April 12, 2007 Archives

Provided by Cshel!

11a-12:15p | Vertical & Retail Track

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Speakers:
Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing
Justin Sanger, President, LocalLaunch!
Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placement, Inc.

Talked a little shop a bit with Phil Maher from LocalLaunch! and Dale Petruzzi from Batteries.com. Saw Thomas Bindl. Room at about 80% capacity by one minute til.

Greg Sterling starts us off. How many ppl have ever been to this session at a prior SES? 3 hands go up. So it’s a fresh audience. Greg says even if you’ve heard this before it’s good to stay fresh and up-to-date.

Marketplace overview:

What is local search? Comscore defines local search as geo modifiers or using a local search engine of an Internet yellow pages site. Sterling’s definition is “Local search is a process where users seek information online, the ultimate intention of which is an offline transaction at a service or business level…”

This market is fragmented, invisible and hard to track. New local search destinations launch every week. All these new sites fragment the traffic and confuse users. Local searches are also frequently invisible to the search engines because they’re lacking geo-modifiers. This also contributes to user confusion. 109 million users of local search engines and online yps. 400+ billion dollars influenced by Internet. Of total US retail spending, e-commerce represents 3 percent.

Forecasts show local spending online is like 2.5 mil. Ad spending online. Marketers give local search advertising gets mixed reviews as per Marketing Sherpa. Ppl still optimistic and excited about Local Search. Traffic fragmentation is still a huge concern.

Emerging LS segments: Word of Mouth/Social (Yelp, Lilaguide, MySpace), Verticals (theknot.com, citysearch.com, zillow.com), Mobile (WAP-based local search, text, voice search/free DA). All make the world much more complicated, but are emerging technologies in local search.

First speaker, Stacy Williams

Reiterates immense fragmentation in local space. Breaks down various players in the segment. She’s going to go over how to get free listings and other strategies for leveraging local search.

Big SEs: Data from Bill Tancer’s blog… less than 1% of the search results in the big ses comes from a special local search db. The best bet is to get into the main search results. Use best practices for SEO, and use keywords including geo-descriptors. Use physical address in footer (text, natch) and that helps the SEs determine you are a brick and mortar business and they can place you accordingly. Submit business profile directly to major SEs. Many sites buy their data from data warehouses, so if you’re not providing your own business info to these sites, they might be using 10 year old info. When writing your business profile, write it
long (1000 words) and then create pared down versions of it at various lengths (500, 250, 150, 100). Other things you need to know: year established, years in business, operating hours, languages spoken, products/services, prof. associations, special deals, geographic areas served, etc. Some sites just publish what’s sent to them, though most have some means of verifying you are authorized to submit changes/new info. Agencies should remember to share the passwords for their clients accounts with the client. Always track everything you do. Even if your profile is mostly correct, find something to tweak anyway because once you begin the changes can help you add a lot more data that you normally wouldn’t know was even an option at the free level. (She puts up URLs for the big search engines business listings).

Local Online Search Engines: Local.com (free or $40/mo). TrueLocal (will tell you how many clicks you get/can expect in your zipcode), superpages, YellowPages.com, SwitchBoard (can’t submit directly), Dex, YellowBook.com.

Business Data Providers: daplus.us. She doesn’t like the interface there. If you have to change your listing, you have to print it out first and then re-enter the WHOLE thing (ew). Acxiom, Localeze (supplies listing to MSN).

Review Sites: Insider Pages, CitySearch, Judy’s Book, Yelp.

Why Bother? Be found by local prospects. Ensure online data is accurate, complete, etc. Build back links. Dominate the SERPs. (Take up as much real estate in the SERPs as you can and leave less for your competitors to fight over).

(Ppl have been filtering in, room is pretty full. Ppl standing along the walls)

Second Speaker, Patricia Hursh:

Local Search Advertising, Why? Ppl are increasingly searching locally. Marketers are increasing their local search ad budgets. Local search ads are effective. Local search is part of the overall customer experience. Patricia shares her recent local searches… find a sbux near the hotels she stays at for conference, other search was she needed directions to an AMC theater in a different town.

6 Tips for Local Search Advertising: 1. Integrate multiple PPC targeting methods. 2. Focus on the customers’ decision criteria. 3. Capitalize on the “local speak” advantage. 4. Drive in-store visits and phone calls. 5. Research available ad positions. 6. Local search isn’t only for local companies.
1. When you’re running a ppc campaign, use geo-targeted /ip targeted campaigns. Figures out where the user physically is to better target the ads displayed. Google and Yahoo reward local relevance if the search is clearly local. In some verticals, you’re trying to reach ppl who aren’t already in your local area, like in Real Estate. So use local keywords. Combine using local keywords AND geo-targeting for best results.

2. Focus on Customer’s Decision Criteria. Consider what the user is searching for, extrapolate what is the most important consideration for the customer, and tailor your ad copy accordingly. (See slide… good examples).

3. Capitalize on “Local Speak”. Write culturally relevant ads. Use local lingo. Focus on the local aspects of your business. Differentiate yourself from the big national players.

4. Drive In-Store Visits or Phone Calls. If primary goal is to drive foot traffic or calls, focus on local search ad products that provide maps, phone numbers, addresses, online printable coupons, etc.

5. Research available ad positions. Google Local Business Ads are displayed on Google Maps results pages. Yahoo Local Listings are displayed on Yahoo Local results. However, there is a tremendous amount of cross-over with main search results. (See slides)

6. Local Search for Big Brands. Most popular types of local searches involve real estate, new and used cars, mortgage brokers, restaurants and hotels, etc. Many of these types of businesses are big national brands, not local. There will be a “big awakening” soon when the big guys will realize they need to be leveraging local search more.

(Wow, LOT more ppl squeezing in and craning necks to see over the standing ppl)

Third Speaker, Justin Sanger.

Big businesses are turning to the yellow pages type companies that they’ve been working with for eons to help with the big brand’s local search efforts.

We are Witnessing a Consumer Revolution: The birth of a new savvy local consumer.

Local consumption isn’t new and local search in actuality is a reflection of our everyday life. 80% of all purchasing activity takes place w/in a 5 miles radius of our homes.

What’s new now is the Internet and its ability to augment our traditional local activities. Kelsey Group says 70% of local consumers are using the Internet to find products and services locally.

Local search innovators are continuously making the “next big announcement”. Each innovation, through its unique displays and ad serving conditions, yields the possibility of new and valuable local advertising inventory. Problem is, all these new innovations with their new beneficiaries aren’t actually benefiting proportionately to the hype.

Local Search Fragmentation: It’s only going to get worse for advertisers. Better for users, as consumers drive the LS marketplace and the demands of these new users are significant.

Constructs of Local Search Behavior (Fragmentation of User Behavior)
• Social Networking
• Special Events
• Life Events
• Health
• Shopping and business look-up
• Travel and Transportation
• Work Life

All aspects of local search. All reasons users are turning to the Internet. Local search has been around forever and has multiple constructs. In order to move forward, the industry needs to understand the fundamental constructs and then fill/serve one (or some) of the specific constructs.

What is missing? Local connotes geography and search is merely an action. So is the revolution we describe really just about a geography search? No. What’s missing is the definition of the behavior construct. Right now, there’s a proliferation of “horizontal” search sites (everything to everyone).

Further segmentation of the already segmented local search utilities. Google and Yahoo understood that the local searchers’ needs and display req’s are different from the “regular” search user, and they wisely segmented the local search out from the main search. They knew they needed maps and directions, etc. To gain usage/critical maps, they’ve both also reincorporated the local search results into the main results page (like what Stacy was saying) to increase exposure for the new segment.

Horizontal local search engines must transform themselves into deep, vertical local search/info aggregators. There will be a convergence of vertical and local. Vertical players currently lead from segmented and niche content perspectives, but they lack critical mass. Horizontal players have or are approaching critical mass, but lack rich, structured, segmented content. Both groups need to address their shortcomings.

Structured Business Content Imperative. Vertical and LS require structured content. Where does the LS data and content come from? Offline-derived local content. Internet-indexed local content. Syndicated-authority content. User-generated local content. Advertising products.

(You’ll need to download the slides; Justin talks *fast* and the slides have tons of info)

• Think beyond your website
• Think atomization
• Study the SERPs
o Authoritative algos point you in the right direction, ride the coattails
• Find vertical authorities beyond the norm including trade orgs and
directories
• Run searches on Google Maps and look for reference sites
• Back-link check your competitors.

Question to Justin: Ppl who have a service based business but have either no physical location or an undesirable location, and you come to the consumer rather than the other way around. How do you still use Google Local/Maps?

Justin: Find the vertical sites where they cater to your business needs.

Question: Any other platforms that allow you to advertise a local address?

Patricia: It’s a difficult issue that our clients are struggling with right now.

Question: Strategies for tracking online influenced transactions.

Greg: Loyalty cards, phone call tracking services, coupons (must be redeemed physically), etc. Some new stuff in wireless.

Stacy: Phone calls are probably the easiest to track. Clickpath serves up dynamically generated phone numbers which gives even greater granularity to your tracking.

Greg: Sometimes just flat out asking the user “Where did you hear about us?”

Question: We just acquired a national pizza chain, and we’re running ppc local campaigns for the national change. Any advice?

Patricia: Make sure all the individual locations are registered in the SEs with their local addresses, include local keywords in the campaigns, etc.

Question: Does getting into all of these directories require manual submission or is there a way to outsource it or something?

Greg: Justin runs a company that offers those types of services.

Carolyn Shelby is the webmaster several sites, including a national plumbing manufacturer, and the city guide for Greater Lafayette, Indiana.

Moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs from Optium. The panel has changed slightly since past versions, with each speaker actually presenting their own PPT. He says there have been some great changes in the past year.

First speaker will be John Marshall, the CEO of ClickTracks. They have a natural bias towards what happens when people click on an ad, since that is the world in which they live. Distinguishing a badly designed ad from click fraud is difficult…they look familiar.

They did a case study and noticed they suddenly got lots of traffic from one particular ad. It looked suspicious, but was it click fraud? An alternative explanation was that is was an ad that appeared on a new affiliate site. The affiliate generated low quality clicks. They went through the thought experiment. The clicks were not converting into sales. Lots of clicks from India. Does this mean it was obviously CF? However, it is entirely possible that the ad was picked up by a publication hosting AdSense that is particularly targeted towards India. The ad sounded interesting to the readers, but when they find out you are in the UK and don’t ship to India, they go away.

Back to case study…came from many diff IPs. Mostly (89%) from the US. They had various user agents, loaded images, activated JavaScript and did the things that real browsers would normally do. However, the majority was going to one page, and the referrer just kind of “looked wrong.” In the end, they submitted it as questionable and got a refund. The moral is that detecting CF from actual traffic can be difficult. They don’t see the type of stuff like repeated clicks from one IP address. Encourages attendees to move away from a model where you think some sort of automated system can tell you if CF exists. This potential problem requires human judgment. It requires a knowledge of your specific website and visitor demographics. For example, if you have an average time on site that suddenly looks low.

An effective approach uses computer-assisted detection for the obvious stuff like repeated visits from an IP. If using a “lack of ROI” to tell you something is wrong, this wont work. For many keywords, there literally is no ROI. Look at campaigns which are different in some sort of definable way. There can be false positives, like airport metal detectors. You should fix poorly-performing ads just as quickly as you would “fix” click fraud. The techniques described, by giving false positives, still provides a value since the overall campaign will benefit from the changes suggested. Like the airport metal detector, you want to tune the system or mental protest to create more false positives than not. The reason being, like with an airport metal detector, you’d rather have that than false negatives.

Next up is Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google. He is excited to be able to present slides this time around. Asks some questions. Where does CF come from? Main incentives would be to attack advertisers and inflating affiliates. Numerous methods are used: Manual clicking, click farms, pay-to-click sites, click bots, and botnets. Shows a screenshot of a botnet console…in some cases these are very sophisticated.

Important to distinguish between CF and “invalid clicks.” CF is difficult to ID, since there is a question of intent. From a theoretical perspective, if they could read people’s minds, they could create a set that included click fraudsters. Like John said, you want to make sure that if you are sensitive enough you will actually catch the activity. There will be some examples where they don’t catch it. They throw the net widely enough so that they have a statistically confident feeling they will get them right. There are a significant number of clicks marked as invalid. The advertiser then doesn’t pay for a real click, so that is good. They are thus providing an enhanced ROI, in a way.

The actual systems that they use is complex and involves numerous algos, etc. There are three principle stages: 2 proactive and one reactive. The proactive methods are filters and offline analysis. The reactive is investigations, which are relatively rare. All advertiser inquiries are investigated by the quality team. CF estimates vary widely. 2004 50-70% (?). 2005 30% of clicks (marketing Experiments). 2006 15% (outsell) 12% (Click Forensics). The reality at Google is that there are a significant (<10%) number of clicks detected as invalid. This wide net ensures nearly all invalid clicks are detected proactively. Reactively detected invalid clicks are negligible proportion (<0.02%).

Google wants to see more over-reporting versus underreporting. By checking each of the advertiser complaints, they can continue to fine tune their reactive technique. So where do fictitious clicks come from. Clicks that actually never happened would be reported by an advertiser. For example, one person reported 20 CF suspects during a time period when only 5 clicks occurred during that time. They found this was a basic problem of ignoring a basic fact of web analytics. Most versions of Firefox and IE will technically reload a page that looks like the original click on the listing. The way to resolve this is to use redirects, or AdWords auto-tagging. ClickFacts and ClickForensics both ask that all their advertisers use auto-tagging.

There are many features unique to Google. They have the only industry actual reports of clicks not counted. Averages are meaningless from the POV of an individual advertiser, they must look at their own data. Google is trying to become more transparent over time, but the challenge is that they do not want to educate the fraudsters. He compares the problem that crime forensics teams now have due to a wiser public able to hide crime more efficiently thanks to shows like CSI.

Next up is Tom Cuthbert from Click Forensics. He wants to talk about progress that is being made on the CF front. He is hearing things are improving. They have been building their team with even more talented individuals to help detect the problem. Search providers have made great progress, with Google’s plans for IP exclusion functionality to Yahoo naming a VP to oversee the issue (who will speak next. However, none of this eliminates the need for a third party monitoring. Other industry progress includes an awareness of CF at an all time high. IAB Click Measurement working group. Click Quality Council meeting monthly. And the “Enhanced Click Fraud Network” launches (from Click Forensics). They give free reports up to 100,000 clicks each month.

The numbers: Overall threat level by quarter. In Q3 and Q4 2006, the numbers increased to close to 14% overall, with 19% in the content network the overall average. Terms that cost over $2 have a click fraud rate of over 20%!

What is next? They have been constantly enhancing their products and services. They like the site exclusion process. They also like the ad scheduling feature of their tool, as well as the country of origin functionality. They recently were named the best tool to fight click fraud, by Inc. magazine. In the next few months they will also comment on things beyond CF, that are also areas that advertisers need to monitor that make up different pieces of the “bad click” family.

Last is Reggie Davis, who has been working for 2 months at Yahoo! as their new VP of marketplace Quality. He spent the last several years managing litigation at Yahoo, including the big CF case (?forgot the name). Their goal at Yahoo! is to create the world’s highest quality search and display advertising network. It is clear they need better disclosures, the executive commitment, and build industry leading technologies and teams. They want to move from the paradigm of front-end filtering and back end refunding based on submitted reports. They want greater visibility and control for advertisers, and more dialogue.

Numbers never disclosed before: between 12 and 15% of overall average clicks coming through have been tagged and discarded. They feel that a percentage of it is CF, but also some lower quality traffic. He shows a graph which displays how the filters work based on rulesets. Thousands of filters are used to assess all attributes of each and every click. Other initiatives: improved publisher assessment. They take actions if they feel that partners are violating terms. Partners using popups, etc have been terminated. They also are seeing an increased advertiser adoption of conversion tracking tools, which helps. They are also making improvements to the matching technologies. They have seen a significant reduction in the number of claims made by advertisers.

Shows some quotes from various advertisers that are happy with panama. He announces today for the first time the new Yahoo! “Marketplace Quality Center.” This is a one-stop location for advertisers come in (password protected) and do research around this subject. They decided to setup the privacy center to be very simple and also thorough. Some pages allow for the advertisers to submit a click inquiry. They will then do the analysis. The area also includes “how-tos” for installing conversion trackers, detecting suspicious activity, etc

Initiatives for 2007: quality-based pricing. Domain blocking will be released in 2007, allowing for the advertisers to help shape the overall quality of their campaigns. Continuing detail in their investigations. When refunds are provided, there will be better clarity and analysis of the reasons why. They also will strongly support the IAB efforts. Next steps are industry definitions and standards, audit against those standards, and let’s keep talking!

I got here a bit late, but most of the beginning stuff is just promo stuff as expected. Quality, inventory, yada yada. I will only chime in when I hear something new.

The showed stuff from adCenter beta...

Molly is now up...
She is talking about customer service. Here sides are pretty hard to read, due to the background.

Then talks about the adCenter community team. Talks about how they help people in forums, blogs, etc.

NEW: They are launching adCenter Accreditation with official tutorials, verification and logos.

Unlimited negative keywords on the campaign level coming this Summer.

Now there are Q&A

Ask.com is set to launch a new search algorithm code named Edison. The new algorithm will combine Teoma and Direct Hit, two search engine technologies that Ask.com purchased a few years back, to bring about a new algorithm, Edison.

I was reviewing the social search panel where Apostolos Gerasoulis, co-founded Teoma Technologies, know own by Ask.com. Apostolos has leaked this information in that panel.

I have confirmed the existence of Edison with Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Ask.com. Jim was not able to give me any more comments or details on Edison.

So I decided to meet with Apostolos Gerasoulis this morning, and I received some more information about Edison. Here is what I got for you.

(1) Direct Hit and Teoma were the original social search engines.
- Direct Hit which was purchased back in 1999 by Ask, uses click data to determine relevancy for rank. So the more clicks, the higher the click popularity, the higher a page would rank.
- Teoma uses hubs and authorities to determine relevancy. In a sense, it uses the "wisdom of the crowds" to determine relevancy and show the best results they can.

(2) Apostolos explained in his presentation this morning that they will be combining the best of both Direct Hit and Teoma into one engine.

(3) Apostolos also explained that they have been tagging for three plus years. So for example, if you do a search at Ask.com, that search query you used, will be associated with the pages you click on Ask.com. So if you search on "cars" and click on the first result, the first result will be tagged as "cars" behind the scenes.

It is my understanding, the new Ask.com search algorithm, code named Edison, will consist of these three components and more.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Update: Ask.com issued a statement which I posted at Search Engine Land. I also wonder if it is named Edison because that is where AG lives and works.

This is a question and answer forum about blackhat and whitehat techniques from some of the experts of the industry in both arenas.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson
Speakers: Bruce Clay, Todd Freisen, Dave Naylor, Jill Whalen

Question: We had a blogger account for the past few years, and we moved to Wordpress and we have scrapers. How do we establish authority on the new site so that people don't rank higher for our original content?
Jill: You need time to get that authority. You can't really fake authority.
Todd: After you use the blogger.com platform, once you move, it's gone. You need to move that content over.
Bruce: It's best to start a blog on your own site, but you can get it with time.
Dave: Get someone to email your reader community.

Question: Will you be in trouble for doing click arbitrage?
Dave: You'll be in trouble.

Question: We work in Canada and we are a bilingual country. Is there a way to spot the Googlebot and differentiate between what type of bot is coming to your site?
Todd: The bots don't differentiate between language.
Dave: If you want to go technical, host the DNS in France. Do the same for the US - put a proxy in the US.

Question: What triggered you to get out of the Viagra thing?
Todd: It was a professional decision - I wanted to get into the agency world, managing people. It wasn't really a reason of competition.
Dave: I moved away from that industry. It is very aggressive. You have to dig deeper. The black hat got much more illegal and it will be a matter of time until people get caught.
Detlev: Black hat isn't always a fix for marketing.
Dave: When BMW got kicked out of the rankings in Germany, that was blackhat spam. Most corporate clients should be kept on the straight and narrow - they need to think search and not user. It's more about educating the larger sites about doing things the whitehat way.
Bruce: I've been playing on the whitehat side all the way through (Dave says - "yeah" and the crowd laughs.) A lot of big accounts didn't let you touch their site. You had to do things external to some of these sites to get them traffic and rankings. As of late, billions of dollars are being given to spammers. There's about 6 weeks from the time a new technology is discovered between being caught. Is that valuable - to be caught immediately thereafter? You have to think about that.
Bruce: If we were to play the game telephone and said "whatever you do, do it right, don't spam" to everyone in this room, it will take one blackhat to put white text on a white background. (Crowd laughs.) In the early days, we couldn't tell what was clean. It's easier to tell what's not clean - people want to come to conferences and do it right. In a few years, it will be 10 times harder to do things blackhat.
Dave: I disagree with that. People will always take advantage of blackhat techniques.

Question: I'm using the scrolling marquee tag and I am afraid it will hurt me. I add corresponding text as well.
Jill: Is the content relevant? (Yes.) You need to be careful if they start looking at that stuff. Make a site or pages for the search engines without flash and things like that.
Todd: We just redesigned a site that had Flash from top to bottom. We cloak to search engines and offer the same exact content to users in Flash. This is a perfectly valid solution.
Dave: Blackhat wants to get as close as humanly possible to do whitehat solution. Blackhats put divs off the screen and you wouldn't notice. How would crawlers notice?

Question: Regarding looking at the first page of results and seeing so much blackhats, how do you compete with that? Are there ever results in the top 10 that you can't explain about?
Dave: There's always a reason. In the Viagra industry, you look at Pfizer, they are bending the rules ever so slightly to compete with generic Viagra. That's more for reputation management. We once ranked for flowers and it ranked on top and it just redirected somewhere else - that's blackhat. You really have a six week lifecycle - every week a blackhat is popping out thousands of websites. Every six weeks, when that batch dies, new sites come up. Whitehats tend to make it safer for themselves. The .edu stuff will fade away.
Detlev: Pfizer is not doing what they need to do whitehat to get there. They listen to a little white hat and a little blackhat, but they don't have any hope of getting up there.
Dave: If you're going to go for a little blackhat, you're going to fail miserably. You need to be either blackhat fully or whitehat fully. Don't cloak partially - just cloak fully.

Dave asks - how many people think that cloaking is a bad thing? How many people think that Google Website optimizer is a good thing? How many people think that it's the same? There's a show of hands for everything, but not so many. Google seems to have made cloaking a-okay to do.
Dave: The word cloaking is such a bad word, but Google has cloaked for years.
Detlev: And people who cloak are not taken out.
Dave: BBC Kids does that - they have a Flash website.
Detlev: Let's do our duty. Does that mean that people should all cloak then? (Crowd laughs.)
Todd: Not all sites are created equal. If you're not one of those websites and you get caught, you can be gone for good.
Jill: Dave, when you say the top 10 are using blackhat techniques, you're talking about very competitive terms.
Dave: Yes. Just the markets where there's real money. (Laughter.)
Bruce: If you are cloaking in a deceptive way, like if you are offering baby blankets to the search engines and then the person clicking goes to an adult website, you're gone. But if you see identical content on the engines and as the user, then it's not evil. It depends on what you're trying to do with it.
Detlev: It's more difficult to draw the line then when you're doing it. You might keyword stuff in cloaked content which might show up in the listing in your search result. When you cloak, you're divorced from the knowledge of where to draw the line. You can get banned in that case as well.

Question: What's your take on the future of social media sites and how they're being treated by the algorithms? Now that blackhat SEOs are really spamming social media sites, how do you think algorithms are going to adjust to this?
Dave: The Squidoo lens has gone onto the blackhat scene. We've known about that for 9 months. When we did blackhats, what worried me was that blackhats were too aggressive. It's like Wikipedia. I would work for free with Encyclopedia Britannica to release that content. Why? Because I don't like that dominance of Wikipedia. It's human edited content - it's not always correct.
Jill: Black hatters ruin things for everyone else. People create spam articles, automated crap, whatever. I do think that these social media sites might not be good in the end.
Detlev: I think that paying Diggers to rank that content higher will have a negative impact.
Dave: Matt Cutts talked about Digg once - don't play in high traffic areas without reading the warning signs. Digg traffic might take your site down. I hate being Dugg. It costs me bandwidth and there are low conversion rates.
Bruce: I think it's worth mentioning that social media is not going to go away necessarily. A lot of us probably grew up and we paid attention to brands that appeared in TV or traditional media. Many people today don't watch TV or follow traditional media. If you have a brand, you should have a presence in that space because otherwise those potential consumers (social media users) may not know who you are. My larger clients are considering projects in the social media space.
Detlev: Those projects are very effective. You can certainly drive traffic. You can use social media for link building and social media in itself is a traffic driver. You don't have to be blackhat at all. Whitehats can do so but they should play in the same way with the right attitude. You don't want to piss these users off - it's a hornet's nest.
Todd: You have to be very careful in this space. Consmerist.com is a site that will highlight your screwups. It's second to Digg traffic. If you do something right, on the other hand, then consumerist.com can be your best friend.
Dave: One of my clients just made an island in SecondLife. It's expensive to play it but you need to measure that traffic. It can help you.

Question: How do you successfully get out of cloaking when you're hooked on it like heroin?
Todd: Why would you? Are you doing the evil bad cloaking and are afraid to get caught?
Audience member: Well, I'm concerned about other sites -- my competitors -- that have gotten caught and banned.
Detlev: Is it that much difficult to provide the same content to your user?
Audience member: Probably not.
Detlev: You can take those steps into rehab. (Laughter.) If the material is almost the same, how much of that information is used in your rankings and how much is inbound linking? Inbound linking is not cloaking.
Audience member: But the problem is that regular pages are not ranking at all.
Detlev: I don't think you wouldn't have that much trouble at all. With "miserable failure," the whitehouse.gov page didn't mention that phrase at all on the site.
Dave: As a safeguard, download Google Website Optimizer and check your site.
Todd: The risk is that you could lose rankings.
Audience member: I happen to be ranking now because of cloaking.
Dave: Then just do it.
Jill: Start a new site the whitehat way so that you have a backup in case something happens to your cloaked sites.
Todd: Right now you're ranking. You're saying if you take it down, you won't be making money.
Detlev: If your rankings go away and you're not banned, it's better than being banned. You're now in line to be banned.
Todd: I'm going to guess that there's shady work in your industry.
Dave: If you put a sword out and people have guns, you're in trouble.
Bruce: There is no one answer. It really depends.

Question: I have a site that has a bunch of different tools and I want to move one of them that ranks well to a different domain. Can you talk about the best way to redirect?
Dave: The best way to pass authority is a 301.
Audience member: Does it have to stay there forever?
Dave: There is a risk that if you take it away, you will flip flop back again, so I would say yes. When is the right time to take it down? I don't know. That's the million dollar Question.
Bruce: I think it's at least 6 months. The Question is - why would you take it down?
Todd: As long as you control it, leave it up.
Dave: Google Webmaster Central is a great tool to see backlinks. Check your site after you have that 301 redirect and tell those people that you moved the site to avoid looking stupid.
Detlev: I advocate telling these people. It will pay off in the long run. You want one site, not two. This also goes for the cloaking member. You do better when you have more links pointing to one domain.
Jill: You will lose some rankings if you go on a new domain. You'll get caught in the aging delay even with a 301 redirect.
Audience member: It seems that there is more attention on my site to break up the sites because I offer tools and they get attention on their own.
Dave: 9 times out of 10 you lose rankings because when you move from site A to B, you have changed the site navigation. Make sure these move over to the new site as well.

Question: I wonder if you can help us about analyzing backlinks. Is Yahoo still the best way to analyze backlinks?
Todd: I don't think anything shows you the order of importance anymore. The best way would be Google Webmaster Central.
Detlev: Yahoo is more comprehensive in its listing. Google only started this a month or two ago. You'll see a different list in MSN. Look at them all and assume that there are even other backlinks that search engines haven't found. I don't think there is any search engine that would be more important than the other for this. If you have a huge list of 10,000 backlinks, you'll probably find the more important ones in the first pages.
Bruce: If you have 3 search engines and you have a list from all engines, those lists are not identical. Look at all of them and aggregate them. You may very well see 10,000 on one, but there really are 15,000. Assume that they are disjoint sets.

Question: Someone mentioned that you can see something in your backlinks even if there is no juice spilled over. How do I know this? Why should I pay for links that don't give me much juice?
Detlev: You're going to be in the dark for that one. Example: Washington Post. You can pay for their directory. Is it worth it for you? Chances are, it's not going to pass rank - like for a site of Viagra, not many people are going to be using it. With regards to search engines, some of the things you buy, you might not get any rankings.

Question: I need to point the traffic of one domain to another because of a trademark issue. How do I do so efficiently?
Todd: Set up a 301.
Audience member: You're going to lose rankings.
Todd: Not if you do it right. Get a wildcard 301 for every page. If it's the exact same website with the exact same URL structure, and you're not on a Microsoft server, then it will be easier to do.
Dave: Don't leave both sites live at the same time. 9 times out of 10, the newer domain will be penalized.

Question: I wanted to know if you have seen anything that shows that search engines count clicks to emphasize popularity in the results.
Todd: For awhile back, you could view the search results on Google and you could see click tracking going on. I haven't noticed anything that is attributed to that but Google has done a lot of things.
Bruce: The problem is, it's self-fulfilling. If you're #1, you'll get more clicks. I'd put faith in the fact that Google can find out if people bookmark you as a way of emphasizing your value.
Dave: AdWords can work - once you are in the top spot, you don't have to focus so much on your side rankings. MSN is awesome - they use MSN messenger to profile you. They are great with personalized search.

Question: Do search engines prefer friendly URLs versus other URLs?
Dave: Yes.

Question: About personalized search, how do we optimize for this?
Dave. This is the best thing for an SEO. How many people go to their own site? Personalization shows you that your personal site is most important to you - your client will go to his site all the time, and he will be so happy when he ranks for those keywords. (This is all sarcastic and everyone laughs.)
Todd: Don't ever log off your Google account.
Jill: It differs via geographical, personalization, and it's a good reason why people shouldn't be looking at rankings but more about analytics.
Todd: At the end of the day, it's about measuring metrics. A lot of people focus more about ranking reports, but it boils down to making money.
Bruce: Once of the things this fringes upon is behavioral search. If people search for Java and want programming, and you search for Java and need coffee, pretty soon search engines will know that you meant coffee or you meant programming. From an organic point of view, you need to just know your audience. You need to make your site the best way you can be so everyone wants your site.
Todd: Behavioral could be a good thing for search.
Dave: Unless the search engines screw it up.
Bruce: We're going to see a lot of behavioral stuff going up.

Question: There's a theory about backlinks in our company. Is it true that if you buy PPC links, you'll get more backlinks?
Todd: Those links don't count as backlinks.

Question: What about a content management system site that has a unique timestamp in the URL?
Todd: You want to stop that quickly.
Dave: We have a client like this. We need to send the spiders to a caching server that lacks the timestamps in the URL.

Question: Do caching server solutions work for sessionIDs?
Dave: Yeah. Search engines should see the content in the same place. They just need a cached copy of the content without the dynamic content. It's not easy to achieve; it's not a quick fix. From a search engine point of view, the hard copy of the content is really important. That is legitimate cloaking.

Question: I'm not as tech savvy. We push different content to users than the search engines. Is that the same thing that he's talking about?
Dave: Yes, pretty much. A specific IP address gets a static page and other IP addresses get other pages.
Audience: Is it a negative nightmare for the search engine?
Dave: Give them the content in a way that they can handle it. Don't make the content totally bloody differnet. If you do, you're going to get banned.
Audience: What we're doing is legitimate.
Todd: IP Delivery (ip-delivery.com). You should look into that - it will provide spider lists and other tools to get you going.

Question: Can you link-build too aggressively (can this sabotage your competitors?), and how important is varying your anchor text?
Dave: They removed the Google bomb for George Bush's website. How many people noticed that he put the word "failure" in his page a few days ago? He's ranking for failure again! You don't need thousands of links. It's the quality of the link and the trust of that domain. My domain is trusted. God only knows why. They should know better. I made a post about "buy viagra" and Danny Sullivan linked to me. I was #5 in the UK for that for at least 6 months. Google changed the terms and conditions and says that nobody can do Google bombing anymore.
Audience member: Are we talking about a couple of thousands of links, or a hundred of thousands of links?
Dave: If high profile sites are already linking to you, that is going to push you up.
Jill: Authoritative site links will boost your rankings.
Todd: Not all sites are created equal. You can throw any piece of crap link on a trusted site and it is going to help it.

Question: I have an established domain and I'm going to release a huge amount of data on a subdomain, and for advertising reasons I need to protect the traffic. Are there any guidelines that I need to know about spidering per month - is there a percentage amount?
Todd: It is hugely dependent on the website. I would get signed up with Webmaster Central, Sitemaps, Site Explorer, etc. You're looking at 4-6 weeks to get your site crawled a lot.
Dave: Are you concerned about the spidering of it?
Audience: No, just the advertising of it.
Dave: I got 2.2 million pages indexed in Google in 3 weeks. I managed to get 2 PR9 links.
Detlev: The key to push it over the top is your inbound linking. There is no amount. The amount of links determine how deep they will crawl.

Question: How much time should you be spending on AdWords or organic or on building your website?
Todd: I'd be serious to say that it should be what's making you the most money.
Dave: One of our clients is spending 80% of their time doing multivariate testing - how to convert the users. He has 25% conversion rate. I never thought that would be possible. Someone who is a conversion expert brought a site that had a 2% conversion rate to 88% rate. It has taken 2.5 years. It's commitment - they test everything - logo size, slogans, etc. Example - "discounted product" changed to "cheap" - raised conversion rates. "Discounted" in the UK doesn't work. "Cheap" does.
Todd: There are many places that do multivariate testing for you. I resell for one of them. Come talk to me.

Shopping Search Tactics Thursday April 12, 2007 2pm
Vertical and Retail Track

Moderator:
Alan Dick, Vintage Tub and Bath

Speakers:

Brian Smith, ComparisonEngines.com
Scott Greenberg, Marchex
Brian Mark, Toolbarn.com

Can't believe I got to this session with time to spare. Had to depart the SEO Women's luncheon early, after gulping down soup and drying off after arriving there drenched from the pouring rain. Nice turnout, despite the weather. Tamar is not far behind, also running back to catch her session. I ducked out with Jill Whalen, who had to speak at 2pm, replacing Mike Grehan. The room was packed by the time they started.

Alan starts off. Shows a product from his company and will give them away to 4 questioners at the end, shower thingy. Another presenter has drill bits to give away. Another has water bottle and money. Silly stuff, incentives from the shopping sites.

Brian Smith - Learn to love your feed. Who uses shopping engines? Do you use more than 3? More than 8? More than 10? Show of hands as he asks. Will discuss basics of shopping search engines. He's from comparisonEngines.com and SEWatch. Blogs for Loveyourfeed.com. DFO = Data feed optimization, a new term. No one thinks it’s easy to work with shopping search engines. It's hard to get images and products up and running. Add as much info as possible with your feed. Read directions carefully. Automated XXL solutions aren't optimal. Track your stats. Submit to Google Base. It's free. They cleaned it up. DFO. Will get into later.

Lots of choices. Big/small, datafeeds/crawlers, free/paid/cpa/vertical lists them. Shopzilla, Froogle, Builders Square, USA Today, MySimon, Buy.com, TheFind, vdeep, Healthpricer, Become, Smart, Cnet Shopper, Pricewatch..I grabbed what I could. There are adult toy comparison engines out there. Some search sites will appear from merchant sites, even if competitors. Consumers - know the question the shopper is asking. Merchant - Delivers a highly target market. Use automated feeds. Fill out all fields. Choose categories. Track. Do it manually is fine.

Scott Greenberg - Start with high margin areas. You will have room for error. Learn about the engines. Actively manage CPCs across cat, prod and campaign. Know the "true" ROI. Returns, charge backs, incentives understand pricing, price changes, bidding. What it means for your products. Fill out all required fields in your feeds. Add price, product availability, tax, shipping, more. Take advantage of merchant ratings, testimonials, non-standard opps. Logos, displays.

Ex. of binoculars search. Shows lots of reviews. Shows logos. Another search site shows ratings and takes advantage of that. They handed out a shopping feed matrix. Has feed positioning factors. They're all different.

Brian Mark - Oneboxer.com is his blog, to learn more. Probs are raising cpc. Poor tracking tools. Analytics don't often get it right. Too many ind. feeds. ROI is hard to calculate correctly. More competitors. Rules constantly evolve. Nowadays there could be hundreds of the same tool listed for example. At first they listed everything but have cut back. Track data. Develop technology to target exact products to send in the feed. They use Froogle/Google Base, Bizrate/shopzilla...and a few more. No need to be on every shopping search. The key is knowing your clicks and sales associated with them. Must decide how much weight each multiple clicks gets. First one, last one sold? Irregularities are several clicks at a time before making a purchase, what if it is a bot, seasons, each engine handles clicks differently. When to discount a click?

They look for most clicks vs. sales. Hidden costs are things like boxes, order processing, merchant acct fees, drop ship, call center staff, and more. GP - (CPC*Clicks), calculate the cost of each sale vs. net profit. Take a look at problem items. Watch new competitors. Set goal for ROI numbers. Drop poorly producing products. Work on conversion rates. Yank a product if it doesn't meet your goals. Smart feeds show a profit. Shows stats on cpc. Watch engines that charge an extra 10 cents per click. Try to get really good ratings. Use your seals, logos, pricing and ratings to stand out. Some engines will charge more for things like logos in the feed. Direct shopping is easiest to track. Someone clicks on a product and buys on the same visit. Indirect shopping engine sales for a number of reasons. Ask how they found the product. Set a cookie on the email to friend inbound link. When your merchant ratings are low, people tend to call to order.

Using shopping engines meant increase in sales. A redesign killed traffic for awhile but shopping engines kept things going until Google found them again. Shopping engines can lead to new customers. about 20%. Adwords - 4% MSN 6, Yahoo 9. 22% repeat shoppers come back via shopping search engines. They like being able to compare prices. Track as much as you can. The more you know the better to track ROI. Set goals and stick to them, even if it means dropping your fave product.

Brian Smith is up again. Uses singlefeed.com to show example of how to do a feed. Everyone wants to get to the top of GoogleBase. Shows an Excel spreadsheet. Quantitative aspect and qualitative aspect. Data feed can be optimized. You can change copy. Add keywords. Don't ignore them. You can do PPC and SEO work through your data feed. Figure out where the title fields are the same. Look for long tail terms. If not using attributes on shopping search engines you're missing out. All engines have different headings. Part numbers are unique identifiers. Remember yours because others who sell forget your product may forget to add it. Don't forget product name. Some sites draw from the product title, so it has to be there. Be specific with titles. You can add color later. Suggest if a great holiday present. Show users you understand what they're looking for. A month before Mothers day, put "Great Mothers Day present" in desc. Be careful to not send JavaScript 9or other code in fields. Sometimes will get a rejection for having a dollar sign. Read directions. Track product urls, so you can track better. Image urls don't like muli9ple image urls because they can't understand the url. All engines ask for unique ID. Be consistent. Don't confuse the engines. If there is no relevant content in your feed, you're in trouble. List payment type. Some engines will strip away data they don't accept. He has issues with Google checkout. Not many people in the aud use it. He provided the audience with an optimization checklist. Make sure your products have unique urls. Don't list the same title 20 different times. No html allowed in feeds. The checklist is on the screen and is very long and detailed. Experiment with using your logo and removing it. Test results.

Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink is modding up this panel.

Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing is up first.

Browser Bookmarks:
- Save for future reference
- Difficult to manage
- Navigation issues
- Single location access

Web Based Bookmarks:
- One click saving
- Tagging
- Sharing
- Wisdom of crowds
- RSS
- Portal

Social Media consists of social news and social bookmarks.

Social News:
- Digg
- Netscape
- Reddit

Social Bookmarks:
- Del.icio.us
- Furl
- Google Bookmarks

Major Players:
- Del.ici.us (high traffic, high syndication, social network, toolbar and firefox plugins, tags, folders and over a hundred hacks). He shows how del.icio.us works, etc.
- FURL (medium traffic, med-low syndication, caches content, toolbar feature, searchable notes and export bookmarks)
- Blinklist (medium traffic, med to high syndication, JavaScript features)
- Magnolia (medium traffic, low syndication, rate bookmarks, grouped oriented)
- Google Bookmarks (med to low traffic, medium syndication, affects personalized results, multiple ways to add, access bookmarks via IE toolbar)

He recommends 301url.com/social-bookmarks is a great resources.

Ways to show bookmarks:
- Text
- Icon
- Combination
- Drop downs
- Fold downs
- Fold out
- Pop up

Tools:
- Alex King plugin for WordPress named Share This
- AddThis.com

Tips:
- Become a user first
- Pick a tool
- Place buttons prominently
- Dont overkill it
- Match bookmarks with audience
- Monitor traffic
- Not limited to just blogs

Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl to talk more about Del.icio.us.

Why Del.ico.us?
- It is all about the links for Todd
- Being in front of a large audience, a large audience
- The anchor text rocks on these sites
- They are real bookmarks so you get repeat traffic and loyal visitors
- This is real traffic
- This helps build your search traffic by getting you more links and more impressions
- These are smart, savvy, successful people who use delicious

Delicious Tips:
- Coordinate the launch (you need help from others, 30 - 50 friends within a 24 hour period)
- Ask friends via IM, etc...
- Put the links on your site, use call to actions
- Tagometer
- Delicious Firefox Plugin
- FeedBurners FeedFlare

Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service is last up.

How to use bookmarking sites to boost your stuff.

Research for Social Media:
- Find out what working
- Find out whats not working
- Discover trends
- Discover key players
- Identify any competitors
- Find out whos saying good or bad things about you

RSS is a great tool
- Its Big
- Fast
- Easy
- Orange :)

Research on Digg:
- Look to see what stories for that subject in a keyword search has been buried (if you need to know how to do this, comment)
- Use Yahoo to Search on Netscape since netscape doesn't have an internal search feature
- Some stories have carryover onto multiple social bookmarking sites, so watch for patterns

Research on StumbleUpon:
- He explains how it works
- You can see a person's profile and see what they submit

Research Using Delicious
- You can see who bookmarked things
- You can see what tags they used, when they did it, etc.
- Delicious has networking features

Track Your Company Name and your Competitors
- Rep management
- Google Alerts, Google News, Yahoo NEws
- Track URLs, etc.

Search Behavior Research Update, Thursday April 12, 2007 11 am
Stats and Research Track

Moderator:
Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro

Speakers:
Anne Frisbie, Yahoo!
Rob Murray, iProspect
P Lee - Microsoft (Was too far away to see name, I'm sorry.)

Room is filling up fast. It's a smaller one, and very warm. I always sit somewhere near the screens, so I can back up what I'm hearing with what they may have on their PowerPoint presentation. And, I plan my early escape route out, by a door, because it's always embarrassing to duck out during Q/A sessions, or have to walk over people with my BIG RustyBrick bag (which is enormously comfortable btw.). It's been said before but I'll repeat it because I need to type...Gordon looks like Indiana Jones. Room has become standing room only.

Gordon says we'll each have a car at the end of the session donated by Oprah. Gord is also presenting. They did a B2B survey, where they did an update of a 2004 survey. Went out to 1086 participants between 3/19-23, 2007. Think about past purchase and one they are currently participating in. Divided by roll and phase. Report release is 4/30. Where was your involvement in buying process? Did you search? Sign check? Still early but he's showing top level findings. They had economic buyers, tech buyers, (influencers), user buyers (need help with a prob), coach buyer (gets solution to the right person who needs it). Parts and components, business servs, equip, IT, other categories. Primary online destinations are SE's. No surprise there. Alot of people search. Short list candidates phase need high level info, this is the hot spot for b2b. This is where deeper verticals help. Primary is always the vendor site. (Was interrupted here...)

Google was number one SE. Yahoo and MSN way down. 17% for Yahoo and 7% for MSN. Google has stranglehold on market (b2b). If not going to se first, how did you get to b2b site? Are you using a se to get there? 1 out of 4 use se to get to a primary site by typing in url directly. People think they are going directly to site. He thinks results are skewed due to toolbars. This was not a user watched survey. Vertical engines - business.com, number one. Influencing factors? Online and offline were measured. #1 is main website of the vendor. #2 was se's. #3 distributor websites, not a vendor but site that offered broader vertical presentation. Top offline, word of mouth? Peer #1, #2 friends, #3 trade word of mouth are influencers. Vendors and industry sites out rated word of mouth for influencers. We are trusting the web more and more. Trade shows are high on offline influencers.

What are they look for? Set pricing references for people when they get to your site. #1 thing people use to qualify. Features and products are next. Installed toolbars, google #1, yahoo #2, MSN #3. Keep an eye on toolbar installation. Google offers search suggestions. Causes you to search differently. Take this into consideration. Online out influences offline.

Rob Murray - iProspect is next.
Presenting study of social behavior and marketing. Methodology - Jan 2007, conducted by Jupiter, 2200 responses, represent US pop of 18 and over. Goals how US participates with social networking sites or social search engines. Site allows for user generated content was used, or site that searches user generated content sites; Amazon was included, digg, and others.

How freq have you visited these sites? Lists SE's and social sites, inc. village, myspace, facebook, trip advisor, to name a few. Social networking visited by 1-4 at least monthly. About 41 million people. Engines visited daily Yahoo was the leading engine. Myspace 12%.Recommends identifying social networking sites where communities match your target profile. Assess value of those sites. Continue paid and natural optimization and marketing.

What was the reason for your search? Research, entertain, purchase...intent varies. Facebook 49% to network. YouTube 72% Amazon 46% to purchase. Intent plays a part in where people go. Map your product to user intent. Seek out well indexed sites that mention your brand. What influenced your decision to purchase or not? 1 in 3 has been influenced by social sites. They base purchase decisions on these sites. People trust people like themselves. Research and purchasing intent on the part of a sites users leads to greater influence on purchase. Research unique culture and code of acceptable marketing practices of each site. Backlash is significant. Be open and honest and transparent. Become part of the community. Not once a month. Really become part of the community. If you are not part of the community, they'll tune you out.

Most visitors don't post comments on sites. 54-90% never have, depending on the site. Participate in dialogue with your users. Embrace negative comments. Recommend other products you think provide a benefit to your users. How to reach sites? Direct nav and bookmarking is #1. Be indexed by major SE's. Make content worthy of bookmarking and linking. Direct prospects to user generated content. 25% on online pop visit social search. Have unique communities. They have own code of acceptable behavior. Social marketing influences 34% of online pop.

Anne Frisbie - Yahoo
Did a lot of research in 2006. Brand advocates. Buying habits of brand advocates. Who are they? Why? What are their plans and habits? How can use them to reach and engage uses? Chose specific verticals for the study. Who are they? Natural leaders. Slightly more educated. They tend to be one of the first to try new things. Feel a good brand is worth talking about. Will recommend. Consider themselves social and well connected. Will talk about products that interest them. They are a minority group- 40% of all buyers, 25% of general online pop. They're impact on purchasing is majority because they convince others. They are heavy researchers. They need to know what they're talking about. They're identifies are tied to their favorite brands. They are loyal customers. They create awareness.

Advocates plan on spending more this year than last year. They will have twice the planning for high ticket items. Home appliance will tell twice as many people about their purchases. 33% they convinced someone to buy. In home decor, 2-1 ratio. 75% recommended products. Basically, advocates could persuade at least twice as many as non-advocates to make purchases. They're a powerful group. 87% search multiple times a week. 75% use social media. 2 in 3 are social media participants. They leverage search to learn about new brands. Willing to be reintroduced to products. You can keep trying to attract them. They use trademark searches more often. They read blogs, post on blogs, make comments on purchases.

Advocates like consumer reviews. Use them to your advantage. Those who came via reviews browsed the site more actively. Special K used Yahoo to get to women losing weight. They created landing pages with communities aimed at support. Thousands of people are participating in the communities. Lots of customer reviews that come up in search. Newsletters can engage users and be tracked as they go into your site. Leverage search side and user passion. Understand motivations your brand advocates. Get involved in enthusiast sites or communities. Include user reviews. Understand tools and website advocates.

(Needed to cut out early due to threateningly low battery. Am off to SEO Women's Lunch and a 2pm session directly afterwards.)

This is the second session of the day, Chris Sherman will be moderating. He says images are interesting that with experiments trying to understand images via pixels, size, etc.. have been promising, but on the web filename, alt text, and so on matter to the search engine. How do you get images well ranked in the search engines?

First up is Shari Thurow and is going to discuss a brief basic review. There is primary vs. secondary text, including alternative text. Web pages should contain the words and phrases that your target audience types into search queries. Information architecture and interface is important to give search engine spiders easy access to keyword rich content. Link development including number and quality of objective, 3rd party links pointing to the url. She discuss the difference between primary and secondary text. Primary text is what the search engines definitely read. Secondary text is the things that some search engines may look at. She gives an example of Art Institute of Chicago and how the page only contains images with alt text that says Art Institute of Chicago. The links pointing to this page is what makes it rank in Google she says.

If your brand is extremely popular OR if your main keyword phrases are truly unique, acceptable to have a graphics intensive web site and or page. She gives an example of the Nissan group and how badly optimized the page is and how Yahoo outranks the Nissan site because it uses a combination of html text and graphic text.

Graphic image search is extremely popular. Term highlighting in the url is popular. Search engines do not see graphic images like they do images. Graphics images are made up of bits instead of text, search engines currently are not able to directly compare query words with the actual content of a graphic image. Search engines can tell now between a woman’s and mans face, they can also see colors in images. She next shows example of why a certain image ranks for a specific keyword, because the text is above and below the images One thing search engines looks for is jpg and gif. Gif’s only have 256 colors while jpgs have millions of colors. Search engines think that jpgs are most likely photographs. File names are important for graphic image optimization than text file optimization. Search engines are looking for context, use keyword rich labels or captions is important for graphic image optimization. Name your graphic images in a way that makes sense to your target audience. Do not let software generate file names. Always provide contextual cues to image search engine when appropriate.

Li Evans from Commerce360 is up second and going to give some opportunities for retailers, rep management people, etc. Image is one the fastest growing search verticals. Shoppers are visual. They want to see it before they buy it. Print them out and take it to the store with them. Search engine incorporate images into contextual searches. Its another avenue of search marketing with out having to pay for the traffic. The opportunities out there are hot products, niche markets, comparison shopping, contextual search, and reputation management. Li gives an example of a hot toy for 2006 which was the roboreptile. Niche markets provide opportunity to gain traffic. It is easier to optimize images and creates better conversion rates. She gives an example of flameless candles and how small business are doing a better job than big retailers in optimizing their images. Use images in your shopping search feed. 3 of the 4 major search engines integrate images into some contextual search results. Searchers can form an impression of a brand, product or service by the images they view. What does an image search say about you? She gives an example of an RIAA search and how there are images that the company probably would not want to have. She gives another example of Neil Princess Patel. Hot products in retail offer opportunities in image search. Niche marketing are great for smaller retailers in image search. Use images in comparison shopping feeds.

Chris Silver Smith from Net Concepts is up and he is going to talk about how to optimize images through image sharing sites. He believes you can get good inbound links from photo sharing sites. The design of Flickr is advantageous for SEO. It offers titles, H1 tag, captions, tagging, cross grouping, comments, sharing, alt text, and optimal linking hierarchies, Date taken & page views. Users can add more text. Steps for optimizing images, have good quality pictures to use. Pictures with good contrast tend to work better. Be broad in experimenting with subject matter for pictures intended to drive traffic and conversions. Factories might show setps in product manufacture. B&B might show furniture & decorative art. Some steps to optimize images. Add unique title, appropriate to the image. Add a description for the photo or even write an article to go with the image. Always tag your image with keywords. Be specific. If the photo is location specific, geotag the picture. If taking many location specific, pix, consider using a camera that has built in GPS, allowing photos to be automatically geotagged with the EXIF data. Create thematic sets for your photos and add each pic to the set appropriate for it. There is a penalty in the interestingness algorithm of Flickr that if you require people to link back to you when you create a group, then it will demote your image somewhat. Also, link over to each of your Flickr photo pages from your website. Try experimenting reuploading images in order to help it rank better. He is not sure how successful this is.

With Google make sure to enable Enhance Image Search feature in Webmaster Central. Some recent research was published and they took image tagged images and associated parts of the image that are tagged and use those blocks to determine what is contained in other images. True image could be affecting the results pretty soon. MSN Live search says they might be doing some of the more advanced true image search by looking at blocks from the images to determine the subject of other photos. Very interesting. Good presentation.

Rand Fishkin is on the podium, got here a bit late because I was talking with Apostolos Gerasoulis of Ask.com, the inventor of Teoma. Social communities don't like SEOs. Because they perceive an SEO role as a type of spam. In many cases they are right. But SEO helps these social communities grow. Trick, act like you are not an SEO. Control your brand before other people do. He showed off a Wikipedia entry that went totally against that individual policies.

Social media helps build awesome link popularity. He said, look for photos and Flickr and comment at the popular ones - hint, they don't use the nofollow tag.

He then showed search results for randfish, and shows how he rules the SERPs.

To create a successful profile you must be consistent. Build out a robut profile, comment, contribute and share. He showcases HD at Flickr.

Site to Target include a ton of places like Yahoo 360, LinkedIn, NEwsite, etc, they have an article at SEOmoz on it.

Neil Patel from ACS is next up to talk about Digg and StubleUpon. The audience at Digg is babish, and explains - not that it is bad. He then gives examples of an article about taxes but how to use your tax refund to build geeky stuff. Important factors include; number of votes in times, by specific voters, who the submitter matters and who your friends are. You get up to 200 friends, so he only adds friends who friend him and then sends it to all his friends with the send to friend feature in. Do not use self-promotion in these submissions. Do not add biased information. Do not pay for votes. Do not break community rules. Do not spam.

He decided to break all the rules. He submitted his own site, create 30 accounts on same IP, used the same domain and he paid for votes. It didn't work and he was banned.

What to do?
- Add friends
- Participate in community
- Use great titles and descriptions
- Become a top user
- Submit during the right time

Andy Hagans from AndyHagans.com

He is a professional baiter. He approaches it differently than others. He uses social media to get links. Here is a case study...

Network Security Journal....

Their strength is a tech oriented subject. The weakness is a dry topic most people aren't into. He said the most important aspect is the title of your submission. Rule of thumb, can you imagine it on a magazine cover? For this client they came up with "The Fight Against Phising: 44 Ways to Protect Yourself."

Then they write the content based on the title. The title is a promise to the reader, so the content needs to deliver on that promise. Make sure it is focused. Make sure its "Lifehacker good." Make sure it is pretty and link out generously in your article. He talks about articles that get buried and it is a horrible feeling, he said it happened to him several dozen times.

The hit list:
- Digg, Netscape, StubmleUpon, Reddit, Delicious
- The second tier is Yahoo! MyWeb and Furl
- Top sites in the industry such as Slashdot and Lifehacker

Old fashion link begging
- Make a spreadsheet with first name and other details
- Personalize every email

Going Live
- Submit to bookmarking sites via a trusted account
- Cram all promotional efforts into a few hour window
- Links lead to links, traffic leads to traffic

Results:
- 40,000 visitors
- 3,244 backlinks according to Yahoo
- Trusted links from industry sites such as OReilly.com, LinuxSecurity.com and Lifehacker

In this session, both speakers discussed the best practices for creating, testing and writing Ads/Creatives for paid search engines. The commonalities from this session were testing ads without affecting the quality score of the campaigns; create multiple Ads and have them simultaneously against each other and let the consumers decide based on CTR% and Conversion Rate. Below are some more interesting details from the session

Vic Drabicky Range online media
Vic Drabicky started off the session with a presentation discussing that in reality, there is only (1) one Ad/creative can be applied to all engines and he entitled it “GoogleHOSN”. Vic also addresses that the goal is not to not get every click, but to get every profitable click. He also emphasizes on his Five (5) Ad/creative rules to live by:

1. Include the keyword in title and description of the Ad.
2. Write tailored, clear factual Ads (not everyone can have best deal in the world)
3. Avoid symbols, exclamation point, numbers and “cutesiness”
4. Avoid non-specific calls to action (book now, save now, etc…)
5. Don’t be salesy. Use the rod roddy rule (monotone, general tone of the offer and this technique tends to be more successful)

Step 1 of 3 - Titles:

• Use DKI


• keywords in title


• use param2 & alt text to further customize


• be grammatically correct


• differentiate yourself from the competition where possible

Step 2 - Descriptions

• Descriptions are most important and customize Ads for every relevant group of keywords is key.


• Setup adgroups by Ads/creative and not by keyword.


• It’s important to tell your story in the Ad


• Also important to include your brand name in the Ad


• Clearly indicate your unique value proposition (price, selection, etc..)

Step 3 – Display Urls
Slight changes in display URL can drastically change your CTR display with in domain has higher ctr%

• Search Engines can automatically optimize creative for you.


• Having 3-4 Ads/creatives running together is best alternative


• Make sure each ad/creative has a very different message


• Track the performance of the Ad/ Creative (CTR% & conversion)


• Search Engines punishes users who make a lot of changes to the Ads/creatives (Quality score)


• Try to keep at least 1 Ad/creative unchanged.

Rule #1 - Use alt text & Param2 for MSN and Yahoo.
Rule #2 - Test often, but limit the testing for quality score problems.
Rule #3 - Get a 2nd opinion, then 3rd, then implement.

Theory #1 - Goal is to not et every click, but get every profitable click
Theory #2 - Searchers may think differently than you, so keep writing new Ads/creatives
Theory #3 - Don’t chase competitors. Have your unique creative message

Darren Kuhn, Group Account Director, ResolutionMedia
Next up to the podium was Darren Kuhn, and he discussed the test and analysis phase in writing effective Ads/creatives as well as going into detail into how MSN & Yahoo handle Ads.

• Best practice to have a testing methodology


• Research categories and industries with historical strong ROI% & CTR%


• Make sure keywords are related to one another


• Keywords and ads should link to the same url/landing page


• Minimum: Each ad/creative should get at least 25,000 impressions or 250 clicks during the test period


• Duration of tests depend on the amount of time it takes each creative to attain the min number of impressions or clicks


• High volume sites test period should be at least 2 weeks

Test phase

• Create 4-6 ad/creativess with different message types (official site, capitalization, price points, free shipping, etc…)


• Place unique tracking on each creative so both conversion and CTR can be tracked


• Disable auto optimizers.


• Continue test for at least 2 weeks.

Analysis phase

• Decide on winner and let winner run


• No clear winners, re-write new themes and messages and test again

Yahoo Panama specific:

• Difference between old Yahoo vs. new Yahoo Panama (quality index where cost savings enabled)


• Ad rank is determined by it’s bid & expected performance


• Yahoo looks at CTR% where it’s optimal for the keyword to relate to the ad (better the relationship, the higher the quality index.)

MSN Specific:

• MSN Allows low performing Ads to continue run and be displayed in results


• Best practice to constantly rewrite ads


• *Important Note: If you rewrite the Ad and don’t rename the Ad ID, the ad will keep its previous performance regardless of the change.

Study 1: Title & description testing:
The DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) option historically works well in terms of CTR%, but not always has the best conversion rates. Best to track Ads with analytics software that handles this.

Study 2 – Display Urls
Noting the performance differences between different variation of Display urls (subdomains, www, etc..) Best tactic is to test all of them.

Study 3 - Content match testing
Track the Content Network very closely, because it historically low converting.

Study 4 – Automated Testing Tool (example: BetterPPC)
Auto generate 54 different creatives and explained the benefits of betterppc. Issue with tool, did not track conversions, but quickly tested to find the highest CTR%. Used these top 6 ads to then test for conversion rates

Article by Greg Meyers Sr. Search Manager at Commerce360

Social Search Overview Thursday April 12. 2007 9am
Social Search Track

Moderator:
Chris Sherman, SearchEngineWatch
Speakers:
Grant Ryan, Eurekster - Did not show
Tomi Poutanen, Yahoo! Social Search

Apostolos Gerasoulis. - added speaker
Seth Godin - added speaker

Rough night with little sleep but made it to this session on time. Early even. About 5 people here at first, with most of them security people. Lisa Barone is blogging nearby. She's extremely dedicated to reporting sessions for Bruce Clay's company. It's gray and rainy. Chris Sherman is here now, setting up for the session. They must have expected a lot of people for this topic because we got part of a ballroom for it, but the session starts in five minutes and the room is only slightly 1/4 full. Looks like they added a third speaker. Apostolos Gerasoulis. (Thank you to the kind gentleman who helped me read the name sign on the table. Even at the front row, I have a hard time seeing due to my poor eyesight.) It's after 9am...looks like Chris is getting the panel ready.

Chris introduces himself. Talks about the opt to win a Mini Cooper during the break after this session, sponsored by AOL. What is social search? There’s no good definition. He defines it as Internet way finding tools informed by human judgment. Informed can mean many things including egregiously uninformed. No good industry standard definition. You can have people influencing social search who really don't know what they talking about. We’ve always had social search. Yahoo was originally created by a team of human editors. Meta tags created in 1996 to help content owners influence search engines and were a massive failure. They were the first "true" social search. They're returning to their roots. They were effective for about 6 weeks or so, until spammers got a hold of them. We now have tagging which are meta tags in a different incarnation.

Algorithm search itself is social. Fundamentally search engines reflect human bias (programmer choices). They observe human behavior, click paths, popular urls and use this to modify algos. New personalization efforts are also used to refine search for everyone. Yahoo stores 12-14 terabytes of data per day. We have privacy concerns. Personalization will be a huge threat to optimizers. Every search will bring different results. Why is SS so popular now? Algos have plateau. Innovation is much harder then it used to be. Humans are still better at some things than computers. Most players in social search are leveraging the work of "millions" of free volunteers. Image search. Flicker. SE's see a pixel not what we see. Images are found based on surrounding text and tags. We can see it but SE's don't see images the way we do.

Types of social search:del.icio.us, shadows, myweb, furl diigo are for bookmarking, tagging. Tag engines are blogs and RSS, like Technorati, bloglines. Collaborative directories like Wiki, ODP, Prefound, Zimbio. Personalized verticals like Google custom search, eurekster, rollyo, trexy. Collaborative harvesters like digg, netscape, reddit, popurls.com aggregates these. Harvesters focus on news. You can vote up or down. Up, stories rise to the top. They tend to be dominated by "power". If they don't like what you write about, they can blacklist you. Social Q & A sites are Google answers (gone now), yahoo answers answerbag. People have questions and other people offer answers. How do you do quality control? Over time, Yahoo really got good at this. They ask, did this person’s answer match our algo on this? Yahoo is experimenting.

Scale and scope issues. There are Tagging issues due to language, lack of controlled vocab, human laziness and "idiots, spammers trying to game the system. What will work? combo of algo and people mediated search. trust networks. increased personalization and user control over result filtering. SS will work best for non-text content (photos, music, video, etc.) You decide what sources you want for your information. SE's can't understand video. How would an SE understand humor? We'll still need people describing media.

Seth Godin is presented next.

"Search is broken." If I go to Google, and type in espresso machine, I find 8 million matches. Impossible a few years ago. Today, humans built content. You all responded. Martha Stewart has a huge site. Someone types in "martha cookies":. The third match is Squidoo. What it shows recipes, images, books, tons of content. A human being compiled the info and built the page. The only purpose of the page is to get you to leave. He saw the need for human beings to build a post search solution. A search for laptop bags. You may have 50,000 pages. Too much competition for first page in SERPs. The first result is a human written page by squidoo on laptop bags and comes up first. She changes the content frequently. She’s doing Yahoo's job. If you like what she does, and follow her other links to other sites built by other people. Accidentally clicks on an image with men standing in underwear and everyone laughs. He's posted more than 2000 times in his blog. He doesn't want you to first meet him there. If you go to the page he built in squidoo, it's more about him, by him with links and books and essays and other stuff that helps you get to know him. The wrong thing to do is try and send in traffic you haven't earned. Have your biggest fans build those pages. If you can get 100 or 1000 of them to build out content because they care about you ,they like you, each giving a thoughtful explanation about what they like. SE's want you to do this. Its important data being put in front of SE's and hence, you.

AP - From ASK.com

Strongly feels ss is the future of search. Direct Hit was first social search. Was bought by Ask.com. (He corrects Chris.) Algo search has plateau. How can you rank in the future with the new technology? SS is a knowledge that is used to guide you into a region of what you want. You want to find the exact info, text will take to the info but not take you to the region where it is located. "Rangers" will mean different things to different people, countries, states, etc. You can guide and give what the users want. Kids looking for college search by college name. They create a path. Creating a path to ivy league schools. Wouldn’t it be nice if I understood who you are when you do a search like this? Teoma is taking the web and splitting it into communities (still working in the background of Ask.) It wants to find the right community for you. Some of this has been a closely held secret until now, due to competition. He came from Madison, NJ and sees traffic. He used his social knowledge and traffic starts early, Lincoln tunnel will be blocked. He makes a quick decision to take the train, so he could make it here. Next generation of search will integrate social search and communities. This is an important future area that we need to support. We must look for innovative solutions to deliver what the user wants.

Tony P - Yahoo Social Search

Thanks for showing up day 4 of conference. Starts with a quote by Peter Drucker, The Educated Person, about the contrast of knowledge and information. Knowledge is embodied in a person. The shift to a knowledge society puts the person in the center. (Paraphrasing here). Yahoo believes in human to human communication. 3 services: Flicker images. Runs a search on golden retrievers. (I started looking for my dog! Got sidetracked). He's showing a power point pres. of dog pics. Flicker geo codes, for maps, can be used to find your morning coffee. Another search is del.icio.us. Social bookmarking product. You can share pages of interest with your network. He searched for the Hilton in SE's, get paid and bland responses. In de.licio.us, you get humanly described content about the Hilton search. Different ways of rank. Yahoo answers. Enables you to ask a question and the community as a whole answers the question. No economic incentives. People helping people. You can ask for suggestions for products or services and get people-driven responses. Chris questions the expertise of information (sources of people), the wisdom of crowds is being built in. Bono asked about world poverty for example. Yahoo is including results from Yahoo answers in its overall SERPs. They are committed to social search. Have been investing in it for the past 2 years or more.

From the Q&A session. The discussion was interesting, so I stayed to listen.

Books are not always the authoritative source. Misconception there, that print is better than the Internet for best. So far everything is free. Google Answers was paid and died. Yahoo is free and thrives. A person from the audience wanted to know how long this free, "hippie phase" of free stuff would last. There are problems with being paid and Yahoo debates this all the time. They like the idea of rewarding top contributors but changes incentive for contributing. Seth says money changes everything. Bloggers work for free. If there's money on the table, you know who the people are. You can fool around for free. Not if you are being paid. Money destroyed the quality of the search engines, Apostolos says. Seth says Dell made a mistake by ignoring blogs. Tony says everyone has to make a choice. If a company wants to serve its customers it can't ignore Web 2.0. Big companies want to get involved but are "shy" because of published "dangers" and bad press on some social sites. There's a "ton" of pent up demand for social driven content.

This session, entitled B2B Tactics, focuses on targeting business-to-business users. The session is presented by:

Brad Bauer, Senior Director of Business Development at ClearGauge
Paul Slack, CEO of WebDex
Patricia Hursh, President of SmartSearch Marketing
Moderated by Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief of The ClickZ Network
Sponsored by SLI Systems

Brad Bauer is up first. He explains that B2B is different because it is a considered purchase. Some of the key challenges faced is mostly keyword selection. The challenge is who you are messaging to.

One of the biggest challenges is that you have a smaller audience. Testing is more challenging. Landing page testing should be limited to a smaller number of variables than you typically would if you were focusing on business-to-consumer markets. It is still very valid, however. He shows that the testing results show that there is not enough volume to make good decisions.

How do you reduce waste? Get vertical. Use vertical search channels to produce a set of audience participants. Business.com is a fantastic source - drove 60% more conversions at 1/5 of the cost and generated 14% more page views per visit over Google. You can also qualify your leads through messaging. (e.g. Make an ad that says "offer financing for $10M and up." This targets the desired audience.)

Measuring the entire buy cycle - one of the biggest challenges is developing a thought process around what's really valuable on the site (e.g. giving a phone number, answering a survey, asking a question, requesting a sample, downloading a demo, etc.) Once you think this way, setting up measurement is key. Measurement also requires analytics.

Once you've defined the highly valued activities and begun to have a solid campaign, measuring qualification levels is the next step. Understand where prospect revenue comes from, how they're behaving when they are actually moving through the process with you, etc. He shows an illustration where a form is tagged to see whether people abandon a particular process on a website.

Once the analytics are in place, go to your direct sales force and find out the quality of the lead/sale and take it back to a keyword you purchased on Yahoo, Google, or Business.com.

He shows an illustration of a valuation model - creating proxies for highly valued activities and tracking them back to ad groups, aggregating them to point values, and becoming more cognizant of the value pipeline of your website. He shows other illustrations about trends (graphs) and says that they are fantastic for portability and providing value to your business - what actionable behaviors can come out of looking at these numbers?

Enterprise Search Strategy: key relationships, local search, determining how to create an organizational framework for success - who owns keywords where, etc., and what your customers want and need is delivered from your organization.

Local search is highly untapped. People need to connect with dealers in local areas and can do so in a specific locale.

The next person speaking is Paul Slack. He says that the interesting thing about B2B search is finding the right keywords. He is going to focus on driving qualified traffic to your website.

He will show us the B2B sales cycle, who to target, how they search, and developing an Internet Marketing strategy.

The B2B sales cycle is that you're not focusing on the consumers - sales by committee, large purchases, long cycle. For example, new equipment in a factory, or refresh their IT department. The need is uncovered on the client side and they research possible solutions. They are then looking for companies to solve the problem. From there, they find a qualified company - they go through a bid process and ultimately come to a decision.

A few years ago, there was a study where they went to B2B buyers - where do you engage search in the B2B buying cycle? Usually, more people focused on it in the consideration or research or decision phase - not so much in the awareness phase.

If we're doing a sales by committee scenarios, there are two individuals in the process - influencers and decision makers. Your website should be geared toward the influencer. It should not be designed to the decision maker. The influencers often begin a sales cycle.

You should target your keywords for the long tail (4 or more keywords) as well for these specific concerns. There's a high probability that you will get a lead. There is greater likelihood to respond to a "call to action" with the appropriate keywords - if you center your call to action around to making the job easier. Your website may not necessarily have to focus on selling your services, but instead - focus on the leads. Communicate that by taking the next step, you'll make their job easier and this will give you a higher opportunity for getting a conversion.

He shows an example of optimizing a whitepaper for a specific search term that ranked well organically. This was a long tail search and 539 visitors with 93 leads - 17% conversion rate.

The decision maker is important too. No decision maker wants to make a bad decision. They are late cycle searchers. You want to focus on high level searches - 2 or 3 words. He doesn't know if not finding the results organically would be a deal-breaker, but in his example, he didn't rank organically, so he had a PPC campaign for visibility.

Your website isn't about you. They fulfill a specific purpose to satisfy a specific consumer need. Make sure you have defined goals, etc. He focuses on imperative analysis - using results of offline marketing as a benchmark for online marketing to set the baseline for success. Once you have this baseline, you can take a dollar figure that gives you real goals. You focus on the budget and realize that to profit, you will need to generate a specific number of leads to be as good as traditional marketing. Search is the lowest cost per lead than any other marketing method.

In summary, begin with an end in mind. Understand who you are targeting, how they are searching, what you want them to do, how you will measure success - then focus on what makes best sense for them.

Patricia Hursh is the final speaker. She tells us that she will cover B2B marketing trends (Forrester research), thinking beyond the "click," and four ways to improve results.

Trends - Forrester research asked B2B marketers asked - what are the tactics you use today? In position #11 was search marketing, but in the top - trade shows, PR, direct mail, and print advertising. B2B customers are slow to embrace search marketing. With regards to focusing on spending, they acknowledged that emerging online tactics and search marketing are the two highest growth categories. Forrester asked how marketers fund this increase in search marketing - they will spend less on sponsorships, print ads, direct mail, and trade shows.

Patricia then overviews the process: find prospects online (put a compelling message online), drive them to the website, let them do actions and convert them to leads, and measure to improve ROI. This can be tricky for B2B companies: multiple buyers, a sale may occur offline, etc.

Finding prospects and driving them to the site = pre-click marketing
Converting these prospects and measuring = post-click marketing

The big lever is conversion, a competitive advantage. Campaign optimization has its limits Conversion has the largest potential impact on marketing ROI. An improved conversion rate allows you to pay more for each click and beat the competition. Integrate pre-click (campaign) efforts with post-click (website) solutions to maximize your return.

Four ways to improve post-click conversion:
1. Mapping visitor needs to solutions. Identify the types of visitors, assess their needs and pain points across the entire buying cycle, associate their needs with your assets, information, experience, and solutions, and turn your assets into actionable, online conversions.
2. Offering options for conversion. For example: download a trial, free web seminar, self-guided product tour, etc. Many websites have one conversion and that can be a little short-sighted. Her example shows a company that has a desire for one conversion - to download that trial. When the free web seminar and self-guided product tour were added, there were many more (720) inquiries.
3. Testing different registration forms. She shows us a form for downloading a whitepaper. It's very long (3 pages) - and she noticed that the minute you ask for a phone number, you'll get a huge dropoff of prospects. There's a real disconnect between the customer's perceived value of what's being asked and the time they have to put into filling out the form (privacy, etc.) With her customer, she tested several different forms. Conversion rate is radically different when there are fewer required fields. Often, you'll ask - how useful is an email address? The client followed up with these individuals via email to get more information from them.
4. Continuously improving landing pages. Registration forms are one element of a landing page. Rapid iterative testing process of landing pages. She shows us how an original landing page was transferred into two test pages with the following focus: general look and feel, page layout, images, messages, action triggers, name and descriptions for downloadable assets, and registration forms. Don't underestimate the huge variances between what you are calling them and the reason that your users will click. Different landing pages showed different conversion rates (first one 5% conversion, others 10-12% conversion rates).

There are certainly challenges with B2B but it is different than traditional marketing. As more verticals get into this, it will accelerate the process.

Reports began trickling in from DigitalPoint Forums and via WebmasterWorld on April 10th, of recent changes to the Google index.

Let me pull out quotes from both threads:

Today my site is back at its previous position (2nd)

Well I had a an *old* (1996) site that dropped in serps around the 6th of March (from like first page to page xx). Today is the first day they appear to be coming back.

I saw exactly the opposite - decade old site that ranked decently just disappeared overnight

Seems like mine is back too.... keeping my fingers crossed that it will last a while until next time....

I had a site pop back up today to the #2 spot after totally disappearing for a few months. It's been top 3 for 3+ years before that.

All this type of chatter spiked up on Tuesday, April 10th.

There have been no official confirmations from Google, as far as I know.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Great news from yesterday at SES. Danny has a great roundup describing that Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery at Search Engine Land and I have some more details with my coverage of the Sitemaps & URL Submission session from yesterday.

In short, all four major search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live.com and Ask.com will all support an autodiscovery method for Sitemaps. Sitemaps is an XML protocol that enables you to freely submit a listing of URLs with more meta-data to the search engines, so that the engines can be assisted in their crawl process. It is like a form of paid inclusion without paying.

Sitemaps was first introduced in November 2006 but back then you had to manually go to Google Webmaster Central or Yahoo Site Explorer and inform them about your sitemap. Now, all you need to do is put a little marker in your robots.txt file, telling the search engines the location of your sitemap and presto, the search engines will find it on their own.

Microsoft and Ask.com both promised to support it, but I believe are currently not supporting it yet.

More details on these bot sitemaps (not human sitemaps) at sitemaps.org.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums.