August 2007 Archives

Last week, the Search Buzz Roundup was primarily replaced by our conference coverage (and the awesome Google Dance). But now we're back to the daily grind (and us RustyBrick folks are at it on Monday as well, so you all have a nice Labor Day and don't forget about us... we'll be reporting here too).

So what has happened in the last two weeks of search? Ah, let's see.

Google and DMOZ and Shoemoney and Corruption
Google has updated DMOZ, but then Shoemoney got extorted by one of the editors for $5,000. After that, Joost de Valk, a DMOZ editor (well, former editor), decided to look into what happened and his account was disabled. So the question is: if Google is not evil, why put so much emphasis on a truly corrupt directory?

Cre8asite Forums Turns 5

Last week, Cre8asite Forums turned five years old. Can you believe that? In honor of their 5th anniversary, you should join if you haven't already!

Microsoft Launched ContentAds for All Advertisers

Users advertising with Microsoft are now all opted into ContentAds. This went into effect two days ago, so if you want to opt out, visit the Microsoft ContentAds page.

YouTube Looks to Monetize

Barry reports during SES San Jose that you'll soon see ads appearing in YouTube videos. I guess it was about time given that other video providers do this, but I hope that the content providers get a percentage of the revenue. I believe that's going to happen -- and it's user initiated. Cool.

Yahoo, Google Search Updates

Yahoo Search was updated last week with the bot behavior being more polite and traffic increasing (or decreasing, depending on the particular person). Ultimately, people are displeased with the behavior of Slurp, so let's see what happens.

Google users have also noticed a surged of dropped links in the index. But the traffic is the same. What will the long term impacts be? Patience, my friend. :)

Map Embedding Now Possible with Google Maps

I love this feature. Google is now allowing you to easily -- without using the API -- to integrate maps into your website. I'm not fond of programming so much, so this is incredibly awesome.

Microsoft Webmaster Central Coming Soon

Great news for everyone: Microsoft has announced that they will be launching a webmaster portal for all of us who have really wanted it. Sweet!

Google Gets Sued Again

American Airlines is suing Google over trademarked AdWords. Good luck to both.

Microsoft Launches Tafiti Search

Microsoft launched Tafiti, a Silverlight-based search engine, last week. You can save your searches in little boxes on the right hand side, but a lot of people wonder if it's more than just eye candy. To me, it looks like a way to sell Silverlight to the masses, but I'm not sure how many people are heading that direction.

Congratulations JohnMu!

As an active participant in Google Groups, JohnMu has been asked to join Google's team in Switzerland. JohnMu has been a huge contributor to the forums and Google is very lucky to have him. Nice!

Search Pulse is Back!

After a long hiatus, Barry and Chris did the Search Pulse live at SES San Jose last week (and even though I'm in the picture, I didn't get to say more than a "hello." This week, Ben came back, so you can hear Ben, Chris, and Barry as well.

Bloglines Goes Beta

Bloglines has launched an awesome AJAX-based beta feed reader. There are some shortcomings, but it really is still in beta. I know they're still working on it. Overall, however, it's nice!

AdSense for All Sites Available to Everyone

Google AdSense has enabled you to specify which sites should display your ads so that people do not steal your publisher ID on their site. That's pretty cool as long as it doesn't get taken away again. It's back now so don't worry!

Google Dropped the Current Time Search Operator

Google apparently dropped the time operator and now you cannot see the time in a variety of locations. Matt Cutts writes in the comments that it is a temporary issue and that it should be working again soon.

Search Suggest by Yahoo is Launched in the UK

UK members are more privy to cool new Yahoo features than us American people. That's the case for Yahoo Search Suggest which was rolled out in the UK.

You Can Ban Google in AdSense

Using AdSense, you can ban Google by going to the competitive ad filter and adding google.com there. How many of you out there are going to try that?

And with my tip about reporting AdSense-monetized splogs, how many of you are going to report them? We did two yesterday and we have many more coming. I'll report on the results later.

GoogleGuy Disappears, Returns

Barry wondered aloud yesterday and asked where GoogleGuy has been. After all, it's been over a year since GoogleGuy posted on WebmasterWorld. Fortunately, GoogleGuy returned and said hello today. He must be reading Search Engine Roundtable. I'm proud of him. High five!

Yahoo Search Marketing Launches Features

The YSM team has launched some cool features, enabling enhancements to create ads, providing information about low quality ads, and giving the ability to optimize your campaign, among other features. The only downside is that the minimum bid is now $30, but overall, advertisers look happy.

Have a great Labor Day everyone! Have a picnic for me (with Kosher hot dogs!) Be sure to check Search Engine Roundtable on Monday to see our Labor Day theme!

YahooPete writes in on Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums, and WebmasterWorld about new features that the YSM team has rolled out.

Enhancements to the process for creating an ad
Low quality index alert – Advertisers will be alerted if their quality index drops below a certain level.
Ad generator – Add titles and short sentences to the ad generator which will automatically combine various permutations of those titles and short sentences to form a set of candidate ads
Campaign optimization – Optimize your campaigns according to your specified goals

The biggest response is on DigitalPoint Forums, where forum members aren't happy that the minimum deposit is $30 (but they're happy that PayPal is now an accepted form of payment). And now impressions can be sorted by descending order.

I nearly had to replace my undershorts today when I hit sort by impressions, and it sorted in DESCENDING ORDER! Thank you! This has been something that annoyed me since the day I began using the most recent version.

The other observation is that the AJAX script is just a bit slow and members are requesting an offline editor.

I can see that YSM is making good advancements in the system efficiency department, but the ajax code in use seems incredibly slow, even on fast computers for the javascript end of things... any chance of an offline editor in the future?

I think that would be hot.

The YSM blog also has in-depth information about these enhancements.

Looking good, YSM team!

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums, and WebmasterWorld.

Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz tied Matt Cutts to a chair and pleaded with him asked Matt to provide some clarifications regarding the nofollow attribute. Matt essentially said that nofollow links aren't followed, but you can exercise control over what is followed ("fine-grained control," as he puts it) by implementing nofollow. He had the following to say:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

Matt then adds to the comments:

I think saying people "should be" using nofollow is a bit strong. More like people can use it for internal links if they're power-user-y enough to want to sculpt PageRank flow within their site at the link level. But I'd say that most regular webmasters don't need to worry about link-level PageRank flow within their site. I think saying "power users and webmasters should be employing on their sites" overstates it a little. It's available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control.

This insight into the behavior of nofollow has welcomed the WebmasterWorld community. A clearer picture has been desired and it is now provided.

In the end, though, use caution when employing this feature.

Anybody who uses nofollow "to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity" (luv that engineer talk), must be absolutely sure it doesn't inadvertently orphan any important pages.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld members are reporting on the Google AdWords announcement that the AdWords Report Center has gotten a makeover and looks a lot like the familiar interface of Google Analytics.

Some, however, are not too keen on the changes. For some, it's a lot of extra work (and more clicks), and it's not possible anymore to copy and paste these charts into email since they're in the standard analytics display.

Others feel that it's useful but they want the best of both worlds: old style and new style.

AdWordsAdvisor is monitoring the thread and says that any feedback will be passed onto the AdWords team.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday I reported that it has been One Year Since GoogleGuy Has Posted in WebmasterWorld. I also pleaded with GoogleGuy to make a post and just say hello. He has done so.

GoogleGuy has posted in a WebmasterWorld thread in the Foo forum on a malware topic. The thread was totally not on a Google topic, but it is nice to see that GoogleGuy is still alive. ;-)

GoogleGuy wrote:

Seems like a lot of people end up spending visits home and holidays cleaning off malware from relatives' computers. I have heard of people buying new computers though.

True, true, true!

Thanks GoogleGuy!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google AdSense has re-enabled the allowed sites feature after taking it away soon after they launched the feature.

Here is a quick timeline:

- 10:30 AM (EST) on August 28th, Google enabled Allowed Sites in AdSense
- 7:30 PM (EST) on August 28th, Google rolled back Allowed Sites in AdSense
- 12:30 AM (EST) on August 31, Google re-enabled Allowed Site in AdSense

Publishers love this option!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there is a way to tell if a particular site or page is able to pass PageRank. In more global terms, is there a way to check if a particular site or page is able to pass link popularity?

There is not always a clear way to check if a page is able to pass link popularity. However, there are many signs you can use to check this.

However, you must keep in mind that many believe that search engines are able to define specific block elements of a page and then block links from those areas. So if a site has an ad section, the search engine can identify that section and decide that those paid advertisements do not deserve to pass any link popularity. That being said, what signs can a person use to see if a page will likely not pass link popularity?

Signs:

• Is that page indexed in the search engine?
• Does the page have toolbar PageRank?
• Does the page have inbound links?
• Are outgoing links from that page found in a link command at Yahoo from the reciprocating page?
• Does that page rank well for unique text found on the page in the search engine?

Those are just some signs you can use at your own discretion to tell if a page is capable of passing link popularity.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a simple question. Is a robots.txt file required for SEO?

The answer is no, a robots.txt file is not required.

If you want the search engines to crawl your site, you do not have to do anything. If you do not want them to crawl your site, you can tell them not to with a robots.txt file.

That is not to say the robots.txt file isn't useful. You can use it to control which pages the search engines should not crawl, which can be very useful for duplicate content and SEO purposes.

In addition, most search engines have added layers of features that you can control via the robots.txt file. So if you want to institute a crawl-delay for Yahoo, you can. If you want to specify a sitemaps location, you can. If you want to try to catch rogue spider, the file can be helpful.

There are many useful uses with the robots.txt. But it is not a required element for ranking well.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In November 2005, Yahoo lowered the minimum deposit from $30 to $5.

Early reports are coming from DigitalPoint Forums that Yahoo has now increased the $5 minimum from $5 to $35. Yes, flipping the minimum deposit back to that number pre-November 2005.

So I decided to give it a try and sign up for a new account and they are right. Here is a screen capture from the billing page on the sign up process:

You can see the minimum bid is now at $30.

Is this a bug? I took a look at the sponsored search page and it still says $5.

Each account requires a nonrefundable $5 initial deposit.

Maybe it is a bug because I didn't see an announcement on this.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Susan Moskwa of the Google Webmaster Central team posts on Google Groups asking group participants what they usually do to monitor posts.

There's a lot of interesting feedback, but ironically, some people actually say that the Google Groups search "sucks." Ah well, at least the search engine is running smoothly!

Some tips on how to check the Google Groups came from a variety of members:

In terms of what to read - I check for post count and sometimes the starring to decide whether to read particular threads. Also look at the last poster - some folk are very worthy of a read.

This sounds like typical Digg behavior:

As for determining factors about what I read, post title & snippet [Good point there about trying to correlate title with response numbers], reply count, starring and the thread-starter & last-poster all play a role.

And others check to give attention to the threads that have less love within:

First and foremost I scan down the page for items without a response - there is usually a reason - either the question is one we don't have a standard answer for (I like them) or more likely, the person hasn't put the question in a way that is clear - so I'll often prompt them a bit and try and get the ball rolling.

What are your tips on browsing the forums? Join in the discussion at Google Groups.

Every Google Adsense ad -- including ads on splogs -- can be reported to Google if it is in violation of any particular AdSense guideline.

How is this done? Let's walk through an example from a splog.

First, you click on "Ads by Google" (in some instances, you will see "Feedback - Ads by Google").

Then, you will scroll down where you can click on "send Google feedback on the ads you just saw."

After that, expand the form to "report a violation."

Fill out the required information.

After you report this splog, Google will send you a DMCA form to fill out and you'll have to show screen caps in order to validate your claim. It will take some time to get these DMCA complaints verified (which can be a bit of a pain), but in the end, it's worth it if you're concerned that your content is being ripped off.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Users from the United Kingdom on the Search Engine Roundtable Forums report that they are now seeing the Yahoo Search Suggest feature.

Yahoo is also rolling out Yahoo Search Assist, which is still in limited beta, and this is a screencast of those new features as taken by Barry yesterday:

I still don't see either of these new features since it's being slowly rolled out to those of us in the US, but Search Engine Land confirms that the Search Suggest feature has been rolled out to all UK users.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Today is the one year mark since the last time GoogleGuy has made a post at WebmasterWorld forums.

GoogleGuy was the first Google search representative at WebmasterWorld to have such a huge impact on webmaster communication between Google and SEOs/Webmasters.

GoogleGuy's last post was on August 30, 2006 at 1:46pm (EST). GoogleGuy joined WebmasterWorld back on October 7, 2001 and racked up a whopping 2,879 posts. GoogleGuy's last post was in the Danny Sullivan Announces He is Resigning From Searchenginewatch thread, which makes you wonder.

In any event, there has been plenty of Google communication in WebmasterWorld and other forums since GoogleGuy's departure. But, there will always be a special place in the hearts of SEOs and Webmasters for GoogleGuy.

Wouldn't it be great to see a "Hi, I am still around" post from sir GoogleGuy?

Tuesday we reported on a new feature at Google AdSense named "Allowed Sites."

That feature was then soon removed from publisher's AdSense consoles without warning.

Finally, AdSenseAdvisor chimed in at WebmasterWorld about the issue.

Sorry for the delayed update - I've been trying to find out as much as I could about this situation in order to make sure I passed along accurate information to all of you.

We're very happy you're all so excited about the new Allowed Sites feature. Unfortunately, we had to temporarily roll back its release, but expect to see it in your accounts again soon. We hope that it helps alleviate many of the concerns publishers have had about code theft and click sabotage.

In the meantime, our engineers have confirmed that we deactivated any settings you made yesterday, so your ads will continue to monetize as normal on all sites.

Again, we're sorry for the inconvenience and confusion, and appreciate your patience.

At this current time, the feature is still not live. But as AdSenseAdvisor said, it should be back soon. Any of the settings you put in place on Tuesday, will probably not be applied in the future or even currently. So pretend Google did not release this feature and wait for it to be released in the near future.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

SEOs and Webmasters are the ones typically complaining in forums about their site not being displayed in Google and possibly being banned.

Well, if you want to ban Google, you can. Of course you have the robots.txt option, but how about banning Google from displaying ads on your site.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks if you can ban Google from showing their ads in your AdSense spots.

Of course you can. Just go to your competitive ad filter list and put Google's URLs in there.

Like one member said:

Nope, they can't ban you [for blocking their ads]. Now it's your chance to ban G.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks how can he generate unique robots.txt files for each domain he has, when each of those sites are sharing the same local files through a form of IIS mirroring?

There are several ways to do this, however, member Pittbug, said he had the same issue. He explained that he wrote domain specific rules in isapi_rewrite to define a unique robots.txt file per domain. He explains that you can set it up as, "robots1.txt will appear as www.domain1.com/robots.txt, robots-b.txt will appear as www.domain2.com/robots.txt" and so on.

Of course you can also dynamically generate your robots.txt file on a per domain basis via your database, I would assume.

The bottom line, as Ammon Johns explains,

I'd simply tell the developers what needs to be done, and let them figure out their own preferred method of achieving it, as they'll know the limitations of their system better than I can.

I agree a 100%, just understand what solution they come up with and how ti will impact the spiders and crawling process.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A Google Groups member asks about the ability to display a desired location underneath a search ad. As I mentioned two weeks ago, you can geotarget ads to a specific city.

And thats' what another member says:

You need to change targeted area.You can change it in campaign settings. Edit "Countries and Territories" option.

Therefore, if you target a specific region in your campaign, the location should show up.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

An article about lack of research into sales pitches has Cre8asite Forums members reeling.

A new study by the Intelligent Business Group, a UK-based marketing think tank, provides a devastating critique of the performance of most advertising and marketing agencies ... Eighty-five percent of the survey respondents believe that the agencies pitching them do a lousy job of researching their basic business issues before making their pitch. Astonishingly, 61 percent believe that the agency did no research at all.

That's a huge number. The forums discussion wonders how much time members spend to pitch their SEO or SEM services.

Everyone says that they do research in some form or another whether to determine the industry, the type of product or service being sold, and information about competitors. Some of the participants don't generally make sales pitches at all; instead, people seeking services call them.

But this much is true:

The statistics are staggering but not unexpected. Too many people want to do their job w/o doing it.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

According to a Google press release, Google CFO George Reyes has announced his retirement. He is 53. The Washington Post has more information about his retirement, with a quote from Reyes:

"I know I'm leaving the company in good hands with a remarkable team of professionals that will continue to build on Google's tremendous achievements," Reyes said in a statement.

Reyes has indicated that he will remain on board to assist in the search for a new CFO, which should happen sometime before the end of this year.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

NewKidOnTheBlock, is asking some excellent questions at Search Engine Watch Forums. His newest question is that he's wondering if it's worth targeting your PPC ads by specifying a minimum cost of a product within the ad copy so that you won't get clicks that won't convert. Apparently, Andrew Goodman's Winning Results with Google AdWords book says it's not optimal.

Im reading Andrew Goodman's book at the moment and yesterday I read that putting the price in the PPC ad was actually not a good idea as it can prevent potentially good clients from clicking on the ad as well, etc..

To be honest I had thought this was one of the best ideas to filter out low quality traffic (people just into finding information).

I'm inclined to agree with the new kid at first glance.

But experience really would determine the effectiveness of the campaign and whether specifying a price is useful or not.

For example, a search on time in san francisco or current time in london would return the current time in those locations at the top of the Google search results.

It appears that this feature is currently not working anymore.

We know Ask.com added a real-time clock to their search results. So the same searches in Ask.com return the time in those locations. Try time in london or if you do a search just on london and scroll down and look on the right pane, you will see the real time clock.

Why did Google remove this feature from their search results? Was it a mistake, will it come back or is it gone forever?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting, in heavy numbers, that Google is returning fewer results for sites they have in their index.

What I mean is that if you do a site:www.domain.com command in Google, the number of results being returned is much lower than in the past.

This is not only being reported by one or two people, there are dozens of people reporting this in that thread.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, confirms:

One of my clients - 9 year old site - has dropped from 1,700 urls indexed to 1,300. They've never been that low in recent years.

However, many are reporting traffic to be at the same levels. So is this just a Google reporting issue or something else?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks if it is best to break our your articles or content on multiple pages or keep them on a single page.

The answer? It depends.

It depends on the length of the article. It depends if the article can be broken out in to logical subsections, where each subsection provides enough value on its own. It depends if it makes sense for your reader to click from subsection to subsection or not.

You must also keep in mind that if you have all your content for a specific article on one page, you are more likely to get more links to that one page than have them spread out to multiple pages.

Like I said, it depends.

In this case, I would listen to DigitalPoint member, WorldImpulse:

Forget google and think what will be better for your visitors?

Will they like to have one long page or 3 short pages ?

What is best for the user.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A very interesting discussion has emerged on WebmasterWorld about link equity from images or text links. What's better? Do image links pass PageRank? Do they imply trust?

According to moderator pageoneresults, both links pass equity, but image links are not as efficient as text links.

Most all links pass value. Its the level of value that is in question. A textual link is at the top of the food chain, it doesn't get any better than that. Image links are okay and perform well. Image links that are formatted properly and utilize accessibility attributes like the alt attribute are going to perform better than those that don't.

But then pageoneresults goes on to say that links that are enclosed in <h#> tags are better than regular text links. And that response evokes harsh criticisms from other users that doing so would be purely to manipulate the search results.

The discussion gets heated with members on both sides of the argument claiming that it may or may not be an issue of ethics and manipulation. But what do you think?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The 35th edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. Ben is back with us, to get things back on track with our new 30 minute show format. We covered the SES show and our indepth coverage. We also discussed the Yahoo Search and Slurp updates. Microsoft is releasing a webmaster portal in late fall. We shared our opinions on Google's new top promotion forumla. Google began cashing in our YouTube, with ad overlays. And we chatted about the heated article on in-house SEMs. We discussed many other topics. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file and listen at your convenience.

powered by ODEO

Topics We Covered:

1. SES San Jose Coverage Wrap Up
   
2. Yahoo Search Update Underway - New Slurp Crawl Patterns
   
3. Webmasters Not Happy with Yahoo's New Crawl Behavior
   
4. Microsoft Promises Webmasters a Live Search Portal
   
5. First Feedback on Google AdWords Top Ad Placement Formula
   
6. Google Wants to Cash in on YouTube with Overlay Ads
   
7. Is In-House SEM Ineffective? Forum Members Don't Think So
   

Continue reading "Search Pulse 35: SES Wrap, Yahoo Updates, MSN Webmasters, Promotion AdWords, YouTube Ads & In House SEM"

While a lot of advertisers are dissatisfied with Google AdWords on parked pages, some folks, like two advertisers on Search Engine Watch Forums, find that it's performing rather well for them.

We get good results from parked pages for the most part. Like you, they make up most of our content traffic and conversions.

Very interesting.

"This is the first time I have ever seen a forum post about how advertisers are loving the traffic and ROI they are receiving from Google Domain Ads (aka Parked Domain ads)," said Barry Schwartz.

So if it doesn't convert for you, bear in mind that you'll soon be able to opt out of AdSense for Domains, according to Google.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums member suspects that if there are no changes performed on any given ad campaign, the ads will drop off the first page and perform progressively worse over time. He wonders if anyone else has run into a similar issue and if Google is taking preference over new advertisers instead of old ones.

Some advertisers feel that Google is hiding the true costs of their campaigns. They feel that Google is estimating lower costs and then hitting them up with higher costs. This may be perceived as a typical "bait and switch" ploy by Google. But you and I know this as the "quality score" weighing in on pricing.

And truthfully, I am not seeing the same results on any campaigns I monitor. A few people believe that the space that the particular advertiser is focusing on is either very competitive or that Google is figuring out the quality score, as GuyFromChicago suggests.

From my experience, this quote sums it up nicely:

It's simply because you have no history so they anticipate a best case scenario. After a couple days google knows if you have a decent click through rate and has calculated your quality score. At this point they know if you deserve a good position or not. It's pretty simple when you get down to it. They aren't going to penalize you for being a new user.

Do you feel the same way? Do you think you have better results whenever you start a campaign and then it gets worse? Do you think you should start a new campaign every time you want to hit the front page?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney, posted on his blog that he's been extorted by a corrupt DMOZ editor. Without naming names, he was told that he'd have to pay $5000 to keep his website in the ODP.

There's been a big stir at DigitalPoint Forums (in two posts) about this, with many individuals suggesting that there's no benefit in being in DMOZ since it's nothing special. Still, however, a good number of people (and Google) put weight on the DMOZ listings and a lot of tools still put weight on it.

However, as forum members notice, DMOZ is pretty much dead and it's impossible to get your site listed there. And with corruption that dates back two years, why give juice to DMOZ at all?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums (thread #1) and DigitalPoint Forums (thread #2).

Update: Joost De Valk, a former DMOZ editor, adds more about the DMOZ corruption to his blog.

Brian Kennish, aka AdWords API Advisor, writes in a Google Groups thread that Google is seeking talent to clarify their help document.

Making our Developer Guide (http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/developer/) and Help Center (http://www.google.com/support/adwordsapi/) as clear and comprehensive as possible is a big deal to us. Tell us how we're doing! What's working and, more importantly, what's confusing or just plain missing?

Are you game? If so, join the Google Groups discussion.

A brand new beta version of Bloglines has been launched this week, and it features a great amount of AJAX and customization features.

The key features in this new beta include:

A Customizable Start Page: You can now drag and drop desired pages to your start page so that you can get a quick glance of the stories from your favorite feeds.

When you mouse over a particular title on your feed, you can see an excerpt of the feed or summary.

Three different viewing options: You now can view your feeds in a standard full feed view, which the old Bloglines version is based off. You can also view only headlines in quick feed view, or you can view the feeds in a three-pane view which combines full feeds and quick feeds in a split pane.

Here's the standard full-feed view that most of us are used to:

But here's a quick feed view which looks very similar to the customized start page. However, this is only for a particular folder that I have selected.

This is what it looks like when you opt-in for a 3-pane view. It kind of reminds me of the way I set up my email.

I like it.

Drag and Drop Feeds for Easy Organization. And finally, for someone like me who subscribes to over 180 feeds, a drag and drop feature is available so that I can organize my feeds better. I really needed this and now it's here.

So far, the direction of Bloglines is promising. The only caveat forum members and I have noticed noticed is that it's not easy anymore to mark feeds as read unless you mouseover them or scroll into the blogs. I can see that being an issue that the Ask team will address, however, so let's give it some time. :)

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

adCenterEU has updated us on the adCenter bulk import draft problem, saying at a WebmasterWorld thread that the problem will be resolved in a "month or so."

Microsoft will be adding new functionality to make it easier and quicker to import campaigns and mark those campaigns from the "draft" status to the live status.

adCenterEU, Microsoft's official adCenter representative, said:

Watch out for this capability in a release scheduled within the next month or so.

So I am expecting the release within the month of September.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in June, we reported that Google ramped up testing the allowed sites AdSense feature.

In short, the Allowed Sites feature, enables publishers to specify which sites can display their ads. This way you do not have to worry about a person stealing your ads with your publisher ID on them, and getting your account banned for "invalid clicks."

The new allowed sites feature now seems to be live for all AdSense publishers. Just login to your account and go to https://www.google.com/adsense/publisher-whitelist-view. Here is a screen capture of what the page looks like:

You can allow domains and even subdomains (i.e. if you have a hosted blog on a blogspot.com domain or something similar). Note, if your ad is found on a domain that is now specified in the allowed sites database, then your ads will still show, but impressions and clicks will not be recorded.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks a unique but very interesting question.

In short, this SEO's client wants him to rank a page well for a keyword phrase, but at the same time, he does not want the page to rank for a single keyword found within that phrase. The example given in the thread is that he wants to rank well for [bmw defects].

I have a good example of this in play on a real site. I purchased a Niko TV (it is an excellent TV by the way) because it had a very attractive rebate offer. Problem was, the rebate was too good to be true. So I wrote a blog post at my personal blog named Niko Rebate Very Scammy. Guess what? I rank in the top Google result (top two) for niko rebate. However, I do not rank in the top ten for niko in Google.

In another example, I was upset that my Sunbeam Water Cooler Sprung a Leak back in 2004, so I wrote about it. It now ranks number one in Google for sunbeam water cooler and has hundreds of comments from other owners of this water cooler, who have experienced the same thing. In fact, Sunbeam customer service has commented several times to offer support. Plus, it has influenced consumer's purchase decisions.

How can you guarantee that a page ranks well for a specific keyword phrase but not the keyword in the phrase? In the BMW example, to rank well for bmw rebate but not rank well for bmw? That is hard. The more competitive the brand name is, the less likely you will rank well for that keyword. It is much easier to rank well for a keyword phrase. So start slow and hope for the best.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Poor Kim Krause Berg. She got stuck in Chicago on the way to SES San Jose and arrived a day late. To make matters worse, she got stuck on the way back home. She shares her frightening travel adventures on Cre8asite Forums and wonders if anyone else has run into the same thing.

Fortunately for Kim (?), she's not the only one that it's happened to. Forum member khalidh used to spend 21 hours traveling for work:

On the last project, I was travelling from Rochester, NY to Houston. The flight was suppose to take 5 hours. I usually left Rochester on Thursday at 5 pm and got to Houston at 2 pm the next day.

Creepy.

swainzy's friend hit a 35-hour delay once:

My girlfriend had a flight cancelled last spring and had to sleep on the Denver Airports floor. The delay was 35 hours.

joedolson has a story that's similar to Kim's:

When I was coming back from Vienna last summer, my flight from NYC to Minneapolis was cancelled twice in one night.

Oy. Time for a fully virtual conference? But then I wouldn't be able to take all these great pictures. Ah well, the end result is worth it. :)

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

In response to an article by SEMPO about the ineffectiveness of in-house search engine marketing (caution, PDF link), Search Engine Watch members believe that SEMPO is off the mark.

The article highlights obstacles that get in the way of efficient outsourced SEO:

1. SEO/SEM campaigns are time intensive.
2. SEM requires dedication.
3. SEM is very competitive and the market drives costs up.
4. Successful SEM campaigns demand accurate tracking and analysis of effectiveness.
5. In-house SEM programs often are unaware of search engine policies.
6. In-house SEM programs do not have support.

But forum members believe that there are advantages to in-house SEO, such as keeping confidential information confidential, having more insight into the industry to which the marketing is being performed, and having internal control of the people within the company for whom the responsibilities lie.

Having someone in house provides a dedicated resource and know-how for any search marketing campaign. Being able to hire someone solely for the job of search marketing is very effective.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last week, Microsoft launched Tafiti, a search engine that is powered by its new Silverlight technology. I played around with the features and have showed some screenshots of the new search engine in action.

Once Silverlight is installed, you see a nice little notepad where you can scribble type in your search.

You're then presented with some results and can drag interesting results to a glass pane on the right hand side of your browser.

Then, you can label these saved searches:

The downside is that you have to turn off your popup blocker in order to see any selection. I found that a bit of a hindrance.

WebmasterWorld members feel that the saved search functionality is useful, but there's not much potential for Silverlight. After all, it is a direct competitor to Adobe's Flash which has been around for over a decade.

Even so, it has a "web 2.0" feel, which some members welcome:

Regardless of the result its always good to see companies experiment, especially with a user interface. That said, I think the site, visually, leaves alot to be desired. I have Visual Thesaurus, which I love to use, that makes Tafiti look pretty primitive, but the storing/sharing of multiple searches could be useful.

Others just don't see much use for it.

Google have it right...give people the results with a minumum of fuss and time. waiting for those animations every time I do a search would drive me up the wall.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld members have experimented with the Google AdWords Campaign Optimizer tool and have offered some feedback regarding the tool.

Some users are finding that the tool does not perform, instead offering a message saying that the tool is "unable to optimize your campaign at this time."

Other members say that the Website Optimizer suggests that "www" be appended to URLs.

Finally, others are finding that Google is demanding a lot of money for minimum bids.

I know exactly what you are feeling. Google is insane with their min bids especially for new projects. Some of my keywords min bids jump from: .15 to .02 to .20 to .10 to .30 to .05 to .50 to .04. It is insane.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Rob Kerry, a contributing author to Search Engine Roundtable, has recently written an article on Search Engine Watch about black hat PPC tactics. He shares information about how by circumventing the human moderation filter, advertisers can display a different URL than is actually clicked through on the ad. Furthermore, if you set up multiple "phantom companies" all with unassociated bank accounts, you can flood the ad space for particular terms and push competitors out of the sponsored listings. Finally, Rob says that you can outbid your competitor and display an identical ad with a different click-through URL, giving yourself a clear advantage.

These are dirty tactics indeed, and Rob says that if you utilize them, you should do so with caution.

Have you ever tried this? Have they helped you? What are your thoughts?

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

JohnMu, a face we all know too well from the forums we cover here, has officially joined Google as a Webmaster Trends Analyst. He announced his new job at Google Groups and his new personal blog.

In two weeks, come September I'll be working for Google as a Webmaster Trends Analyst, based in Zürich, Switzerland.

It's been a great couple of years here in the Google groups. It's been great to work with so many different sites, with so many different people and backgrounds. I've learned a lot from you all, especially those of you with "uncomfortable" opinions. I know that things are not always so easy for webmasters, especially those with smaller sites. I've seen how small changes can lead to disasters, I've seen how other changes have led to better sites than ever before.

I hope that together with Google we can take things to the next level!

JohnMu has created dozens of tools for SEOs and Webmasters at http://oyoy.eu/. He has also been a strong presence at Google Groups, answering Google webmaster questions on a daily basis. In addition, JohnMu has been a frequent contributor at many of the SEO forums we cover, such as Cre8asite Forums.

Google could not have found a better individual to continue the communication between SEOs/Webmasters and Google Web Search.

Congrats John Mueller and Google!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Last week we reported on a Yahoo update and a new method of crawling. The new crawl behavior is supposed to help the Yahoo bot, Slurp, be more efficient on your site.

It seems that many SEOs and Webmasters are not happy with this change.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several negative comments:

OK, this is completely bogus and helps nobody. The number of IPs that Slurp uses? WHO CARES...

The fact that Yahoo has multiple crawlers for every division that crawl independently and don't share the common cache, now THAT's a problem that needs to be fixed.

We get 50% of our pages crawled every day.

Well Yahoo is a waste of bandwidth on one of my sites (a large directory). It hammers it almost every day and has only sent about 975 referrers this month. That is so low that I wonder if people even use Yahoo in Ireland for anything other than e-mail. I am strongly considering blocking it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In the Copyright & Trademarks: What SEMs Should Know session from SES San Jose last week, adCenter announced they have a new policy on how they will be handling trademark complaints.

Instead of them being the go between, between affiliates and advertisers, they are kind of going to take a step back and let the two duke it out.

Microsoft then announced the change on their blog.

Microsoft adCenter will no longer attempt to mediate affiliate compliance by creating lists of trademark-owner approved advertisers who can bid on trademarked keywords. Support teams will be contacting those trademark owners who have provided affiliate documentation previously to explain this policy update and answer questions.

If you have a trademark issue, you now need to use this form.

WebmasterWorld moderator, Receptional, said:

Not sure this will upset agencies looking after client trademarks too much. This seems to me like the onus is on the advertiser to stick to their trademark rights, but trademark owners will still be able to protect their marks as and when.

Skibum adds an important point:

Microsoft is Microsoft so they can do whatever they want but this sounds confusing and inconsistent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has an interesting discussion where a publisher of content that supports his specialty product is noticing his content is being used on sites with Google AdSense ads. He explains:

The thing is, lately there are so many copycat websites that give people the same information but they don't sell anything. They just sell Google ads that often lead to our site because we are one of very few actual sellers. Some of these guys are search engine pros, with their content and skill they are leapfrogging our natural search results.

This individual sends out a newsletter and has over 80,000 customers who may receive these newsletters. He was wondering ways he can utilize his readers to help him either 'thawte' or protect himself against those MFA sites.

He came up with an idea to ask those readers to link to his site, if they like his content. Plus, he is thinking of asking his readers to go to review sites, such as Epinions, and give them a positive review.

Overall, if he has an 80,000 user target base. He can and should ask for that link. But he has a greater opportunity to turn his useful content into some sort of useful widget, a widget that can be embedded on his readers' site, that links back to his authoritative site.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

As I mentioned last week, Google was planning on making it easy to embed its maps onto websites without knowledge of the API. Now the dream is a reality. A Google Press Release announces its official launch and highlights some practical applications of the maps.

* business owners can now add a map of their business location to its website, with links to directions and more information on Google Maps. * bloggers can now write about a restaurant or a place they have visited and embed a map of the location in the blog post itself. * individuals can update their personal websites by publishing maps of geotagged vacation photos or creating sophisticated maps mashups using the simple tools available in the My Maps tab.

Cre8asite Forums members are quite happy with the news. I mean, seriously, how much easier can it get than this?

To embed a Google Map, users simply pull up the map they want to embed - it can be a location, a business, driving directions, or a My Map they have created - and then click "Link to this page" and copy & paste the HTML into their website or blog.

See the second line with the iframe embed tag? That's it!

Awesome.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

WebmasterWorld members have spotted that the Google ad placement formula is now in effect. The Google AdWords blog confirms this.

To recap, the key change to the formula is how we consider price. Like the formula used for ranking ads alongside Google search results, the top ad placement formula now considers an ad's maximum CPC.

Members are also seeing the following trends:

I am noticing that those of my keywords that have very high max CPC, very little impressions and even fewer clicks and had a very low average CPC over time have had their average CPC skyrocket towards the max CPC. Those keywords that fit the same profile but have lots of impressions and clicks have had their average CPC go up alot as well but not as much. It is always good advice to adjust ones max CPC down to the absolute highest one is willing to pay but it appears to be even more important now with these increases.

DigitalPoint Forums members notice other findings related to the display of ads.

First, there are far fewer of the top ads in search results for the keywords I use in my campaign. In some cases, there are no top ads in the results, which is very unusual. The second thing I notice is that the first page of results is totally different than what I am used to seeing. Usually, the first page contains the usual suspects, but not so much today.

It probably is a bit too early to tell how much of an impact this new top promotion formula will make for most advertisers. We will continue to watch the forums and report back any major and even minor changes noticed by this new algorithm.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Last week, ComputerWorld reports that Google has been sued by American Airlines because the airline is seeking to stop its competitors from bidding on its trademark in Google.

Their argument is,

"Without authorization or approval from American Airlines, Google has sold to third parties the 'right' to use the trademarks and service marks of American Airlines or words, phrases, or terms confusingly similar to those marks as 'keyword' triggers that cause paid advertisements, which Google calls 'Sponsored Links' to appear alongside the 'natural results," the lawsuit said.

This isn't the first lawsuit against Google for trademarked terms.

WebmasterWorld members believe that the suit is baseless.

Their "trademarked search term" could also be considered generic. Kind of like when people are lookimg for american (based) airlines, french airlines, engilsh airlines, etc.

That's a good point.

But others are not rooting for Google.

I hope they win. How would like you competitors bidding on your company name. We don't.

History has been on Google's side before. Can they win again?

What do you think about this? Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Many are excited that Microsoft has announced that they will be building out a webmaster portal. The portal will be similar to that of Yahoo's Site Explorer of Google's Webmaster Central.

As Danny Sullivan explains, the portal will help consolidate forms and help documentation, plus offer tools on:

• Linking data
• Indexing data
• Crawling data

Microsoft is now accepting private beta requests, just email lswmp@microsoft.com to make your request.

When should we expect the launch of these tools? Microsoft says it will be "available publicly in late Fall." I certainly hope so. Why am I skeptical? They have made promises in the past and did not come through until just recently.

So we will see...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Four days of SEO, PPC, SMO, Link Baiting, Landing Pages, Google Dancing, and SearchBashing has now come to a close. I am extremely proud to announce we have covered 64 of the 74 sessions offered at the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference.

How did we cover so many sessions? All the credit goes to the contributors including Chris Boggs of Brulant, Li Evans from Search Marketing Gurus, Kim Krause-Berg from Cre8PC, Steve Krull from The Krull Group, David Wallace from SearchRank, Carolyn Shelby aka cshel, Rob Kerry sir EvilGreenMonkey, Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and Tamar Weinberg of RustyBrick. This coverage, along with coverage from aimClear Blog, Ask.com Blog, Lisa Barone at BruceClay.com Blog, Justin Davy, David Dalka, Lee Odden, Search Engine Journal, Unofficial SEO Blog, WebProNews and others, is a true testament to the SEM communities values and good will in helping others.

Now for the wrap up, in alphabetical order, the sessions we covered:

1. Ad Exchanges are Changing Everything
2. Ad Testing: Research and Findings
3. Ads in a Quality Score World
4. Advanced Paid Search Techniques
5. Advertising Track: Search Ad Buyers Forum
6. Are Paid Links Evil?
7. B2B Tactics
8. Benchmarking An SEM Campaign
9. Buzz Monitoring
10. Content is King
11. Contextual Ads & AdSense Clinic
12. Converting Visitors Into Buyers
13. Copyright & Trademarks: What SEMs Should Know
14. Creating Compelling Ads
15. CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Search Engines
16. Domaining and Address Bar-Driven Traffic
17. Earning Money From Contextual Ads
18. Fun with Dynamic Web Sites
19. Getting Traffic from Contextual Ads
20. Images & Search Engines
21. In House: Big PPC
22. In House: Big SEO
23. In House: In, Out, or in Between?
24. Introduction To Search Engine Marketing
25. Keynote Conversation with Jim Lanzone of Ask.com
26. Keynote Conversation With Marissa Mayer
27. Landing Page Testing
28. Link Baiting
29. Link Building Basics
30. Local Search Marketing Tactics
31. Meet The Crawlers
32. Meet the Video Search Engines
33. One Billion Searchers
34. Organic Listings Forum
35. Personalization, User Data
36. Podcast and Audio Search Optimization
37. Post Search Ads
38. Public Relations Train Wrecks in the Interactive Biz: Disaster Can Be Avoided!
39. Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix
40. Search Advertising 101
41. Search APIs
42. Search Engine Friendly Design
43. Search Engine QA on Links
44. Search Engines On Click Fraud
45. Search Marketers On Click Fraud
46. Search Term Research and Targeting
47. Searcher Behavior Research Update
48. SEM Pricing Models
49. SEO Q&A On Links
50. SEO Through Blogs and Feeds
51. Shopping Search Tactics
52. SMO: Social Media Optimization
53. So You Want To Be A Search Marketer!
54. Successful Site Architecture
55. The Search Landscape
56. The SEO Reputation Problem
57. Universal & Blended Vertical Search
58. Usability
59. User Generated Content
60. Video Search Optimization
61. Web Analytics and Measuring Success
62. What is a Brand Vehicle? Integrated Marketing Together Forever
63. Wikipedia & SEO
64. Writing for Search Engines

Panelists

Jeannette Cezanne eWay Direct
Benjamin Lloyd Amplify Interactive
David DeVries Microsoft Small Business

Moderator
Jennifer Laycock

Jeannette is up first. Content is the future of search and design. The expression has always been content should never be an afterthought. Content is usually created without much thought or without SEO thought. Her take away is content, design and SEO should all go hand in hand. It’s easier said than done but you must focus to get the job done.

Important part of SEO is linking, but what makes a site want to link to you? Do you have quality relevant content? You must give them something of value. When content is keyword rich and focuses then people will link to it. Become a resource.

Jeannette says a great example of site with good content is Progressive Car Insurance. They are a resource, have become trusted so both spiders and humans go back to.

Look at each page and ask yourself the question “so what?” If you can answer that – good. Look at each page from the point of the end user. If I was the end user what would be useful for me to read, see or hear? Tell your visitor how to do everything on the site. Make it easy to find things.

Pretty pictures don’t bring people to a site it’s the content that engages people with a site.
What’s the path to go through the site? Make it easy for people to find all elements on your site. There is a reason the site exists, explain it.

What is the site trying to do? Is it an information site? It’s it entertaining? Determine what the site is and then design each page of the site around it. Here’s the theme of the page – if it’s not clear then you’ve not optimized the content properly. Good information should be at the top of the page.

Think about the end user, this is the person you want to communicate to about the content.

Quick exercise to use on your site: make a list of all site pages then ask yourself:

Does each page have a theme?
Is there a call to action on each page?

Best SEO specialist is you. Here’s a handful of useful tools to analyze content and help you work: Cleverstat - Shareup Snapfiles

Know your audience what is the content your visitor wants to see there? Find someone who is part of your target audience to go through site with you.

Be creative in your user keywords, broader keywords are less competitive

People and spiders like new content, be sure it’s relevant to your site.

You need to be careful with misspelling, people are turned off with them, and they might not use you for lack of trust. Check for grammatical errors and misspelled words.

Make what you want your customers to do – the easiest thing they can do.

If you give her a card/email she’ll send you a cheat sheet for content providers.

David DeVries – Microsoft

At the end of the day it’s the results that matter to a business owner.

Showed Microsoft small business pages when bCentral which was very content heavy versus now (showed site) it has video, call to action, ask the experts, etc – exposing content in different ways. They’re taking a more multimedia approach.

Here are there 5 steps to great content:

1. Identify your audience and their needs – ask what their needs are, what problems can the content solve? How does your audience search?

2. Choose new keywords. What’s the target market searching for?

1. Take stock of your existing content – look for gaps in resources, don’t have the same information everyone else does. Inventory the properties/assets on your site

2. Build content within zones of opportunity. Be sure you can place it in a way that it makes sense and is easy for customers to consume it. Look to build wikis, blogs, podcasts, forums, training, user generated content, etc – how can you add all these elements so the end user can easily use and understand?

3. Once content is in place, promote the content on the site. Promote through RSS, newsgroups, develop a personal dashboard, blogs etc. Promote the content off site as well, share video with YouTube and Google video, increases traffic and real estate in Google universal.

Great results come from great content strategy. A planned journey is key, continually re-evaluate your site.

Benjamin Lloyd

Going to show case studies and practical advice to help with your content strategy.

First case study – Tripwire. Unfortunately, Benjamin used a laser pointer on the screen opposite where I was sitting to point out elements while he spoke so I couldn’t see what he was talking about!

Focus on solution content development, architecture improvement and optimization. Leverage content rich white papers and web casts content for search traffic and lead generation. Develop niche specific links to deep content.

Don’t put your white papers behind a registration process, search engines can’t find it. Include an overview of what the paper is about. Bold headlines, include forms for people to fill out and ask for more information. When content changes were made search results and conversions went up.

For B2B clients – need to think about what you need to solve. Boost content and increase effectiveness.

TheFertileSoil.com was the second site for the case study. Site is about acupuncture.

The owner wanted to generate qualified prospects and registrations for a retreat she offered. To drive more registrations, they used PPC but needed more long term strategy. Through research they found out women searched for problems not solutions so content was written to talk about women’s problems. Search traffic went up as a result.

Universal search results mean more of your content is content for search engines. But text is still critical. Wrap video and audio results into page. Timely content is found faster, allow your users to generate content for your site and blogs.

Debra Mastaler - Alliance-Link / TheLinkSpiel Blog

If you build a user friendly site, chances are you've also built a search engine friendly site. This session teaches how good usability can help your human visitors while bringing in search traffic.

Moderator: Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro Search Solutions

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, Omni Marketing Interactive
Matt Bailey, Site Logic Marketing

Finally, it is about 12:30 pm Thursday and this is the last session of the day. Today is a half-day, with tomorrow devoted to training. People are still trickling in. I've covering this session for the third or fourth time...am losing count. Ice cream cones are being passed around. Gord throws one to someone in the audience. It gets thrown around until it finally lands in the back to someone in the audience. The speakers and Gord are eating them too. He kills time by asking how the parties were last night. Room is about full. Gord introduces Shari by using her old company. She teases him about that. Gordon remarks they get less formal as the days wear on. By the time the session was ending, the room was packed.

Shari:

She will discuss search usability vs web site usability. A lot of SEO's don't understand web site usability. People type in keyword phrase. Ave. is 2.3 words. Get a search result. They go to the page they desire. SE's do term hightlighting of that word. This provides "scent of information" (see Jared Spool). They want to see their same keywords on the page they click into. IF you design for the user only you won't make a lot of money.You need to meet business goals too. People don't always create using user personas or base design on user behaviors. Browsing? Pogo sticking (jumping between pages), foraging, scanning, reading, berrypicking. Querying. These are search behaviors to take into consideration. Scent of info, sense of place, user confidence, info arch vs site nav, interface are key concepts in search usability.

Scent of info is make of text and graphical cues that people use to decide a path to chooose. Term highlighted in engines helps with scent of information by offering clues. Usability serves relevancy via HTML title tags, body copy. Secondary text is meta tag desc and url structure. Provide a sense of place and scent of information. This encourages clicks to the your pages. There is the 8 second (or 5 second) test. Show people your page for 5-8 seconds. Ask where are you? What are you viewing? What is the topic? Is the info you want there? This helps you understand if the keywords are there or not or the content provides enough scent of information clues. She gives a demonstration of a page constructed and describes the content elements, how screen real estate is used, where people's eyes go first, how search engines react to the page, etc. Recommends not removing the underline for clickable links. Because blue is associated with being a click, using blue for non clickable words is confusing to people. Her demo page also shows a litle bit about how to redundant info to help visitors understand the page.

Info arch is the organization of site content into groups. Determine info arch first, then design. She has a demo page that shows navigation, groupings of info. Asked people what are you viewing? They got it 100% right because page was keyword focused and navigation supports it via keyword oriented labels and specific placement of info. Keywords help your visitors find what they want while also aiding search engines. Site nav, cross linking,page layout, allocation of page real estate and url structure is where you add keywords to content to be spider friendly. Shows a demo of breadcrumb navigaiton and how you can put words in reverse

order in the breadcrumb trail, for keyword searches in reverse order. Cross link vertically as well as horizontally. Use embedded text links. If you have a glossary, you should have some form of alphabetical navigation (A, B, C, D etc.) Every site should have a sitemap. Don't make sea of blue. Annotate the links. She says if you have to create a sitemap so your users can use the site, it means your site isn't built right. There are those who disagree with this few as well. Simple URLS are the ones users will remember the most. (The ones minus the extra parameters.) One sub directory or two? Both are fine and both are search engine friendly. Sub directory or sub domain are fine. Sub domains are recommended for very large sites. URLS can and should communicate the site arch and it doesn't hurt rank She shows a case study...says a swear word and asks me not to blog it. (That was funny.) The case studies show how different organization of elements on a page, with exact same content, compare with each
other. You have to consider the end user. The performance of tasks was tested. Search usability helps web pages be found and helps visitors use the site once its found.

Matt:

Last speaker, last session, last day...he jokes. Usability is always last. Says he's on a sugar high from the ice cream. Search and usability are hand in hand. SEO is a child of usability and site arch. When you make usability changes on your site you will see changes in search results too. Number one goal of search is to get people to your site. Increase qualified traffic. USability is what happens when they get there.

Where do you want them go and what do you want them to. IF they can't find it, it's not there. It's your problem if users can't find what they want.

Matt launches his traditional funny screenshots of bad sites. Seeing is believing and this session is always hysterical.

If you try to force people where to go. Shows a site where you can shop now or enter the site. You can't do both? Avoid user fear. Should I have clicked that other button? They second guess themselves. Shows a page with product info with images that make it look like they have one product to sell. Shows a ecommerce site with ads that take users off-site as soon as they get there. Shows a page with navigation you can't see, including contact us. Color and placement matter. Taxonony- hierarchal stucture, classication, grouping. You need to determine how people classify things. People don't do it the same way. When you develop

keyword groups, how do your users group the words? This information goes into your navigation labels and information arch. How do you shop for wine? Region? Red, wine, pink? Blends? Wine.com takes this into account for their groups of links. You can provide different ways to look for products so people can find them. Make links clear and visible. This allows SE's to see those pages. You can also interlink your own web pages.

Break out products into categories. Show related links on the page. Don't force anyone to go back out to main navigation or homepage to start a new search on your site. Shows a page with several navigation schemes that confuse the task at hand. Know when to stop selling and when to allow them to get what they want. Shows a redundant navigation structure that works. There is a left side nav and inside content version but the content one has descriptive content that further describes the link. Avoid using "more" and "click here". Allow your users to explore. Give them the ability to find related items. Make it easy for someone who knows specifically that they want and wants to get in and get out. You also want to enable browsers to find info, be sold on what they're looking for.

Be product specific with terms. Call your product what your customers will call it. Users are searching for specific products rather than brands. Sales decisions are emotional decisions. Shows a Fish n Flush product. Not something people would be normally looking for. People have to know it exists before they can search for it. Landing pages, people want to know if this is the right page they should be on. Avoid dropping them on homepage. Put them on product pages instead. They want to immediatey get what they want.

He gets to the Butt Paste page (he's used this before. Always gets the most laughs.) It's really diaper rash ointment. Why don't you call it that? Branding vs what people call it. People don't search for butt paste.

Shows a product page where you can recommend it to a friend but you can't buy it. Shows a funny sushi disk page with all kinds of illogical elements on it...have to see it to understand. Shows a page with repeated keywords to the extreme. Shows a page where you hit "Start shopping" but you're presented with 3 PDFs to read first. You have to read to the policies first or "you will lose financially". (A real site did this.) Shows a cup warmer page with a ton of content on a silly product.

People look for different things. Digital camera info has to be different than MP3 player shoppers. You can't sell it the same way. International, content may be lost in translation, avoid slang, use clear instructions.

Don't assume that something is usable here, it is usable globally.

What are people saying about your company or clients? What are the hot trends that turn into keywords you should be mining? Discover tips and techniques for monitoring buzz in this session.
Moderator:

* Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:

* Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
* Andy Beal, Consultant, Editor, Author, MarketingPilgrim.com
* Jonathan Ashton, Director of SEO, Agency.com

Chris introduces the session and says that if you have negative publicity, you need to reduce the effects of it.

By the way, I have better hearing than Lisa. I can hear Chris just fine. But he does seem to be a little shy.

First up is Rob Key.

What is buzz? Consumers want to talk to consumers. They don't trust marketers; they trust each other. MySpace gets more traffic than Google.

Social media is linkable. You can't have a search strategy without a social media strategy. You cannot have a social media strategy without a search strategy.

You no longer own your brand. Your brand is a conversation.

There are different parts of the conversation - enterprise, mainstream media, and consumer generated content. Unless you're monitoring the buzz, you won't know what's there.

What is the conversation below the waterline? Buzz monitoring is conversation mining. You can scour the discussion areas to capture, understand, and report the products, issues, and opinions that consumers share between and among themselves. This includes newsgroups, blogs, podcasts, and social media sites.

The value of conversation mining is that you can spot trends and find out what customers really think of them. They can come up with ideas and concepts and companies can now listen in and engage.

Conversation mining helps marketers promote and protect their brands through the measurement of analysis of online word of mouth.
- Where is it being appearing?
- What is being discussed?
- What should I be wary of?
- Who is talking? Is it customers or employee?
- Is my market engaging with consumers?

What are the core business uses?
The failure of conversation mining is that when you won't take advantage of these issues, you may have issues with reputation management. It's an extension of customer service.
- Reputation Management
- New Product Launch
- Market Effectiveness
- Customer Service
- Brand Management
- Sales & Acquisition

Key mining dimensions: what do you want to mine for?
- What's the source?
- How do they feel? Positive, negative, netural?
- What's the topic? Product quality, service?
- Tone - enthusiastic, angry, etc?
- How influential is the venue?
- How deeply do they understand the product? Do I need to educate them further?
- Existing versus new voices.

Conversation leads:
- Influence: who are the most frequent and visible voices in the brand? What are they talking about and what is their sentiment?

Trending - category conversation mining. Trending over time provides great insights, allows you to find out if the sentiment is changing, and learn about the new topics. How are the perceptions of new voices?

Above the waterline: what's the source, what's the tone? You can see the stuff below the waterline and before it moves p.

Social media mining:
What's your reputation for the most popular terms?
Who can you influence?

Making it actionable: buzz monitoring allows you to create a social media strategy and we define social media strategy to proactively and ethically engage in proliferating consumer-generated media universe to inform the community.

Social media has detractors - reasonable detractors who you should kill off and determinate detractors who hate you and will be hard to work with.

Social media can enable you to take your site to the top.

Next up is Andy Beal who talks about buzz monitoring and wants to tell us how to take advantage of it for free.

Why should you track? There are a number of reasons:
- Get product ideas
- Get keywords (keyword research)
- Be prepared for scandals
- Product recalls
- Industry trends
- Client opportunities
- Customer reactions
- Competition

What should you track?
- Company name
- Executives
- Customers
- Patents
- Press releases
- Competitors
- Stocks
- Services
- News

Industry: you can subscribe to RSS feeds that are broken down by industry. If you want to track the most recent news, you can get an idea of what's happening by going into Google News which tracks mainstream media and second and third-tier news sites. You can subscribe to that RSS feeds as well.

News Buzz: you can search for items on Digg. (Now I'm happy I chose my Digg shirt to wear today.) If you're a voyeur, you can use products like Digg Spy.

Blog posts are good to track. Technorati has a great amount of information for industries. This is probably the best RSS feed to subscribe to if you choose to limit your subscriptions.

Google blog search also works rather well. It picks up on things within a matter of minutes.

Blog comments: the conversation may have a deeper impact than the post itself. Make sure you see that too. Someone could have written a very positive post but the tone may change in the comments if your detractors are there. You can subscribe to comments.

Blog conversations - viral blogging - you blog, someone else blogs, etc. Blogpulse.com/conversation

Blog trends: you can check blog trends and see how often a topic has been blogged about. A service that does this is blogpulse.

Bookmarks: we're very lucky that people bookmark sites publicly rather than locally. Delicious is a good site. Subscribe to that RSS feed. Now when people bookmark things you can track it and see what's being said.

Photos/videos: You might want to keep track of anyone who has been uploading photos of your product. You want to make sure you can track Google Video, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

Tags: Everybody is tagging things these days. Check the brand name and see what people have tagged with a particular word. Then you can browse through Technorati, delicious, etc.

Forum posts: These are hard to track but we have BoardTracker that keeps track of conversations.

Changing information: Wikipedia.org. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all the changes made to that page.

Job Listings: Oodle.com. You can use this to aggregate classifieds. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for that.

SEC filings: For example, google.brand.edgar-online.com lets you find out about these publicly traded companies.

Patents: google.com/patents. Look for ideas or keep track of your competitors.

Conference calls: You can subscribe to transcripts of conference calls.

Events: upcoming.yahoo.com. You might want to know what conferences are being held, etc.

New Products; amazom.com/tag/productname - you can see what other tags are being applied to products as well.

Search queries: Google Trends. This can be narrowed down to city.

Keyword referrals: searchanalytics.compete.com. If you type in the phrase iPhone, you can see which sites get the most traffic for that phrase. Compete can also tell you what search terms your competitors are ranking for.

Email Updates: google.com/alerts

The untrackable: copernic.com tracks a page for you and tells you as soon as it's changed. It's great for monitoring a BBB report or a PR page of your competitors.

Lastly, Yahoo! Pipes can be set up to track many different products. You can track conversations that happen in real time.

The last speaker of the conference is Jonathan Ashton.

He is focused on talking about minimizing the impact of complaints.

How much do you have invested in your brand? It's very important to do online because search engines can magnify that space. Brand owners can no longer control your message. The community sites facilitate the word of mouth communication. That branding you've invested can be killed completely by one single complaint.

He illustrates some brands that don't exist anymore because of the impact of negative word of mouth marketing. Complaints can have a life of their own.

Buzz management is now brand management. Push marketing from corporate sources is less impactful. In this era of social computing, word of mouth, customer reviews, and tagging that carries more weight than the billions of dollars you've invested.

You need to abandon the top-down perspective on brand management. Actively seek out the communities that respond and engage them.

Terminix and Orkin are brands under siege:
- 99% of customer satisfaction means that there are tens of thousands of less than satisfied customers.
- Complaints and bad buzz of all kinds show up in the SERPs when these brands are searched.

Some sites that do this are:
- BBB
- Ripoff Report
- My3cents.com
- Complaints.com
- consumeraffairs.com
- TheSqueakyWheel.com
But do your teams actually play defense?

The blog is really the soapbox of the new millennium. Today, it carries worldwide. Search Terminix and look at the third SERP.

Problems, complaints, and other problems show up in the results as well. You can find out about lawsuits and settlements. Even though they were from the past, they live in the presnet.

Co-opetition (book published in 1997). Finding ways to work with competitors and positively influence the environment in which you live so that you can separate the brand from the complaint.

Simple solutions:
- When you search for Orkin, right above the fold is a complaint. Bid up some sites that are based on your brand. It may push the results below the fold.
- Maximize your site to run interference. Give yourself over knowing that your customers are complaining about you. If your site is "Orkin Customer Service," change it to "Orkin compliments and complaints" so you'd rank higher. (Their Customer Service page has a high PageRank so it has high authority.) Modify your property to deal with this.
- Help your corporate siblings to do better as well. Many local branch websites should also be linked to the results to push bad pages down.
- Get your HR involved. Get a brand landing page on Monster and CareerBuilder so that it will be optimized for keywords related to your brand.
- Maximize your PR. Use sites like newsreleasewire.com, marketwire.com, etc.
- Wikipedia. Orkin has a Wikipedia article and Terminix does not.
- Help accidental tourists: You can pass link popularity to people who have the same name. Jeff Orkin is not related at all to the company but you should pass juice to him so you can push down that bad buzz.
You can't put the genie in the bottle but you can reducethe negative buzz with creative thinking and co-opetition.

Representatives from major crawler-based search engines cover how to submit and feed them content, with plenty of Q&A time to cover issues related to ranking well and being indexed. Danny Sullivan the conference Co-Chair is moderating with Peter Linsley of Ask.com, Evan Roseman of Google,  from Eytan Seidman Microsoft and Sean Suchter of Yahoo! Search are panelists.

Eytan is up first for a short presentation. He talks about their Live Webmaster Portal which includes features on how Microsoft will crawl your site. They support site map submissions and you can also see statistics specific to your web site.

They have multiple crawlers that will always begin with "MSNBot" -

- web search
- news
- academic
- multimedia
- user agent

Next he points out that they support "NOCACHE" and NOODP" tags.

Sean is up next for a short presentation on some updates with the Yahoo! crawler. One is dynamic URL rewriting via Site Explorer. Another thing is the "Robots-nocontent" tag which allows you to block access to certain portions of a web page. They have implemented crawler load improvements (reduction and targeting). New crawler has lower volume with better targeting.

Evan is up next and to start things off, he highlights Webmaster Central and explains some of its features. He suggests that you take advantage of it to submit a site map so that Google can index all your content. He also points out the Google Help Center in which they feature answers to some of the most common questions.

Finally, Peter is up. He talks about catering to the search engine robot as many times in catering to the actual human visitor, the robot is forgotten. Some problems include requiring cookies. He points out that Ask does accept site map submissions but points out that they'd rather be able to crawl naturally.

Peter uses the Adobe site to demonstrate some issues that they may have with multiple domains and duplicate content. He then uses the Mormon.org site and shows that they are disallowing crawlers to index the root page. This creates problems with crawling.

Now begins the Q&A portion of the session.

Q: First question if for Google rep. Wants to know whether they will allow users to see supplemental results within Webmaster Central now that they are no longer tagging them in search results.

A: Evan stated that being in supplemental is not a penalty but did not provide a definite answer as to whether they would allow users to discover if or not results are supplemental.

Danny interjects that all engines have a two-tier system and Eytan, Sean and Peter confirmed that. So... they all have supplemental indices but people only seem to be concerned with Google's, most likely because they used to identify them as such in the regular search results.


Q: What can a competitor actually do if anything to hurt your site?

A: Evan says that there is a possibility where a competitor could hurt your site but did say it is extremely difficult. Hacking, domain hi-jacking are some of the things that can occur.


Q: Question relates to scenario when you re-publish content to places such as eBay but the sites you re-publish to rank better than original. How can a webmaster identify original source of information?

A: Peter answers that one could try to get places they republish content to use robots.txt to block spidering of content. Another thing to do is have link back to original site. However on a site such as eBay, that is not always possible. The response to that is to create unique content for these sites that this person is re-publishing content on.


Q: Robert Carlton asks if all engines are moving towards having things like Webmaster Centrals. Also asks how they treat 404s and 410s.

A: As for 404s and 410s, Ask, Google and Yahoo! treat them the same. Robert points out that they should treat them differently as a 410 indicates the file is gone whereas 404 is an error.


Q: Question regarding getting content crawled more frequently.

A: Evan suggest to use the Site Map feature in Webmaster Central and keep it up to date. He also suggest promoting it by placing a link to it on the home page of their site.


Q: How can one use site maps more effective for very larges site that have information changing on a regular basis? Also inquired how to get more pages indexed when only a portion are being indexed.

A: Submitting a site map with Google is not going to cause other URLs to not be crawled. Evan also points that they are not going to be able to crawl and include ALL the pages that are out there. Again suggests that webmaster promote them such as listing them on home page. However when dealing with hundreds of thousands of pages, that is not always feasible.


Q: How do engines interpret things like AJAX, JavaScript, etc.?

A: Eytan answered that if webmaster wants things interpreted, they are going to have to represent those in a format the engine can understand, AJAX and JavaScript currently not being one of them.


Q: Question regarding rankings in Yahoo! disappearing for three weeks but then they get back in. Is his due to an update?

A: Sean answers that it certainly could be and suggests using Site Explorer to see if there is some kind of issue.


Q: How many links will engines actually crawl per page? How much is too much?

A: Peter says there is no hard and fast rule but keep the end user in mind. Evan echoes the same feeling.


Q: Do the engine use meta descriptions?

A: All engines use them and may use them if the algorithm feels they are relevant.


Q: For sites that are designed completely in Flash, can you use content in a "noscript" tag or would that be considered as some type of cloaking?

A: Sean said IP delivery is a no-no but if the content is the same as Flash, he'd rather see content in noscript than traditional cloaking. Evan suggests avoiding sites in complete Flash but rather use Flash components.


Q: Is meta keywords tag still relevant?

A: Microsoft - no, Yahoo! - not really, Google - not really, and Ask - not really. All read it but it is has so little bearing. For a really obscure keyword where it only appears in the keyword tag and no where else on the web, Yahoo! and Ask are the only ones that will show a search result based on it.


Q: How do engines view automated submission/ranking software?

A: Evan - don't use them.


I asked a Peter Linsley a question after the session regarding whether Ask is working to make their index fresher. In other words, are they working to re-index content as fast as the other engines do as typically it takes 6 months or more to get changes made to pages in the Ask index.

He said they are working on it but cannot give me any definite timeframe as to when that might be rolled out.

I also asked if they prioritize sites such as a CNN or Amazon in that changes to those sites are updated in the index more frequently than a mom and pop brochure type of a site and he confirmed that was true.


David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank

The growth of Wikipedia and its almost ubiquitous presence on search results pages means that search marketers can't ignore this important guide. This session looks at appropriate ways to interact with the service. It also examines if there's more that can be done to make Wikipedia editors more accepting of marketers and to make marketers more understanding of the Wikipedia community goals.
Moderator:

* Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies

Speakers:

* Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
* Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
* Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates LLC
* Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

First up is Neil Patel. Neil is pretty cool. He's going to introduce Wikipedia. He talks very fast. I'm really sorry if this is incoherent.

It's good for authority links, branding, and information (especially for copying essays). Wikipedia also gets a ton of traffic especially since it's so high up in the Google SERPs.

What you shouldn't do:
- Do not use Wikipedia as a link building resource.
- Do not add biased information. They hate that.
- You don't want to break rules.
- Don't want to delete accurate information. (If you put in inaccurate information, Neil's term papers will get him a bad grade. He doesn't want that.)
- You don't want to SPAM.

Once, Neil totally broke the rules and added a link to his website, but they found out and he got in trouble.
Rule of thumb: Don't be a dick.

How to add links:
- Develop a reputation as an editor.
- Add information first, links second.
- Follow the Notability rule.

Adding images is good for branding. You will succeed and you will do well.

Wikis are everywhere. You don't need to leverage Wikipedia only. There are real estate Wikis, etc., and those are easier to manipulate.

Jonathan Hochman is a Wikipedia editor. He focuses a lot on SEO on Wikipedia and he wants to resolve the issue of the SEO reputation problem (which I covered yesterday!) Wikipedia ranks really well for SEO in Google. Competing for that spot is hard in SEO.

Wikipedia can rank for almost any generic search phrase. Even if you can't outrank the competition, Wikipedia probably can
What's better at the top fo the search results? A neutral Wikipedia rticle or propganda from your competitor?
How to optimize a Wikipedia page:
- Introduce links from other articles
- Add proper categories

Digg is great but Wikipedia gets better traffic. If you look at Social media, Wikipedia is better than Digg. (By the way, I am in the front row wearing a Digg shirt. I'm getting a bit sad.)

There is a thing called a spam blacklist and sites will be added to the blacklist. Search engines know about this blacklist as well. I wouldn't recommend that you join that blacklist.

Articles have to exist in Wikipedia as long as the subject is notable. There was an article about Matt Cutts that had no notability and it was nominated for deletion. That wasn't a bad thing to do, because most people don't know who he is. So you need to find notable sources to validate these entries. Also, it's not good form to start an article about yourself (like Barry did). :)

WikiScanner allows you to see IP edits from many sources. If you have a big brand, avoid getting yourself embarrassed. Make policies. Tell your people that editing Wikipedia at work is not anonymous and they need to follow site rules and avoid conflict of inflicts. I recommend a liaison take appropriate action for Wikipedia issues.

Example: zango - Check the Wikipedia page. It's perceived by many as a spyware application and thus people are writing bad things about them. But Zango is not happy with this so they're communicating with the users through the Talk page. You can use the Talk page to get attention. You can also go to the Conflict of Interest notice board to notify someone about inaccuracies.

Last thought is Tom Sawyer: you get all your friends to paint the fence. Get people to write about you and write important things about you. Think about that in those terms and you can promote great value.

Next up is Don Steele of Comedy Central. He shows a clip of Stephen Colbert editing Wikipedia. "If enough people agree with it, it becomes true." Comedy Central is a division of Viacom.

Wikipedia is one of the tenets of their online strategy. They're using social networking, email marketing, search, videos, etc. But their content is viewed as products and they are trying to find people's content that they can trust and discover.

Why do they care about Wikipedia? In the SEO world, it's huge. They want to channel it and make it better. The content is highly referenced on Wikipedia. If there are links back to Comedy Central, they need to be up-to-date and not 404 pages. They need to focus on a good user experience. Comedy Central needs to use discussion pages to get their company's word across.

Wikipedia brings a ton of traffic to them.

How did they sell the idea internally? There are 50 million users a month on Wikipedia. For branding, that's huge to understand the reference of your brand. Getting all this traffic through Wikipedia is free instead of doing it through an SEM agency.

What we don't do: Google/YouTube vs. Viacom's lawsuit is known. They won't edit that out because they are not changing the brand perception. They work with discussion pages and editors and let them know about relevant content to promote it.

Sean Penn was once on the Colbert Report with a guy named Robert Pinski. This was put on Wikipedia. That ended up driving traffic to Comedy Central through Wikipedia. Cool.

Beforehand, Comedy Central was able to edit the pages, but now they can't due to IP tracking. So they post references in discussion pages. Wikipedia editors are decision makers. They don't troll for outbound links. They want to encourage conversations within Wikipedia.

South Park is not known to the staff of Comedy Central at 5pm. But at 8am, they get a press release about the episode. Someone who received this press release unrelated to Comedy Central put it on Wikipedia. The following morning, there were 3 pages on Wikipedia about this episode created by editors. Wikipedia has a rabid audience. But Comedy Central does want to make sure that the information conveyed on these pages are accurate.

Summary:
- You must understand how your brand is conveyed on Wikipedia.
- You should monitor Wikipedia.
- You must follow the rules.

Last up is Stephan Spencer.

You need history and street cred to get your edits to stick. It helps to have an altruistic profile. But if you don't, your entries will be deleted. A virtuous profile has a lot of age to it and has great history of altruistic edits, has won awards (Barnstar).

You should deelop a user page and a talk page. It helps to work your way up to Adminship status.

When you make an edit, you don't just want to add links. A harder edit to revert is one that you edit juicy content at the same time as that link. Add links to the references section and not to the external links section.

Communicate with the main editor of that article before adding an external link and negotiate with them. Ask them what they think.

References must substantiate claims made in the article copy. Reference links that require registration or login to access the information may be construed as spam.

When you create new entries:
- Really important to clear the notability hurdle. Criteria: having something that's notable enough to be mentioned in a mainstream encyclopedia. Be written up in the mainstream media that are mainly about you (not just a passing reference). Get your PR firm to work on this stuff.
- Have more solid contribution history for a new article to stick. You're guilty until proven innocent.
- Make sure there is no connection with you and the article subject.
- How do you make sure that the entries are perceived as real value and are neutral? If you're going to be editing/adding content to a page, do so by participating through the Talk page. It's a great venue for communication.
- Watch the page after it's added because it can get shot down at any time. You don't want it to get Speedy Deleted or AfD (Articles for Deletion). If you get AfD, jump in and get your $0.02 to stack the deck and get the rubber stamp on your argument and the article.

Once you added a page, protect your investment - watch and make sure it stays. Use a tool that emails you when a web page changes (TrackEngine, ChangeNotes, ChangeDetect are some services that do this).

Wikipedia is a social network. It requires friends and you're going to need them.

Maintain activity of your profile. Keep altruistic edits going. If you make self serving edits, have a nice balance of that and other edits. Be selfless and there will be dividends. This is a bizarre community kind of like Digg. (Remember, I'm still wearing that shirt.) There's a lot of politics. The fact that Jimmy Wales is a cofounder of Wikipedia and also owned a soft porn website gets into Wikipedia but he tries to get them removed. The information is on wikitruth.info.

Everything you do is going to leave a trail. Anybody can get nailed into the future because every single edit is kept. You need the tools to mine that and make sense of that.

In the book Freakonomics, there's the story of teachers changing the test answers of their students. It took some time for that to be picked up but they got fired eventually. That can happen on Wikipedia. Don't think you're anonymous.

Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief, The ClickZ Network

Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

Lee starts off saying, "in the spirit of the session, we thought we have some of the people in the audience to come up and give the presentation for us." I enjoyed that joke.

1) Users spend a lot of time in UGC (user generated content)
2) Consumers expect to be able to make their own content
3) Consumers trust user generated content
4) Product reviews increase sales
5) Increases conversions
6) It is a great way to generate SEO generated content

UGC is various kinds of media content that are produced by end users.

He then showed examples of sites using UGC.

Types of UGC:
- Information Resources
-- Wikipedia
-- Linked In
-- Yahoo Answers
-- Etc.

Platforms:
- Reviews
- Blogs
- Etc...

Pros:
- UGC is trusted
- Contributors are loyal
- More content for search engines
- More information sources for users

Cons:
- Oversight and moderation
- Spam
- False and outdated info
- Who owns the content
- Structure can be challenging
- Negative information about your brand

Tips on Optimizing UGC:
- Crawlable URLs
- No session IDs
- Less than 3 parameters
- Links crawlable
- Site Architecture
-- Pre define keyword rich categories, topics and tags
-- Logical structure and cross linking, bread crumb navigation
- Template optimization
-- Focus dynamic content as the majority of the on page text
-- Dynamic insert title tags, meta descriptions, image al text and anchor text

- Create incentives for content creation
-- Contests
-- Add functionalities to make it easy

- Crowdsourcing, create a task community with generating ideas, content for a particular goal/purpose
- Reward super users with more access and benefits, status

Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex

Case for User Reviews:

- Good For Marketing
-- Users add content, often using key search terms
-- You gain unique content on boilerplate product pages or...
-- Create new pages targeting "review" searches for that product
-- May capture more "long tail" queries

- Good For Business
-- Reviews educate customers
-- Fewer product returns
-- Reviews educate the retailers also
-- Reviews lead to more sales

Overcoming Fear of Users

- Fear of Negative Reviews
-- 85% of reviews are positive on Yelp
-- According to Bazaarvoice says 80% of all reviews are either four or five stars
-- Negative reviews can be helpful
-- Negative reviews create trust
-- Reality, no product/service is perfect for everyone

- What if they are not my customer
-- Fake reviews
--- Not a huge issue
--- Track IPs of reviewers
--- Require registered accounts, manual processing of submitting reviews via email and "was this review helpful" feature

Implementing Reviews
- Add policy
- Make sure reviews can be crawlable
- Allow shoppers to sort products by rating
- Create a top rated products category
- Promote the UGC part

Where to get reviews:
- Do it yourself
- Bazaarvoice
- PowerReviews
- Amazon
- Inods
- Expotv

Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media

To give case study on his site named HomeStudy

- UGC 1.0 + $$$ + Crowdsourcing savvy = UGC 2.0

First examples:
- Open Directory Project
-- Army of editors
-- Supposedly overcomes the scalability issue
-- Directories then fell out of favor
-- Issues with quality control

- TripAdvisor
-- Users help each other to avoid bad travel experiences, find good ones, etc.

Lessons learned
- You can make money from this so now everyone is doing it
-- YouTube
-- etc.

Unique Advantages of UGC
- Search Engine Strategy
-- It dovetails with search
-- Doesnt compete with search engines
- Search Engine Tactics
-- Smart tacticians will architect site properly
-- Content is popular, topical
- Solves long tail weaknesses of editorial driven media
- Fills a human need for community and content

UGC Checklist
- Got search engine strategy
-- Is it risky (he says like Squidoo)
- Using Search Tactics
-- Architecture
-- On-page and off page
- Do you compete with Google (i.e. Mahalo)
- Do users have any incentive to contribute en masses
- Any major drawbacks that will sink you?
-- Legal
-- User interest is fleeting
-- Credibility and truthfulness
-- Space just too competitive
- Can you become a destination or platform, so 1,2,3 no longer matter

He said TripAdvisor had all of this in place, so they did well

PlentyOfFish.com is a great example, turned a dating site into an open network. It grew like wild fire.

Yelp had good search engine strategies, the incentives were offline promotions,

NowPublic.com doesnt have a search strategy

Squidoo's top 100 is pretty much all about handbags, seems like that screen shot was spammed.

Mahalo's problem is that they do have crowdsouricng but they compete with Google. They cant win unless they become a destination.

HomeStars "the zillow for after you own the home"
- Search strategy like Yelp
- Sheer user interest

Questions:
- How dependent is your site on user generated content?

Pose questions to our panel of experts about free "organic" listing issues, plus participate in this session that allows the audience to share tips, tools and techniques. There's no set agenda, so this is an ideal session to discuss any major recent changes with organic listings.
Moderator:

* Danny Sullivan, Conference Co-Chair, Search Engine Strategies San Jose

Speakers:

* Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* David Naylor, SEO, Bronco
* Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online Media
* Jill Whalen, Owner, High Rankings
* Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC

It is 9am. David Naylor and Greg Boser are wearing sunglasses in an already dim room. Danny is talking about sumo wrestlers. Todd Friesen's nametag is printed backwards. That gives you an idea of what happened last night.

Mike Grehan says that he's the only sober person on the panel. I actually believe him.

Greg Boser says that scheduling this panel at 9am is a sick joke. Danny mumbles, "Oh, but I'm here too."

Today will be an interesting day.

Q: I was just curious about proximity of content and the source code being weighted heavier based on perceived importance. Do you think it really matters anymore? Do you think the engines can determine where the content is from the source codes?
Bruce: I've run experiments on my own site and moved code up and moved code down. I haven't seen it impact rankings at all. But if you repeat the same stuff on the top of the page, we recommend that you take it off or reposition it. The table trick is something you can implement it (search for it on Google).
Followup: Can you expand upon externalizing scripts and its ability to
Greg: If your content is not towards the top, you've probably built a crappy website.
Dave: If you keep it really simple, keep in mind that spiders are stupid things. Don't put a gazillion links there.

Q: I have a text driven site and I have dynamic pages that I need to optimize to get into the top 10 in most of them. I was wondering if there's significant advantage of CSS over tables and if I should take that fight to my IT department.
Greg: Yes, you should, only because that's how the web progressive and that's how we roll these days. I don't think there's an SEO benefit but I think it's important to follow and maintain some of those standards. If your website is using the font tag, that's bad becasue it's deprecated. Can you make an argument that you can rank way better? Not really. I wish that search engines did reward valid code but they don't.
Dave: Way back, if you had a lot of elements inside of your table, the page wouldn't render until everything loaded. It's about user experience too.
Jill: The bottom line is that it's not going to affect your SEO. If it's a big deal to revamp your site, don't do it.
Bruce: When I redid my site, I switched from tables entirely to CSS. I also made it W3C compliant. That may be something that emerges. I was moderating a panel at adTech and Google said that the cleaner the code, chances are the search engines will get a better idea of what your site is about. From that point of view, go to CSS because it's simpler.

Q: I work for a medical publisher and we're trying to make as much money as we can off our content. We put scientific articles up and try to sell them. We want to get indexed. I'm facing a problem with duplicate content because we cater to different environments (hospitals, education, etc.) and want that audience to see it in the results. How do you convince the indexers that they want to get it more than one time?
Todd: That's going to be problematic.
Greg: Here's the thing: it won't work. I want things like that too. In the big picture, the engines are really good at duplicate detection. An example is the AP publishes the same story on hundreds of websites verbatim. When you do a search, only one of those websites show up in the results. That's based on trust. If you see the same article over and over, it's poor user experience. The question is: can you leverage the experience in other ways? We do something called conditional redirection (robots.txt file on steroids). We can redirect pages to one central location and you get the benefit of all random links to pages that won't rank anyway.
Dave: If I just take your content and put it on my higher ranking website, whose website are they going to choose?
Followup: All my stuff is copyrighted.
Todd: That doesn't mean anything! (Sad truth.) Having multiple copies and rank one version for one market and one for another market won't work.
Followup: Can you tell my boss that?
(At this point I'm thinking - I just did. I hope you're reading Search Engine Roundtable.)
Dave: They are all about most relevant.
Bruce: How many here syndicate content? This is the exact problem syndicators have. Some people get their content ripped off by affiliates. Your content is going to be indexed on the page that is most relevant to the query. The site that ranks highest is the one that has the highest authority. I had a client (Edmunds.com, the car guys) who would write their content and AOL would copy it. AOL would rank and not Edmunds. This took a lot of effort to straighten out.
Jill: The simple rule is one URL for any piece of content. That's your best bet.

Q: We have an e-commerce site in the states and we want to launch in Europe. We want to host the sites in the US. Is there an issue with that?
Todd: The domain extension will do well for you. If it was sitting on a .com, then you need to start playing around with IPs.
Mike: You do have to have TLDs for a particular country but I've found that being hosted there helps as well.
Greg: The difference is also duplicate content in the US, UK, South Africa, and Australia. Be careful. Also, Google Local favors mobile content more than in the past. If at all possible, use the TLD or the IP that tracks to that country.
Mike: We've had a number of issues where it's not possible for the client to host in their countries. But the best advice is to host in the other countries. Sometimes this isn't feasible financially. I've said to Matt in the past that it would be a great idea to add a tool into Webmaster Central to put in an option where you can specify which country you're targeting.
Greg: You should set up a reverse proxy. You can also do multiview DNS which is cloaking from a DNS level: you give a different IP based on who is trying to resolve the DNS. That can make the engine believe you're in a different country that you're not in.

Q: I am doing a good job at getting ranked on Google, MSN, and Yahoo, but I can't figure out why I don't rank on Ask.
Dave: Ask is a bit weird. Ask looks at communities and themes and areas, so you need to make sure that the authoritive sites in your industry are linking to you.
Todd: In the paid link panel, the big argument was that paid links are all bad because they cannot determine their relevancy. So people bought thousands of links on blog networks. It didn't make sense. Ask really understands this; they really understand the relationship of different communities. I wouldn't worry about it though. Let's wait for them to come out with a new algorithm.
Mike: The original algorithm is subject specific and creating communities. There's an algorithm based on PageRank that is keyword independent. There's a keyword dependent algorithm as well. But I tend to find that the subject matter is really important.
Greg: Their search doesn't scale. Several years ago, someone asked us - "How do you spam our engine?" And I said to them, "I'll tell you as soon as you bring traffic."
Jill: They don't bring traffic, so don't worry.
Danny: Ask's big thing was "when you do a search with us, we're going to take a collection of documents that match the query you look for and we're going to look at keyword relevance and look at the linkings within the documents to get relevance." To me, Ask gets funky because of the way their ranking algorithm.
Dave: Ask prioritizes the way that they spider - if you don't have a robots.txt file, you go to the bottom of the list. Even if it's empty, you're at the bottom of the list.

Q: Our website is teardown.com and we disassemble electronics and we write competitive intelligence reports. We rank well for teardown, assembly, etc., but when we come out with a new report, we don't rank highly that quickly after we publish a report.
Greg: The biggest threat to SEO is the CEO. I suggest you log into his account early in the morning and personalize the results so that he sees the rankings very highly. (Everyone, this is obviously a joke.)
Followup: I can't do that because he stays up all night.
Greg: You should implement an RSS feed because it will attract Google's bot for blogs and that has a lot to do with news search. It helps get you spidered a lot quicker.
Dave: Just put a blog up there with a blog footprint. It will rank you much quicker: an hour, within a day. If your CEO wants to see a new report and ranks immediately, ranks will help.
Mike: I read a whitepaper a few weeks ago about how search engines are able to rank news results faster from looking at RSS feeds. I think that generally speaking, if you have newsworthy content, you need an RSS feed.
Todd: You should also consider press releases.
Jill: How do you link to it when you put it out there? Is it easily accessible from your main navigation?
Followup: We put it on our main page and then put it on the content page.
Jill: That should help.
Bruce: We blog the conference and we actually do it in a pretty much live mode. Every one of our blog posts are spiderable within 15 minutes of being posted. (Hi Lisa!)

Q: I wanted to find out if DMOZ is a player anymore.
Jill: Submit and forget.
Followup: How do you get your listings out of there?
Greg: Just ignore it.
Jill: You can use your noodp tag to get your description out of it.
Followup: Why is Google still using it?
Danny: Google is using their directory but nobody goes to it. They aren't dropping it because if they did, there'd be anger about how Google is dropping open source. So they have it. But the noodp metatag lets you stop using the title in your Google results.
Mike: The main reason why they use those directories is because it's a directory with a human element. But nobody outside the SEO community knows what DMOZ is.
Bruce: Don't worry too much about directories. Last year, I had a half a million unique visitors and last year only one visited me from the Yahoo directory.

Q: I have a client who has tens of thousands of pages on their website and they publish fresh content every day and they didn't do a good job with sitemaps or 301s. The problem is that Google is removing some of these old listings, but Yahoo doesn't flush out this old content. Do you have any tips for removing the old content?
Todd: Within SiteExplorer, they have a facility where you can instantly pull URLs out of the index.
Greg: Buy Tim Mayer something and ask him to fix your stuff.

Q: I'm a jewelry seller. I have very unique content and the site is optimized fairly well. I can't figure out why I'm not ranked. I think that I'm being buried now because sites like Amazon are duplicating my content. What do I do?
Greg: That's it. When you syndicate stuff, that's a risk you're taking. Amazon will always win over your site because it's more trusted. They're the only e-commerce site left in the world that ranks. That's the downside of syndication.
Todd: If you're going to syndicate content on that level, syndicate a different version of your content.

Q: We're trying to protect our copyrighted material and we're trying to put information in our PDF that says we're the authoritivate owner of the site. Does the search engine care?
Todd: No, that's just a link.
Greg: Googlebot is very stupid. They take the content and throw it in a pile with the rest of the data on the Internet. They don't rely on any input on you, the webmaster, becasue we all lie, cheat, and steal. They try to use as little signals as possible provided by you so they focus on authority, PageRank, etc.
Dave: When you think about it, Google doesn't know that you're lying or not.
Bruce: There's an actual tag in HTML called the quote tag. It's supposed to specify the authority of the source for a specific quote. We've been ramping sources in quote tags to point to the original content. Even though there's no proof that anyone pays attention to that HTML, but as part as an overall project, that seems to have helped me. The only assumption here is that the people who duplicate your content actually points to you and uses that tag.
Danny: Your pain is well understood and shared by many people. It's frustrating. We've waited many years for this but they're focused on video copyright theft right now. All those issues on YouTube now are applicable to webpages. Aaron Wall had a good rant where he poked at Google and said they don't care about copyright. The good news is that a lot more people are being vocal about duplicate content, so maybe we'll get better tools in the future to verify the original source of the information.

Q: Bruce, you talked earlier about experimenting on your site with techniques, and I think that most of us do this. But do you recommend setting up a really clean test environment? If so, are there any tips?
Dave: There's no such thing as a really clean test environment. If you're going to do it, put it on a domain that isn't worth keeping. Don't do it on a quality domain ever.
Jill: If you're not trying to push the envelope, use any blog and test how many keywords are indexed in meta descriptions, etc. You won't get in trouble for that and you can learn a lot. That's what I do.
Mike: You can reduce the risk by dealing with an affiliate (webmarketingnow.com)
Greg: The hardest thing is replicating the factors. When you do research and development, you can't replicate authority and trust. You have to test specific theories. In the old days, we can rip government sites and do numerical find and replaces for common words (we'd replace the word census with 19427) and then we can find numeric combinations to find keyword density, etc. because there were no competing pages. We looked at thousands of factors. But you can't draw conclusions from what you see anymore.
Todd: We run SEO for about 28 different brands and we get to look across 28-29 different types of websites in different verticals, but it's very hard to do tests.
Bruce: We did simple tests. I own a lot of URLs. Nobody links to many of these and I have to put in content and then test it, and then I have to take the site down and wait for the data to be deindexed so I can test again. You don't want the first test to bias the second test or the third test.
Dave: In different industries, there are different quality signals in these industries. Consider the pharmaceutical industry. One test may work well for one industry but not for another.

Q: I'm looking for a tool to understand the optimization of my site. Do you have any tools that you'd like to share with us?
Todd: WebmasterCentral helps. You can use tools to find broken links.
Bruce: If you search for "free SEO tools," you can get 132 free tools. I think most of us have proprietary tools that we've written.

Q: I have worries about pages being scraped over the years to the point where snippets of your page are all over the web.
Greg: I apologize for that.
Followup: We always beat somebody who scrapes the whole page. But I'm beginning to see that it's almost as though we're being treated occasionally badly. Have you seen that?
Greg: Some industries are powered almost 100% by scrapers. Most of them will leave your links intact. You can build backlinks from this.
Followup: Most of these people are not taking everything. They're taking snippets. Using a tool like Copyscape helps us find them, but they're not in Google.
Greg: Google is doing a pretty good job. They'll let you put AdSense on it though (laughter).
Dave: That's actually changed. (Yay!) Google has gotten really clever about scraping data.

Q: We're considering using a content management system and I'm worried about using iframes. Is that a problem?
Todd: There are many CMSes: you want to have good URL structure and no iframes.
Dave: Most SEOs use Wordpress for their blogs. Check how to optimize Wordpress.
Jill: You want to be able to customize your title tags and meta descriptions as well.
Dave: Does it use session variables? Those should be crossed off the list.
Todd: Look at people who use these CMSes and see how they're being crawled to see if they are good. We have a client who pays about $500k a year to license the CMS and it propagates the same title over the entire site, so price isn't a good indicator.

Q: We're finding that we're getting a lot of referrals from Google but Yahoo and MSN are not close. Do you find that there are issues with those engines?
Greg; There are demographic differences in the engines. It's not always about volume. Benchmark if it's a ranking issue or if it's just because nobody uses it. The Yahoo index indexes everything really well but doesn't rank it very well.
Bruce: It's very specific to industry on Yahoo. Equally optimized sites may rank differently in different engines. There's no real way of getting a site to rank everywhere without putting in a fair amount of effort.
Todd: MSN does have deep crawl issues. They admit to that.
Dave: I see that all the time. With Google, the amount of backlinks will determine how deep they let you index it. But in Microsoft, there's no indicator to determine how deep they should go. Yahoo is a weird one because they can go crazy and end up with 10x the amount of pages in Google. I don't know.

Community-built web sites, Wikipedia and new sites allowing content being shared through "tagging" can be a great way to tap into links and search driven traffic. This session looks at SMO services and strategies to tap into them appropriately.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, Position Technologies

Speakers:

Neil Patel, ACS
Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz
Todd Malicoat, Consultant (aka "Stuntdubl")

It's the last day for sessions and, sigh, the night after the WebmasterRadio Search Bash, where everyone who was there sounds like a frog this morning. That includes me. The room fills up. This is a fun session because Todd, Rand and Neil give good presentations with humor, funny pictures and lots of resources.

Detlev starts. Asks for show of hands to see how many are here for the first time and want to do it again. Half the room responded. Asks how many people use Linkedin. It's been around for years and is just now starting to become really hot.

Todd:

Do something that people feel. Gives a quote by Kid Rock. You must have a human voice to market with social media. The Cluestrain Manifesto ...read the 95 thesis. It was social media before Linkedin, before the second or third generation of SM. You'll understand link baiting and marketing better if you read it.

Hooks:

attack
humor
contraian (contrary opinion)
news
resource
ego
picture/movie

These are ways to write to attract readers. Links come with something resourceful and a human voice.

Top Titles

Think of your title second
Copy blogger
over promise and deliver
action words
alliteration
social proof
cliched titles work for a reason

Come up with 10 titles based on the type of hook. At least one keyword for good anchor text. Make sure content is focused, make it pretty (bullet points, short paragraphs), make it "magazine good," link out generously. Link out to a variety of areas. Be prepared for failure. Some linkbait will bomb. Ex: The cheating spouse guide - what every guy should know. It was funny. Did well with exposure. Cheating was the anchor text that helped. Stretch relevancy. A new twist onan old topic is the only to get an old topic to new eyeballs. Ex. 8 diseaes that give you super human power - an example of an extreme angle and it did really well as link bait.

Prepare launch date for your piece that you want to market. Use a trusted account. Digg is a 24 hour period. Cram all promo efforts into a short window. Don't always submit to the same sites. Digg, Netscape, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc. as examples

You can ask people for links to your SM article. This is one area where emailing friends for links does work. Cache your content, host images on alt host, search diggslashdot effect. You can get 30-40,000 "nearly worthless" visits, lots of scrapers, tons of backlinks What you really want is trusted links from high profile industry sites. You may only 10 of them out of the thousands of junk links. Track your links. You won't sell to social media. It's not adSense. You want to establish your "flagship" content. Global links. Increased link pop and trust. RSS subscribers.

Rand:

How many of you had heard of SEOMoz. Show of hands. Never did any advertising or marketing. They just did social media marketing.

What is SMM? Social media marketing. Creating web 2.0 profiles on web 2.0 sites. Why? Goal is to build friends and relationsips in the blogosphere and online social sites. Not same demographic as customers.

You can't sell to social media like you do to customers. You can control your market by participation in conversations. What do you people think of your business? You can go and partipate and correct information if you wish to. Some people don't expect the response. Reputation management and link building is done via SM. You can control your brand better in Google and Yahoo better. You get mindshare and branding.

People will see your brand on the social media sites they use. You need to be playing in those spaces.

Where to conduct SMM?

YouTube, Stumbleupon is the 2nd driver of traffic for SEOMoz. They don't have to submit to it or thumbs up there anymore. It's a discovery engine. People want to see something new and different. Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers. Has 3.5 million users now. Broad population there. Digg, Yelp -for local business reviews. Reddit is good for linkbaiting. It's more "Serious" than Digg, Linkedin for business networking. Flicker can expose image content if you brand it well. Netscape, same as Digg and Reddit. Del.icio.us is a bookmarking site. People share their links there. Facebook and MySpace. Craigslist has forums and "best of" Craiglist is popular. Amazon, is where you can leave comments and if you provide content like a book they have a blog in Amazon. Technorati is for if you have a blog. Get people to "favorite you". Newsvine is serious, newsy, you can submit stores, top of the vine, Sphinn (screenshot shows Cre8asiteforums 5th birthday, thank you Rand!~),City Search is another site to submit to. Helium has good editorial quality. Wikihow for some good quality content. SecondLife is at the bottom of the list for a reason. It's a game. But the fad is ending. Twitter can be useful to help communicate that you have something they can link to.

Neil:

Leveraging Digg and Stumbleupon. You need to know the user base. The audience is young. 4525 diggs for "Pictures of the craziest urinals from around the world". Digg users are "retards like me". (audience laughs) Massaging your content. Ex. The angle was an article targeted to those who hate to pay taxes but a popular piece was how to spend the money if you do pay them.

Number of votes, time, voters, submitter, friends - these are important factors. Power submitters do better than random submitter. You can be banned for having too many friends. Stick to a few thousand.

Do not self promote. Add biased. Pay for votes. Break community rules. SPAM. This stuff can ruin your reputation and you will banned for good. If you get caught paying for votes, can be banned. He experimented with submitting with his own site, created 30 accounts on the same IP and he paid for votes. It got pulled and banned.

Do:
Add tons of friends
Participate in communities - same interests; before submitting you want to help the community grow before leveraging it for yourself
Use great titles and descriptions
Become a top user - Do this by submitting to quality stories
Submit during the right time - submit when people are on the web and not sleeping

Q - Someone wanted examples of using the SM sites and how it relates to business.
Rand gave a lot of detailed examples, using different sites and methods. The possibilities are endless. The method has to fit your business. Every situation needs its own plan.

Q - What are tags?
Tagging is used to identify content or images. There are no guidelines for using spaces or dashes. Everybody does tagging and entering the differently. You can tag your own stuff. Readers who post your content can tag it when they submit it. Todd suggests mixing broad and specific tags. Detlev says user generated tags can be helpful and instructive. Be aware that words have different meanings.

Q - How does SM effect search results/behavior (ie. Universal Search)?
High ranked video and podcasts are getting more click thrus than text results.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced yesterday a new crawler behavior for the newly trained Slurp (Yahoo's search crawler). So instead of Slurp running around your site like an untamed animal, it is not more proper and polite.

I looked through the forums yesterday morning to find people discussing any ranking or traffic changes seen at Yahoo but came up with nothing.

Now, however, people are buzzing a bit about traffic changes seen from the Yahoo Search referrer.

One person saw a drop in traffic:

I just ran through some of my results page ranking for Yahoo and man-o-man have I taken a nosedive. Looking through G-Analytics its as if my site ceased to exist on Yahoo on August 18th.

An other person saw a huge spike in traffic:

I don't know if it's significant... but my Yahoo traffic quadrupled today and now outstrips my Google traffic. I don't know if it's a blip but it appears to be an improvement in traffic from Yahoo across the board and not from a few specific keywords.

Typically the forum threads come before any official Yahoo "weather report," but in this case, they came in after.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Chris Pierry from Yahoo
Video usage is widespread. From News to movies, everyone on the internet has watched videos on the internet.

Content Analysis – Extraction of semantic information form unstructured data types. Page analysis, what is the page about
Analysis of the video itself – Flesh tone detection to detect adult content
Audio match form a sound track
Logo detection object detection
Text to Speech

Submit data feeds to Search Engines
Enter accurate data descriptions – titles, keywords, abstracts, summaries, close captions
Embrace the social web!

Biggest challenges – safe search for adult content and copyright violations

User experience – in-place media consumption, hyperlink – jumping to the appropriate scene. Tags, bookmarks, sharing, commenting. Yahoo can play in page, both video and songs/mp3s

Stephen Baker –from EveryZing (formerly PodZinger)
-Core technology of everyzing is speech to text
-Problem with video and multimedia content. – crawlers can only see meta data.
-If you can view the transcript of the video, it helps the crawlers.
-Text Transcript increase Audience Reach, they can help you optimize the page better – tags, content, etc.
-Text transcripts can increase Content Access, can help to create better snippets, etc. -Text transcript from Podzinger also help you navigate through a video via keyword mentions or time mentions
-Text transcripts can be used for monetizing, by issuing calls for ads relevant to the video

Onil Gunawardana VP of Advertising at Blinkx
Indexing –
Automated spiders that literally understand audio/video content
Agnostic approach – ability to use metadata and closed captioning where it exists.
Search and discovery
Autonomy-powered conceptual search that acts on phonetic, as well as textual data in parallel
CQF – Cluster Query Focus delivers relevance and accuracy In non-linked data world
Video Search Engine Types
-First generation – metadata, display-oriented spidering (AOL Video, Altavista, Yahoo)
-Second generation – speech recognition, visual analysis, video optical character recognition (podzinger, blinkx)
-Blinkx SEO Whitepaper – blinkx.com/video-technology#Video%20SEO

Peter Tuttle – Turveo (AOL company)
First wave of improvement for video was in 2004, 2005
2nd wave – iTunes announces you can buy full length videos, the opened the flood gates for content producers
3rd wave – YouTube in 2006
4th wave – Google acquired YouTube, copyright lawsuits ensued, videos taken down and users go to video search engines to find videos

Truveo.com – one stop shop to search all video on video sharing sites, but you can search all the videos on all the sites that have videos.

Truveo offers API’s to enable their users to search and browse through millions of online videos – http://developer.truveo.com -- submit feeds to them too

Li Evans is the owner and editor of Search Marketing Gurus and is also the Search Marketing Manager for Commerce360.

Session Overview:
Forget consumers. You want only the business-to-business audience! This session explores options and issues in targeting B2B.

Moderator:
* Gordon Hotchkiss, President & CEO, Enquiro Search Solutions Inc.

Speakers:
* Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing
* Paul Slack, CEO, WebDex
* Karen Breen Vogel, President and CEO, ClearGauge

Karen
Karen is planning to cover some things that will give us the insights that support complex selling cycles, dealers and distributors.

Agenda
- What's different from B2C
- Making the case for SEO in B2B
- Key Challenges and Solutions
-- Who is the searcher
-- Low sample sizes for testing
-- Avoiding waste
-- Qualifying visitors
-- Measuring the value of a visit or a conversion
B2B goals is more about starting or continuing a relationship. You are not closing the deal.
If you are successful, it is likely you are not only using the major search engines - look at Business.com and specific verticals.
Users will use different keywords depending where they are in the buying cycle.
Given the long buying cycle, you cannot give just one offer in B2B.
- Highlight one offer but provide other opportunities
Track ROI through the pipeline - put a financial value to it.

The Case for SEO
- 64% of users are searching related to business search.
-- Odds are good if you are only doing PPC you are leaving money on the table.
-- PPC costs are going up
- Organic CTR is much higher
- Can get a wider buying cycle through organic versus paid.
- SEO cost is upfront and you don't pay over and over.
- Need to know the value of the form completion on the site.
-- If you don't know the math, you might be spending too much money.
- Cons
-- Algorithm shift
-- Competition
-- Lack of immediate results
- Conclusion - Get it started.
B2B Challenges
- To whom is the messaging directed? You often don't know who the searcher is.
-- Do you want the user to go through a Pain Point link, a Buy Cycle Link or Functional link?
- Low Sample Sizes
-- Perform A/B testing as it will get the job done.
-- Multivariate testing is ok, but you need to limit your variables because of the lack of traffic.
-- Vertster.com is good resource to check out your A/B testing or multivariable results.
- Get Vertical
-- Investigate the verticals - narrows the scope for your users. Google is more like a needle in a haystack.
-- Must test and measure the vertical engines - sometimes the backfire.
- Qualifying the leads through the cycle
-- Specifically tailor the message to weed out users you do not want.
-- Tag your form fields and use that data to optimize keywords.
- Measure the entire buy cycle
-- Don't just measure the final activity.
-- Measure all of the smaller activities as they occur along the way.
-- Award points for each step of the way.
-- Tie it all back to a keyword or a form and award points to keep score.
-- Map out the cost per point which keyword buy makes the most sense.
-- Look at the entire funnel and assign appropriate credit.
- The best thing you can do is to turn the points into dollars.
- Calculate your threshold or breakeven CPA's

Paul Slack
B2B Sales Cycle
- Uncover the need on the client side - whatever the need they start by doing research and looking to solve the business problem.
-- Research solution
--- List of vendors
--- Bid
-- Make the decision
Search Engine Buying Funnel
- Awareness
- Consideration or Research
- Decision
- Purchase
When there is a long sales cycle group the users into buckets - Influencers and decision makers.
If you intention is to generate leads, the web site needs to be an influencer/catcher.
Influencers are not as inclined to follow a PPC trail because they are in the research mode.

Targeting the Decision Makers
- Late cycle and are using the web find the right company.
- Influencer recommends the finalists and the decision maker goes out to look. They may not even click, they just want to see.
- Don't be fooled into thinking that the site needs to be tailored to the decision maker
- (Speaking too fast…tough to keep up)

To target the Decision Maker use bulleted text and a strong call to action but the key is still the influencer.

It's about the user/influencer and how you can satisfy their need for knowledge. It's important to define the goals and measure against them to make improvements.

For each client compare and measure all of the clients marketing efforts and determine what the lead cost is. At that point, move on to determine the cost per acquisition. If you want this spreadsheet send him an email.

Run the breakeven analysis and see how many leads you need to generate. It creates a solid benchmark that it realistic to meet or exceed with SEO/SEM.

- Begin with the end in mind.
- What do you want them to do?
- How do you measure success?
- Make sure they can find your content on either paid or organic.

Patricia Hursh
Agenda
1. B2B Marketing Trends
2. Think beyond the click - post click marketing
3. Four ways to improve your results

B2B marketers are slow to embrace search
- Search marketing was in 11th place among marketing practices
- Good news is that in 2006 online tactics and search marketing were poised for growth.
- Where does the money come from?
-- These programs are being funded by taking money from traditional channels.
-- Money shifting as results are promising
Think beyond the click
- Find
- Drive
- Convert
- Measure

4 Tips
1. Map Visitors Needs to Solutions - Not every visitor is the same.
2. Offer Action Options - Offer options to different users. Not everyone wants a call or to fill out a form.
3. Simplify Registration Forms - Test your forms. Simplify.
4. Continuously Improve Landing Pages - Test and improve the landing pages.

Map Visitors Needs to Solutions
- Needs are different by user and place in the buying cycle.
- Turn their pain points into actions on the web site.
Offer Action Options
- Provide options - downloads, tours, webinars, etc.
- Think in terms of primary and secondary conversion.
Simplify Registration Forms
- Long forms don't convert.
- Don't make the form a wish list for the sales team - make it about the user.
- Test the forms and use the data to make better business decisions.
- Simplify the form and create a robust follow up process to get the additional data you need. Send follow up emails, engage the prospect.
Continuously Improve Landing Pages
- Test the look and feel, layout, images, messages, action triggers, names and descriptions of downloadable assets, registration forms.
Summary
- Search is a potential killer app (Forrester) for B2B customer acquisition
- Marketers will follow their customers online
- Missed this one
- This trend will continue.

Verticals are becoming more and more important over time. The verticals are maturing and providing better results and information.

Think of information in terms of random access - quick information available for download. They want to assemble the information, process it, and move it through their organizations.

Q and A
Q - How do I convince the decision makers that we need to reduce the form?
A - Karen - Get them to do a test. Usually the data speaks for itself. Also, would ask what they are going to do with the information? Question the purpose of the data. Think of it as volleyball - just touch the ball back over to the prospect.
A - Paul - Yes, please test. When we encounter that issue, we toss it back to sales. “If we don't need an address to deliver a white paper, why do we ask for it?” Test, test, test!
A - Patricia - softly suggest a test. Be honest about what you're getting when the customer downloads a white paper - is it really a lead or is it an inquiry?

Q - Can you share link building strategies and link-baiting you will share?
A - Karen - When we work on link building. Find the credible sites, but its research. Associations and academics are a great place to look.
A - Patricia - It comes down to content. What is unique and valuable? Sometimes B2B companies miss the obvious - links from partners, suppliers and others.
A - Paul - Block and tackling works well. Get a press release and article strategy in place.
A - Gord - Anything you do with link building has to consider your end user.

Q - Is there any 3rd party tool to use with SalesForce to track the full circle?
A - Karen - Integrate the leads into SalesForce then it comes down to commitment. Get the sales people to manage the data. If you do this, you should be able to follow it all the way through and report it back to the campaigns.

Provided by Steve Krull

Moderator: Danny Sullivan

Speakers:
Peter Linsley, Ask.com
Shashi Thakur, Google
Sean Suchter, Yahoo!

Have questions about links? Search engine reps provide answers to the audience.
Danny is telling everyone to run. The room is starting to fill up...but not standing room only. Last session of the day today.

Shashi:

He goes first. It's his first time speaking at SES. Danny jokes "no pressure". Shashidar Thakur, Tech staff at Google. In the old days people created lists of favorite sites Google figured this was a good way to figure reputation. PageRank was born. Links got messy. A link is a personal reference. Says a lot about you. Poor linking effects credibility. Link on topic. Be relevant to your page/site. Be useful to vistors. Be visible. Designed for users not engines. Make good anchor text with descriptive text rather than "click here". Bad linking attempts to manipulate SE's. Low value to users. Bad linking is like wearing a ball and chain on your legs. They try to catch bad linking. Shows example of spam linking page. It was a meds site. Another example of spamming forms. Hidden links are bad links. The whole point of links is someone is supposed to click on them, so don't hide them. Shows a page with hidden links, exposed. Bad neighborhoods is another example of spam links. Unrelated to your business. It says something about you when do this.

Sean:

Runs engineering for Yahoo web search, for about 10 years. Attract organic links. Stable urls attract cut and paste behavior. They're attractive to linkers. Avoid dynanic URLS, session IDs, don't require cookies. USe https only when necessary. No popus. (No address bar). Users can't copy the url and link to it. Use 301 to redirect on the same site if moving URLS. Submit sitemaps to SE's stay up to date. Link farms, no. Users may link to the different domains diluting your organic links. Better to be concentrated. Muliple countries sites can link but be careful about same exact content. Don't dilute links. Nofollow - don't use it for ranking algorithms. Doesn't mean non-inlcusion. They follow both absolute and relative links. Don't break the links. Yahoo site has a help page for SEOs.

Peter:

Create good conent with good links rather than bad pages with lots of "bad" links. Linking is about the quality of links. Links from on topic count more. Shows an example of web page and shows source with spammy links. Tons of hidden links showed up on another otherwise normal looking page with decent content.

Microsoft: (Did not catch his name. Wasn't on screen or print info. If someone can leave his name in comments, I can fix this.)

Announcing beta for webmaster tools. More details on our blog. Live Search New Webmaster Portal...official blog for the Live Search team.

QA:

1. I hear bad links work well. How to tell if bad links?
A - They rely on algorithms. Recommend not buying bad links. Matters not whether bought or not. What matters is the value of the link itself. Is it relevant to users. What causes user disatisfaction? It is often bad links.

2. If "blackhats" spam your site and the spam is not your fault, but rather "their fault"?
A - You can report the bad inlinks in Yahoo Help. Ask says to write and alert them to the problem.

Danny asks if audience would like a tool to be report spam links.

3. Using Google Alerts discovered a porn site that is using text on their site that includes a lot domains and are linking to them, alphabetically. They show up as inbound link but its a porn site.
A - You can report this to all SE's.

4. New name, new domain. But new site.
A - Use 301 redirects and use sitemaps to educate SE's. Keep old site? For users, yes. Want the crawlers to learn redirects. How long to keep up? As long as possible. Microsoft says keep old site up as long as you can. Keep the old domain.

5. Is linking to a vanity URL that real one that redirects to destination URL?
A - See Yahoo Help for their advice. Microsoft will pass it through. Be careful with 2 different identifies. Messy for users and brands.They go to vanity URL vs the destination one.

6. How to handle bad publicity via blogs, etc. that you can't control. Afraid of people who use submission tool to send bad links to you.
A - Danny asks how many people link to you that you don't want linking? Not a lot of response. Should you worry? Danny really thinks a tool to help us control bad incoming links would be great.

7. What if you have a blog like Blogger.com domain to new domain?
A - Put a note on old blog with the new domain and URL. Redirects don't work for Wordpress or Typepad.

8. How is purchasing a highly relevant link "evil".
A- The vast majority of paid links are not relevant. They see it used for spam more than legitimate linking. They don't care if it is paid for. They care about whether its relevant. Danny talks about the debate on this. There are no real clear rules issued by SE's. It shouldn't matter how the link comes in to you, whether via good content or paid or submitted to social media site like Digg.

SEO is a four-letter word to some people that stands for snake-oil salesmen and blog spammers. Yet SEOs are also highly in demand and plenty help website generate traffic that converts. This session looks at SEO's reputation problem and explores possible solutions.
Moderator:

* Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

* Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
* Kristopher B. Jones, President & CEO, Pepperjam
* Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
* Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
* Kathleen Fealy, Education Chairman, SEMPO

Jeff Rohrs introduces the session. Everyone then introduces themselves. Kris Jones says that he's Jason Calacanis Dave Pasternack himself.

Shari talks about reputation management. A few years ago, she was a MSN search champ and someone was convinced that she was a spammer. This woman wouldn't let her post on her blog to rebut. So how do you handle a situation where people won't let you rebut on their blog? She used other avenues, like blogs, to communicate this.

How do you tell the academic community that you don't have the plague? There's a huge need of education. We have to teach people how to search and discern the good from the bad.

Kris says that the crux of this discussion lies in question and answers but he wants to emphasize that this is an incredibly important issue. The portion of people's profession seems to define the rest. Those fundamental attribution errors and illogical conclusions that are made put business professionals in a difficult position. That's quite unfortunate. One of the foundations of online marketing is your placement organically in the search results. He recommends that you be careful of the small percetage of SEOs who will attempt to sell you guarantees. That's his biggest pet peeve. Stay away from them. He does a search for "guaranteed search engine placement." There are a lot of results. A lot of companies have failed at successfully finding themselves in these organic listings and have desperately tried to get in the results. But the important thing is to convey the proper expectations. Otherwise, the client will have unreasonable expectations. Many of these "guarantee" websites do try to cater to these people but these people are not doing due diligence.

You can't take shortcuts. The approach is long term. You need to follow the policies and work to integrate SEO to your paid search and your other strategies.

Jonathan Hochman is next. He shows that there are reputation issues at stake for sure. Some people sell Wikipedia page placement on eBay (as he illustrates). This is fraud. It kills the reputation. Another one is from a prominent SEO blogger who wrote that. Another link is on Wikipedia itself which links to a web design firm. People are spamming Wikipedia and it causes frustration.

Some people, therefore, think that SEO is spammy. That's because they've been burned. Wikipedia responded with nofollow. nofollow was implemented because of an SEO contest, which isn't very known. A lot of people were upset about this. Andy Beal was very sad about it. He blogged about it and Jonathan showed a screenshot. But Jonathan says that Wikipedia is not vindictive; they had a reason for it. A long time ago, back in the 80s, there was a thing called netiquette - net etiquette: you need to remember that the internet is a shared resources. Even nonprofits need to do policing. Let's tell the public what the slimy process are and how to avoid them.

SEMPO people should email eBay and tell them that it's fraud. You should get involved with these communities to fix the reputation problem and become more profitable as well as remove the perception.

Kathy Fealy is up next. A lot of businesses are asking for SEO services for under $5k. Here are some comments:
- I've been taking before. I don't want to be taken again.
- Why should I bother with SEO because the results can change?
- I thought my web designer did this for us?
- Our IT dept thinks it's unnecessary.
- Click fraud.
- I thought PPC is better because you can see ROI.

How do you know if you're hiring someone who is qualified?
- People don't know if the people they hire are up to date.
- They may not get what they're promised.
- They aren't "certified."

We have to work with people and find out what they need and what their objectives are. Are they planning on bringing more products, increase conversions, or reputation? But they get conflicting ideas in their proposals. Everyone has different prices. There's a lot of jargon.

Some people are victims of scams. "If it's too good to be true, it probably is." "There is no such thing as a free lunch."

A little knowledge can be dangerous -
- Web designers don't know how to design.
- Traditional PR firms put up graphics instead of text.
- Marketing professionals think it's an extension of current work.
- Many clients use small business templates that build sites for them. Then when a real professional says that they have to redo their website, the person goes back to the business template provider who say that the SEO is wrong and that they can fix it.

The perceptions is the reality.

Every true SEO professional needs to become evangelists. An SEO needs to explain what needs to be done and why.
- Write articles, speak to organizations, join professional organizations (SEMPO), continue learning (SEMPO institute, conferences, major Search Engine publications, books, podcasts), and advise clients of the risks of search engine strategies - ethics.

Last but not least is Jennifer Laycock. She is talking about social media. People can connect with people who share their passions from all over the world.

Some people think that social media marketing is a one-stop shop. You need to engage your customer and join the community. However, not all people like this and assume it's a marketing stunt especially if they have proof that you're a marketer (which occurred in Jennifer's case). It didn't matter what the truth was, the perception was reality and everyone believed it. From a regular business, you have issues with reputation management.

You don't have to have a hard sales pitch. We need to think about making this as a tool to build the reputation of yourself to your customers.

Session Overview
Learn how content from your ecommerce or merchant site can -- and should! -- be included in shopping search engines.

Moderator:
* Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers:
* Brian Smith, Analyst, ComparisonEngines.com
* Bob Reeves, Director of Sales & Account Management, Marchex
* Brian Mark, CTO, Toolbarn.com

Brian Smith will teach us to learn to love our data feeds

Small shoe store in Tampa was able to drive significant traffic and increased sales and conversions. Overall a 10x lift in sales volume online

Shopping engines come in all shapes and sizes. Some are free, some are paid and charge monthly fees, revenue share or other.

Little guy list;
- PriceTool, Calibex, Become and more.
- Beauty of little shopping engines is that sometimes you can get better conversion rates.
- Pronto
Verticals
- Vdeep
- Healthpricer
- Builders Square
Syndicated Listings
- Shopping.com will get you listed on Buy.com
"You have to test everything out"

How do you get on the engines?
Some basic concepts
- Adwords is easy - Yahoo Search Marketing is easy - Shopping engines = Yucky!
- Track something - know your metrics
- Automated XML solutions are not optimal (in e-commerce platforms)
-- Take your time and optimize.
Basic date feed is name, product price, category and much much more.

Google Base now has custom fields - like battery voltage or other different product options that are unique to your products.

How to create a feed
- Use a management firm
-- If you do this, manage it closely.
- Do it yourself
- Track everything
- Test out different engines - find 5 or 10 and test them

Bob Reeves
Keys to Success (some may sound simple - hope they’re not insulting, but these are often neglected)
- Start in high margin areas - so if the returns and conversions are off you have some wiggle.
- Create bid & placement rules - do not re-purpose you search rules.
- Tailor Submission to each engine - look at the competition and see how they look on the engines
- Monitory each engines ROAS - recommend daily review.
- Retest product that has failed previously - sometime
- Feed completeness
- Make use of all required and recommended fields.
- Optimize the titles and descriptions of your products - make sure they show up in search results
- Shipping/Price Availability
-
Loves shopping engines for their ability to merchandise

Merchandising Keys to Success
- Use ratings to measure success
- Testimonials
- Focus on pricing and placement
- Pay attention to other opportunities - placements and category

Internal case study found that for one retailer that client got more sales with fewer merchants. ROAS began to slow.

Another retailer showed that as long as they were within 10% of the lowest price the ROAS was strong.

If price >$1000 users tended to click on merchants they knew

Feed Positioning Factors
- Use of all required fields awards rank and relevance.

Brian Mark
Shopping Search Difficulties
- Rising CPC
- Poor tracking tools are "included"
- Analytics vendors don’t "get it right"
-- Tell you where the last click was.
- Too many individualized feeds
- ROI is hard to calculate correctly
-- So many variables that have nothing to do with clicks and products - internal costs and phone calls.
- Rules constantly evolve
Four Step Program
1. List everything
2. Scale back
3. Track it
4. Built the technology needed to manage
The key is to build a strong foundation
- Know your clicks and the sales
-- They use a redirect on their site to track
-- Set a cookie
-- IP / UserAgent info is gathered and logged
- Trying to get as many data points in order to track it back
Weight of multiple clicks
- If user clicks on multiple engines - how do you weight the click?
Fixing Irregularities
- Multiple clicks
- Bot clicks - some engines forget bots exist.
- Seasonality - potentially huge factor.
- Each engine handles it differently
At the end of the day they wanted to know how many clicks, how many sales and what the profit was.

Hidden costs
- Boxes, Order processing, phone calls, customer service and more

Gross Profit - (CPC * Clicks) - (other expenses)
Custom tailor each feed for products that work well on each one.
Don’t just say "it’s not selling" but look at factors affecting sales.
Set some ROI goals and stick to them.
If a competitor is doing something "dumb" for a while - back off and wait or drop out.
Optimize your conversion rates.

Smart Feeds Show Profit - 1800-3500% ROAS

Seals and logos have not shown significant conversions but stresses that you should test. Smilies and ribbons have done better.

Tracking indirect sales
- Set a cookie on the "Email a friend"
- Unique toll free numbers
- Ask where they found the product
- When merchant ratings are low, people tend to call.
Overall effect on sales
- Started in 2004 with a redesign and the site tanked in the SERPs. If the shopping engines had not been there, layoffs would have happened.
- 18% of new customers come from shopping engines
- 22% repeat customers come through shopping engines.

Conclusions
- Track as much as you can
- Know as much about each order as you can
- Set your goals and stick to them

Back to Brian Smith
My Two Theories (disagree if you like)
1. Garbage in - Garbage out
2. Google Base really really really does matter - submitting as structured data - your Google base listings may become more relevant than your organic results.
Google will list relevant products in organic listings

Data Feed Optimization (DFO)
- Think about it and think about tracking it
- DFO
-- Engine setup
-- Qualitative
-- Quantitative
- Engine Setup - are your products running and is it running with the right information.
-- Are the field lengths correct, are the fields there - watch and review.
-- Beware database dumps that have HTML - could cause problems.
-- Watch engine specifics
-- Be patient
- Tip - test taking down your logo and pay that .10 for the click to move up.
- Qualitative
-- Tracking and more tracking
-- Similarities between SEO/PPC & DFO
--- Look at the DF in a structured manner
-- Product titles and descriptions - write them wisely. Use the carryover from your SEO/PPC to re-write long verbose names
-- Use all of the fields available.
-- All of the shopping engines are still search engines - give them as much information as you can.
-- Categorization - If you fail to categorize your product, it will get stuck in miscellaneous.
- Things to avoid in your feed
-- Duplicate content
-- Duplicate URLs
-- Not following the rules - required fields
-- Not following the unwritten rules
-- HTML
-- Incomplete data
- Do tests against titles and descriptions
- Quantitative
-- Tracking
-- Quantitative
--- Make metrics based decisions
--- Spent X, made Y, margin of Z - decide if you should be there.
--- Channel
--- Engine
--- Look at profit by engine.
--- Category
--- Find the categories and products that are not profitable and remove them.
--- Product/SKU
--- Start using the pixel trackers or building redirects to track.
--- SKU level reporting is near impossible using them engines themselves
- Click fraud can be just as hard to track here as it is on the search engines.
Start with good data and work toward the quantitative
There are many factors to test
- Test different titles, descriptions, banners ,logos, bidding strategies
Be proactive and manage this as you would any other channel.

Q and A
Q - Do you think the shopping engines are a valid avenue if I cannot compete on price but instead on trust and brand?
A - Brian Mark - Use the logo program to support the brand. Use some products the other retailers do not carry and test those.

Q - Is there any talk about a common shopping feed format?
A - Brian - They tried and it didn’t happen, but think it should happen. It will happen eventually after some pushing and pulling.

Q - If you had to optimize and submit to one site which would it be for children’s birthday party supplies?
A - Brian Smith - Why are you submitting to just one?
A - Allan -If resources are limited, what would it be?
A - Brian Mark - Use shopping.com or shopzilla.com and one of the smaller ones like Pronto.com

Q - What percentage of your product sells online?
A - Brian Mark - It’s different between engines - it runs from 30-60%

Q - Should the landing pages for my top 10 products be without "also considers?"
A - Brian Smith - No, it’s ok to have this so long as each item also has its own landing page.

Q- Should I just take my top 10 products and upload only those to all the engines?
A - All - Make time to add products even if it’s two a day or just to pick one engine at a time. Another option is to add everything and then pare it down. Make sure the overall plan is manageable. You have to be able to go through the feeds and make them right.

Q - Can you talk about CPC paths and CPA paths? Why do some retailers put more emphasis on CPC vs. CPA?
A - Allan - You really have to ask each retailer. They deal

Q - How does setting a cookie work as far as tracking a click and how do they charge?
A - Brian Mark - It’s not a charge. The email sets a cookie as a continuation from the original user.

Q - Do Pronto & ask overlap?
A - Brian Smith - Most engines syndicate their content. Ask.com search results may show product search results from Pronto.

Q - How do you know which shopping engines work with which search engines?
A - Brian Smith - If it were syndicated from Pronto to Ask, then Pronto will charge you for the click. Shopping.com syndicates to 300-500 different sites and you cannot opt out and you cannot tell where the product was actually clicked. There is no transparency into the sources of those syndicated clicks

In House: In, Out, or in Between?

Moderated by Jeffrey K. Rohrs. He asks speakers to briefly introduce themselves and give their backgrounds both in house and agency-side if applicable.

First speaker is Marshall Simmonds from the New York Times. He describes that his team at NYT is completely responsible for their search strategy , and is directly involved with all aspects of it. “Imbedded Strategist” role is imbedded into many different levels. They run SEO point, and work with company thought leaders. You have to alter SEO strategy to mirror company’s voice. If you do not understand the business model, you will fail. In the “Consulting” model, this is typically a validation. The consultants are there to validate the model that is in place, working with the existing team.

What can big brands do today? Organize. Hire an in house search specialist or SEO project manager, who should be a strong communicator along with a strong understanding of SEO. Establish an internal team, and include at least one person from technology, marketing, editorial/content production, product development, strategic planning, and sales. Then analyze the data and the roles,- the goal is to not become beholden to SEO consultants. Lastly, “educate,” and make sure to follow up and stay current.

When to seek outside help? For a core competency outside your department. If you do not have the time and resources, a “buy in from the top,” it is not worth the time to bring in a consultant or imbedded. There has to be a strong commitment from leadership to perform.

Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International and the SEMPO BOD is up next. He announces that he thinks his presentation sucks. (laughs) He describes that there are 3 options that should be considered to be the best model for the company. Either “all outsourced” (what most people do), “Hybrid,” and “all in house.” Remember that there is no one other than those in your team that has the passion for success. However, he says that “if their skin is in the game,” they may be more likely to perform better.

He advocates full integration for optimal results. Need to tie in all the major constituencies into the search planning. How do they get Search into the workflow of the other teams? Ask “what are we trying to get from search?” Most people can’t answer this question well, he has found. In many cases, there are not enough resources within an organization so they have to end up outsourcing.

People have started to think along the lines of “I can build a great team for the $2 million that I am spending on PPC management.” This is a growing problem for agencies that need to provide value. Another question to consider: “is the current model working?” For program management, ask if more control is needed, and if there is an advantage to having more control. What is the culture? Will vendors fit in, and how are they managed? For the execution, ask “what is the labor resource required? What are customized tools…do we “need something custom?” They have created lots of customized tools and it has been very valuable. And are there internal barriers that hamstring agencies? He relates that iProspect did a study that showed that very few recommendations ever made it to being implemented.

For cost efficiency, What is the total cost of each program? What are the barriers to implementation and what will the costs be to overcome them? In measuring/predicting time and success,, he feels that in the end some form of hybrid marketing will rule.
He recommends going through all the above questions and answering them to be able to make sound decision

Jessica Bowman from Business.com is up next, and polls the audience to find out what they feel they will do, based on what they have learned so far this week. The majority of those that raised hands felt they would use a “hybrid” type model. She asks, do you think you can do it yourself? Goes through a scenario where a consultant would bill 15-20 hours a week. Can you do as much in that amount of time? She cautions that people will likely not be able to accomplish work as efficiently as someone who is experienced with working with lots of different types of sites.

You can do well completely in house, especially for the low-hanging fruit , like header tags, directory submissions, ALT text, unique page titles. Then there are more advanced things that may require help such as architectural issues and more advanced coding problems. So, if you are going with completely in house: spend time at conferences, understand you market share. What are you getting versus what your competitors are getting. She says Hitwise is a great tool for that. Recognize that in the beginning, the results are likely to be lower. You probably want to only be in house for two years before essentially losing interest and a “fresh perspective.”

Completely outsourced? It is nice to have someone to assign the work to, but you still need to remain educated, in order to not go in the wrong directions. Remember that you will also have to guide the consultant, especially for keyword selection and copywriting, as well as link building.

In between: you can manage the overall project. She feels the in between route is th best of both worlds. Remember that no matter which option you choose, there will always be in house work. There will be disagreements, and approval processes. Still need to work with IT to launch the changes. Remember to keep the projects in scope, and that reporting will likely require in house input for revenue numbers, for example. She provides a few links of what she likes to read. 80 20 rule of the in-houser: 80% of time is spent selling search marketing to the rest of the team, 20% actually doing SEM.. The larger the company the more complex the politics, usually.

Matt Greitzer, from Avenue A | Razorfish (my old company) starts with the slide titled “This is the slide where the agency guy tells you to use an agency.” The benefits of using an agency is the thought leadership that exists within it. It is hard to hire someone that alone has the same resources and experiences as the 2000 people coming up with ideas on a regular basis at A|R. The tactical leadership experience is obviously valuable as well. He has found that SEMs consistently drive better results than in house, based on campaigns that they have taken over. The other big reason to use an agency: track record of results.

What are the questions to figure out before hiring someone? “What is the staff t- client ratio?” “What is the employee turnover rate?” he feels that 20% in the agency environment is average. If anyone is vague about the answer, it may be a red flag. “What is the level of customization?” He says that A|R will pick up your dry cleaning if needed (laughs). What is the standard deliverable, and what will cost extra? How does process, training, and onboarding work? Lastly: Meet your team. At the end of the day it is about the people who are working with your business.

How to get more from your agency? Share data. It may take longer to become comfortable with sharing sensitive data, but when you can, it will improve performance. Invest in learning, and plan for long term gains. Reward success – structure something in the contract to give agency extra based on performance. Push for innovation and exceptional results.

Paul Elliott of eMergent Marketing \ Brulant, Inc. (my new company) starts with a comparative experiences list. He used to work with Things Remembered as in house, and now is the principle eMergent, which he sold to Brulant last year. At, Things Remembered, he was a 1 person SEO / SEM / affiliate marketing / email marketing / and partnership marketing “team” as part of the eCommerce department, and now with Brulant he is part of a team of 40+ SEM professionals. TR: Gained extensive insight into products and competitive landscape, but at eMergent worked diligently to gain product and industry insight for our customers, but rely on clients to leverage their expertise. Most importantly, he became bored with working on only one site, and now he never has a dull day 80-100 hour work weeks are the norm.

As a part of the team, he gets to leverage the learnings of the others on his team. He missed that on the in-house side. He loves to be able to bounce strategies off others internally, even while continuing to gain insight on clients’ industries. His personal job now is the project or relationship champion with the client. This avoids those natural roadblocks with getting stuff implemented, because the communication channels with the clients are better.

He gives a summary of the pros and cons of being in-house: Pros: Strong connection to the product / service offering and in depth understanding of the industry and top competitors. Concentrated focus on servicing just one client instead of balancing the needs of multiple clients. It may be less expensive to maintain internal resources, depending on the size and experience of the team. Timely and complete access to forecasts, sales data, inventory, etc. Better integration and coordination with other internal departments, including: marketing, merchandising, IT, and finance.

Cons to being in house: Many of the best SEO / SEMs are extremely competitive individuals, yet internal positions do not usually foster this competitive spirit. There is often a sense of boredom and eventual lack of motivation that comes with continually working on the same site as opposed to new challenges and opportunities. As part of a small internal team there is often a lack of informal learning opportunities which inhibits professional growth and the ability to deliver in a rapidly changing environment. With a single in house resource, you will be constrained to a single set of strategies, as opposed to best of breed solutions that result from an integrated team approach. SEM professionals are rarely equally trained or experienced in both organic optimization and paid search marketing (except me, of course :p). Therefore, you may be sacrificing by relying on one resource or investing in a larger team. It is often difficult to drive organizational change from within. Often times, external resources are needed to justify priorities, directional change, and budgets.

Decision factors that he would suggest: How competitive/dynamic is the industry? Will campaigns require constant adjustments and testing? How aggressive are the goals for the search marketing efforts? Have you allocated the appropriate budget to support your marketing costs plus the fees of a qualified internal team or external partner? How likely are you to be able to attract, recruit, and retain top search engine marketing talent within your company? How complex is your product or service offering? Is this something that only an internal resource can truly understand? Can you provide the appropriate level of data and insight to properly support an external partner?

He provides a chart which shows the different members both in house and on the agency side that will be important to the hybrid team. The two major players that he calls out on the in house team are the “Client Executive Sponsor,” and the “Client Marketing Liaison.” Paul recommends the use of an external partner, in order to: Introduce diverse skill sets and creative strategies; Avoid the need to attract, recruit, and maintain hard to find and expensive resources; Leverage best of breed tools and processes; Maintain focus on other aspects of the business; Potentially minimize cost risk by developing a performance-based partnership.

Usually do not cover QA, leaving that for those who attend the conference, but there was a nice “discussion” about the merits of an agency when it comes to keyword list development. Bill Hunt mentioned that he would want that to happen in house, and Matt and Paul both disagreed, saying that doing it in an iterative fashion with an outside POV works better. Bill wanted seemingly to hold back, but decided instead to raise the BS flag (in his opinion – btw he is a former Marine so I am not surprised he let his feelings be known). He said that he has seen mostly inadequate lists from agencies when he has taken over an account or consulted. He got the last word in, but it would be interesting to see if that particular subject gets more detailed at SES Chicago, should this panel still be on the list.

(This is live coverage of SES San Jose 2007, and some typos or grammatical errors may exist. If you were a panelist and you would like something clarified, please post in the comments or contact me through the system)

No presentations -- just plenty of time to put questions to search engine optimization and link building experts who are in the trenches about issues relating to linking.
Moderator:

* Danny Sullivan, Conference Co-Chair, Search Engine Strategies San Jose

Speakers:

* Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* Debra O'Neil-Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link
* Jim Boykin, CEO, We Build Pages Internet Marketing
* Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC

This is a question and answer session.

Q: I was curious about run-of-site links and their implications and their problems.
Greg: Purchased links or..?
Followup: What if they aren't purchased?
Greg: It depends on why they're there. There was a time when Google treated external links the same way as internal links, so you could get a link buy on a 50k page site and life was good. It doesn't work that way anymore. I don't see that benefit. It creates huge backlinks that your competitors can see and it's not good.
Jim: If your link is a sitewide link like in the footer, I don't think it carries as much weight as in the body.

Q: I understand that Google is penalizing for paid links. Is that true? What's the consequence?
Mike: 3 months in jail. (Everyone laughs. This obviously is not true.)
Jim: The rule is that Google will try not to pass the PageRank on those links. But from Google's history, you have to be really bad to get banned like this.
Greg: That can change. My suggestion could be to stay away from brokerages in the future because you're going to see "seek and destroy" where these people will be penalized. It's better to do work to get links even if that means to buy them. A lot of these brokerage firms have open inventories that are obvious.
Debra: Most links are paid links in some fashion, but you might want to stay away from Sponsored Links.
Danny: Unless it's AdSense.
Mike: Buy buying them, it might take a sweat to get the great link, but it's harder to discover if it's paid or not.

Q: What about links on chambers of commerces where you pay minimum fees or local marketing?
Greg: That's a slipperly slope. Look at Microsoft as a charitable foundation - their link equity comes from them as a sponsor in many cases.
Debra: Their issue is that they are afraid of buying links to manipulate.
Greg: If you help the Boys & Girls Club, that's okay.

Q: How do you think universal search will impact linking?
Debra: I think that's wonderful. Link builders have always focused on a content issue or a quality issue. But now these are going to show up in your search results - it's an incentive to get that quality content on your site.
Mike: I think that you shouldn't think that you're Steven Spielberg. A lot of what comes out in universal results comes from end user data. They're only going to be put in there if they're popular with the end user.
Greg: Google talks about universal search as the greatest thing since sliced bread. In the big picture, I don't see it even popping up a lot for day to day queries. But for high profile terms, you may see it.
Mike: On a tangent, the end user data will need to be aggregated over time to be displayed on the search results. They need to keep out questionable data like pornographic data, so it will take time. Take notes now and think for the future.
Jim: For most of the searches our clients are targeting, video is often going to be ignored by many people anyway.
Danny: Universal search is the future, and you really need to get your content out there, regardless of it being image or video. Those are new opportunities.

Q: What do you believe is the value of unpaid PR0 and PR1 links, if any, and if they're relevant?
Greg: You need to separate the idea of PageRank and anchor text. You can definitely get a lot of links from low-PR sites. I wouldn't worry. But over time, if it's a low PR site, then you might want to reconsider.
Jim: Check the page and find out if the page is in the supplemental index.
Danny: Why do you care about the PageRank?
Followup: We've been asking for links in return for supporting some of our partners.
Danny: It's not an issue of the PageRank. It's a question about the network of sites that are linking to you. The idea is even if you have some dodgy links, you'll still have some natural links that point at you, and those links will balance each other out.
Jim: The most natural way to ask for links is to ask them to link to you without telling them how. That means the anchor text is varied. It looks natural.
Greg: It looks a lot less spammy. You can write a script that changes the alt text for buttons that give some variation on the text links.
Debra: It takes a lot of work but do some keyword analysis and determine what your competitors are doing.
Jim has a post about why a site with 50 backlinks is better than a site with 1000 backlinks. He explains that if you have a relevant neighborhood, it may be more valuable than having links from unrelated places.
Debra talks about TouchGraph, which is a cool site that lets you see your link environment.

Q: I have a question about internal linking. When Google acquired YouTube, they added nofollow to many links on their site. What do you think about this? Can you pass around authority with this tactic?
Greg: You can use it to control the flow of juice. You may not want the "About Us" page to rank, so you can nofollow it. Thus, it's a strategy worth exploring.
Debra: From my understanding, Google views a page nofollowed as one not to be trusted and they don't follow through with it. If you don't care about the page being indexed, it doesn't matter. But you never get a straight answer about it from them.
Mike: Bruce Clay is a firm believer of using nofollow in internal linking and he creates silos where he tries to pass link juice down a specific vertical.

Danny explains that nofollow, for those who don't know, is like a link condom; you touch the site you link to without actually touching the site. Nice analogy. (Rhea made me blog this.)

Q: I try to keep external link ratio to internal ratio about 40/60. Do you have a magic number?
Greg: I've never broken it down on a percentage basis.

Q: What's your opinion on linking to nonrelevant sites?
Greg: I once worked for a client in that space that got penalized. This is where the engines are at - if you get a large group of people who collectively conspire to conspire the engines on a grand scale (like a real estate site where they all link to each other on many directories that have misleading anchor text) - some of these places have thousands and thousands of sites. You can get banned for this because it's clear manipulation. There's no reason why a real estate agent from California should be linking to one in Maine. It happened to more than one particular company in my experience. That whole industry needs to rethink how they develop links. It's a dying model.

Q: There are many ways to get links, but what's the best way to get links?
Debra: It's hard to say one thing because every site is different and some are more competitive than others. Link building overall is hard.
Greg: It depends on what your goal is. Blogging can develop links but they may not help you rank for the products that you sell.
Jim: Finding good resources yourself (not through networks) and writing to these people proving that you're human may yield better results.
Mike: I agree with Debra. There's no one-size-fits-all solution. Look at certain niches: some B2B places might benefit from PR tactics, etc. But you need to think about the content and understand what the content means. Is it compelling copy or is it a great tool? Some services may benefit from having a mortgage calculator. Others may benefit from other products.
Debra: You may want to want to set up incentives to ask for links. You can go through a lot of networks and obtain information.
Mike: Find niche newsletters and focus on them. There's a likelihood that people link to it.
Jim: There's a problem with linkbait. People link to the bait but it's not selling the product. If you link to the wrong page with the wrong text, it may not be good. Getting links is good, but you may want to write to people and request that they place the link a certain way.
Debra: Bait is great for exposure but one-on-one linking can be achieved by asking.

Q: Is it ethical to have people who write content and link to "grey" areas?
Jim: If someone writes an article and submits it to lots of places, you may be penalized for duplicate content. But if it's on one page, then don't worries.
Debra: There are so many places that have guest writers. You know that they can put links in there.
Jim: If someone said "this guy paid me money to put this page there," you might trip a filter. Be careful about that.

Q: We have a site that ranks real well. The content is high-quality and relevant. A few years ago we ranked in Sponsored Links. Should we nuke those? I don't want to trip any filters. But I don't want to change it because it could affect our great rankings.
Greg: Odds are it's not passing any juice. But if you turn it off and you do slip, can you get it back?
Followup: If Google knows, who will be penalized? The advertiser or the publisher?
Greg: It's not really a question for this session. (You should check out coverage of Search Engine Q&A on Links where representatives from search engines will answer these more authoritatively.)
Jim: If your site ranks well now, I wouldn't change anything. But if you hear eventually that you'll get penalized, remove it and put your competitor's site there. (Yes, he was kidding.)
Danny: With Yahoo, you can report inlinks as Spam. Maybe that will help you. But that's a good question to ask the search engines.

Q: In your experience, have you seen the behavior with linking differ across search engines?
Greg: Microsoft has no clue. The fundamentals are the same. Google is a little farther along in their ability to filter and tweak the leverage of links. But the core concept is the more links wins. MSN: you really can't tell.
Mike: Google has been using this type of ranking mechanism from early on. There's a lot of historical data that they have but Yahoo and MSN have relatively new data. But the mechanisms are all based on the same characteristics.
Jim: Yahoo is in the same place that Google was in 2003. As Greg said, Google has a history of doing this a little longer. That's an advantage. As Yahoo gets smarter, it will look more like Google. Most of the stuff you do for Google is still good with Yahoo.
Mike: Links are a powerful signal. You're going to have different patents of end user data and toolbar data that causes fluctuation.

Q: I have 2 websites that are SEO friendly and generate a good size of revenue. I have to shut down one of them. Can I use the external links into that website and direct them to the other website?
Greg: Yes by using 301 redirection on the site you're shutting down. Hopefully the one you get to keep is the better one in terms of links.

Q: Why is it when the keywords appear on blogs, they seem to propel up a result faster than others? If they're consitently posting on the same blog even though they're varying the keywords, why will that push them up?
Mike: Legitimate blogs?
Followup: No, spam blogs. There is duplicate content - everything is verbatim. They are propagating in the Google results, not Google Blog Search.
Danny: Talk to Matt Cutts offline.
Followup: Why does the blog propel up the ranks?
(I'm thinking to myself that it probably has something to do with fresher content from recent blogs. But nobody says that.)
Greg: Much of what you see in that aggressive space shows a weakness in the algorithm. You may want to apply it in a more traditional whitehat way when you stop getting angry.

Q: What's to stop people from having the same links from the same sources?
Greg gives out a strategy - when trying to get links, he gets some backlinks for all terms on his competitors and sorts by PageRank.
Debra: There's nothing wrong with contacting the same source.

Q: If people link to each other reciprocally and it may not be relevant, what do you think?
Jim: The issue is if it makes sense. I'm guessing that there are some filters. If you have 500 natural backlinks and there are 10 people that you're trading with but it still makes sense, then there's no problem.
Mike: When you have a look at your website, you need to be brutal and ask 10 reasons why you should link to this website.
Danny: You're going to get in trouble if it's not natural. If you're a mortgage website and a realtor site, link together, but otherwise, don't.
Debra: Don't utilize this tactic solely.

Q: We're looking to implement a glossary on our site. What are the risks of doing this aggressively by linking internally even if it's valid and good content? Is there any value of this? We're putting a lot of effort into it.
Mike: What's the use of it to the end user? Is it beneficial to them?
Followup: Yes.
Greg: Is it niche specific?
Followup. Yes, it is. Is there a risk of quick implementation though?
Greg: The thing is with glossaries is that if you create everything on your own page and everything is short, those thin pages all end up being worthless. My suggestion is that you shouldn't scrape content from Wikipedia. If your content is in-depth, that's a great thing to do.
Followup: Would you recommend a structure?
Greg: If you turn it more than just a definition of the word, like history/application/etc, then it makes sense to do word by word. It's more valuable to the search engines.

Q: Rhea! asks a question. Google is in a philosophical pickle regarding paid linking. They have a lot of confidence and if they did they wouldn't have implemented a snitch report. My question is - do you think this is something they're going to focus on aggressively or are they going to change the algorithm?
Jim: I think they're going to try to scare people to stop buying links. FUD!
Greg: It's absurd.
Jim: It's good. They're doing their job well.
Greg: 95% of their algorithm is based on fear. Results are good because people behave because they are afraid of getting kicked out. They are going to exaggerate what they can catch algorithmically. Realistically, that's not how it works. There will still be paid links. I think they're far away from implementing an efficient solution but they might penalize people so that it reinforces that fear. I know they're working on it though. Brokers who do this mainstream will drive this more and more underground which will affect the user.
Mike: It makes you be more cautious to get editorial links. Great editorial links are better than paid links.
Jim: Just stay under the radar.

SES San Jose
Organic Track: CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Search Engines

Speakers:
(Moderator) Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink
Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
Vanessa Fox, Zillow.com
Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com
Amit Kumar, Yahoo!
(Q&A) Amanda Camp, Software Engineer, Google

Shari Thurow: CSS

Advantages CSS
- HTML addition that allows webmasters to control design parameters such as margins, font/typeface appearance.
- Ability to change the "look" of a site quickly and easily.
- Can significantly decrease the download time fo a page.
-- Usability pros say 8-12 secs.
-- Yahoo rep says 30 secs or less

Disadvantages
- End users must have fonts installed on their computers or the page will not display as designers intended.
-- Logo or corporate identify
-- Banners (ads or self-promotional)
-- Condensed font used for screen real estate
- Usability testing (task oriented) and focus groups (user opinions) might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers.
-- Print materials
-- A/B and multivariate testing
- CSS-formatted hyperlinks can dominate the content of a web page making the content appear unfocused.
- CSS can be used to hide text on a webpage

Surrounding a graphic with an H1 tag does not make the alt text does not make the SEs believe the text is more important.

CSS can be used to layer objects. SEs can detect negative coords. Negative coords are used to cloak content. The SEs know about this and it doesn't work. Another form of CSS manipulation that doesn't work is layering an object under another object so the user cannot see both objects but the SEs can. Search engines detect CSS positioning. Drop down menus are one form of acceptable invisible layers.

Should you robots exclude your style directory? No.

Definitely use stylesheets. Only determine use graphic nav versus css nav after testing with your users. Make sure your pages display appropriately on multiple browsers. Hidden elements (layers, text) are acceptable to SEs as long as those elements are meant to be seen and used by site visitors. Do not use CSS to exploit SEs.

Wow. We're at standing room only now. Big crowd.

Mikkel deMib: Web 2.0

What is (important about) Web 2.0? Most people still don't know what it is. Basically, web 2.0 is a new type of application. Not so much new technology, but it's a new use of the same technologies. One of the most popular new use of technology is AJAX.

Web 2.0 is also a deeper interaction with users. Turning visitors into active participants and "community" members. The paradox of Web 2.0 is that it embraces the true web and the power of user generated content, but it also isolates itself from existing web interaction.

AJAX is Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX puts a new javascript layer onto the client and handles a lot of the interaction that used to be handled on the server side, which dramatically increases the response times for the application.

AJAX is cool, right? WRONG. Remember frames? Useful yes, but they still suck. AJAX breaks the standards. AJAX shares the same problem with frames and flash... you can only link to the application, not a specific page. So it doesn't make sense for the SEs to crawl an AJAX application.

Tips from Mikkel:
-- Should you use AJAX at all? Yes, but not as much as some people will tell you to.
-- Ask yourself why you want to use AJAX? If you only want to because it's kewl, then don't. However, if you feel it will improve your business or make you more money, then do it.
-- Let AJAX be an option -- not the default. Don't turn away users who don't support it.
-- Set up proper (301) redirection of "wrong" linking to the AJAX application.
-- Let the pros do the work! Do not let happy script kiddies and HTML-amateurs destroy the user experience and jeopardize security with poor AJAX applications. AJAX is HIGHLY insecure. Use TRUSTWORTHY vendors and consultants.

The Social Web 2.0

User generated content is great for SEO
-- Original content is expensive -- loyal users write it for free
-- You don't have to do keyword research -- users write (just as bad) as they search
-- Miss-spellings are acceptable in user contributed content -- even in headlines and titles
-- User generated content improve your freshness factor on your site and help rank non-community pages too!

Would you like to have 20,000 SEOs? Use your users to actively promote your site. train your users to help themselves to help you. Though you have to watch out how you train them. If one percent of your users turn out to be spammers, you suddenly have 200 spammers.

The "One page -- one link" strategy. It is not that hard to get one link to one good piece of information. Teach users where and how to get that one link -- and make it the goal to get that one link for every contribution. With just 1000 contribution a day, that's 30k new links a month!

Vanessa Fox: SEO in a Web 2.0 Startup World

The life of a startup... we don't need a lot of money (truemors.com). We have cool data (zillow.com). We don't need advertising, we have link bait! We have snazzy new technologies.

Oh, the woes of cutting edge technology... Does your site work with javascript turned off?
If you can only do one thing, build in the ability to do more things later.

The biggest SEO mistakes
- Blocking links
- Blocking content (AJAX does that a lot)
- Not providing content

Real World examples -- 95% of Zillow's search traffic comes from people searching for "Zillow". Which is very, very sad. So how can Zillow get traffic for other terms?

"But everyone has Flash!" Say your content is only available through Flash, but you think that's okay because all of your users have Flash installed. Yes, but SEs still can't read that content. "But Flash is so snazzy!" Eh, not always.

Keyword research in a web 2.0 world...as a searcher looking to find out about home appraisals, real estate estimates, etc. Make sure you use REAL words/names for terms, and not just your cool proprietary product names (like zestimate instead of estimate).

Remember that AJAX prevents SEs from seeing (as well as users with JavaScript turned off) lots of content.

User generated content is awesome! More indexable information, more freshness, etc. However, make sure you HAVE information... empty discussion boards look like ghost towns. Ensure you've got a place to get some content from.

Amit Kumar: From a SE point of view

The four things I wanted to talk about are the guiding principles, technologies, techniques, and resources.

Guiding Principles
- Build for your users: Yahoo! will adapt.
- Think "Accessibility"
- Users vote by attribution -- the way we determine what people are looking at and people like is by how many links a site has. It's important to remember in the context of AJAX. Make sure users can link to you.
- We accept hints! Use sitemaps.

Technologies
- CSS
--- Issue: understanding your pages
--- Core to the web, like HTML
- Flash and JavaScript
--- Issue: reading your pages
--- Need to consume carefully.
- AJAX
--- Issue: Finding all your content
--- Think "form filling"
- Badges
--- Issue: Where is the content from?
--- Attribution

Techniques
- Graceful Degradation
--- Turn off js/css in your browser, make sure everything still works.
- Alternate Nav
- SItemaps
- Site Explorer
- Robots.txt

Amanda Camp, Google:

I'm on the WMX team (WMX == Webmaster Ecstacy). Our goal is to make Webmasters happy. See www.google.com/webmasters

We have a ton of content off of Webmaster Central that deals with AJAX, CSS and web 2.0 things. We just did a post, in fact, about Flash. How Google handles Flash, making sure your site does okay, etc. Hopefully you've seen it, if not, go read it.

We also have the webmaster guidelines. Really, you should go read them if you haven't already. It talks about things like content and javascript and all of that stuff. What to do if you have javascript, etc. Really, just make sure it degrades gracefully.

So, we have lots of information, please go check it out!

Interesting Concepts and Tips...

Search engines don't use the title attribute to determine relevancy. (Not the title TAG, the title attribute)

Sitemaps are not meant to substitute for poor site organization.

Moderator:
Misty Locke, President & Co-Founder, Range Online Media

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz.org

SEO Services:
- Standard SEO for keyword rankings
- Site Auditing
- Standard Consulting
- Keyword Research
- Content Creation & Copywriting
- Link Building
- Strategic Planning Design/Reports
- Viral Content Creation and Promotion
- Social Media Marketing
- Reputation Management Control
- Brand Tracking and Reporting
- Web Development & Design
- Training & Workshops

Pricing Models
- Hourly Consulting ($100 to $400 per hour)
- Monthly Retainers
- By the Project Pricing
- Pay for Performance
- Profit Sharing
- Hybrid Models

Example:

Travel Industry Web Site
Needs: keyword, strategy, link building, measurements, roi
Method: consulting, phone emal
Cost: $24,000 - 8k first month and 4k for remaining X months

Large Media Web Property
Needs: SEO training, consulting
Method: on site meeting/training, ongoing consultation phone and email
Cost: $25,000: 10k down, 10k upon training, and 5k following month

Classifieds Web Site
Needs: SEO audit, recommendations
Method: Remote consultation and report construction
Cost: $16k: 8k down and 8k second review

Personal Reputation Management
Needs: Two listings pushed to page 3+ of results
Method: Remote link building and optimization
Cost: $20k, 5k down 10k on page two and 5k when on page three

Technology Web Site
Needs: link bait
Method: remove creation of link bait
Cost: 30k, 6k start, 6k for 5 months

The Consulting Business Model:
- Scalability issues (more clients, more hours, more people)
- SEO Products vs. SEO Services

Lance Loveday, President, Closed Loop Marketing

He shows extremes of profitable and non profitable clients.

Pricing Goals:
- Minimize risk
- Maximize upside
- Rationalized/justifiable
- Competitive
- In line with client expectations
- What works best for the client

Pricing Models:
- Flat Fee
- Hourly (doesnt use it anymore
- Cost Plus (doesnt use it anymore)
- CPA (doesnt use it anymore)
- % of spend
- Retainer (rare)

Set Up Fees:
- Fixed Cost (+7k)
-- Discovery
-- Keyword Themes
-- Strategy
-- Campaign Structure
-- Write Ads
-- Keyword Research
-- Tracking
-- Campaign Setup
- Determine Fee based on
-- Scale
-- New vs. Existing
-- International
-- Geo targeting
-- PITA factor (hard clients)
-- Size of client
-- Estimated time

Management Fees:
- % of spend
- Monthly
- All inclusive (mostly)
- Absolute floor ($3k)
- Tiered - % decreases as spend goes up

Our Guidelines:
- Set up fee average 2-3x monthly management fees
- Number of keywords less important than the number of campaigns / ad groups
- Additional one-time fees for major campaigns expansions/reworking
- Ad hoc consulting on landing pages, analytics and other online marketing best practices is included (design and configuration is extra)

Ken Jurina, President and CEO, Epiar Inc.

The Big Question:
Q: How should you charge for your SEM work?
A: The way that is going to make you the most of profit and deliver the highest value of your ideal client

4 Typical Pricing Models:
- Retainer based (2k to 50k month)
- Pay for Performance
- Fee for service model
- Hourly consultations

Get Niched
- What are your strengths?
- PPC or Organic?
- Established SEM (then price the market, but if your new, then price to live)
- Know your competition and market

Importance of Customer Profiling:
- Find the right client

What They Do?
- 90% fee for service
- 7% pay for performance
- 3% customized services
- Three branded core SEO service phases
-- Extensive keyword research
-- Keyword placement
-- Link building

Stick with your profitable business model

Customize Services and Pricing
- New domain
- Past SEO
- etc.

Different level of services are variables
- web site audits
- web analytics
- monthly maintenance plans
- hourly consulting

Pricing & Perception
- Our initial pricing model was fixed
- Pricing models changed over time
-- Phase and variable pricing
-- Clients comprehend costs/phase and accept price
-- Final cost came out to be the same

Location, Location, Location
- Pricing based n what market can bear, geographically
- Outside major markets (NY, LA)

Proposals and Contracts
- Proposals must be detailed and comprehensive but to the point, shows transparency, terms, conditions and legal stuff - and make sure they sign it

Mike Murray, Vice President, Fathom SEO

He gave someone $10.

Bizarre Price Factors
- 20 placement 8 engines
- Refund admin fee
- 800 directories no spam
- 10 top 10 rankings

Hourly Pricing is good but you may run out of resources

Custom Fit Pricing they shy away from but you can tailor to client needs, but it gets expensive and doesnt fit in a process

Performance based model, they dont do it, but they almost came close. You get what you pay for but you need to trust them.

Retainer/Annual Contract
- They want clients in for minimum a year
- You can continue to improve with long term program
- But it is expensive for a client
- And quality issues

Models:
- Easy access for small and mid sized business
- Time tested
- Comprehensive
- Easier to train consistently
- Accommodates teams with diverse skills
- Simple, short, easy
- Scalable

SEO Models
- Annual with monthly payments
- Based on number of keywords
- Can add extra keywords pages
- We post updated to move program along
- Follow strict process
- Long term fits ongoing optimization
- $800 to $1,800 monthly plus options

Online PR/Links:
- Annual but with monthly payments
- Hourly focus provides campaign directions
- Vast offerings
- Campaigns crafted quarterly
- Follow strict process
- Long term reflects sound plan
- $800 to $1,800 per month

PPC Model:
- Three month arrangement, monthly payments
- MAnagement fee and 5% of media spend, reflects efficiencies limits investment
- Adhere to prices
- Analytics and conversion
- Custom reporting
- $800 to $1,800 per month

Conditions
- Money back guarantee
-- It doesn't drive more sales from serious prospects
-- Risky

Right to Cancel model
- Cant demonstrate full program merits
- Creates a premature focus on rankings

SES San Jose 2007
Issues Track: In House: Big SEO

Speakers:
(Moderator) Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget
Bill Macaitis, VP of Online Marketing & SEO/SEM, Fox Interactive Media
Marshall D. Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, New York Times /About.com
Melanie Mitchell, Vice President of SEO/SEM, AOL
Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Strategies International
Kara Jariwala, Search Strategist, Cisco

Marshall Simmonds

We've broken up the topics into 5 categories, I'm going to be discussing hiring and retaining talent.

Challenges
- New Employees/Turnover
- 11M documents (and more all the time)
- URL integrity - maintaining standards
- Paid subscription wall - TimesSelect
- New site launches
- IT developments
- Corporate acquisitions

Methodology that works for big brands:
I. Organize
II. Analyze
III. Educate -- constant education for new and old employees.

How did we enable in-house talent to get these results?
- Build a well-organized SEO program
-- On-site SEO program manager at each NYTCo property responsible for leading cross-functional etam to push optimization agenda.
-- Engaged team of marketing, tech, research, editorial and even sales -- Everyone has a role in creating and maintaining search intiatives.
-- Share success when a newly visible section gets great links or achieves good rankings
-- Be a resource for employees that are heavily involved in the SEO outcome, and also for those who aren't focused on search.
-- Be a liaison

Who can you hire for SEO?
- Skills:
--- Can come from many different interenet and/or marketing experiences
--- Marketing background -- understands importance of metrics
--- Thorough understanding of "Best practice" search optimization techniques and marketing methods with current knowledge of latest and future industry trends in the search arena
- We execute strategy and measure results on an ongoing basis
--- Metrics save jobs

Incentivize based on performance of properties, incentivize based on total search referrers on a TOT basis. Set milestones related to site/section performance. Make SEO training part of new employee curriculum.

Bill Hunt: Defining Opportunity

This is the carrot or stick part that Marshall alluded to... I like that "metrics save jobs" thing... the problem is metrics also lose jobs, hence the carrot or stick.

What are things your execs ask?
1. What is SEM and why should I care?
2. Tell me how this helps me meet my objectives?
3. Where do we stand today?
4. What is our competition doing?
5. What do you propose we do?

Why calculate your opportunity? It makes the business case and justifies the investment. It also allows you to focus your activities and identify gaps. Make sure you set expectations and keep it real. Monitor your performance and keep track of your metrics.

To evaluate your opportunity, take your "goal words" and look up the estimated searches per month for each (this goes into your matrix). Next, look in your log files and find out your current SE traffic and what percent each is of your overall traffic. Make a column for your current Google rank for each term. (Execs like ranks, it's a simple concept they "get"). Next, project your visits. Next, calculate the value of a visit. Now show the revenue opportunity. Break it out and show what the costs and ROI.

Importance of understanding intent... we've created a model we call the Searcher Mindset. Mindset > Goal > Keyword > Projection. Determine which types of searchers you reach/try to reach and use each of their unique motivations and behaviors and apply your goals to predict/project the keywords you need and what kind of traffic (and therefore dollars) you shoud expect.

By showing that you increased traffic X% to these pages that are important to the company, you're cementing your case and ensuring your budget. Remember, there is rarely "new money" so give solid justification of what should be cut and the business case for change. Understand the goals of the current budget allocations and show how search can compliment or increase results over current spend. Explain competitive pressures and missed opportunities. Prepare for turf warfare and budget battles.

Eat the elephant... one bite at a time!

Bill Macaitis: How to get a project through

This is one of the most common pain points. I want to go through and discuss all the SEO roadblocks. Like editorial doesn't like it when you tell them you want a certain keyword density.. design looks at you funny when you say "no flash".. finance won't give you any money because it's supposed to be "free".

1. Define your opportunity (see Bill's portion of slides)
2. Evangelize -- lots of people don't understand SEO... so help them
3. Sell all the stakeholders
4. Find allies
5. Focus on small wins -- let people start to see the impact for future buy-in
6. Focus on your money words -- your money word is whatever your CEO's favorite pet words are. If the CEO is happy, everybody is happy
7. Education
8. Weekly meetings -- monitor projects, keep everyone in the loop, keep the communication going
9. Build relationships
10. Bribes -- do what you can to get the ball rolling on your project
11. Face to face -- Meet with the roadblock person... email doesn't suffice
12. Internal competition
13. External competition
14. Show past successes
15. Show past failures
16. Utilize ranking reports
17. Prioritize your projects
18. Put names against projects
19. Utilize deadlines -- hard deadlines keep things moving.
20. Accept no excuses for seo projects not getting through or getting started.

Kara Jariwala: Tools You Can Use

-- Keyword research is always where we start and metrics is always where we end.

-- Pick out the "just right" to track. There are words we know are "too hot", the search volume in a particular month is just off the charts, but then the following month is drops off tremendously. There are words that are "too cold" in that there just isn't enough volume there to justify bothering with them.

-- Automate your research. There are different software packages you can buy; most are ASP type of models. Automating your time consuming research frees up your time to focus on strategy.

-- Give your clients digestible pieces of data.

Melanie Mitchell: The Large Site Challenge

If your corporate culture or structure doesn't believe in or buy-into SEO, you simply cannot succeed. When I came to AOL, I had to ask them to change the entire way they do everything. The entire corporate structure was configured in a way that made optimizing for search completely impossible. To make SEO a big part of our strategy, we had to weave it into the corporate DNA, and make people aware that we're all responsible for it -- from the CEO on down.

The Six-Point Plan

- Create core search team (Subject Matter Experts, Systems Architect to connect the dots, Tech Lead (business analyst to interface w/ programmers), Front Liners (programmers), Program Manager, Project Managers)

- Set priorities, goals and incentives. In our case, we track search referrals, and we ties these referrals to people's bonuses -- this makes it more important to people :)

- Provide training. If you're going to hold people responsible and accountable, you have to provide training. In our case, it's required and graded and those grades roll up to supervisors/managers.

- Set internal standards. Make sure what you're doing is defined. It helps you check to see how you're doing.

- Provide tools. Help all of your departments be successful with their seo strategy.

- Measure and track (and adjust). Track pages indexed, search referrals, user behavior (abandonment, return visits, page consumption)

Thoughts to take with you

- You can't ignore search.
- You need executive buy-in.
- No accountability, no success. Your whole effort needs to have teeth.
- Be transparent with the data.
- Be willing to do what it takes.

Interesting Concepts...

-- Melanie Mitchell recommends webconfs.com -- free tools (spider simulator, keyword clouds, backlink checker), she also said AOL uses an internal version of Nutch (an open source search engine) to evaluate the AOL properties she oversees. According to the Nuth website, because it's an open-source SE, there is "no bias" in the results, and the ranking algorithm is visible and known.

-- All of the panelist seem to agree that search needs to be independent of other departments, or perhaps mostly independent with dotted line reporting to IT/Marketing/Finance, etc.

What better way to get links than by doing something that makes people feel compelled to link to you? That's link baiting -- coming up with an idea, a service, even a controversy -- that gets people talking and linking your way. A viral campaign is similar -- a program, a system or an encouragement that gets people linking to you over time. This session is designed for experienced marketers. Beginners should only attend if they've gone through the Link Building Basics session earlier in the conference.
Moderator:

* Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:

* Chris Boggs, Manager, Search Engine Optimization, eMergent \ Brulant, Inc.
* Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
* Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz.org
* Cameron Olthuis, Independent Online Marketing Consultant

Chris Sherman introduces the session. Link baiting is an appealing strategy because you're giving something really good for link love.

We start with Rebecca Kelley, who totally rocks.

Linkbait is content on your site that targets the "linkerati." A lot of people think that linkbait is manipulative because you're getting people to link to you in a malicious way. But it's not. If it's interesting content, people should have no problem linking to it. Therefore, viral worthy content and an audience = link love.

When you have a campaign, you want to focus on the linkerati who are the tech savvy people.

Some opportunities there include:
- Researching your sector's linkworthiness. Get some ideas from Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us.
- Discover the big players in your field. Look if they're discussing trends you want to focus on.
- Leverage that community after you do your launch.
- Target the right kind of sites (the ones that are more appropriate to your content). Tech news fits on Digg, but offbeat news might be better on Boing Boing and Fark.

Designing appealing content pieces:
- Select a content focus. ex. Mingle2's "How Dating my Ex was Like Playing Doom II on Nightmare Mode." the person who wrote this studied Digg, got 4000 diggs on this submission and got 1700 links.
- Mesh together your branding and viral elements. Relate this to your sector. It wouldn't really work to write about Apple and the Wii in the mortgage industry.
- Target your keywords. You want linkbait that is relevant. Make sure the title of your piece gives you the right traffic.

Appealing does not necessarily mean complex. The web2.0 look feel is good, but not essential. Simplicity works. An example is a drawing of a flowchart (scanned in, not even Photoshopped!) It got 2500+ Diggs.

Target the Linkerati's emotions. Rand Fishkin wrote a post about emotions that make links. Linkerati are very emotional people. They're angry; they're excited about product launches; they like controversy. They like getting riled up and talking about things.

Don't forget vanity. People who are very likely to link are people whose egos are stroked. Matt Cutts talked about how David Klein, a chiropractor, took pictures of people drawing pictures of what they want to do - David created images and got links. (Matt linked him. I read it.)

Leverage the community you research. Do a little pre-launch PR. Ask opinions before launching your piece. Since you're involving them in the process, they're more likely to take interest and spread the word if they have a contribution to it. Once you do launch it, stay on top of the traffic and manage your site. The first 15-30 minutes are crucial to handling traffic. That's when the top linkers and bloggers will see your piece. A successful piece can get up to 10k visitors an hour especially from sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Try to have static pages to handle the load. You want to receive ongoing value from your linkbait. Take advantage of your traffic increase after you launch something successful because it will bump the users (who are sticky!). Good linkbait has continuous relevance over time.

Drivl's 22 Worst Place Names in the World - 2400 Diggs, 1300 links, 192 comments, and 4000 page views (6.5% of the total pageviews on the site). It continues to pull in traffic and visitors - the content is timeless.

Keep in mind:
- Linkbait is not a sure thing. Don't get discouraged.
- Linkbait doesn't necessarily target your typical audience. You have to keep this other mentality - "I'm targeting the people who will link to me" rather than your typical users.
- Linkbait isn't a quick fix. It's a fun and clever wait to get links but it's not an easy solution.

Cameron Olthuis is next.

Linkbait is remarkable content or feature on your website that compels other people to link to you.
- Informational content
- Controversy (Jason Calacanis against SEO)
- Humor (funny content, funny images, viral videos)
- News (being the first to break a major news story or offering thoughtful opinion on a story)
- Tools (mortgage calculators, SEO tools, etc.)

What are the benefits?
- Links. Linkbait is link building in mass. Traditional link building is not fun to do and it's time consuming.
- Link profile. The best links show up naturally and show up from all different sources. They are not reciprocal.
- Traffic. Social sites can drive insane amounts of traffic.
- Branding. When you're on these social sites, people perceive you as the authority.
- Bookmarks. Not only are bookmarks links, but people are saving these because people want to revisit these pages in the future. It's great to have that additional traffic source.
- Media publicity. These social sites can get you in front of major news sources.

Case Study: Drug Rehab center. It's typically perceived as boring. How can you get linked to?
First, I want to see what the community likes that's relevant to this. So an example is del.icio.us. Search for the keyword/tag "drugs" e.g. the effects of cannibus on a web based lifestyle. People actually like this even though it's informational (it's also funny).
Second, brainstorm with your coworkers, friends, family, and the client. Brainstorming can give you many multiple linkbait ideas.
Then, create the content. "Guide to Identifying and Recognizing Illegal Drugs." These need to be very interesting and social media friendly pages. When these people are clicking, they're not spending time on the site. Make it easy for them to scan the info - intro paragraph, table of contents, etc. It was submitted to Digg and did great. It got 1300 Diggs, 150+ comments, 1000+ links, 50K unique visits within the first 48 hours., #1 for illegal drugs ranking.

Keys to promotion:
- Having a power account. Your success rate is much higher. Tips: Provide value to the community. Don't submit your own articles. People look at your past submissions and think you're boring. If you go out to other sites and link to them, they're perceived as more legitimate.
- Good titles and descriptions. This will make or break your linkbait piece.
- Submit it to the proper category.
- Target the proper sites. Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Netscape.

Example: Search Engine Smackdown. This is a flash game where you learn about SEO by battling a founder of the search engines. It got a lot of great links and worked out for us.

Ideas beyond content:
- Flash content
- Viral videos
- Mashups
- Images
- Widgets
- Tools

Jennifer Laycock is next. She says that the core purpose of linkbait is to build links. The reason it works is that people are looking for things to talk about. There are millions of blogs (she says 71 million, but Greg Jarboe is sitting next to me and he keeps saying 98. In any event, that's a lot!)

Viral marketing is about marketing. It's great for building your brand and for driving conversions. People build relationships online. We know that people listen to their friends. With these new communities popping up in social media, people are building trust relationships with others that they haven't met and may never meet. It's viewed differently than traditional advertising.

So why do this? The cost is in your idea. You usually have a higher development cost (creativity), but you're not paying for placement, CPM impressions, etc., so if it goes successfully, you do very well.

It also creates brand evangelists. The added benefit of having people speak about your product increases your credibility.

You also get a rapid response rate. The spread of email, blogs, and social media spread is instant.

How do you do this?
- Ask yourself: what sparks passion in your customers?
- Look at what hasn't been done before.
- Look at how your ideas benefit your users.
The real big question is asking if your audience will risk their reputation on this. If you have people who have relied on you for restaurant reviews, for example, and you give them misinformation, will they trust you again?

Quick tip: using other people's resources is a great way to be viral.
Get ad space without buying an ad. Example: Widgets. (Flickr, MyBlogLog, blog quiz - cheap ideas - dating sites can do "are you a romantic, what type of flower are you?" and vacation sites can do "what's your ideal vacation spot?")

When opportunity presents itself, be ready to act. Jennifer shares her story about her issue with the National Pork Board. She sold shirts on her site to help local milk banks and one of the slogans on the shirt was "the other white milk." The National Pork Board sent her a cease and desist notice. When she thought about it, she realized that this is a social media match made in heaven.
She did the following:
- Prepared the right story: indignation and humor
- Have a buzzworthy hook. The lawyer handed that to her on a platter - they used the wrong wording and assumed she was pushing a breastfeeding fetish (when they were, in fact, clueless).
- She created a call to action. Something as simple as adding something on the end like contact information can help. And she did that. (And they didn't like it.)
- Make it easy to spread with bookmarking tools.
- Planted the seeds - emailed friends.
She also started adding a link back out to people who linked to her and that pushed her site higher up.

It paid off great. A traffic spike was 400% (80,000 visits). She got great branding spike. It was a great topical blog spike. Her sales spiked 700%. She also had a community spike - tons of comments come in to this day. (I linked to it less than a month ago!)

She ended up receiving an apology and the cease and desist was revoked. They also offered a donation to the milk bank.

Last up is Chris Boggs who is not owned by Microsoft like I wrongfully implied last week. He works for Brulant now.

Some of the past sessions we've covered are - Link Building Basics, Are Paid Links Evil?, SEO Q&A (up next! Yes, I will be blogging that.)

Not everyone can leverage Digg. How can you build links without this? Let's talk about those strategies.

Best practices:
- Free and paid directories
- Quid pro quo: give something to get something. This includes link negotiation and buying links.
- Link baiting
- Links from Matt Cutt's blog!

People have talked about Yahoo! Site Explorer and I wanted to show an example of some of the research you can do with that. Chris is sharing how he uses it to get links.
- Check the inlinks.
- Remove links from the internal domain.
- You can watch links from the entire site or to a particular page.
- You don't want all your links to point to the homepage. You should focus on linking to subpages. This works in general because most of your content is likely not on your homepage. Linkbait increases your deep-link ratio.

Exercise when building links: how many degrees of separation can you map? If you're talking about high blood pressure, you're probably going to look at sites that are related to that. But you might run out of sites. So maybe you'll want to find other related ideas - heart disease, exercise. I like to go out to at least 6-7 degrees of separation. The search engines should realize that there's a semantic connectivity between that and your topic.

How does this work for linkbait? Once mapped, additional research is required for link baiting efforts.
1. Examine buzzworthy topics for each area.
2. Look for trends (Nielsen BuzzMetrics / Umbria)
3. Participate in communities discussing the issues.
4. Create "ubiquitous" linkbait, which will be more likely to draw links from a larger variety of websites (and thus look very natural). The added bonus of this is that the majority of the links should be coming from sites that are relevant.
5. Build on successes, or try again.

Moderator:
Misty Locke, President & Co-Founder, Range Online Media

Pradeep Chopra, Co-Founder, OMLogic

Internet has changed the business marketplace, not limited by time, distance or capital.

SEM is considered the best options and SEM industry is growing at an incredible pace.

Talent:
- Demand exceeds supply
- SEM is the core of marketing
- Today is the best time to be an SEM professional

Why a Career in SEM?
- Flexibility
- Skills are portable and global
- SEO: One of the four cutting edge jobs (Source: RHI)
- Innovation and adventure
- You don't need a professional degree
- Salaries are attractive

Salaries Overview:
- Executive entry level 30-45k
- Specialist 3-5 yrs 50-75k
- Expert with etc...
From ClickZ

What Skills do you need?
- Communication
- Passionate about Internet
- Networking
- Quicker Learner
- SEO is technical, PPC is creative
- Sales & Marketing

What Lies in the Future:
- Web 2.0
- Rich media
- Behavioral
- Conversions
- Beyond US
- Verticals
-- Retail
-- Travel
-- Finance
-- Education
-- Social Networking
-- SEM

Key to Success:
- Use SEM for finding a new job
- Continuous Learning and certification
- Leadership role

Dan Perry, SEO Producer, Cars.com

Believer in interviewer skills in getting the job.

Preparation:
- "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." Ben Franklin

- Expect to meet with at least three people
-- HR: Did you like on your resume?
-- Boss: Can you do the job?
-- Boss' Boss: Will you fit in?

- Questions to answer:
-- Where do you want to be in 5 years?
-- Strengths and weaknesses
-- Biggest accomplishment/failure?
-- Friend/coworker boss describe you?
-- Best decision you ever make?

- Never bring up money
- Don't say you have offers elsewhere, even if you do
- Don't ask for more vacation
- Know your number and stick to it
- Consider entire package
-- Insurance
-- Relocation details
-- 401k match (and vesting)

Interview Process:

- Do you have a question for me?
-- Always have a question
-- Be specific (no culture questions
-- Think about this one and have a few

Final Thoughts:

- Be prepared to compromise (working on groups and teams)
- Develop diplomacy

David Wallace, CEO and Founder, SearchRank

- David stumbled into this industry, got his computer in 1996. April 1997 he went to a seminar on making money online, became an affiliate of web design. They launched niche web site to attract customers. They developed a contractors resource directory in Arizona. They relied on free organic results. Started then building their own sites and then added SEO services.

Today way to learn SEM:
- Free resources like Beginners Guide from SEOmoz, blogs, forums
- eBooks, SEOBook.com, etc.
- Online Courses, SEMPO, Bruce Clay, SECollege
- Conferences, SES, PubCon, SMX

Take this knowledge and apply it to a site.

Establish a site to learn from:
- Choose a niche (something not highly competitive)
- Secure a domain name (new ones can be a hurdle)
- Establish the web site (design yourself, hire someone, or use automated solution)

Applying a Search Marketing Strategy:
- Conduct keyword research
- Apply organic search techniques
- Set up paid search campaign
- Track progress

Networking with Others:
- No matter where you work, networking is important
- Develop business partnerships with ad agencies, web design firms, etc.
- Network online with SEMs through forums, blogs, social media
- Network in real life at conferences, local, etc.

Brand Yourself as an Expert:
- Write informative articles
- Participate in forums
- Participate in social media
- Start an informative blog

Things not to do:

- Don't spam forums or blogs
- Don't steal other's content or sales copy
- Don't come off as a know-it-all
- Don't promise what you can't deliver

Stay on the cutting edge

- Live and breath it
- Active in forums
- Subscribe to quality blogs
- Never be afraid to experiment
- Buy savvy SEMs drinks at SES

Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service

How to Avoid Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Manage Client Expectations
- Only promise what you can actually deliver
- Set reasonable time/date expectations

Set Reasonable Limits
- How much time will be spending on the project
- How much time will you be available
- Avoid the temptation to become the equivalent to an in house SEO

Conflicts of Interests
- Disclose any conflicts before you close a deal
- Decide if you are going to limit yourself to only one client for a particular area
- Avoid competing with your clients

Manage Your Risks
- Don't let your business depend on one client
- Don't let your business depend on just one web site
- Don't expose your clients web sites to unnecessary risks

Keep Learning and Growing
- Pick and follow some of your favorite blogs and limit yourself
- Use recap or roundup bloggers
- Experiment with your own sites and build your own test labs

Use Sub Contractors
- Use sub contractors to scale up or down quickly
- Use them to compensate for your areas that aren't your core competency or expertise
- Be careful using sub contractors for mission critical functions

Contracts
- Know when you need and don't need a contract
- Large companies wont work without a contract
- Understand "Work for hire" and copyright

Accounting:
- Get a good accountant
- Learn how to use accounting to your benefit
- A good accountant will save you more money than you are paying them each year

Jessica Bowman, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Business.com

You are now a student that is constantly learning

Learn the basics:
- Work.com
- Google Hacks
- SearchEngineGuide
- SEOBook
- Search Engine Visibility
- Cat Seda
- Attend conferences
- Attend training programs
- Most training will come from hands on experience

As You Get Started:
- Outsource aspects of your project
-- Strategy
-- Technical site audit
-- keyword research
-- Trouble shooting issues
- Q&A

SEM is Constantly Changing:
- You need to stay on top of it
- Especially if you will charge for it
-- Read Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable and Sphinn (thanks)

Big Changes Occur
- Cloaking can get you banned and it once was acceptable, she said
- Link exchanges once worked well and not always so good
- Link buying was once acceptable, not anymore
- You must stay on top of this
- Expect to spend two hours per day on reading

As You Work:

- Systematic process in place
- Document
- Gaps between client meetings require documentation
- When you are consistent, productivity increases
- Once solid, it you can outsource portions of the project as needed
- Things you can document:
-- Gathering rankings
-- Keyword data gathering
-- Gathering link data
-- Directory submissions
-- Portions of site audits
-- Optimization QA

Build Industry Camaraderie
- You need other people to talk to about questions

Know What you don't know

The 34th edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. We took most of the summer off and decided to come back with a live show at SES San Jose. We discussed some of the hottest topics of the summer including, paid links, advertiser controls, Fox leaving Google, Sphinn, supplemental tags, and much more. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file and listen at your convenience.

You can listen to the MP3 file with our new player directly below:

Chris Boggs, Barry Schwartz & Tamar Weinberg during live airing of The Pulse

Topics We Covered:

1. Google Webmaster Central Cleans Interface, Adds Paid Link Report & More
   
2. Google Adds "Excessive" To Link Exchange Guidelines
   
3. Google AdWords Allows You To Block Ads With IP Exclusion
   
4. Google Tests "Allowed Sites" Feature for AdSense
   
5. Google AdWords To Allow Advertisers to Opt Out of AdSense for Domains
   
6. SEOs & Webmasters Lose Important Google Link, Vanessa Fox Goes to Zillow
   
7. Google "Buffy" Update - June Google.com Update
   
8. Yang & Decker Take Over Yahoo While Semel Steps Aside
   
9. Threadwatch Blog Closes Down
   
10. Google Webmaster Central Now Offering "Sitemaps Warnings" With Error Reports
    
11. Sphinn Combines Social Search and Forum Discussion
    
12. Google Hides Supplemental Results Label in Google.com: Webmaster Reaction
    
13. Microsoft Now Using Autodiscovery Sitemaps for Crawl Assistance
    
14. Google Cache Showing Last Retrieve Dates in Minutes

The topic list is in order of how I wanted the conversation to go. I felt that these were the most talked about and discussed topics in the search community. Again, you can listen to the MP3 file here.

Tune in next week.

For our past shows, please visit the Search Pulse archives and browse through them all.

Session Overview:
This session looks at ways search marketers are tapping into an audience using local search engines, online yellow pages and other local search methods.

Moderator:
* Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:
* Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing
* Justin Sanger, President, LocalLaunch!
* Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Let's get the party started with Chris -
Show of hands for what type of marketing budget folks have - small, medium and large budgets - pretty even.

Marissa Mayer made the comment that Google has a large opportunity in local and more specifically mobile. 82% of local searches contacted a local business 60% making a purchase.

Justin
Local Search is a trillion dollar marketplace - whether you talk mobile, mapping or any aspect. Advertising opportunities are unrealized and significant.

The hype is about the fact that it's worth so much. Stats show us that a trillion dollars will be affected by local search. Some 93% of local search conversions take place offline.

Question is how you track local campaigns, but make no mistake that the market is here.

2.2 billion monthly queries with local intent. All behavior is inherently local - restaurants, shops, restaurants. The internet is learning to augment that behavior.

Local results real estate on Google has grown over the last several months because of demand and user experience.

SME's are starting to move ad dollars into search marketing.
- They represent 98% of the 22 million US businesses.
- 5-6% of the SME base have adopted online marketing!
Targeting for these players
- Local search tools
- Paid inclusion
- IYP's
- All of this is confusing to the SME's
Six Steps that a small business can use to take advantage. These are the most important steps to realize your place in the online marketing world.
1. Content control and dispersion
2. Empowering ratings and review channels
3. Riding the coattails of the authorities
4. Understanding Google references
5. Simple and structured optimized pages
6. Local link building and strategic IYP purchase
The beauty of the local marketplace is that it doesn't have to cost a fortune!

Content Control
- Driving the marketplace is content.
- All of the local search sites want to add local business and resource content.
- Think beyond your website
-- Think about how your content can live and breathe on each of these unique locations.
-- Start with the base content, meaning the basic information and optimize the profile.
-- You goal is to ensure that the majority of places online know you exist and know what you do.
-- You content needs to live and breathe in this environment
- The structured content catalyst
-- Drives local search
-- Drives positive local experience
-- Reach new business prospects
Riding the coattails of authority
- Becoming more difficult for companies to optimize for a local search against the local directories.
- Use these directories you can increase your own visibility
- Your job is to ensure your business is there!
- IYP are not dying - there are dominating very specific searches.
Empowering Ratings and Reviews
- User generated content is a critical driver for your business online.
-- Qualitative content in the form of user reviews and ratings should be embraced
- You can propagate social reviews and ratings for your business. Kick start it yourself.
- User reviews help determine rank in the search engines. Provide incentives to your customers to rate your service.
- Search engines are polling review and rating sites to provide local search content. These can support your business profile online
Google Reference
- Study Google Reference to find out what authorities Google is relying on.
Optimized Web Pages
- Make sure your pages are structured and can be crawled.
- Follow the very simple best practices
-- Complete address information
-- Global footer
-- Mix up your address construct
-- Mix up state names and abbreviations
- Each address derivative is an opportunity to tell something a little different
Local Link Building
- Use Google references
- Find out who the authority is locally and make sure your information is clean and available.
- Use solid linking including geography and vertical

Patricia
Tons of searches, highly fragmented, 22 million confused businesses.

6 Tips for local search advertising - staying focused on PPC and local advertising.
7. Integrate - use more than 1 way of targeting
8. Focus - look at the decision criteria of the searcher
9. Capitalize - get local and challenge the big guys
10. Drive - get the user to come in or pick up the phone
11. Understand - the options for ad placement
12. Utilize - local can be useful for big brands too

Integrate - Multiple Marketing Methods
- Tested 3 concurrent PPC campaigns
-- Geo-targeting
-- National campaign with local keywords
-- Branding campaign - used branding message
- But why?
-- Got cost effective cost per acquisition in all 3 campaigns
-- Test all the methods and follow the ROI.
Focus - Decision criteria - what are people trying to do in search?
- Target the proximity of the search
- Immediate availability
- Price or discounts
- Referrals and opinions
- Experience and ambiance
Local Speak
- If you are a local restaurant competing with a chain - focus on the local aspects of your business. Choose your history and local flavor.
Drive - bring them in
- Google Maps
-- Focus on local products like map, driving direction, ratings and hours.
--- Ex: Local business ad in Google maps
--- Ex: Google local business coupons
-- Get in to local business ads
--- Check to see if you're in the directory - if not get added.
--- Easy to create ads and show them on maps after that.
- Yahoo! Local
-- Use Yahoo! Local listings
-- 3 options - basic, enhanced and ??
-- Recommends featured ad (if you can afford it)
--- Great thing about it - it's easy to manage.
Understand your ad positions
- Your ads will show up in the Yahoo Search results in a proximity based search.
- Google will do the same thing.
Local Search for Big Brands
- Valuable for big brands, national chains, dealers and franchises.
- Use national integrity combined with local message.
Summary
- There is more than one way to reach the local search - test them.
- Ad products offer a variety of options places and prices - do your homework.
- (missed one - went by too fast)
- Test measure & refine

Matt
The best lessons are learned through screw-ups. "Did I really do that"
Focus on paid search for locals

Case Study: Local College
Goal: Increase MBA enrollment
Situation: very local, turf is well defined
Unique local challenge: very narrow geo-area makes it difficult.
Test: Set up 2 campaigns
- Set up a geometry around the area
-- Zip code & geo targets
- Set up a national campaign
-- IP results are not always good which is why they used the national campaign
- Both campaigns had "good local scent"
Oops, they turned on content
- Email started flooding in from overseas. Originally thought to be a mistake. Turned out to be a glitch in the local algorithm. It turned into a conversation starter about new international programs.
Lessons
- Don't bother with zip codes.
- It's ok to be wrong and admit it.
- Lucky is good.
Case Study Two: Care Providers
Goal: Connect Families with Nursing Home & Care Providers
Situation: National provider - local clients, intimately local problem, lots of keywords, it's a big country.
Unique Local Challenge: deliver ads that will help solve a problem. Create a manageable campaign as a national company without local offices.

Test
- Wanted to paint a campaign across every state
- Forget the national campaign after states were running
- Keyword list grew by 51x
- Google and MSN had geo-targeting options
Went Live
- As soon as the national campaign was turned off - the traffic fell off, conversions fell off, client was furious.
To Fix
- National campaign was brought back online
-- National and locals competed
- Realized that the national had really long history
-- Down bid the national and up-bid the state
Lessons
- Keyword + State outperforms keyword+st
- Be careful using abbreviations
- Good keywords for local campaigns
-- Near Boston
-- In Boston
-- Boston area
-- Western, area, east, west, north, south.
- People search on county names when thinking broad. Counties are very powerful terms.

Q and A
Q - Is there a way to find "best of" and "top 10" in newspapers and local web site to make it easier for us to get into them?
A - Matt - You have to know you territory.
A - Justin - Great question - very ambitious. Check the papers, trade associations and local chambers.

Q - How you see tourism being affected through local search?
A - Justin - Tourism has been profoundly impacted by local search. 80% of all business takes place within a 20 mile radius. Target the entire national because customers can come from anywhere.
A - Patricia - See much better response rate on local ads versus national based on extra line of local text in the local ad.
A - Justin - Utilize geo-qualifiers in your ads and keywords to target your users.

Q - Is there any way to track the value of local search when your listing information is being displayed in the SERP
A - Justin - Yahoo! Enhanced will show impressions of your listing. The best way however is to get into call tracking. You have to go through great lengths to find out and track the information.
A - Patricia - Assign some value to visibility. Some products can help you define a visibility score.
A - Matt - How many search on your key terms? If you are, stop doing it. You are establishing a negative behavior for your IP address and Google will rotate your ad out or down. Start using the Google ad preview tool instead.

Q - Do you have any tips for optimizing a city search listing? Are there ways of utilizing city search and other tools to optimize listings.
A - Justin - City Search wants to get better data because it reduces their cost of acquisition. Treat the profile pages in these services as you would your own site. Follow SEO best practices.

Q - Can you tell us your experience building out keywords using various types?
A - Patricia - It varies quite a bit from campaign to campaign. Broad match can save you time, but be careful because it can be used to broadly and cost quite a bit if money. Tactics have included inputting a keyword in each of the 3 match types and study the results.
A - Matt - Use broad match for research and then start to move things to exact and phrase as you refine your campaign.

Q - How can I cope with small maps on the search results that don't include my service business?
A - Justin - Maps don't matter for service business as much because most service businesses come to the home. You still need to be advertising, utilize different tools.
A - Patricia - If you're serving a whole region, set up a paid campaign to serve the region.

Q - Have any of you targeted wireless ads to local search?
A - Matt - Check out David Dalka's blog as he is tracking the space.
A - Justin - Best answer is to deal with the Internet in its current form - use Google maps, use content tools that create mobile content. Look into Google mobile syndication. Make sure you are out there as these companies move more and more to mobile.

Q - How do you deal with the idea that local is more work for less result versus a national campaign?
A - Justin - The beauty of the local customer is that they have a very identifiable customer and the incremental value of a customer is significant.

Q - When you look at primary data sources - InfoUSA, Axiom, etc. - What if you've never been in an update cycle for them - how do you address the challenge of that delay?
A - Justin - There are some tools but not many. You have to keep fighting. Keep doing what you're doing.
A - Patricia - Stacey Williams has put a great presentation together about getting your data into all of those directories. Don't forget that you can also go into Yahoo! Local, Google Maps and others to tell them.
Q2 - The engines seems to weight the data sources more heavily. If you're not already in the primary data source, you have to wait.
A - Justin - More and more the engines are relying on the site/business owner to be the de-facto source of the information.

Q - Do I need to be concerned with duplicate content as I am updating my profile everywhere?
A - Justin - No, it won't. They are geo-vertical directory pages, therefore the content being displayed is there along with other results so the page is unique.
A - Chris - Agrees that it won't be a problem.

Q - Is there the possibility that the services will see different call tracking numbers as a less valid result.
A - Justin - Yes. The call tracking numbers will be replaced by the next authority. Spend the money, log in to Google business center. Pay the money to manage your listing.

Q - Should I have the same phone number in a Google Base and Organic Local results - I want to track the campaigns separately.
A - Justin - Sure if you want to be able to track performance across these different channels, then yes you may want to use different phone numbers. Especially in those areas where you have a local advertising outlay.

Provided by Steve Krull.

Jeffrey K. Rohrs welcomes that panel which includes representatives from Adobe, Fox and Intuit. Bill Macaitis from Fox Interactive Media begins by giving an overview of Fox's network of sites that includes MySpace, photobucket and American Idol. Fox has recently taken the move to consolidate SEM into one in-house team of 15 to work across all of the Fox websites. An important part of Bill's work is with PPC arbitrage (the good kind), using a large network of high quality content sites. Ad sales is Fox's largest revenue source, although they also look at other monetisation efforts such as sales, subscriptions and e-commerce. He stresses that it's important to tie all your systems together to get real time data, including your financial backend, ad server, web analytics and PPC bid management system. You're then able to calculate real time revenue and makes running large scale PPC campaigns easier and more cost effective. Targeting high quality content and high revenue sites offers better returns and bid management software is important in order to keep the money flowing into the most profitable keywords. Keep increasing the money you feed into campaigns until cost equals revenue and then optimise so that the best profit levels can be made.

Olivier who works in-house at Intuit begins by explaining the issues that they faced when he joined the company, with each department running their own PPC campaigns and little internal communication. He formed an organised design of personnel structure and moved into creating a single department to focus on all brands and keeping Inuit's objectives aligned. Agency resource was also consolidated so that a single company was used for their campaign optimisation and keyword expansion. The result was significant cost savings and a resulting increased (and continually increasing) profitability. To keep these efforts aligned, there's a continued effort to ensure that keyword duplication across campaigns doesn't occur (bidding against yourself). Testing campaigns is also essential, should multiple products be targeting the same set of keywords.

Dena Yahya from Onetime.com is introduced as someone who has experience in managing over one million keywords within the travel sector. Each member of her team is given their own vertical and is empowered to make key decisions on their campaigns - helping to stimulate their initiative and job satisfaction. Keywords are divided into different buckets and are optimised from the tail to the centre. Regular analysis is extremely important to ensure that budgets don't get out of control, although you shouldn't micro-manage. A/B test the products and pages that you market and optimise your landing page based on how it effects conversions.

Jay Middleton for Adobe outsources all of Search Marketing (he's a team of one) and takes an overall view and management of strategy. In the perfect world there would be no keyword, product or audience overlap and and no internal conflicts and goals – although that's never the case. Adobe manages over 175,000 keywords worldwide with multiple agencies and products. With such a large company, it's often the case that inter-division competition occurs, especially when new products and companies are acquired. Software suites and bundles cause chaos with campaigns and interlinked keyword groups.

Moderator:
Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Jon Diorio, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Google AdWords, Google Inc. was first up.

The AdWords API allows:
- Account management
- Campaign management
- Reporting
- Traffic estimation

The API helps manage more accounts and campaigns faster and more accurately.

Sample USes:
- Automate the regular generation and retrieval of reports
- Automate cumbersome bid management
- Automate complex inventory management
- And more

Resources Include:
- Developer's Guide (<-- most fundamental)
- Developers Sandbox
- AdWords API Blog (<-- most important)
- API Email Notifications
- API Developer Forum
- FAQs
- Sample Code
- SOAP Toolkits

There are 9 different services:
- Campaign Service
- AdGroup Service
- Criterion Service
- Ad Service
- Traffic Estimator
- Reporting
- and more...

AdWords API Versioning:
- They no longer break things
- Goal is to reach a feature parity with the front end
- Older versions are maintained for four months
- Version "Diff" information is available in release notes

Usage, Units & Billing
- AdWords API utlizes a unit based system
- Each ooerating performed on an AdWords account consumes a certain number of API units
- While some types of operations may consume a single unit, others may consume more
- On a regular basis, each developer will be billed $0.25 per thousand API units

www.google.com/apis/adwords

Dan Boberg, Managing Director, Sales Technology, Yahoo!
Yahoo Developer Network gives you:
- REST web services
- Desktop based environments
- RSS feeds
- Presentation libraries
- Developer centers
- Applications gallery
- Open Hack day

API Programs:
- Advertisers Program (YSM marketplace)
- Developer Program (open access and online support)
- Commercial Program (enterprise class support)

There is a new API commercial program
- Open to All
- No fees for API access
- Open and transparent
- Commercial grade technical and marketing support
- Massively scalability production platform
- There are fee based services for SLAs

Goals:
- Building partnerships

Commercial Program Addresses Specific Needs:
- Reliability
- Scalability
- Support with SLAs

Q4 time frame for application directory and they also want to add certification for certain applications.

David Flesh, Senior Director, Product Management, SEMDirector

Which Engines Have APIs
- Ask
- Business.com
- Baidu
- Gogole
- MSN
- Ingenio
- Lycos
- Yahoo
- Miva
- Mirago
- Mamma
- Kanoodle
- LookSmart
- Local.com
- Simpli.com
- SortPrice
- etc.

Challenges
- Not a standard around developing those APIs
- No common data schema standards across search engines
- Organic API data is either non existent or offers little value
- Occasional inconsistencies between cost data reported through the API and what is actually billed
- Changes to metrics that are reported are not called out in the API, therefore it becomes necessary to implement checksums to make sure historical values are consistent from week to week
- Quota for large clients
- Lack of special character support from some APIs strip out meaningful data
- Deleted campaigns are not always noted matching performance metrics with account structures is difficult

Documentation and Support:
- Great job of documenting things online
- Inquires to reps are ignored, passed off, or responses are refer to documents
- Personal support is offered

Improvements:
- Panama
- Google asking for feedback on APIs
- Missed Opportunity metrics reported by Google
- Noticeable improvements in MSN support efforts

Roadmap Requests:
- Organic search API
- Increase quota limits
- Provide percentage of clicks seen at varying average position
- Provide the number of queries for a keyword
- Demographic data
- Improve sandbox capability

API Futures:
- Standards
- Common Ontology or Schema

Julienne Thompson Hood, Director of OutSearch™, Advertising.com

- Automated, reliable information exchange between campaign and engine needed 24/7
- Campaigns are managed across multiple engines on a portfolio basis...

Best Practices
- Develop core applications that let them translate data into their own systems
- Identify most important business needs and decide which API features to take advantage of
- Write application to compile and provide meaningful reports on your most important data elements, costs, bid updates, etc.
- Test new features before implementing
- Utilize user forums

She posted a cheat sheet on search APIs by engine, I can't type it, sorry.

Tips and Tricks:
- Feature parity among engines
- Yearly releases among products
- Development lead team
- Data visibility
- API usage costs

Not yet running a blog? Not syndicating your content through web feeds? Then you're missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. Learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization.
Moderator:

* Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief, The ClickZ Network

Speakers:

* Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
* Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
* Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google
* Doug Hay, Principal & CEO, Expansion Plus Inc.

Rebecca starts talking, and I realize that the sound system in this room is really bad. This reminds me of what Lisa wrote about at SMX. It sounds like she's talking into an air conditioner. I hope I can hear the rest of the speakers.

Stephan is much more audible. Maybe Rebecca is just shy.

Since everyone knows what RSS is about, Stephan skips his slides about feeds and talks about optimizing your RSS feeds.
- Full text feeds, not summaries. It has rich HTML in there which is really important.
(Rebecca just moved the mic away from Stephan. Now he's not as loud but you can still hear him. Score.)
- You want to have as many items in the RSS feed as possible - 20 or more. The default is 10 but you should have more for the syndicators.
- Offer multiple feeds: category specific, latest comments, comments by post, tag feed.
- Optimize in terms of keywords in the item title and site title
- Have a compelling description
- Don't put tracking codes into URLs (e.g. &source=RSS). That's bad for splitting PageRank.
- An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories.

Have a good description - not "Just another WordPress blog."

Optimizing your blog:
- Rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure. People rely too much on the date based archives. Dates are horrible for the anchor text. The anchor text is as suboptimal as you can get. It's all bad. Nofollow those date-based archives or comments.
* Tag clouds and tag pages (UltimateTagWarrior plugin). Add keywords in your internal links. Tag clouds are very powerful. You can specify the maximum.
* Related posts (Contextual Related Posts plugin). Once you have tags on your page, you want related pages to be linked. Related tag pages and tag conjunction pages are very helpful.
* Title tags: SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress. It is a free plugin written by Stephan Spencer. It lets you assign unique title tags to every single post, category page, etc.
* Top 10 posts (Popularity Posts plugin)
* Pick a great plugin.
* Next and Previous posts
- Build inbound links
* Add Technorati tags to your posts (must claim your blog first)
* Get onto bloggers' blogrolls
* Trackbacks and comments won't help with linkgain.
* Use "Sticky" posts - you can set the keyword theme consistent and stable. Always appear at the top of the page. It's a way to add keyword rcih intro copy to a caetegory page or tag page. An example of this is the Adhesive Plugin.

The next person who is speaking is Rick Klau from Google. He's a former Feedburner employee but we know that was acquired by Google.

What's new:
- Syndication is increasingly popular
- Social networks are encouraging feed distribution. You
- Feedburner's "pro" features are now free (TotalStats and MyBrand)
- Yahoo Pipes makes RSS more customizable. You can mix and match content from many RSS feeds.
- Sitemaps support feeds. You can tell engines where your content is.

A few things specific to Feedburner that you can take advantage of are:
- When feed items are rendered in the aggregators, you know about it. You know that people are reading your feed content. That makes it easier for you to determine the impact of your feed. You can find out link clicks.
- MyBrand - you can map a CNAME to feeds.feedburner.com (use feeds.yourdomain.com instead of feedburner.com) but you need DNS know-how.
- You can get detailed visibility. Know which items generate activity.
- As Stephen said, full text is better than partial text. Big text on the slide: "It's the link, stupid." I think that more than anything the reasons that publishers want to look at full feed vs. partial feed is because they want people to show the content. It has nothing to do with monetization.

Best practices for Search Engines
- Noindex: if you prefer to keep this out of the search index, Google and Yahoo support this.
- Robots.txt
- Auto-discovery "advertises" your feed's availability to browsers and bots. This one line of code tells everybody visitor where your feed is so you can subscribe to it with one click. You can also know which services know you (which bots have accessed your site).
- If you're producing a podcast, please include show notes. Search engines love those.

Facebook lets users import notes so you should leverage social networks for distribution.

Doug Hay speaks next. (At this point, I do think Rebecca is just shy. Doug is quite audible as well.)

Google wants to see content and escalating amounts of content. From a marketer's point of view, you want to analyze the utilization. RSS is great on a blog. RSS feeds outside the blog platform are useful too, and I'll talk about that.

Any marketer has to have a strategy. RSS is a good strategy:
- Increase the rate of change on your pages. Add more content.
- Add more optimized content through RSS feeds
- Reach new niche markets
- Have ability to drive more qualified traffic to your site
- Have the ability to provide more inbound links.

An example: you can deploy RSS for text, video, or audio, or all 3 combined. With video/audio, provide text because search engines can't understand video and text.

Applications:
News articles
Product information
Customer education
Destination information

In addition to syndicating the content, add social media tagging.

Case study: Vision Media. They have an online/offline publication in history, philosophy, ethics, morality, and so on. Their pages have been revamped with RSS. Before RSS was implemented, they weren't in the first 1000. Subsequently, they ended up with top 10 rankings (4, 3, 10, 3). Through the syndication process, Reuters in Africa picked it up. Social networks got picked up by Digg, had 295 Diggs, and got over 5000 visitors to the site.

Last up is Greg Jarboe.

Everybody has a blog - 98 million people do. There are only 100,000,000 websites. Soon there will be more blogs than websites. If you don't have one, it's too late.

Greg wants to show something interesting: you don't need to have a blog to benefit from blogging. He shows an example of a guy who had great traffic. People looking at popular search terms - look at Google trends and blog about it becasue chances are, your competitors have not.

Using a tool called Buzzlogic, we mapped 40 influential bloggers and journalists who started joining in the conversation. Fifteen wrote about the stories and doubled about the traffic to the site. Getting influential bloggers to write about something can increase your record subscriptions. Blogger outreach brings more sales.

Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google, talks with conference co-chair Danny Sullivan about Google's moves in search, including recent changes to add more personalized and "universal" search results.

Before the event, Vanessa Fox came up to me and told me to blog about her. She doesn't work for Google anymore, though, so I don't know what she wants from us. Go away, Vanessa.

I just took 8 pictures of Vanessa and she had her eyes closed in all but one of them. Wake up, girl.

(Vanessa posing)

Now, Danny and Marissa sit down and they're about to talk about really cool stuff at Google.

Danny: How is the impact of universal search?
Marissa: We're really happy about how it turned out. We changed a lot of the infrastructure. The users seem to be really liking it and finding what they're looking for. We know we have a way to go, though, but we wanted to go beyond 10 links and give better, richer answers. Search results should be like an encyclopedia - images, text, and other resources. Today we have images, video, news, and books integrated into the results. We will also try to pull in other results into the main SERPs.

Danny: It's been interesting to see how the pages are evolving with AJAX like clicking on PlusBoxes in maps.
Marissa: We have a few bells and whistles that we call zippies and are working really well.

Danny: Do you think we'll get a lot of other results in time?
Marissa: Yes, we're looking at things that are a lot more radical.

Danny: Are we having more sources going into Google Video?
Marissa: We want to organize the world's information to make it useful. It didn't make sense to organize videos just from Google Video and YouTube, so we're looking hard to incorporate other video properties. It's up to the content creator to decide where to put their videos. We want to find videos from all these places.

Danny: Google Personalized Search ramped up and in May, web history was launched. How's that been going?
Marissa: In the future of search, there are a lot of changes. We get better every single day. In 10-15 years, we will be better than we are now. We think we can see more relevance for the users and help them find their answers faster by knowing more about them. Many people are opting in for it. It's really interested to experiment with the new science of personalized search and how we use this data to get better relevancy.

Marissa: We're trying to do this for ads and for search. They really need to match. The query and response should be the same. We want parity in the way we match ads and the user results so that people don't have to reconstruct their queries in artificial ways.

Danny: What personalized options will be available in the future?
Marissa: We're looking at things like locations, address books, web history, and we're asking our users to opt in for these features. Once we get those explicit opt-ins, we want to experiment to achieve more relevancy for personalized results.

Danny: One of the comparisons is with Amazon - when you searched for music years ago and Amazon still tries to assume that I'm interested in it. How do you want to deal with that?
Marissa: We want transparency and control. You can look at the information that Google has to personalize - the searches you've done, what you've clicked on, etc. You can remove that to reverse the effect of that particular action.

Danny: What about subtle clicks?
Marissa: That's a hard question. We've wondered if we should mark the results for personalization. But there's a spectrum. How much personalized results are being affected? If we mark personalized results and non-personalized results, it isn't the right model. We're looking at marking some of the results, but it's a gray area for us right now in how you should treat them.

Danny polls the audience: how many people want to have their personalized results marked? (A good number of hands goes up.)

Danny: You can't toggle results in the webmaster end for personalization. But Matt said you can add &pws=0 at the end of the URL? Can we have a button instead?
Marissa: We've looked at having a toggle. Our view is that personalized results will become the default in the future because they provide a relevance boost to that user. We want personalized results. I think it's a valid request though.

Danny: We're going through a lot of privacy which was kicked off by Google. Now everyone is doing that but you are still building detailed profiles of users. How do you deal with that?
Marissa: For users who want a relevance boost, we're having people sign up for a service. As part of that signup, they agree to privacy policies which is there to protect them. We may have a longer history because you've opted in. We're ultimately putting these on systems that are more protected.

Danny: We touched in the personalized experience and there's the iGoogle portal. You've had the growth in gadgets and now we have Facebook that people are saying is the new Google. How does Google view Facebook?
Marissa: We're really happy with iGoogle and Gadgets. I see a lot of parallels with that and Facebook applications. With that said, there's a similar vain between both programs: they're open platforms. It's not necessarily a walled garden. The power of these programs is that anyone can create a gadget or a Facebook application. That's why they're both growing. Both provide a great opportunity to build a deeper relationship with users and also this is great for distribution. I have a Netflix queue and it's part of my homepage experience in iGoogle. It's a robust form of advertising. It's not a small piece of text; you can provide functionality and information that's responsive and interactive with the user.

Danny: Do you have to go out and have a bunch of profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn to understand these services?
Marissa: I have profiles on all these services.

Danny: I wanted to know about other search engines. Wikia will be coming out to compete with Google. Jason Calacanis, a great friend of the SEO community (everyone laughs) decided to create Mahalo. How does Google deal with the human search engines?
Marissa: Google is painted as the algorithmic purist. That's not our view. The algorithmic approach is important. That said, once you had the basic algorithm, you can layer human elements into it. We have properties like Google Co-op where people can label items and Google Notebook which has human interaction. But you need to layer the two together - algorithms and human elements to achieve relevance.

Danny: Can you tell us about adding comments to Google News?
Marissa: Google news has always been focused on providing clusters. We want to provide multiple viewpoints. Krishna, the engineer behind this, wanted people to see one story and also what other people were saying behind that topic or organized presentations. We want people to see that comments. Now only can people read these published articles but they can also read the commentary, so that's why we wanted it to be compelling.

Danny: I wanted to shift over to Google Local. I wanted to talk about the usability in terms of fun or voyeurism of Google Street View?
Marissa: Street view is all about finding things faster. It's nice to be able to see what a store looks like from a street address. We want people to find things faster. The product is not about looking at faces or license plates. We're going to blur the faces and license plates. The spirit of street view is more about understanding what places look like.

Danny: A hot vertical is mobile search. Tell us about that.
Marissa: Google is seeing more and more mobile activity. Mobile saw this big increase. It's clear to see that people are switching off their computers and switching on their cell phones. This is true even with the iPhone - there was a big bump. We launched 1-800-GOOG-411. There's a nice integration with that and the iPhone. You get free 411 service. From that service, you can search for a particular business names, categories of that business, and related results. When you're on the phone with them, you can say "Map It," it sends you the map in an SMS message. It's very interactive. (She illustrates it on her iPhone. She has an iPhone. Cool.)

It's a particularly great application to get a lot of information.

Later, Danny asks Marissa what her favorite non-Google property is. She says Facebook, particularly with the way you are able to connect to people and write about the connections.

Then, Danny asks Marissa what her favorite Google property is. She says she cannot do that because it's like choosing a favorite child. But she likes web search, Book Search, and Google Desktop.

Yesterday afternoon there was a temporary issue with Google AdWords. A WebmasterWorld thread reported that billing information is temporarily unavailable at about 4pm (EST).

Google said they were aware of the issue and they were working to fix it:

Yep, engineering is aware of the issue you describe, and is hard at work towards resolving it.

I strongly suspect that this'll be seen only by a small percentage of advertisers - and my apology to those who are.

I'll update you all as I learn more.

At about 6:20pm (EST) the problem was resolved. The total issue lasted approximately one hour and thirty minutes.

In addition, the Google Maps Coupon featured is reportedly fixed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

YouTube Initiates Monetization Strategy With Transparent Video 'Overlays' by Greg Sterling sums it all up well. Google has started to try to monetize YouTube with video overlay ads that are a bit transparent. Here is a screen capture from Greg:

How does it work exactly? Greg explains that also:

• 15 seconds into the video, an overlay ad appears on the bottom 20 percent of a video
• The overlay animates for up to 10 seconds and is 80 percent transparent
• The overlay then closes automatically
• A user can replay ad by clicking button

Reaction towards this?

It is a sit back and watch type of attitude on this Google / YouTube monetization strategy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

I reported this the other day at Search Engine Land, Microsoft Content Ads To Open To All US Advertisers August 29.

In short, Microsoft is opting in all US advertisers into their content network (i.e. ContentAds). The only way for you to say you don't want to be included in the content network is to fill out a form prior or turn it off after you are opted into the network. More on that over here.

Publishers, listen up. This does not mean Microsoft is launching an AdSense competitor on the 29th. All they are doing is allowing all advertisers to put their ads on Microsoft's content network. The content network from the publisher side is currently locked down. So no, you can't put Microsoft ContentAds on your sites, just yet.

There is a lot of confusion about that point.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Cre8asite Forums, a forum we have been covering forever here, has turned five years old today.

I was chatting with Cre8asite's founder, Kim Krause Berg, last night, when she mentioned it.

Cre8asite is truly a wonderful place to learn tips about SEO and site development. It is friendly, educational and patient.

We have covered most of Cre8asite's birthdays including their fourth, third and second birthday.

You can wish Cre8asite a happy birthday at Cre8asite Forums.

San Jose SES
Successful Site Architecture

Moderator: Barbara Coll , WebMama.com

Speakers:

Matt Bailey, SiteLogic
Derrick Wheeler, Axciom Digital

It's the last session before the Google Dance. Not a packed room.

Barbara intros the session. It's the 6th year of this talk, according to Barbara. Two speakers. Both are veterans. They'll cover the details and give you info to take home. They'll review classic errors.

Irishtourism.com is her choice for an example of a perfect site, both SEO and usability wise. She introduces Derrick Wheeler first.

DW:

Who has been to the top of success mountain? Web arch, quality content, unique and user friendly are the blocks in the foundation. SE's have to go to your website via URL, follows links, reads content, etc. He has a funny illustration on power point of all the things that happens in eng's. Search crawls, indexes, users perform targeted queries, se's rank users click on ranked pages and users take action. This is what you need to be sucessful. It will impact your website.

Internal linking - SE's use them to discover URLs, deterine relevance and understand the importance of the page. If you link to a page a lot, you tell the SE the page is important. Shows example of URLs source code and how SE's identify them. SE's can't follow JavaScript..we've heard this. He shows an example of script and how and why SE's can't execute the script. They can't follow the path to a product page and this blocks it from the index. He shows examples of URLs that SE's may be able to follow. Internal cross linking is how you tell SE's what pages are important. Navigation architecture is used for this. He has a screenshot diagram of this. He shows a page of a web page that has an image that has no alt attribute in it. Top navigation should be text so SE's can understand the content. They can't with images.

Form based navigation is a problem for SE's who can't use forms. Inconsistent linking creates duplicate linking. Creates a poor user experience. Shows a breadcrumb nav example URL that's very complicated the way its constructed. Same pages, different URLs, is an issue for SE's. Shows examples of breadcrumb navigation that end up as dead ends for SE's and users. (You have to see his presentation to get the visuals for this. He's showing code.) If you don't have to redirect, then don't redirect. There's another example on the screen of a press release link structure starting from a homepage. SE's use URLS to determine relevance.

Be careful with the number of parameters, number of directory levels, total length. He prefers shorter URLS with fewer keywords over long URLs with stuffed keywords. He recommends 'URLs with dashes rather than underscores for usability issues. You can't always see the underscore. If you use parameter based urls link consistently to a single version.

He shows a screenshot of http request/response cylce. Describes the actions servers take depending on the URL status code. Most websites link to your domain (shorter URL), even if you redirect. Shows an example of a site that constantly redirected users to different urls but the content was elsewhere. The circle of death is the robots.txt file that people leave on the server by accident. If you leave it in there, SE's can't index the site with it in there (used during the development stage to prevent search engines from crawling during a build.) Remove it after launch.

Note: My battery is getting low so I'm stopping here to save some of it for Matt's part. Sorry!

Barb presents Matt Bailey next. I may have to cut out early...

He begins with joking about search engine submission is no longer necessary. The process of submitting websites is extinct. The SE's will find you. If you build it properly, they will come. Build it right the first time.

Discusses the Target lawsuit and the fact that it was inaccessible to those who used screen readers. There were no alt text. It relied on image maps. You had to use a mouse to use a form or fill things out or make selections. If you don't use a mouse how can you do this? Target resisted a judge's demand to put in alt text.

Read the Google Guidelines. You can save money if you do that. They do update them. They'll tell you what they want. Use text links, sitemap, do keyword research, use title and alt tags and more. Google's guidelines are similar to the accessibility checklist at W3C. Provide a text equiv to every non text element. Provide redundant text links. SE spiders are very reliant on accessibility. They can't see. Don't use a mouse. They rely on the architecture to get through your site. He shows a Target page without the images. It's blank, with a little content. All of the sale information is in images with no text equiv. If you have to select a country first to get into a website or language, if a drop down menu requiring a mouse action, SE's can't get into the site. The Target URLS are extremely cluttered and very long. Shows example of usable URL, with a favicon.

Keywords in the URL rather than confusing parameters. Talks about branding with favicon. They appear in your bookmarks.

CSS and standards. Can validated CSS help you rank better? Do sites using CSS will I rank higher? There is an indirect correlation between them. CSS allows content to be the primary focus of th epage. Design elements and mark up contained in external files. Reduces page "clutter". CSS vs tables. Shows a screenshot of how a page looks with table tags to SE's. It's search friendly but SE's look at the left most table, then the next column, down and then the next column. They stack the tables on top of themselves. The content is moved to the bottom of the page. (My note: Mobile phones do this.) Okay, Matt just used this as an example. We think alike, ha ha. He suggests viewing pages in mobile phones to see how SE's stack code. He says to use Google Webmaster Central. Look at sitemap.org and use them for large websites. SE's agree that sitemap.xml format is the best protocol. He says he uses as a last resort.

Getting someone to click on your search ad is only half the battle. Once visitors arrive, the landing pages you display to them are a crucial component in converting them into buyers. This session looks at ways to test and tweak your landing pages to get that conversion. NOTE: The session is designed for those who are already familiar with how paid placement works. If you are new, be sure to have attended Search Advertising 101 on Day 1.

Moderator:
* Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers:
* Scott Miller, CEO, Vertster
* Tim Ash, President, Site Tuners
* Jamie Roche, President and CEO, Offermatica
* Tom Leung, Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer

Tim Ash - Conversion tuning crash course - ½ day workshop condensed into 20 minutes.
- What is tuning?
-- Follow the 3 main online marketing activities
--- Acquisition
--- Conversion Retention
-- Increase conversion through tuning
- Many companies drop the “part in the middle”
-- Don’t neglect the landing pages
- Economics of Conversion
-- CPR = CPC/CR
-- Fix your site to lower costs
-- CPA is going up if your conversion rate does not improve.
Who should design your site?
- Agency, marketing dept, IT, boss or nephew?
- The right answer is the customer!!
- The only thing that matters is the process the users are going through. People with wallets win!
What can you tune?
- Landing pages that lead to trackable actions.
- Price of product or service
- Elements
-- Headlines
-- Layouts
-- Navigation
-- Color Scheme
-- Form Layout
-- Button text
-- Sales copy
-- Graphics
-- Calls to action
- There are no “Universal Truths”
- Do not copy your competition - test your customers instead.
Types of testing
- A-B Split
-- Test one at a time, send equal traffic to each.
-- Easy to track and implement
-- Typical Test Size: 1-10
- Multivariate
-- Tests several variables at once
-- Compress your data into one test across all the variables.
-- Typical Test Size: 100
- Proprietary Tuning
-- Infinite
Mistakes to Avoid
Do not ignore the baseline
- Compare to a baseline - not just week to week
-- Beware that things could get worse and it could be hidden in a week to week analysis
-- Always measure relative to the baseline
Not collecting enough data
- Collect more data to increase confidence in the numbers
- Get enough data!
#3 Ignoring Variable Interaction
- It’s not the picture or the headline - it’s the interaction between the variables
Google sees strong effects between elements.

Get the combination of elements that gives you the best conversion rate.

Testing Theme
- Less is more
-- Remove the clutter - leave the persuasion and trustmarks.
-- Shorten the forms - remove unnecessary elements.

Tom Leung
Google agrees with everything Tim said.

Why is testing important?
- More than just usability and conversion
- It’s about users
Economics are tough - you spend a lot of money to Google, SEO’s and your visitors still leave!
The goal is to get you more green. More non-bouncers.

Tested the Picasa homepage and found a 30% increase in download rate. Tested 200 versions of the page using Google Website Optimizer.

Technology is only a tool - plan and manage the process! Know which pages to test and why, what variations you want to test. Which parts of the process - form, download, click, purchase. Know when the test is complete and know what you’re doing next.

Options
- Do it yourself
- Hire an expert
- Talk to design agency or SEM

Optimizer
- 4 types of JavaScript to copy and paste to your page
-- Control - assigns user to experiment ID
-- Section - alternates content for experiment
-- Tracking - follows the different elements
-- Conversion - did user hit the goal
- Show the user different combinations and measure the results.
Setting Up a test
- Pick a page
- Tag it
- Type in the content
- Launch

Instantly create variations by adding them to the tool.
The Google dashboard will show you the chance each test has to beat the baseline.
The best combination is often not the full combo page, but a mixture of elements.
The only way to know is to run a test.

6 Tests that you can run
- A/B
- Multivariate -
- Split path
- Multi-page multivariate
- Time-based
- Do Anything

Scott Miller
You can use their software to test yourself or let them run the tests.

Test 1: The Offer
Offer components:
- Headline - should describe value
- Supporting Copy - bullet, text, image captions
- Value proposition
- Risk Reversal - reduce the risk of an online transaction.
-- Test your privacy policy, live chat, free shipping offer.
- Scarcity - limiting the availability of something - use messaging or promotional message.
-- Dell does a good job of this.
-- Time crunch pushes you to make the purchase.
- Price/Promotions

Tested Hacker Safe logo
- Simple A/B test site wide
- Objective
-- Conversion
-- Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)
- 14.8% conversion lift
- 15% lift in RPV
Takeaways
- Balance risk reversal, value and scarcity.
- The only way to get there is testing

Test 2: Getting Attention
Elements which can influence bounce rate
- Logo
- Headline
- Tagline
- Imaging
- Audio/Video
Ran an L16 Algorithm Taguchi test
Ran against all PPC traffic
Setup
- Hero Shot
- Call to action
- Button color
- Low Banner
- Guarantee

Of the 16 variations, the Hero Shot, Call to action Header and Low Banner were the most important.

Anything underneath an image naturally gets attention. We look underneath to find out what it’s all about.

Test Results
- 40% lift on lead generation through 3 rounds of testing
Takeaways
- Focus above the fold
- Conversions ,mirrors eye tracking study
- Blink of an eye mentality
- Before you can convert, you must get attention

Jamie Roche - Offermatica

“Personalization and the value it brings”
Normal people can use the tools.

As different people require different experiences, we are moving toward personalization.

Is the best page the best answer? No, different people require different experience to bounce less.

Reduce bounce by increasing relevance. Increase relevance by user type and bounce will drop.

Relevance is the key to targeting customer categories or customer stage. Make it relevant through personalization.

Showing content of interest has improved RPV and conversions.

Myth - Personalization is very difficult.

Dynamic insertion of search keyword on landing pages has shown increased conversion.

The most important thing to do when you start personalization is to group your customers into big buckets.

Grouping your audience
- Behavior - new vs. returning, category
- Time-Based - time/day/season
- Source - Paid, organic, email
- Environment - geo, IP, resolution
- Registered Customer - CRM, analytics, demographics.

Steps to Personalization
- Think about where you are going to start
-- Focus on wrong areas.
-- Focus on areas where you cannot make the change.
-- Upper medium landing pages from paid are a good place to start.
- What can you remove when you test personalization?
-- Look at the site and remove elements - registration solicitation
- Start with the big stuff
-- More fun to see big results
-- Once you start showing success, attention will be drawn and budgets will be opened.
- Two types of optimization
-- Evolutionary - it always seems to start this way. They are less likely to produce results.
-- Revolutionary - Eventually have to do something drastic. It mail fail but you’ll learn.
--- Make this test as extreme as you can! Stretch it out.
Barriers
- Change is blocked by
-- Brand people stop the change and they fight you.
-- IT gets threatened and wants to keep it to themselves.
-- Standard operating procedures.
- Overcome Obstacles
-- Trojan horse - simple change. Go around IT. Host the page
-- Fight for branding changes - get 5% of the traffic and win them over.
- Benefits to working through barriers
-- Brand can evolve as they see results.
-- IT is happen not to serve the whims of Marketing
Do Right Now
- Do a keyword repeater
- Get into category affinity - even if you have just 2 groups. Create versions based on interest.
- Change story for repeat visitors - if they’ve seen it change it.

The key to performance is relevance. The key to relevance is showing the right people the right things.

Q and A
Q - When does your test become your baseline?
A - Tim - When you have enough data to support your results. The answer changes over time.

Q - Am I safe to consistently use testing tools in a natural search experiment?
A - Tom - Google published a help topic with guidelines for testing. What you show Google bot should honor the spirit of what you’re testing. Don’t show babies and sell online poker. If you are testing clean then you will be fine. It is in all engines best interests to improve user experience so please test.
A2 - Tim - Balance between stripped down page and crawler friendly pages.

Q - How do you set up a test and maintain the user experience page to page?
A - Scott - Has the ability to define testable objects within a template and they can be maintained throughout the user experience.
A2 - Jamie - Optimize the experience and not just the page.

Q - When we run multivariate test how do we know which variable worked?
A -Tim - Run a confirmation test when you have the results to confirm the results.

From Steve Krull

Search engines, especially Google, say don't do 'em. But some search marketers say paid links work. Are paid links subverting search quality? Or are they simply a fact of life, here to stay? We explore the issues, in this session.
Moderator:

* Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

* Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
* Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru, Google Inc.
* Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl
* Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC
* Andy Baio, Founder, Upcoming.org & Waxy.org

First, they showed a really cool link at Rentvine. Here it is. It totally rocks.

Matt is up first. Are paid links evil? He says that this is the wrong question. But the right question is - Do paid links that pass PR violate search engine quality guidelines? The answer is yes.

The FTC has said that you must disclose whether you are being paid to market.
Disclosure on the web: the web is used by both people (surfers) and machines (search engines)

What is adequate disclosure on the web? It is understood by both machines and people.

Make a clear disclosure: this won't pass PageRank -
- Redirect URL blocked by robots.txt
- redirect through URL that does 302
- JavaScript
- nofollow
- Meta tag with nofollow

Some people say that Google says that you can't buy links. That's a common misconception. You can buy within search engine guidelines: AdBrite, Quigo, IndustryBrains, adCenter, YPN, etc. But we do have a problem with links that are used to pass PageRank.

He shows an example of a type of link that is a Linux site that has a bad neighborhood linked on the bottom with unrelated links. Furthermore, there is a sponsored links tag but it's an image and doesn't get larger when you resize the font.

It can be difficult to buy links - think about this:
- Buy for a limited time?
- Buy run-of-site links? Buying links on every single page?
- Buying links from sloppy sellers?
- Checking if a link seller cloaks?
- Can a competitor spot your paid links?

How do we tackle paid links? Google uses algorithms and also detects it with humans. Recently, Rand Fishkin posted about paid links - and detected all but one link algorithmically. Google is willing to take strong action against PPP links.

Then Matt gives us a bunch of links and we clap.

Michael Gray is next. He's wearing a Google shirt. He says that Matt paid him $100 to wear the shirt (in the interest of disclosure).

His first firm statement is that "Google is not the government." It's just a corporate message. Google is not the covernment.

Google developed an algorithm based on links. That is flawed. They expect you to change your business model and implementations to compensate for flaws in their algorithm. Last quarter, Google made 1.12 billion dollar. They want you to sacrifice your profits to keep them profitable. They want you to do that for free. (The audience is going crazy.)

nofollow was implemented to combat blogspam, but Michael says that it hasn't helped. 3 months later, Google changed the rules. Google then took advantage of this to keep them more profitable.

What constitutes a paid link? Google has linked to people. If you blog about the Google dance and blog about it, you're giving Google link love. There's no way to tell if these links are paid or not.

Why Google is opposed to paid links: they work. It's nearly impossible to rank in any competitive SERP without paid links, except if you're Wikipedia. Google runs a competitive advertising product and they want to keep it profitable.

Creating Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD)
- Google tries to convince you that by buying or selling paid links, you are breaking the law or unethical. Google is not the government. They cannot pass the laws and cannot judge your ethics. (audience adds: "yet.")