December 6, 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 6, 2007"

Tools of The Trade
Location: Salon A

Successful Search Engine Marketers should be armed with the tools of the trade to make their lives easier. This panel will review some of the well-known tools and not so well known SEM tools. It will cover basics from research tools to advanced paid tools. Knowing how to interpret the data of the tools is just as important as knowing which tools to use.

Moderator: Joe Laratro
Speakers:
Todd Malicoat, Independent Marketing Consultant, Meta4creations, LLC
Joe Laratro, President, Tandem Interactive
Derek Vaughan, CMO, Techpad Agency
Jessie Stricchiola, Founder & CEO , Alchemist Media, Inc.

First up is Derek Vaughan from HostMySite.com and he shows statistics for an eye tracking study. Researchers call the upper left the "golden triangle" and being below the fold is bad for you.

As far as Rankings, he uses a tool called WebCEO - www.webceo.com. It's easy to set up and use, supports multiple websites, it's easy for inputting keyword information, is automated and runs in the background. The warning is that long keywords can take hours and it's addictive. Its interface is beautiful, he says.

Analytics is extremely important and he uses IndexTools (www.indextools.com) It has the best view of your last 100 visitors in almost real time. This is extremely valuable especially if you produce timely content because it alerts you immediately when things get popular. He acknowledges that some people swear by Google Analytics but he doesn't.

What do I know what I don't know what I currently rank for? Use Spyfu (spyfu.com). It has a simple interface that gives you information in adwords, competitor sites, keywords, etc. It really is a deep source of information and is great for metrics superfreaks.

Understanding Traffic to Search Terms: Google Trends (google.com/trends). You can search for a term and see the historical traffic for high tonnage terms. This can help you create a deep list of keywords. Why it rocks: Straight from the horse's mouth, compare traffic over time for key phrases, and iteratively used to create a traffic list.

Tools for generating keyword lists:
- WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com)
- Google AdWords Keyword Tool - beyond the vast knowledge offered, there's a 'site-related keywords' tab in results where you can enter webpage URL to find keywords related to the content on the page.
- Yahoo Keyword Search

Todd is up next and talks about his toolbox:

- Domain and server tools: whois.domaintools.com/domainname.com, dnsstuff.com, ip-report.com/index.php (safe IP blocks), number of sites on this IP bookmarket (Todd has this on his site at stuntdubl.com/tools - seologs.com/ip-domains.htm).

- Competitive tools: Spyfu, SEO for Firefox (tools.seobook.com), SearchStatus Firefox Plugin (quirk.biz/searchstatus), Proxy Switcher (extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/switchproxy)

- Backlink/off page information: Link Harvester (linkhounds.com/link-harvester), Greg Boser's Tattler (www.gregboser.com/downloads), Hub Finder (www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php). Another way to get links is to use keywords and concatenate them with keywords that give you search results that have pages that are attainable (webuildpages.com/search).

- Keyword Information: WordTracker, AdWords, Aaron Wall's keyword tool (tools.seobook.com). Google Sets (labs.google.com/sets)

[Cut. I had to take a break. It was pretty important. I'll blog about it somewhere else.]

Some other things -
- Mr Ploppy's Tools
- Webuildpages.com/tools/
- WMC File Converter at cumbrowski.com

Next up is Jessie Sticchola and I missed the beginning but she says that a great tool is the External Greasemonkey script by Joost de Valk.

There's also DNScoop.com that gives you the age of a domain, the PageRank, and the approximate price.

Another domain research valuator is seochat.com/seo-tools/link-price.

What about project management? A great tool is 37signals BaseCamp.

You should check hothandadvantage.com - Brett's "personal" site.

Joe is also going to present some stuff but I missed a bit of his recommendations. Here's what I caught:
- Google Webmaster Tools
- MSN AdLabs (adlabs.microsoft.com)
- TheFreeCrawler

WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas
Organic Keyword Research and Selection

Moderator: Detlev Johnson
Speakers:
Craig Paddock, Boost Search Marketing
Ryan Smith, Lead Systems Architect, Beyond Ink
Seth Wilde, Search Engine Marketing Manager, uShip

Craig Paddock

Developing keyword lists is the first important step in successful organic search engine optimization. This panel will review how to mine, research, expand, and refine your keywords.

Need guy's name

Keyword Discovery
- Looking at log files -- converting keyphrases
- 3rd party sampling (WordTracker, Trellian)
- Track organic conversions vs. paid conversions

Competitive Intelligence
- HitWise
- Trellian

KWP Expanders/Variations
- Best /online / buy / cheap / discount / wholesale / accessories

Defend your band names/terms
- highest converting (2x+)
- easiest to rank for
- misspellings, variations (locale, etc)
- affiliates will target branded terms you miss
- target more than one result - Universal
- include on ranking reports - don't assume

In determining which kwps are most important to you, let your customers decide. Organically, it's not easy to determine the most important if you're not ranking somewhat for those terms in the first place. What I do is starting a paid campaign just to get data. In as little as 48 hours you can get very good impression data. Use exact [keyword] and broad match in setup. Set no daily limit and bid high enough to be on the first page. Monitor impressions and CTRs specific to your site.

When you're running this test, minimize impressions for "broad" terms. Buy both broad and exact so you can see both what people are searching for and what people are clicking on.

Look at the competitiveness of KWPs. Wordtracker exports popularity and competing sites. Try to the SEO Quake plug-in for FireFox, the SEO for FireFox plug-in.

Check the current ranking for a particular keyphrase. Even if you're already ranking for a term, that doesn't mean you shouldn't target it. It's much easier to improve your ranking for a term you're already ranking for, than ranking for a new term that you currently do not rank for at all.

What is Google Clustering? If you have 2 pages naturally listed from the same domain on the same SERP, then Google will cluster them together. Example: If you have #1 and #9, they will appear as #1 and #2 (indented). If you have #1 and #14, they will not be clustered because they do not appear on the same page. It's basically a freeride up several spots for the less high ranking result.

For your research, create a spreadsheet to organize all of the data you're collecting on each term and then use that to make educated choices. Also, when making your keyword phrase selections remember it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than to jump into a big pond as a small fish.

Also, consider targeting some keyphrases on two pages to take advantage of clustering.

In summary, let your customers decide which KWPs you should target. Let your PPC data steer your organic campaign. KWP research is much more than just KWP popularity.

Ryan Smith

API means "Application Programming Interface". It lets you get information directly from the search engines without having to strip out the HTML and it can greatly speed up and automate a lot of your KW research. It can help you generate lists of keywords found on your site. Suggests keywords, etc.

To write an API, you need to know a web scripting language like PHP, Ruby, Python, ASP/ASP.Net, or Perl.
You need to know how to make Web Service API XML requests, or how to hack their example code.
You might need to know a little reexp voodoo for parsing HTML results.
You'll also need some type of database like MySQL, SQL Server, or even Google Gears.

So let's look at Keyword Rank Tracking...

Advanced Web Ranking XML Reports
- Cheap, reliable, east to manage for small jobs.
- Will use G/Y API keys if available.
- Pulls keyword data via API's
- Will use proxy servers
- Harder to develop automation cs. Web APIs
- Bad for automating large and numerous projects with multiple keyword groups.

Yahoo Web Search API is great.
Windows Live Search API is also great.
Google SOAP Search API is a great... oh wait, they canned that. So if you have a key you're golden. If not, you're screwed.

Matt Cutts said he's working on it. He's "talked to people at Google" and is advocating opening it back up so people can get new keys and don't have to buy them off of eBay. If you'd like to, write to googleapi@hackingsearch.com to sign my little petition.

The Ask.com Search API got killed shortly after Google killed theirs.

Let's look at Web Harvesting...

Web harvesting violates the SE TOS; however, closing the API access violates the trust of developers, so as far as I'm concerned is it serves them right.

Anonymizer.com Proxy Services allows you to prepay for 1 million proxy requests ($1,000), and runs CIA-style front companies who own IPs. They do regular blacklisting detection to rotate out bad IPs. If they have to, they completely kill off front companies and start new ones to get around blocks and blacklists. Cool, huh?

For auto keyword extraction you can use the Yahoo Term Extraction API, WordsFinder.com Keyword Extractor API, or ClickTracks API.

For search volume estimates, the overture keyword selector tool is slightly unreliable in terms of availability and tends to scramble search terms. The Google Trends API and Microsoft AdCenter APIs are good. WordTracker is cool, it's cheap. But I get a lot of zero results so I'm not exactly sure I can recommend it. KeywordDiscovery.com is really the be-all end-all, but it's $500 a month. It's worth every cent though.

[Lots of links you should look at to get up to speed on search and click behaviors... see slides online at hackingsearch.com ]

Seth Wilde

[Seth's presentation was made in the newest version of PPT, and wasn't compatible with the presenting computer, so he had to give his presentation from memory]

The internal search on your site is a wealth of information. You should be regularly mining that data to see what keywords people are actively searching for once they're on your site.

Go to your competitor's sites. Look at their metadata, look at their title tags, etc. It should be relatively obvious what they're trying to rank for. Check to see what terms they're buying.

One word phrases might send you a ton of traffic, but they really don't convert well. It's better to get a 1000 hits with a 15% conversion rate than 10,000 hits with a 1.5% conversion rate.

General rule of thumb, one to three keywords per page. If you go for too many, you won't do well for any of them.

Constantly refine your keywords. It's not something you can do once and forget about it. As your site progresses, adjust as you grow.

Kim Frederiksen - Addvisors - Case Study

Find an Edge
- more business
- better business
- cheaper business

Case Study - VIP Properties
- ppc was getting to expensive

8.7 millionaires in the world
- 2.9 in NAmerica
- 2.8 in Europe
- 2.4 in Asia

Did research to show why it made sense to not only invest overseas, but in Vegas.

Showed the buying power they had. Weakening of the dollar was good for them.

Keyword: Las Veas High Rise
Vegas Condominiums

Shows price per click for Us vs Denmark vs Russia

Lead prices compared and the CPL and CPA

Quality of traffic from overseas was actually BETTER and found that the overseas leads were spending more

Thomas Bindl - Refined Labs

Facts: Shows a map of Europe and an arrow to Germany.
- 82.3 million people
- GDP - #31400
- 52 million people online

Search Landscape
- Google rules 75-90% and in Germany its 93%

shows some CPC numbers
- the expensive categories are the same but are much lower

Language Barrier
- shows some English vs Deutch (German)
- special characters

Local
- 11 million .de domains
- credit cards are just getting popular
- some legal requirements
- German is highly rec'd

Michael Bonfils - SEM International - Cracking the Asian Riddle

Phase 1: assestment
1 - access the translated usability of your site
2 - analyze your competition
3 - research the asian market
Phase 2: Planning
1 - Mapping your action Plan
Ecommerce Japan -> Korea
Branding China -> Japan
2 - Search engines 35% Google - 65% Yahoo (Google has better conversion)
Baidu is about 60% in China
3 - translation and localization
- make well localized keywords, adcopy, and landing pages
- translators are NOT copywriters
- Trust building is HUGE in Asia
- Human face or mascots help
- Monitor your local comps - be aware of what they are doing
Phase 3: Implemetnation
1 Japan
- Its easy - use google
- challenge is the translation
- reporting/analytics - google or other packages will work
- include contact information
- get a .co.jp or .jp domain
2 China
- Start with Google
- Baidu - Implement Directly
- has an implementation fee
- only takes wire fee
- no one there speaks english
- Domains/Hosting
- get your .cn domain
- HOST in China
- Reporting/Analycis
- Yahoo and Baidu give NO impression results
- Use Google for analytics
3 Korea
- Go through Google, Yahoo
- More complicated the BETTER
- Koreans love complex
- Domains and hosting - good luck, get a .kr

Gives many stats on Japan, China, and Korea

Andy Atkins-Krueger - Web Certain - It's Global

- has a blog that covers global search issues

- Lanauges and markets
- The opportunity - there are a LOT in other countries
- Which markets to enter?
- Strengths/Weakness + Opportunies/Risks
- Web Market analysis
- feasiblity of raniking
- internet audience
- market size
- Trans-optimisation
1. keyword research
2. glossary
3. translation
4. optimization
- Usability isnt the same in every language
- 30% off doesnt work in Polish - had to change it to "-30"
- "city breaks" has no direct equivalent in most European languages

- When to use local and when to use English in your campaign?
- Long Tail outside English
- shows 14 languages/countries compared for long tail
- slide shows the shortest and longest tails
- Short to Long: Romance, Scandanavian, English, German/Dutch
- Plurals, prepositions, accents, alternate spellings, inflection, disaggregation

- Hosting
- Local domain name is the way to go
-how many use "pages from" - 15-40% - depends on sector & country
- Organising your Campaign
- shows a slide of countries and what the leading search engine is (Google is dominating)
- Social networking is BIG in Europe
- shows data from Comscore 2007 on some worldwide social networking stats

- Universal Search - different rollouts in different countries

Q: Will English become the language of the internet?

A: There are languages with many more speakers out there now. Speaker gives an example of how English is being used as part of other languages but with different meanings at times.

Q: Keyword research? Tools?

A: European - google keyword tool is the best. Google in Asia works as well. For Asia there isnt anything else on a grand level. They use Google and local people to assist.

Contributed by DaveR.

WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas
Competitive Intelligence

Moderator: Jake Baille
Speakers:
Jake Baille, Managing Director, STN Labs
Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
Larry Mersman, Vice President, Trellian

Andy Beal

FIrst, I like to look at their background. So I go to a service like DomainTools.com where I can see if a site is in Yahoo Directory, Open Directory, registration details, etc. It also tells me all the different sites that are on their IP address. This is a great way to see who all of their client sites are or what their other properties are.

I also like to look at their keyword density. Rank.nl/tools/spider.html What I like about this tool is it breaks things up into 2, 3 and 4 word phrases.

For backlinks, I use Yahoo Site Explorer. What's especially nice about this is that Yahoo generally puts their most important backlinks at the top of the list.

I also like to use the SEOMoz.org/tools to check my competitors page strength. I can see how many bookmarks they have in del.icio.us, how many times they've been popular on digg, etc.

I like to see my competitors growth. SoloSEO.com/tools/indexRank.html

For tracking site changes, I use copernic.com. I can see when my competitors are hiring, releasing press releases, etc. Anytime they update a page, you'll know about it. You can set special alerts for particular words, phrases, links, etc.

Watch technorati.com to see if your competitors are mentioned on blogs or other media.

Also, set up Google Alerts to watch for your competitors activity. Google does a good job monitoring traditional/main stream media. You can set up an RSS feed or email alerts... whichever you prefer.

searchanalytics.compete.com will let you see which keyphrases are driving significant traffic to your competitors website.

touchgraph.com will show you visually how link clusters look. You can see where the major hubs are.

If your competitor is a public company, you can monitor their SEC filings. If someone sells stock, if someone's being investigated, if a financial officer leaves... they have to report all of those things.

Youc an also use Google to keep an eye on their patents.

Oodle.com, a classifieds aggregator, will help you follow job postings at your competitor's company.

Keep an eye on your competitors employees. If you can find any of their blogs, follow them. Especially if the company isn't aware the employee has the blog, they might let something important slip.

Larry Mersman

The definition of competitive intelligence can mean manu things depending on the channel we're dealing with. For the most part, it's the gathering of data on your competitors.

Without going into the log files of the competitor, several forms of information can be gathered by different means. Info can be collected several ways and from many sources. The most typical data pools are: Internet Service Provider, User Panels (User Installed Software) and Website Search Patterns/History.

Who is your competition? More than likely, you already know who most of the platers are in your market. Find your online competition using services like HitWise or comScore, or you can do your own research by going into the SEs to see who is bidding on your kws.

Now that you know who is in your space, find out how they got there, and where ther traffic is coming from...

Referring Domains/Backlinks: Who is sending traffic to your competitor?

Keyword Data: What kws are actually being clicked on to get the user to your competitor?

Knowing what kws your competitor is targeting is important, but knowing which kws are performing best for them will help you understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Many companies will optimize their website around kws they think they will be found under, or where the end user will find a link to their site.

Jake Baille

The best webmasters already investigate their competitors.
SEO is a game: know more than your competition, and you will win
Most novice webmasters have no idea -- use this to your advantage.

Novice webmasters are by and large idiots. They do idiot things like putting sensitive data on their web servers and thus they get indexed by search engines, and even use competitive research tools from their own company IPs.

"WHOIS" My competitor
-- Designed in the 80s
-- Originally intended to be contact point for technical issues
-- Evolved to be the "legal documentation" of internet domains.

Using WHOIS
-- Novice webmasters will enter their real contact information
-- Intermediate webmasters will use an "anonymizing" service
-- Advanced webmasters will just forge their info.

If the domain is forged, you can report the owner to the registrar. The owner has a limited amount of time to correct this.

Regional IP Databases... you can use nslookup to find the IP address of a given domain. Plug the IP into a regional database IP and see what company that IP is registered to. At worst you'll at least find out who the ISP is.

Social Engineering Targets
-- ISP employees
-- Spouses, significant others of employees or ex-employees.
-- Marketing departments/sales people
-- PR firms

The Script for Getting Information Out of People
1. Introduce yourself as somsone you're not.
2. Be friendly. People love friendly people. Never become confrontational.
3. Thank them for their time, and move along.

"allinanchor" is your friend. Returns all the webpages linked to with that target term. It's good for discovering networks.

Google Them! Where are their links from? You can pretty much tell an SEOd site these days by visual link inspection. Also just remember to search the damn internet. Search Facebook, follow people on Twitter, search MySpace.

Watch for unnatural traffic. People who type in "allinanchor" in Google are not your target visitors. People who come from the same search engine 20 times in 2 minutes aren't your target visitors. People who come in from whois.sc aren't your target visitors.

Tracking and Logging: Track their referrer and do something cool with competitors via mod-rewrite:
1. Send all incoming traffic traffic from that specific referrer to a porn site.
2. Serve that traffic a 403 forbidden message.
3. Make them think the site is down.

Defend against social engineering:
1. Instruct your employees they are to talk to no one about your site.
2. Find a trustworthy ISP - most intelligence is gathered at this point.
3. Tell your S.O. to not take business calls at home.

Remember... If you can track something, you can do something about it.

Search and Blogging Reporters Forum
Location: Salon A

Round table discussion with searches prime bloggers and reporters about the state of the industry.

Moderator: Michael McDonald
Speakers:
Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
Lee Odden, President, TopRank Online Marketing
Michael McDonald, Managing Editor, iEntry Inc.
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz

This session is cool but it's mostly a back-and-forth-no-PowerPoint presentation thing. They're all talking about how mainstream media is influenced by blogs. Political news is being shaped by the blogosphere. A lot more mainstream media people will even be ready to admit it.

Remove paid content and monetize with advertising.

Also, when there are screw-ups in the blogosphere, bloggers often admit their mistakes with a badge of honor whereas in traditional media, those stories are buried and never spoken about.

If you're marketing your product, write a blog. You can get a lot of press with this. Use a blog as a place to point people to.

Rand asks Andy - "How come I'm not on Techmeme and you are?"
Andy answers: That's why you talk about intricacies of the nofollow tag and I talk about real news. :)
Everyone laughs. Andy goes on - your site and my site have different audiences. Your site is more discussion oriented whereas mine isn't as much.

People always say that some blog niches are too saturated like SEO blogs. But think about a site about bathtubs or something - you can own that space if you start a blog. As far as SEO blogs, Andy Beal says that he discovers new blogs all the time in the SEO space and that you should not get discouraged. I agree, yo!

Lee says you can tap into industries even if you have no knowledge in the industry. Rand says that you should use your business and talk about it on your blog: do you sell handbags? Talk about celebrities and their handbags. If you sell housewares, go ahead and talk about housewares.

Mike asks - how much do you talk about? How much do you keep a secret?
Andy says that Rand doesn't reveal enough. He's way too secretive. (But we know that's not true.)
Rand: If you're talking about whitehat practices, 90% is on the blogs and 10% is behind the curtain. I think I've met a lot of people in the last few days that I can't talk about in about a year -- if I did talk about it, they would never talk to me again. (Really? Rand keeps secrets?)

If you generate the illusion of expertise, you're able to get a lot of business too. It's like a free trial run software - if you like the content, you might buy the real deal.

Andy says that he doesn't hold anything back. The more he shares, it's better, but he shares generically. Andy says that he divulged a lot of information in his Reputation Management book that can either make or kill his consultancy business.

What about optimizing the blog?
Blogs are RSS friendly by nature. But you have to be careful with the setup - the average blogger may not have the blog set up correctly. Bill Hartzer wrote a great post about how to optimize MovableType and WordPress (it's on billhartzer.com).

What about frequency? It depends. Some people write very frequently and do well, but some don't write as frequently and do just as well (Todd Malicoat and Greg Boser, for example).

WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas
Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Optimization

Moderator: Joe Laratro
Speakers:
Rob Snell, Managing Partner, Rob Snell
Ethan Griffin, CEO & Founder, Groove Commerce
Panelist:
Jimmy Duvall, Director, E-Commerce Products for Yahoo! Small Business, Yahoo!

Expert ecommerce panelists take a look at ecommerce sales specifically designed to sell products. Topics include optimization, as well as shopping cart, monetary, presentation, and traffic issues.

Ethan Griffin, "7 Habits of Highly Effective Shopping Carts"

1. Designing for Success

- The top 100 eTailers prefer a 2 column, centered designed. The next most common design is 2 column, left justified design. However, there is no one size fits all solution. You have to test to see what converts best for your product.

Example sites:
-- KineticFountains.com
-- Cafepress.com
-- ATouchofBrass.com
-- EpicDental.com

Make sure your proceed to checkout buttons are highlighted and easy to find. Make sure you have contact information easy to find, same for shipping info.

Try to have a mini-cart show up in the sidebar after users have begun adding items to the cart. This gives them easy access to the products they've already selected.

Take people through specific funnels to optimized product pages. (Checking analytics and seeing what keywords people are searching for is helpful for this).

2. Internal Site Search

It's not an option, it's a requirement. Make sure your site search is displaying relevant results. Check the Google Analytics site search report. People that utilize site search convert at a rate 5 times higher than other visitors. If you're not doing your site search well, then don't make it prominent.

No results page is your chance to save a customer/sale. Offer the visitor other options... best sellers, links to similar categories, etc?

-- WallysWine.com (Site Search Results Page)
-- EpicDental.com (No Results Page)

3. Why Should I Trust You?

Establishing trust with your visitors is important. Assure them your site is secure, your business is solid, responsible and fair. Footers are a good place to put all of your assurances... again, years in business, security, guarantees, credit cards accepted, etc. Remind users that you value their privacy and personal information.

4. Make Buying Simple

-- Show progress
-- Eliminate distractions
-- Reduce shopping cart abandonment
-- Relay error messages in a friendly, useful manner.

Single page checkouts often help conversions by reducing distractions and generally making the process more simple and quicker.

5. Let Your Site Be Known

-- Internal Linking
-- Header Tags
-- Page Titles
-- Anchor Text
-- Image Optimization

6. An Image Says a Thousand Words

-- Your images sell your products
-- Telling a story with your images
-- Multiple images
-- Comparing product images; make sure you're using the most enticing photo available. If you only have blah pictures, get new ones shot.

7. Climbing the Ranks

Pay attention to your off-page SEO. Increase your inbound links through:

-- Online Press Releases (PRWeb.com is used as an example)
-- Directory submissions
-- Blogging/Link Baiting
-- Shopping Feeds (make sure you optimize your data feeds)

Rob Snell, "Pimp Your Products, Sell More Stuff"

The more content we put up, the more our sales went up. First, we got a spokesmodel (Rob's brother Steve), then we wrote buyer's guides. The buyer's guides answer the questions the buyers are going to ask before they call us and ask. We're also starting to add videos. We haven't seen an increase from this yet, but it's new and I think it's going to really help things.

The problem that people run into with their ecommerce sites is that most retailers copy and paste their vendor information right onto their sites. So everyone sounds the same. Exactly the same. These retailers are being lazy. They're not adding any value to the customers.

So how do you pimp your products?

Be an expert. You know so much more about your products than your customers do, and in general retailers aren't doing a good job conveying their knowledge to their users.

Offer your opinions on your products. Offer testimonials. Tell the users what to buy.

Make your own images. Again, you don't want to look like everyone else; but, make sure you're making high quality images.

Get all the content from the manufacturer. Get stuff from on the box, in the box, advertising, instruction manuals, etc. The more content the better. Remember, it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. I'm not telling you to violate copyright... but I'm not telling you I'm not doing it, either. I've never had a manufacturer call me up and tell me to quit promoting their product.

Use the keywords the customers will use.

Just remember, pimpin' ain't easy.

It seems that half of the panel was unable to make it at the last minute.

Marc Juneau - Nolagraphics.com

Gives his background - started at GoDaddy and now has own company.

History of Web

- 1 site to 160 million
- Web started as text base
- Along came graphics and flash

Problems started in about 1996
- sites were built of just flash and images

Why does this make it hard?
- search engines only see html
- many different ways sites were being coded in html
- in many cases there was more code then content

W3c Gets Noticed

Why validate? Clients will never notice.

- 2 schools of thoughts
- make it look good no matter what the html looks like
- design to a standard

*shows a bloated code sample*

Advantages
- helps when multiple people are working on something - everyone knows the standards

Ted Ulle - The MEWS Group - CSS and HTML Today

XHTML - what he considers a misstep

There are a lot of reasons we should not use XHTML - there is a thread on WMW that goes into great detail and should be looked at it.

HTML - the M stands for (the audience yells Markup)

Semantic Meaning vs. visual Rendering

HTML - semantic
CSS - visual

Under used CSS

- common elements deserve their own default style rules (p tag, h1, and so on)

-

Whats the deal? Its a CSS Toolkit and allows you to be very flexible
- .c - text align center
- .s - is a small font
- Line-height - it matters
- set radio (1.25) not px or pt
- improves readability and comprehension
- plugs Usability News and how it is a must read - its from Wichita.edu and only comes out a few times a year

Abused CSS

- Hiding Anchors
- Dont let aesthetics trump communication - Removing underscores?
- Use redundant link cues
- color/background-color
- font variations
- hover behaviors
- Links are the core of the web

- Span tag
- should be rare, very rare
- it exposes weak CSS planning

- H1 and H2
- Do not use just for presentation
- use an imitation style for H1 and H2

A guy does a stand-in as a presenter and uses a presentation from last year.(didnt catch his name)

Shows what is a "standard way" for CSS menus.

Shows a dynamic sample that can be written in PHP, Perl, ASP or any other language.

Advantages
- less code
- less storage
- faster download of css

Q: What is a difference between an ID and a Class

A: ID is for something that only appears once on a page. Marc puts in that he uses IDs for layout and class for everything else.

Q: Image replacement - any techniques?

A: Tester: Some of the old ways (putting text 950 pixels over) looks like spam. SWF Object is the best way for replacing flash. He is suggesting that Adobe and Flash do it for you - that it creates the alternative text on the fly.

Contributed by DaveR.

Effective Action Based Copywriting
Location: Salon D

Copywriting, copywriting, copywriting – it’s not just about lots of content anymore. This session will examine ways to write effective copy for search and sales. Learn about action based copywrighting from leaders in the industry.

Moderator: Heather Lloyd-Martin
Speakers:
Brian Clark, Copy Blogger
Heather Lloyd-Martin, President, North American Division, SuccessWorks
Jill Whalen, CEO, High Rankings

Heather is first and she talks about how content is so important for search engine purposes and also helps improve ROI. The way you create and write your copy as persuasion architecture can make the difference between getting a so-so sale and tremendous success.

5 tips:
Learning to love keyphrases. 3 tips: (1) optimize for three related key phrases per page. Some people do one key phrase and stuff their page full of that one key phrase (the money key phrase). You can still have more keyphrases without risks. (2) how you focus your keyphrases depends on the page type (home, product, resource). A lot of people think the home page is everything but it's really not. It's more like the back cover of a book. (3) don't fear keyphrase overlap. It's a good thing. Once you do it, it can help you make your site more relevant.

Work with your wordcount: search engines index the page and the words therein. It's good to provide information. The rule of thumb that's fuzzy - it's about 250 words per page. It depends on the type of page. Technical fields allow you to go over without sacrificing readability but e-commerce sites don't work well in that format because that would be too much fluff. I don't subscribe to keyphrase density but some people do. If it's relevant for that keyphrase, it's really good to go.

Power Keyphrase positions: main body text copy, top to bottom; headlines and subheadlines; and hyperlinks. If you have benefit statements in that headline/subheadlines, you'll immediately grab that person's attention. Put a keyphrase in the hyperlink since it benefits search engines.

Pen-tantalizing titles. The first opportunity for conversion is the SERP: the clickability of a title that differentiates you from the others who have their results on the same page.

Keyphrase rich content + keyphrase rich titles = search engine love

Pen-sorching hot titles:
- Think "clickability"
- Create unique titles for every page
- Include each page's main keyphrases
- Don't necessarily target your company name though that's something you should test for clickthrough.
- Each title should be 50-75 characters with spaces.

Google hint - place benefit statements near your main keyphrases. When Google takes a snippet from your SERP, your description boosts you benefits.

Leverage lots of content opportunities. Content is not just your blog. Check out sephora.com.

REmember what SEO copywriting is ... and isn't. DOn't shove keyphrases into the content and assume it's good. SEO copywriting is the same thing as traditional direct response copywriting but you need to do it just a little differently for search engines. (Bob Bly - every word written is to target your audience.) That's where you see incredible success. Search engines don't pay your bills so write for the customer who do!

www.searchenginewriting.com - free SEO copywriting guide is available on Heather's site.

Jill Whalen is up next.

What's good content? The regular pages of your site - every page should have content that describes your offerings and services. It should speak to your target audience. You want to provide them with information.

Some content is king and some content sucks. Content that's written for your users while keeping the search engines in mind = content that is king. Get the right balance.

What do you need to do for content?
- Keyword Research: find what words people are using to find sites like yours.
- Base your copywriitng around those words: answer their search on your web page.

Choose phrases:
- On the home page, do more general terms.
- In the inner pages, use specific phrases.

Engines have to see the content, so avoid graphical headlines, Flash or graphics, and technical programming that traps spiders.

Some tips:
- Be descriptive. Try something like "our Toronto event planning services" instead of "our product" or "our service." Just be careful and don't stuff it a billion times.
- Don't optimize for single words; expand into phrases. For example, what is "Marketing?" Maybe you can revise it to "Internet Marketing Strategy" or "Marketing your Business" or "Opt-in Email Marketing" or "Marketing Program"
- Don't fake real content. Fix your site - don't add useless articles and write clearly and descriptively. It's going to take work. That's the reality.
- Remember: great content gets you great links. It brings highly targeted visitors that want exactly what you have to offer and converts them into customers.

Finally, up last is Brian Clark whose blog is totally awesome. If you have never visited it, it's at CopyBlogger and you should bookmark it. You'll thank me.

Brian's presentation is entitled "Attention and Persuasion Strategies for Search: Creating Content that Ranks Well and Sells."

You can write in a direct response way to offer organic links.

Here's what you should keep in mind:
How can you create a piece of content that attracts links and persuades people to convert (subscribe, buy something, etc.)? No one is going to link to your sales page, at least not naturally. Provide the following:
- Independent value. We like to get straight to the point but that's like asking people to marry you on a first date. Add something extra, such as a tutorial or a how-to. At the minimum, tell someone why. It develops a persuasion story that naturally leads to the action you want them to take.
- Headline and hook. The headline is the title and that has to contain your keywords. The hook is the angle. It's the beginning of what kind of story you're going to tell. You want to engage people, capture their attention, and get them to read. Attention nowadays is so valuable. You don't want to repeat their search phrases right back to them.
- Scannable structure. If the opening engages them but that's all, that's not so good. You still need to communicate your points with subheads, lists, bullet points, etc. These are opportunities to repeat your keywords. You're writing about that topic and are presenting in a natural way that represents your subject matter.
- What's the story? This is an overview. These all feed off each other. You need to approach your content in such a way to get a cohesive overall piece.

He uses an example of eBook creation and how he blogged about it with a how-to with subheaders that holds people's attention. (He says that doing so is 80-90% of the battle. I'd be inclined to agree.)

Selling tips from Aristotle: have an opening, empathy, solution, and action.
- Essentially you want to structure a story that has a great hook (opening). You need to understand the reader's problem (empathy). Then the solution appears (general terms about what it takes to solve the problem) which leads to your solution or your call to action - you link to another page that is a sales page.

Moderated by Jeff Rohrs, who states this this will hopefully be an Oprah-like therapy session (laughs).

First speaker is Michael Murray from Fathom SEO. Difficult clients - they want solutions to their problems and assurance. He suggests to avoid problems in the first place by framing expectations and conveying a consistent message. They use as many possible methods to amplify the points they are trying to cover. Being attentive to regular calls and conferences, even if the client is less-so. Keep thorough notes on clients. The requirements: signed agreements with specific terms – commitment time period specific, control methodologies in place, and collaboration channels are clearly identified. For example, they have to have full and immediate access to analytics in order to participate in the measurements.

Objections: what is the problem? What caused the problems? What are the possible solutions? What is the best solution? They ask these questions internally prior to the meeting/phone calls with the client in order to be well prepared. Handling concerns – be proactive about direct communications – no voice mail messages, etc. It is better to know we’re going to respond and then call within one business day. The more people we bring into meetings, the more they know we are dedicating a lot of resources towards solving their problems. A “show of force” like this can go a long way in making the client content. Be consistent and rapid in the communication.

Jeff asks the panelists about the idea of managing expectations. What are good ways to do this once the process has begun? Simon states that the initial thing as Michael said is the full requirements gathering clearly states the expectations. Kendall thinks it is a progression. Yes the first thing is a thorough scope. Typically, unless the person is already a friend, you have to get to know each other. As you do get to know each other, you have plenty of opportunities to more clearly define and continually revisit the expectations of the projects as well as the quality expected and the level of service desired. Michael insists on 6 weekly calls form the get-go, in order to get them in the habit of meeting with them. The first six calls really tell the client how serious they are. They are adamant about scheduling that immediately. Simon adds that you are maybe regularly dealing with someone in the middle level of management and used to managing to their expectations, and then discover a new level of expectations in a meeting with the C Suite.

Next up is Simon Heseltine from Red Boots Consulting. he will talk about the six types of difficult clients: 1. The “I want it yesterday client.” 2. “The Denier.” These people do not implement recommendations, and yet are taking times to second guess everything. They are sometimes only partially implementing. 3. The “sneak attacker / Invisible man.” They disappear for some time and then all of a sudden contact you and turn into the I want it yesterday client. 4. “The scope creeper.” Before you know it the one site audit turns into 3 site audits and a white paper on Bolivian dental services. 5. “The spy” they are trying to train their in-house staff when they are working with you. This is fine if it is a formal training situation, but at some point they may dump you. 6. The lack of internal process client. He describes a situation where IT teams sometimes simply copy stuff onto other pages, etc, making it difficult to understand strange changes manifesting themselves in the analytics. This leads to the discovery of recommendations that were either improperly implemented or reused erroneously.

Be proactive in dealing with difficult clients. Set expectations up front – use the contact for scope issues. Provide regular updates on a mutually agreed schedule. Identify the issues ASAP and then resolve them. If all else fails, you can fire them. You are in the business sot make money and to help clients. If you have someone that is an absolute pain, then you have to possible reevaluate the need for the relationship. He then announces that Red Boots will be rebranding in January as Serengeti.

Jeff asks about the differences in communications styles based on generations or other differences in demographics between the client’s makeup and the internal team make up (paraphrased). Kendall suggests asking up front to see how they like to operate/communicate, and fit into that. Jeff wonders if that should be documented specifically, and Kendall doesn’t necessarily do this every time. They do not want the client to think they are being so diligent about writing every single thing down and referencing it formally in email etc…this is not their style.

Kendall Allen from Incognito Digital. (She has no PowerPoint) They are a small agency and they want to focus on deep relationships with a few clients. Some of the things they think about from a positive front. They help clients with branding and conversions, which can be challenging since it is a dual metrics campaign. They are focused on developing long term engagements and long term planning, so they want to be in that process with the client along the way. It can be challenging with some of the types of clients that Simon talked about.

It is a constant progression/journey, not a one time event of setting expectations up front. They are focused on helping their clients with preparing reports to present internally. Then there is the component of good and bad ideas…some times the client’s ideas need to be carefully re-crafted. The idea of building a relationship with clients that would last even over multiple agencies is something she considers. If you think of that possibility instead of short term, you will likely have a better relationship.

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

WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas
Responsible Web Design

Moderator: Heather Lloyd-Martin
Speakers:
Gregg Banse, President, 7thpixel
Ted Ulle, Partner, The MEWS Group
Scott Fegette, Technical Product Manager, Adobe Systems, Inc.

<editorial comment>Heather Lloyd-Martin is entirely too energetic and happy for this early in the morning.<editorial comment>

Gregg Banse, "Our Reponsibility to the Client"

Before the Bid
- Determine the goal of the client
- Determine the client's experience and amount of hand-holding
- Be clear about the deliverables
- Know the decision process and who has the final say
- Be sure you can meet the timeline
- Be sure you can meet the timeline
- Do you have the ability and experience to do it -- or can you assemble a team
- Is the job right for you?

Plan the Job
- Get all the pieces out on the table (current project and for the future)
- Don't wait for questions to be asked -- answer what isn't asked
- Murder the little darlings; don't try to force any of your special little pet items. If it doesn't fit in the project then don't force it.
- Offer suggestions and guidance -- fill in the gaps

Plan for the Future
- Plan for upkeep and edits
- Don't break upgrade paths
- Build scalable elements (navigation, databases, scripts)
- Choose scalable hosts
- Write code in up-to-date formats
- Choose open source products with active support forums
- Choose commercial products with support staff

Details Matter
- Robots.txt, favicon, and .htaccess
- Meta Data
- Code Structure & Clean Code
- Cron, SSL, Backups, Script Security, Spam Prevention
- Statistics

Communicate
- Keep the client informed
- Check in with team members often
- Educate the client so they can make informed decisions
- Listen to everyone -- including yourself
- Be clear

Take Price in Your Work
- Periodically review your work
- Get feedback from clients
- Keep yourself educated
- Network with others
- Be on the lookout for ways to improve
- Share your knowledge

It's Just a Job? Not.
- Do what you enjoy. Be honest with yourself and do what you love. If you don't love it, it will show.

Ted Ulle, "Rsponsible Web Design and the Mouseover Menu"

I really only want to lay one little trip on you today. It's a highly opinionated opinion on my part, and it's trendy garbage. HTML hover menus. They've grown like mushrooms after a rainstorm. 95% of the time they're crap, but 5% of the time they're actually useful. So hopefully you'll be able to steer your clients in the right direction.

First of all, a web site is NOT an application. The hover menus are designed to mimic the GUIs for applications. Application users need to (and will) LEARN how to use an application. Website visitors need immediate and intuitive usability. If you're hiding information and making the user poke around, you're doing the user a disservice.

A mouseover menu is akin to having inviting someone over for dinner and then just telling them to help themselves to the fridge. "Figure it out for yourself" is basically what you're telling them.

Visitors cannot see and compare all the options in mouseover menus without hunting around. Further, categories are often constructed using the "company mindset" rather than a user's mindset.

Information Architecture is difficult. It's seldom applied for real, yet it's the most essential work that must be done BEFORE the menu labels are decided. It's a college degree to know how to do this completely.

- Read O'Reilly's book on Information Architecture.
- Also see "Information Architecture for the Small Site" thread on WMW (library/HTML forum).
- Also see "Putting Information Architecture into Practice" thread on WMW (library/HTML forum).

Search Engine Signals

- 100 or less links per page: Count how many links your fancy multi-level mouseover links are adding up to. You're telling the SEs that EVERYPAGE on your site is about those terms... and clearly they aren't. There is a REASON they give these suggestions.

- Understand Importance Hierarchy

- Check Your Google Sitelinks.

You're better off with an inverted L menu. Your visitors will never get lost. The Search Engines will appreciate it. Think hard about following a trend... is it really a trend or is it just trendy?

Scott Fegette, "Responsible Web Design"

As the years have progressed, our responsibilities have changed radically. Job listings for web designers in 1995 were literally: have an eye for design, access to a text editor and a modem. We made up the rules as we went along.

That same job listing today requires that the candidate know; XHTML, CSS, JavaSCript, Flash, Flex, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, SQL... etc.

The Freelancer's Dilemma:
- Deadlines vs Web Standards
- A new Responsibility Every Day
- Is it a Page or an Application?
- Clients are still as demanding as ever!

It's a liability to fall behind and a chore to stay ahead.

Responsible Web Design?
- Staying current with web standards and best practices
- Error-proofing for consistent, predictable behavior
- Adopting eddicient workflows to increase productivity
- Using technology in a maintainable, degradable way

** Separation of Disciplines

Three major components: 1) XHTML/HTML; Content/Data Layer. 2) CSS; Design Layer. 3)

JavaScript; Behavior Layer.

(X)HTML - Content Layer
- Treat IDs and Classes as a guide to your content (semantic HTML)
- No 'Bed and Breakfast' markup. (don't use deprecated tags and don't use tags inappropriately and thereby litter your content layer with garbage)
- Respecting Document Flow
- Microformats: real-world semantics you can use (microformats.org) Firefox 3 will be supporting microformats. Learn it now.

CSS - Design Layer
- Name for the styles intent, not it's representation. (If it's for the header, call it "header"; not "BlueBar200px")
- Separate stylesheets by function (layout, typography, effects, hacks, etc.)
- SSIs to include CSS into doc head.
- Use hacks as required, but plan to remove them.
- Test heavily. Disable CSS, resize window, scale fonts, etc.

JavaScript - Behavior Layer
- Externalize all functions for better efficiency
- Attach behaviors unobtrusively to keep markup clean.
- Test with scripting off - confirm the baseline experience
- The Page vs. Application conundrum

The Next Ten Years
- Rich UI functionality keeps increasing
- Media and interactivity intertwines with 'classic web'
- Mobile and non-PC browsers maturing quickly
- Toolsets continue to evolve
- Our jobs will get more complex.

It's extremely important for IT and Marketing to work together.  Kiss and make up!!!  IT guys do more than play quake.

First begin your research project by looking at:

• URL Structure How many variables are in that url?
• Search Engine Indices
• Current Rankings You have a list of phrases that you want to show up better on?  You need to look at historical numbers as well as current and future changes.
• Spider Activity How often are the spiders getting down to your 3^rd, 4^th or 5^th level content?
• Determine Target Terms What keyword phrases do you want to show up for?  You would want to rank for your highest converting keywords.
• Overcome technology, resource and/or
• Index, Optimize political challenges
• Monitor Improvements

Homepage titles really do matter.  What keyword phrases are really important to your site? 

Category page titles are important as well but its not enough.  Be sure to use an <h1> tag that reflects your title tag with your important keyword.  Use on page copy in a paragraph that is keyword rich.

If you've done all of this and your still not ranking what's wrong?  Many times your competitor has the particular keyword in the domain or domain name.  In this case make sure your important items or keywords are featured on your homepage.

Basic Optimization Principles

• Page titles
• Headings
• Navigational Text
• Content
• Metadata
• URLs
• Anchor text
• Links

Universal search- is it affecting your organic placement more off-site factors for competitive keyword phrases

Select keyword phrase improvements in Google, but takes longer to achieve top positions

Consider optimizing a Yahoo data feed

Robots.txt

Be sure to use robots.txt file Can you exclude files that would be considered duplicate?  The robots.txt is like a welcome mat at your house.  People are still going to come into your house if you don't have one.  Its like this with search engines, they'll still come in but your telling them where they can and cannot go.  Be careful when building out your robots.txt file, 1 “/” and you can disallow your entire site from the search engines.  You must educate yourself about the robots.txt file.  Google webmaster central can help with this.

Redirects

When doing any kind of redirecting it's recommended to use a 301.  It's not good to do this on the root level though.  Most of the time people link to the homepage of a site because it's the easiest thing to do, but what your telling the search engines when setting up a root level 301 is that none of my content is here but its somewhere else.

Architecture

Don't use javascript in your navigation unless you want to loose the search engines. 

Duplicate content

Everypage on your website should have its own address like your physical house that you live in.  you don't share 20 homes.  With duplicate content you basically have 20 mailboxes for one home.  You need to think about which “home” or page is the important page.  An example of who's doing this wrong is www.brookstone.com and the product level page (Maxell Batter, 9-Volt)  this page can be accessed almost 20 different ways through this one website.

Canonicalization

You can start with http://www.domain.com or http://domain.com  If so you have 2 websites with the same content that can be accessed two different ways.  How are you linking from your home button?  Are you doing something like this http://www.domain.com/index.html?  Now you've just created a 3^rd way.  You need to use a 301 and choose 1 way to link to your homepage.  When linking from your navigation be sure that you are consistent as well.

“Legacy” Spam

Does your site still have “invisible” text links from years ago?  If your doing this, you will be caught and your ranking will slip as well as the pages being indexed.

Be sure to take advantage of Google Webmaster Central and the offerings from the other search engines as well.  Fix your architectural problems instead of just trying to Band-Aid with a sitemap.

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

Keynote Coffee Chat With Matt Cutts of Google On the Hot Seat
Location: Salon A

Bring a pile of questions with you. This is a pure question and answer session with the master Google company guy, Matt Cutts.

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.

This is the last session day of Pubcon and I am leaving tonight. I am already sad. It isn't sunny out for the first time this week and I feel that Vegas is already starting to miss my presence. Or maybe my sadness is contgious.

Brett asks: What's a typical day at Google?
Matt: I was in grad school in computer graphics and you have to take a couple of classes related to Computer Science as part of the requirements. I ended up taking a library science class that was related to search engines. This was in '99 and I had an interest in jobs in the area. Matt sent an email asking how much these companies pay and they weren't initially doing active negotiations. But 4 days later, they revisited the question, flew him out to California, and Matt's been there since 2000.

As far as a typical day, it's hard to answer that since things happen everyday. It depends on what kind of issues are in the news (like malware on .CN domains). Matt loves his colleagues and webmasters and he loves trying to fix problems and tackling problems before competition gets to Google.

Q: What's your employee number? There's a rumor that it's 69.
Matt: No, it's not 69. It's in the first hundred but it's not 69.

Q: People are all about links but then there's a concern about linking to bad neighborhoods. How do you identify bad neighborhoods? Should you nofollow them or stay away totally?
Matt: Use your gut. Trading links is natural and it's natural to have reciprocal links. At some level, natural reciprocal links happen, but if you do it way too often, it looks artificial. My advice is to go with your gut and if you're worried, you can use nofollow. [Matt notices that there are birds in the conference hall. This is a really big conference hall.] Using nofollow disassociates you with that neighborhood.

Q: What's the deal with paid links?
Matt: A few years ago, there was another search engine called Overture that you'd search and the results weren't sorted by relevance, it was sorted by money. So you'd type "harvard" and not get the university - you'd get test prep. I learned that you don't want a search engine that wasn't by pocketbook. We see a lot of differnet stuff. We capped out our policy recently on our blog about paid links. I put up some screenshots on my personal blog. There was a recent paid post where someone tried to buy the anchor text "alzheimers." The anchor text went to a site that wanted to take money from you. But what if you search for Alzheimers and you get that result first? Obviously it's not a good user experience. We've come out against it as it hurts the relevancy of the results. One misconception is that it's a "Google only issue" but that's not true. All search engines have agreed when we go on record. A user who does that search should not have to find an irrelevant result.

Q: Google recently bought g.cn in China. Can you elaborate?
Matt: If you're in China and you speak Chinese, even remembering the word "Google" is really hard. One of our efforts is to make it really easy to remember. We have google.cn and g.cn and google.com. You can go to either one. Google.com gives main search results but we can restrict g.cn and google.cn to requirements of the country.

Q: Back to the China affair and the backlinks, we see that they buy a lot of links, we see that they come from specific regions of the world. Have you thought of properly investigating these countries or the companies that do this?
Matt: It's a good question. A lot of the spam is not in Chinese. It's in English -- but it's on a .cn domain. If you look at the backlinks and they're all from Japan, that starts to look suspicious. Some spammers have links from every TLD. There's always more we could do. We're always trying to work on it.

Q: Google makes a lot of money on the content networks from parked domains but a lot of these are typosquatted domains. What is Google's stance on taking these down since they're not legitimate?
Matt: First, this isn't my area of expertise so I'm going to give you my opinion only. Suppose you're going to stop all typosquatters. It used to be the case that you tried to get something and maybe you got it right or maybe you didn't get it right and you'd hit some really malicious websites instead. To some extent, Google legitimized domain-related advertising. Search Engine Roundtable (that's us! Matt said my name!) covered some articles where you can opt out of these kinds of domain related advertising. Google is moving in that direction. Having that alertnative is a really good step but we're still listening to feedback to make it even better. I personally think that whenever you advertise, you should have as many options as possible.

Q: Let's say if I have a VPS and I have a neighbor on the same class C doing shady stuff. Can that poision my entire class C?
Matt: VPS = virtual private server. (I have one too, just FYI.) Spammers are really smart. They will drop an IP address when it's poisoned and then some innocent person will take it. It can't hurt you anymore - the data gets outdated very quickly so we don't worry about this as much anymore. The only concern is when there's a lot of IPs in the same subnet doing some shady stuff and then we may take action.

Q: There's this A-CAP protocol for newspapers that they put content behind a paid wall after a certain time. What are the ramifications?
Matt: It came out a week ago so we need to study it to see what kind of value it provides. I can't say in its incarnation will be supported by all search engines but it may become more mainstream.

Q: If I have a site and I redirect a certain amount of files, are there any set of rules on how many 301 redirects you can set up in a chain?
Matt: To the best of my knowledge, there's no real limit. You can do a 301 and change it 2 weeks later and you'll be totally fine. I don't recommend a chain of redirects that is so long that tires out the Googlebot. It's easier for things to get lost in the queue at the time, so maybe you should point it to the final destination.

Q: On paid links, what's the drawn at when it comes to paid links vs. advertising?
Matt: Those links don't pass PageRank. I want a clean index and accurate search results. I don't want things to hurt Google's revenue. MFA sites are not good for users.

Q: When you're changing servers (on IP addresses), is there a certain period of time that you should leave the old server up?
Matt: There are 3 or 4 steps that I can do. First: lower your DNS TTL to like 5 minutes. Bring up the site on the new IP address, switch the site on the new IP address, keep the old and the new live, and as soon as you see Googlebot crawling the new IP address, you're totally fine. Normally a day or two is all you need.

Q: We're seeing our blog content being stolen and being put on other websites (even with changed words). How do I report that? (Oh yes, that happens to Search Engine Roundtable a lot.)
Matt: Come up and catch me afterwards and we'll talk about it. But that's not entirely scalable. The general way to do it is through a spam report. I need to do a blog post about this but Barry Schwartz (actually, that was me. After I raised my hand and corrected him, he corrected himself also!) wrote an awesome post with screenshots about how to report spam results. See? Look. My name is on it.

Q: What do you think about other directories that charge money to review your site. Is it worthwhile to do this? What do you see for the future? Will Google stop passing link juice to these directories?
Matt: Check the directories and see who is behind it. If you can't figure out who that is or if the directory has the wrong neighborhoods listed, you don't want to be on it. You shouldn't pay all the time to get added. If you pay and get added anyway, that site doesn't use great editorial discretion. Use that criteria and we can determine if it's worthwhile or not.

Michael Gray asked a question and Matt answered and I didn't get it. Sorry. Someone can ask Michael at wolf-howl.com to blog about it.

Q: Are there times when a 302 is interpreted as a 301?
Matt: It's pretty rare because it dilutes things. We try to make it hard for people to hijack listings.

WebmasterWorld Pubcon 2007 Las Vegas
Brand Management

Moderator: Joe Laratro
Speakers:
Lauren Vaccarello, Director of Publishing, Forex Capital Markets LLC
Matt Tuens, VP, Sales and Business Development, CKMG, Inc.
Tony Wright, VP of Client Services, Kineticresults
Jessica L. Bowman, Sr. Marketing Manager, Yahoo! Inc.

Joe Laratro:

Brand Management is a complex conversation on the web. Traditional media, social media, blogs, forums, groups, and even chat can leave your brand vulnerable if you are not a participant. This panel will look at traditional brand management issues in this complex and sometimes hostile web environment.

Lauren Vaccarello – Building, Maintaining and Defending Your Brand

What is branding? Branding is what your company is associated with, it’s who you are. In today’s presentation, I’ll be talking about building, maintaining and defending your brand.

Building: What is your story and why should I care? Consumers don’t buy products, they buy stories. For the purpose of this presentation, we’re focusing on a fictitious business: Veg-O-Mania.

Competitive Research: Build your keyword lists. Find out who your top competitors are, why people buy their brand, what their strengths and weakness are. Good tools for this are Keyword Research Tool on SEO Book and social media sites (Digg, etc) -- see what stories are ranking well.

Content: Build your quality content keeping in mind what you learned during your competitive research phase.

Maintaining a brand:

Monitor: What blogs, forums, etc. to see what’s being said about your brand. Google Alerts are great for keeping tabs on things. Set alerts for your company name, your products, and your competitors (and their products).

Defending your brand:

Respond to negative publicity in a timely fashion.
Buy sucks.com so no one else can get it.

If complaints surface, empower your affiliates. Find your best ranking affiliates and then assist them in ranking better. Create subsites, create yahoo groups, participate in forums and blogs… do everything you can to occupy as much of the SERP real estate possible.

Designate someone to personally respond to/address negative comments on forums, blogs, etc. Talk to the people on their level and don’t lie. Also, don’t participate in debates, especially with trolls. You won’t win.

Empower your brand loyalists. Talk to them and let them know you’re aware of the bad publicity and tell them how you’re dealing with it. This will give them information they need to go out on their online communities and defend you. Their word will carry more weight than yours.

Matt Tuens, Brand Management = Content Management

A lot of what Laura was talking about was the content behind the brand. Information is power. The importance of content is discussed far and wide and especially here at PubCon, but very few people actually take full advantage of the power of content.

Content:
-- Extends brand exposure
-- Drives customers to you.
-- Delivers your message.

Brand Management = communicating and maintaining the brand message.
Brand Management = strategic development of the brand to maximize its market value
Content = crucial to brand management

Negative postings on blogs and forums are HUGE opportunities to not just save your brand, but to promote it and make it stronger. It gives you a chance to give your brand a certain je nais c’est quoi. You can increase the perceived value of your brand in the minds of certain demographics and that results in customer loyalty and market value.

Brand management is necessary in all aspects of the brand.
-- Developing the Brand
-- Maintaining and Extending the Brand
-- Protecting the Brand

Content has a four pronged value:
-- Generate high quality organic traffic
-- Establish trust with your visitors
-- Maximize the monetization of each page
-- Simultaneously, each page of content is another opportunity to spread and reinforce your brand message and value.

How much content do you need? That’s not really the right question to ask, the more correct question is “what can I do to make my site as usable and informative to my customers and potential customers as possible?”

Create the ultimate informational resource in your vertical. This lays the foundation to be the dominant brand it its vertical for years and maximizes revenue today. It also develops the brand’s online real estate to maximize its market value.
In summary, responding to negative postings shows the company in question is:
-- on the ball
-- willing to listen
-- accountable
-- cares about their customers
-- welcomes interaction with their demographic
-- willing to help, educate and find a solution for their demographic
-- will respond to concerns
-- will set any records straight that need to be
-- puts a human face to the brand.

Tony Wright, Brand Management and the Art of War

Brand Management as War
-- It might be cliché, but it works.
-- Brand Management doesn’t have the horrors of war, but it has its own horrors. It costs jobs, businesses their livelihood, etc.
-- As in war, winning goes to the prepared.
-- As in war, the goal is minimal damage.

Preparing for the Battle
-- Know the battlefields; monitor your brand
o Google Alerts
o Yahoo Alerts
o SERPs
o Social Media Outlets
o If you don’t have the time, hire someone to do it.

-- Avoid the war if at all possible
o keep your customers happy
o don’t screw ex-employees
o don’t screw partners
o practice good business
o practice good customer service
o admit your wrongs – through the proper channels

-- Train your soldiers
o Make sure your employees know when and how to respond to a crisis
o Don’t keep your employees in the dark – transparency is key
o Provide drills for battle during peacetime
o Prepare for every situation, but be prepared that you might not be prepared.

-- Keep your mercenaries happy (affiliates == hired guns)
o Affiliates are hired guns, treat them as such
o Again, transparency is key
o Treat affiliates with respect and equality
o Have policies for dealing with rogue affiliates
o Get the button pusher involved BEFORE there are problems

-- Know your enemies and your friends
o Monitor ex-employees – especially the disgruntled ones
o Keep tabs on disgruntled customers
o Know who your friends are and when you can call in favors
o Avoid confrontation if at all possible

-- Keep the button pusher informed – but not in charge.
o Lawyers are important, but will damage your brand while trying to save it.
o Use the lawyer as a last result
o Listen to counsel, but make your own decisions
o If counsel doesn’t like it – get new counsel

Jessica L. Bowman, “The Role of Search in Branding”

How brand management is typically viewed as either a way to increase traffic by having a thorough brand-focused PPC/SEO campaign or it’s what is needed to protect your brand again bad publicity or problems in the SERPs.

Maximize traffic and revenue from brand search terms
-- Leverage all of your properties to rank for your brand.
-- Dominate the SERPs as much as possible
-- Display multiple marketing messages within the SERPs
-- Coordinate the SEO/SEM campaigns
-- Coordinate with other marketing efforts – commercials, print ads, mailers, email campaigns, etc.
-- Coordinate with brand management and product management – product/service naming and descriptions based on internet audience terminology.

Hedge against negative content and competitors ranking and getting traffic for your brand terms
-- Recognize threats: competitors and unfavorables
-- Develop proactive and reactive strategies
-- Stay on top of tactics used by threatening sites.

Anything negative is a risk.
-- Any form of negative content on the internet has potential to rank high for your brand.
-- Any web-savvy customer can easily post something negative on a site that makes their way to the top of the SERPS

It’s not just the SERPs, make sure you check the following types of sites…
-- Flickr
-- Picasa
-- Technorati
-- Forums
-- ConsumerAffairs.com
-- Amazon.com (also for websites)

You might be the only person in your company that can fully comprehend the risk your company faces.
-- Bring it up when you see it.
-- Identify the threat that it presents.
-- Get the legal department involved – they can be your champion.

In summary:
-- Look at brand management in the SERPs holistically
-- Make an effort to influence the SERPs, similar to how the PR department does things.
-- Respond as issues arrive, but don’t get sucked into the online debates.
-- Be proactive do you don’t have to be reactive.
-- Be a voice of reason.
-- Empower your brand loyalists.

Ready to start your search marketing career?  This panel looked at ways fledgling SEMs can educate themselves to get started in this exciting profession. The session was moderated by: Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

Dave Davies, CEO, BeanstalkThings to do: Get a great lawyer and accountant, stick to your strengths, pick your strongest skill and be excellent. Take care during growth and only hire what you need, not what you want. Watch your stats and keep researching your market position.

Things NOT to do: Don't be over optimistic you won't rank for "SEO-Your-City" in 2-3 months (sorry). Try not to do everything you are not an expert at SEO, and design and everything else. Hire friends. If they own part of the company, you're not hiring them. Don't rest on your laurels, they will get you crushed. ENJOY your business. If you don't then it's not truly success.

David Wallace, CEO and Founder, SearchRankToday we have many ways to learn about search marketing: Free Resources -SEOmoz's "Beginner's Guide To SEO, "multiple blogs and forums, eBooks -SEOBook.com, Small Business Guide to Search Marketing, Online Courses -SEMPO, Search Engine College, Bruce Clay, Conferences and Seminars -SES, PubCon, SMX. However, in David' opinion, nothing replaces a "hands on" experience one obtains when doing SEM for their own site(s).

Establish a website.  Choose your niche (Something that interests you but not highly competitive), something that may help establish your business. Secure a Domain Name If new, you then have the hurdle of "establishing" the domain, Old domain is better but can require some work and money to obtain, Establish Web Site. Three options -Design it yourself, hire a designer or use automated solution.
Applying a Search Marketing StrategyConduct keyword research. This lays the foundation for your search marketing effort. Techniques Involve applying what you have learned to date which should at least be basic SEO and link building techniques. Set up Paid Search Campaign (if applicable). Track Progress. Analyze visibility, traffic, even conversions where applicable. Most of all learn from successes and mistakes.

Network with others.  Whether working for an agency or establishing your own SEM firm, it is important to network not only with partners but other search marketers. Develop business partnerships traditional ad agencies, web design firms, etc. Network online with search marketers forums, blogs, social media, etc…  Network in "real life" with everyone. This can include this conference for example but even things like local business organizations or trade shows.

Brand yourself as an expert: There are many search marketers, there are few that really standout. Write informative articles. Participate in forums. Participate in social media. Start an informative blog.  Words of caution: Don't spam forums and/or blog comments. 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. No matter what color hat you wear, don't be unethical in your business practices.

Nicole St. Martin, Search Marketing Analyst, HotGigs/Jobs2webSearch marketing is a great field to get into. It requires No College Degree, employment terms are extremely flexible, salaries are lucrative, skills are portable & global. Skills like patience and passion and problems solving are very important.
Learn search marketing from SEOMOZ, High Rankings.com, TopRank, SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand, SMX, SearchEngineStrategies, and Search Marketing Standard.

David Hoffman, Search Smart MarketingFive Rules for Dating My Client: Partnering with Agencies, Web Developers, PR Firms and others:Rule #1: Sign a "PreNup, "including Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreements which should protect both parties. It will put the agency's mind at ease. You live under their roof and under their rules.

Rule #2: Don't Disrespect the Family meet deadline and live up to their standards. Establish guidelines for client contact.

Rule #3: Earn Their Trust. Exceed expectations. Provide education; lunchtime seminars, pertinent articles. Don't "nickel & dime."

Rule #4: Be Discreet About Dating Others. Working with multiple agencies can become dicey. Avoid client conflicts. Be wary of exclusivity.

Rule #5: Keep Everyone Happy. Make sure it's worth their while. Make sure it's worth your while

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

Marty Weintraub writes for aimClearBlog, published by aimClear, a Duluth advertising agency specializing in organic & paid search as well as social media marketing (SMM) and blogging.

Before beginning this post, I will be honest, I struggled if I should post anything at all, because I feel like I have been writing about this PageRank update way too often in the past three months. But I found the coverage of the Link Buying Panel at PubCon Vegas 2007, from Tamar to be interesting.

Besides for Matt Cutts of Google reportedly scaring the panel (this was a saractic post by Raven-SEO) by walking in and acting all intimidating (sounds funny writing that, knowing Matt to be a nice guy) - Matt actually spoke about the recent PageRank update. Let me quote Tamar's coverage, knowing that it is not a word for word transcription of Matt's discussion:

The toolbar update was intended to reduce visible PR based on sites selling links. Google DID NOT visibly reduce PR of all sites that they caught and Matt didn't want to give a percentage. Going forward, Google is likely to continue this practice of visibly showing some portion of sites where it feels the owners have violated link selling protocol.

So Google seemed to have reduced the visible PageRank of select sites only. It seems like sites were hand selected. Is this visible PageRank reduction a true penalty? If dropping the visible PageRank is not considered a penalty, Matt said that it is possible for Google to remove the "ability of links [from a site] to pass value, but [not] show [this penalty] visibly; [or] remove the ability of the links to pass value and downgrade the visible PR in the toolbar; remove the ability of the links to pass value AND penalize the rankings of the sites/pages being linked to AND/OR the site(s) selling links; remove the ability of the links to pass value AND remove the offending site(s) from the index."

So anything is possible, but currently there have not been reports of sites losing traffic in relation to the drop in PageRank from this recent update.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and Sphinn.

We have two different recent threads asking if you are allowed to place your phone number in your Google ads. The two threads are at Google Groups and WebmasterWorld and in both threads, a Google representative came in to say, yes it is allowed.

For example, a search on new york dentist has an ad with a phone number in it:

Google said, "Yes, you may use telephone numbers in AdWords text ads. It is not against AdWords policy."

But does Google recommend it? It depends, for some advertisers it works well, Google said. But for others it doesn't work well - people still want to "click and learn," Google said. Google recommends doing a simple A/B test, "with two ads in the same ad group - one having the phone number, and the other without."

Testing to see what works best for you is a great idea.

Forum discussion at Google Groups and WebmasterWorld.

I have been following a WebmasterWorld thread that has a site owner asking why his SEO company is requiring him to remove his verification code and add only access to Google Webmaster Tools for the SEO company.

Again, Site Owner A has hired SEO Company B. SEO Company B is requiring that SEO Owner A drop his verification for Google Webmaster Tools and then add SEO COmpany B to that access. But they are saying only they can have access and not Site Owner A.

What is the rational of this SEO company? And I quote:

We need to change our Google web master account due to some technical reasons, we have informed you to change the Google site map verification code. We will not be able to verify the site if more than one verification code is added in the server.

This seems extremely weird, since most of us know that it is perfectly fine and acceptable to use two verification files to give multiple access to your Google Webmaster Tools data for your site. In fact, Google recommends it over here:

How can I give other people access to my Webmaster Tools account?

Each person that needs to access data for your site in Webmaster Tools should be verified separately.

There is even a way for a site owner to manage who has verified ownership of your site.

So either this SEO company doesn't know that two verification files is doable or they are indeed hiding something. Either way, it seems way to sketchy for my taste. Either they don't know their business or they are not telling the truth about something.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday we reported that MSNBot failed some reverse DNS tests. In short, if you did a reverse DNS lookup on the IP addresses of their spiders, it would not resolve to search.live.com. The big issue with this is that Webmasters who have set their servers to block rogue spiders that don't pass reverse DNS tests, would be blocking a legitimate MSNBot and possibly notice a drop in traffic from Live Search.

MSNDude has replied to the WebmasterWorld thread confirming the issue and promising to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Thanks Shurik for detecting this configuration issue on few servers, we will fix that.

Again, this can be a very serious issue for some sites and should be taken seriously by both webmasters and Microsoft.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft announced a new feature that advertisers can use make their search marketing ad management easier with Microsoft adCenter. The tool is an adCenter add-in for Excel. It will allow you to:

• Easily extract keywords from any website, just by entering the URL
• Quickly understand keyword popularity and trends
• Gain valuable insight on the demographic and geographic information of actual search queries

Some advertisers already got a preview of this tool and they had the following to say at a WebmasterWorld thread:

I've seen this in action... IT'S VERY NICE. I'd suggest getting on the beta asap.

I just got a long demo on the new Microsoft Keyword Research Tools at Pubcon, and it's extremely powerful.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have been spotting threads over the course of the week that Yahoo's Overture Keyword Selection Tool is not loading for people. I tested it myself, and yes, it is not loading for me either.

This is nothing new with the tool. Yahoo has not been eager to support this tool since they have other tools in place within their Yahoo Search Marketing console that does similar tasks. In addition, the tool is a huge scraper graveyard, which requires huge server resources - something Yahoo probably doesn't want to invest in with this tool.

Here is a historical look at some of the problems we covered with this tool over the past year:

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? on January 29, 2007
• Overture Keyword Selection Tool Back Online on February 2, 2007
• New Free Yahoo! Keyword Tool Coming; Overture Keyword Tool Suffering; & Other Tools on January 31, 2007
• Yahoo! Removes UK Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 2, 2007
• Yahoo To Stop Updating Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 8, 2007
• Is Yahoo Working on New Keyword Tool with Search Volume Data? on May 10, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Seems Dead on September 17, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has Returned on September 24, 2007

So now it is back offline, for the time being. Do we have alternatives? Of course!

A Cre8asite Forums thread lists a bunch of alternative solutions, including:

• http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
• https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
• http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2
• http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/Default.aspx
• http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
• http://www.seosleuth.com/site/www.seochat.com
• http://www.seodigger.com
• http://www.spyfu.com/
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.