December 5, 2007 Archives

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 5, 2007"

Rick Klaus - Feedburner/Google - SEO for Blogs and Feeds

- Google does not index RSS/Atom content
- social netowrks encourage feed distribution
- Feedburner's "pro" features are free - one of the large upsides to being bought by a large company
- includes TotalStats and MyBrand
- Sitemaps support feeds - RSS feeds work as a poorman's sitemap

Evolution of Feed Publishers

2003 - Blogs and RSS overlap *visual*

2007 - Feeds today are all manner of content *another visual*

Another visual - shows # of Feeds going way up and shows that we are no longer in an early adopter phase.

Clickthrough Tracking
- They use to use a 302 (Stephan was one of the people that had a problem with the 302) and they now let webmasters choose to be a 302 or a 301

MyBrand
- DNS skills NEEDED!
- you can map the CNAME

Importance of Full Text Over Excerpts
- Says it is stupid to not push your full content in a feed. There are only special cases where a partial feed is right
- They have data that says full feeds are better.
- Encourages people to check out techmeme and how they bring in feeds and create relationships based on the links and the data in the feeds.

Noindexr
- Yahoo and Google do follow it
- you can turn it on in feedburner

Robots.txt
- force services to consume or not consume your feeds

Auto-Discovery "advertises" your availability of your feeds to browsers and bots

*skips ahead over some slides*

If you have a podcast, do NOT just poing to the mp3. Create a page and point to the page where you talk about the podcast - search engines like text.

Facebook lets users import "notes"
- takes poll of how many users import feed into Facebook account
- about 25% raise hand (including myself)
- goes into how to set it up

Stephan Spencer - Netconcepts

- takes poll on who is a blogger and how many use WordPress

Blog SEO
- so easy a child could do it
- 16 year old blogger
- passive content of 1000$ a month
- shows her blog

Optimizing your blog

- Rejig your internal linking
- tag clouds
- related posts
- top 10 posts
- next and previous posts

Build inbound links
- add technorati tags to your posts
- get onto bloggers blogrolls
- trackbacks & comments wont help with link gain

Shows some tag cloud examples

Shows a technorati tag example

Talks about hyphen and underscores and that hyphens are ideal.

title tags
- blog name
- dont use the same text for the page title and the post title

"SEO Title Tag" plugin for wordpress
- Download it from netconcepts.com
- shows how you can use the plugin to optimize title tags and that you can do mass edits

Related Posts
- increases inter-linking on the site
- can use plugins or just call out and do it manually

Name your blog what you want to rank for

Anchor Text
- make the posts title a link the the perm page
- use neat-o-tool (webuildpages.com)
- inernally link back to old related posts with the body of the blog.

Heading tags
- category name on category page
- yes for post titles, no for dates

Optional excerpts - to minimize dupe content
- write unique content - dont just use the first couple paragraphs, dont use the <-- more ---> tag!!

Sticky posts
- always appear at the top of the page
- a way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page
- e.g. adhesive plugin

Author profile pages & author links (for group blogs)

relnofollow
- if you do this you wont pass juice

noindex
- will pass juice but wont show up in the SERPs
- could use a robots.txt to do the same thing

Optimizing your feeds
- full text, not summaries
- 20 ore more, not just 10
- multiple feeds by cate, comments and so on
- keyword-rich item - title
- your brand name in the item - title
- your most important keyword in the site - title - container

George Aspland - eVision

*missed first 2 slides, went to quickly*

better rankings & click-throughs from SERPS
- use lots of formatable text
- optimize the text of the document
- update the document title

A search engine listing for a PDF in Google
- no document title
- all text within images (scanned from hard copy)

Shows a good SERP for a PDF
- encourages you to rebuild a PDF if needed - worth it in the long run

Link to the PDF
- link from pagees that are already indexed
- link pop is important so promote it

PDFs can have links
- shows an example that has active links
- logo is a link to the website as well

how to convert the url's in a pdf into an active link
- highlight your links
- just making something a link wont highlight it like it does in Word, thus you need to highlight it
- export/print your pdf
- open with acrobat - to edit you will need acrobat, not the free reader

- go to Advanced> Links > *toooooo fast man!!!!!*

How to turn any text or image into an active link
- Long list of steps, to get them go to his site and download the instructions

PageRank and PDFs
- seem to follow same pattern as sites

Lets test it (wants people to do this)
- downlaod "optimizing PDFs for Search Engines
- include links to 2 charities
- post PDF and pass along
- we'll check results in couple months

Analysing PDF search results with Click Tracks
- what PDFs were entry pages to a site

Add active links
- PDFs hosted on your site
- PDFs you distrubite to others - white papers, articles, and so on

Can find more here: http://sphinn.com/story/16067

Q: Free forester reports

A: search forester research grapevine endnotes filetype:pdf in Google and you will get a suprise. - Send your thanks to Stephan

Contributed by DaveR.

SEO and the Big Search

Moderator: Joe Morin
Speakers:
Melanie Mitchell, AOL
Dave Roth, Yahoo
Maile Ohye, Google

Melanie Mitchell from AOL is up first. She says that AOL has a search engine but when they look at SEO for the site, it's not about the search engine itself. It's more about how they manage the large scale effort and for the content and product areas. How do you optimize a site for search when the organization and culture does not believe in the power of search? You cannot succeed in SEO without the support of the executives, company, and corporate culture.

How do you align the departments along search and how do you build a consensus among your organization to build a competitive advantage? Hopefully, the answers are valuable to you.

Making a search marketing program work at a company without losing your mind:
It's a corporate challenge - change in discipline and change in culture. How you organize, plan and execute determines how to change these key roles.

There is no magic wand to fix it. Why do you have to sometimes be the wicked witch of search marketing?

AOL wasn't designed for searched and it didn't have to be. We weren't set up to be successful in search. You need to change the way to do everything in order to optimize for search. She came on board as an SEO but it was hard to show the executives how it would benefit them.

You had to go from a push company to a pull company. Once we understand the coverage, we need to see the quality of the rates to get people to come to this site to know that 'hey, we're a free site, we have what you're looking for." We needed to gather information and lay it out for the executives to understand. We needed to provide competitive intelligence on competitors and then needed to quantify a gap between AOL and the competition. Our factors were query coverage and query rankings. Then we could lay out the estimated clicks and estimated revenue. What's the current revenue mix between what is search and non search? We know what our organic traffic is but looking at the competition helps us estimate the traffic and then we can tell what our page views are and multiply that out by your competition and say "if we're the leader, here's what we're looking at with our page views." Once you put that together, then everyone can understand it. That's how she sold the executives and told them that she needed their backing: "this is important to our company." That's how you get things out the door quickly. Once it's embedded in the DNA, everyone can play a role and we needed to help everyone understand that role. Is it easy? No.

Put search marketing at a high priority. AOL ended up committing to it in the top 3 of 450 priorities listed. It determines AOL's success. Most people, when they go on the web, search - that's their first stop.

A 6 point plan:
1- Create a core search team. Have subject matter experts and these are folks who eat/breathe/sleep search. They understand the ins and outs of the search industry. Have systems architects who can connect dots between the different platforms of publishing systems. You also want to have a tech lead - take business requirements and translate them to the engineers. Then you need frontliners: SEO leads: programming group, product group, etc. You need program managers and project managers who focus on indexing and ranking - the folks who maintain a roadmap and can worry about delays.
2- Accountability. You need goals, priorities, and incentives. There are hundreds and thousands of folks who have a dramatic effect on how we perform. Search referrals are our major engagement metric. We said "we want to target 30% of our traffic on organic search. Where are we today?" They would get statistical analysis and reward people when they did this well.
3- Training: we had to train people. Test them. If they fail, they need a new job. Otherwise, a failure as a company is worse.
4- Set internal standards. When you first start to learn it, there's a lot of information and it's inundating. Some information can be outdated or can be misinterpreted. Worse, things are plain wrong. So lay it out: here's what we expect from programming to design to technology.
5- Provide tools and training for these tools. There are free tools (keyword analaysis, keyword research, crawling tools, etc.) but we also set up an internal Wiki and a running FAQ.
6- Measure, track, and adjust. If you're going to hold people accountable, you need to know what they're doing. How many page are in the index? What's your search referrals - does it grow or does it stagnate? The market is growing so keep that in mind too. Worry about user behavior: abandonment, return visits, and page consumption.

The last thing you need to do is create a dashboard - a report card of your plan and the results. Show the company the performance.

Final points:
You can't ignore search.
You need people from the top to support you (they have to listen to you).
If there's no accountability, there's no success.
Be transparent with the data.
You have to be willing to do what it takes. It's tough but it pays off. Those who do so become hereoes and so will you.

Next up is Dave Roth from Yahoo. I met him last night. He's a nice guy. I also see Yahoo folks sitting on the other side of the room. Hi Marc, Kristen, and Ruth!

Dave says that there is a new breed of executives that are taking shape. There didn't use to be VPs of search or directors of SEO or SEM. It's a good sign that search is going mainstream but is also a testament of the progress that we've made since we can sit at the big kids table now. The future is bright.

Let's talk about how to do SEO and SEM at a place like Yahoo. My goal is to empower you with the knowledge that we do basic marketing but at a larger scale. We follow very basic principles even though we're a big firm.

Why search marketing? Why do we do it? It's only recently that we did this but it's pretty much for the same reasons: it's the best way to acquire customers, you can make money doing it, and everybody loves it. We do a lot of search marketing: paid search, SEO, and affiliate programs.

Yahoo is engaged in search marketing for a large number of properties: personals, autos, small business, travel, etc. Within those properties, there are subscription models, conversion models, transactional models, lead generation models, and CPM revenue models.

We need to have one method to combine all these models: LTV (lifetime value) optimization. What's the value of that customer? Do I want to break even, profit, or take a loss? That guides your efforts.
What's the lifetime value of subscriptions, referrals, and CPM/CPC revenue?
What's the net present value (NPV) of that lifetime value revenue stream?
What's the acceptable profit margin on NPV?
It works for SEO, too!
As many people say, if you can't attach value to it, it doesn't exist. We therefore have strict metrics.

We have central groups for training, standards, best practices, reporting etc.
But we also have properties and business units who hire SEOs and execute the plan and are accountable for the results.

[He shows a cute picture of his kids. They really are cute.]

Leveraging internal resources:
- What we don't get: speical treatment, algorithm insights, sensitive data
- What we do get: limited data, Yahoo! Buzz, working with search for internal tools.

[He shows another picture of his son wearing his daughter's bunny hat. Awww!]

Opportunity reports: the goal is to quanitify the opportunity to get it in front of the execs so that they can say yes. Run opportunity reports on some properties. We built a predictive model for SEO traffic (keywords - estimate traffic). When you do that, you can compare your virtual performance with your competitors and you can identify gaps. Then you can attach value to it with tools like LTV. Show them the money!

Make SEO a part of the process: SEO is a part of each stage of the product development cycle. Yahoo cranks out products at an alarming rate.
Phase 1: Concept: competitive research, strategies for attracting traffic and links, partner and affiliate SEO possibilities.
Phase 2: Wireframes: site architecture considerations, URL structure planning, internal linking structure planning, SEMantic setup and benchmarking
Phase 3: Desig: Use of keywords, AJAX/Flash/CSS/iFrame considerations, content distributions and layout
Phase 4: Development: clean URL implementation, on page SEO, robots.txt, indexing and feed creation
Phase 5: Launch: datamart report setup, feed and URL submission, press release optimization
Phase 6: Post launch: reporting and analytics, optimization testing and tweaks

Organizational recommendation:
Get the SEO program manager who leads the SEO product development manager. That SEO product develpment manager (a team of people prioritizing each property) who manages SEO property managers (wireframe, design folks who are tied to properties and are related to engineers) and the SEO producer and SEO analysts (measures data).

Be careful for what you ask for or it gets way complicated!

How do you measure success of SEO? There's an SEO scorecard that shows the property, total SEO traffic, change, trending data, value assessments, and SEO health (color indicators). How do you know if you're doing well vs. not well? We built an index and it works on a "clickspace model" (Competitive Visibility Index). Some of our key competitors are identified and we compare our traffic against the competitors traffic. We then compute a relative score that's tracked over time. The key to do this is packaging this up in a way that people can consume.

Final points:
We're not trying to be the most efficient SEOs - we have to do SEO across a huge spectrum (scale and complexity).
Make sure you quantify it and value it.
Train everyone.
Hold people accountable (tie it to their pay or salary).
Infuse SEO into the development process.

Last up is Maile from Google. I saw her before. She was with Vanessa Fox. She's cool but Vanessa didn't introduce me to her.

Maile works at Google Webmaster Central. She is going to go into three topics:
SEO how not tos - common mistakes of optimized sites
Opportunities in video/book/local search
Fundamental and SEO truths.

What happens if you are serving content from the US but then to the rest of the world? A common technique is IP delivery. Broaden your marketplace.

How Not To: Often undesirable IP delivery - same URL but serve different content. If GOoglebot comes from another IP and sees that, it would be providing the wrong information.

How do you go about IP delivery? Keep in mind: Googlebot IPs can be global, Google often transfers information from source to target if 301'd. Search rankings can be influenced by information relating to URL's language and location. Users/browsers have language preferences to respect.

When you design for IP delivery, serve largely the same content on each URL. Create separate URLs for more varied content (like blah.com/de for German content or example.de for the domain). Use Webmaster Tools for geolocation.

What about bells and whistles like Web 2.0 technology - Flash, AJAX, and Videos:
- Don't have a blank cache. Don't go all out and make your site in Flash that is not easily crawled by search engines. She shows an example of disney.go.com.

Instead, design with progressive enhancement. Get HTML for content and navigation. Then think about videos and flash. We have official statements about using SiFR, Hijax, etc. for Flash.

Now that you have these SEO how-tos, there's a lot of opportunity at Google. We have Video, Local Businesses, and Book Search. You can submit this through webmaster central.

How does Google leverage this opportunities? Webmaster Central with more videos (e.g. Matt Cutts talks about snippets). It has over 29,000 views (and it's relatively recent). We're adding snippets to complement the user experience.

SEO truths:
We have design principles: we design for accessibility, speed, and easy navigation. Webmaster Tools helps you verify if Google crawls your site and indexes as expected. You should also get techniques and ideas from the Webmaster Central Blog.

Create unique, compelling content, or a service. An example is Kango's viral piece - what if Google created its own site? (Google for it - I didn't get the whole URL.)

That's all folks!

Moderated by Kevin Ryan, the conference’s organizer. He welcomes people and provides a brief introduction to the topic. He discusses that search is great since you do not have to have the campaign “in the can” months in advance. He cites the Aquadots story and how they are being recalled, and that many ads on Black Friday still featured the product in their creative since they could not remove it in time.

First up will be Matt Naeger from Impaqt. What did you learn from last year? It is important to understand this and is a good starting point for holiday planning. He feels you should actually be looking at last year every day. You should know exactly what percentage of your online sales occurred in December. He suggests following traffic and revenue by hour and day not week and month. Think “Cyber Everyday” – the biggest thing he has learned from Cyber Monday is that it is a starting point to the season. Typically there are 5 or 6 higher volume days than Cyber Monday (he did not mention which). He recommends that you learn from your competition, since they are smart too. Also, you should manage to your market, not your budget. Don’t worry about the budget, instead understand where the market is and react accordingly.

Pay attention! Keep your search in step with other marketing vehicles. Be persistent with your creative…don’t put it up today and take it down tomorrow. Many people get nervous too quickly. Don’t forget about organic – you will see these results sometimes change on a daily basis, and should react accordingly with paid search tactics. Build supporting messages and be prepared to launch at any time. Submit creative pieces early to get them approved, and then store them in the campaign ready to go right away. Test creative by time of day, especially with high volume terms. Differ the creative based on the audience that is likely more prominent during the particular time of the day, such as the “happy home makers,” for example.

Ongoing campaign refinement is important – don’t buy what you can’t sell and don’t sell what you can’t deliver. He suggests promoting delivery times by product. Use creative that states the typical delivery times, not just “last ship date.” Focus on products based on volume and margin. He recommends buying generic keywords on low position – he has seen a lot of benefits from a lower position for terms such as “gift for…” Lastly, learn from your customer – start looking at the actual full phrases that the customers search for instead of relying only on the broad match keyword.

Next up is Kevin Lee from Did It, and also a member of and past Chairman of the SEMPO Board of Directors. There has been significant growth in online holiday shopping year over year. Are you getting your fair share? Consider asking for some additional “slush fund” money to let you take advantage of opportunities. Conversion rates change sometimes on a fairly large basis during the holidays, so consider this in your planning. Don’t make decisions based on old inaccurate data. Monitor shopping cart sizes, lag times (reductions may be occurring) and the offline purchase behavior. Perhaps you have a ton of data which will support your request for additional budget.

He also feels it is better to pre-load campaign creative to be able to turn it on when you want, but that you should also create new campaigns and ads during the high opportunity seasons. He suggests using a cloned campaign instead of the main campaign for this. Offer shipping deals, promotional couponing, etc. Are you monitoring buzz indicators? Use Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz index, and your own top seller information. Knowing what is hot sooner lets you follow the trends more closely, and take advantage of the opportunity to make changes. Watch your competition spending – are your competitors or suppliers spending heavily both online and off? can you piggy back off their spending? There may be a halo effect around particular buzz. Search is often not spontaneous – people don’t typically wake up and say I need a new cell phone,” for example.

Some tactics to consider include home page takeovers, viral marketing, TV, and bug banner buys. It is never too late to execute new tricks for the holidays. Kevin also stressed the importance of using “free shipping” type verbiage, but recommends even using “free FedEx” in order to take the ambiguity away from some people that will wonder if they still have enough time to get it delivered.

Bill Tancer from Hitwise was supposed to be here, but got caught at the airport due to weather. Bill sent data to Kevin Ryan including the research that shows a 37% growth since last year. He suggests being culturally sensitive as well. There is a big timeline difference between Hanukah and Christmas, for example. People “go nuts” for gift cards, so he recommends keeping active in promoting these even after Christmas. Remember to take ads down after the holidays – this may seem obvious, but it happens often. Kwanza ads during June? This is a waste of time and money.

***Note this is “live” unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007. Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist.

Speakers:

• Todd Parsons, Co-Founder and CPO, Buzzlogic
• Jay Sears, SVP, Strategic Products and Business Development, ContextWeb, Inc.
• Jason Weisberger, COO, Federated Media

Blog Statistics

• 65 million Americans read blogs
• 60% of those readers access blogs to explicitly get an opinion
• 65% of online “power shoppers” say they always read consumer generated reviews and spend more than 10 minutes engaging with UGC before they buy.
• 3.5 billion brand-related conversations per day

Who is directing traffic and attention to a particular post?

Who is the influencer linking out to for information?

What do these linking patterns tell me about consumer behavior?

Super engaged audiences are now going to targeted content via social media.  So if an iPhone is being blasted in a conversation about how it doesn’t work with corporate email then blackberry would find it valuable to advertise on that page.

There’s been a lot of media fragmentation over the past few years, with page views in the top 3 portals declining while total internet growth in page views is up 21%.

With that being said, media spend is lopsided with over 50% of media spend going to those big destination sites.

Scale vs. Control includes the need of a common denominator to bring scale.  Other important factors are demographics, behavior and targeting based on “social nets”

Control can mean a lot of things:

• Pricing & reliable volume projections
• Content adjacency (what type of content is my ad going to run against)
• Brand Association (if you have any brand based considerations you want to be in a brand safe environment)

Contextual is not search

• Readers are not searching for you
• More like banner or print advertising
• Blog readers are in research phase, not buying phase

Never run content while running on the search network at the same time.  It should be a separate campaign.

Algorithms look at the keywords and the ad copy and then picks a theme for that category in one of 594 themes.  No more than 30-50 keywords per ad group.  The lesser the better.

More on the structure of content campaigns

Match types are irrelevant (except negative)

Individual keyword bids are irrelevant

Negative keywords are necessary

Ad Copy Differences

Ads need to stand out

Yell, don’t whisper (your not punished for low quality scores like with search network)

Be more competitive – e.g. free shipping

Test, test, test

Ad Position Differences

Magic positions for search are 1-3

Magic positions for content are 1-4 since avg. pub runs ads with 4 spots

Watch Google placement performance reports.  It shows which sites your ads have appeared on as well as the metrics that you’re used to seeing in your keyword reports.

Sample Strategy

1. Setup separate content campaign
2. Run performance report
3. Use site exclusion to eliminate poorly performing sites
4. Move top-performers to a CPC placement targeted campaign
5. Rinse & repeat

Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.

Speaker 1: Mark Jackson – VIZION Interactive, Inc.

I will cover getting your site to do well and traffic – not the end of the game; you need to convert and be successful on all browsers. I will cover keyword research, creating a SE friendly architecture. I won’t get into details, just highlights, and content.

Keyword research – you may use your tool and build strategy around most searched for keyword. At this phase you need to talk to your target audience, don’t just go for the most popular, go for the tail end. Make sure the keywords didn’t come from the CEO, talk to the target audience.
Assign relevancy to words to get a good targeted list. At vision, we put together a spreadsheet and assign relevancy – up to 100%.

Once you’ve done research, find out who is ranking for those words and why. Know who you are; carve out your niche, try to determine factors necessary to compete with those words, then develop your content.

We look at indexed pages for competitive sites and your own, Yahoo does the best here.

Creating the IA: incorporate the keyword research, incorporate comp analysis, then lay out your site. Use keywords when you can in the names of the pages, assign tags, metas, etc.

A good example is Tripadvisor.com. Look at the site map on tourism. They organized their verticals well.

A lot of people say SEO sites are ugly – not true. Avoid java script, image based navigation, flash navigation, flash intros to site. Allow space for content – a lot of ecommerce site get carried away with images. Use alt text. Try to write static urls in the development stage. Design should follow the IA – design should be the 3rd phase of the process, try to have a reason why the site is being designed that way.

Trip Advisor is good for usability. Usability is important. What’s below the fold on their home page is a lot of links using great anchor text.

Read Searchenginewatch.com this Tuesday for article on spam.

Building content:
Once you have your keywords, your site is only as good as the copy you put on the pages write engaging content. Don’t stuff. Make it engaging for visitors and search engines. Once you have content, go back through it and try to link between one page to another, this is great for spiders. Use good anchor texts. People get so caught up with external links but forget about linking within site.

Make sure you avoid marketing fluff. Blogs are great for getting out quick content. Pages will rank quickly.

Summary: do research before design, use research smartly to develop IA. Deign for usability and SEO, in that order. Make sure you have good content.
Speaker 2: Alan K’necht, K’nechtology, Inc:

Linear approach: spiders read from top to bottom, left to right, and go straight through. Search engines care about words, words and words! Not pictures. Also care about positions of words. Then why show graphic first? Good for usability, not search engines. Use 2-tier design architecture. Separate content from presentation. Doesn’t necessarily mean design will be ugly. Organize content logically, i.e. don’t use privacy policy first – use H1 tag first! Use CSS to position.

Newspaper philosophy – they get readers engaged. Why? Linear info – easy to read! Headlines first! Main story first! Important stuff up front! That’s what search engines are trying to do, be easy for the human. Newspaper puts links to inner pages at the end (i.e. continued on page 22). So linear approach is that the important elements must come first! H1 first, H2 second, target words in H1 – first and foremost, this is what page is about! Stick graphic at the bottom!

One of the ways to see if coders did a good job is to turn off CSS using the Firefox Webmaster Toolbar. You can see what the site looks like. You can remove lots of the fluff. If the logo is relevant or well known keep it in towards the top. Get content up front though. Usability for search engines.

Speaker 3: Lyndsay Walker – WestJet – Canadian Airline

Design for your visitors! You want to have a clear navigation not only for visitors but also for search engines.
Avoid flash, there is no advantage whatever. There is so much you can do with CSS and Java that can simulate what Flash can do.
Fresh content is the best.
Use DIVs – more reliable than a table structure.
Use your stats – what browsers are people using? Where are they going on your site?
Test everything in Firefox – it’s a compliant browser. If you design for Internet Explorer, you will test in Firefox and it will be broken. Design for Firefox and tweak for IE. You will save yourself a lot of headaches. Especially since Firefox has great tools and plug-ins. If you watch your stats over time, you will notice an increase in Firefox users as well as mobile device users to surf the net.

Must-haves recap:
Title tag – unique to every page.
Meta description tag – the yes or no if someone will click on our site. Very important.
Header tags – place prominently at the top, H1, H2 etc.
Strong code-to-content ratio – CSS is so important, you really don’t need a lot of code these days.
DIVs instead of tables.
Don’t forget your keywords.
Links – so important – internal linking structure just as important as external.

Side note - Inadvertent SEO – If you are testing out new pages, the search engines will find it whether you are ready or not. If you are not ready for it to be live, use a testing environment or watch your linking structure.

Speaker 4: Paul Bruemmer – Red Door Interactive

Organic Site Structure:

- Server configuration: robot.txt, redirect codes, 404 error codes, internal broken links, canonical duplicate content, dedicated IP address, alias URLs, transfer of keyword page rankings, etc.
- Site architecture gone bad: messed up situation. To prevent, 6 essential components to implement:
Inclusion ratio – it pays to know and track the number of pages indexed to gauge how you are doing in the index.
Directory structure and naming conventions.
Internal linking structure – very often neglected and annoying to correct.
Dynamic and persistent URLs.
Site Map.
Privacy statement.

Content Generation:
Look at competitive landscape and be equal to or greater than.
Textual content types: articles, industry news, etc.
Think about content promotion, RSS feeds, blogs etc.

Content Optimization comes down to 6 on-page factors, Lyndsay summed them up. If you work them into your design you will do really well.

Natural Link Profile: think ahead about creating a neighborhood of links around you which will have a huge impact on your site. Give some thought to your link profile.

Deep Link Profile – ratios of links to subpages in comparison to links to homepages.

Additional considerations are feeds, paid search, local search (map locations, XHTML for mobile), development and administrative staff etc.

Contributed by Sheara Wilensky, a Search Strategist for Promediacorp.

A web site cannot exist without hosting. This is an area that is often poorly researched by site owners. This session reviewed current issues with the web hosting industry and touched upon on hot topics including shared hosting, shared IPs, DNS issues, up time, speed, reliability, dedicated servers, server farms, redundancy, back up options, email options and other added value services.

Brett Tabke - Moderator
By George Roberts – Interjuncture Corp – produces anti spam tools, info technology since 1995
Ben Fisher - TechPad Agency – SEO and hosting since 1994

George: Which hosting is right for me?

Shared hosting – this is an account for one or more domain names. Cluster of servers divided up among different hosting customers and gives everyone a little slice. It is usually inexpensive and pretty easy to get the site up and running. The downside is that you are sharing resources. If the hosting company is overselling services, you may have bad performance, or there may be security or spamming issues within all customers.

(Ben – Shared hosting is great for when you are starting out, or if you don’t need a lot of resources. As the site gets more popular and develops, it also becomes more of a target and it grows out of shared hosting. From an SEO perspective, the drawback is they are shared on one IP address – listed in spam house or if blacklisted it can affect your website.)

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) – this is similar to shared hosting – it is dividing resources, but gives you a mini server inside the server so you have control over the operating system. It has a lower cost than dedicated servers but also less resources. You may also only get a certain amount of memory.

Ben – I think VPS is more for the technical savvy. If you know what you are doing and want to have control, VPS is more viable and more cost effective than a full blown dedicated server.

Dedicated Servers – with a dedicated server, you purchase all hardware, build all infrastructures and pay a flat fee per month to host the server. If you have a hundred sites, you can throw them all onto one server. You can even put thousands of domains onto one server. The disadvantages are that with shared hosting, you need an on-site administrator and technical support. With a dedicated server, you are on your own; you need to implement appropriate security measures. If you have the time and the resources, it can be a good value.

Ben – Managed dedicated server – for people who want to spend time on business and not on technical side, will let someone in house take care of everything. Managed is really the way to go. The host will handle upgrades, drives going down, upgrading memory, if someone hacks into your site and uses your box, host will step in and fix. With a standard dedicated server you have to manage, it’s less expensive but everything is on you to fix and maintain.

With a managed server, talk to your hosting options, ask them what services that management includes: just monitoring, updates, admin hours per month, make sure you have clear idea what you are getting with your package.

The big daddy of hosting is co-location. This can go from a single server to a full rack to cages. If you have a few hundred servers, you can rent a cage from a data center, pay flat monthly fee.
There are 3 components with co-location:

Space rent
Bandwidth cost
Power

Advantages are you can pretty much do anything you want. When working with dedicated servers, what you get is a billed out infrastructure with choices of different things. They own the hardware and you are renting. With co-location, you buy everything, switches, hardware, etc. Expensive in the long run but usually balanced out in flexibility and power.

Ben – with co-location, the issue is cost. You are paying for space, bandwidth and hardware. But it is a managed scenario. It’s usually for large corporations.

George - The next thing is controversial in the hosting industry. One of my pet peeves, trying to make people understand, is non-traditional hosting. A lot of people are providing hosting-like services such as online storage, Flickr image hosting, blog hosting sites, Blogger, Live Journal, Word Press, MSN Spaces, YouTube (very specialized hosting site for video). A lot of people have everything on Facebook or Myspace, these are not traditional specialized hosting services.

Ben – non-traditional hosting works because the majority of people don’t know the word “hosting”. It’s mostly for webmasters. The beauty is it makes the ability to communicate on the web very easy. The line between paid hosting and the community/blog is getting blurred. In the future, I think this is where it’s going. If you are building a social media site, you have a future in hosting!

George – dedicated hosting is not going away anytime soon. But those using shared hosting are using it for straightforward purposes: info on their business, photo gallery, blog etc. most of these things are replicated in a lot of these non-traditional hosting services that are out there! Most people say – I want to put up a blog so I need to do XYZ. It’s too much work, and most people don’t want to spend so much time…so a lot of the shared hosting is going to switch over to non-traditional hosting over the next few years.

Live Spaces is very simple! Something to keep an eye out for.

Side note - 20,000 unique visitors is serious traffic and that’s the point where you want to move to VPS or dedicated.

Shared hosting is the “carts/vendors” of the shopping mall. If you are an internet business, putting it in anyone else’s hands that you don’t know, you can go for years and never have a problem, and get complacent, but the first time something happens, you will wish to get off the shared hosting.

Q: What are default packages that the servers come with?
A: Varies. Contact sales dept, should be able to do side by side comparison with different providers. I haven’t seen a standard package. Most of the companies are good at scaling prices commensurate with the services they provide. Everyone markets differently, if you are looking for something specific communicate what you are looking for. Ask questions, find out as much as you can before making your purchase.

Q: Can you elaborate on Grid computing environments?
A: Ben: Amazon uses a grid – it’s a large cluster of servers configured with software that allows you to spawn computing resources on demand. Depending on how your application is developed, if the load gets to a certain point, it will move some of the computing over. I think it is a good technology and there’s a space, but you won’t see widespread use. It’s not really an everyday type product. Not quite at that point yet.
Guy with Question: Servemap allows you to specify your exact requirement and will allow you to customize an environment inside a grid, just like a dedicated server, but it’s set up inside a grid environment.
George: that may be a redundancy in hardware. There are a lot of different ways to do things, that’s not particularly mainstream, I agree they are nice technologies, but don’t think they are mainstream yet.

Q: what is the best strategy of parking a secondary site?
A: Ben:I will have a main domain on an exclusive IP address. If it’s a parked domain or secondary it depends on if the site has content. If it’s just a keyword stuffed domain name and not relevant, it being on its own domain is questionable. Being on the same IP address raises another flag. If doing everything legit, no problem. You want as little similarity as possible – different Who Is records, different IP address, etc.

Side note: Test servers early on for their ability to recover data. Check with service provider to make sure they do back-ups. A lot of hosting companies don’t do backups, it’s up to the domain owner. It’s not necessarily a good thing or bad thing – you get what you pay for – usually they will schedule a backup but they won’t do it automatically.

Q: What is the average pricing and average size site for each type of host?
A: George: Shared is $3.95 - $12.95, as high as $17.95/month. The cheapest ones are mass market hosting companies, looking for as many customers as possible, compete on disk space and bandwidth. More expensive players are more about the customer service because they know more. In a shared environment, you can have everything from a blog to a full blown ecommerce site. Going from this to the next level depends on traffic and how much you are making off the site. If it’s just a blog, shared hosting is fine. VPS - $30 - $79/month depending on resources you want allocated, hard drive space, memory…you can get lower-end dedicated services from $225 – $300, $400/month for more high end hardware. It’s approximately an additional $150/month for managed. Co-location is $100/month for a megabit of bandwidth per second up to $50k, $100k – depending on how much space you need. You are paying for bandwidth regardless of whether or not you use it...but you are getting it at a lower price per bandwidth with the more you order.

Q: Where would you have your DNS hosted, registrar or server?
A: Registrar or 3rd party. Don’t put on server because if the server is down, DNS is down. If it’s resolving you are OK, but if domain name is not coming back…that’s no good!

Q: How do you protect yourself from Slashdot or Digg effect (should we be so lucky!!)?
A: If you want to be that type of site owner that is going to be posting things that could take off, you need to be prepared in advance! Need to be on an infrastructure that will cushion the blow. Let your provider know you will be hosting something that may get a lot of traffic, they will help you move over to another server. If they don’t know about it they are not going to be happy. If you on a shared hosting, you will go down and take the entire server down with you! Go with a low end, managed dedicated server and let your host know - I am willing to pay for it just help me out. Another option is to redirect the URL that gets Slashdotted over to Google, they have free hosting, may not have your system, but you can throw something up there with your logo etc. temporarily. Realistically, Google can handle millions and millions of hits – and it’s free- so take advantage. The less data you have to send back, the less your server has to work.

Contributed by Sheara Wilensky, a Search Strategist for Promediacorp.

Brett has each person give a background on themselves. Each quickly does so. Monti plugs the domain auction @ 3PM later today.

Domain names as a marketing tool

Mark Klein - Sedo

Background:
- descriptive "direct navigation" - this is where people type a domain into the search bar and not google

About 10% of PPC traffic is "direct navigation" type traffic

Shows a Comscore study.

Why should marketers buy domain names?
- brand
- traffic examples: pc.com, laons.com
- vertical ex: baby.com

Baby.com - a well-implemented advertising portal
- premium domain add to credibility

Better organic search engine placement

Why use campaign specific domains
- I have a headache.com could be an example

Ends the presentation with a few slides aobut the company and what they do at Sedo.

Monte Cahn - Do

Goes over who and what Moniker does. Manage over 2.7 million domains now.

Ways domain names generate profit
- ppc, cpa, affiliate sites, search revenue, and selling domains
- annual advertising is estimated to grow by billions
- domains contribute 15% of Google/Yahoo's total revenue

Domains owned
- shows upward trend of owners of many many domains. 15 in 2006 had 100k+ domains

138 million domain names are registered in the world, 31% increase over Q2 year over year

88% of pages are live (standard and parked), 76% renewed

More then 310 ccTLD extensions globally but 10 make up more then 66% of the total. Germany with .de is number 2.

What makes a good domain name?
- natrual and generic brand
- easy to remember
- clear, concise and descriptive
- commercially oriented
- industry segment
- visually pleasing
- existing type in traffic
- look at if a domain is blacklisted - use the way back machine to see if a domain had content on it in the past aka archive.org

Mistypes - Go home and have loved ones or coworkers type your brand name/company name as fast as they can. Go and register all the misspellings

How do you generate revenue
- domain traffic (direct navigation)
- domain sales
- domain development

Creating your profile
- look at aftermarket
- watch domains dropping

Examples - asthma.com
- company sells medicine for asthma

Look at other langues - Spanish is growing and big already.

Has a list of useful links

Jeff - moderater on wmw (webwork) - 13 domaining strategies in 2007

Asks some questions - domain name portal and webmasterworld domain forum plug

1. Creative domain acqusition finance
- letting the ppc revenue pay the costs
- your revenue isnt their revenue
2. acqusition of underperforming (parked) domains - buy cheap, fix it and use the new found money to pay for the domains.
- auctions - you can find steals
3. auction sniping
4. bottom fishing at certain resellers - Jeff has personally been a bottom feeder for a long time.
5. diversification of revenue stream - test different services
6. macroeconomic adjustments (foreclosures, debt, etc) - the market is dicey, debt and forclosure domains are hot right now
7. tracking the buzz in the forms and emerging buying opportunies - if people are crabbing about income, it may be the time to buy some domains.
8. dailychanges.com and observing domaining trends - domain tools has some nifty tools. Dailychanges is great for research/intellegence. Watch the big guys and see some trends that they are showing.
9. intelligent proactive acquisition vs waiting for doamins to drop - reach out to owners of dropping domains and see if you cant just buy it. Its easier then fighting with the big guys once it drops
10. business owners acquiring keyword traffic domains
11. domainers focusing on the value of converted leads from KW domains
12. domain parking experimentation: images, rotating companies, etc.
13. specilistion, tasting, patent, and informed domaining.

Lists some of the domains he picked up just recently. There are still good domains available right now.

20 unregistered domain bets likly to pay better then Vegas odds. - all were available this morning.

Tom Murphy - State of Aftermarket and Effective Domaining Strategies

Baiscs
1. Buying Domains (primary or secondary market)
- concentrate on areas you either understand or that you believe will increase
2. Selling domains
- take profits as you see fit
3. Maximizing the revenue from your portfolio
4. Test

12 Drivers of valuations
- traffic, popularity, vertical, comparable sales, language, and so on

Everyone is getting into the after market sales (Godaddy just added it)

Buying domains
- if I had 5k or 50k - what should I buy is a question he hears often. Treat domain names like stocks and mix it up.

Selling
- people should have domains for sale at all times
- parked domains sell 5x better then non parked

Contributed by DaveR.

Clark Walton, Esq. - Domain Name Law

Diffe cant hide
- Domain privacy services between UDRP and ACPA

Register your trademark
- stay away from trademarks of others

You cant hide

UDRP
- uniform dispute resolution policy
- binding arbitration
- less formal rules
- no hearings

Benefits
- fast process
- works well against international registerants
- fixed costs, can estimate what it will cost to get a domain
- 2500-5000 for laywer

Downside
- only thing you will recover is the domain
- cant recover lawyer fees

ACPA
- anti-cybersquatting consumer protect act (1999)
- federal court
- very formal rules about prodedure and evidence
- live courtin hearings common

Benefits
- Can get domain and damages up to 100k, laywer fees, restraining order, and some other fees paid back

Downside
- harder to estimate costs
- slower 3-6 months and sometimes longer (into the years)

ACPA: (3) Likely outcomes

- settlement 80-90%
- Default judgement 10-20%
- verdict at trial less than 1%

Case study: Default Judgement

Partner Weekly v. Tek System

Partner Weekly is client

- 2004 - Company starts and applies for trademark

- 2006 - Is granted trademark on company name

- Feb 2007 - Client finds partnerSweekly.com

- Feb 2007 - started with a C&D letter

- March 2007 - Defendant makes whois data private using Domains by Proxy

Choose ACPA because:

- emergency relief
- TRO - get domain locked
- Preliminary injunction: get control of domain name
- Possiblity of recovering damages

Wanted control of domain name during process and thus they choose the ACPA.

- March 2007 - TRO / Preliminary Injunction

- April 2007 - Had hearing and judge grants preliminary injunction
- got control of domain

Service of Process
- Have to serve defendant with complaint and motions
- Can be difficult
- email
- regular certified mail
- came back unreachable
- in person service - old mailbox
- search business records for defendant's address
- no match

- July 2007 - Service by Publication
- Use a newspaper ad for 5 weeks and this counts as the above types of ways of serving a person

- August 2007 - Motion for default
- asked for attorney fees, 100k

Conclusion
- Judge granted all requests
- Won lawyer fees and 100k

Can they collect on judgement?
- not without doing more work
- does defendant own any other faluable domain names?
- new service - search whois.sc

John Dozier - Techniques to monetize trademark domain names of other people

Uses the example of Caeser's Palace

- The hotel can protect its trademark in gaming, hotel, and entertainment. But if you open a laundry service in Idaho ... they cant stop you.

If you get a domain

- start a business with that name
- once you are in business for awhile you can consider your brand protected
- its faster to trademark the business name
- there are ways to get a trademark in less then 30 days
- once you get it you go to Google and Yahoo and tell them to not let anyone bid on it

- if you have records that show you are doing it legally - you will have a better chance against other companies that try to get the domain

- Sites like company-nameSucks.com and protect yourself that way
- use it to voice your opinion (via a forum for example) and use free speach to protect yourself
- you will win and lose some cases

- parody/critism - another way to create the site

- international domain law
- if you are in the game, you take some risks
- not everyone knows all the trademarks

Newest trend - International Disputes
- has seen a rise the past 12 months

Sending a C&D gives the domainer time to react and a heads up that you are coming/aware.

Q: Dont hear question

A: Panel explains an example interesting case: Mergers. Two companies merge and the new name is unknown. Domainers go out and register different variations. The new merged company may or may not change the name to one of those domains.

The domains will get some traffic even if the new merged company doesnt change name to them. Merged company could come after the domainers - if they win or lose will depend on each case.

This has been happening more often as of late (this type of example)

Q: If you buy a domain and 5 months later someone creates a company and a trademark.

A: They cant get the domain from you, but depending on the trademark and what you are doing with it - they could come after you for trademark infringement

Q: Federal vs State trademarks?

A: Clark explains that even though he has a state trademark 4 years earlier, the federal could beat him. He considers the state trademark useless.

Q: Another question about state trademarks.

A: Google pays attention to state trademarks and you could take out your comp with them.Google does this on a global scale and is hard for them to second guessing/digging too deep into the trademarks and how trustworthy they are.

Q: What is the law about companyname-sucks.com

A: Right now it is legal in the US. The company can come after you and get it - but not always. If you are trying to make money on the page, the company has a better chance to get it from you as it just isnt a freedom of speech arguement.

Q: John Doe.com - asks if anyone has had this type of case.

A: Personal names can become trademarks. They can be a brand and can be more difficult. Last names for example. When operated as a business it can/will be treated as if it was any other business name.

Contributed by DaveR.

Speakers:

• Marc Barach, Chief Marketing Officer, Ingenio, Inc.
• Dan Hight, Director of eCommerce Sales – Agency Division, Superpages.com

Pay Per Call is paid calls from search.

• Calls: A performance based advertising service and network that drives calls instead of clicks.
• Cost-per-action: Advertisers only pay for tangible results
• Bidding: An auction based marketplace where advertisers compete for top placement
• Targeted: A service that allows advertiser to target ads to specific categories and geographic locations
• Accessible: a marketing vehicle available to any advertiser whether they have a site or not
• Intuitive: A service that requires no change in customer behavior
• Disruptive – A revenue source beyond traditional media
• Multi-channel

Ad network includes: Internet Search, Internet Yellow Pages, Mobile Search, Directory Assistance, Text Messaging, and Podcasting

How it works: Toll free number redirects to actual customer number.  Consumer simply picks up the phone and calls. (This isn’t click to call)

Top 10 Categories for Online Directory Searches

1. Cable & Satellite
2. Internet Service Providers
3. Mortgage Refinancing
4. Credit Repair
5. Travel Agents
6. Substance Abuse Treatment
7. Auto Insurance
8. Cosmetic Surgery
9. Timeshares
10. Cruises

Why Pay Per Call works for Mobile

• Delivers timely relevant content to mobile customers.
• It’s intuitive
• It’s easy to advertisers to get started
• It makes sense for portals and publishers

Top 5 Search Categories for Mobile

• Food and Dining
• Arts & Entertainment
• Travel
• Shopping
• Family and community

This session echoed a common theme that consumers are searching online but primarily buying offline.  (3% buying online and 97% buying offline)

Cost Per Call factors include CTR, Bid Prices, Call Duration, & Repeat calls from the same number.

Advertisers can prefund their account on a one time or reoccurring basis or for larger advertisers they can sign up for invoicing. 

Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.

Speakers:

• John Squire, SVP, Product Strategy, General Manager, Search Services, Coremetrics
• Bob Heyman, Chief Search Officer, Mediasmith
• Isabel Sopoglian, VP of Search Marketing, Cars.com

John

Think about your marketing in terms of how we get the right visitors and what the right pages are to land on.  Also how do we get the right measurement to validate our decisions? 

Think about where you should invest your marketing dollars.  Over 50% of customers interact with more than 1 ad when making a conversion.  A little less than 50% click on one thing and then take some sort of action.  When you look at the data though nearly 25% are touching more than 30 channels over a 25 day time period before making a conversion.  Its important to look at all the influencers all the way through the sales process instead of just looking at the final conversion and believing that that was what made the sale.  Multi-touch increases a marketers decisions whether to eliminate an investment, invest in more 3^rd parties linkages, or bid up a particular keyword.

• Use attribution reporting across all sessions to gain an accurate picture of the paid search terms
• Identify critical groups of low cost per click keywords that precipitate sales

Bob

 

Search works with all the other branding activity that you do.  When Napster did a Super Bowl spot, search activity went up. 

Whether it’s an email or banner ad, it’s important to watch the click trail leading up to the last click.

There are instances where you try to be so efficient like just running search that you’ve eliminated all of your volume.

Isabel

 

What counts as a conversion on your site.  (sale, signup, traffic)

What is the value of that assigned conversion.  Are you tracking on keyword level?

Internal Key Factors to Conversion

Keywords, Ad copy, Landing Page, Conversion Path, Negative Keywords, URL Blocking

External Key Factors to Conversion

Traffic quality, click fraud, behavior of searchers, algorithmic changes, SERP changes, search engine testing

Example: Impressions up almost 300 percent for particular ad on Yahoo.  This decreased CTR’s.  They called Yahoo and Yahoo said they had been running “tests” Sometimes results are out of your hands.

Important to track

• Ability to track on keyword level
• By search engine
• Match type
• Ad copy
• Landing page version

Simple Strategies to Convert

• Only select keywords that are relevant to product
• Extensive negative keywords
• Use appropriate keyword match types
• Don’t mislead searchers with your ad copy
• Optimize your landing page and lead path to convert

Advanced Strategy to Convert

• Detect international clicks and demand search engines to block source or refund money
• Block non-performing domains
• Score traffic quality by source and implement into your bidding
• Check traffic for click fraud and provide search engine w/proof

Judge carefully when just looking at pure conversion data! The higher the quantity of traffic, the more statistically relevant becomes the results for your conversion. Once they were able to get more traffic from the Yahoo network they expect the conversion percentages for Google and Yahoo to even out!

Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.

Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch moderated the panel.

Managing PPC without automation is becoming impossible to do by hand. Tools at different price points are becoming more prevalent and require serious expertise. This SES session discussed using API bid management applications to increase ROI and gain a competitive advantage.

Anton Konikoff, Founder and CEO, Acronym MediaEduardo Llach kicked off the discussion of automated bid management. “Automated bid management is outdated” and is just one of many functionalities search marketers need to run campaigns. “Campaign management” is what it’s really about.

First decide what you actually need. Do you need a solution for campaign syndication? Optimization? Reporting? Customer insight? Regardless, can you trust automated systems to make good decisions? Data-driven automation is not a substitute for granular web analytics. He recommends Omniture because it has strong web analytics integrated with bid management.

Pretty looks can be misleading but flexibility trumps good interface design. DoubleClick has the ugliest interface but the most powerful solution. Will automation actually save you money? Don’t forget keyword research, copy testing, user and user experience.

A good rule of thumb is to automate what you already know. He suggests optimizing campaigns by hand and then turn what you know works over to the machines.

Drive your friendly technology vendors mad by understanding the system and pushing it to the limit. Do not hire statisticians. Campaign automation needs smart search marketers because automated tools don’t ask deep questions, YOU should. Finally, campaign tracking is not a substitute for full web analytics. You need sophisticated, granular, and real-time technology to track user behavior.

David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing
At first Clix was skeptical of automated tools. Even after they became convinced, their interest was further piqued by the “campaign management’ features of API tools. Clix asks, “How complex are your bidding requirements” and chooses tools based on needs.

Are they simple or complex? If simple, just use Google. More complex applications require dealing with variables like multiple publishers, tracking conversions and revenue, episodic flight based programs, inventory linkage, and keywords that are competitive.

Google offers free (of course) Google Conversion Optimizer for campaigns > 300 conversion / month, you can specify maximum cost per acquisition, and Google manages the bid price. It automatically manages your bid to manage a cost per action business rule. TIP: if you don’t meet the criteria by generating enough conversion, Google recommends that you “game” the system by placing the code on a non-conversion page.

Google has data that third party vendor do not have including geographic location, publisher site conversion history (content campaigns) day/time, and “other factors.” You get to campaign optimizer by “edit campaign settings.”

CMO and Founder, SearchRev discussed advanced techniques for paid search. He recommended putting together complex campaigns and then turning them over to tools to manage the campaigns.

What is common about all rules based tools are that the use one bid per keyword. SearchRev believes in multi-variable targeting + syndication, for instance separate bidding for the same word in different geo-graphic locations, times of day, and platforms. “How is the keyword doing in New York on Monday morning on Google as opposed to MSN in Massachusetts at 6PM in the afternoon on Friday?”

Track the results for each day, focus on the conversion rate and CPO, and bid according to conversion rate and CPO. In Google you can do accomplish day-parting right in the standard interface.

***Note this is "live" unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007. Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist. You can find Marty Weintraub at aimClearBlog, published by aimClear, a Duluth advertising agency focused on organic & paid search along with social media marketing.

How ThomasNet reinvented itself after 100 years

A little history

ThomasNet was a print directory company who turned into a giant online marketing force.  They connect industrial buyers and suppliers. They’ve been online since 1995; 100% focus on industrial marketplace.  They cover a wide array of areas and Linda assures us that the lessons they’ve learned will benefit all of us.

There are new authority sites popping up like Travelocity, Amazon’s and Expedia. 

Years ago there were only a few options in terms of television; they were NBC, ABC, and CBS.  This shook things up and made the marketplace competitive.  Linda compares this to sites like Travelocity, Amazon’s and Expedia’s that are focused on categories which compete with the Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

To be a destination site, you need to be a trusted authority.  They moved their directory from print to online but it’s more than that.  You need to reinvent yourself and listen to your buyers.

Staying true to core business adjectives

They stuck to what they had done best and that was bringing together buyers and sellers.  They didn’t just build a web component for the heck of it.  The important thing is to understand your buyers and users and this will help you to build relevant results and how to fill that need. 

Buyer Centricity

Building and improving products & services

Measure everything

Promote and marketing

Continually improve w/ testing

 

Questions to Consider

1. Where do they currently look for products/services?
2. What information is important to them when sourcing?
3. What level of detail are they looking for?
4. What frustrates them?

Older vs. Newer Methods

Direct Mail vs. On-site/online and email surveys

Focus groups vs. Online Focus groups

In-person surveys (one-on-one) vs. Webcast Surveys

Key benefit: rapid proto-typing – faster to market

9 out of 10 buyers start with the Internet to source products and services.  Their buyers were going online faster than the suppliers were putting their products online.  Less than 5% of their 20,000 clients were performing e-commerce actions on the site.

Situation -> Opportunity

Spending more time sourcing online -> Increase speed & efficiency of site

Sourcing online is not easy when looking for complex information -> Provide more company information in relevant categories

They reinvented themselves but developing products/services that enable suppliers to help buyers display information and easily navigate.

The website now has to serve the purpose of answering questions and asking questions back just like what a typical sales person would have done if talking to the buyer in person.  Your site has to have the ability to do that.

Situation -> Opportunity

Knowing key places buyers’ source online -> Educate suppliers on where buyers go first – reps, workshops, etc.

Website falls short of detailed specs and navigation -> Help supplier build websites, catalogs and CAD drawings that buyers want.

Proving ROI – understanding metrics -> Produce tool to help suppliers identify conversions actions and measure activity.

Constantly think about what user action you would want to take place.  (phone call, email)

Additional growth areas….

They post about 100 new product articles on a daily basis (many of these are press releases on new products).

Available via RSS feeds

Daily, weekly, monthly product alerts

Bi-weekly blog

Bi-weekly industry newsletter

Expand internationally, site translation

What they offer

Website Design & Development

Online Catalog Tools

Online CAD Drawings

Website Tracking

Measure Everything

1. Quantitative user online surveys
2. Traditional and online user focus groups
3. Web analytics

Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.

A year ago, Microsoft promised to enable Webmasters a method of verifying MSNbot. Way too often, rogue spiders mask themselves as official spiders from Google, Yahoo, Live Search or Ask.com. The search engines have enabled methods to conduct reverse DNS lookups on the fly, so that you can allow those spiders that pass the reverse DNS test in and the others, deny at your gate.

I opened up my log files for rustybrick.com and found these records for MSNBot, Microsoft Live Search's spider.

65.54.165.35 www.rustybrick.com - [05/Dec/2007:01:44:46 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 23 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)" "-"
65.54.165.35 www.rustybrick.com - [05/Dec/2007:01:44:47 -0500] "GET /seo_articles_8e.php HTTP/1.0" 200 11224 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)" "-"

Now if you do a reverse DNS lookup on this IP, 65.54.165.35, you will notice it returns the host name "by1sch4030208.phx.gbl" and not "livebot-[IP-Adress].search.live.com" as promised.

If you have implemented a reverse DNS lookup requirement for MSNBot, be warned that you may be blocking MSNBot from crawling your site, because Microsoft did not properly set up this IP block to reverse DNS to search.live.com.

The whois information for the IP confirms it is owned by Microsoft, but the reverse DNS does not.

jdMorgan, a WebmasterWorld moderator, said in the WebmasterWorld thread that there "are actually two PTR records for addresses in that range; If your server checks only the first (which appears to be a CNAME), then it may fail rDNS verification. The second record points to hotmail.com." But in any event, this is still a major issue for some webmasters.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you are a Google AdSense publisher that opts for the checks to be mailed to you as opposed for an EFT (direct deposit) solution, like me, you may notice a misprint on your November checks.

Google sent me and other publishers emails with the advanced notice:

It’s come to our attention that the messaging printed on your November AdSense check was incorrect. Please be assured that this issue is purely the result of a printing error and will not affect your ability to deposit these earnings into your bank account.

The misprint seems to be in the paystub section of the check and should not impact you depositing those funds into your bank account.

The payment details on the paystub section of your check should have read as follows:

THIS CHECK IS FOR YOUR EARNINGS AS PART OF THE GOOGLE ADSENSE PROGRAM. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE EMAIL ADSENSE-SUPPORT@GOOGLE.COM

Instead, the following message was printed on your check:

CREDIT NOTE -VAT OVERCHARGE BETW. 1 JAN 2004 & 22/11/07 IF YOU NEED DETAILS OF THIS VAT PLEASE EMAIL GOOGLE@BDOSX.IE WITH CUSTOMER REF

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google AdSense publishers and AdWords advertisers were eagerly awaiting a package in the mail from Google this year. And now they have started receiving their gifts. Typically, I am one of the last to get the gift, so I have to rely on images from the forums to show you what it is. This year, Google gave out fancy 2GB USB Memory cards. Here is a picture from V7N Forums:

There are more pictures, including this one at Digital Inspiration, and this one over at ImageShack.

For some reason, I was expecting a lot more from Google. In 2005, they gave out memory sticks plus a lot more, including usb devices, mini mouse, flash flight, ear phones and much more. In 2006 they gave out sweet digital picture frames. This year, a 2GB USB Memory Card wrapped in a pretty envelop?

Well, I suspect Yahoo will be sending out holiday gifts as well. Last year they gave me Yahoo! sweatshirt and USB drink cooler, I wonder what they will hand out this year?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.