Dan Crow from Google speaks next.

He speaks about the robots.txt exclusion protocol - robots.txt and robots meta tags. Tells search engines what not to index. The exclusion protocol started in 1994 and is the de facto standard in the industry. There are still significant changes between search engines

Standardization: Should we revive the standardization effort? Common core features as they exist/defined extension mechanism.

Long-term goal - consistent syntax and semantics/improved common feature set.

Sean Suchter, director of search technology at Yahoo speaks next. He says that the Yahoo spider is Yahoo Slurp which supports all standard robots.txt commands. There are custom extensions, such as crawl-delay, sitemap, wildcards. There are custom meta extensions, such as NOODP and NOYDIR. He adds that different Yahoo search properties use different user agents, so if you are trying to affect one robot, please only address that robot. You want to be careful - depending on how you use your robots.txt, you will have different effects on different robots and can lose out on traffic from some type of search.

One question that he has for us is regarding the crawl-delay. How should this be rate limited? A crawl delay actually seen "in the wild" of 40 seconds means that Yahoo can never crawl a large news site. Is it about bandwidth reduction? In what manner is this used?

Another one that is floating around - robots-noindex and robots-index - this goes in your HTML page that mark pages that you don't want the robots to use for purposes of retrieval. For example, templates or ad-text that would cause irrelevant traffic.

The last question he has is about complex HTML and CSS, iframes, etc., there's a lot more than the page that is useful - how would users want to emphasize or exclude this?

Questions - Danny asks: Is it better to have robots.txt in an XML format?
Some guy from the audience says that it should be part of the sitemaps standard if this is a requirement.
Another guy says that he likes the XML idea for the nature of his business. He mentions that XML could underline parts of his site that have duplicate content issues. He says that he wants to know if there are any tools that display any pages that have duplicate content.

The first guy who responds adds that he is concerned about people being able to authenticate through robots.txt to only allow spiders that people trust.
Danny says that there is the ability to do reverse DNS lookups, but he acknowledges that this is a pain. How can the robots.txt be improved to allow for authenticated spiders?

Danny asks about timezone control. Not many people seem overly concerned about timezone control.

A woman says that she wants the META exclusion to be available within the HTML "absolutely." She says that she actually has clients who cannot add robots.txt files to their root directory for whatever reason.

A man asks if robots.txt is optional. Dan responds to say "yes, there are." But some search engines may ignore it though. Dan says that content will be crawled unless you tell the spiders not to crawl the content.

A developer says that he wants to be able to ignore dynamic content completely.

Danny asks about the crawl-delay and asks if all of the Big 4 have an exact definition across the board. They all look at each other quizzically and don't know. Sean says that it's probably not used the same across the board. Some webmasters don't use it correctly; it hurts their site. Crawl-delay should be defined as page loads per second or queries per second, megabytes per day, megabytes per month - but there is still no definite answer. When suggesting megabytes per day or MB per month, the audience gets all muttery and Danny responds, "We don't like that!"

Keith says that there is anecdotal evidence that shows that some sites have different robots.txt files that are served at different times of the day. Sean adds that "if you do this, we have to crawl it every minute, and how many people would like that?" Since some people actually need a time-of-day restriction, this is very bad to swap robots.txt files. "We'll note that, but please don't swap the robots.txt files."

An audience member says that the day of week is more important for him.

Danny asks how many people were hit by a scraper site, and a few people raise their hands.

An audience member says that spiders should adjust their crawling based on server response times, and Dan says that Google does this.

Another audience member chimes in about the XML standard and says that doing an XML based format will be more easily messed up. Dan says that this is one of the main reasons why they are against doing this XML format.

Dan says that some of the robots.txt files he sees (75,000) contain a jpg.

An audience member asks about legal jargon on his financial site with over 40,000 pages. He wants people to ignore parts of a site with the legal jargon.

Dan asks if standardization would be useful and people raise their hands and say that it would be.

An audience member says that she likes the crawl rate but she wants a robots.txt option for a crawl rate that can be slow, medium, or fast.

Another audience member has privacy concerns about robots.txt. She says that because "robots are not indexing the page, but you're still indexing the URL, we have PPC links that are easily accessible in Google and that's a click-frauders dream. Do you have comments on a separate standard where we won't even index these URLs?" Also, she asks if there's a way to have a Webmaster Central way of defining your robots.txt so that you don't have to have a public file.

Eytan says that Microsoft is looking at that. It's not a great user experience to show a URL and description so they do want to know how to optimize it.

Sean says that on Yahoo, you can delete URLs or paths in SiteExplorer and that will affect any indexing. Dan says that Google has the equivalent as well. Vanessa Fox from Google (who is in the audience taking notes) says that you can do this on the page itself so that it cannot be indexed at all.

Danny asks about who should be the priority - is the siteowner always right (unless it's the homepage)? There is mixed reaction in the crowd.

Someone in the audience says that there should be more meta commands - don't crawl me but list my URL, for example. A few people actually want a lot more options, but Danny says that there are problems that can result from these options.

Dan says that people have complained to Google that their pages weren't being crawled but it was really the fault of their robots.txt files that excluded the spiders. Sean finds this hilarious: he says "check the robots.txt file!"

Someone in the audience talks about the sitemaps.org standard and asks what would happen if you didn't include everything to be allowed in the sitemap but don't necessarily exclude it on robots.txt? The speakers agree that this information will not be excluded. Keith reiterates and says that if it excluded in robots.txt, it will be blocked, but if it's not in the sitemap, it will still be crawled.

Feature request: ability to tell people about dynamic session parameters and that search engines should not crawl them. Sean says that you should redirect content with for Yahoo's robot to another page without the session ID. It is not the best solution, but if you see Yahoo slurp coming, you could redirect to the right page without tracking codes or session IDs.

Sean reiterates part of his presentation and asks how robots should be used to focus on CSS, iframes, etc. Nobody has said anything thus far so he wanted some input. Dan says that Google looks at CSS, but a lot of people actually do block css files through robots.txt. Dan says that the CSS should not blocked because it is occasionally used by Google to find out if people are using spammy content (white text on white text, for example).

Sean asks why people in the audience are blocking off CSS files. Nobody really has an answer but one guy says that he puts all the non-search-engine-essential content in a folder (CSS, Javascript, etc.) and robots.txt tells the entines not to crawl that folder.

Note: Please excuse typos, this coverage is provided live from a complete discussion with much audience interaction.

Moderated by Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro and the Chairman of the SEMPO Board of Directors.

First panelist is Kevin Heisler from JupiterResearch. He states that they got over 1100 respondents to the survey of agencies and marketers. His first slide is titled Agencies Should employ advanced creative tactics to replace standard Display and Pop. He finds that richer advertising techniques will start to replace traditional display ads. Recommends the building out of micro-sites, rich media, etc. They know that this will be a major aspect of Google’s YouTube strategy over time. They will slowly roll this out once people are more sued to other in-stream ads.

In the future, when building a campaign, it won’t be limited to the 30/60 second spots. He actually cites a very creative ad they saw recently from Avenue A | razorfish, using some rich media in a campaign for Coors. Advertisers expect campaigns to benefit from improved measurement tools in the n ear term. 38% of the online advertisers using an agency indicated an increased sophistication of planning and measurement tools (31% of those not using an agency). Following was increased availability of new creative formats.

They strongly believe that agencies need to improve their deep ROI metrics. They need to actually specify metrics and belonging to brands. They need to define branding success metrics. Across the board of different sized companies are all interested in using online e to increase brand awareness. They also agree on increasing the intent to purchase. He showed a slide where he was trying to show the closing of the gap between goals and measurement. This is a huge gap for all different sizes of companies. Thanks the audience.

Dan Sundgren from Efficient Frontier. His presentation is titled “Branding with Platform Marketing.” He feels that platform marketing will evolve into Google, Yahoo! etc. Step One: protect your brand. His “poster boy” is Nordstrom, which actually is zealous about protecting their brand. Also uses the Nike example. In Nike, they actually let affiliates bid on their term. Shows next the example of a search for Morgan Stanley. No top listing by MS, but the top Paid Search listing is a quite negative result indicating Morgan Stanley misconduct. The ad uses Morgan Stanley in the title and description, which shows him that they have not bothered to fill out the paperwork with the engines.

After the “blocking and tackling” suggestions above, he goes onto the planning. Uses an example of Pepsi, which is promoting a design a can contest. They did not match up the Paid Search by buying related terms like “Pepsi can design.” He shows the Google trends tool which indicated a spike in “Pepsi can” searches around the same time.

Shows two case studies that he did while employed with Google prior to EF. First was with Intel ViiV that showed trends history. He likes this type of research because the benchmark is zero since ViiV is a new product. They worked with an agency to setup tactics that matched search marketing to offline branding tactics. Google Trends also shows major news events that occurred, which correlates nicely with the spikes in traffic. The Intel ViiV PR resulted in 15,000% more Google searches (yes this is deja vue, because another speaker mentioned this same case study in a session I covered yesterday). He says the key is to do both pre and post-studies. Remember to engage your user.

Second case study is on whitepages.com. they wanted to test three DMAs (designated marketing area – Nielsen metric) with a different media mix. Each had very different blends. You can run radio and measure the lift on the DMA. Found that CPA’s varied by over 50%, depending on DMA. Brand lift was anywhere from 9-18%. One thing they noticed was that outdoor was very effective. This type of research gives you the ability to go “back to your boss” and show specific variations between community areas. He is eating his own soup…he paid for the term “ses new york” just before the conference. He got 63 clicks for $7.18 which is his blog and the creative is inviting people to this session.

Fionn Downhill, founder of Elixir Systems (and SEMPO BOD Member). She says that her story starts in 1912 at a Dale Carnegie Training session. He started writing his own materials. One of his trainees was from a small little know publisher called Simon-Shuster (sp?)…this led in short to the “How to win friends and Influence People” being voted as a top 4 most successful business books of all time. She actually said that the book was the first one she ever read, “when she was a girl years ago.”

Background of case study she will present, DCT had traditionally generated leads through print and offline media. (The statistics that were orginially presented herein were removed at the request of the speaker)

In short, DCT feels that this is the most successful lead generation campaign they have ever done (quoting Piera Palazollo, the Senior VP of Marketing at Dale Carnegie Training).

Gord adds that now brand building is a participatory experience, compared to years ago. “We are sharing the brand building experience with a number of additional people.”

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by n the interest of speed.

Tim Ash at Site Tuner.com is up first and explains that this is going to go by real fast due to time constraints. What is conversion tuning and why should you care? There is three online marketing activities such as acquisition, conversion, retention. He says the problem at this conference is about getting people to your website. He asks how many spend for on site conversion and testing. He says he wants to help us fix the weak link. The economics of the business is to get cost down on the website. Who should design your website? The real answer is none of the above, it should be designed by the visitor of the website. So what can you tune? You can tune mission critical parts of the website. Landing pages leading to track able actions. You can tune the price of your product or service. What can you tune on your page? What can’t you tune. He recommends don’t go to your competitors website and copy what they are doing. What works for them might not work for you. There are several ways to tune, A-B testing, multivariable testing. With A-B testing you can test one variable at a time. Send equal traffic to all at once. The typical test size is 10-100 recipes. The testing tries to predict best setting for each variable. He explains there testing engine. It uses proprietary math for internet marketing.

What mistakes should I avoid? Ignoring your baseline. He shows some examples of baselines on sites. The conversions improved but the baseline got worse. Always devote some bandwidth to your current version (the baseline). Measure relative to the baseline, not an absolute number. He asks another a question, 90 conversions or 100 conversions. The answer is that we don’t have enough data. Mistake number two is not collecting enough testing. Do not make decisions based on too little data. Pick a confidence level. He nexts puts up some example of pictures of Ferrari and then a Ferrari that had crashed. He explains Volvos are safe! Its not the picture, not the headline it’s the context which you see them in. Interactions are very important. The best setting for variable depends on its content. Mistake number three is ignoring variable interactions. There are major testing themes. Less is more, grab their attention, test the offer, reinforce your key messages, and personalize it. Radical simplification can improve your bottom line.

Next up is Tom Leung from Google. He is going to talk about some common pitfall and various testing concerns. He asks what about if I place the javascript on my pages will it penalize me? There are hundreds of factors search engine consider. Don’t treat search engine bots differently. The variations that you are testing should be consistant. He said don’t be evil with your testing. Javascript tags will not hurt you in the search engines. Testing is still part art and part science so you need to put your thinking cap on or retain a consultant. The Google optimizer works by testing different types of pages. The conversions are recorded and they are telling you what is the best situation and the best conversion.

Fun with Dynamic Websites is a session presented by Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Laura Thieme, and Jake Baillie.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen (demib.com) presents and says that search engines like to index as much valuable content as they can possibly find. If search engines don't index you, it's not because they don't like you. Dynamic websites can be difficult to be indexed.

It comes down to IRTA:
Indexing - getting your pages indexed
Ranking - ranking for relevant keywords
Traffic - get people to click on your website
Actions - get users to do desired actions

Indexing is where the problems are. Typically, there are a bunch of problems being crawled.
Ranking: options - dynamic websites can potentially outrank static websites
Traffic - the game is the same - static or dyamic
Actions - technology only plays a limited role as long as it works.

Dynamic architecture - a user requests a page and the webserver might query a database, server side includes, or other variables. The problem with this picture is that the complexity of what goes on at the backend level is usually just returned directly to the users and the spiders - that is not always good. If your engineer comes back and offers Javascript, requires parameters, or needs cookies, this can cause some problems. How do you improve this issue? You can simplify technology. If this is not possible (buying off-the-shelf CMS systems and untweakable systems), you might want to think of a virtual layer between the back architecture and the front architecture, like a bridge. One of the most common ways to do this is requiring a URL rewrite engine. The complexity of the URLs can be in the backend but the users/spiders don't have to see it. Another option is to use a static replication of the content.

What is not a problem? It is not a problem to store content in the database. Search engines need a safe way to navigate to the content. Search engines won't fill out forms or query the database. Also, a ? mark is not a problem. It's just an easy way to identify a template-based dynamic web page. It shows that there's one file that serves different content depending on parameters passed to it. SSIs (server-side includes) are also not a problem. The thing that is important is what is returned to the users/spiders.

Extension names are also not a problem. Use .asp, .jsp, .cfm, .html, whatever you want.

Search engines don't care what processes run on your web server as long as what is returned is valid JHTML architecture.

What are some indexing barriers?
One of the most common issues is long and ugly URLs. This URL will not be indexed in any engine.
Another common issue is duplicate content: session IDs, click IDs, time-stamped URLs. The engines do not want to index the same content on different URLs. You don't want many-to-one problems. He shows an example of over 200,000 visits on Yahoo and says that sooner or later, this will hurt you.
Server downtime and slow response times can be issues. If you don't know how fast that Google can spider your site, sign up to Google Webmaster Tools.
Spider traps - infinite loops of dynamically created links and pages

Other indirectly related issues (You can find these issues on static sites as well) include: required support of cookies, Javascript, Flash, etc.; geotargeting and personalization, form (post method) based navigation

Issues not related at all: robots.txt and META-robots exclusion, frames/password protected sites.

Solutions that work:
There are many solutions available. There's always more than one way to solve a problem. Don't just pick the first and best. Get an overview of the ways to deal with a dynamic website and pick the one that works for you. Work from the bottom up.
- Fix your system - or:
- Add a "bridge layer" or:
- Replicate your content

Favorite fix: the one-parameter website.
Change something from index.php?id=12&cart=23&sort_order=44 and store this in a database to one parameter to call something like this: index.php?R=35

Identify spiders on a global level. Don't serve session IDs to spiders. This has nothing to do with cloaking so don't be afraid to use this techniques.
Static pages may not be as bad. Use dynamic objects on hard-coded static pages (examples are banner scripts, timestamps from server, rotating news flash, RSS feeds, etc.)
Create a sitemap: guide search engines to the most important part of your site, etc.

You can also pay to play: pay for inclusion - directories, Yahoo! search, etc.

A dynamic website can be more optimized than static site!

Next up is Laura Thieme (bizresearch.com). She mentions that she's been in the business for 10 years and focuses on key topics: are you indexed? The crucial pages should be indexed. Other important things include optimization tactics - how long does it take? etc. Extenrnal factors (CMS, etc), and ensuring that you don't lose rankings.

The first thing is to begin your research project. Look at the URL structure. How many variables are in your URLs? Look at the search engine indices (doable for Google/Yahoo, but what about MSN whose site:xxx.com is broken?), curren ranking, spider activity (NetTracker, ClickTracks Pro, Log Analyzer), determining target terms. Once you are here, however, you have to overcome technology, resources, and/or political challenges. Index, optimize, and monitor improvements.

With dynamic versus static pages: in most cases, you do not have to keyword embed, you do not have to create static only pages. Be prepared that by doing these changes, you can lose rankings.

Home page titles can really matter. Example: Pier1.com - we had a few select phrases that we wanted to focus on.
Target term: Dining Room Tables on pier1.com. Google said it did not want this URL but MSN took it. Even though it was relevant, it was not indexed. Therefore, it was in the homepage title. Ironically, within 6 months, the title "Dining Room Tables" showed up in the Google SERPs as #3. Category page titles matter too. There are other optimization opportunities, because you can add target terms to the title. Interestingly, people search for "candle holders" instead of "candleholders." Make sure that your tools can overwrite the subcategory titles. Titles, headings, navigational text, metadata, anchor text, links - incoming and outgoing.

Example: champion.com. The page was indexed but wasn't optimized. Sure enough, they are ranked in the top 10 with a title update for Women's Fitted Tees.

Example: Pear's Gourmet. Revised page title bought better rankings.

Example: Levenger ballpoint pens. Each product title added "Ballpoint Pens" to the product and that increased its ranking.

Example: Gabriel Logan - replaced images with text, optimized page title.

External factors: so what if you've done this optimization? If you can't get the search engines to read your URLs and your CMS (content management system) is keeping you from getting indexed, what can you do? Watch out for these vendors that prevent spidering, fail to properly redirect, and lack administrative tools for you to focus on optimization. Try talking to a CMS customer service rep. Research before you buy.

Search engines may choke on some dynamic URLs generated by your site search engine. You may just need to upgrade your CMS.

You might see that MSN might be picking you up faster than Google. Select keyword phrase improvements in Google, but takes longer to achieve top positions. Consider optimizing a Yahoo data feed.

Which one wins? Dynamic or static?
There are many times that we work with clients who work with agencies that are determined to create static sites. On a scalable model, static pages are harder to keep up to date. Other technology challengeS: site search engine, check the version and way it's getting indexed; check your robots.txt; canonical issues, 404s

Keyword embedding URLs work - but don't forget to put 301s in place, but be willing to temporarily lose rank. If you redesign your pages, focus on 301s.

In summary: get indexed, optimize based on the way people search, submit a data feed, monitor improvement, be persistent/patient. If you see that you're still not ranked, you might have a duplicate content penalty or over-optimization.

The final speaker is Jake Baillie, managing director of STN labs.

He focuses on duplicate content - why it happens on websites and how you can control it.

Dr. Phil's duplicate content primer: "To take control of your problems, you have to understand why they happen." The biggest cause of duplicate content on dynamic websites is circular navigation. Brand/category/item, category/brand/item, etc. When you build, for example, e-commerce sites, you have multiple ways to get to the same result. You need to be consistent on how to access certain content. If you have a page on red widgets, make sure the URL to that is always the same.

Print-friendly pages, by definition, are duplicate pieces of content. Use CSS to style and JavaScript to flip between them. In a pinch, block the other content from search engines.

Designers have this mental block - to slash or not to slash, that is the question. Pick a directory index format, and be consistent. This causes 60% of duplicate content issues.

Looks don't count - you need content on your pages. Lack of content causes stoppage of indexing. Stoppage of indexing causes lack of rankings. E-commerce sites are a problem.

You might have issues with your registrar's DNS redirection service - 301 redirects are the best way to do it. Different URLs - same page. DOn't use cloaking scripts you don't understand.

Contnet : URL - always one-to-one relationship. The golden rule to avoid duplicate content issues.

Enjoyable image service - if you are selling a product and someone links to the picture on eBay, you can use mod_rewrite to serve them a different image. You can also do a price swap RegEx example. What Jake is trying to say is that with modern webservers and dynamic sites, if you can think of a condition to test for, you can act upon this condition: competitors, time of day, type of browser, length of visit, number of visitors, your mood, etc. If someone requests 200 pages in 30 seconds, it's probably not the kind of visitor you want - but you would want exceptions to be made for spiders.

A few years ago, Jake focused on shortening URLs for search engines, but there are a lot more ways to focus on mod_rewrite to be creative with your results.

Other ideas for harassing your competitors: 403 - access forbidden, 404 page not found, different pages, sounds/lights/pictures/movies, annoying JavaScript, their own website, track. This is good for testing too.

Dana Todd starts off by doing a few surveys to gage audience knowledge and then passes the podium on to Jennifer Slegg. Jen's top tips for AdSense publishers include using your page titles effectively and implementing/optimising meta tags. Think twice about disabling image ads as well, they can often earn you a lot more money. It's worth testing the new CPA solution on Google once it comes out of Beta. Video ads work quite well and a lot of the advertisers have viral adverts that people click on them. Test between using borders and not, different sites find different results so don't assume that one is better than the other. Don't forget about Yahoo Partner Network, a lot of people who have moved across from Google are making significantly more money (it's currently in Beta although the people at the Yahoo! stand have the power to get you in). Try to prevent banner blindness - use ad rotation software to mix up colour schemes and borders. AdSense is affected by the inbound links to your site and the keywords used in their link text - just like in organic search. Making AdSense titles the same colour as your normal site links can highly increase CTR. Think twice about using more than one ad unit. Although Google recommends using several placements, it can force users into clicking on the lower units, which means less money. Forums are tricky to monetise on forums, use a colour scheme rotator in order avoid people ignoring your ads. Using image ads on forums also works well as forums tend to be quite text heavy already. Targeting ads on sites using a lot of flash or images can be hard, make sure that you use meta tags and alt tags on images effectively. Use caution when using ads on a site selling products and services, it will make alarm bells sound in your visitors heads (why are they advertising their competitors and not converting me as a new customer?). If your AdSense account gets suspended, make corrections and make yourself compliant as soon as possible. Google usually send a warning first unless something such as click fraud is occurring. You should keep your account in good standing, don't pay for cheap traffic, don’t encourage clicks and don’t click on your own ads. Analyse your logs when you get a suspension notice including IPs and referral URLs. Be polite and professional in all correspondents with Google, as angry/threatening publishers probably won’t get unsuspended.

Jeremy Schoemaker describes how he got into contextual ads, creating a website to convert file formats and then found AdSense as a way to monetise it. You should make a usable and useful website before getting into AdSense - think about your users and not the money. You should usually wait until you get 1000 unique visitors a day before putting ads onto your pages. Getting into the AdSense programme is very quick and simple, just apply for an account and stick the JavaScript code on your website. Be careful about what adverts are shown on your site, you can exclude certain sites although it's very hard to keep on top of it. Remember that when people click on your ads they are leaving your site; they may also see the adverts as recommendations, which can be damaging to your own reputation. You can test the boundaries with what you do with AdSense, but always be completely open and communicate with Google. Preventing your site from getting banned is all about communication, make sure that you comply and keep AdSense support reps informed. YPN was launched in August 2005 and was unstable and unreliable at the start. The targeting is still really bad and is mainly focussed on the advertisers rather than publishers. A lot of false alarms also occur with compliance issues, which can be quite stressful. Google Analytics is excellent for tracking your progress; heat maps are also a very effective way of deciding where to place your ads (such as Crazy Egg). Jeremy's top tips include testing all the time, use analytics, take advantage of user heatmaps and keeping communication flowing between your contextual ad providers.

Note: Please excuse typos, this coverage is provided live and without much editing, due to the timeliness of the coverage...

Moderated by Gord Hotchkiss, President of Enquiro as well as Chairman of the SEMPO Board of Directors. He lets everyone know that one presenter is missing (?not sure which one).

First up is Curtis Dueck from Epiar (one of the sponsors of last night’s dinner thrown by Allan Dick – on word: wow). Will discuss Search Informed marketing (SIM) – Use of search data and intelligence. Marketing 101 recap…as any seasoned marketer will tell you, in order to connect with those that have a demand for you, they must see you clearly. Once upon a time, the “TV/Industrial complex” made for a circular motion in supply/demand. In today’s environment, how do we connect supply with demand, and how has demand changed?

Two forms of research are necessary: focus groups, surveys and polls. Now they are joined by search research. Billions sample size, “pulled” data sources, and low human hours required to effectively collect data. In the others, the sample size is much smaller, require high human hours, and need to be “pushed” to provide info.

Prerequisites to success with SIM. Willingness to embrace change, to genuinely provide what the market demands, Willingness to change your vocabulary to match what people are asking for. In order to do this, you need comprehensive research and insight. Remember that competitors are dealing with these same \questions. There is an alternative to adopting SIM, but the results could be bad (shows a pic of a dinosaur).

Search frequency research: looking for trends, patterns, ratios, relationships, oddities, and ultimately meaning within the data. He shows a series of search frequency research charts by product segmentation, television demand. He finds that people are looking for plasma twice as often as rear-screen projections. Looking at what market is entering into search engines allows the “finger on their pulse.” Another chart: Brand Equity. Phillips approx 500 times a day searched with one L, another 500 with two L’s. How would that feel to find out?

Another chart: product ideas. With searches related to wholesale candles show an example of product ideas…since “soy” candles are near the top of consumer demand, this could drive the idea to sell them. Next chart: Consumer feedback. Auto brand used in searches surrounding EGR and PCV valves.: Ford #1, but this is bad since these searches are indicating a problem with these types of valves. Chevy and Honda were 2 and 3, respectively. They can then look within a specific manufacturer.

Next chart: Competitive intelligence. Looking for terms surrounding “Microsoft downloads.” If you were looking at doing your own software development, simply knowing what people are searching around MS terms could help guide strategy. Next chart: Foreign affairs. In searches around “Iraq,” he found the Iraqi dinar, which was interesting to currency speculators he knew. Next chart: Public Issues: healthcare. If working in government, or in a pharmaceutical company, you may be able to gain insight into what searches occur around “spasms.” The different spasm being entered into the SE’s provides unprecedented insight into aggregate human condition..

Next chart: Celebrity brand searches. Surrounding “Tiger Woods” was a huge list starting with “wife” (laughs). The last place was Nike….this could be an issue. He showed a couple case studies. #1 client was an online retailer, and they suggested some redirects to various product pages, which worked great. #2 also experienced explosive growth due to the SIM strategy. Anyone is able to apply this information: online/offline, for or non-profit. Anyone who is in the business of demand can benefit.

Next speaker is Bill Mungovan the Director of Search for Carat Fusion. He will present about how you can take the type of data that Curtis presented and build a great campaign out of it. He talks about the fact that he works in a company that still considers search just a department. He points out that although $10B will be spent on search out of $20B online this year, still $150B being spent on other media. This puts things into perspective. He feels that agencies are organizing around preparing for further shifts towards online spend. He feels that they are not currently very well integrated and becoming one agency, but that he feels that is the direction they are going.

Search is a function of demand. Sots between online/offline media and buzz. They need to be told by something somewhere to search for something. Search inventory fluctuates with demand influencers. He will cover a case study of some work done for their client, Hyundai. Goals: maintain 100% share of voice on brand terms, also support online and offline events. Starts with a media plan that includes other efforts such as TV flights. They actually build an area for display and search into the overall media plan, which he was happy about.

They found that display and search interacted: 36% increase in Yahoo! click volume in the (day?) after a Yahoo! homepage takeover. Then shows a chart that search reacts to all advertising. They used scheduled TV spots and an additional homepage takeover (AOL) along with a TV spot to keep sustained click volume. They saw a drop when all print spots were completed. Then they ran another Yahoo! homepage takeover and the volume was brought back up again.

There is a 0% opportunity cost. If you don’t plan ahead and have a huge search budget, the TV spot will not lead to the additional volume. Without having a search program and without using budget for search while running TV ads, you are potentially losing tons of traffic. Allocate enough budget to capture this increased volume that is created online. Connect with offline media plan before client approval. Map keyword bundles to overall goals, not just lower funnel acquisition efforts. Lastly, remember search is still cheap! Very few large marketers are getting it and thinking in the full circle.

Last was Misty Locke, co-Founder and President of Range Online Media. She starts with a short case study looking at brand leads can stay ahead of non-brand spend. Unfortunately, I could not really understand the chart she was working with, but I will try to get a recap from her. The next thing they did was challenged measurements. It is sometimes not the media and the placements, but how we are measuring and tracking it. Realize that the ROI is not the most important factor at all times, but how you grow overall revenue. Currently only 15% of advertisers have consolidated all online and offline consumer data/. 39% actually don’t even measure online.

So they make a group decision between 7 diff agencies involved in one project and worked together with them, in a case study she presented. She showed examples of shared creative with online and offline. The online media can try all three ads they made. This was for Reliant Energy. They has a 13% increase in search conversions the week after the direct mail launch. Q19% decrease in cost per acquisition. Shows some other great results stats, and says they will obviously try this again.

Shows another case study in order to capitalize on Oprah Winfrey show. They placed/monitored ads around her name and products. Results: 100% increase in brand demand during the first week. 34% of total online sales came from search te first week. 60% increase in overall CTR. 5.8 ROI. And a “keyword shoutout” when the guy first featured on the show went from 0-200 searches with the week. I think I remember Misty from a past coverage because she talks so fast! :) This is great stuff but I can’t get it all…

3rd case study focused on a Pier One “Instant Win Game” campaign. Almost 74K players opted to receive offers from Pier One Imports. Resulted in over 343 actual in-store transactions (up 79% over previous years). She thanks everyone.

Gord has been making some good comments between and after speakers. He tells a story about the Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” bands. He went on a show, and was not prepared for the following traffic. He had a Yahoo! Store Website, and it in fact shut down the entire Yahoo! store system for a day due to the traffic generated but the offline exposure.

Looks like Andrew Goodman has a new pair of glasses. Greg Jarboe is sitting on the panel looking very calm. Spencer and Falkow are also on board. Finally, Rick Klau from FeedBurner is up on the panel, curious what info he has to add. People are sitting on the floor, this room is packed. I guess blogs and SEO make for a popular topic. Here we go...

Andrew asked who has a blog, 99% of the audience raised their hands. Wow. And I used to be shy about having a blog.

Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC.

Optimizing your feeds:
- Full text feeds are the way to go
- 20 or more items (not just 10, posts, comments, categories, etc.)
- Description field should be unique in your feed

Optimizing your blog:
- Rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure (tag clouds, related posts, top 10 posts, next and previous posts)
- Title tags (decouple the title from your blog post, talks about joining multiple tags together to make unique pages)
- URLs
- Anchor text (influence that)
- Heading tags
- "Sticky" posts, posts always appear at the top and they help with intro copy.
- Author profile pages and author links

He explains it is easy, even his daughter can do it.

Rick Klau from FeedBurner is next up.
- Manage over 600,00 feeds
- yada yada
- 301 vs 302 redirects
- Search engines incresignly consuming feeds
-- auto-discovery
-- noindex
-- ping full content are critical
- Style sheets helping feed usability
-- Raw code is going away
-- IE7, FF2, ignore stylesheets, FeedBurner is now capable of overriding
- Yahoo! Pipes makes RSS more customizable

Click Through Tracking
- They sometimes use click through URLs to track this but those URLs go through redirects.
- Default redirect is a 302 and not a 301 redirect, but you can opt for 301
- They recommend using a 302, because you don't necessarily want to tell the search engines you permanently moved them from your site to them but your call.
- Feeds are not just blogs, they are podcasts, they are videos, they are retailers, yahoo pipes, web services, etc.

Full Text vs. Summary Feeds
- The publisher needs to decide
- But there are a number of publishers adding value to the feed, like Techmeme. Techmeme looks at the feeds and looks at the links and the relevancy of that content.

- Use autodiscover
- Make sure to ping when you add new content
- Know which services that are crawling feed content
- Adding meta data into your feed helps with rich media feeds
- Use show notes in your podcast downloads
- Give people more of a reason to click through from your feed to your site, (i.e feedflare)

Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus Inc.

She is giving a case study. She has client who uses RSS for news items. So she said, Google thinks it is a blog. It seems like a hosted news page, that allows you to easy add content, that is RSS enabled. She showed rankings for Google Blog search, related blogs. More examples of how the links work, nothing major here. She shows results in stats, rankings and links. Full case study and more case studies, if you want them, give her your card.

Greg Jarboe from SEO PR is last up.

Greg drops me a live note... He then asks some Qs about how quickly it takes to get indexed. He will share a case study on getting blogs indexed.

StubHub case study. FYI, they don't sell tickets. Someone else sells them, but not StubHub. They wanted to create 15 blogs around the issues for fans, on ticket sales. There may be small audiences in your corporate blog, but there are lot more people interested in your news in your industry. Greg set up "news objectives" for each blog. What can they do that is unique? News, perspective, etc? By focusing on the content, you begin to build an interesting relationship with your readers.

They did a stock market analysis on the value of tickets for sale for concerts and events over time, up until that event. This is useful info, that is unique. So they did a ton of keyword research on what people were interested in. They researched what is important to the friend.

They tried new tools like who are the top bloggers, but who do they link to, who link to them. This helped them figure out who the influencers are.

He then showed the growth in rankings and traffic over 1, 2, 3 and 6 months. They saw the links increase. They got some really good links. And then eBay bought StubHub for $307 million - of course he said he cannot take credit for it, nor did he get some of the money from that - people laughed. The average price of the concert ticket sold decreased $20 per ticket year over year, due to the information out there.

Coverage provided by Lisa Barone for Bruce Clay.

Rebecca Lieb is moderating this afternoon’s Meet the Search Ad Networks session featuring Doug Stotland (Microsoft adCenter), Stewart Easterby (Yahoo), John Kannapell (AOL), James Speer (Ask.com) and Brian Schmidt (Google). Now that representatives from all the engines present and I have a tummy full of falafel (thanks for lunch, Tamar!), I say let’s go!

Up first is Stewart Easterby. Everyone say hi to Stewart.

Stewart gives us a quick Yahoo update and says that Panama was the worst kept code name in the entire world. Heh.

He notes that the buzz around Panama started about a year ago and assures the audience that Yahoo is on pace to successfully move all of its advertisers over to the new platform. Early feedback is very positive, with users really enjoying the geo-targeting features, shares of clicks forecasting (can see potential bids and positions), and the signup process.

Stewart talks about some recent brand advocate research. A brand advocate is a customer who really loves a specific brand, but I’m sure you could probably figure that out yourself. Anyway, Yahoo conducted a survey and found that 87 percent of brand advocates search several times a week or more, 75 percent regularly use social media, and 2 in 3 social media users are brand advocates and highly engaged. I’m not sure what that has to do with paid search, but okay! Stats are delicious.

Stewart leaves his stat talk to remind us that Reggie Davis was recently appointed to VP of Marketplace Quality. He says that Yahoo is 100 percent dedicated to ensuring quality across all of their listings. And for the first time Yahoo is revealing how many clicks they remove on a regular basis before advertisers are charged. The discount rate is 12-15 percent and that’s across the entire Yahoo network.

Up next for Yahoo are quality-based pricing, domain blocking capabilities in 2007 and building on their new deal with Viacom which will help them deliver search and contextual advertising on Viacom’s 33 broadband sites. Cool.

Up next is Doug Stotland to give us our adCenter update.

Doug makes a very important and impressive announcement: Yesterday, Microsoft adCenter finished first in a head to head competition with Google and Yahoo…in a Rock 'Em Sock ‘Em death match. (I can confirm the validity of this statement; I’m proud to say I was there.) Doug hopes this will give advertisers some confidence in Microsoft. I think I love him.

We’re also reminded that since the last SES, adCenter has been live for 11 months. They’ve launched in the US, UK, and Canada and done over 5 releases. The feedback has been consistent:

• Clicks are very good clicks -- The clicks people get from adCenter tend to convert higher in 4 of 5 categories, according to a recent study.
• Not delivering enough clicks to advertisers – Microsoft is now running a Pilot Program to open up ads on the Microsoft Network.
• Haven’t made it easy enough for advertisers to manage campaigns – If you want to play with new, not-yet-released adCenter features, you can visit http:/beta.adcenter.microsoft.com and toy around. Features include full text search, the ability to manage campaigns Costco-style, campaign import, favorites, and improved navigation and UI.

James Speer is next to talk about Ask Sponsored Listings.

The IAC Advertising Solutions was recently created to integrate all of their media and advertising solutions. It offers a one-stop-shop for media and search advertising throughout all of IAC’s properties.

James moves on to ASL and says its best feature is the standardization of its traffic. All of Ask’s publisher partners are actively monitored to ensure CPCs, conversion rates, and CPAs.

To ensure ASL advertisers get even distribution through the day, Ask calculates pacing factors which can be adjusted at the request of an advertiser. New campaigns are conservatively defaulted to a pacing factor of 50 percent. The lower the budget to spend ratio, the higher the pacing factor. The objective is to slowly move pacing up/down depending on search levels.

In Q2, 2007 Ask is introducing referrer blocking to the ASL console so that advertisers can decide where their ads are displayed. How does it work, you ask?

• Advertisers review their click logs to determine whit sites are driving down campaign CPA metrics
• Important data points include: date, keyword, clicks, conversions, and referrer
• Log into your ASL account and add the refers to be blocked

Brian Schmidt is up next and he’s here to talk about vision. Sweet.

Google believes they’re in the connection business. They connect consumers with what they’re looking for and connect advertisers with the customers they’re looking for. They do this through the three-tiered Google platform:

• Search Solutions
• Content Network
• Web Utilities & Other Programs

Google is working to give advertisers more control over their ad campaigns by launching tools like Google Web site Optimizer, pay per action ads (PPA) and CPC Site-Targeting.

Other things Google is working on:

• Google Audio Ads: bringing efficiency, relevancy and accountability to radio advertising. Audio ads will be at scale, targeted, efficient, inclusive and measurable

• Google Print Ads: Web-enabled marketplace for buyers and sellers of newspaper ads covering the top DMAs.
  

Next up is John Kannapell from AOL who says AOL’s Advertising Network is thriving.

AOL Search keeps users engaged, brings them back and enables high quality ad opportunities. (No, don’t laugh; he said that with a straight face). Their goal is to be accurate, more complete and more convenient.

AOL Search Marketplace allows advertisers to really focus their message to AOL users and give them more control. It also helps to increase ROI. What this does for AOL is bring an end to end solution. Users get:

• AOL-branded version of relevant components of the Google AdWords system
• Sponsored Links specifically on select AOL properties to select advertisers
• AOL’s new system offers advertisers the best of breed functionality, features and reporting that is used in Google’s AdWords system for text-based ads.

AOL Search Trademark Layer is the most prominent placement on the AOL search page. It appears above both the sponsored links and Web search results. There are four clickable elements.

Next came Q&A with was by far the most amusing part of the sessions thanks to some quirky mics and Brian’s (Google) inability to hear anyone in the audience. Heh, good times, good times.

The best question was posed by Rebecca Lieb, who dared the networks to answer one important question: Why should we spend with your network? The engines went round-robin to answer.

• Microsoft adCenter: Two reasons: These are the highest quality converting clicks and there are things you can learn and do on adCenter in terms of understanding your audience that you can take to apply to all your campaigns.
• Yahoo: The reach of the network, the quality of traffic, ease of use of our interface and the quality of support.
• AOL: Sends consistent message. Building a comprehensive solution to build your brand.
• Ask: We can deliver incremental conversions for the same CPAs. It’s an incremental buy. We have lower spend points established. Take the heavy lifting off your plate.
• Google: Reach, innovation and options, support and usability.

One advertiser asked the engines’ representatives how they can incorporate search ads in video.

Brian of Google responded that there are existing opportunities to use or leverage Google’s video marketplace. Obviously, Google believes that online video is a growing market, but they’re not sure about the right way to do it right now. They’ve been careful to put the user first and have been cautious not to damage the brand of YouTube.

I can’t help but think Googler’s answer questions far better than any other search engine rep. Maybe because they admit that they don’t know everything and that they’re okay with that. Googler’s are awesome.

And that’s it. Consider yourself updated on all the search marketing networks.

This session covers search engine writing and keyword usage in the copy, presented by Heather Lloyd Martin and Jill Whalen.

Heather Lloyd Martin speaks first. She discusses her overview. First, she will use a case study about how SEO copywriting boosted profits of a company. Then, she discusses best practices, and finally, she will discuss how to overcome challenges.

Case study: AmsterdamEscape.com.
She noticed: "Everytime I look for something in Amsterdam, you have something ranked!" How do you do that? It's a highly competitive marketplace.

At first, a "bad" SEO created duplicate content but were banned from Google. They then spent $4,000 on AdWords to keep visibility. This was a considerable amount of money for them.

They hired a short-term consultant who discovered the duplicate content. The consultant developer/SEO made great content and then filed for reinclusion.

They added value-added content pages. AmsterdamEscape is about apartments in Amsterdam, but they created other pages about what people like in Amsterdam - nightlife in Amsterdam, Amsterdam do's and don'ts. This keeps visitors at the site for a long time. They started ranking for Amsterdam nightlife, Amsterdam shopping, Amsterdam red light district, Amsterdam apartments, etc. Furthermore, there were other rankings for long-tail keywords too. This is success from a content perspective.

The result = the company cancelled AdWords and saved $48,000 a year. (Not every company should do this -- but for this company, this represented a huge amount of savings.) If you are spending on PPC and you have organic listings, this can definitely boost your visits.

Best practice rundown: Don't do the easy bake method for copywriting where you stick in key phrases and then hope that it is done. Every word you write is highly important to the tone and feel and conversion metric. So you don't want to sound spammy -- visitors who come to this site will see it as keyphrase stuffing. It is not content creation.

There are certain things to avoid or look for when writing content:

#5 - lack of keyphrase focus. You need to look at your page and see if your keyphrase is there in text, not graphics. If you're not positioning in the SERPs, make sure those key phrases exist on the page!

#4 - short, stubby copy. People who write for catalogs write in a certain way. But writing online content is different. You can control everything you say with content. Increase your usability with around 250 words per page (which is a sweet spot). There are ways to structure pages so that they are not scary. Example: 220 words with white space might be good - not hard to read. You can put a complete explanation of what you have to offer on several pages - longer copy is not a bad thing. Palm.com is a good example of a site that breaks it down into several pages.

You should have 2-3 keyphrases throughout your copy. The first paragraph is important for marketing to draw your users into the content.

How to structure the page? Main body text copy, tp to bottom. Headlines and subheadlines - benefit statement next to a keyphrase. Call to action links (hyperlinks) - especially important in internal linking structure. SEO copywriting makes your writing more specific. It does not destroy it.

#3 - content doesn't convert. People are hitting pages and leaving them. Should you edit this phrase for keyphrases? Probably not. At this point, if your page doesn't convert, rewrite it. You can't take something that isn't doing so well to dress it up.

#2 - you want clickable descriptions on the SERP. The cruel thing is that Google and other engines don't display our carefully written meta description. SERPs display a snippet of text around search query. There is a workaround - hint - putting benefit statements near your main keyphrases, especially your first instance. Your description will boost your benefits. The first opportunity for conversion is on the SERPs, so you should have a good description.

#1 - untantalizing titles. Titles, from a marketing prospective, are nothing but headlines. The better the title, the better you can boost your rankings. Titles can be really important. She says that she had a client whose title was revised alone and that ranked a previously unranked site to the top 10.

Example: Radar detector sale - save up to 60% -- that's exactly what the user wants, and it's on sale!

Titles should be unique to every page. Make it read like a compelling headline. Include keyphrases. DOn't necessarily target company name unless you are a big brand (because you already have trust). Each title should be 50-75 with spaces.

In SEO copywriting, it's okay to take baby steps in your organization.
* For fast success, try editing pages that are not crucial for conversions and tweak the title to reflect keyphrase focus. Another tip is to try adding headlines and subheadlines to text (this can add keyphrases and hyperlinks). Adding a hyperlink to another related page can boost that page's ranking.
* See if the web developer department can dynamically generate titles that can be tweaked later.
* Hand-create titles as much as you possibly can on your most important conversion pages. This can be a gradual process.
* Unless you are a big brand with a lot of links, chances are your copy will not position. Therefore, you should look for creating new content for your product to differentiate the content. This makes you more competitive.
* Rewrite your main conversion pages first and figure out a gradual strategy, and then tweak the title accordingly for maximum power.
* Don't be afraid to provide lots of information - and you shouldn't feel afraid of splitting this into different pages. The cool thing is: the more content, the more opportunities your site has to position for different keyphrases.

What content can you write? You can write article pages, FAQ pages, how-to pages, blogs. The richer that your site is, then you really do become an authority hub. Even e-commerce sites can be hybrid sites - you sell a product but you also have a lot of information in your site that is geared toward the target audience. People may not find you for the digital camera you are selling, but they will find you for the article that says "how to buy a digital camera."

Smart SEO copywriting closes the loop between the engines and your offer - the right approach is critical. You can do this for your own site and you can babystep it. Do a couple pages a month; the rankings will slowly build.

Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com speaks next. She will provide editing strategies and opportunities.

Remember that keywords are the key. Focus on what people are searching for. That is "guinea pig" SEO. Do keyword research. Optimize for real words that people are searching for.

Your homepage can have general phrases - what your business is about. On your inner pages, you should be specific. Every page should be written well because they are gateways to other pages on your site.

Keyword-rich content is crucial: 1/3 of SEO. Don't forget title tags, links, crawler-friendly design, etc. If you have been around for a long time and have built up links, this may help you and will stick. Newer content will just require you to focus on linking again.

Example: Cosmetic Dentistry page. It looks fine, but Google's cache shows nothing. You can view the text cache of the site to see what text Google sees.

Placing keyword phrases into copy: No text graphics, user comes first, descriptive, location is important in geotargeting, keyword phrases (not just keywords), and plurals, tenses, suffixes, etc.

Search Engines don't read graphics (as in the cosmetic dentistry page). You can use ALT tags. You should watch out when you use a WYSIWYG editor because sometimes the copy may not show in the final page. Flash is not readable by the engines. Comment tags are not helpful - they aren't hurtful but they do nothing for you. PDFs are indexable and are technically like graphics; search engines do convert them to HTML text. You can optimize PDFs.

Turn text images into real text and watch out for graphic headlines. Do stuff with CSS and other tactics that can be read by engines.

Users come first. Write content that makes sense to people. Don't sprinkle keyword phrases - temporarily this might help you but your users will wonder what "crazy drugs you're on" (the crowd laughs).

Add keyword phrases that make sense. E.g. replace "Frequently Asked Questions" with "Frequently Asked Questions about Gastric Bypass Surgery, Stomach Stapling, etc." This technique is "thinking like a reporter." Ask who? what? where? Ask questions as you're writing them and be descriptive.

The simplest trick is to be descriptive. Don't use terms like "Our team" or "Our service." Use something like "Our search marketing team" or "Our event planning service." Try, instead of "if you'd like to contact us, fill out this brief form online" -> "if you'd like to contact us for help with your next meeting planning, fill out our special event planning request form." Put two different phrases in one sentence - be creative and descriptive. Another example: "this small resort offers tone of the finest views in St. Lucia" can be turned into "this small Caribbean resort hotel offers ..." And another "with the industry changing and print providers offering..." to "with the print on-demand industry changing..."

Single words don't count. Turn them into phrases. Often times, a single words can be turned into longer keyword phrases. A quick trick is to go back to your one-word terms that are part of a longer phrase - turn these into longer phrase or phrases. You can optimize your page for more than 2-3 phrases. Sometimes 5-6 phrases is enough to help you rank for them too.

Keyword: Invest. Do keyword research - small cap investing, real estate investing, online investing, invest in stock. See where these longer phrases make sense to substitute into pages.

Keyword: Marketing. Do keyword research and see what fits better: Internet marketing strategy, marketing your business, opt-in email marketing, marketing program.

Keyword: Balloons. Keyword research: inflatable advertising balloons, outdoor advertising balloons, promotional balloons, promotional helium balloons.

Don't push these words in. Make sure they sound right in your copy. If it doesn't make sense to turn this word into a larger phrase, don't.

If you're local (e.g. doctor, dentist, lawyer), you want people to find you in the same geographical area. You need to make sure your website is clear about your location for lots of reasons. Search engines can categorize you based on your local phrases. Instead of "our office," say "Our NYC office," "New York City barber," "cosmetic dentist in Manhattan."

Before - fully customized packages. Discounts and coupons to more than 100 shops and attractions.
After - fully customized New York City Travel packages. Discount and coupons to more than 100 shops and attractions in the Manhattan area.

You don't have to use the same phrase again and again. Use plural, past tenses, suffixes. Don't rely on search engines for "stemming." Search engines understand the plural but you should do it yourself. It avoids repetition.

People should see "art lesson" and "art lessons" - example - 1) take each art lession when you have time. 2) Personal critiques of your art lessons.

Words with multiple spellings.
- Forklift or fork lift
- work place safety vs. workplace safety
- colocation vs. co-location vs. collocation
- webcam vs. webcam
Advice: Use all these forms to get all the traffic, but focus on these other spellings on different pages. It looks like a typo if it's "misspelled" in multiple spots on one page.

Bonus phrases: not as targeted but are descriptive, still relevant, and might be searched upon.

Example: "New York's finest dining establishments" changed to "New York City restaurants" - maybe these people are not looking to rank for NYC restaurants but they can add ads for NYC restaurants on their page!

She shows us a page called the epitome of no copy. Someone who looks at the website and won't know what it is. People who write for websites might think along the lines of a brochure, but this is not the case when people find a site from a search engine.

Good web writing matters! It can help bring extremely targeted visitors, and then converts them into customers. It's worth paying copywriters what they're asking.

Andrew Goodman kicks of the session by mentioning that the audience is most likely knowledgeable about paid search already and looking for more a source of more quality traffic. He passes onto Chris Bowler who starts by surveying the room to get an idea of the existing contextual knowledge in the room.

What is Contextual Targeting? Displaying advertising on a third-party website which is used by your target consumer market. Google offers content targeting across hundreds of top partners such as About.com, as well as many thousands of AdSense publishers. They offer several different forms of content targeting including a new Cost Per Action initiative, which is currently in Beta testing. Advertisers are demanding performance-based deals to make campaigns more cost effective and reducing risk. Yahoo also has a partner network for contextual ads, although it’s much smaller than Google's. Their options include contextual, keyword and behavioural content matching - as well as Run of Network. MSN has a contextual network pilot program, although there's little data about its status or release date yet. While search traffic has matured and stabilised, content networks continue to grow and also offer cheaper CPCs. Content targeting can differ a lot between different verticals - finance seems to perform poorly whilst retail advertising works very well. Networks are starting to offer formats other than just text now, with some of them trialling video and graphical ads.

Anton from Acronym Media specialises in keyword driven marketing. Keywords tell you a lot about a potential customer, so you must look at the keywords they're using and make sure that you're targeting them correctly. The CPC model offers a lower risk way of experimenting with campaigns. Contextual advertising is perfect for brand awareness as it's instant and has broad coverage. It extends an online marketing campaign beyond the search box and gets around the issue of a lack of search inventory. It should be managed and monitored separately from a search campaign due to their differences. Utilise keyword data from search and other online advertising information in order to get the best possible results. Remember to use negative matching in order to avoid damaging your brand by advertising next to questionable content. It can be used for damage control as well though, when people blog or write about something negative regarding your company you may be able to advertise your response next to these pages. Check your referral logs to avoid poor quality sites and try to track this back to conversion rates per publisher. Using fewer keywords in each ad group can allow for more granular tracking and monitoring. Publishers can use multiple ad spaces on their site, so make sure that your site is positioned well. Top position is important for contextual advertising as well. CTR is not taken into account on contextual networks - you can bid as low as you like and your keywords will not get disabled like with PPC quality scores. Click fraud happens and is more likely with contextual ads so it's important to look closely at your traffic and record information such as IP addresses in order to catch abusers and report them. Choosing the right channels is crucial, so investigate your options.

Don Steele from Comedy Central uses contextual advertising to promote comedycentral.com, which promotes their TV shows as well as generating traffic for their own advertising inventory. You need to read and understand what people are saying when they mention your brands so that you can understand the words and terms that they use. Contextual banner ads offer a great alternative to buying display inventory, reaching a much wider group of sites that may not be known or accessible otherwise. Be flexible and fluid with your campaign; get ready to catch traffic from new interests e.g. an upcoming guest on The Daily Show.

Note: Please excuse typos, this coverage is provided live and without much editing, due to the timeliness of the coverage...

Converting Visitors into Buyers

Wed. April 11, 2007, 1:30pm
Moderator: Alan Dick (AD), Gen. Mgr Vintage Tub and Bath

Speakers:
Bryan Eisenberg (BE), Future Now
Michael Sack (MS), Idearc Media Corp

AD:
Introduces BE

BE:
Fiddles with mike. Asks how many have read Call to Action. 7 tips to boost conversation rates.
Overstock.com was doing 1/2 billion a year. One page was costing them 7000 a day. 91.8% abandonment page, number visited page. Changed image and overnight, increased 5% sales. Must understand why and what you test. Once you do SEO, then what? Then you move them through funnel. Ave 2.4% conversation rates. No change, despite changes in procedures.

Is it functional.
Is it accessible?
Is it user friendly?
Is it intuitive? Does it feel natural? Doesn't make me think?
Do people really want and understand what they are buying? Persuasion.

How many of you would love a high performance site? How many of you work for companies that are overstaffed? There's a difference between what we want and what we have. It's never about what but why. A computer can never tell you how much you could have sold. It tells you how the last dime you made.

Who are we trying to persuade to take action?
What action, what page to test, knows your profiles, and how does they buy, understand their motivations: methodical, spontaneous, humanistic, and competitive. Create pages ppc ads emails and ads that drive prospects to your pages. Do A/B split testing. Before and after.

Test using a link or a button. Test your top 5 high bounce rate, Top five high exit rate. Products tell a story. Shows examples of imges that tell a story. Downloads - shows examples of how many ways show it and test which converts.

Shows pics of beans. Ordered beans converts best for methodical people. Scattered beans no. Test headlines. Test fractions. Test asking questions. Test "We: language. Try the WeWe calculator at FutureNow. (audience laughs) Test call to action buttons. Get them to click. Shows examples of different ways of doing buttons. Don't copy from others without testing your versions. Learn more changed to Help me is an example of better convert label. Little things have a huge impact. Let them know you value privacy. Shopping cart? Show privacy policy when they add to add. Sometimes increasing the font size of a phone number can increase convert.

How many of you like "Submit"? (aud laughs) Be careful of the words you use. Don't waste people's time. Create low bandwidth images for fast load time. Does your site stink? Are you providing relevant scent? They need a "smell" to know they are coming to the right place. Jared Spool studied effectiveness of trigger words. Move forward until found rule. Most traffic drops off by page 3 of a website. Did they find what they were looking for? They are losing scent.

4 types of people. People have different motivations. You can't market to them the same way. Shows an example of someone looking for product, finds it but it is not within any context to base a buying decision on. It takes a long time to find product that finally has information about the product to help her buy. Lesson is don't just present the product.

Test outside your environment. Not in-house or developers. Find users or get outside help. When planning a test, test on page and off page factors.

What is the action we want someone to take?
What does that person need to feel confident?

MS:

Gives history of company. Two sides of lifting conversations. We can always do a better job. We should be looking at 8-10 % conversion rates but we are not. Two sides: first side is outside-in. You can’t convert them if they don't come. Keywords, site side optimization, other marketing vehicles. Inside - in is homepage on in. What do you now that they are here? Conversions enhancements. Targeted delivery. Prepare your site target, traffic ,track and learn fix your cart. Do not force 19 steps to purchase.

Prepare your site. Go out and look at best sites in industry. Emulate practices. Identify conversion points but make sure you measure ALL conversions. What makes their site convert? Find benchmarks.

Get your customers to see your site content. Control the experience. Why is milk always in the back of the supermarket? Retail industry has 37% conversion rate. (offline world). Can we apply offline to online? Milk is always far away. Why? Because consultants tell us to put it there. Based on studies and behaviors. Your experience is being controlled. Why is perfume the first thing you find in some stores? There's a lot of testing. They are trying to enhance the buyer’s experience. We all have different intent, so marketing is lowest common denominator.

Homepages can be overkill. Too many links. Shows a page with 50 links - too many. Confusing navigation. This design is not good for users. It's a good directory structure. Shows K-mart site. Amazing number of links to click on. 100 plus links on the homepage, some of them redundant. Users need a fast path to what they want.

Marketers Dream. If you know Mike is walking in the store and you know milk is aisle six then you put it into aisle six. But you don't know who Mike is. How can you move the milk to where he wants it? The web is dynamic. As soon as you know who user is, you deliver what and where they want it. You need to know what door they walk in. He creates "virtual doorways" by testing landing pages. It's like testing where you put the milk. He describes behaviors in groups and how we make decisions based on this. Think about how they start at search and where they land.

Good layout, clear purpose, limited options, self id, good search -elements of good homepage. Content optimized for spiders. Make a site fit searches.

Virtual Doorways are more specific search phrases. More specific key phrases mean higher conversions and better ROI. The keywords that are more important to you may not mean as important to users. Pay attention to the behavior of your keywords during different points of the day. Calls this the "Bidding Zone". If you can plot this and understand you can improve conversions by driving traffic in at those times of days. You can decrease bidding and increase bidding at different times of the day. You can plot it. Use heat maps. Create graphs.

Target landing uniquely. Direct traffic to specific destinations. Implement test-analyze-adjust cycles. Determine best click paths. Connect search phrases to conversions. Drive people to best paths to search. He calls "Scent", "intent". You can control the intent. Use different terms like model number, compare products, and just product name. Different variations - test them. Test A/B/C. Showed a product page with 3 versions. The one with more images of product was tested to convert best.

Some landing pages can increase conversions by 200%. Keep testing and track results. Google Analytics is a free tool to try. Must be able to track keywords. Be able to see click-thru from search to conversion. Be able to track direct and deferred conversions. Associate cost per click with transaction. Track offline sales. Search stack and attribution is the converting search stack and how it converts. Sometimes there several searches needed to narrow down.

Elements of a good cart
Speed. Make the cart fast.
Few steps. Privacy. Make sure people know where they are in the process.

Inventory and shipping - accurate inventory, and shipping avail, tell people where they are going to get it, no hidden charges, let them safe carts. Make cart a gift for other people. Capture email address prevents - can we save the cart for you, how to get them back? Be nice. Handle errors gracefully. NO RED. No surprises.

Bought a headset for $12.99 plus 9.00 ship plus 5.95 handling fee. Cause for abandonment because fees were more than the price of the product.

This room is PACKED, I feel like I am a rock concert there are so many people in here. It is an obvious testament to the interest in duplicate content issues.

Shari Thurow is first up to talk about the issues and says that they all agree with each other and here to share various outlooks on the same topic. She put ups a slide and says she will show 5 ways search engine detect duplicate content. What is duplicate content, the definition is unclear. A duplicate can be a replica of exact syntactic terms and sequence of terms, with or without formatting differences. The problem is a single formmating change such as CSS. Search engine don’t like redundant content in their indexes because it slows the information retrieval process and it degrades the search results. Searches rarely wish to see duplicate content in the search results. Search engine use clustering to limit each represented web site to one to two results. She shows an example of clustering. The other search engines do is that they also filter out duplicate content in news section. She gives the example of BMW getting banned from Google News.

Shari says that search engines look at content properties such as boilerplate stripping/removal. A boilerplate is a section of HTML code that is common to many different documents. She says they look for a unqiue fingerprint and heavy html density. Collection and filtering happens first. Indexing is one thing and adding to te index is another thing. Another item that search engine looks at is linkage properties. If the linkage properties are too similar. Press releases are a concern she says. Extermal third party links going to PRWEB and the National Cancer site. They are different and not the same. She loves Yahoo site explorer, a big groupie apparently. The other thing search engines are looking for is content evolution. In general is 65% of web content will not change on a weekly basis. 0.8% of web content will change completely every one to two weeks. Search engine are also looking at host name resolution. Many host names will resolve to the same web servers. Search engines are seeing geninue redundant content and that which is not. The last is a shingle comparison, every web document has a unique signature or fingerprint example.

She gives the example of a shingle comparison and gives an example of a word set. She gives three examples with the same site but slightly diffent product descriptions. The content is similar but varies in placement. She recommends finding the page with the highest converting rate lets Google spider it, and nofollow or robots.txt pages with similar content. Robots meta-tags is a good way to manage this. Some duplicate content is consistent spam and some is not. She puts up a university page (Norwich). This is a good site she says but indeed it is spam. Its stumped Danny Sullivan. She found a hallway page or a page with links to many other doorway pages. Universities do spam. Some duplicate content is copyright infringement. These are things such as scraper sites and link farms. You can also use DMCA reporting. Shari also recommends to register your copyright. Its gives you the keys to the courthouse so to say.

Mikkel deMib Svenden is up second. He says there is a million ways you can create duplicate content problems but he is going to highlight the popular ways. Some sites resolve both to www and non-www. Most engines have a problem with this, but they are getting smart to the fact they are the same site. There may not be an issue with indexing, but are you leveraging the value of linking the best way. He recommends using picking one way to use www or non-www. Session ids are also a problem, he puts up an example of a site that had the same page spidered 200,000 versions of that page. This is a resource problems for the engines. Dump all session information in a cookie for all users or identify spiders and strip the session ID for them only. IN any case: deal with it. He mentions using Wordpress and using permalinks. He says don’t leave the engines to decide which url is supposed to be used. The solution is to 301 the non official version of the url to the official url. For example http://www.domain.com/sessionid?=33 to http://www.domain.com/this-url.

He says you can user server header check to look at the various responses you get to diagnose any problems. The header check should show a 301 redirect if you did it properly for the non-official url to the official url. He next gives an example of Many-to-one in forums. He puts up a search engine watch.com issue. Its not a problem for the site right now because you have to register and login in. But when somebody links to this url it can create a problem and a way in for the search engine spider. The solution for the forum example is to detect for bots and redirect them to the official urls.

Breadcrumb navigation can also be an issue. The problem is a when you use breadcrumbs that reflect the url structure of the site. He recommends having a product or article in on physical location. Don’t put multiple types of urls in the breadcrumbs. He last pearl of wisdom don’t ever leave the search engines to make decisions for you. There are a couple ways they can approach the website and usually it’s the wrong way.

Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink. Why is duplicate content a problem? Because they said so. They are clear on what you should and should not do. What happens when you have a site in two different languages? Internationally generally is OK – Google identifies user by IP. But US is a single region and Google aims to return only on result for a set of content. You need one canonical domain and link all internal pages on the site to it. Exclude landing pages for tracking from search engines using robots.txt. Use 302 redirects ONLY for content that is going to change and only for temporary content.

Allan Dick, Vintage Tub and Bath - Moderator

Speakers:
Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placements, Inc.
Laura Thieme President of Biz Research

Q&A
Akin Arikan, Unica
John Marshall, Click Tracks
Chris Knoch, Omniture
Brett Crosby, Google Analytics
Barry Parshall, WebTrends

Laura Thieme
Search Marketing Without Web Analytics – Its all about proving value
Conversation become more interesting web analytics

Is Search Delivering -- Leads, Sales (At loss or at profits?)

Strong analytics – can you track to the product and keyword data?
Is the data accurate

Key Performance Indicators -- Impressions, CTR, Average CPC

Advanced KPI’s
Dissecting ROI & ROAS
Average Cost Per Order
Cost Per Action
Gross Profit
True Customer Acquisition Cost

Tracking Organic vs. Paid
Without tracking strings that are updated and accurate this report in your analysis

Web Analytics – ROAS Analytics
Provide more information than visibility report
Provide more than just traffic reports

“Managing Customers as Investments”
What is your acceptable customer acquisition cost?
You need to know this to truly understand your costs acoss all channels

How can you track?
Visibility, Spider Activity, etc.
Recommend Web Position Gold to help track rankings

Why Ranking Reports Matter?
Typically an issue when you‘re getting ready to redesigning , keyword embed, or otherwise changing URLs in anyway.
Make sure 301s are in place

When to run reports – 1 and 15th of the month

Tracking Spider/Robot Activity – make sure that you understand how long it takes the spiders to go through your site

Launching a new site?
Her experience was that MSN first to index, Google first to visit. Took weeks for Google to have her “live”

NetTracker – very easy to understand
Path analysis is great
Better is the funnel analysis

Click Tracks Pro – shows the power of certain pages and content over others

Blogs can change your traffic demographic entirely
May increase your visibility in other ways
Blogs can generate leads

Cross Segment Performance
Make sure you select 50 or more keywords

Web Analytics is extremely time consuming
Should be broken out, different than SEO, SEM

Products: Omniture, CoreMetrics, WebTrends, Hibox, Nettracker, Click Tracks, Google Analytics

This influences what customers think
Latency tools are very important

No tracking tool will do with everything, you might need to use 2 or 3
SEM/SEO people do not make the best analytics people

Stacy Williams – Prominent Placement Corporation
Basic Concepts – those need to be understood before your proceed
Why should you measure – SEM is strategy and planning
Web analytics is like the backend to your online marketing plan
What should you measure?
B2C vs B2B
Big Brand vs. the Boutique
Business Goals
It’s all relative to you
You should ask yourself these questions
What do you really want to know?
What will we do with the information?
Have a clear understanding of your company or project goals
Don’t let the data hold you down, don’t get stuck inside of the really minute stuff
Don’t get tied up in what your competitors are doing
Where do I start?
Start small – do little and learn from it
Set a time to look at your data reports
Avoid analysis paralysis
Maintain a diary – to help you track metrics over time to see seasonality
Create a checklist
Atlanta Childern’s Shelter
Online visibility was non-existing
Goals: build awareness, acquisition of quality prospects who would donate money, goods a nd time to the shelter
Market Leap’s free tool to help see market saturation page was use
Showed that holidays were big time for them with volunteers and donations

Minimize the “spazz factor”
Bounce Rate –
you can be high because you “accidentally” rank for something you shouldn’t
Using it as a rolodex (contact information)
You cannot make your site invisible for words you don’t not want to come up with in organic
Outside Factors
There are thing you can control
There are things you can’t control (seasonality)
If you are doing marketing internationally be aware of the culture and their holidays
In lieu of reporting – seek discovery – tell a story
Don’t waste time on measures that don’t tell you much

Liana “Li” Evans is the Search Marketing Manager that is responsible for all SEO, Social Media, and WoMM at Commerce360. Li also is the owner, editor and chief writer of SearchMarketingGurus.com.

Danny opens the session with welcomes, ask for a hand survey on a number of “who uses this and that” type things and then announces his kids are here with him and in the room. I came in right as things were to start (with Dan Thies) and so we had to sit in the back of the room.

There are many ways to be listed in the search engines. Everyone would like to be #1 but we know that isn’t going to be the case. Google has free listings, or what we refer to as organic and editorial/paid listings. The paid listings are on the right side of the screen. Local listings has maps, directions and telephone numbers.

News and local search results are taking the number one and two spots in some searches lately, even if you don’t want to see them they popup. Says google is trying to showcase their local engine by putting the results in the organic serp space since people apparantely aren’t clicking those links off their main search page.

Why do they call it vertical search? Because the info is narrowed down to one slice of information. Free listings come from the search engines crawling the Web.

Don’t depend on free listings. It’s best to mix things up and have free and paid searchc listings (meaning – work the organic side and pay for ads). When you do, write a clear and concise call to action, know your message.

Use the top 10 phrases for your site and don’t use single keywords, use at least two words. If you don’t have the time or money to do the research for your terms, go with your gut. You know your business.

Where can you go to do research for your keywords?

Danny stops and does joke about his kids who now head out of the room. They’ve had enough of dad.

So – the research tools…. Use Wordtracker, Yahoo keyword tools etc. You can’t guess at everything people are searching for but you should have good content on different topics using html text. That means if you can cut and paste it, the engines can read it.

Ideally have a page or section with real content on it for each key term you’re going after. Hits for less important or long tail terms add up.

Danny explains process behind the long tail. Sometimes the less popular terms end up bringing in far more targeted traffic and end up equaling more searches than popular terms. He puts up a chart that shows the hits for primary keyword terms, and then the sum of all the long tail searches and surprisingly, the long tail terms produce more traffice.

The reality is, people searching for something specific don’t enter your site through the main dot com but through an interior page. The more people you catch with long tail terms the more people will come into the site.

How crawlers work.

They follow link and read age found
Text of pages are stored in an index and when you search they are retrieved for matching text. Page content is crucial, Title is important, Design issues have an impact
Link analysis plays an important role.

Other off the page criteria may be considered such as the age of the site, clickthrough and the neighborhood a site is associated with. Crawler should find some pages naturally and they especially like to get pages with many or important links pointing at them.
Submitting may speed the listing process and may increase representation.

Danny lists free add your url list for Google, google sitemaps, yahoo msn and ask

What to submit

Submit home page and key section pages, turnaround for this could be a couple days to 2 months.

Should you deep submit? Use google sitemaps and submit a file with URLS to Yahoo.

Yahoo Slurp crawler.

Like google, yahoo has a crawler that may list your pages for free
Like all crawler it may not find and include everything so yahoo also has paid inclusion program. Danny makes joke about bots having cute names.

What is paid inclusion?
A submission program that guarantees your pages will be mixed into the free listings and revisited on a regular basis. Only Yahoo does this.

Why should you do paid inclusuion? Because you want to have pages added right away, you have dynamic pages or not all were picked up. Paid inclusion is definitely something you want to do if you have a product database.

Ground floor content.

Article was written by Debra Mastaler at Alliance Link

Continue reading "Introduction to Search Marketing"

This session is Link Building: The Basics, and is presented by Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link and Detlev Johnson, who will be assisting Debra because Eric Ward's wife is giving birth this morning! (Congratulations Eric!) Mike Grehan, who was supposed to attend, is also not here because of a loss in his immediate family. You can send condolences through his website at mikegrehan.com.

This session covers: why links are valuable (definitions and concepts), link spam and what to avoid, and link tools and tactics.

As visitors, we need links to go from one page to another. Links are used for traffic and organic results. All of the search engines have the same function - you type in a term and you get a relevant query. The algorithm that returns the results uses a variety of components. Link popularity is one of the largest factors in determining rank. Link popularity = measure of quantity and quality of links. All the major search engines use link popularity in some format. It's considered an off-page factor because the value is determined by another page. If the link sits on your page, it's content.

Link popularity: quantity of links, quality/authority, relevance of linking sites, and anchor text.

What is quantity factor? It's not necessarily about quantity anymore. It's more about quality. You need a lot of links from quality sites to rank well. What is an authority site? It is a site that ranks well. They are linked to by other quality sites, they are well-known in their circle, etc. This happens for a reason - co-citation process that exists on the web. They typically have higher PageRank scores. (Disclaimer: This isn't definitively the way it has to be. It changes all the time.)

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm written by Larry Page as a way to get Google to improve the rankings. When it was created initially in 98, it was based on the quantity of links. The PR algorithm has changed significantly since it was written. Pages that ranked well also had higher PR scores back in the day, but this is no longer the case. Higher PR pages don't rank well necessarily. PR is not used as strongly as it has been in the past.

The relevance factor behind link popularity - search engines read words around anchor text and throughout the page looking for on-topic and subject relevance. They want sites relevant to the query and thematically related.

Anchor text indicates the subject page that the link is pointing to. A link that says "Click Here" does not help as much as "Click here for Snow Tires." People and search engines read the words in the link.

Tip: I have found that I rank higher when anchor text links that are used on other sites linked to my sites that use the same text as titles or file names.

PageRank is dead, Long Live Anchor Text

Does Google still use PageRank? Yes. It's still a part of the algorithm but is not as heavily emphasized. Should I use PR as a linking criteria? Pages with higher PR scores are crawled more frequently. The info in the PR toolbar is probably 6-8 months old. I would not use this as the only indicator.

Link popularity measures quality and quantity. You need links from authority sites. Anchor text should highlighy on page keyword phrases. PR has little effect on rank. Look for links from contextually relevant sites.

Are there links that you should avoid? Yes. If you're looking to build for rank, avoid the following:
- links that use rel="nofollow" (use Firefox SearchStatus tool to point out pink links = quirk.biz/searchstatus)
- other links that don't count: links in Javascript code, image links, redirected links through 3rd party sites - affiliate links and tracking codes. However, if you're an affiliate marketer, you can still pass link popularity through tools - search for Naked Links.
- It's not a good idea to be involved in a link farm. These are sites that are set up and have been developed to purposely manipulate rank.

Some of the most valuable links don't appear on websites. They appear in email-based communication (emails with over 100k subscribers). You won't get link popularity but you will get the residual effect. Don't overlook these opportunities.

Outbound links - should you link out? The only thing you lose if you don't link out is opportunity. Link out to people who mentioned you. Link back to similar industries and established sites.

TouchGraph offers a tool where you can pop in a keyword and find out who has been linking to you by term. It points out topically relevant websites.

Link out to press releases, directories, award sites, affiliation listings, associations, articles. Regarding directories - if your directory is topically relevant, link to yourself in the directory.

Linking Tools and Tactics

If you are getting links, make sure that these pages have been indexed by the search engines.

Link building takes a ton of time. Make sure you have your tactics prioritized and budget for them. Then have your resources organized.

Some of my favorite tools are:
www.marketleapcom/publinkpop - down, dirty, and quick comparison tool
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - brings back all links. The links that come back are typically brought back in the order of importance as seen by Yahoo. Yahoo has Trust Rank (whereas Google has PageRank). Bottom line is to understand that Yahoo acknowledges that there is a seed set of authority sites out there.
www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php - brings back anchor text, unique domains. You can save the results to Excel spreadsheet and it's free.
www.linktree.info - takes multiple sites and looks for recurring backlinks. It's another free site that allows you to export the results to Excel.
www.urltrends.com - both paid and free options. It brings back all the information about a site - Alexa, how many links, pages in archive.org, and what category in DMOZ the page is listed. Use it to see where your competitors are listed.

There are some paid tools:
SEOElite ($170)
Caphyon Advance Link Manager ($149) - www.advancedlinkmanager.com/download.html - 30 day free trial.
They do a lot of compare and contrast, they do rank checks for you, etc.

You can set traps with RSS - use Google News, Yahoo News, and type in keywords. The point of this is that if you have a competitor that is in a news publication, you could always go to the news source and perhaps get the same coverage.

Tactics - Basic, tried, and true linking tactics that produce consistent and solid results: trust links, directory links, reclaimed links, reciprocal links, credibility links, just ask links, elbow grease links (time consuming that nets very solid links), article writing, press release.

Consider your tactics. Press releases don't always have lasting effects. Do foundation linking on the right sites.

People don't have a page that asks for links - "Just Ask." Debra mentions that she created a page for a client that asks for links. So far, in four years, there are 365 links. You could also offer an incentive (freebies). Requesting that people link using code specified helps too. (Tip: Give out free T-Shirts.)

Credibility Links - you can secure links from industry credible sources, such as the [virtual] chamber of commerce or associations (www.ipl.org/div/aon: The Internet Public Library links clubs, military organizations, etc.). You can join these offline and online.

Elbow Grease Links - soloseo.com/tools/linksearch.html?keyword=your+keyword+here

Directories - general and niche, RSS, article, podcast, blogs, wikis.
www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories/General_Directories
www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php - breaks down the general directories

Debra says that she has been asked whether the Yahoo! Directory is worth the link but says that it is completely credible. It is $300/year. It is a good link especially if you're relatively new to this.

Is DMOZ worth the trouble? Yes. They are an AOL search partner, Google gets its directory results. You can get a lot of different relevant page links using DMOZ.

Other notes about directories -
Avoid directories hosting excessive search engine ads.
Check robots.txt and nofollow links.

Reclaiming links - there's a thought process that links that have been around for quite some time could be revised wordwise. It can work better for you to reword some of these anchor text links after a good amount of time.

Finding authority sites -
www.langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html
Using a specific term, you can see the top links on Google and Yahoo and how they are ranking. If there is commonality between the two, you will want to have the link from it.

Reciprocal links - do search engines devalue this tactic? Yes and no. If you only use reciprocal linking (exclusively) in link building, you may not be successful. Avoid excessive reciprocal links. Swapping links is great because you control what the link says. Not all sites have the opportunity to swap links.

Press Release Submission Services -
www.prnewswire.com
www.i-newswire.com/submit.php
home.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?front_door=true
www.ereleases.com/submit.html
prweb.com
These are sites that take a press release that you have written and send these to other publication online. They are all paid services (which can help - there is tracking capability in some of these press releases).

Media contacts in your niche - traditional venues: Gebbie Press and Burrelles Luce. You can also go to topix.net, which breaks down sources into category and geographic location. It pulls up all of the sites that have press information in them. Another one is cyberjournalist.net and Yahoo news.

Article Writing - become an authority. Everyone is looking for content. This is why this is a very popular tactic. If you are a specialist in a specific area, people will come after you for information. There is a list of article directories at www.arcanweb.com/resources/article-directories.html. Other tips include: creating a lens on Squidoo and link out to the article resource center on your site.

Buying Links - there are two ways to buy links. You can go through brokers or do it yourself. Make sure that your link stands out. Try to stay out of paid links where "paid links" is obvious. Search for blogs (which can be less expensive for you). AddThis.com - use social site icons and add these to your articles.

Ask anyone of the panelists and they will tell you domains are hot right now. There is a lot of interest in this sector for many obvious reasons. At one point you will probably need a domain to establish a presence online or if you dare squat on someone else’s presence. So it makes sense that at search conference highlighting some of the issues in this market is a good idea. This particular session is new for New York and one I have covered before last year. It is an information packed session dealing with all things domains and more specifically how to monetize them, type in traffic, buying and selling, and the current state of the domain private market.

Chris Sherman is moderating this session.

Monte Cahn the CEO from Moniker.com is up first to present. He stats by asking how many domains people have, 10, 100, 10,000? There are a quite a few hands still raised when he asked about who has 10,000 domains. He talks about the basics of domaining. ICANN regulates the domain industry. The original revenue sources for monetizing domains were not developed early on and it is something that has evolved tremendously. There is a 850 million in annual revenue and domains sales. Its predicted to reach $2 billion by 2010. He talks about several companies that own quite a few domain names. These large scale owners have been rising. Since last year, domains have growth 30%. A record 112 million domain names are now registered, a 30% increase in the past year. 9.4 million new domains were registered during Q3 of 2006, the third highest number of registrations ever in a single quarter. At least 100 domain sold twice between 2004 and 2006 for double their value.

So what maybe a good domain. Natural generic brands, there is a lot of search volume. They need to be easy to remember, clear concise and descriptive. Sometimes they can be commercially oriented. It also matters what industry segment is hot or cold at the moment. Are the domains visually pleasing? Is there any existing type in traffic, or backlinks. Mistypes are all popular.

So how do domains generate revenue? Domain traffic (direct navigation) is ad revenue from CPC, CPA, CPM, selling traffic directly to companies or advertisers. Domain development individually or in partnership domain owners add content, diversify advertising and build networks. You can also vertical dominance to monopolize groups of domain names in category verticals. Domainance means more power and revenue. Domains for the first time are not leveraged value for financing/loans, charitable donations/tax deductions. He next goes into a lot of stats. He says that 70 percent of internet surfers use direct navigation, up 53% from four years ago. The rest use search engines. Direct navigation is a $1 billion business by 2007, on track to surpass 1.2 billion.

He next puts up a landing page from Fabulous.com and describes the type of landing page for one click landing. He also shows an example of 2 click landing pages. He says there is a correlation between search volume and type in traffic. He says that a lot of people are typing domain names into search engines with the extension. This is a reverse of a direct type in. Monte goes into examples what people are paying for domains.

There are many ways to get a domain portfolio started. The barrier of entry is low. It does take moderate capital, intelligence, patience and time. There are a lot of aftermarket websites, whois, search databases, and trademark exclusion tools. He says it’s a little late in the game but definitely not dead.

Jon Lisbin from PointIt, Inc is up second. They are a search engine marketing company and wants to give a different perspective about domain parking. He asks if there is anyone that doesn’t have parking sites. Hey says that traffic from many parking is bad. There is a problem with cheats who arrange for people to click on there ads. There is also cypersquatters and domain kiting. Registers abuse the ICANN 5 day holding period to test domains. He explains that traffic from sources like Sedoparking the CPA is really high. He mentions that you can not opt out of Sedoparking and Oingo sites in Google Adwords search network. This is different in the content network which you can opt out, but not in the search network. The domain parking traffic is bundled together with the search network.

He next gives an example of how a parking page that has no real content buy sending a lot of traffic to his clients site. Jon gives an example of the parking page and says there is no reason anyone would want to go to this site. There was 0 conversions from these sites. His examples are pretty funny because they are clearly obvious the traffic is bad. He says that Yahoo is doing work to clean up their network. When will that happen completely, who knows. He asks why Yahoo doesn’t go after they guys who cheat the system.

Andrew Beckman is up from SearchAdnetwork and going to give a positive look at domain driven traffic. He says that you need a web analytics and or bid management system to track the traffic. He puts up an example of kids.com and what they parking page looks like. He says you can use the Google site exclusion tool to prevent your site from getting traffic from those sources. He says parked domains need to be developed a lot more such as a search box and keyword drill down need to be fine tuned. There should be content developed around these domain names.

I walk into the room, 7 minutes before air time and Vanessa Fox of Google Webmaster Central is handing out donuts. Yum! On the panel are representatives from all the major engines plus Todd Oilman Friesen and Eric from Performics. Danny Sullivan is modding up this panel. All the search engines have a big announcement, specifically Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery from Danny at Search Engine Land.

Todd Friesen walks in a minute after the official start time, but he made it. They did not start yet. Don't think we didn't notice Todd! This panel is packed. Looking forward to getting something to eat...

I guess Todd was not late. We are now scheduled to start at 10:30 not 10:15. Danny decides to hand out the remaining donuts, imported from Canada, to the audience. I could have charged my laptop another 15 minutes. Anyway, he is trying hard to sell those donuts. I learned Yahoo Canada has actually brought them with them here. Then Danny mocks that I am blogging about the donuts, but he is not mocking that I am covering that he is mocking me. So who gets the last laugh now?

Priyank Garg, Product Manager, Yahoo! Search is up first.
- Sitemaps are an XML schema to publish your site's URLs to search crawlers
- Google initiated it and Yahoo and Microsoft are joint sponsors.
- He showed a sample file, he then showed examples of the fields.
- Sitemaps rules include; the path must contain the sitemaps file, sitemaps are expected to be valid XML, all URLs must be entity escaped, all meta data are hints for crawlers and used to improve crawl.
- You can put several Sitemaps in a Sitemap index file and point in this file to all your sitemaps.

- How do you submit your sitemap to a search engine?
- Publish your sitemap and then submit to a search engine so they decided to make it better.
- Autodiscovery now is there, today (see link above)
- So now all you do is publish your sitemap, put a ointer to the sitemap and the search engine will find it.
- Ask.com has also joined in to support this standard
- Sitemaps are independent of useragent
- Provide full URL of sitemap
- There are international languages also available at sitemaps.org

Danny again mocks me! Tim Mayer comes in; so then Danny gives him attention, so the spotlight is now on him. No Matt Cutts, so attack Tim from Yahoo!

Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer, Google is next up.
The benefits of sitemaps is that it maximizes your site to search engines. A sitemap list URLs as a txt file, rss feed or XML protocol. She then gives examples of all the protocols. The benefit to search engines is that it aids the crawler to build a greater index. Sitemaps improve index freshness by helping awareness of new or frequently modified content. Sitemaps increase efficiency by helping to identify unchanged pages to prevent unnecessary crawling. So now you can get indexed through web crawl or through sitemaps submission. She quickly shows other methods into Google's vertical engines. She shares some sitemaps guidelines, similar to Yahoo's discussion. She then goes through the different files accepted, Ill skip these slides. There are sitemaps generators at code.google.com. She then shares URLs to help at Webmaster Central. She then goes through the steps to setting up a Google Webmaster Central account, she goes into this in detail, so I will take a break.

Priyank Garg, Product Manager, Yahoo! Search is back with more on Site Explorer tools that recently came out. It is now out of beta. He shows how it works, I covered this so many times in the past, so again, Ill skip. He explains you get more info when you log in and authenticate. They now accept mobile feeds in Site Explorer as of yesterday. He shows the delete URL feature and shows last crawl dates that are available to authenticated users. If you delete it by accident, you can recover. They added a "report spam" link. If you find an inlink that seems spammy, you can just click a button and all you have to do is click send. This won't hurt the inlink that you reported, directly. So you won't be associated with the link farm.

Vivek Pathak, Infrastructure Product Manager, Ask.com is now up. They are excited to be part of this. Ask.com will be looking for your files. He just explains why this is good.... He is looking forward to comments...

Nathan Buggia, Senior Product Manager, Live Search is now up also, without a presentation. He asked a few Qs. Of those people using sitemaps, how many are using txt based sitemaps"? Not so many. Atom sitemaps? not so many. XML sitemaps? Most people raised their hands. He said he is also excited by this announcement. Microsoft doesnt have a webmaster section now, they hope to roll out support over the year. Keep your eyes pealed on their blog, to see when it comes out (yea, whatever, they said that a long long time ago).

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, Performics is now up. So now you have this info, how can you use it?

- Sitemaps usually picked up within 1-2 days
- Entire sitemap is normally crawled within 3 - 14 days, average 7 days
- Small sites with low PageRank will take longer
- Also have an optimized native sitemap
- Focus the crawer on the right content by excluding redundant content, disembodied content and spammy stuff
- Use the preferred domain tool
- Include separate sitemaps for news, video and mobile content
- They either see number of indexed pages go up or go down depending on the redundancy of those pages. In both cases, there are successes.
- He then shows off some crawl errors
- He then shows the link reports

Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online Media to not talk about sitemaps but rather about paid feeds from Yahoo. Search submit pro. It is a hybrid model of both natural search with paid links within those results. A flat CPC model, it is not an auction model. You control this and it has nothing to do with your page. It is easy to set up. Your feed is crawled on a daily basis, so all changes are picked up and refreshed within 48 hours. Two kinds of submissions, TLP submission (top level domain) and the best part of the TLP submission is the "quick links" under the results - you define them and they convert very well. The next level is the feeds part, where you submit categories and products.

They like to use feeds on the forefront of their SEO campaigns. You get some nice reports by using these programs. Updates are within 48 hours, so you don't have to wait too long. The CPC prices run about 25% on average of the top CPC price in the sponsored results.

He then has a case study... I may post these details later...

Note: Please excuse typos, this coverage is provided live and without much editing, due to the timeliness of the coverage...

The first two rows here are dominated by bloggers. A girl name Sam is on my left, she is a loyal reader of the Search Engine Roundtable. On my right is Tamar, the sidekick, followed by Li Evans. Just behind Li is Kim Krause Berg and husband, Eric. Yes, and Lisa Barone is sitting right behind Tamar, with these pointing sharp objects - what they are for, I don't know.

Steve Berkowitz is ready to get up on the stage, but they wait for the audience to pile in. Now Danny and Steve walk up on the stage, take their seats, with their very manly headset microphones. Danny welcomes everyone and introduces the Senior VP of Microsoft Online. Before he was CEO as Ask.com, and jumped into a larger ship to Microsoft.

Danny: Danny brings up the NY Times interview where he describes the change from a row boat to a cruise ship. How do you handle it Steve?
Steve: The first 6 months was walking around and finding his way around the ship. He said this is an amazing place. Tons of technical and marketing talent. They are really trying to focus on search as navigation and then the advertiser. Then he talks about that ecosystem thing that everyone talks about (yada yada). Last you need operational excellence.

Danny: Brings up the unified search platform that will be headed up soon, as a new initiative. I.e. Shasha...
Steve: First he praises Shasha... A single delivery platform is important to bring this across.

Danny: How do you deliver the produtcs?
Steve: He said that he has product management. It is not one person who has all the ideas. It is bringing all this customer research together and bringing products based on that. It is pretty flexible.

Danny: Windows Live came along, we had MSN. You have Office. How will they all come into place with search?
Steve: For Microsoft, they look at Windows Live, how do they extend the Windows presence? You can take your Live ID and take it anywhere. Take your identity and who you are, and bring your history, wherever you go. You will see Windows Live as that extension. For Microsoft it is about getting the products right. They moving their portals into more social, user generated areas, with using one profile. From hotmail to Word, making them more social. It is not a one size fits all solution.

Danny: How does Microsoft do this big win search? Microsoft says you keep saying it is early in the game. Will there be a big pop? Are you happy with let's say being #1?
Steve: Search will continue to evolve. They won't be happy with just #2, in a sense. There are different types of search - destination search, convenient search (integrated search in mail, msn, etc.), Steve said he believes it is where you find search. So it is about where you are, when you are searching. It is the ability to integrate search into where you are. Know how your friends searched. In the context of semi-structured data. It is about; let's get the basics right and then innovate. The things they have in labs, will blow people's minds.

Danny: Do you see yourself having to do deals with Lenova, HP, etc.?
Steve: Those are the deals of the day today... But in the future, those won't be as important. He said it starts with the operating system, then the OEM and then the ISP. There is real no benefit to owning an OS today, outside of being a good business. Today, Dell has a great deal... The OEM is in the best place. Then the ISP is there. He said, let's earn it with the customer and if someone wants to change the default - then that is their choice. You need to earn it.

Danny: Do you think we will get to the point where you let the person choose the default from the start?
Steve: Well, money is money. And people are out there that don't think about it. They just use it. The most important part is the experience they build with Lenova and Alienware is better than other places. It is not just about buying it, you need to do it right.

Danny: There is renewed discussion on Yahoo and Microsoft joining forces.

Out breaks Ms,. Dewey, which is funny. She pull sup a chair between Danny and Steve. Very funny.

He then asks about launching an experimental search engine, Ms. Dewey. And what is the future of Ms. Dewey... More jokes...

Steve: It is more about the UI. Ms. Dewey is about a way to deliver information in different ways.

More jokes from Ms. Dewey, and she leaves... She walks away, "What a bunch of geeks" as a joke.

Danny: I won't let you off the hook.
Steve: He cannot comment on Yahoo or other things like that. He can only comment on what he controls today. He explains he is amazed at what they have, but they have not been bold enough to bring these technologies out there. They are not cool enough, he said, yet.

Danny: Will there be more integration between things?
Steve: I am not talking about Windows from a tech perspective. They need to build on top of the Microsoft APIs like anyone else. The challenge is that they sometimes forget they need to use the APIs. Whatever benefit they get from the brand of Windows is different from integrating into Windows. They take for granted how things work for them, sometimes - they need to extend the paradigm of windows to the Web.

Danny: What puts you ahead of Google, Yahoo, Ask.com?
Steve: It is not about who is ahead. He said they do better at engagement. The way they build out integration of search into the MSN experience, Windows experience, etc. The advantage Microsoft has is reach. There are very few companies that can do it from the data center perspective from the storage perspective. The need to invest in infrastructure and ability to compete on the technology side requires research and you need to think 10 years ahead. Microsoft also has the advantage of experience, plus great resources, plus ad business and diversification.

Danny: When you were at Ask.com, you were searching at Ask.com. When you moved to Microsoft, did you switch to Live.com? Did you require others to switch?
Steve: You cant force people to switch. He uses Live.com 90% + of the time, and uses the other engines mostly for comparison purposes. He was not a messenger user before, so now he uses it. They are more than search... It is more about integrated the search experience into all of those things.

Danny: You tried to get people to take notice to Live.com. Search and Win strategy? Does that work?
Steve: To be in search, you have to have the basic for everyone. You then need to segment. There are lot of people who use coupons, people who like to win, lots of new UIs, etc. Making search more graphical versus text based. There will be so much revolution around the UI.

Danny: Favorite features of the product:
Steve: He downloaded the local app on his phone. He got live traffic as he was driving up here last night. He found a restaurant... It is that type of stuff that they do, but don't do a good job marketing of.

Q &A Now:

Contextual ads? Basics first Steve said.

Elyse Thibault, Hearst Magazines
In this session, Elyse’s opening comment was her best. She stated “Bidding Wars get all of the glamour, and that keyword research and campaign organization are most important”. This statement was a great lead way into her presentation. She then continued to identify the problems of competition within the internal divisions of larger companies and corporations. She mentions that the common issues such as generation gaps, sibling rivalries, new kid syndromes and the world cup where companies are competing regionally as well as internationally. She also mentions the difficulties of Affiliate marketing and resellers/partners who are also driving up the costs of paid search campaigns.

Elyse identified the main challenge areas such as Messaging, Tracking/Reporting, Keyword management, bidding wars as well as how we need to differentiate between metrics such as downloads, form submissions, sales, etc… She also talked about how the lack of coordination leads to irrational bidding. There was much emphasis on creating benchmarks and having a more centralized structure are ways to overcome the challenges of multi-divisional SEM campaigns.

Olivier Lemaignen, Intiut Global Search Marketing
Next up to the podium was Olivier, and he discussed the “real-life” issues with having a multi-divisional SEM team at Intuit. He mentioned the complexities of handling paid search for all of Intuit’s products such as online editions, Mac vs. PC editions, QuickBooks, TurboTax, etc... He went into details such as redundancy and the overwriting of the display urls which confuses the engines, hence making it a nightmare to track performance as well as driving up the costs.
Another area of focus, just like in Elyse’s presentation is the importance of SEM Team organization and how to best manage the teams as well as harness the best practices and processes. He went though how the company had a more “Holistic approach” where one (1) person had oversight over all teams, and that having an aligned keyword development and an SEM strategy process reinforces faster sharing of best practices, consistent communication and methodologies. In closing, his vision for the future of search is a more holistic SEO/SEM relationship.

Matthew Greitzer, Dir. of Search AvenueA/Razorfish
The last presenter Matthew Greitzer, pinpointed on the four (4) rules for managing internal competition which are building an organization & service structure to support collaboration, having accurate unified tracking, strong keyword allocation and brand protection. He acknowledged that most of all big companies or corporations have “intra-company problems” with regard to paid search. He also discussed the importance of a well organized “Centralized Vision”, as well as developing master keyword lists and trying to avoid competitive bidding conflicts.

Matt then focused on Trademark protection especially with affiliates and reseller partners. He noted that even though all of the engines address Trademark policies, they are all different. His best suggestion to get a handle of this is to simply restrict affiliates and partners from bidding on that company’s trademark terms. A strategy that worked well for him was to convince the client to run a test without affiliate bidding and the results very very encouraging. The client saw lower CPC (quality score & less competition), higher conversion rates, better ROAS% and more qualified traffic volume.

Due to internet problems yesterday, this session is being posted a day late.

This article written by Greg Meyers from Commerce360, Inc.