April 13, 2007 Archives

Big thank you to Kim Krause Berg, Debra Mastaler, Chris Boggs, Greg Meyers, Ben Pfeiffer, Lisa Barone, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Carolyn Shelby, Tamar Weinberg for helping me out with this awesome coverage. Here are the sessions we covered, somewhat in order.

Here are the fifty-plus sessions we covered at SES NY 2007.

1. In House: Big SEO
2. Video Search Optimization
3. Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies
4. Podcast and Audio Search Optimization
5. Benchmarking an SEM Campaign
6. Online Video Advertising
7. Advertising in Social Media
8. Mobile Search Optimization
9. Where Are Your Spending Your Client’s Money?
10. Advanced Paid Search Techniques
11. Ads In A Quality Score World
12. In House Big PPC
13. Keynote Conversation with Steve Berkowitz
14. Sitemaps & URL Submission
15. Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic
16. Link Building Basics
17. Introduction to Search Marketing
18. Web Analytics & Measuring Success
19. Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
20. Converting Visitors Into Buyers
21. Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads
22. Writing for Search Engines
23. Meet the Search Ad Networks
24. SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
25. Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix
26. Earning Money From Contextual Ads
27. Fun with Dynamic Websites
28. Landing Page Testing & Tuning
29. Search and Branding
30. Robots.txt Summit
31. Successful Site Architecture
32. B2B Tactics
33. Social Search Overview
34. Creating Compelling Ads
35. SMO - Social Media Optimization
36. Images and Search Engines
37. Search Behavior Research Update
38. Social Bookmark Strategies
39. Shopping Search Tactics
40. Organic Listings Forum
41. Microsoft adCenter: Today and Tomorrow
42. Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues
43. Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan
44. Local Search Marketing Tactics
45. Search & Regulated Industries
46. Wikipedia & SEO
47. Linking Strategies
48. Usability and SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One
49. Link Baiting and Viral Success
50. SEM For Non-Profits and Charities
51. SEM Agencies: Working With Ad Agencies
52. CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines

Moderated by Sara Holoubek, a “Free Agent Consultant,” as well as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO.

First speaker is Janet Driscol Miller, from searchmojo, in Charlottesville, VA. They have had a great experience in partnering with Ad Agencies. There are natural synergies between SEMs and agencies. Agencies are seeing requests for SEM/SEO, and many do not have in-house expertise, and this can be difficult to build. SEM firms offer full-service marketing through partnership. This means low-cost lead generation, and allows the SEM firm to focus on SEM and leave the sakes to someone else. Also, working with agencies leads to an increased possibility for acquisition.

There are major challenges, though: you have to find the right partners. Each needs to pick the right SEM/Agency for them. There can be operational issues such as billing (SEMs often have a different type of billing structure that agencies). Some recommendations: relative to your assize. Track records of success. Boutique agencies are less likely to have an SEM person of staff. Do your homework: remember the brand is now associated with the agencies. Don’t be afraid to cold call/network with agencies. She heard another panel where an agency person said “one of the happiest days of my life was when an SEM firm came through the door,” which made her very happy to hear.

Solving operational issues: create an integrated process flow. Use flow charts and project plans and insert SEM process into it. One problem that is common is that an agency will redesign and client site without informing the SEM, which can lead to major issues. She emphasized regular updates in training. Can the agency sell your service? It is important as an SEM to enable that. Train them regularly in the basics, and then they can always call you in on a sales call. One way they have achieved this is through handbooks. They created handbooks to all partners, specific to their needs and processes.

They also recommend dedicated account managers. The SEM will assign an account manager to each partner, to facilitate easy and rapid communications, Use co-branded marketing activities to promote the partnership. For example, use an email announcing the partnership to the agency list. So, should you lower prices to allow for agency markup? Not always needed, and this depends on the fees. She never lowers the fees for any body. She finds that SEM firms are in high demand, particularly by agencies, so she doesn’t feel the need. However, she does find ways to make the partnership mutually beneficial. You can work with the agency if needed to find creative ways to compensate, such as perhaps using a PPC setup fee instead of adding to the management percentage of ad spend fee. They are always open to testing models.

Contractual issues can exist. Try to be transparent versus white label in the approach. You can keep the brand presence, and maybe represent the firm as a trusted partner. Otherwise what may happen is someone meets with her and then Googles her name and finds out she doesn’t even work for the agency. Thus, you should always be transparent if possible.. Mutual NDAs are recommended – otherwise there may be situations when the SEM ends up training the agency to do their job. Make it easy: use a blanket services agreement, and append service agreement with a statement of work, instead of starting from scratch.

In summation, try to make it easy to work with agencies. Do not limit to only ad agencies: there are interactive agencies, marketing services, PR agencies, customers. Remember to evaluate the relationships on a regular basis.

Peter Hershberg from Reprise Media next. He will present: Working with Ad Agencies: “Transparency versus Opacity.” Just in case, he defines Transparency as “Full client visibility.” Opacity is “white label partner.” Pros and cons of each: transparency first. Pros: the client relationship is open. Can help influenced decisions over marketing and budget. Also, there is more credit for work. The downside: Two clients, agency and the client/brand. This leads to the need to establish credibility twice. It can be challenging for the agency partner to articulate the value proposition.

Opacity has pros and cons as well. Pros: There is a less intensive service relationship. This can be an incremental sales channel without being involved in the Business Development. At the same time, you will not be getting credit for the work, and there is less influence of strategy. Search may not be automatically integrated into the broad campaigns. Also, the issue of having project work versus ongoing, and this may not have an extended shelf life.

What are some of the major reasons agencies prefer an opaque relationship? Many agencies fear change. The client demands search, it is outperforming everything else…so what if the clients knew? This makes the years of experience with the client obsolete. He showed an example of an agency that actually had to hide the effectiveness in SEM so that they wouldn’t lose the other media. There are downsides for SEMs as well: Retail business, through an agency, case study: they got a ten-to-one return on 100K product, and were never able to cite it as work/success.

He shows a mini case study for a major electronics retailer. They felt strongly about SEM being integrated and actually brought them into the meeting with the agency. The results were excellent, thanks to the total integration. He cannot share specific results, but they are “killing it.” In the end, he feels transparency is in everyone’s best interest. Everyone is able to work towards their strengths. It allows for joint proposals and pitches. It can be very powerful when a specialist goes in with the ad agency to a cline to pitch the new business. Also, the coordinated execution helps the rest of the project.

Scott Orth from GTS Services in Portland, Oregon. Shows a Reebok TV commercial on slide titled, “why cant we all get along?” It is the Terry Tate commercial (office linebacker). Very funny… the idea is that if you are an SEM working with a traditional marketer, you may have issues with conflict. But aren’t we the same anyway? He shows traditional marketing and their online equivalents: PR = SEO. Media Buy = PPC. Creative/storefront design = Website. In the example he showed, he felt that the emphasis on driving traffic to the site to see more Terry Tate videos was not strong enough (they had a brief image of the reebok.com domain at the end of the ad under other verbiage). People tend to search for ideas within the media piece and search around that.

He does a short case study about work with a Corporate HVAC company. The environment included three players: SEM, Web Development firm, and traditional agency. The problems: working independently, ad and brand messages were not integrated, the site design was based on web and technical details, and the primary SEM goal was the increase of traffic.

So, after the creation, problems were: Directories, Titles and META descriptions were not reflective of the global message. Imagery and content did not match. Solutions: traditional agency lead the initiatives and shared media plans. The SEM realigned organic SEO and PPC campaigns to match up with offline campaigns, and they had a three way partnership to do a full site redesign, focused on SEO and usability. Results: Streamlined branding and messaging. Traffic from search jump 53%, which was incredibly successful because it was global brand that already receive millions of visitors. The interactive tools they designed were also an instant success. Lastly, targeted conversion increase 59%.

The secret to success: knowing who to blame for mistakes. Learn to point fingers, trash-talk traditional marketing. Finally, communication, how will the client know their traditional agency suck without you telling them (laughs from everyone – he says obviously he is kidding with these). So how to make it work? We’re on the same team, sharing different skills – remember that. Share plans, brainstorm together! Give regular presentations. Assist in sales pitches…doesn’t only mean that you have to go to the pitch, but at least work with them in the creation of the pitch. Remember, it’s all about success – use test campaigns. He also feels you can “get in the door” with PPC, show some success, and then move towards organic once they are convinced of the value of search. He feels that PPC best aligns with traditional media so it works well at the onset.

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines, Friday April 13, 2007 12:30 pm
Organic Track

Moderator: Danny Sullivan

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, GrantasitcDesigns.com
Jim McFadyen, CriticalMass
Dan Crow, Google
Amit Kumar, Yahoo! Search
Ryan Johnston - Critical Mass

This is the final session for me today and one of the last for the conference. Again, it is being held in a ballroom sized room and it's cold in here (but better than being in some of the hot rooms.) I didn't have info in advance on who would be moderating, but Danny Sullivan just appeared and it will be he who moderates this session. Two minutes to go and the room is starting to buzz and fill up.

Danny is at the podium and cracking jokes. Last session of the last day. This will be the "best session" he jokes. The web has evolved as more people are making use of css, ajax. Issues for SEO? Shari leads off.

Shari:

I think everybody who attends the last session deserves a reward. CSS - html addition that allows webmasters to control design, font, link appearance, etc. It’s a text file. SE's can read it. Decreases download time of page. Easier to control elements on a page. Communicates visited and unvisited links. Ability to control look of a site. SE's monitor hidden links. Disadvantages - end users have to have the fonts you call in stylesheet. users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers; they often prefer odd typefaces found in print. Css hyperlinks clutter a page. Sometimes there is unusual text wrapping when a stylesheet is changed, like changing font sizes. CSS can be used to hide text on a page. SE's don't use alt text to determine relevancy. Some people use h1 tags as workaround and they make a lot of content h1 tags in CSS. CSS layer coordinates are something SE's can detect. Some SEO's try to hide content in negative coordinates. CSS makes it easy to put layers on top of each other, making it easier to use CSS to hide text. They myth is that you can use CSS to hide things from SE's. Drop down menus are not considered spam because text is meant to be read by humans and so are the links.

Put all css into separate directory. Make a different design for mobile, she recommends. Not just changing the css. Should you robots exclude css? No. SE's don't want you to hide CSS or JavaScript with robots.txt. She highly recommends css. Increases page load times. Make sure your websites display properly on browsers. Not all elements need to be css. Some images are fine rather than doing it by css.

Ryan and Jim co-present:

We use tools like AJAX all the time. Used for some high end clients. Tech has been around for 7 years. Asynchronous JavaScript XHTML. X is for data formatting. AJAX is not a programming lang. Nothing to install or download. All browsers are enabled. AJAX not supported by SE's.

Full/ partial /none are 3 groups of support. SE's and AJAX don't mix because of the use of JavaScript. Makes it hard to locate or index content. If AJAX delivers your content, this is the problem. Every pg needs to be an html, php, aspx page. SE's must find and index them. Every page must have content that exists on the page. All links must be in html. Test by turning off JavaScript. If pages are there, SE's will find them.

AJAX enhances the user experience. Engineers come in and change anchors on the page to change function to AJAX calls. Ensure your baseline app supports non-AJ users, including spiders. AJ can help a site be more interesting for users. make it run faster. offer assistance, like Google suggest.

Ex - Rolex.com

copy in nav
wanted nav accessible from every page

They didn't want all content indexed by SE's. Solution was AJAX.

AJAX breaks the normal browser refresh. This means content does not always correspond to the URL. No history, no back button. Major usability issue. They use JavaScript to update urls, won't refresh the page and fake an entry into browsers history. Advises not to cloak. Our research suggest duplicate content should not be an issue as spiders don't index past the # sign.

[This is a very techy presentation. He is having trouble showing his examples from a live site due to FLASH. It's hard to take notes on this session because he is showing AJAX solutions in use.]

AJAX is used to accommodate url updates and handle deep linking. Looks at gucci.com. It's a pretty site. Easy to move around. If you remove the JavaScript, there is nothing on the pages. No content. It breaks every rule for SEO. All images, all JavaScript driving it.

Amazon is viewed next. Shows how AJAX handles interface and menus. Amazon Diamond search. Site works without JavaScript.

Panel input:

Dan Crow - Google
Says Google is moving towards indexing css FLASH, AJAX, JavaScript. They say there is no change in the present state, but expect a major shift in the future. They're interested in this technology. If you think everything is hidden behind JavaScript, someday that will longer be true. Be cautious about your assumptions about how you build your websites because they are making changes.

Amit -
It's our fault we can't index programming. We don't want to stop you from designing for your users. He states that what is built for accessibility is also built for search engines. CSS and JavaScript would like it not be hidden by robots.txt. If you have a problem with this, let Yahoo know. If technology you use requires clicks to use a form, makes it hard for SE's. They look at content and references from other sites. AJAX that doesn't allow urls to change is a problem for SE's and bookmarking because descriptions are in those urls. SE's don't know exactly which url is the actual inbound link that is making the referral.

[Note: This session was about conflicts, or not, with CSS and AJAX with search engines. It was a little hard to follow if you don't know about AJAX and what it is used for. It was interesting to hear what the search engine reps had to say. I think as AJAX solutions become more popular, we'll be hearing more about this and getting more details on actual applications for use.]

Provided by Cshel!

Vertical Track | 10:45a-12p

Moderator, Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Speakers:
Ettore Rossetti, Senior Manager, Internet Marketing, Save the Children
Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Kevin Gottesman, Founder, Gott Advertising

Audience is fairly light. Anne encourages the audience to move closer.

First Speaker: Ettore Rossetti

1. Apply Pareto’s Principle to SEM. (20% of the searches result in 80% of
the clicks)
2. Find Your Search Niche, being small and finding your narrow niche is
better than being big and broad and general. Try to be #1 for a very
narrow category than fight to be #1 in a broader category that might
already have a leader.
3. The Brad Pitt Effect. Informally named after the “butterfly effect” in
chaos theory. Unanticipated effects from non-intuitive actions or causes.
4. Actionable Advertising. Discover what times of year/day/whatever your
visitors are more likely to convert. Be aware of these peaks and valleys
in traffic. Know when your browsers buy.
5. Searcher Intent = Expectation. When searcher intent and results
delivery connect, the result is a win-win outcome. Make sure your call to
action perfectly matches the result after the user clicks.
6. A click is not a Customer. You cannot communicate back to a click.
Therefore, a click is not a customer, nor is it a lead. It’s an anonymous
suspect with the potential to become a prospect. Be aware of your
conversion rates and what you’re actually paying for. Make sure you
qualify your customers before you communicate/convert them?
7. Measuring holistic results. Search marketing is part of a greater whole
of integrated activity and needs to be tracked and measured holistically.
Make sure you’re getting a “panoramic” view of your online marketing
efforts. If you focus in too narrowly on a single aspect, you might miss
more important details or trends.

Second Speaker: Kevin Gottesman

Non-profit is not a dirty word. People have real money, they spend real
money and they’re using real budgets and buying advertising and developing
strategies, etc. A few years ago, non-profits seemed to be (or at least
have the reputation to be) all about getting free pub and just praying for
some conversions.

Client Goals and Types of Campaigns:

1. Fundraising:
a. Get peoplel to renew or join,
b. Get EOY (end of year) donations, etc
c. Appeals for specific assistance or types of donations.
2. List building
a. Breaking News – Have a baseline campaign running constantly so that
when a breaking news event happens, you can just add in a few new keywords
to take advantage of the search spike in the 2 or 3 days after the story
hits.
b. Core Issues
c. Seasonal – Take advantage of seasonal events and tweak keywords
accordingly.
d. Petitions – If the primary goal of a campaign is to get people to
sign/send petitions to congress, whatever, then once you’ve successfully
completed the petition action, send them to a page inviting them to join
your organization. Piggy back an additional action on the campaign and
take advantage of the traffic.
e. Land based events – Rallies, petition drives, food drives… non-online
events.

Google offers “Google Grants” for non-religious, non-political
not-for-profits to run free keyword campaigns. Many groups who are taking
advantage of this make the mistake of driving all the traffic to their
homepages, rather than to a specific call-to-action page, rather than
hoping they dive deeper past the homepage and choose to act.

Potential members and donors are online searching, donating and joining
daily.
Look for them where they are searching for your information, mission,
cause or event.
$200 billion donated by individuals in 2005
SEM and SEO are long term, necessary investments for all non-profits and
charities.

Third Speaker -- Nan Dawkins

“Missed Opportunities”

#1 PPC
• Overly broad keywords and terms
• Mismatched keywords
• Failure to fully utilize Google Grants

#2 Failure to be seen – Multi-channel visibility
• PPC isn’t the only way to be seen on the SEs. The cost of PPC is going
up, and will continue to do so. A multi-channel strategy helps you appear
more time on the search results page; the more likely you are to get a
click. The more clicks, the more conversions. Plus, the more times you
appear, the better your brand exposure is as well.
• ROI is higher with multi-channel strategies

#3 Social Media Strategy

What does social media have to do with search?
• Brand recognition, improves CTRs dramatically.
• SERP shelf space and reputation management.
• Social media can boost the number of quality links which boots your
organic rankings… in other words, better search visibility.

Social Media Examples:
• Wikipedia, blogs (your own, your supporters),
• MySpace/Facebook (local organizing),
• Vertical social networks (Change.org, Hot Soup, 43 Things),
• Ning,
• Flickr (photo sharing from events),
• Second Life,
• Video

Don’t start a social media campaign or effort without a sound strategy,
because a misstep or poorly executed effort could inadvertently alienate a
large group of very vocal people.

#4 Testing and Tracking

Make sure you have analytics and use them. Make sure you’re looking at
your log files and regularly audit your traffic, clicks, see what search
terms your users are clicking on to get to your site, etc.

Moderated by Jeff Rohrs
Presented by Rand Fishkin, Cameron Olthius, Jennifer Laycock, and Chris Boggs

Rand Fishkin is up first. He gives a background of linkbait evolution (18 months). He presents a quote from Matt Cutts about linkbait as a powerful tool.

Linkbait, above all other tactics, in marketing, has the greatest chance for high impact.

How do you leverage this? Linkbait is about getting content on the web that is worthy of being shared.

Rand shows us the linkerati - web researchers, journalists, and bloggers. Linkerati dominate the linking on the web. Browsers and customers do nothing compared to the linkerati. They are very important and you therefore should target them. They mean rankings, branding, mind share, and getting the word out about your product.

How does linkbait help you rank if you provide content that does not relate to your site? A page that has many links will help the global authority of your site. The 2,000+ links spread the link love throughout your site. Doing this consistently will help your entire site rank better. Example: Wikipedia. They rank for every arbitrary term but that's because there's a great amount of links to other pages.

Sample of successful linkbait: Worst College Mascots on drivl.com. It ranks very well for college mascots. Celebrity Nudity Awards on Drivl.com - it ranks #5 for nudity. These pages have several hundreds of thousands of page views, several thousand links, etc.

But if you're not in this industry and you need something practical, think about this - Rand discusses linkbait about a drug rehab firm - a drug identification chart - ranks #1 for illegal drugs. It was launched via Digg and got over 100,000 views and many links, etc.

Some content strategies: lists (best of, worst of), list of tips, howtos, problems, benefits, resources, teaching resources, humor/irony, controversy, interviews, breaking news, product reviews, poll results/data results, aesthetic beauty, tools, comprehensive reviews, great insight, and many more.

If you are looking for what these people are looking for, look through the linkbait portals (a lot of people a day look at content on those sites). Digg.com is an example (2mil+ visitors daily, tech/web centric but has news/photos/offbeat pieces, 50-100 votes required for homepage, 10-30k visits on average after the homepage, somewhat over 1000+ links after a few weeks). Reddit.com is another example (500k visits, broader in scope, 20-40 votes required for main page, 4-10k visits average, and 600+ links after a few weeks). Netscape.com is more of a news centric site (250k visits daily, 20-40 votes required for main page, 4-8k visits average, 300+ links per article). Del.icio.us popular (1mil+ visits daily, developer centric, 20-30 for main page). StumbleUpon (3mil+ users, all subjects, 70% thumbs up, 50-5,000 visits that are continuous, 25-250 links).

Other portals: popular blogs and sites
- Michael Arrington of Techcrunch
- Boingboing.net suggestion page
- Engadget
- Lifehacker
- Slashdot
- Techmeme
- Scobleizer
- Daily Kos
- The Huffington Post

Rules for Linkbaiting Safely: keep in mind about IP tracking, geography of users, groups, profile identification, and spam submissions. Digg is pretty savvy about acknowledging ways to game the service.

Cameron Olthius speaks next. How does viral search success impact traditional search?

1. Improving your rankings: there are three types of linkbait - content pieces (flash games, written content), widgets (e.g. MyBlogLog), and mashups (content from more than one source to make an integrated experience).

2. Reputation Management. There are two ways to use social media for reputation management. Control the top results through social media profiles. You can also contain the negative buzz before it goes viral. An example is Comcast Customer Service - search Google - #1 result is comcast.com, #3 result is a blogger's rant, and #5 result is a YouTube video of a Comcast guy sleeping on his couch.

Where do you monitor? Social media sites, blog search engines, and comment trackers.
What do you monitor? URLs, company name, product name, public facing figures, relevant keywords, and competitors

Participate to keep the good buzz going or to turn negative to positive. This can lead to more links.

3. Rank social media pages (like on MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia). Create profiles and control small linkbait here - the sites here have such high authority so it will be easy to rank.

Our third speaker is Jennifer Laycock, who says she will cover viral side. Linkbaiting in its purest form is about getting links, and it's not about branding. It's great about a new site launch. Viral marketing is all about marketing. It gets you the links but it's more about building your brand, driving conversions. It's getting past the traffic.

Why would you do viral marketing? (1) The cost is in the idea - there is no placement cost (no PPC, banner ads, etc.) This is word of mouth marketing. (2) A good viral campaign creates brand evangelists and increases your credibility. (3) It also has a rapid response rate (between blogs, discussion forums, and email).

How do you create these viral idea? Find out what sparks passion within your customers. Find out what hasn't been done before. Come up with something new that nobody has tried. Ask yourself how the idea will benefit your users. Find out if your audience will risk their reputation on it.

Ideas spread because they are important to the spreader, not because they are important to the originator.

You have to think of a viral project from the very start - formulate your marketing campaign out of that.

Viral marketing works through relationships. Social media speeds this up. Find ways to work through these relationships to get these to spread.

How does it spread? You launch via opinion leaders. Find out who the thought leaders are who would be most interested in this linkbait. Once you reach them, it goes down the line.

A few techniques: "send a friend" links on your website; one-click access for social bookmarking; integrating the ad (e.g. like signatures in Hotmail). Another one is exploit motivators - "cool factor" Gmail accounts. Use existing networks - people are already talking, so find them and get your services talked about. Take advantage of other people's resources.

Be ready to act: Jennifer has a personal site called thelactivist.com. She mentions her personal battle with her CafePress shirt that said "The Other White Milk" which was apparently a conflict with another trademark. She was battled with the National Board of Pork who issued a cease and desist letter to stop selling this shirt. She took advantage of this in viral marketing, which she calls "a match made in social media heaven." Something will fall into your lap and you can jump on it. She prepared a blog post with a PDF. She had a buzzworthy hook (she played upon how the Pork Board said that she's ruining pork's good reputation). She posted the blog as a call to action. People came in and read her blog. She had links to the bottom of her blog for social media sites. She planted the seeds (emailed mommy bloggers and others in the search engine world - that was enough for the publicity) and motivated linking (by adding a section that listed who covered the story). The result was that the traffic spiked 400% in about a week, there was a branding spike (people looking for her blog name), there was a topical blog spike (pork board, Jennifer Laycock, thelactivist.com, etc.), she had a sales spike (700% increase), and she had a community spike of people who are now visiting her blog. Eventually, she got a sincere apology (especially after they said "how do I make the calls and emails stop?" - the audience laughs.) They revoked the cease and desist and donations were made to the milk bank.

Jeff adds how quickly the National Pork Board reversed their decision after this increased buzz.

The last speaker is our very own Chris Boggs. (Hi Chris!) He talks about leveraging the community. In searchenginewatch.com, there is a "forum roll" on the forum homepage - you don't have to feel competitive. Find a community where a lot of people within your industry belong and that's a way to pass links along. He shows us Barry's own Link Farm.

In other community love, Chris shows us SEOmoz's recommended list of competitors.

Chris then tells us about the My Super Proposal site where this one anonymous individual wanted to propose to his girlfriend on the SuperBowl. It ranks pretty well for a superbowl proposal, but not for "will you" yet (#1 result for "will you" is "how will you die?" - the audience laughs).

Purists think that link baiting should not include link building efforts.

You should research your backlinks - Yahoo! Site Explorer. Logfiles are also a great way to understand information. Check Technorati to see what people are saying. Look for anchor text and locations of new in-links (webuildpages.com and seobook.com).

Chris then presents an example from Neil Patel - "My 50 Favorite Blogging Resources" - Posted 11/13, and by the 19th, 1292 referrers sent traffic to that post; 4358 Diggs, 1762 Del.icio.us, 2851 Stumbles, Yahoo MyWeb 641 links, and 521 links on Furl.net. Traffic incrases over weeks also.

There is Good and the Bad - for example, as mentioned earlier, Comcast Customer Service.

He shows us savetoby.com - a guy said he would kill a rabbit if he didn't get $50,000 in a given amount of time. The more you can spend on being creative, the better chance you get.

Another example is Norelco's ShaveAnywhere.com (with title Philips Bodygroom), which was a viral initiative and got 750,000 uniques.

Viral can blow traditional marketing away if done properly.

Remember: there are risks when you want to consider, like on Norelco. If you search for Norelco now, #2 is Philips Bodygroom, which could cause people to consider other options and not want to work with Norelco.

Usability and SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One, Friday, April 13, 2007 10:45am
Organic Track

Moderator: Dana Todd, SEMPO and SiteLab

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, GrantasticDesigns.com
Matt Bailey, Site Logic Marketing

Was just interviewed by Mike McDonald of Webpronews again. I thought I'd be more relaxed, the second time around (1st interview was in Chicago), but I was still afraid my words would come tumbling out too fast and I wouldn't make any sense. He and videographer, Richard Easterling are professional, comfortable with what they're doing and do their best to put interviewees at ease. We discussed usability a little and how it relates to seo, which leads me into the next session I covered, presented below. This session is in a ballroom size room and it is full.

Dana Todd arrives. She is the moderator. She's surprised to see so many people show up on the last day...cold room. Every visitor is important to convert. You need to think about making your website perform. Introduces for Shari Thurow. She's a lively moderator. My favorite so far!

Shari is first. Dana and I have been with the conferences since the beginning. She calls it "search usability." Website usability vs. search usability. She loves Jakob Nielsen's view that usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces or web pages are to use.
Are you giving users enough info when they arrive? SEO and usability are not that different. Focus groups measure opinions. There is a herd mentality, the one who disagrees will likely go along with the majority. Usability. Measures whether person finishes a task. Did they click a button? Did they add to cart? Not a matter of being a cool site. Are they completing a desired task and if not, why not? Balance between user and business goals? The customer is not always right. We have to balance what the majority expects. Usability. Addresses search behaviors. Queries, browsing, surfing, pogo-sticking foraging, scanning, reading, berry picking. Search is not a linear process. If people are jumping back and forth between search results pages, that's negative search behavior. They're not finding what they’re looking for. Scent of info, sense of place, user confidence, info arch vs. site nav, interface - key concepts in search usability.

Scent of info = term highlighting in search engines is one ex. Google uses it in titles, ad copy, html title tags, term highlighting in snippets, some urls can provide scent of info. Too much highlighting bugs people because it seems like keyword stuffing. Primary and secondary text serves SERPS. Html tags, copy, meta tag desc.... Whenever a page provides scent of info and sense of place, not irritating to users. Show people a page for 8 seconds, and remove it. Ask them if they remember what the page was about. If they can't recall, not enough keywords to give sense of place. Good places to put keywords are top left. Recommends H1 tag. Breadcrumb trails are good for keywords. Main body.

What do you want people to do? Put that in the middle in the page and or above the page fold. Embedded text links are good for keywords. Navigation links. This is providing a sense of place for people and it also ranks well. She's showing an example of how pages can be optimized for SEO and are people oriented at the same time. Her illustrations show placement of copy, labels, content and links that illustrate this balance. Do your keyword research first, and then do you IA based on that. Site nav is part of the interface. Categorization is the IA, and how you do nav is the interface. She shows primary, secondary, and lower level navigation. Asks users in tests, What level are you viewing? If the IA and interface are keyword focused, people recall data easier, and where they are on a site. This is not keyword stuffing. It's logical placement of keywords to support the people who are visiting the site. She shows how this also ranks pages at the same time.

Nav schemes - text yes, FLASH now. User what your users prefer and put supplemental text links at the bottom as alt. Graphic nav, make sure you have relevant cross linking. Number 1 design mistake is cross linking. Cross linking is internal. There are vertical - breadcrumb, cat/sub/product and are a "you are here" directive. Breadcrumbs help form a mental model of the site. Don't make the homepage the main emphasis. Embedded texts are great because you look at a page of content and it is boring but links are keyword focused and provide scent of info. Alphabetical nav links can be helpful for some search scenarios. The key she points out is to provide alternative nav for different types of users and needs. Alternative links for products are good for things like related products, for ex. Sitemaps are huge positive. It's a map of sites global nav. If you have to submit your sitemap to engines, then your IA is poor. Keywords in urls count. Characters in URls are stop signs to SE's. Hyphens in urls are not the end of the world. What urls will your users remember better? Dynamic urls are hard to recall. Directors or subs? Both are fine for people and engines. Sub domain or main domain? Both are fine with SE's and people. Whenever possible your urls should reflect your sites arch.

She's over her time limit. She's going to talk about MedicineNet.com. She got the project of making the site of making it user friendly rather than seo friendly. She shows examples of on page optimization for human goals. Then they tracked and it shows skyrocketed conversions, ROI with no zero PPC investment. Shari is a detailed speaker. This is my third time covering this session. Her strength is in the fine details and illustrating to the audience on-page placement of elements, which I can't do justice for in this post. Her screenshots are a better way of communicating her ideas. She shares a great deal of info.

Matt Bailey is next.

Once you get involved with usability you fall in love with it. The reason you are here is because you want people to do what you want at your website. Get people to your site. Why spend money on seo when you neglect to measure where they're going and what they can't find? If they can't find it, its not there. It doesn't exist. Same as seo. If not in engines, it doesn't exist.

Homepage should have clear directions. SEO links out to the rest of the site and keyword focused navigation. What you sell must be very evident. Exit and bounce rates, when they search and they land on a page that has no info on what they just searched for, they will leave. They need a reason to stay and go somewhere from there. There must be a goal for your visitors. He shows Hall of Shame sites.

You can shop now or enter the site, which one should I do? Funny ex. of a site for cars. Users have a sense of fear in their choice. "I made a wrong decision at the very beginning” They want to shop but also want to go into the site. Pet site example - he has the audience cracking up. Is there anything on the homepage that shows it’s a store? It says product not products. Nav needs to be more desc. of what people will find. Shows a wine site. Ads from Google on a homepage are illogical because it takes people off your site. The color contrasts were terrible. Black links. Dark colors on dark colors. You need high contrast colors.

Taxonomy= good organization. User research comes in handy. What do people call your products and how do THEY group it? Not you or your company. New customers? Existing customers? Address your users’ needs immediately, right from the homepage. Understand what your visitors are looking for. Bring it forward. You can divide up by categories, as one suggestion. Groupings by how people do tasks. By price? Ratings? Popular? He shows a wine site that constantly changes their homepage based on research on how visitors conduct tasks on the site. This analysis explains what they want to do and the site nav and content, and keywords back it up and support this.

You need an established hierarchy of categories. For seo, multiple links with keywords. Customer based nav groupings. Don't hide links. Make them look like links. Buttons that don't look clickable are a no-no. Don't make people think about what they need to do. Use keywords in product links, Alt text, captions and labels. When you group in product pages, don't put so many categories on one page forcing a long scroll down. Don't clump all products on one page. Don't be afraid to add new pages. Shows an example of missing sub-navigation and faulty nav. Shows example of sub-navigation that is redundant. Stop selling so much. Far into a site, people want to focus on just the product, not all the other stuff you throw into the top and side spaces. Shows a good ex of ThinkGeek site and how they do sub-nav well. Other ex. is nav by type, price, etc. Call products by what they are. Be product specific about product content. For seo, call products what they are. The want benefits, value prop., how it connects to your users vs. just product stats. Sales decisions are emotional decision. You need to sell to the logical and emotional sides How will product make my life better? Problem solve keywords. Make your nav solve problems.

Shows a toilet aquarium site and everyone laughs. Site homepage is one big graphic, and everyone boos. Landing pages, does this page meet my needs and expectations? Shows his now famous Butt Paste web page. It's on a baby site. Has everyone in stitches. It was featured on Oprah. Search is for diaper rash ointment. That keyword is on the page in one place. But product is "Butt paste", a product name which is not what people search for.

Shows example of third party shopping cart on another site. New UI to deal with. Shows a sushi site. Has a buy button but no price. What happens if someone clicks a buy button. Shows a science site...rubber band powered racers. The page had 3 different product names on one page reinforced with content and big visible buy now button. Shows a real website warning that failure to review company's policy may be damaging financially to the user. Funny. He shows a product page with content that clearly describes product benefit to the user if they use it. Asks for review or upload you using the product. High rank because of extra content. Where do people enter and exit your site. Hilarious screenshot of with people using search engines and he represents Yahoo and Google with MSN sneaking onto the page. Avoid using slang. Words that are lost in translation. International users - not everyone have 5 digit zip codes. Not everyone lives in a state. Show shipping before they buy. Make pages easy to navigation, easy to find.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson
Presented by Justilien Gaspard, Greg Boser, and Jim Boykin

Detlev introduces the session and says that link building is core to developing a presence in the search engines. Good links can build good traffic in their own right.

He introduces Justilien Gaspard (justilien.com) who has a link building business and is a contributing author to SEMPO Institute and an author of SearchEngineWatch.

He says that for linking, some methods work better than others. You should find one that fits you best.

One of the ways to do this is through directories that are made for people and that people use. People found things through directories before search. There are low-quality directories around now but you should look for older ones that have been trusted by users and search engines. Trusted neighborhoods are important.

Niche and vertical directories are also neighborhoods that are trusted and often overlooked. He only uses directories that rank well in Google. (e.g. search Google for "travel directory" if you are working in the travel industry and submit to the top results.) The one time fee is worth it for many of these.

Other good directories are local directories, organizational directories, and chamber of commerce directories.

When you're looking for them, look at whether human edited, what they are listing (sites you want to be associated with or spammy ones?). How many links? (Less is better), age, and high-quality backlinks. PageRank is a litmus test - don't focus so much on it. The backlink is most important. Avoid directories with nofollows, selling sitewide links to mortgages/pharm, or few pages indexed.

Some tipes: follow their guidelines and appear natural (use good anchor text that are not keyword stuffing or look like you're using an automated program). Have non-spammy sites.

Another thing that is important is content + research which will yield links. Find out from your customer service what people want and focus on content for that. Do keyword research and find out what is attracting links in your industry. Don't reinvent the wheel. Look at the top 20 results in your keywords and see what tools and resources that your competitors create that attract links. Don't copy them but do something similar.

You can use blogs, wikis, and forums as well. Blogs help and establish you as an industry expert. Blogs also attract attention from the press - you can get contacted for interviews, etc.

You need to be proactive. Promote. Don't sit and wait for links to come.

A good way for promotion is to find influential media - reporters, newspapers, televisions, radio stations, and bloggers. Some media directories are Gebbie Press (gebbieinc.com) and Burrelles Luce (burrelleseluce.com).

Take advantage of social media for promotion - Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, etc.

Another way to link is press releases. Press releases and social media - progressive media relations.

You want to build a solid foundation, create useful content, promote it, and use social media for promotion.

The next person who speaks is Jim Boykin, CEO of WeBuildPages.

He says that links can be looked at as currency. If you get a link from a good trusted website, that's like getting quarters or dollars. The quality of backlinks is important - how you're linking.

Submitting to search engines is long dead. They find you.

Meta tags and on page optimization without backlinks is dead.

Don't use the Google toolbar to look at your backlinks. The best way to do this is on Yahoo linkdomain:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com

Don't link a bunch of your sites together. The IP addresses of the sites are important. Google is a domain registrar now. They know who owns what, even if you use Domains By Proxy.

Link trading is dead. Here's why - if you link out to 500 places and they all link back, this is not beneficial for you because the results get filtered out.

Buying PR8 and PR9 is semi-dead. Some of these might not count in Google.

Getting new sites ranked quickly for competitive factors is dead.

4 Trust Factor categories: unique content, who do you link to (and their neighborhoods), who links to you, and is your link found within the content?

On Google, the "similar pages" link gives you a neighborhood of pages in your linking network. Similar pages share common backlinks.

Google is getting better at seeing link maps - who links to who. What is the neighborhood, what is the trust? www.touchgraph.com shows you this neighborhood.

Solutions: produce good quality content, link out to other related/trusted sites, get good quality places to link to you, and get your links within the content of a webpage. Block level analysis - if the header is the same and navbar is the same, the things that the search engine will analyze is - what is that middle area (that differs?) You want your links in a different area - the middle area - within the content. Add lots of text to your homepage, make sure your existing pages have content, add new pages (resources, FAQ, testimonials, manuals, guides, tips, linkbait, etc.)

Who do you want to link to: trusted sites, edus, govs, non competing resources

Natural backlinks are best. Think: do backlinks look natural or "SEO'd?"

The better links you have, the better you rank.

Greg Boser from WebGuerilla speaks. He focuses a lot on competitive analysis - analyzing what others are doing to build our own strategy. A lot of people don't understand the trustrank issue. What are good links for you and what are good links for your competitor are two totally separate things. Older sites have more leeway with regards to what's accepted algorithmically. Newer domains have more trouble.

Linkbaiting strategies can help the whole domain. The problem is that sometimes there are links from sites that are not contextually relevant. Forbes.com hosts pages that are not about finance that still rank well - that's becoming a problem. Ultimately, Google will have to find a way to make domain trust contextually related.

When you are linking, think ahead - find out where people are headed. Google is going down that road to focus on contextually related domains.

Danny Sullivan is moderating the session. He ask about who has heard of wikipedia?
Many people raise their hand. This is a pretty packed session. My laptop had a case of senioritis so I missed the first few mintues. Sorry Neil.

Neil Patel is up first, and starts explaining about wikipedia and what it does. He talks about the Colbert report and his campaign to make sure the elephant population was well represented. He explains how wikipedia is beneficial and what not to do on wikipedia.
How to do you add links to wikipedia? Only add reliable links from authorities sources. Neil next discusses how to add images. He gives an example of a bottle company and putting an image of a bottle that improved the brand of the company. Wikis are everywhere.

Jonathan Hochman is up second. He says wikipeida gets more pageviews than myspace and other areas. He says we have a lot of bright SEO’s here, but wikipedia ranks first for the term search engine optimization. SEO have enough reputation problems already, so try to remember wikipeida isn’t a linkfarm. The wikimedia Blacklist means “no links for you”. He says there are people that like to hunt for spammers. The blacklist is a bad thing, because you will not get a link from wikipedia or all the other 2000 wikis out there. Search engines could eventually look at this public list and take it in account. Yet that is doubtful. Wikipedia links actually deliver traffic. To reduce spam wikipedia adds no follows. Ha, he mentions the attempt of some SEO’s to create entries for themselves in wikipedia. These are the non-notable people. He explains that Matt Cutts was non-notable because the majority of people don’t know who he is. You need to state your cause. I wonder if Jon is an editor? He says that articles that fail to assert notability, supported by reliable sources, are nominated for deletion. Writing an article about yourself or a client is a conflict of interest. He says not to get involved about an article about yourself or your competitors. He says read the conflict of interest guidelines. Barry Schwartz posted an article on wikipedia about himself. Wikipedians jumped on this article to delete it. There was a few editors that changed their minds about Barry’s article and decided to keep it. Barry is notable they decided. COI doesn’t prevent you from participating. Learn the policies and customs and work with other editors to get your points into the article. If you have an article you have no control to edit that article or influence it in any way. He puts up an example of the Criticism of Wal-Mart page. On this page Wal-Mart can not do anything about this page. Ideally, the page needs to have a pros and cons section of the article. With an article about yourself, you can delete spam, remove slander, revert vandalism, and state your view on the article talk page. He also gives an example for Green Zap, and how the companies reputation was ruined because they did some bad things and it found its way into the search engines. Oh my! Wikipedia is a bit stick for generic search terms. Even if your own site can’t outrank the competition, Wikipedia probably can.

Don Steele from Comedy Central is up next. He is here to talk about how wikipedia works with Comedy Central. Comedycentral.com is the online arm of Comedy Central Cable Channel. They use a lot of methods to market their content in a diverse manner we can create momentum, capitalize on buss and are constantly driving traffic to Comedy Central. He puts up a video of Steven Colbert about changing a wikipedia entry and that enough people believe it, then it becomes true. So why do we care about wikipedia? Traffic volume and soccues in SEO made wikipedia a vital channel for us to understand. Our content is highly reference and referred on Wikipedia. Make sure information is accurate and up to date. Make sure our site has the information being referenced. Wikipedia has become a relevant traffic driver to comedycentral.com. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report is an example that sends traffic. He says that they had 90,000 visits come from wikipedia in one month. It’s a top 5 traffic driver. He says they are saving $20K a month by using wikipedia and the traffic is coming to comedycentral.com. 9AM Wednesday morning they announce a new south park show. He shows an example of the wikipedai article. The episode plays on TV and then their appeared 900 entries on the southpark page about the episode and it becomes a little community about that episode. The Da Vinci code was really the Hair Club for Men and so on from the Southpark story. Don talks about the benefits of wikipedia. They identify relevant content and post references on discussion pages. Wikipedia editors become decision makers. All of our discussions have been added as they are relevant and do meet the standards. If you are marketing content, make sure what is appearing in wikipedia. Monitor traffic from wikipedia. Good presentation.

Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink is modding up this panel. The room is suspected to be fairly roomy this morning, due to it being the last day. And it seems pretty empty as they start the session.

Heather Frahm, co-founder, Catalyst online is up first. SEM in the pharma industry.

She explains how competitive this category is.

80% of american users searches for health information online. 66% begin at search engines and 27% go to health vertical search engines.

Those who use search engines are 2x more likely to view third party health sites and 3x more likely to view pharma sites.

Regulatory benefits is the control they have over paid search. Pfizer purchased "high cholesterol" and showed a Google ad for it. She shows more examples of these types of searches.

Best Practices Process:
- Educate and involve regulatory team
- Present and approve corporate policy via regulatory
- Expedite regulatory review

Paid Search Best Practices:
- Safety information on every web site page
- Condition and brand in text/URL: one click away from safety info. Compliant and minimize destination disappointment
- Do not bid on a competitor;s brand name or trademark terms

She then showed more examples. Use negative keyword phrases, this is standard ppc stuff.

Organic Search Marketing & Regulatory Issues:
Best Practices:
- Don't include competitors drug names in your tags
- Visible and non visible content should be approved by marketing and regulatory teams
- Present key-phrase research to your regulatory team
- Guidelines dictating content is close to sixth grade reading level
- Misspellings (spelling multiple sclerosis)
- Popular keyphrases but incorrect circumstances (high blood pressure symptoms)

She then shows Botox's home page, and showed how they are cloaking it for Google. Showing one page to the user and one page to the search bot.

Authoritativeness - Linking Practices:
- Text links approved by regulatory team
- Links from US based sites for us approved drugs
- Careful of making claims ("cures")
- Stay away from bad neighborhoods
- Integrate your PR efforts
- Optimize your press releases
- Link back to the branded site (but some don't like to do that)

Martin Murray, Chief Executive, Interactive Return is next up.

SEM for the drink industry....

There is a wide diversity of cultural acceptance of drinking world wide. Different countries and cultures accept no minimum drinking age. He shows the various laws across the world.

The Regulatory Bodies:
- Century Council
- Distilled Spirits Council of the United States
- The European Forum for Responsible Drinking
- The Portman Group

Guidelines:
- Not have the alcoholic strength of the drink
- Encourage immoderate consumption
- Incorporate images of people under 25 years old
- Suggest any association with anti-social behavior, illicit drugs, sexual success, social success, enhanced mental or physical capabilities

Google's Content Policy:
Google won't allow ads for beer or hard alcohol (yes wine) as of Q4 2006. Now that has changed a bit, depending on the countries.

He shows examples of beer sponsored listings in the Google UK engine. In Google.com, he showed wine sponsored results.

Yahoo permits alcohol sponsored ads.

There are other concerns, for example if you go to a page on drinks, you need to enter your age in an age verification page, plus what country you are in. This can stop a bot from entering your site.

I have to step out for a bit, sorry....

Li, let me know if you want me to post your slides. Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360

If you log into your Google AdWords account and click on a campaign, you may notice a new look plus an announcement about a new look.

Here is the message:

We've recently redesigned the AdWords Campaign Summary page for Standard Edition users. The new design looks much like the page you're used to, but has a few spicy new twists.

Grouping by Media Type. AdWords is starting to add many new types of advertising, from text and image ads to video and beyond. This new design groups various campaign types together, so that you can see how all campaigns of a given media type are doing.

Most users will see only one grouping so far: Online Campaigns. This includes text, image, video, and mobile ads. As other types of campaigns are introduced in the future, you'll see additional groupings added to your Campaign Summary page. This should give you a clearer view of your account, and of your performance in each kind of ad medium.

Show All Campaigns. This feature has been simplified. Pick your date range, then click the appropriate link to make your choice: Show all campaigns, all campaigns except those that have since been deleted, or only those campaigns that remain active.

Create New Campaigns. The links used to create new campaigns have moved. Formerly they all were found at the top of the Campaign Summary page. Now each link can be found in the title bar of the campaign groups. For instance, to create a new online campaign, go to the Online Campaigns group and click the link reading Create new online campaign.

No More Click-to-Call Tab. If you've been testing click-to-call ad campaigns, you're used to seeing the information about those campaigns on a separate tab on the Campaign Summary page. Your data on those campaigns is now in one of the new media groups. You'll find it just below the Online Campaigns grouping.

New Date Picker. The date filter has moved to an easy-to-find spot underneath the Campaign Summary page title. The pulldown menu can still be used to choose preset time frames like last seven days. Or, use manual entry to select any dates you like. The manual entry includes a new calendar feature to make finding dates even easier.

We hope you'll find that these changes make using your account even easier. As always, we thank you for using AdWords.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

The Google Blog and Google Checkout Blog both announced last night that Google Checkout is now available in the UK.

Now, shops in the UK can offer Google Checkout to their customers and benefit from increased sales, higher conversion rates, and lower transaction processing costs. From now until 2008, merchants that offer Checkout in the UK will receive free transaction processing for all of their Checkout sales. And just so buyers don't feel left out, we're giving them £10 off all orders over £30.

Google Checkout launched in the US back in June of last year, after much speculation.

Google Checkout is running a similar promotion encouraging the UK base to use Google Checkout by giving off £10, which is a lot more than $10 US dollars.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread first spotted this, even before they made it to the respective Google Blogs.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Google had a special logo up for Russian astronaut, Yuri Gagarin.

The logo looked like this:

When clicked, it took you to a search result for Yuri Gagarin.

The first result was a Wikipedia entry for Yuri Gagarin. I wonder how much traffic that Wiki entry received?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This session is a question and answer with Danny Sullivan.

Question: Where is search going to be in three to five years?
Danny: I wouldn't be surprised if search is very similar to the way it is now with a box and results. If you type in New York Hotels, instead of getting 10 links, you will get a big map and listings will come out of a local guide with a thing that says "Or do you want to search the entire web?" For "Madonna videos," you'll see a list of videos. Search engines will get smarter to present the vertical results rather than jumping through hoops. You'll still see Google as king of the heap, and Yahoo will be there. I think that Microsoft will be there but they might be splitting up a share with Ask - Ask.com is just hanging in there. I tend to think that we'll see more human intervention in the search results. In the future, it may be possible for people to vote on the results and influence the rankings. Maybe there will be new exciting new verticals. Google and Yahoo will likely acquire a lot of these verticals.

Question: What technologies are you excited about in that 3-5 year timeframe?
Danny: So far, I haven't seen anything that has made me jump up and down. I was pleased with Hakia and its internal language search. "Madonna nude" doesn't need a lot of natural language interpretation. What I thought was interesting about what they were doing was tapping into other data sources and building out nice content pages to answer this information. I don't know if that will revolutionize things. I do look at social media sites like Digg and find it fascinating but don't know if it will translate into improved search results. These sites are so undemocratic though - maybe we can be the top Googlers from this. I don't see a lot. A lot of new properties are overhyped and overpromising and will be gobbled up by the major search engines.

Question: When will the "incentivizing" of search engine spamming through AdSense break?
Danny: Didn't it break already? Google tried to make it very expensive. On the other hand, it doesn't cost a lot of money to put a scraper site on blogspot. It is still an issue if you get bad conversions. I think they will get a handle on it but they will have to drag their feet to do it. I think the web search people hate it. Danny then asks: Why does Wordpress have so little spam compared to blogspot? It seemed to be because Wordpress is running their Akismet trackback spam checkers. Blogspot doesn't have such a spam checker, however. There is more that they can do.

Question: We are serving products to baby boomers. They are grandparents and are not computer savvy. How do we target them?
Danny: That's not a search thing. There are sites that are designed for people who are older. Crusty? (Someone says "Cranky." Danny says "Oh.")

Question: I currently use WebPositionPro for visibility reports. I run monthly reports and a colleague told me that I could be banned. Is that true?
Danny: You are running analytics, right? That's more important than reranking reports. Secondly, the issue with web position and ranking tool is that they put a burden on Google. If Google sees a specific IP doing this, it will ban it. If you are on a shared IP address, it will affect hundreds of sites. I'd relax if you do it once a month or so, but if you do it all the time, be careful.

Question: Can we get your $0.02 on the impact of personalized search on SEO?
Danny: When you go to personalized search, person A might see my ranking, but someone else might not and the incentive to rank will be a lot less. It will be harder for me to blatantly spam. It doesn't make SEO go away, though. If I still have the key ranking criteria, I have a best shot. He then provides an overview of personalized search and explains how people need to just be signed into Google to get personalized results. For the SEO side, the results are definitely different. The results are not that dramatically different, however. One or two things change.

Question: Couldn't, as a resolution to the personalized issue, Google implement a toggle button?
Danny: Yes, but they don't want you to do it.

Question: Does Google want more personalized data to charge the advertiser?
Danny: Microsoft is the only major service that does heavy demographic targeting.

Question: As long as we are talking about Google and how you are using your influence to change things, I hope I'm not the only one who has problems with parked domains that have Google ads.
Danny: You can. When these people opt out of the content network, they opt out of any links on those sites that are hard coded. Those links that are hardcoded are part of the content network. Someone at that site did a search at that site and they got your result (which you are paying for) from the search network. You can't opt out of the search network. Lobby your Google representatives.

Question: Who is going to win the local space?
Danny: Who knows? Does anyone from the local search space want to self-declare that you've won? I went out to lunch with someone and noted that local search had too many features and I don't know what features I need. This guy told me "we are the best local search!!!" (He's kidding.) The difficulty I have is that I live in a small town in England and I know what people do. Local search doesn't help me. I suspect that the winner will be one of the major players. The major search engines are often the major search utility companies. If you are a smaller search, you tend to go to the major utility company.

Question: How will do you use Craigslist for local search?
Danny: Craigslist has great listings. Anyone who has local service will get that data in there. Google is crawling this data but not in a structured way. Google Base is taking listings and making structured data. I don't think that Craigslist is going into the Google Base system. I think it's just a regular web search. Someone says, however, that Craigslist is going into Google Base.

Question: How many people here are from small to medium sized manufacturers who want to promote their own search?
Danny: You realize that this audience doesn't answer, right?

Question: Can you tell us stories about your SES experience? What were your biggest disasters?
Danny: In San Jose, I lost a bet about the World Cup so I had to wear Thomas Bindl lederhosen. At the end, they ran out of food at the Google dance. Tim Myer from Yahoo is there with Paul Garney, head of Ask with a Google web guy. They were mocking each other jokingly and Paul got onto the chair and said "Look at me, I'm Yahoo! I'm the tallest of them all." At one conference, a guy ran off the stage and said "I can't do this" (he returned the next day). Back at a conference, Sergey once spoke and it was hard to get Yahoo to attend. Back then, Yahoo controlled the web. I was afraid that they were going to get attacked -- physically attacked -- after they started asking questions. However, someone came up and said "I want to thank you for coming out for us today." There were tears and hugs and it was a really sweet moment.

Question: I want to go back to personalized search. Can you find out who searches? Will people stop searching?
Danny: There was an incident with AOL search when they released user data and the NY Times found a woman. But people were still using the search engines.
Question followup: But the search engines will now target my habits.
Danny: Why would it register to you that they are targeting you? You're going to Google and getting specific results based on what you are searching for. People might be more concerned about it in the future and lawmakers might make it an issue in the future, but it doesn't seem to be problematic now. Right now, we can't operate without search engines. Even if you turn off personalized search, potentially, your IP address can get traced back to you.

Question: I'm with an SEO agency and we have small businesses. Is the supplemental index going to make it difficult for small businesses to get better rankings?
Danny: Supplemental results means that "your page is not important enough for our really important index." It doesn't mean that it won't rank. Google just decided not to revisit it again. It's rare that I see them ranking. I'd be a little concerned but I wouldn't freak out about it.

Question: I have an audience poll. I don't know how many of you went to the mobile search session. I went to it and came out of it and didn't think I learned much. Does anyone else feel the same way? (I actually read up a lot on it.)
Danny: There were 2 mobile search sessions actually.
Question followup: I didn't go to the other one.
Danny: Oh. I see. It's really difficult to cover in a general conference a topic like that in depth. That's why there are vertical conferences. We could run an entire track on it but then we'd get in trouble for not focusing on video search or other types of search.
[The lights dim. Danny asks, "Do I have to go?"]
I understand. I'm sorry. The other problem with mobile search is that - do you know how hard it is to do mobile search?
Question followup: They're doing it in Asia.
Danny: How many people here market in Asia on mobile phones? (Laughter.)

Note: Sorry for the typos, especially with regards to names of people.