March 2008 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: March 31, 2008"

Adam Audette wrote a brilliant piece on the fundamentals of link building on his blog, and he's right on the money. His core message is that links reflect value, so your linking strategy should focus on finding that valuable link and seeking out the appropriate neighborhoods for gathering such links. The higher the quality of the link, the better it is for you.

I'd summarize the entire post, but it really deserves its own read, your social media bookmarking, and your links too. Seriously. Adam did a great job. He divides his post into how link building has evolved, the components of a quality link, the importance of link neighborhoods, where to begin, and how to perform strategic link building.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

What would you consider a better scenario? Would you rather be below the fold on page one or above the fold on page two of the search results? If so, why?

The answer may depend on your wants and needs. On DigitalPoint Forums, a forum member is saying that he's getting a lot less traffic in the #10 ranking than in the #11th position.

While few don't see a difference between page 1 and page 2, many say that page one is obviously better. It gives you incentive to work towards ranking even higher on page one. And that should be a goal you shouldn't sit on -- it's a consistent work in progress.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Jill Whalen discovered through several site audits that Google appears to have merged the index page with the root page of the domain. In other words, if your www.domain.com was the same as www.domain.com/index.html and you still linked to www.domain.com/index.html, Google is now seeing these pages as one and the same versus in the past where they would treat them as two separate pages and even split toolbar PageRank.

It may be an issue of the duplicate content filter on Google finally kicking in, which can take awhile, according to forum member Ron Carnell.

However, Jill has noticed it on the last five site audits she performed, so it's possible that it's something that Google is now putting into effect -- at least for now. Ron mentions that Google has once merged www.domain.com and domain.com but then unmerged it, so it may only be a temporary change.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

YahooPete has visited the forums over the weekend and has announced that Yahoo! Search Marketing's customer support hours have changed. The new hours are:

Monday – Friday: 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time

Saturday: 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time

Sunday: Closed

The number for the support team is (866) 924-6676.

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

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has dozens of reports that Yahoo Search's crawler, Yahoo Slurp, took some bad medicine recently. Many are reporting that they see the crawler spidering their sites like never before. Some times they have seen the spider multiple to over a 1,000 crawls at one time.

The first report claimed about 500 Yahoo spiders:

I have a forum and I get 500+ (sometimes 800+) Yahoo spiders daily. Why is there so many? I only get 1 or 2 Google spiders.

Others reported similar cases with much more Yahoo spider activity then Google spider activity. These reports seemed to have died down recently.

The initial report came at Friday afternoon and then died out Saturday afternoon. So maybe it was just a temporary Yahoo glitch?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Yahoo sent me a statement update this behavior:

On March 29th and 30th, some of you have noticed Yahoo! Slurp spidering your website more than usual – this temporary blip was inadvertently caused by a major crawl infrastructure upgrade we have been doing for last 1 month.

While the Yahoo! Slurp should be stable now, if you continue to notice unreasonable traffic from Yahoo! spiders, please provide feedback at the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Thanks,

Yahoo! Search Team

It seems like you can now request to join the pilot Microsoft ContentAds program as a publisher. Currently, there was really no public method to request to show Microsoft ContentAds, via the adCenter content network, on your site. But now, there appears to be a form at http://advertising.microsoft.com/publisher that you can sign up at.

By completing the form, you have a chance at:

• To keep informed about new developments
• Receive invitations to participate in focus groups or feedback sessions
• And most importantly, possibly be considered for participation in an upcoming pilot program

So does this mean that Microsoft will soon be opening up their publisher program and be competing directly with Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network? If Microsoft opens up the program soon, they can likely take away publishers from Yahoo. Yahoo is still closed to non-US based publishers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The world was abuzz about Google.com going black around the world at 8pm local time. It happened a bit earlier at Google Israel, and then Saturday night it went black again:

Why? For Earth Hour.

Google users in the United States will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don't do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Ironically, for me to take that screen capture, I had to have my lights on to power my computer. In any event, we have lots of forum reaction to Google going dark.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Cre8asite Forums.

Google China seems to be highlighting the query term in the search results in red, instead of just bolding the query term, like was done in the past. For example, a search on search engine roundtable at Google China returns all matches of the keyword phrase on the page in red. Here is a screen capture:

Let's compare this to a search at Google.com:

Wonder why Google China is going with the red highlights, as opposed to the normal bolding highlighting?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As reported, Google held their first live chat even hosted by the Google Webmaster Help team. I listened and participated in the live chat event, and I can personally attest that it was a huge success. I believe there were well over 200 attendees, maybe almost 300.

It was hosted using an 800# call in, to hear the Googlers. Plus a WebEx plugin to view slides, video and two methods of chat. The first was a general chat area, which Matt Cutts spent most of his time in. He even helped out this webmaster who had his site recently hacked (it was nice to see). The second chat area was reserved for Q&A, webmasters submitted questions and Googlers answered them either live or via the chat.

I did copy the transcripts of each chat area, and I was going to post it today, but no need to. Googler, JohnMu, posted both transcripts in Google Groups, so if you missed what went down, check it out there.

If you have questions about the transcripts or have feedback on the live chat event, use this Google Groups thread, started by MattD.

I was told by one webmaster that they were recording the audio and they would email it to me. But I have not yet received a copy of that audio. If you have it, I would love to add it to this post.

It appears to me that Google will be hosting the events more regularly. It seemed like almost every Googler associated with web search and webmasters was on board (maybe we were missing Brian White?). But it seemed like they were all there, all helping webmasters. A great thing to see - like I said before. Kudos Google and great job!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Postscript: John posted audio recordings of the chat session. Check them out over here.

The huge WebmasterWorld thread devoted to tracking Google changes over the course of March 2008 has sprung some late March legs. Reseller, well known at WebmasterWorld for tracking the slightest changes at Google, posted two data centers that are very different.

The two data centers that appears to be shuffling around include:

• 72.14.207.104
• 64.233.183.104

Reseller jokes:

May be the folks at Google Search Quality Team are focusing this weekend at improving the search relevancy at the top ;-)

Google's constantly updating their search index and results, but this update seems to be pretty major. We do not know yet if it will propagate through to the main Google.com results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: I am getting word that many folks are seeing the dramatic changes at the main Google.com results. I personally don't see the 72.14.207.104 data center hitting the Google.com results for me, but many are now.

In this week's video recap of the Weekly Search Buzz we announced the winner of the prize from last week's video recap, plus I chatted about some of the most interesting and important discussions around the search industry.

This week's video recap is a summary of the Weekly Search Buzz RoundUp - 03/28/08: YouTube Video Statistics, Google Demographics Targeting & Video Ads on Google and Yahoo. In this video edition I discussed YouTube Insights, Google Demographic bidding, Google Video ads the Live Search update and much more. So check it out:

To win a prize, you need to comment below and rate the video at YouTube.

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: March 28, 2008"

Happy Friday everyone! It's officially spring out here; the weather has gotten warmer and it's almost April! Wow.

Easter!

Yeah, that's right. Last week was Easter. And there were plenty of celebrations in the search sphere.

YouTube Analytics

Probably the coolest thing (for me) that happened this week was the announcement that YouTube is now providing analytics on their videos. I know Avinash Kaushik would be proud. It is very cool to see how well your videos are doing, and Barry provides a nice screenshot tour of the various options you can take advantage of. Sweet.

Google AdWords Demographic Bidding Screenshots

Barry has been in a screenshot mood lately. After the announcement about Google's demographic targeting for AdWords advertisers, he provides Google AdWords demographic bidding screenshots as well. You can see traffic reports by gender, age, and more.

We Asked You What You Thought About Minus X Penalties

....and most of you thought it was backlink related. In other words, the links pointing to your site may be causing a drop in your rankings. Even Barry thinks so.

New Google Mobile

A spy blogger journalist dude from ZDNet was snooping around examining Google's robots.txt file and found Google's new mobile interface. It's actually quite cool; it knows where you're located and gives you popular attractions. Of course, if you're not a tourist, the results Google provides may not help you, but a big chunk of folks are probably looking for something on that map. (For the others, Google, personalized search!)

Microsoft Live Search March 2008 Update

The March 2008 update of Live Search has left webmasters really upset at the quality of results. One even likens it to "split personalities." Not good.

Google Sitelinks March 2008 Update

On a similar note, Google is performing updates of its own. I finally have sitelinks, albeit they're ... interesting.

New Versions

Some advertisers have been invited to the new Microsoft adCenter Editor Beta. No word on performance issues yet.

On Google's end, Google AdWords API version 12 is now live, and you have until July 26 to switch over. Speaking of deadlines, it's almost April 1st, and the Google AdWords display URL policy is going into effect then. Check your campaigns carefully as soon as possible if you haven't already.

Video Ads Come to Google and Yahoo

It looks like other search engines are jumping in the video ad game. Google came out with AdWords video ads and Yahoo now has Partner Results. Life is changing and it's all video, baby. (I am not sure if I'm impressed.) ;)

Do Search Boxes in Google Search Results Increase Traffic?

The answer is maybe. Search boxes in the SERPs increase traffic astronomically, according to one person who was fortunate enough to get a search box on his site. The "traffic doubled overnight," he says. Others disagree, though. So time will only tell if it helps or hurts.

No, You CANNOT Blend Your Ads

The Google AdSense team has officially provided guidelines saying no to blending ads with your content. Will they enforce it? Hard to say. Keep watching this site. ;)

10 Minutes Until Google Time

You have about 10 minutes until you can join the Google Webmaster Help Live Chat depending on when this post gets published and when you read it. Don't miss it!

Welcome Brian and Suman

Finally, I'd like to welcome AdSensePro reps Brian and Suman who hail from Ireland and India, respectively. It's nice to have global assistance when you need it. :)

Have a great weekend!

Lately, we've heard a lot about the need for search marketing standards. Most people that I've encountered are overwhelmingly supportive of such a move.

Not Jill Whalen, however. Over at Search Engine Land, she provides her four reasons as to why we shouldn't go that direction. Her reasons: there's no "one size fits all" solution to SEO, the definition of "SEO" is not agreed upon entirely by the community, laws already exist that protect consumers from SEO scams, and there's no such thing as "cheating" in SEO.

At High Rankings Forum, people are largely supportive of Jill this time around. One even puts it this way: "standardizing SEO is like standardizing art."

But Ian McAnerin, who spoke at the Search Marketing Standards session I liveblogged during SMX West, disagrees with her. His blog post addresses this (note: there are two parts) and he feels that the standards are more for the public's understanding of SEO, not for SEOs themselves.

In the end, it may be two different discussions entirely. We may need to standardize this debate. ;)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

At a Cre8asite Forums thread, a user is looking for guidance on how to compile a SEO strategic document. What would be contained in such a document?

The first step in writing a document like this is determining your audience and asking who is going to read this strategy document. Once that's set, you can think of other goals, particularly the company goals and the departmental goals.

But be careful. Don't make promises you can't deliver:

I'd also try to be easy on predicting awesome sales. It is better to underestimate and be a winner later, then overestimate now and be seen as underachiever. Even if in the latter variant, you've done exceptionally well.

What do you think? Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums -- and the final outline for the SEO strategies document is revealed.

Want an official Google robots.txt generator? You have one. Yesterday, the Google Webmaster Central blog announced the launch of a new tool in Google Webmaster Central, the robots.txt generator.

Here's what it looks like:

You'll then need to download it and save it as your robots.txt file. (Be advised that you'll probably overwrite your current robots.txt file if you already have one.)

For now, forum response is supportive of the tool, but the big wish is that wildcards be supported in the future.

Danny Sullivan has written more about the tool at Search Engine Land, where he walks you through the process and explains the syntax of a basic robots.txt file.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google AdWords advertiser at WebmasterWorld reports that he used to pay $0.15 per click on his ads but recently his quality score forced him to up the price of his AdWords ads to $10. He'd like to know if there's any way to recover from such a high jump.

An interesting discussion has emerged as a result of this question. Some people believe it's not possible, but it also depends on what kind of site you are hosting. If, for example, it's an ebook site, a "get rich quickly" site, comparison shopping engines, travel aggregators, or data collection sites, you're probably out of luck.

Others speak from experience: one has had 2 of 4 sites recovered from what he believes to be a quality score algorithm change. And some others believe that it impacts the entire account and that you need to fix the entire account before proceeding with the actual problematic keyword.

One person has circumvented this by migrating his data to another brand new campaign. He then waits to get slapped again with high CPCs at which point he moves to another brand new campaign.

Other suggestions speak from experience and users trying to make sense of it all. They call it AdWords Engine Optimization.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The other day we reported on the March 2008 Live Search update. Most of the feedback was that Microsoft took a step backwards in relevancy and spam and their new index is poor, to say the least.

MSNDude, Microsoft's Live Search representative at WebmasterWorld came into the forum thread and completely violated them. He asked for specifics and we all know that WebmasterWorld does not allow specifics. He asked:

I am looking into this and could use some sample queries where you are seeing problems. I have tried the "cheap hotels" example, but I could use some more specific examples to test with.

Please post the term and the query link and we will take a look.

Soon after, the moderator of the forum told members not to post specifics, but it was too late. Some of the example queries include:

• lower my car payments
• vista
• cutts
• bush
• ballmer

The moderator asks you to Sticky Mail MSNDude instead, so here is a quick link to email MSNDude via WebmasterWorld. Send him good examples so he can have the engineers look into improving the index.

As you can tell, I like picking on Microsoft.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

One of the most successful Google AdSense optimization strategies was to make your Google AdSense ads look as if they are part of your site content or navigation. This strategy is commonly referred to as blending your ads into your site design.

Now, there are many grades of blending your AdSense ads. There are ways to do it where you can not tell the difference between the ad and your content and there are less extreme cases. Google AdSense posted a clarification that some of these techniques are not acceptable. Google said:

• Ads shouldn't be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
• Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.

It is important to note that Google does not call these "suggestions," they call them "guidelines."

Google shows specific examples in their post so it is crystal clear what they mean. Personally, I never liked sites that blended those ads so deeply in. But the main goal of those sites was monetization of the AdSense ads. I wonder how this will impact publishers, advertisers and Google's net.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some feedback from members. I'll quote the passages I like:

Well, it's only the opposite of the previous guideline ;-D

See Google's AdSense Heat Map for why people might think this.

I'm thinking Google itself used to be in violation with these guidelines (sponsor results below the search box). Certainly sites like Ask and AOL seem to be in violation.

Yes, AOL and Ask are paid search partners and they blend those Google ads right into their search results. Here is a screen capture of the Google ads on Ask.com, next to an organic result. Very hard to tell which is paid and which is free:

Let's see if Google stats to truly enforce this guidelines now. It will be interesting to watch all the forum threads on this topic.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Googler, JohnMu, posted a Google Groups thread telling everyone that Google is aware of the verification issue in Google Webmaster Tools and not to worry. He said:

I just wanted to give a short heads-up that we're aware of the issue with site verification in Webmaster Tools. The team is working on it, so you should all be able to take a deeper look into your site's indexing through Webmaster Tools soon! If your site was unverified, it will generally have no impact on any settings or statistics in your account. They will all be back once your site is re-verified.

I'm sorry for the disruption and hope to see you all in our chat tomorrow!

So no need to worry, everything should return to normal, if you are impacted by this.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

YouTube and Google both announced YouTube Insights, a new way to see more detailed statistics on your YouTube videos. I did a detailed post at Search Engine Land on the topic. If you have YouTube videos, you can see the stats by going to the my videos link and clicking on "about this video" button. Here is a screen shot of the button:

Now, my most popular video by far is the iPhone Popcorn Trick where I wrote that my iPhone can make popcorn. Here is that video:

Here is the YouTube Insights stats overview for this video:

Let's zoom in on the chart on the left and expand it to a year to see views for the past year:

Here is the video popularity compared to other videos across the year time span:

Views plotted on the world map:

Here are pictures (slide show format) of the views by continent:

Why is it so popular? Well, YouTube Insights currently doesn't show referral data but I have a feeling that is coming. I know why this video is so popular. Due to universal search and the video ranking number on in Google for searches similar to iphone popcorn.

Love the stats we have so far and looking forward to referral data YouTube!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Like most PPC campaign systems, there is a default cap at how many keywords, ad groups and so on you can have per account. Microsoft adCenter has their limits to:

• Keywords: 10,000 per adGroup
• Ads: 20 per adGroup
• Keyword Account Limit: 100,000

So you can basically max out your keyword list on a per account level to 100,000 keywords. I suspect a phone call to Microsoft, if needed, can help increase that limit, but I am not 100% sure about that.

adCenterRep adds he is "I am happy to assist" those with questions at a WebmasterWorld thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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: March 27, 2008"

Julie Joyce writes on the SEO Chicks blog talks about the American Express believes that SEO is a waste of money. The idea is that there are snake oil salesmen (not all SEOs do this, though), but it ends up affecting the industry as a whole. Just because someone promised "guaranteed top 10 rankings in 90 days" doesn't mean he's doing it right or ethically. The industry shouldn't take a hit for that, but unfortunately, they do.

Julie says that you shouldn't give out bad advice as it's extremely irresponsible.

Yes, there are examples of poor SEO but that’s absolutely no reason to advise all small business owners against employing the services of reputable people who happen to have the background and the knowledge to compete in the online arena.

And she ends the article with a bang: that bad advice isn't much better than bad SEO. So there, AMEX.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Ann Smarty has written a post at Search Engine Journal about how the mindset of webmasters who launch sites with and without SEO in mind. If SEO is a priority, choose a relevant domain name and think over website structure. Of course, that's how you'd approach it if search engines were important.

But what if they weren't?

If search engines didn't exist (or rather, you'd like the search engines to find you instead), you wouldn't care about indexing the site immediately and you certainly wouldn't submit your site to search engines. You wouldn't update your content that quickly. Instead, you'd search for alternative traffic sources, like blog comments.

She has a good point. As Barry Welford says, "Simply put it’s getting the fundamentals right then watching it grow." Eventually, it will, but technicalities may not have to be at the forefront of your thought process.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Google has announced that it has launched the newest version of the AdWords API: version 12. Release notes are here, but include the following new features:

• Conversion Optimizer support
• CPC bidding for placement-targeted ads
• Expanded code sample library

Version 11 will be discontinued on July 26, 2008, so if you're an AdWords API developer: upgrade soon rather than later.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld member asks about the frequency of Quality Index updates on Yahoo Search Marketing.

The answer is that the Quality Index updates daily provided that your ad has served impressions the day before.

How can you maximize your Quality Index? The Yahoo Search Marketing blog gives some insight into this value. Some tips include using relevant keywords, applying the keyword to your creative, taking advantage of excluded keywords, using A/B testing, gathering intelligence, and offering specials.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Monday we reported that Google Webmaster Central Team to Offer Live Chat on Friday, March 28th. As promised, I am updating you with the how to join details of this live chat session. Google's Adam Lasnik posted a bunch of details at Google Groups, throughout a few pages.

Here is the FAQ which has the agenda and instructions. Let me summarize:

8:45 (PST) :: You can now join the chat
9:05 (PST) :: The introduction by the Googlers
9:15 (PST) :: Site Clinic (you submit your site)
9:40 (PST) :: Advanced topic: Images in search results by Maile Ohye
9:50 (PST) :: Additional Q&A time
10:00 (PST) :: Hang Up Your Phone (The End)

How To Join The Chat:

It appears Google is powering the chat and conference call via Webex. So to get the Webex meeting URL, you have to go here Friday morning. It won't be posted until then, I don't think. Then when you get to that sign in URL, you will be asked for your name and e-mail address. WebEx will then install it's software on your computer. Webex will then aid you in calling in, but you can call 1-866-469-3239 or if you are international you can use one of these numbers.

It appears you will not be allowed to speak on the phone. You can listen to the Googler's talk, chat with other listeners and then type your questions to a Googler during the Q&A.

Any questions? If so, use this Google Groups thread to ask them and don't forget, if you want your site reviewed, submit it here.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

There are many reports via DigitalPoint Forums that Google has added the Sitelinks feature to many new sites.

Tamar even mentioned to me yesterday that a search on tamar weinberg now returns Sitelinks for her site.

The last Google Sitelinks update was about a month ago on February 22nd.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

One of the oldest questions in the search engine optimization practice is on the META description. The META description is this little tag you include in the header file, that provides a machine readable short summary of your page. Many search engines including Google, Yahoo, & Live Search use the META description in one way or an other. Here is a screen capture of what our META description looks like within the source code of a page:

A Cre8asite Forums thread has a recent discussion that probes into the META description and how it impacts the search engine snippet. The search engine snippet is the piece of content found directly under the blue hyperlink of the search results listings. Here is the search engine snippet in Google for a search on search engine roundtable:

Yes, in this case it matches my META description but not always. If you search for barry schwartz you get this alternative description for this site:

Google and most engines, try to match the content of your search and then apply a more contextually relevant snippet to your query. In the case of "barry schwartz," Google noticed that "barry" and "schwartz" were both not mentioned in the META description, so it proceeded to look for content on the page that matched. What it found was the word "barry" in the little links under each post, in the alt and title tag text:

Ron Carnell, Cre8asite Forums Administrator, makes an interesting observation, which seems to be true:

In every single instance in my experience, putting the search terms in a meta-description sentence resulted in THAT sentence being used in the snippet as soon as the page was crawled. Every instance.

Got that?

Anyway, the forum thread also touches on topics such as why a search engine doesn't use anchor text when developing a search snippet? It also asks how we, webmasters, would want to extend the META description. I love Cre8asite Forum Modertor, EGOL's response:

Looking forward... maybe some day search engines will be able to pass query information to websites. If a person searches for "Bluenote Widgets" perhaps the search engine could pass those words to my website and there would be an easy to install tool that make them appear in highlight on my page... or maybe the link to my page would dropdown to the occurrence of those words on my page. These links could be tiny icons beneath the snippet. Searchers would click them if they want the highlighting or the dropdown anchor.

EGOL's first answer is a lot like how the Google Co-Op works to allow webmasters to trigger certain search results for trusted searchers:

By the way, do subscribe to our Google coop subscriber links.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

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: March 26, 2008"

A WebmasterWorld thread has a horror story about how difficult it seems to take PPC data out of Yahoo! Search Marketing and port it to another account. In this particular case, the person is trying to detach from a search agency and migrate the information elsewhere. Is it possible?

It seems that the answer to that is no.

Werty speaks about his own experience with his switch over to Panama. According to him, when that happened, one of his clients had master account privileges to all his other confidential accounts of his clients and in the end, there was a huge issue with trust. It doesn't seem like the issue was resolved to his satisfaction.

In the end, then, it seems that YSM still needs to iron out a few kinks: one, in security, and two, in portability, in order to win over and maintain more potential advertisers.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Let's say you're performing a campaign on Google AdWords and you have similar search terms -- for example, some with broad match and some with exact match for particular queries. Say, for example, that one of your searches is for [blue widgets] and the other is for blue widgets (broad match, no quotes). The question is -- which one does Google choose to trigger the ad?

A Google AdWords help document discusses this question in more depth. Depending on the criteria, different things may occur.

For example:

If there are multiple eligible keywords and one identical keyword, the common denominator keyword will trigger an ad.

On the other hand, if there are multiple eligible keywords in the same ad group (but no identical keyword), the keyword "that contains the most words" will trigger the ad.

Finally, if there are multiple eligible keywords across ad groups (but again, no identical keyword), the keyword with the highest combined Quality Score and CPC bid will trigger the ad.

Additional criteria for how Google chooses which keyword triggers which ad is included in the help document, and forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Some clients just need to know if their SEO investment is worthwhile. But how do you measure ROI, or rather, can you prove that there is a return on the investment?

It's a hard question to answer. On the superficial level, you can check Google Analytics and check if there has been an increase of visitors to your site, and if so, where they came from. But typically, there's really no way to prove ROI since there are so many different factors in play, including the increase in traffic, the attribution of that traffic to your actual SEO efforts, and the long-term investment of your SEO efforts.

Additional metrics include gathering prospective callers from the website (a practical solution to measure this would be to put a different phone number on the website versus on print publications) or by simply asking "How did you hear about us?" to people who dial in.

Forum discussion and (which includes a very nifty guide for metrics posted by nethy) continues on High Rankings Forum.

In February, we reported Google intends to change the AdWords URL policy, where the display URL must match the landing URL. Now, if you log onto your Google AdWords account, you'll likely see this in your dashboard:

There are still a number of WebmasterWorld members who are baffled by this announcement. They thought this was the rule the entire time. The difference, really, is that it's going to be enforced as of April 1st. Basically, the TLD of the landing page has to match the domain listed in the ad, and there's not much else to it. Hopefully, that will alleviate some concerns many people have had regarding the "new" AdWords rule.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Andrew Shotland aka Local SEO Guide has a very cool writeup on Facebook Pages and Local Search Engine Optimization. He explains that it's possible to do local SEO from your Facebook page and illustrates the process, which includes setting up your own blog, installing a Facebook application called SimplyRSS, keeping content updated regularly, and networking on Facebook very often.

Does it work? He illustrates that an accountant from the UK is using it, and it seems to appear pretty useful. However, with 8 fans, my bet is that they're not applying Andrew's fourth tip: "networking up the wazoo." In any event, with an RSS reader, you can embed your blog posts into almost any Facebook page that you can customize, be it your profile page or a fan/product page, and it's a very valuable tool to leverage.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

I was doing some searches this morning and I spotted a new type of Google AdWords video ad. For example, a search on cell phones returns a video ad for BlackBerry. Here are screen captures:

(1) The search results page:

(2) Zoom in on the ad on the right side of the page:

(3) Click watch demonstration:

(4) After the video is done playing, you can click on an in ad link to the advertiser's landing page:

Other searches that seem to work include smart phones. Here is the ad, again for BlackBerry, but this time it says "watch/hide commercial."

So, clearly, BlackBerry is testing out the AdWords video ads. Wonder if we can spot any other advertisers?

FYI, what triggered me looking was the Yahoo video ads post from this morning.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Just tried a search on phones and it showed a commercial in the top sponsored ads for AT&T Wireless:

Here is an video of the video ad, so you can see it live. This one is from a search on laptop, which was spotted by Google Operating System.

More discussion at Techmeme.

Dozens of reports from WebmasterWorld claim that Google AdSense's advanced reports are having major downtime issues. The errors people have been seeing are:

Report generation failed

There was an error in generating the report you requested. Please try again later.

First reports came in at about 8:45pm (EST) and the issues still appear to be bogging down some AdSense publishers. I tried a few reports and they worked for me, but maybe my advanced reports are not advanced enough?

Reportedly, it has been mostly down for the past 12 hours but there are times that the advanced reports work. Seems server resources related to me.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: AdSenseAdvisor early Thursday morning (March 27th) responded saying it has now been resolved:

Thanks for all of the reports. I have just heard back from our engineers, and they have now resolved the issue. Please let me know if you are still having trouble with your Advanced Reports page.

Last week, at Search Engine Land, I wrote Yahoo Graphical/Video Search Ads Named Partner Results, and then Greg Sterling did a nice follow up with his Branding Coming To Search In A Big Way. The point is that video in search ads are coming and looks like they might be here to stay.

We saw this with Google in February with the Jason Bourne example and now we are seeing it with Yahoo's shop honda "partner results" search ad. Let's take a look:

Here is the ad for shop honda:

When you click on the icon or play video, it blacks out the search results and overlays this video ad:

What I find interesting is that clicking on the ad doesn't take you to Honda. There is no "on click" event for the actual video. Your only recourse is to close out the video and then click on the links from the non-video ad.

In any event, we know video ads are coming to search. The major question is, what form will they ultimately take in the next year or so?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Just four months ago, Google added two new AdSense representatives to the Google Groups area to help the original AdSensePro. Since then, AdSensePro Ashley and Jordan have been hard at work helping AdSense publishers in the AdSense Help Group.

Google has decided to add an additional two representatives, AdSensePro Brian and AdSensePro Suman.

AdSensePro said in the Google Groups thread:

Brian is based out of our Dublin, Ireland office and helps support the UK English market. Suman is based out of our Hyderabad, India office and has experience working with Indian publishers.

Welcome Brian and Suman!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Early March we reported that Google Tests Additional Sitewide Searchbox Within SERPs. Yes, for certain queries, Google will show a site search box, likely so they can increase search volume for the engine but say that they can help the searcher. In any event, since then I have been watching to find reports on what a search box like this would do to one's traffic.

One report via a WebmasterWorld thread reports that his traffic doubled due to the addition of the search box under his search listing in Google. Here are the exact words from the webmaster (see post #3592869):

They did one for my site. Works with a search for my domain. Traffic doubled overnight.

The thread is also analyzing how many pages a site has to have to be granted the site search box in the search results. There are sites found with less than 10,000 indexed pages with the site search box, according to the thread. But not everyone wants the site search box. Amazon.com for one doesn't. As you can see, when Google launched it, we took a screen capture of Amazon having the site search box, but now it is gone, because they asked Google to pull it.

If it increases traffic, then maybe it is worth keeping. Maybe Amazon thought that it would reduce traffic to their site, because the searcher would stay on Google one step longer and have less of a chance clicking over. Who knows?

I'll keep watching the space for signs of how this search box impacts webmasters.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread says Microsoft is inviting some adCenter advertisers to beta test a new ad editor. The acronym for this product is ACE, standing for adCenter Editor (Beta).

According to the member in the thread, it appears to be an Internet Explorer browser plugin that helps you manage your search ads. I assume it speeds up the process as well as gives you more data as you edit them.

Here is the exact post from WebmasterWorld:

I just got an invite to try the beta version of the software called AdCenter Ace.

If you have firefox set as your default browser you may have trouble installing this program. I had to make IE my default browser to install Adcenter Ace :)

Hopefully it will become a bit easier to use AdCenter.

I don't have official confirmation from Microsoft on this new beta nor do I have screen captures at this moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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: March 25, 2008"

I promised when Google launched Ad Manager that I would provide a tutorial of some sorts on how to set it up for your site or blog. I didn't have time last week, but today, I finally got around to writing up the tutorial. It is so big that I decided to publish it at RustyBrick.com.

I named the article How To Set Up Google Ad Manager On Your Site or Blog.

It goes through the process of setting up ads on your site or blog, similar to how I have them set up here. I actually have Google Ad Manager serving the ads on our forum, not yet on the main Search Engine Roundtable site. But I suspect it won't be long before I switch off Open Ads and on to Google Ad Manager.

Why am I switching? Not because I am a Google fan boy. Simply because Open Ads runs on my server and thus is an extra strain on my server. Google Ad Manager is hosted free of charge on Google server, so no strain on my server resources. I was able to accomplish everything I needed to with Google that I had with Open Ads, so I will be switching the main site over shortly.

If you need assistance, I recommend using my walk-through: How To Set Up Google Ad Manager On Your Site or Blog. If that doesn't help, the Google Groups area has a Google representative who is fairly quick in responding and is very helpful. He helped me set it up.

Forum discussion at Google Groups and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A ZDNet editor was looking at Google's robots.txt file when he stumbled upon an entry for http://www.google.com/m/lcb. It looks to him like a brand new Google Mobile interface that can pinpoint your approximate location and give you suggested places to visit.

His take:

The feature works pretty well, but it would be even better if it could somehow figure out your exact location rather than simply the city. This way it could browse real businesses that are close to you rather than everything in the entire city. Maybe if you pass in some weird parameters with latitude and longitude it will do exactly that, but I can’t confirm that at the moment.

Not bad. Of course, it would be cooler (according to forum members) if Google could utilize cell phones' GPS coordinates and really give much more targeted results, but I imagine as phones get more technologically sophisticated, that will be in the works eventually.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, one of my Google Apps for my Domain accounts was down for several hours. It eventually came up but it looks like some other Gmail folks aren't as fortunate. A Google Groups thread has several members complaining that they are receiving 502 errors when trying to access their Gmail accounts. There is a pretty big outcry of how Gmail is not stable enough for them.

Gmail Alerts Manager updated another Google Groups thread with updates, and as of last night, everyone should have their email up and running. However, a number of folks posting in the Google Group are still not able to access their email.

We'll update this post if we get any other reports.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A High Rankings Forum member has lost his high rankings (no pun intended). Apparently, he's been deindexed since January 2008. His first inclination at this point is to check the IP address, assuming everything else is looking good.

Is the IP really the right direction to go? As one member puts it, it can help, but moderator Randy has a different take.

As a general rule the search engines do not ban IP numbers. There are simply too many sites out there on shared hosting plans, so if they did they'd end up throwing out a lot of babies with the bathwater.

So what can you do instead? First, check if the search engine spiders are visiting at all. If they're not, you might be right about the IP blockage. But also investigate other possible reasons for being deindexed. Here's what you can do to check:

1. Make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking spiders.
2. Browse your site as Googlebot and see what the spider sees.
3. Investigate files and ensure they aren't hacked.
4. Run Xenu on your website and check any external links
5. Register your site with Google's Webmaster Tools to check for red flags

What else would you add to this list?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

What do you do when you have an SEO client but they refuse to give you access to their servers and do not act upon recommendations that you're giving nearly blindly since you have no access to their statistics?

It depends on how you approach the client when offering services. Before a contract is signed, it's ideal to tell the client that you will need full access up front.

Since there is no right answer to the question, though, you should be sure not to guarantee rankings, especially when you cannot see how well they're doing from your efforts. You might want to eventually approach the client and say "it doesn't feel right" that you're taking their money and not able to make the suggested changes.

Some clients won't give you the access. In that case, the business relationship is probably not a healthy one. You need do what's right for you.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Google Webmaster Central is hosting a live chat session this Friday at 9pm (PST), noon (EST). Adam Lasnik of Google posted some details at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Date/Time: Friday, March 28 at 9am PDT / noon EDT / 16:00 GMT

The location of this live chat has not yet been announced, but they will update this Google Groups thread with the details, when available.

It appears the Googlers will be viewable via a video camera on a web page. It also appears that they will allow users to call in, free of charge, and ask questions (I assume in a moderation queue). So all you need to participate is a phone, web browser, and an internet connection.

Googler's JohnMu adds:

Thanks for posting this, JLH! We'll add more details to the groups in the next few days.

I hope as many of you as possible can join in, it should be an interesting session!

As more details come out, I will update you.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: Details on how to join this chat can be found over here.

Serbia currently has two TLDs, .rs and .yu. The .rs TLD is now replacing the .yu TLD, all .yu TLDs should be transferred over to .rs by September 30, 2009. FYI, .rs stands for Republika Srbija (The Republic of Serbia).

On March 10th, webmaster were now able to registration their new .rs domain names. Many people started the transfer process from their .yu TLDs to the new .rs TLDs. They set up the 301s, moved content, and tried to verify their sites with Google Webmaster Tools.

A detailed and long Google Groups thread has confirmed issues with Google Webmaster Tools verifying the new Serbia TLD, .rs. Googler, JohnMu said:

Thanks for reporting and researching this issue. From what I have been able to test in the last few days this most likely only affects verification in Webmaster Tools (not crawling and indexing). I've passed the issue on to the team so that they can look at it.

I certainly hope it is not an issue with the main Google crawler indexing and ranking the new TLD. It seems to me that Google has indexed many .rs TLDs already, so the issue must only be a Webmaster Tools verification issue. I suspect the issue will be resolved fairly quickly, if not, I will keep you posted.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

It seems like there was a major update over at Microsoft Live Search. The update appears to have begun some time yesterday morning.

The update was suppose to loosen up the spam filter a bit to allow the crawler to index more sites and include those sites in the search results. Maybe Microsoft tweaked that filter just a bit too much.

According to a WebmasterWorld thread, many are complaining that the search results seem to be full of poor quality sites. Here are some of the responses at WebmasterWorld:

MSN has done another update and they now have HORRIBLE results. It's ALMOST as bad as Yahoo's now and that's bad!

Even WebmasterWorld's Live Search moderator, caveman, commented:

Don't often comment in update threads anymore, but am forced to agree. Oddly, both authoritative sites (often with ranking pages that should not have ranked), and quality niche sites, seem to have taken a hit on this go around. I expect it had something to do with ridding their SERP's of the dominance of stray pages from high auth sites (i.e., where the stray pages were ranking too well), but the net result has been more pages from iffy, third tier sites ranking than I have seen in long while.

A lot of spammy mini-nets too. Reminds me of Yahoo five years ago. Especially the weird stuff, like niche sites with top ranking homepages, and badly performing high level subpages. Illogical, split personality stuff.

He adds that he believes Microsoft's geo-targeting and local-detection algorithms seem off as well.

The update before this one might have been on February 6, 2008, but Microsoft rarely confirms an update has taken place, so we typically don't get official confirmation.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This morning I complained that Google AdWords demographic bidding was announced to be available to all advertisers but yet truly not available to all advertisers. At 7pm (EST) tonight, Google emailed me back, telling me it is now really live. And they are finally right. Here are screen captures of how demographic bidding works in the AdWords console:

Go to a campaign and click "edit campaign settings." Then at the bottom right of that screen you should be able to see this option:

Click on "view and edit options" by the demographic bidding section and you will be taken to a page to select how you want to bid higher for certain genders or ages, or exclude certain genders or ages from showing you ads.

The top message reads:

This summary shows ad performance for the last seven days on sites which offer demographic information. Those sites provided 0.0% of this campaign's total ad impressions during that time. For statistics on all ad impressions for this campaign, see your campaign summary page.

Click Edit in any row to adjust your bid for that demographic group, or to hide your ad from that group.

Following that, here are the two options:

Gender:

Age:

Clicking on the "Edit" buttons opens up this dialog menu:

Enter in the bid adjustment or if you want to exclude that demographic and click "apply changes". As you update each of the options, the box on the right will change to show your "Resulting Combos:"

I will be tracking the forums and advertisers feedback over the course of the next few weeks and report back with any results.

Keep in mind, there is still the "demographic targeting" option as well as this new "demographic bidding" option. Demographic targeting seems to use comScore data and is only available for placement targeted ads, whereas this new demographic bidding uses data provided to Google from sites they trust and seems to be available both on the search and content networks.

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

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: March 24, 2008"

According to Aaron Wall, since Mahalo adds no value (if you remove the links which point to other pages on the Internet), it violates Google's spam guidelines.

While many people, particularly SEOs (who have been frustrated with Jason's commentary in the past -- though to me, he redeemed himself during the keynote at SESNY last week), lauded Aaron's statements, I have to disagree with Aaron's statement. Personally, do you think that this post on how to convert from a PC to Mac lacks any substance? I think it's a great piece.

Jason responds in the Sphinn thread:

Over time I think you’ll see our pages grow to be over 50% original content, 20% links, and 20% UGC (i.e. reviews, votes, comments). Most pages in the system are 50-70% complete.... over the next two to three years they will reach 80-90% complete thanks to the help of the community and they will be worthy of a top 30-50 ranking in 20-30% of the cases is my guess.

Furthermore, all pages with less than 400 unique words will be nofollowed.

Personally, I think that's a great step. And I have to continue to disagree with individuals who think it's appropriate to continue bashing Jason when he clearly rectified the situation last week -- since, well, I was there.

As one member puts it, "if an actual human being combs through that data to provide us a garbage free page, then it should not be considered scraping or spam."

Agreed on all fronts.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member asks how to find local directories for link building purposes.

One member suggests that you search with "directory + [your local area]" on Google or Yahoo to find some really targeted local directories.

There are also some great paid directories including Best of the Web's regional directory and Yahoo's regional directory, both of which are subscription-based models.

How do you find quality link directories?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

So you can't travel the globe for every conference, but finally you discover that there's a conference in your area. Now you need to justify the expenses. Is it worth $1500+ for just a few PowerPoint presentations, or is there more to it?

The session in question is actually one of the SMX series, so Danny Sullivan chimed into the thread and provided some insights about the cost vs. value. The cost really does justify the content and other conferences aren't much different in this respect. For SMX in particular, Danny notes that there are lower cost networking passes if you already consider yourself a pro.

In the end, one of the bigger questions drills down to the number of people you can potentially make business deals with. At an SES conference, for instance, there are a lot more people you can partner with. On the other hand, SMX is much smaller and business opportunities aren't as abundant.

But Danny admits that attending the conference is not just to gather "tidbits" of information and instead says that it's full of value. I can't agree more. In fact, someone who already attended an SMX event vouches for it:

For experienced SEMs, SMX Advanced is definitely worth the money. I can personally vouch for that!

If cost is a question on a regular basis, though, don't attend every conference; just attend those specific to your area of expertise (whether it be advanced tactics, social media, or a general conference like SMX West/East).

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A month ago I wrote, Google's Matt Cutts Replies to -60 Penalty Thread at Google where I summarize how Matt said some links are hurting a particular site.

At that point, I decided to poll our readers and see if they feel that most of the "minus" X related threads and penalties are back link related or something else. Most believe the penalties are related to one's back links.

Here is the break down:

• 47% said Yes (50 responses)
• 28% said No Idea (30 responses)
• 25% said No (26 responses)

My personal feeling is that many of those perceived penalties have to do with the links to the site. Just a hunch.

Forum discussion continued at Google Groups.

Google AdWords announced that demographics targeting is now available to all advertisers. Google has been testing this feature for over two years now and relaunched the test recently without comScore data, although you can still use demographic targeting with comScore data under placement targeted ads.

Google gives you step by step instructions on how to set up demographic bidding, but I have yet to see the option under the "Advanced Options" section after clicking on "Edit Campaign Settings" on any of my campaigns. Here is a screen capture to prove it:

Here are the instructions:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Select the name of the campaign you want to edit.
3. Click Edit Campaign Settings.
4. Find the Advanced Options section of the campaign settings page. Next to the heading Demographics, click Modify bids.
5. If this is the first time you've made demographic bids, you'll see a page with details on demographic bidding. After reviewing the page, click Get Started. (If you have edited your bids before, you'll be taken directly to the next page.)
6. On the demographic bidding page, find the gender or age group (such as 25-34) for which you want to adjust your bid.
7. In the Make Adjustments column for that demographic group, click Edit.
8. A separate box will open. Click the check box marked Exclude this demographic.
9. Click Apply Changes.

If it is live, why don't I see it?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday was Easter and some search engine related sites has special logos up for the day. Google and Yahoo did not have any logo up for the day. Here are some of the logos from the industry.

DogPile's Easter Logo:

Ask.com's Easter Theme:

Cre8asite Forums Easer Logo:

Bruce Clay Blog's Easter Logo:

Google did once post a special Google Easter Bunny Search a while back, but nothing really new this year.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Over the weekend, there was a new onslaught of Google AdWords phishing attempts. Basically, fake emails have gone out that appear to be from Google. The emails ask you to login to AdWords and update your billing information. Although the link may appear to look like its a Google.com address, it is not. If you click on it and enter your billing information, it will go to a non-authorized individual, who may use your credit card information for their own shopping sprees.

The email looks like this:

Dear Google AdWords Customer!

In order to update your billing information, please sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com, and update your billing information. Your account will be reactivated as soon as you have entered your payment details. Your ads will show immediately if you decide to pay for clicks via credit or debit card. If you decide to pay by direct debit, we may need to receive your signed debit authorization before your ads start running, depending on your location. If you choose bank transfer, your ads will show as soon as we receive your first payment. (Payment options vary by location.) Thank you for choosing AdWords. We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team
------------------------
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message. If you have any questions after following the steps above, please visit the Google AdWords Help Center at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8336&hl=en_US to find answers to frequently asked questions and a 'contact us' link near the bottom of the page.

It looks very official, but the link that reads https://adwords.google.com actually takes you to http://adwords.google.com.fr4ck.cn/select/Login/.

Google's AdWordAdvisor recommends that when you see such an email, you report it to Google at Google AdWords Support:

In this case - or any other similar case - if you see what you suspect to be phishing email intended to look as if it came from Google AdWords, I hope you will take a few minutes to send all the pertinent details to the AdWords support team.

This is not the first time we have reported on Google AdWords Phishing attempts. There was a case in July 2007 and January 2008.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

Listen up, you have a chance to win a prize by watching this video. If you spot a "prop" during the video, comment below and star the video at YouTube. The following week, I will pull a name out of a hat and the winner gets a prize. US only contestants please.

Here is the video recap of Weekly Search Buzz Roundup - 03/21/08: Universal Porn, Malicious Links and SES NY 2008. We covered a lot of news including the Google porn issue, Google toughening up on malicious web sites, SES NY and much much more.

Again, to win, you need to comment below and rate the video at YouTube.

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: 03/21/08"

Finally, some closure to a really long three weeks. I can finally relax (though the work doesn't stop). SES NY wrapped up yesterday and we're ready to get back to some normalcy around here. With that said, what happened this week?

Today is Purim

Before we get into search events, Happy Purim to everyone! We have a nice theme on Search Engine Roundtable today.

Earlier this week was St. Patty's Day

Happy belated St. Patrick's Day everyone. The search industry celebrated St. Patty's Day with you. What did you do?

Google Doesn't Allow Malicious Websites

Trying to be naughty? Don't even think about getting indexed on Google with phishing sites or other malicious websites. Google has updated the guidelines to connote that it will not tolerate this kind of content, and that's great. Who needs that crap on the Internet anyway?

Two New Google AdWordsPro Guides!

Welcome aboard, Google AdWordsPro guides! It looks like the work there is getting busy, so more and more Googlers are staffing up to tackle forum discussion. I think it's great community engagement.

Yahoo Microformats Make it Easier for Scrapers?

Last week, Yahoo announced microformat support for open search. This week, webmasters have expressed concern because microformats will make it easier for scraperrs to steal content. I understand that this is a needed direction, but the spam and content theft issues will need to be addressed too.

Consider Your Linking Strategies: Order is Important

...or so some say. Rand Fishkin performed a study that showed that the first anchor text is more important than subsequent anchor texts. It's possible, and it's still a debated topic, but the findings are interesting. Go test it and see for yourself.

Microsoft adCenter's 0.0% Conversion Rate

It appears that Microsoft adCenter's conversion traffic is worsening. From a recent campaign, a forum member notices that Microsoft had no conversions from 200 clicks. Is anyone else able to reproduce this issue? I

Google Beacon Coming Soon

Don't be surprised when you see Google Beacon in the near future, which will be especially useful for Google AdSense and monetization. It's a promising metric for some, but privacy pundits may disagree. Either way, as the web grows more social, this is a likely direction that Google shall take.

Google Universal Search: Filter Out the Porn, Please!

I hope parents are watching what their kids are searching for because some very pornographic images are making their way into the universal search results. I feel sad for Barry that he had to saw it. My boss is so pure. Not anymore, I guess.

Yahoo Site Explorer Links Decrease... and Fixed

In case you were wondering, the Yahoo Site Explorer links dropped off earlier this week, but one of our commenters report that it's been fixed. Thanks for the blog discussion, Rebecca. :)

Google Suggest?

Have you seen the new Google Suggest feature? This is Google's attempt -- or so people suppose -- to propagate the drop down from search results. What do you think? I like.

Check out Google Analytics Benchmarking

Earlier this week, Avinash Kaushik suggested that Google Analytics Benchmarking was going to go live. Well, say hello to Google Analytics Benchmarking. Barry explains how it works and shows some statistics. Cool stuff.

Google vs. Yahoo Radio

Since radio is relatively new (and not embraced by the masses--yet), one wonders if Yahoo Radio can give a the company a competitive edge over Google. What say you?

Google AdWords Site Exclusion up to 5,000 Sites!

This should be pretty useful for Google AdWords advertisers: Google AdWords has now put its site exclusion to 5,000, giving you more control over your campaigns and preventing low quality traffic. Will it need to be unlimited in the future? Maybe, but this is a good extension for now!

A Lot of You Want to Work at Google

66% of you would like to work at Google, according to a poll we did earlier this week. Why? I guess the free car washes, laundry, and day care is attractive. Pool tables, foosball, and free food aren't bad perks either.

Don't you think that's cool?

SES NY 2008: It's Over. Now Read Our Coverage

We covered 34 sessions at SES NY 2008. Thanks to all of our helpers: Avi and Sheara Wilensky, Jeff Quipp, Chris Boggs, Bill Hartzer, Debra Mastaler, and Marshall Sponder.

We have Google's Blog Search and Technorati for blog search, but has anyone found a reputable forum search engine? Enter Twing.

Twing allows you to search and discover forum discussion. We do that here but this is something different. Find content from long ago and use the tag cloud to get additional inspiration.

Here's a screenshot of the system in action.

Sort you results by relevance and date and then even search forums with the associated keywords.

Looks pretty cool. If you're a forum junkie, this search engine looks very cool.

Over at WebmasterWorld, moderator werty asks about the quality of YSM traffic. Has it changed, improved, or worsened?

Within the past few months, people have been seeing an increase of quality with Yahoo! Search Marketing. You can now exclude partners who send low-quality traffic as per our update in January. The low quality domains need to be entered by hand and there is a 250-domain limit at this time.

UK members aren't seeing any changes, though, especially because domain blocking is not yet available.

What are your opinions of the state of Yahoo Search Marketing? Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen blogged about how difficult it is to perform a Google search:

If you thought it's easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn't do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.)

He concludes:

I doubt that any Web designer would be incapable of running a Google search. So, the fact that 1/4 of users can't do it is a striking demonstration that you can't rely on your own experience if you want to reach a broader audience.

Surprised? Not so much. How many people grew up around computers? Most of us did not. You're still dealing with people who are adding "www" to their email address and are discovering that pages actually can scroll.

But not everyone prefers Google:

What shocked me last week at a barbershop is absolutely nobody there considered Google a good search engine. They all considered Yahoo and MSN the better search engines. There were about 15 people ranging in age from 25-75. People were vocal about Google. They were upset at seeing a lot of pages on Google where the keyword was only mentioned once on the web site. As I listened further these people were savvier than I thought. Many seemed to show a shift to other search engines based upon the roll-out of Universal Search. Most also seemed to like SEO. They felt even if the web site overused the keywords it was more prone to be about the subject. Also it seemed to be about branding and the fact that Bill Gates at least tried to help his fellow man.

Interesting. Do you think the findings are farfetched? Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has two members reporting seeing Google Suggest like suggestions as the default feature of the main Google.com search page.

Typically, if you go to Google.com, you can type in a query and press search. But these users are seeing an auto-complete feature that you would typically only see on Google Suggest. Here is a screen capture of how it may look:

Can this be coming to the main Google.com search results? Possibly. Yahoo does it by default with search assist and they love it. Ask.com does it also. So if it works, why not port it over the the mainstream?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week, I received a preview of some of the radio commercials Yahoo just started running. The commercials are aimed at trying to build more awareness of Yahoo Search. Some of the commercials target Google.

Elinor Mills has some quotes from some of the ads.

Search engines like Google get you lost in all the links, but not Yahoo search.

You won't find that on your Google page!

I am going to see if I can get some clips of these ads to add to this post later.

What do SEOs and Webmasters think? From a WebmasterWorld thread:

On a serious note, these ads have proven to be extremely dangerous as I almost drove off the road in disbelief when I first heard it.

Dead medium for a dead search engine. Pretty appropriate.

As long as they're polluting the results with paid inclusion, it doesn't matter how many radio spots they buy. People will still prefer *any* other engine which doesn't sell out the results.

Anyway, time will tell if it works. They are currently not doing any TV ads, like some other search company tried to do.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Anyone who knows the Google Web Spam team well, knows that they all have a huge distaste for link manipulation. In my opinion, it is more than just a distance for some of the web spam team members, specifically Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts, a great guy, Google engineer since January 2000, has a strong, deep, gut wrenching distaste for link manipulation, in my opinion. Where do I get this opinion from? I don't think from our conversations but from watching Matt write and communicate with webmasters on link issues since early 2003.

Let me pull out one recent post by Matt Cutts that demonstrates it. A Sphinn thread, Matt writes:

Todd, what about a query like [symptoms of a heart attack]? The searcher wants accurate results ASAP, and might not have enough time or patience to research the subject thoroughly. We think about searches like this and issues like this all the time, which is why Google may come across as humorless when we talk about some linking issues.

I thought Eric made a pretty compelling argument. When you search, you don't want a search engine that is "fooled" by lower-quality links. And if you're trying to compete for search rankings fairly, you don't want a site that takes short cuts to do better than your site. That's why it's so helpful to have great content first and foremost and then promote that content well as opposed to just building links to low-quality content.

Just read that. Do people search for such things? I would think so. I don't think heart attacks are sudden always and I hear many people get them without knowing, they just feel discomfort. So Matt takes this stuff beyond seriously, but sometimes, I feel, personally. Imagine, spending eight plus years working at a company to build out a search experience that provides as much help to the searcher as possible. Now, imagine you have people come in and try to manipulate that? In my opinion, it would take a strong man to not take that somewhat personally. Of course, Googlers can't take it personally, but in some cases - it can be hard not to.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Last night, the Google Analytics Benchmarking feature went live for those who opted in to the program. More on how to take advantage of that feature over here. Here are some stats from my personal blog.

You can also filter down the benchmarking to specific industries by selecting the "category list." Here are some of the options, broken open - the list will continue to expand as more sites are included:

Note: Google doesn't ask what industry you are in, they must get this information from some other method.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A couple days ago, Google has officially shut off support for version 10 of the AdWords API. A WebmasterWorld thread has one advertiser who is very upset, claiming Google did not warn him.

Our system stopped working today, just as everyone is about to go on vacation for Easter. Just when our programmers are hard to contact. Just when we are most likely to be attacked (our competitors guess we won't be monitoring as closely over Easter).

Seems to only way Google communicated this change from V10 to V11 of the API was a blog post last October.

I feel it is just plain rude of Google to not even bother to email users of the API, to let them know that anything they have developed would stop working today, unless they had rewritten their software.

But that is not true, Google communicated this message not just in October but also again on January 31st, after extending the deadline to March 18th.

If the API is that critical to your business, one would think you would subscribe to the AdWords API Blog or join the AdWords API forum to get updates. Honestly, I doubt Google did not email API users about this change before cutting it off. I may be wrong, but I just highly doubt it. I am sure they can see the number of people using version 10 and make that call.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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: March 20, 2008"

It is weird writing a conference recap while sitting in my office but that is where I am. Like most New York conferences, I commute back and forth - so no flying for me (thankfully). In any event, the Search Engine Strategies New York show is now over.

It was the first big show that Danny Sullivan did not run, so yes, it did kind of feel like it was missing something, at least from my perspective. There were a lot of different things taking place for the first time, like several keynotes instead of one and these Orion panels. So SES did not feel like an old SES. Not sure yet if that is a good or bad thing.

The Internet Marketers of New York held a charity even Wednesday night for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, sponsored by Best of the Web and Search Engine Land. The event pulled together over $16,000 for the charity! I know many of those reading this now were unable to make it to SES NY. But I strongly recommend you pitch in and represent the SEM community by donating to the charity. I would make a note that you are from the IM-NY event, this way we represent the SEMs!

I would like to thank our volunteer contributors who possibly burned the rubber off their keyboards covering the sessions for all those who were unable to attend. It is amazing how hard they work (I know, since I did several sessions myself) to get this live blog coverage up for you. Here is a list of the volunteers that are due our appreciation and thanks (feel free to comment thanking them). A huge thank you to Tamar Weinberg, Chris Boggs of Brulant, Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and of Link Spiel Jeff Quipp of Search Engine People, Marshall Sponder of The Analytics Guru, Bill Hartzer and to Avi & Sheara Wilensky of Promedia Corp. Thank you all so much for helping with the coverage.

Here are the sessions we covered:
March 17, 2008

• Organic Listings Forum
• Redefining The Customer
• Video Made the SMB Star
• Igniting Viral Campaigns
• How to Build Investment Interest in Your SEO/SEM
• Network Neutrality is for On-Line Marketers too!
• Web Analytics: Measuring Success
• Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues
• Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right

• SES NY Conference Welcome and Opening Keynote: Nick Carr
• Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
• Orion Panel: Universal Search
• What's new with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer?
• Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic
• Do You Know the Breakdown of Your Competitors' Paid and Organic Traffic? Hitwise does.
• Earning Money from Contextual Ads
• Search Engine Friendly Design

• Morning Keynote: Search Has Changed Everything... And So Can You
• Widgets and Gadgets are taking over, but what are they?
• Social Media Marketing - What is it and What is it Good For?
• Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization (SMO)
• Search Advertising 101
• Keynote with Jason Calacanis - Official Launch of My Mahalo
• Social Media Research: Informing Search Strategies
• SEM Small Business Blitz
• Dealing with Affiliates
• Social Search - The Next Step
• The New Face of In-House Search
• CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines

• Podcast & Audio Search Optimization
• Morning Keynote: Andrew Tomkins
• Staffing Up for Search
• Oldtimers: The Impact of Search on Brand Health Metrics
• Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions

Link building is crucial, but linkbait tactics that worked this year may not be as effective next year. This session focuses on the underlying quality as well as ingenuity needed to get other websites to link to you early and often. It will also explain how you should approach journalists, bloggers and other authoritative sources to enhance your company's online reputation, whether or not you get links.
Moderator:

* Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch Expert and President, SageRock.com

Speakers:

* Chris Boggs, Manager, Search Engine Optimization, eMergent Marketing/BRULANT, Inc.
* Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus Inc.
* Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

First up is Sally Falkow.

What is an authoritative site? A site with strongly themed content about one topic that is updated frequently. Has hundreds of outgoing links and incoming links.

A different approach to authoritative links - public relations: there is a news story in any business.

HerRoom.com - videos of women in different sized bras - the "bounce test" videos. A number of people have been looking at them and it is building a lot of links. Interviews with doctor in podcast format.

Search results - previously not in the top 100. Sunday they were at #17. Now they're at #14 for sports bras.

If you can find a story in bouncing boobs, you can find a story in anything.

There's always a way to turn the content that you have into an interesting news story.

Chris Boggs speaks next.

Why go beyond linkbait? Apply it with oldschool stuff and offside linkbait.

The long term value of social media links is questionable. Digg links are great but it doesn't drive sales. There are exceptions to the rule but it's a fair argument that social media links may not be the way that you want to go. Links can become stale very quickly because of a fickle community that votes or links to sites. Also, linkbait can be confusing to clients.

A holistic approach is both natural and effective in growing inbound links.

Back to old school -
- Monitoring inbound links and its continued importance in structuring advanced strategies - you can remove this in Yahoo Site Explorer.
- Reciprocal linking - can it still work?
- Building directory links. Good directories = good deep links. Use Best of the Web as a directory.

Offsite linkbait - YouTube, challenge the linkerati. No more top 10s! Be creative and not salesy but remember that there are haters out there.
Case study with a client - over 25k viiews were genreated from YouTube and video search engines. To date, links to the entire site as a result of the project are over 5000.

Advanced strategies:
- Link remediation
- Link requests from relevant content sites
- Directory submissions
- Optimized press releases
- Optimized articles
- Site sponsorships
- Blogging
- and some other stuff. He purposely killed the slide before discussing each in detail or letting me see what the rest said. :)

Lee Odden is up and talks about media and blogger relations.

Push and pull PR
Push - outreach effort - wire services, networking, pitching, and RSS.
Pull - optimized content press release, newsroom, social media, media coverage

Outreach side - whether you're engaged in blogger or media relations, it comes down to persuasion. Have a compelling and relevant story.

Build relationships with folks who can extend your message.

Do your homework and be relevant.
- Biggest complaint that journalists/bloggers have: getting irrelevant pitches
- Research the target market - articles and bog posts
- Use tools like MyEdcals and Cision
- Technorati, blogrolls, social media monitoring
- Journalists need reliable resources (and tend not to link out), whereas bloggers need compelling content. If you're going to pitch to bloggers, have a blog yourself.

Make it easy:
- For journalists, make sure the pitch is meaningful for their needs and audience
- Offer high res images, videos, or presentations
- Provide extra resources to help them write the story
- For bloggers, write a summary of the news. They might even use it as a blog post.

Publicize your publicity:
- Blog about your coverage that will provoke dialogue
- Archive your past press releases and media coverage
- Offer RSS feeds
- Invite social bookmarking and news submissions
- Encourage social voting.

Don't be sloppy or spammy.
- Avoid broadcast email pitches without a qualifying list
- Avoid impersonal and irrelevant pitches
- Be sure to QA broadcast email pitches
- QA efforts should be used to personalize pitches

Don't be a one trick pony
- Once coverage is gained, keep coming back
- Develop relationships
- Be a trusted, consistent resource
- Continue to send story ideas
- Don't give up

Don't be arrogant
- Never assume a journalist has to write about your company
- Don't treat bloggers like they're second rate
- Treat influential bloggers just as you would treat mainstream media
- Skipping lesser known sites will also skip out on links
- Many journalists are also bloggers

Don't ignore multiple promotion channels
- Flickr, BusinessWire, RSS, delicious, PRWeb, Odeo, Facebook, Reddit, PR Newswire, Twitter, and more.

Don't forget to say thank you
- Journalists and bloggers are people too. Thank them!
- A little bit of appreciation goes a long way toward relationship building - paying repeat dividends

Takeaways
- Do your homework
- Build a list
- Be relevant
- Be personal
- Make it easy
- Develop a relationship

Kevin Ryan said it is very hard to run a session like this because he knows everyone for a long time. "We were doing this when no one else was." Here are some of the "founding fathers of the industry" as we know it today.

Rob Graham, Vice President of Creative & Technical Training, Laredo Group is first up.

How do we use search as a market research tool?

How do we know what we know... about our brands, customers, customers. What do they really want.

So does marketing research ask the right questions?
- Do you like this product?
- etc.

But what they don't ask is...
- How often do you do x
- What factors would make you choose this brand over others
- Would you go out of your way for the brand?

Sometimes it's about being polite:
- The observed consumer behaves very differently from the unobserver consumers
- Consumers often tell marketers what it is they think they want to hear
- Sometimes the market research doesn't reveal real consumer intention

What Marketers Need to Think About When Introducing New Brands

It's Never Cheap to launch a new product
- Product Design/Development/Importation
- Marketing, web site dev
- Distribution and infrastructure
- Staffing

Use Search to Test the Market Place
- Create a simple test page to see
- Tweak your keywords and ads and see the results

Doron Wesly, VP Strategic Services, Millward Brown Inc. is next up.

(1) Search volume rise immediately after the start of the print campaign
(2) Search volume remains higher after TV campaigns, when the print campaign is continued.

They have been doing studies to show this. But some instances don't make sense to build brand with search. It would not be appropriate to bid on competitors brand names and point them to you, but you can point them to a comparison site.

We need to always take into our objective and understand the cost of getting to those objectives are. Why? Because it can be very costly.

Stephen DiMarco, CMO, Compete is next up to tell us about him. He is a new guy in the old timers. He gives the company speech, caused he was asked to.

Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Didit. He does PPC stuff, and gives the about Did It. He does a weekly column for ClickZ on paid search.

Kevin Lee asks if he can talk about branding, so Ryan finally lets him...

Kevin Lee said branding was invented by ad agencies. So they came up with brand metrics to sell it. Direct marketers say, if I can get you a sale, awesome but if I can get you branding, that is just gravy. One thing many marketers dont think about, that is not just the SERP that generates brand awareness, but also the web site, landing page. As you start to think about search and branding, don't just think about the SERP. Think more about that this is only stage one of the ad, it starts with the click and continues until they stop with your web site (hopefully leading to a sale). To not include that, he says, is "kind of selling search short."

Lee adds people search because they are stimulated to search. And to add to Wesly, yes, marketing campaigns offline can and do trigger searches.

Then Wesly and Lee start arguing about diapers. But it is about, does media trigger search... Yes.

Ryan asks about recession...

Graham said its category specific, people in loans and mortgages have pulled out. There are less consumers searching for mortgages, he said.

JP Morgan from the audience said that they seen an increase in mortgage searches and the rates are lower.

Search as an advertising medium is increasing and more and more people are coming in. In certain categories, we may loose some advertisers but in other categories you will gain. In any market, there are up and downs in different categories.

Lots of Q&A going on... Might add more if things spike my interest.

3 Speakers
Kendall Allen, Managing Director, Incognito Digital
Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, IBM
Nell Thompson, Director of Education, Media Arts Full Sail

Allen's Presentation:
Talent Considerations:
1. what's your organization
2. role
3. values and flaws - 6 profiles
4. the drivers of talent

1. What's your Org?
Staffinf up = reviewing and hiring an agency indiependant, building out an agency or client side group, or simply marketing your next killer hire.

2. What Role?
Someone for sales, technical, production, senior management, etc.

3. 6 Profiles she has identified in search:

a. Polly Pedantic
- seems to talk down to people
- doesn't collaborate well with the team
- strategic mindset ... but ends there. She gets outgrown as she does't keep up

b. Hamish
- data centric
- obsessed with stats, lulls, spikes
- fails to give campaign enough time to perform
- must frequently regroup after false starts

c. Leonard:
- able planner
- has it down to a repeat formula
- uses all the latest methods and tricks of the trade
- views search as an accountable media
-

d. Dirk the Dilettante
- hangs out with gurus
- wants to be rich
- admires those
- goes to all parties, but doesn't remember his clients
- stays junior and doesn't really jump in
- never really becomes an expert

e. Trina and Tools Addict
- obsessed with training, especailly offsite
- constantly researching and testing
- doesn't really understand the tools though
- prides herself on knowledge of new tools

f. Real Deal Ronnie (want to hire)
- broader internet perspective
- dealth with both branding and performance
- distinguishing between strategy and methos
- knows how to plans
- knows how to run tools
- talks to you as a natural collaborator
- he's thoughtful, and engaging

4 Drivers of Talent:
#1 Roots
- early on role in SEO, SEM industry
- broader understanding of media

#2 Intelligence:
- ability to synthesize strategy and methos
- current point of view
- understand client intent

#3 Ethics
- consistent dedication to full equation

#4 Style
- curiosity and tirelessnes
- obviously smart
-client focus
- telltale spark in the eye

Moran
Wants to help you find the good people Allen discussed.

Need to focus on identifying skills needed, and how to find those people. Focus of this discussion.

Things to think about:
1. will you use an agency or in-house
- some things best done in-house
- page indexing
- optimizing content
- others best by agency
- diagnosing problems

How to Chose an Agency?
Do you need an agency to help train your team?

How to Spot the Spammer Agency/Person:
- look like you are trying to hire someone full of tricks and blackhat knowledge
- they will then tell you what they know
- those ethical companies will try to talk you out of it.

How to get inhouse talent:
- hire people with requisite skills but without the background (too expensive, and too likely to leave), and have the agency help you train them
- people with a statistic background such as librarians, translators, linguists, etc.
- Need folks who can understand the numbers
- and folks that are great with words/writing
So don't overlook people you've already got inhouse. They already know the company culture, the business, the people.

Thompson:
An Educator's Perspective:

Challenges of Acquiring Talent:
- colleges and universities and just beginning to deal with topic
- no standardization in academic approaches
- MBA and marketing degrees do not cover specific internet marketing topics
- 2 areas that need to be addressed:
- IT considerations
- web design principles
- Every company has a different approach

Challenges to the educators:
- mixed messages on hard skills
- an abundant wish list of soft skills
- wants fresh perspectives
- wants everything or wants total conformity

Specific Hard Skills Needed:
- strong writing skills ... writing is very important
- fundamental understanding of web design - important for many aspects of search
- intorduction to web interface and usability
- basic IT understanding
- internet business models
- internet law and legal issues
- web metrics and marketing math

Soft Skills Needed:
- world perspectives and cultural studies (its a small world)
- internet consumer psychology
- social media intuitiveness
- viral marketing understanding
- emotional intelligence
- self awareness
- self management
- relationship management

For the Student (potential future employee):
- look for opportunities that provide a balance between marketing and the web
- double major to gt writing, technical, and analytics skills

For the Employers:
- conduct 'think tanks' at colleges and universities
- contact career outreach depeartments at colleges
- join advisory boards and give input to curriculum

Jeff Quipp is President of Search Engine People Inc. a Toronto SEO, SEM, SMM firm.

Thursday morning SES New York keynote address by Andrew Tomkins, Chief Scientist, Yahoo! Search

Mike Grehan has called him the smartest man in search today!

Where does Yahoo see search going? Will be the subject of much discussion today.

Eg of a search ... looking to book a vacation to Tuscany.

Start searching .... need hotel, car, flight, etc. Go on trip. Enjoyed it immensely. Now I want to find that amazing coffee I drank in Tuscany. Try to find it online. Ah ... need a special coffee maker. Find it online, buy it.
As you can see ... the process can go on for quite a long time.

Trends in Task Complexity:
Dawn of search:
a. navigation of queries
b. pockets of information

Long Running User Goals:
Search as a hub:
- start here
- return for resource discovery and define task boundaries
- traverse the web broadly to complete task
- web services integrated into search
Summary, search will more about hard core productivity.

Content Growth:
- published content 3-4 GB created per day
- professional web content ~ 2 GB created per day
- user generated content 8-10 GB created per day
- private text content ~ 3 TB (300x more) created per day
- upper bound on types content ~700 TB (200x more again) created per day
Only a small fraction of content is being indexed, and even that is growing exponentially.

Growth of Metadata (amount of metadata produced per day):
- anchor Text - 100 MB
- tags 40 MB
- pageviews 180 GB
- reviews ~ 10 MB

Content ownership:
- content consumption is fragementing - nobody owns more than 10% of www page views
- no single place will own all the content
- best of breed processing will operate on the web
- value transitions to ecosystem

Content Consumption is Fragmenting Across Users:
Yahoo peformed a study showing different age groups' search patterns are often defined by stage of life (eg. teenagers search for cars).

The Search Interface:
Challenging for search engines, because content is becoming more rich and complex. Content is being published by many more publishers than ever before.

What Does This Mean for Search?
- few changes through 2005
- entering preiod of massive change to handle more complex content
- rich media, aggregation, simple task analysis
- moving beyond the stateless query/response paradigm (understanding tasks)
- personalization theory

Rich Media and Search Assistance:
Understanding what people want when looking at rich media ... probabalistic search results.

The dataweb needs a killer app!

What has Yahoo announced? Search as the killer app
- publishers and search engines collaborate!

Search Results of the future:
The amalgamation of lots of content (inclusing reviews, pictures, etc.) called abstracts. Numerous deep links, possibly statistics, rich content, reviews, general information from different publishers (eg. Yelp) in addition to specific companies. Expect the look and feel of search results to change substantially.

Comprehensive Support
much more coordination with web publishers (eg. yelp) to show more than one opinion and source of data. Some such formats:
- microformats
- hcard
-more as they get adopted
- RDFa and eRDF markup
- Open Search
- Atom/RSS Feeds

Yahoo announcing support for a different vocabulary to help publishers communicate their information to search engines.

What Does This Mean for Publishers?:
- Yahoo! open search platform does not modify ranking
- richer abstracts may provide more information to users and draw higher quality/quantity of clicks
- we want rich abstracts (results) that give users a better experience
- we don't want misleading abstracts
This is likely to be based to a large extent on trust.

Different classes of abstracts:
Yahoo looking to put together a gallery of abstract formats, that you as a user can select among to see. None of these are proprietary, but are out there for all to get on board with.

The Whole Story - summary:
- user needs becoming more complex
- content growing, changing, diversifying, fragmenting
- search responding by increases in sophistication
- value migrating to ecosystem
- unlock the value by enabling interoperability - expose semantics

Jeff Quipp is President of Search Engine People Inc. a Toronto SEO, SEM, SMM firm.

With the inclusion of audio results in the main search pages, search marketers must now include audio (podcast) optimization in their tactical toolkits. This session will cover the why and how of audio search optimization, including how to use RSS to increase reach.
Moderator:

* Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

Speakers:

* Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
* Daron Babin, CEO, Webmaster Radio

Amanda Watlington speaks first:

Why new rules for customer engagement are needed. What should I do and why should I do it? Where does audio fit in the customer engagement process?
- The effectiveness of interrupt advertising has had a sharp decline and in attention and in effectiveness
- There's a tremendous fragmentation in the overall media
- Small more specialized audiences
- Diminished brand loyalty
Podcasting can address these areas.

This is a new customer engagement model - reach the audience, they become aware. You communicate them in a more targeted fashion and it's more personalized. You can reach new audiences who don't know of you, your brand, or what you have to offer. Search helps in the awareness phase because you can increase your communication. RSS particularly and targeted sites think about music artists and music sites through search. Last but not least, RSS lets us share content, and the growth of widgets has helped in this process as well.

She illustrates how keywords influences across the spectrum and how it plays out in the search results.
e.g. Reach keywords: "mp3 download," "mp3 music"
Awareness keywords: "new punjabi music," "free punjabi music"
Targeted communication: "punjabi songs by malkit singh," "jassi sidhu mp3"

By using this kind of information and applying RSS feeds, iTunes stores, and widgets, you can create a personalized communication and engagement.

It's not a simple strategy to put it in action. Before you launch, you need to make decisions.
- Ask yourself: Should I do one standalone show or short series of podcasts? When you do one, it's like potato chips. You won't just do one. Think longer term.
- Ask yourself: should I have a scheduled series of podcasts?
- Ask yourself: do I want to create a radio or entertainment site?

Get down and dirty:
- Think about the name of the show. Tip: make sure it's not in use. Names aren't as easy to check as domain name. Chaning the name is difficult once you have an audience
- Consider the show name versus the episodes. Each episode needs its own title and description.

Prepare:
- Develop a keyword list and determine how you're going to brand name (host, show, overall site?)
- Write the audio tag information in advance because you'll want to mount your show quickly
- Get album art done quickly, especially if you use iTunes for distribution (she recommends that)
- Review iTunes categories to look for the right fit
- Build your infrastructure in advance so you can mount it rapidly

Walk and Tackle:
Record - Post - Distribute - Find - Play - Learn

Podcast optimization can be broken down into 4 steps:
- Optimize audio file
- Optimize webpage
- Create/distribute RSS feed
- Promotion

Step 1: Optimize your sound - ID3 tags
- Get real friendly with these tags because they offer you a lot of opportunities.
- You can even put lyrics in there!
Essentials: Name of the podcast, title, comments section (URL, transcript or abstract and who to contact). You can use an application like Audacity.
When you optimize the filename, make sure you use a short and unique name which is recognizable. This is important for users and directories.

Step 2: Optimize your webpage. Have a show page and then individual episode pages.
Optimize your landing page - use a separate page for audio content. Provide information on the show's schedule to attract subscribers and how to subscribe. This is how you can engage users on the series.
Provide a player for them - let them listen online. A lot of people listen to the material online. Include with the player the length and the size of each audio file - some people are reluctant to commit. Our time online is valuable.
Include an abstract or transcription (I like transcriptions, kthx!)
Multiple feeds and multiple formats
SEO the page

5 tactics and 5 tips beyond search engines
1. Use the content and its power to draw your listeners in: Interviews, topical subjects
2. Use PR and word of mouth techniques for awareness. Embed links to the audio in online Press Releases
3. Use marketing communications to drive listeners. Make URL recognizable
4. Feature links on our website to boost awareness of your podcast.
5. Provide widgets for letting users embed your audio in their site or Facebook page.

5 quick tips for SEO success with your audio
1. Develop a long range strategy for how audio fits with marketing and search efforts
2. Optimize audio files
3. Buold SEO landing pages
4. Build accurate effective RSS files
5. Submit and promote broadly to grow your audience those multiple marketing channels

Daron Babin is next. He hosted an awesome search bash last night. If you were at SESNY, why weren't you there?!

He shows examples of what Amanda has done practically well on his website, Webmaster Radio. He does live and on-demand content - you can go into production on a myriad of topics and look at it with a little of forethought and figure out where it fits and how you can best optimize it for delivery.

There are a lot of categories on Webmaster Radio because there's a lot of content. How do you promote the content and programs? Amanda talked about how to brand your podcast; do you come out with a name or brand the show host? Honestly, Daron says that there's something to be said about branding a person's name in there. If you're potentially planning to distribute numerous podcasts, there is value in basically making sure you have "sticktuitiveness." (He made up that word.) There's a lot to be said for what's in a name. If you're a long time listener, you see that there's a lot of SEO on the website. However, Daron needed to think out of the box on deployment and branding.

If you're creating a singular podcast for your company, there are a number of things to do:
- WordPress has plugins - PodPress
- If you ever plan on selling advertising, you're going to get a lot of hurdles - "how many listeners do you have?" You need to be able to answer that questions because you need checks and balances between you and your web host. If you're not up front with your webhost about what you're doing and you become popular, there will be a lot of donwloads. Your bandwidth bill will be REALLY high and unexpected.

- How can we employ not traditional SEO tactics but some really cool SEO tactics which will help not only our brand but those doing podcasts so that there's ROI? He sat down with the engineers and said he wanted to make the site 100% dynamic (the site was designed in ColdFusion, btw.)

- Give thought to a variety of things - make sure you have album art in there. You also want to simplify your approach to distributing the content.

- Pinging is a huge thing - be able to ping if you're producing and distributing yourself. Hit all of the top podcast diretories including iTunes that you're submitting to on a regular basis, and if your feeds have already been included, you only need to ping them once. Anytime you ping them, they will grab the update of your feed and post your new content. ONLY ping when you update your new content. Don't ping too often--it can be detrimental.

- When you update content on WebmasterRadio and publish it, the system is set up to ping, publish, update robots.txt and the sitemap, and updates the infrastructure immediately.

- You can also optimize that RSS feed. It's extremely important (he says that very slowly and says that I should underline that). What can you do to optimize it? If you've never done your job, you can take care of visibility with FeedBurner so that you can get analytics and optimize it itself. If you're not adept with editing XML, let someone else do it for you. Include your RSS over iTunes and eyeball it. You can really tweak your feeds very well and give you a lot more awareness.

What are the upsides? The more you do it, the more visibility you get. Someone in the audience says he podcasts and has 30 listeners. Daron says that for 300 or 3000, you need to be religious about it.

Daron talks about the Shoemoney show. His first show with WMR was called Net Income. Webmaster Radio ranks in the top 10-15 for that search phrase.
He abandoned 250k RSS subscribers to change his podcast name! Without a strategy and forethought about how to deploy your content and how you build brand loyalty, if you begin to think differently and want to abandon that, go back and look at your feed - look at your stats. Tell yourself that it's a bad idea!!!!
You cannot port RSS subscribers from one feed to another. It doesn't work like that. It just doesn't.

Look at the keywords that you wish to rank for. Every category on WMR is a keyword. Deep content pages are all high PR pages.

TRANSCRIPTION is very important. Is an abstract enough? That is never enough. He has 3.5 years of content. NBC produces 18 original hours of content a week. WMR produces 20 and every ounce of it gets transcribed. When those transcriptions are done, he outsources. Why? Transcriptions are not cheap! They're very valuable. Every time you go in there to publish, not only is there an abstract but on the page, he'll drop in all of the transcript. You won't see the transcripts unless you subscribe to the site (monetization technique). As transcripts are dropped, on the page optimization is taken care of. How can this be beneficial from an SEO standpoint? Keep using those keyword rich terms in the podcast - you're SEOing your content as you talk into your mic. Not only do you deploy that transcript on the page, but it gets shoved into the ID3 tag. You can get a lot of content there.

He also explains that WMR's publish button also embeds player codes dynamically. You can C&P those codes directly and that helps him rank for those keywords because they are 100% relevant.

comScore released February 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings which showed that month-to-month, search volume was down about 6-percent from January 2008 to February 2008. Here are the stats on that by engine:

At the same time, Google gained slightly more market share in the US, when compared to the previous month. In February 2008, Google saw a 59.2 percent share up from 58.5 percent in January 2008. Note, Danny hates comparing stats month to month - and I am sure he will have his huge stats slides up soon to give us a better perspective of patterns we are seeing, if any - in the industry. Here are the stats by engine:

Tons of coverage on this can be found at Techmeme. The forum threads discussing the comScore stats are at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums. Here are some quotes from the threads:

There's 2 less days in Feb than Jan. Gosh, I wonder why total monthly searches were down. Journalists love a sensationalist story about Google, and Comscore definitely loves the free PR they get when these stories run.

This is not only for google, i think all are getting affected from economy crisis now a days...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google has plans in the near future to limit the number of sites you can exclude as an advertisers in the Site and Category Exclusion area of AdWords.

Here is a screen shot to shock your memory on what I am talking about:

Reportedly, if you currently are already excluding your AdWords ad from showing on over 5,000 sites within the Google content network, you are safe and Google won't drop them from your list. So maybe it is now time to really start adding sites to your Site Exclusion. Here is how:

(1) Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.

(2) Go to a campaign and click on the link as highlighted below:

(3) Make sure the Campaign Management tab is selected.

(3) In the shaded area beneath the tab, click Tools.

(4) Select Site and Category Exclusion.

(5) Choose the campaign whose exclusions you'd like to edit from the Campaign drop-down menu.

(6) Use the tabs to make exclusions. See detailed instructions for using each tab below.

(7) When you're done, click Save all exclusions.

(8) Repeat steps 5-7 for any other campaigns.

More details on using the Site Exclusion feature can be found at AdWords Help.

So be prepared, rumors of a 5,000 site cap is coming to Google AdWords site exclusion feature.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Recently, one of the most requested Google Webmaster Tools features I have been hearing through the forums either directly or indirectly is the ability to mark links as links you do not vouch for.

Even though we have said time and time again that links can't hurt you, no one believes it. Not only do people feel they can hurt you, they feel they can kick you while you are down already, which makes it even worse. Once Google penalizes your site for having bad links pointing to it, Google expects you to contact the people linking to you and make them remove the links. Good luck with that!

That is why Webmasters want a feature to opt out links from counting in Webmaster Tools. Yahoo Site Explorer has it, so maybe Google should follow the lead. Here is how Yahoo Site Explorer works.

(1) Login to Yahoo Site Explorer

(2) Click on your inlinks link

(3) Mouse over a link and notice the "report spam" button:

(4) Click the report spam button and you are taken to this page to confirm the request:

After that, then supposedly, Yahoo won't count that link against you.

If SEOs and webmasters are expected to be responsible for the links pointing to them, even if they can't control all of them, then Google must give them a way to fully control which links are counting for good or bad.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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: March 19, 2008"

As the web moves into its second generation, sites are making more use of CSS, AJAX and other advanced and interactive design techniques. But how are the largely Web 1.0 search engines reacting to these, from an SEO perspective. This session explores issues and solutions.
Moderator:
• Jon Myers, Head of Search, MediaVest
Speakers:
• Jonathan Ashton, VP of SEO & Web Analytics, Agency.com
• Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Google
• Chris Humber, Director of SEO, 360i

Jonathan Ashton

I would like to talk about the issues of standards in web development, and ultimately presenting the right experience to all web users.

You guys remember when Flash came and brought the whole idea of life into the static environments of the web. Ren and Stimpy was one of the first automated cartoons built in Flash. When Flash emerged, it was something that gave us an added layer to bill our clients extra for! But today, we have so many amazing tools that now our clients are paying us for our ability to measure proper use of these elements.

Usability standards for optimizing in web 2.0:

AOL still has 9 million + users on dial up! You have to realize that if you are going to be a good internet citizen, you cannot leave these people behind! Now, 35% of people use Firefox to explore the web without JavaScript! If your intention is to reach every human, you will also reach every search engine bot!

If a person who is blind visits a web page, they can’t tell a picture of a horse unless it has an alt tag. So by taking yourself out of the perspective of someone who is marketing, and into the shoes of someone trying to create a good community, you will benefit.

I have met SEO’s who have not taken time to read the Google guidelines and recommendations. If you are spending any time messing with your site on trying to get more traffic, please take the time to read this stuff! Google is showing you as much of their hand as they are willing to show!

Google tells you that certain technologies are not crawlable! It also suggests you download an old school browser and look at your site in it! We need to help our clients achieve that level of interactivity.

What does index actually mean? Just because it’s indexable does not mean it’s going to win for anything meaningful. I know search engines are focusing on more content in these dynamic environments, but indexability does not mean winability! So leave semantics behind. You need the layer underneath for the non-Flash enabled user, or spider.

Information architecture is core to usability. It is also required for a usable site. Optimizers should get involved early and often. If the content needs to be indexed, don’t hide it. As optimizers we need to bring this level of rationality to the IA process.

Is dynamic content really required? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it a valid reason to do it. If there is a valid reason, go for it. But if you can accomplish everything without using the newest technology, then great, don’t use it.

So what’s the A in Ajax? It stands for asynchronous! It may look cool but it’s ultimately a challenge to index.

Validate your HTML and CSS. Careful development means good optimization, a browser is designed to interpret what it sees and is forgiving of mistakes, but what a search engine sees is a much more literal engagement.

So, how do you finish first? Develop for the highest common denominator and the lowest. Make sure your tools are still 2.0 plus, in a 1.0 environment.

Ben D’Angelo

A lot of content is already easily accessed by search engines. Blogs, wikis etc. use HTML markup. It becomes more challenging introducing other ways of interaction. The 2 main technologies I will talk about are Ajax and Flash.

What is 2.0 about? It’s about richer and more complex systems relating to the management and interdependence of content, presentation and navigation.

Ajax maybe content and navigation. Flash – all 3 of these are tightly coupled.

Most people have Flash enabled. Why should I worry about the tiny of fraction of those who don’t have Flash enabled? You can say a similar argument about images back in the day! Of course now we know, images are great but at the same time, have alt texts, etc it’s much more accessible. So it’s similar argument to Flash.

When you think about accessibility for all users, it will become much more available for search engines. If it’s viewable for the blind reader, great. Some tech savvy people have plug-ins to disable Flash. Cell phones and low-bandwidth devices also don’t support Flash and is a market you likely want to target. Bookmarking is something you might not think about, but it’s important. It’s good for your site to attract links but can they link to your site if you have Flash – can I link to this cool game I played if the entire site is in Ajax? If a user can bookmark it, it will be accessible to search engines.

A simple thing – make static links and they will automatically be recognizable by search engines.

CSS – it allows you to isolate the content from the presentation. You can try turning off CSS to see if your site still looks reasonable. Avoid abusing techniques like hiding text in CSS.

Start with traditional HTML, add a little embellishments like rich media elements. You Tube is a good example.

From an Ajax perspective: URL parameters vs. fragments. Googlebot can ignore fragments in a URL. If you want to use some Ajax, use together with HTML.

Flash – Google does try to read some of it in URLs but not all, so use regular HTML for primary content and navigation and then compliment it with Flash elements.

A little more advanced technique – SIFR – takes content in HTML elements and will replace t with a little Flash – primary use is for different fonts. If a user does have things installed and enabled they will see it, if not, they will see regular HTML.

Useful links: Google webmaster central blog, webmaster help center, webmaster discussion group.

Chris Humber

Flash is a restrictive technology. Why, because the content is invisible to the spider and spiders can’t navigate it. I personally am waiting for the day where I can see a great article when Google can incorporate Flash! Unfortunately, the engines operate in a 1.0 space.

TheBar.com – great website where the bartender will respond to your questions. They have a great margarita recipe. This site is built entirely in Flash. This is great info that would be extremely useful in the search engines, unfortunately when you search for a margarita recipe, it cannot be found. The user perspective gets a rich interface, but the spiders get nothing.

Some best practices to incorporate if you must use Flash:

Adobe Search Engine SDK – extracts texts and links from a SWF file. It’s a direct sort of output of a Flash file, never use alone, can’t be indexed.

SWF address is a code library that allows you to create URLS in a Flash environment.

An SWF object is a great way to embed Flash into your HTML code, it’s compatible. Plenty of sites use it. Allows for content integration. A DIV layer allows you to provide static text in a Flash environment.

You have to privde the navigation if you use a SWF address or SWF object. The spiders need enough navigation to find the content. Also think about inbound linking. Otherwise you wont rank very well.

sIFR – short text vlocks, page editors, carousels – ensures content is accessible. Uses combo if CSS, java, Flash. ABC News uses it for their website. Very useful if you have a dynamic lead on the website.

If you apply the above best practices, you should see an improvement in search visibility and increase traffic via natural search in a Flash-based environment.

This session is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promedia Corp.

As Search Engine Marketing (SEM) grows in popularity, many companies are attempting to handle the SEM function in-house despite the inherent complexity and challenges. Join us for a spirited discussion and get a chance to meet some of these intrepid do-it yourselfers behind the in-house movement as we debate the pros and cons of developing and training a dedicated in-house team. Laying the foundation for in-house SEO success, long-term cost savings, gaining project support at the executive level, leveraging innate knowledge and creating accountability are just some of the topics to be discussed.

Moderator:

• Ron Belanger, Vice President of Agency Development, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Speakers:

• Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Strategies International
• Olivier Lemaignen, Group Manager, Global Search Marketing, Intuit
• Marshall D. Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, New York Times / About.com
• Bill Macaitis, VP of Online Marketing & SEO/SEM, Fox Interactive Media
• Brendan Hart, Vice President - Marketing & Business Intelligence, National Geographic Digital Media

We are going to be spending the next hour talking about the rising tide of folks bringing, or thinking about bringing search in-house, and the fundamental issues involved. We have a great panel joining us, everyone is bringing a unique twist to this. It’s really good stuff.

The first panelist is Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International.

So Global Strategies doesn’t sound like an agency but we are. We help companies migrate search internally, we do it for a lot of big brands.

The SEMPO/Did-It in-house search marketer study is great, interesting data. According to the data,

26.4% have a manager title, while 10% have a director title.
51.7% have a team size of 1-10 and 46.5% have a team size of 0.
33.1% have 0-3 years experience.

How should you approach outsource vs. in-source vs. hybrid?

Many use the hybrid, the agencies for some things.

The hard questions you should ask:

- What are the objectives, what are we trying to achieve?
- Can we achieve them given the resources we have?
- What is the level of management support?
- Can we measure a program to show the benefit?
- What is our bench strength?
- Can our program scale? (for those with multiple brands, multiple countries)
- What is the total cost for each approach?
- Am I willing to endure the pain and suffering necessary to succeed? Is the organization willing to put forth the activities necessary?

How supportive is my management: they want it done but are not willing to pay. How to bring this forward, what needs to change? This is hard for companies to acknowledge, what needs to change in order for the company to be successful.

You need to have written stats and a business plan in order to get management support. Search engines have things like this to help convince companies.

Can we measure performance: I flag this as “outsource” because analytics software is used for this. In many cases, 8 out of 10 applications are not configured correctly. If you can do it yourself great, but track it.

How scalable can we be? This is a “hybrid” - it makes sense for most companies to integrate SEO in house, optimizing press releases, etc. It’s amazing the economies of scale if you think about it. It cannot be matched. That’s why some companies with one or two people blow away the big companies.

What is bench strength? This is flagged as “hybrid” - say you do everything in the company in marketing and you are frazzled, if you were out sick everything will come to a halt. Use that as a way to get more people. Show you can’t always do everything and what you could do if you had more labor available.

Next up is Olivier Lemaignen from Intuit.

A year and a half ago at Intuit we did not have an in-house SEO team. Just a couple of guys who ran search part time. SEO was a mythical thing they weren’t sure if it was going to work. So I will take you through the journey we have gone through. We are definitely hybrid, in house, but for paid-search we use agencies for bid management.

First thing to do when take in house is hire a team. And you need to get budget approval with executive support. You need to then define the scope of the team, what skills you need on that team, to help you hire the right team. If you hire someone with the wrong skills you will waste a lot getting them up to speed.

Then you engage with internal clients. In order to do that you need to define and measure the success metrics to improve the profitability of the program. With a central team, you need to then develop clear service levels – what are you going to do and for who. You need tools and processes that are scalable. If they are not scalable they will not work because you won’t get good results. You realize from this that not all businesses are created equal. Define service level agreements.

What’s absolutely critical if you want your program to endure is to evangelize and educate.

The Keys to Success:

-Budget autonomy
-Executive support
-Team structure and coverage – having the right team organized the right way is key
-Tools and metrics
-Evangelization and education
-Results

Building the in-house team:

• Understand your business dimensions – business type, site, product.
• If you think about success metrics, a service vs. web apps are going to be very different.
• Combine the SEO expertise.
• PPC Specialization. Holistic thinking is key. Note that PPC is a piece of the puzzle.

Be able to do all the stuff in house that an agency can do, and have the tools and support to scale what you are trying to manage.

Scope: 6 main objectives:

1. Develop consistent and repeatable processes.
2. Implementing scalable tools and reporting.
3. Enduring coverage for the right businesses.
4. Coordinating with agencies, web engineers, teams, analytics teams, copywriters (if your efforts are not coordinated with the folks who touch the site every day – it won’t work).
5. Defining and deploying best practices and standards. If you won’t share with the organization, who will?
6. Evangelizing and educating SEM across business units, web teams, and engineers.

Get the team to wrap their minds about how they are going to accomplish, not just what they are going to accomplish.

Next up is Marshall Simmonds from the New York Times.

I think the processes are pretty straight forward. The NY Times oversees a lot of different properties, like Boston Globe, About.com, etc. So it gives us a unique experience because a lot of what we do is in-house. But the best-practices are going to stay the same. But how you do it?

• Organize
• Analyze
• Educate
• Execute
• Track your results

This is always the same, but the differences are where they are in the lifecycle. So how those 5 elements react to where the vertical is, is definitely influenced by how we address certain people. We have a lot of turnover, and millions of documents that we deal with. Communication is imperative across the verticals.

Organize the teams. Not only should the SEO person have a strong understanding, but also good communication. Find one point person in the department. Have an engaged team of marketing, technology, research, editorial, sales.

Analyze, break down into buckets. Where can we monetize something immediately? Depends were you are in the cycle. Educate based on where you are in the lifecycle. Where can the smallest change have the biggest result?

Education: no matter who it is, it has to be done. We currently train thousands on SEO. It needs to be ingrained in the root level. Educating from the bottom is imperative, but you need to approach each department differently, like IT and editorial.

The execution portion is fairly clear. You need to communicate because if you are not following up on a monthly basis on what’s working and what’s not, you are not measuring your successes carefully. Metrics allows you to communicate the success. Give feedback to the workers and to upper management.

Mistakes we’ve had for you to learn from:

-Don’t wall off content. Don’t have hundreds of versions of a registration page.
-Don’t under communicate success. You need to let people know. It can be a great motivation device.
-Not checking in. IT will screw something up. Constantly check in. Weigh it at every level.
-Meta keywords tags. Don’t forget.
-Talk to those who are implementing the changes. Make a lot of checklists.
-Managing expectations. It is a long-term process. Not for the quick blast of traffic, that’s what buying ads and clicks are for.
-Lack of editorial oversight. Make sure headlines and title tags are looked at or the content won’t go live. Things should be automated where they can be.

Next is Bill Macaitis who does SEO for My Space and Rotten Tomatoes (Fox Interactive Media - FIM).

I head up the online department. We work with about 20+ FIM sites out there. We look at social media, email, but we focus on search. We do utilize some 3rd party technology, some web analytics and bid management – but all our SEO and SEM people and researchers are in-house. We are at a staff of 22.

We are ROI driven. You gotta position your department as a revenue department. If every piece of messaging you put out there is generated by revenue, it’s very helpful. You will get more successful this way.

Some questions to think about:

How do we expand? Do we organize pal by content vertical, or specialization?

Here’s how we did it. We split it up into the paid side (SEM), SEO, and within each one we split it by vertical, we have a research and reporting team who handle all keyword research and new studies, and then we have a small tool-building team.

My section: training your in-house team. It will take time and money, it’s an investment. We use about 10-15% of our compensation towards conferences, travel, etc. I let my team go to 3 conferences a year and they can choose. You want to empower them. We give our people a few weeks of training, let them shadow others. You need time for them to develop. Our field changes a lot so the education is ongoing. Spend an hour or two a day to educate yourselves. Give them the tools to do their jobs, and if you invest time in your group they will develop loyalty.

Here are some ways to train your staff:

- Sessions
- Industry sites
- Podcasts
- Conferences
- Course, certifications. SEMPO has a great course, Bruce Clay has one, the search engines have them.
- Magazines
- 3rd party research, Marketing Sherpa, Hitwise.

Last is Brendan Hart of National Geographic.

For national geographic, it’s a changing landscape on a daily basis. I deal with marketing intelligence, from blogs, to widgets, to media. My team is responsible for building the online promotion for our new movies.

Our industry has evolved pretty significantly over the past years. Each page now is important, not just the home page, and every day is a challenge. Thinking about an evolving landscape, what is it that we need to do?

Search Strategy:

- Build content with consumer demand to create category ownership
- Follow best practice
- Optimize strategy based on changing trends
- Rich media feeds
- Include a search marketing component to all content
- Engage SE consultants to review whorl flow am best practice analysis

It is important for us to find our inner search voice. Look at the current situation. Who is going to do what? Who is going to own this? What skill sets do we have? Let’s define our goals.

Then you have a decision process. You must make it work cross-functionally because everyone has a different skill set and will bring something different to the table. When we think about the team, what are the core actions to building the team? How do we build consensus among people who will actually have to implement actions?

De-mystify the process. It puts a human face on it that makes it interesting to work on. Then we think about, well how do we train people to keep them interested? So we came up with a search program.

We defined a mission which inspires people. By creating a program we developed innovation. In terms of creating a team, I think scalability is key to any in-house program. You also need to think about success, are we aligned to where the industry is going. Assign tactical responsibility based on function. Prioritize implementations based on business objectives. Continually revise. Optimize the process to drive great results.

To get there, we bring in an expert point of view. So we can maintain these programs in house, but we are constantly seeking ways to innovate.

We are focusing on growth. We set our benchmarks of analysis, then operationalize which allows everyone to contribute, and success is a great KPI, so don’t shy away from that.

This session is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promedia Corp.

Moderated by Kevin Heisler the Executive Editor of Search Engine Watch.

First speaker will be Simon Heseltine from Serengeti. He is wearing a quite awful tie with zebras on it. (Just kidding Simon). What is social search? It is search with human involvement. It can be delivered using an Algo + humans or just humans. The whole concept is wisdom of the crowds/masses. Others have called this folksonomy.

Common search topic for use to examine these will be the local “Eliot Sptitzer.” He shows the varied results at Anoo, Sproose, ChaCha, Malhalo and briefly describes each of these. Also shows: irazoo, which is run by iwon.com. Everyday they give away gift certificate to a lucky searcher. He shows LinkedIn Q&A search. yoname is a name-based search engine. Then he shows social media site searches: mixx, Digg, StumbleUpon. He says that StumbleUpon is a favorite of his as well asd the other panelists. he likes it because they also show who talked about a person, so you can then follow that trail. he then shows Facebook and that “Eliot Spitzer has no friends.”

Social search aggregators: twing, zudos, friendfeed. Social web browser: Flock, which is mozilla based and similar to Firefox.

What are some of the issues in social search? many sites are slow due to lack of expensive hardware. Sourcing of data challenges. Low volume of active users – if humans are not using them then all you have is a crappy search engine. They need the humans to succeed. Being found amongst the chatter is an issue as well. A group with an agenda to hijack a results page can still do so fairly easily due to lack of a lot of users. This leads to potential reputation management issues.

Getting into reputation management: there are a lot of possible problem sources: disgruntled ex-employees; etc. The first thing to do is look at what is being said, how it is said, and where it is said. If someone is saying something bad about you on a blog that is only read by the guy’s mother and two dogs, probably not an issue. However if she writes for another blog, there may be problems. Damage mitigation should be SERP based. Legal threats: “even if it works it never works.” This may cause more issues that it resolves.

How do you respond to issues in this world of social search? You have to get involved in the community, and not be overly defensive. If what is said is true, then maybe you should go there and say “OK you are right, and this is what we are going to do to fix it.” This may lead to positive response, and in fact it often does. If you put out great content, that will hopefully drown out the other stuff. Remember that social media sites constantly appear and disappear: each requires a unique profile and individual management.

Steve Marder of Eurekster will speak next. He will speak about Distributed Social Search. He calls his company a “Social Search Pioneer.” he shows a slide titled “trends in social media/social search - then.” It shows Web 1.0 feeding to media 1.0. In the “now,” the bubbles are blended and media 2.0 and search 2.0 are connected. He describes social media as being about many-to-many, collaboration, “wisdom of the crowds.”

Why should you care? Because your brand is being mentioned. What can you leverage? Power of community and collaboration. Leverage your expertise and passion but also leverage the passion that people in your community have. He describes that this is what Eureskter does, which combines a Wikipedia platform with a social community. They built a widget called the “Social Search Widget.” He then talks about the video “buzz clouds” that they created for people to share video. He walks through an actual example of a Swicki, which he left an “subliminal” message under the example with a strong call to action to build your own and get started. He essentially spends 3 minutes walking through his specific product’s details. Make that 8 now…

Finally, some challenges and opportunities ahead: the need for a trusted relationship with you search platform, or an expert source/guide. How to effectively apply the social graph to search? How to create/surface additional high quality content (user generated)? His conclusions: social search from an SEO perspective is that it is all about content. It is hard to game the system. Next generation search is comprised of quality of content plus human interaction/rating.

Next speaker is Marty Weintraub of AimClear. He will be doing a very unique presentation. 48 slides in 15 minutes. I will try to get as much as possible. Potential customers are congregating…wherever they go we are here to sell them things. Now that social media has shown up, we can measure chatter. He says that social pay per click is the 800 pound gorilla that will take over. Google wants money, mainstream social media sites need money too…PPC helps both.

“Buzz pocket mining” is the new keyword research tool. Congregation point for millions. Tools are available in most to measure the chatter patterns. he will look at Facebook (FB) to see how it is measured there. He feels that FB is the millennial harbinger of what PPC will be in the future. He walks though the way you can find out info about advertising at FB through the small link in the bottom navigation. You can ask the system to choose the audience, then you create the ad, and lastly set your budget.

Don’t “piss off Facebook.” They are jagged…the traffic goes in waves. There are interesting patterns, and it can drive a tremendous amount of traffic in paid search. His studies show: Leads convert to sales +11%, 80% reduction in cost of leads. 14-18% on-page conversion boost from AdWords. Landing page segmentation increased conversion rates by +8%.

Conclusion: The “Tao of keyword research/buzz pocket mining.” Use free tools to measure buzz. Stay abreast of Facebook, open social, and other emerging social PPC platforms. Recognize the inevitable future is here. Look around, everything is personalized.

Last up is Eric Qualman, and he only has two slides. (laughs). he wants to go over the some of the top things heard recently about social networks. First thing: “social communities are just for kids, and it’s just a fad”. typically agencies will just ignore it, or will say they are developing a strategy for it. He would not recommend creating a community for all your clients to congregate in, for competitors to find them all together.

He then shows the results for a search for “John Deere” at Facebook and it has many non-official John Deere groups, all using the logo. One of the funnier ones is a misspelled group called “Country Girl’s Who Aint Afriad to Dip n Drive a *John Deere*” This group has 595 members! (Eric gave no details as to how many different family trees are represented).

Eric talks about how CBS is actually driving sports fans to Facebook.com/brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament. It takes guts to do this.

Why is everyone ramped up about social networks? Takes an example of needing a new car since you now have two kids. You have to go to a bunch of sites to find out about options, etc. In the future, you can type in a search at Facebook and search “SUV” and FB will then provide information about the people in your list of friends that somehow are related to an SUV, such as if they purchased within last year, etc. This will save lots of research time.

You have to pay attention to what is out there and react. The fourth thing that should be really hot in the short term are the Facebook applications. Right now the craze is games, but he feels that the functional applications will continue to grow in value. They looked at the status updates section, and they will be creating a way (called Beacon I believe) for the system to automatically update where you are…”Suzie is at the Louvre…Suzie at the Eifel Tower…etc.”

He advises if you create a Facebook page, don’t use “John Deere” as the first word in your title but instead a more commonly searched keyword like “lawnmower.” What are the applications that people really want right now? The top things are ways to be able to brag, or ways to seem smarter than other people by winnign trivia or other knowledge-based games.

This is live blogging coverage of SES New York 2208, so some typos or grammatical errors exist. Panelists or other attendees are encouraged to comment below to share any inaccuracies, and to help fill out the rest of the story.

Jeff Rohrs of ExactTarget is moderating, and he introduces the first speaker Kris Jones from Pepperjam. Dealing with affiliates from an affiliate network perspective. Your Affiliate (aff) Network should stand as a resource to help you with understanding who your affiliates are (transparency) and how to identify and address channel conflict.

Four primary potential channel conflicts: direct linking, Trademark (TM) bidding; bidding on same keywords as you; promoting conflicting marketing messages. Direct linking occurs when an aff uses an aff tracking URL as the destination URL for PPC purposes instead of sending traffic through their own unique URL and landing page. Unfortunately for you, Google does not provide protection from this, so you must learn the rules to minimize. There is at least an easy way to determine if direct linking is occurring. How do you know how to see this? 3 step process. find advertisement, right click it, and observe properties.

Direct linking: learn the rules. Google only delivers one advertisement per unique destination URL per search result. This means that if your aff is direct linking, they may be the only one shown. Second conflict is TM Bidding. For many of you this is a serious concern, and you therefore include it in contracts as being not allowed. For those not preventing this, you may want to do so.

Third conflict is competing for the same keyword. Many advertisers complain that SEM affs run up the pricing for the same keywords the advertiser is trying to bid on. This is only true if the advertiser doesn’t have specific rules in place. Before you put a no PPC policy in place, realize that the search engine result pages represent available real estate for you and your competitors.

Final conflict is if your message is inconsistent with the one that affs present. Conflicting messages can occur with inaccurate products info, non-authorized banners/text links being used, etc,. He finishes off with a quick summary and repeats the 4 major factors.

Minimizing channel conflict methods: send a request to Google to disallow use of TM’d terms in ad copy. Amend your affiliate contract with a “no direct linking” or “no TM bidding” policy. Be very specific about what search affs can and cannot do.

He believes that one of the keys to decreasing overall conflicts is to increase transparency. Less is more, quality is better than quantity. Having insight into the exact sites you will be working with is much better. He finishes with some hints on how to make the aff channel work, which I unfortunately missed but maybe he will come in and post in the comments.

Next speaker is Jeff Molander from the Partner Maker. He apologizes that he will speak very quickly but he has a lot of info to cover. His argument is that “Yes, you should integrate affiliate and Internal SEM” and “No, TM usage rules are not the answer.” Everyone can win: think strategic and not tactical. There is too much focus on the TM issue he feels. Why are we even still debating it? There has been a failure to talk honestly about some of the strategic issues involved. The answer is a strategic realignment, and there is no gain without a little pain.

What marketers want: increasing incremental sales, decreasing double counting and wasteful spending. Less competition for customers in spaces they understand. The path to success is first audits, then new rules, then a strategic realignment.

What is an incremental sale? Simple answer is one that the advertiser would have had “no shot at” w/o help of third party media. Happy to pay for $$. More specific answer is that it relies on aff spending with mostly native traffic.

What is forcing the issue? The big guys that use TV, catalog, advertising, etc. Hence the Trademark issue has been pursued. The cause is not TM infringement. The cause is that marketers are measuring referrals beyond referrals.

55% marketers making 25%+ of sales from PPC and SEO. 29% make 50%+ of sales w/SEM. Forcing new questions…what do I want from affs? What have I been getting lately? Is this acquisition, retention, or both? he had spoken just before I tried to catch the stats above about how there is a difference between new customer acquisition (new to file) and a past customer coming back to the site through an aff link.

He talks about the strategic realignment need and defined it. Marketers need to firmly grasp what “good affiliate” means: using strategic goals and targets to find out what is new-to-file customer ratio; what order volumes; cost per order or lead. Assess this information and optimize your campaigns.

Tactics for marketers – need to make trench level change and perform routine transaction/action level reconciliation as needed. Get dirty, but get smart! Use a business analyst for this. State goals clearly up front in writing. state them clearly, repeatedly, and make them easily accessible. Show respect to affs and publishers.

What is needed? Strategic realignment. Affs/publishers should convert from a “traffic-shuttler” to a “traffic-seller.” You need as an aff to realize that you need to build a relationship. You have to go to conferences. Know what you are selling and sell it well. You are in business now, so marketers expect you to act like one. He also states that arbitrage is all but dead.

He had to rush through his last few slides because he ran out of time. He advocates getting flexible with payments, for example on a repeat sale from an existing customer versus a new sale.

The last speaker will be Jeff Ferguson from Napster. He gives and overview of Napster, and then introduces that he will be presenting some information of affiliate marketing from the client side. What better way to show how to make nice with your affiliates than using “politics and war.” He will be using analogies along these to help illustrate. In the beginning it was regimented management of affiliates in the “Dictatorship Era.” Very little growth came out of aff during this era.

Next was the “Highland Charge” which was when a bunch of unruly Scots would line up and look crazy to try to psyche out the competition. Napster got tired of competitors and other music entities buying up “Napster” and other branded keywords. They allowed the aff to start doing that and it was an interesting era in terms of results.

Next was the “Laisser-faire” era when aff and search “came home.” It was Napster’s brave move of shutting everything down and rebuilding it piece by piece. They stopped using search agencies and bought aff in-house as well. They hired people that would work well together and help to improve their system. They essentially allowed affiliates to do what they wanted. The results where that the aff program tripled in size. the SEM program eroded AP results, slightly, but the sum of the two programs was greater than its parts.

Last era is “fiscal conservatism,” or “last man in,” which came along with some new bosses at Napster. They were getting tired of paying for branded visits as they let the brand was strong enough to stand on its own. So they kicked out a bunch of affs and let people who would play by the new rules stay. They wanted to make sure that if people came in through those terms that they were identified. They don’t have results yet.

In the end, a balanced plan exists. They liked a lot about each of the eras, and have found the right mix to run their program.

This is live blogging coverage of SES New York 2208, so some typos or grammatical errors exist. Panelists or other attendees are encouraged to comment below to share any inaccuracies, and to help fill out the rest of the story.

This session will provide a rapid fire take on how to tackle the most popular SEM tactics with a small staff and an even smaller budget. Would feature practical, affordable ideas and real world examples on PPC, SEO, Viral, Blogging and Social Media.

This isn't a "how to do this" session so much as a "how to do it cheap and effectively" session.
Moderator:

* Carrie Hill, Search Engine Watch Expert and Certified Search Engine Marketing and Promotion Account Manager, Blizzard Internet Marketing

Speakers:

* Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
* Stoney deGeyter, President, Pole Position Marketing
* Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex

Strategies that Don't Suck - presented by Stoney.

* keyword organization: once you have your keyword list, you want to know where to apply them to your site. Drive searchers to pages that best represents the intnet of the query. There are 3 types of searchers - researchers (info gathering), shoppers (comparisons), buyers (looking for best options). For researchers - they may or may not be a buyer. They are in the early stages of the process and are in the learning process. They don't know what they want necessarily. Shoppers are looking just for different sites to perform comparisons and are closer to a buying decision. They have a general idea of what they want. Buyers (best option) - they know what they want, they are ready to buy, and they know where to buy. You need to target your keywords to different types of the phases. Check your different keyword phrases - better conversions for longer terms but not as much traffic. Look at your budget and look at where to spend your money.

* website architecture: Title tags are really important but not many people seem to get it. Create unique titles throughout the site. Set up default titles for products. Site content: build unique content for each page. Don't rely on default product descriptions - unique content stands out. Also, have interlinking pages - link to related content whenever possible. Related products is a great way to do it (or related info) .

* getting attention: create a unique valuable resources. Know your unique value proposition. What can you do differently from others? Build information with blogs and articles. It's not what you do, it's how you go about doing it. Develop contributor products - engage known experts (e.g. Link Building Secrets Revealed - 11 experts provided a secret from their link building arsenal). Write authoritative articles, papers, and ebooks, and submit to magazines, blogs, and industry directories.

* PPC strategies: use the Google AdWords editor - export keyword lists, add comments to changes, and more. You want to look at measurements as well - cost/conversion is most important. Know your profit margin! Add your negative keyword list in there - perform keyword reseqarch to see what people type in. Avoid job seekers, researchers, education, bargain hunters, price shoppers, freebies, legal

* CodeMonitor Spy Tool: Stoney uses it for his clients. You can monitor your own pages and see when people make changes. You can see SEO efforts of competitors. You can get information on sites that don't have RSS feeds. You can also see Wiki site changes.
- Once you monitor a page, it highlights the difference - compare text, HTML, and browser view

Jennifer Laycock is up and she has no voice. :( She's talking about social media - you are your most effective online marketing tactic.
SMM isn't about how much money you have to spend. It's really about who you are as a company or individual. Look at who you are - that's the key.

Passion + knowledge = credibility
- Bento Yum - blocked search engines but saw community involvement.
- Traffic through Flickr - Take a little time and view community involvement as marketing time.
- It has to be ongoing
- Rule: despise no search traffic (even bad traffic)

Business + Blog = personality
- Try to educate your community. An example is the tinbasher, a blog for a metal company. It turned mundane into fascinating stories. Their gross revenues tripled after they put themselves out there. 30-40% of their sales are attributed to this blog. They had 3 employees, now 5. 50k uniques a month.

Video + Creative = Viral Love
Blendtec blender = Will it Blend? campaign
- First 5 videos cost roughly $100
- Crazy coverage and press - iVillage, Newsweek, Playboy, NYTimes
- Online sales quadrupled
- This shows pricewise that creativity can really covert.

Comments + Blogs = Exposure
Find other blogs and add quality comments to them.
- Comment early to grab readers' attention

Compassion + Freedom = PR Heaven
- I heart Zappos: someone bought shoes for her mother and her mother passed away. When Zappos emailed her about the shoes, she told them that her mother died. They ended up arranging pickup and even sent her a sympathy bouquet. She was touched and blogged about it. (For the record, I am wearing shoes I bought from Zappos.)

Takeaways: it's not about the budget. It's about the attitude.

The last person up is Matt McGee who talks about Guerrilla Marketing for small businesses - the problem with SEO and PPC. You create your campaign and you hope that the person types the right keywords. You hope that the searcher likes your product. You hope that he/she is finding what he/she is looking for.

HOPE is not a marketing strategy. (MATT SAYS THAT SEO AND PPC IS A BAD IDEA! OK, I'm kidding. He specifically addressed me to say that I shouldn't blog that. Too bad.)

Solution is Guerrilla Marketing. There are several places to do that -

What he means: it's not sabotage or illegal or anything spammy. It's unconventional, unexpected. It's marketing without making it look like it's marketing. The rules are - don't spam, avoid the hard sell, participate (connect, don't alienate), and contribute (put the community first).

Flickr - Matt loves this and he has great photos so I can't blame him. The heart of Flickr is the groups - enables discussion, shares photos, etc. Think about this - if you own a music store, you can join groups that are related to music (guitar world is one that he illustrates with thousands of members). Flickr also has place-oriented groups which works if you provide services to specific geographic areas.

Yahoo! Answers is another tool for information sharing and questions and answers. There are also groups that are targeted to specific geographic areas here as well. Yahoo answers says that it's okay to link drop as long as it benefits the user. He has the highest percentage of new visits and the lowest % of bounce rates among the top 5 referring sites (illustrated).

Other options: forums and mailing lists - newspaper forums are really big because their subscriptions are dropping. Yahoo Groups is a great mailing list platform as is Google Groups.

One of his personal favorites is freecycle.org. It operates on the Yahoo Groups platform. The idea is that my junk is your treasure - your junk is my treasure. I don't want something, you can have it. It also helps people get awareness of your services.

Does it work? YES. Cookie company had Flickr photostream and was found by CNN. They got profiled by CNN. freecycle.org - my wife is a real estate agent. We like getting rid of junk in our house - we have 3000 VHS videos. He told his wife, "you send out email to freecycle and add your company information to the signature." One lady came over and did business with his wife for buying a new house. COOL.

Moderator:
Pauline Ores, SES Advisory Board and Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, General Business, IBM Corporation

Andrew C. Frank, Research VP, Gartner Media Industry Advisory Services is first up.

Marketing in the Spotlight:
- Losing:
-- Faith in the power of the mass media communication forms
-- Ability to control the terms of the marketing dialog
- Gaining:
-- Unprecedented quantities of data
-- Visibility into the public psyche
-- Scalable direct consumer dialogs, at marginal media costs
- Net:
-- As it masters the data, marketing will adopt a more strategic corporate role as customer proxy in consumer-facing organizations
-- New voice in product design, investment priorities, partnerships
-- New emphasis on transparency and responsiveness.

Are Brand Advertisers Ready to Take the Plunge?
- Shows a chart showing both answers

How Do We Use Social Media Info to Optimize our Media Mix, to influence our targeting models? A lot of this is to automate the advertising and agency model.

One of the key problems is that new media marketing organization is that they have too much information from very diverse sources.

Lots of people will supply new marketing intelligence platforms.

The landscape for social media metrics players include Nielsen BuzzMetrics (big player), other players include umbria, cymfony, buzzlogic, verisign, and many more...

Simplify and Test with a Phased Integration Approach:
- Portal integration: Leverage intranet portal deployment for rapid service testing and feedback
- Reporting integration: develop data dictionaries and tagging schemes
- Model integration: custom ETL and regression platforms
- Platform integration: process automation, cost and risk reduction

Jonathan Ashton, VP of SEO & Web Analytics, Agency.com is next up.

Social content gives you good linkage. You can see trends and react faster. Tagging already influencing your strategies. Certain types of search have moved off the SEs and into the social networks.

27 Social Network Tools:

(1) RSS
- Yahoo Pipes helps you filter

(2) News
- Yahoo News
- Google News
- PRNewswire Feed
- Reddit
- Newsvine
- Reuters
- Google Alerts

(3) Blogs
- Google Blog Search
- BlogMarks.net
- Technorati
- Blogpulse
- Conversation Tracker
- Blog Trends
- Blogger Profiles
- Co.Mments.com
- TalkDigger.com
- IceRocket

(4) Tags
- Simpy.com
- Keotag.com
- Ma.Gnolia.com
- Del.icio.us

(5) Images
- Flickr
- YouTube

(6) Bigger Tools
- Trackur.com
- Copernic.com
- Site Analytics from Compete
- Search Analytics from Compete

Rob Key, CEO, Converseon is last up.

The community is becoming the center of the web experience. 12 - 24 year old want a community experience. Within these communities, brands have not been invited.

As communities diversify, new cultures and language emerge. Key drivers of culture and language speciation
- isolation
- group membership
- time
- migration
- technological discovery

Words Die out and New Words Emerge

Principles of Effective Social Media Engagement:
- Listen First
- PArticipate and Learn
- Make friends with community elders
- Understand and respect community mores
- Lead with altruism, come bearing gifts
- Discover a community need
- Learn the linguistics
- Value and cultivate the relationships
- Leverage appropriately ... over time

If you don't do that, you may be "busted"... or taken hostage (shows second life hostage take over).

Free Tools:
- Yahoo Buzz
- Technorati
- IceRocket

Conversation Mining Tools also...
He shows some tools but doesnt name them.

Wait, it is a product he sells.. Ah...

Got to run...

Afternoon Keynote: Jason Calacanis

* Jason Calacanis, Founder & CEO, Mahalo.com, Inc.

(I'm sitting next to Allen Stern who already discussed this new development and it's now on Techeme. But you can read the other stuff now!)

First of all, Jason clears the air. He wants all SEOs to know he didn't mean to offend them. Some people think SEO is about gaming their way to the top rankings at search engines. Since then, however, Jason Calacanis has been educated about SEO and realized that there's more to it than that "black magic" stuff (which you know is "black hat SEO.") Does he feel that SEO is BS? No, but black hat SEO is BS, he says. "I do feel that the white hat stuff is very important... In some ways, I am an SEO. I'm a white hat SEO." If it's about building clean sites, that's what he does.

Now, the big announcement:

Mahalo was launched on May 30th of last year. Many people asked, "Isn't this DMOZ?" After all, the directory structure on the site looks like DMOZ or Yahoo Directory. That's intentional. But they said - DMOZ and Yahoo Directory failed for search queries. Why doesn't it exist? Yahoo Directory sold placement and removed human curators. It failed because they sold it out. Why did DMOZ failed? It was neglected. Both, however, were incredible at their respective times.

The next question is "How is this going to scale?" It's a tough question. Well, it works with a distributed workforce. The Mahalo Greenhouse was launched where people can work from home and build search results. http://greenhouse.mahalo.com's Most Wanted page shows the data. There are 400 people doing this at home. It's trailing behind Wikipedia and About.com.

He displays a graph of the projective cumulative pages and you clearly can see that the pages are only increasing in number.

"How are you going to keep this up to date?" Having seen delicious, SU, and Wikipedia use site owners, Jason knew that a lot of people want to keep pages correct. They can inform Mahalo when the pages are incorrect. Additionally, in December, they launched Mahalo Social where you can recommend links and update content. They look at everything coming in and build a trust score (which is working well). If you submit good links, you get trusted more often and don't have human review as frequently.

After Mahalo Social was launched, there was an incredible boost of cumulative recommended links. The monthly message board posts also increased.

"How do you reduce bias?" We'll discuss with anybody any time in public the order of the links we put on a page. If you disagree about a Google and Yahoo ranking, you can't talk to anyone. Mahalo has that feature -- and they have that conversation in public.

With recommended links, you can share it with many people on twelve social networks at this moment. New domains need to be validated by a human and old sites (over a year old) are considered (loose rule, he says). There are about 15k recommended per month. There is a high percentage of links that are accepted lately. Only a small number is banned. This is 9 months in and people are seeing good traffic with 4.1 million uniques in the past 30 days.

Where is all this going? Today, we (re)search with machines, experts, friends, and the wisdom of crowds.

If you do a search for the Macbook Air, for example, you might look at blogs, reviews, StumbleUpon, and the social graph (delicious, blog comments, Wikipedia, Digg, etc.) Now the social graph is being added on top of the search. This is called My Mahalo, the new feature at Mahalo. You can now see what your friends are recommending in terms of products, movies, services, etc.. If you don't have any friends, the most trusted Mahalo users' reviews are going to be posted first. There will be ratings on the right hand side and reviews will be on the bottom.
Push the social graph to when people want it: during the search. It's not valuable in Facebook or MySpace. You want this information when you're searcing.

The semantic web: Search for a movie that isn't out yet. Look at which friends are looking to watch that movie. Communicate with that person. Create a relationship between people and objects. We create states between people and objects. What's the state between you and a book? "read a book, reading a book, want to read a book." They'll start with movies, books, places, music, and products. As you look at his profile at Mahalo, there are other vectors in terms of the trust score: pages you've submitted, things you've reviewed, etc. If you trust people through their behaviors, they can contribute more to the site. The algorithm to determine this trust score at the time being is not yet determined; it needs careful study.

They also let people take information out of Mahalo and sync it with other services. An example is GoodReads (a bookworm site) - social networking for books. Using the Mahalo toolbar, if you go to GoodReads, it will ask you to import your book list into Mahalo. Now your books appear on Mahalo search results. This will work on other services as well: pulling your Netflix queue, your order on Amazon -- all of this is opt-in. He mentions that Chris Finke works for Mahalo. (I like Chris Finke.)

A lot of people don't want to give up Google or Yahoo. But if you do a Google and Yahoo search and you're a Mahalo user (AND you opt in), you can still get the same experience -- part machine, part human.

(He also says that Mahalo put a bid in for Yahoo. But he was kidding.)

Blended Q&A:

Q: Define what you think an SEO does.
A: My perception has changed radically. I think that affiliate SEO types are intelligent and hustlers. But I think that they are misguided in a way because they are "gaming" rather than creating a "value solution." The blackhats are polluting the web. Consumers don't trust the internet if the first 20 results are polluted. He mentions that he puts nofollow on stubs and tag pages to focus link juice on his stronger pages.
Kevin says that you shouldn't want to piss off black hatters.
If I'm technically able to take the number of results, should I do it? If you feel like you deserve the #1 site and someone who steals content is in the first position, you're upset with it. (They're schmucks, he says.)

Jeff Rohrs asks: You tend to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. But Mahalo supplants Google's paid listings in their results. Can you address this?
A: When people go to Internet, what they end up doing is their choice. (He's okay with AdBlock, etc.) It's their right to do - you can do whatever you want with your data.

Q: What is your approach toward linkbait?
He also thinks that you need to be authentic. Linkbaiting, he says, takes you so far. "15 ways to XXXXXX" is not authentic.

Q: You've repeatedly dumped marketers. The only positive message is that you want better website content. It seems that you shot the messengers and failed to understand the reasons behind the message. If you were a marketer, what is the best way to promote your content?
A: I think the best way to do it is to have a blog. Being real and making a good product is important. You should have an about us page that indicates that real humans are working behind it. People don't want to have products that don't have people around it.

He talks a lot about Allen Stern. It seems that he loves Allen.

Q: What about the long tail? Most searches have never been seen before.
A: I don't believe that one solution is going to solve the search problem. I think it's going to be a blend of techniques (not blended search, however). Sometimes machine search is the best. Sometimes human search (experts) is better. For mid-tail, social stuff is good. Sometimes you go to delicious because PHP scripting resources are very good there. Sometimes you go to Indeed to find a PHP job. The person who is going to win big is the person who figures out how to blend these different disciplines to build a single product. We had a lab and determined that people do not care about the layout of pages. They care about if the result is good. It was a real shocking lesson.

Q: How would you categorize the traffic relationship that you have with other search sites and where do you see that headed?
A: There are going to be a series of services that are dependent on search engines and some portions will be able to convert it to direct traffic. We saw a trend at Weblogs Inc. that 60% were coming from SEs, but a year or two in, 60% was direct. It converted users. In many cases, search gets it right. We're a content provider at the end of the day. We're in for the long term.

Q from Joost de Valk: You were speaking of becoming an affiliate marketer. Can you elaborate on that?
Jason: I'm learning a lot of affiliate marketing and I think there's potential there to create affiliate links (that are high quality) on some of our pages. They will be hand-picked. He's only really sold display advertising thus far but doesn't know much about it to say if it's going to work or not.

Q: Can you explain why you chose not to implement canonical redirects?
A: I wanted to have URLs that you can easily type - mahalo.com/keyword. When we started, that's how we installed it - I hated the SEO value of the other URLs.

Q: How to you categorize Mahalo contributors?
Jason: There's a large group of people who don't like FT jobs and do freelance stuff and have a passion for certain verticals, so if they can monetize that, it's a cool way to live their lives.

Paid placement is a form of search advertising that provides a top ranking in return for payment. Every major search engine offers a paid placement program. Learn what's available in this session that is especially geared toward beginners, with details on programs from major providers and advice on how to succeed.

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

Speakers:
• Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
• Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Dana Todd

How many of you have been advertising on search engines for the past year or two? This is a beginning class, fundamental, because believe it or not there are thousands of people every day who are doing their first campaign online.

So, before you spend one dollar, I want you to spend some time in training. Every hour you spend in training is going to save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars in mistakes, missed opportunities etc. Google and Microsoft give you free wonderful training materials. A lot of stuff on the blogs doesn’t make it into the training material so check out the blogs too. The SEMPO Institute provides great online training, and there are free webinars on sempo.org. Do educate yourself. It will pay off.

Some of the best PPC managers are highly analytical people but if you are not don’t worry. This is a fairly linear progression. You need to start small, and test.

How many people know that you can buy your way into paid inclusion or paid submit? You should do it. This is where you can set and forget. Not huge volume, but it does convert. With Microsoft, you can buy your way into their shopping results.

You can also look at feeds like shopping search, white paper networks (tech target), B2B, of course the new Yahoo mobile, and of course yellow pages.com. You can do Pay Per Call too!

So how do you buy search?

- Flat cost per click
- Traditional ad auctions
- Hybrid ad auction networks like Google and Yahoo

With hybrid, your position in the ad queue is affected by quality position or quality score. That’s why it’s yield maximizing – or profit maximizing for the search engines. The hybrid auctions are blind auctions, so you are kind of guessing. It’s engineered to get as much possible money out of you as possible. This is though the most efficient ad buy on the planet. It’s a phenomenal change in advertising landscape.

Google is a bit more complex then Yahoo, they have quality score, and “other relevancy factors”. Quality score can ultimately affect your budget more than anything else so you don’t want to ignore it. If you have a low quality score you have to pay more. Be aware that you don’t want to get a low quality score.

Google will start looking at your page load times too which will start affecting your price.
You also will need to isolate low-impression keywords in Yahoo!

So how do you build a good campaign?

• Good tracking software! It’s really worth the investment because you will be able to get more out of it. You also need good Key Performance Indicators.
• Set values.
• Establish baseline metrics so you can judge your performance and test.
• Strategy – wrapped around your goals. What you would like to see happen.
• Money – of course you need a lot of money! Those who get the most out of search ultimately spend the most! If you can spend more you will find better efficiencies. However you need to be careful will this – diminishing returns!
• Rules – set rules. If a keyword does not meet certain rulles, get rid of it!
• Organize your campaign – don’t be messy.
• Keyword generation – you need several, maybe thousands.
• Controlling the ad distribution.
• Copywriting (last thing you do before you go live).
• Look at an ongoing ad schedule, keep it fresh.

After launching, continue doing your testing, bid management, and campaign optimization.

Setting base values and goals – Conversion. Can be anything that has any value! Whether it’s an engagement or a transaction. It’s ok to have conversions that don’t have dollar signs. 95% of transactions occur offline or in an extended space, so you are only getting part of the story online.

If you don’t know, it’s ok to guess! You can always modify your assumptions as you go along.

Easy math:

-What’s your gross margin?
-What is the conversion of your site coming from search?
-Multiply those and you will get your break even costs.

Keyword generation: Where do you start?

Your site, competitors, thesaurus, trade literature.

Brand names will typically be your best performers. Some people put their brand in and the portfolio looks great because they convert at much higher rates. Some advertisers keep brands and generic terms separate.

Negative keywords: Most marketers do not do this! If you don’t have filters set, your ad could be showing for some really ridiculous queries! Don’t worry about thousands, but you want some so it doesn’t bring down the overall campaign performance.

80/20 rule: 20% of your keywords will always drive 80% of your revenue.

Microsoft AdLabs: upstream/downstream. You can see what people are putting in. Google’s keyword tools are phenomenal. You should set up a seasonality map around your keywords.

Building the Ads: Because CTR is one of the most important factors, you want to focus on it. You want to pay attention because it will affect your price.

Make sure you put your keyword in the title and description. It works best! Searchers are very focused.

Choose appropriate landing page URLS, not necessarily always the homepage.

Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion! It’s an advanced concept but it’s a shortcut.

Searchers prefer uninterrupted logic (shows some good ad examples).

Schedule: Don’t just set and forget! It will tank if you leave it alone. Set aside a few hours a week. Map out a calendar of the campaign rollout, testing periods, promotions, budget changes. Schedule promotional and seasonal messaging.

Day Parting: time of day, days of week. Can help you save a lot of money. Overlay any expected seasonality. Schedule quarterly “housecleanings” to correct any coding mistakes. Test. Makes sure all the landing pages work and are correct.

Managing campaigns:
Daily budgeting technology is not perfect! Put your high dollar words in their own campaign to control that better.
Start out with a bang on Google – overspend for 2 weeks on Google to achieve a good quality score than pull back.

Google has a conversion optimizer, a budget optimizer, preferred cost bidding and manual bidding.

20% of ads need to be managed every day, especially high cost/high volume words. Others you may be able to ignore for a week.

Popular tools: Atlas, Keyword Bidmax, Omniture, SearchRev, Performics, Clickable, Adapt. But people are still required!

Are you paying too much? Improve CTR and landing page. Data equals money. Delete low performing keywords or pause/isolate them so they don’t bring down the overall campaign.

Final thoughts:

-Don’t be afraid to start small and grow your success.
-Don’t be so conservative – set aside 10% to buy crazy keywords and experiment.
-Reinvest a portion of profits back into budget
-Leverage the engines for knowledge but don’t believe everything they tell you.
-Provide enough resources to support the campaign.
-Strive for integrated strategy across all media.

Matt Van Wagner

The whole idea is that it’s not a set and forget. You need to be involved every day.

PPC is great because you can get people to the site for less money than it costs to run a newspaper ad! We show to people in the target area and it works great.

I also love PPC because it’s measurable. One client had a good product, good campaign but they were being too shy about their budget, so we increased it 3 fold – and they increased their returns 4 fold!

PPC and SEO are complementary. You can discover what words convert, and it gives you a predictable dependable flow of traffic. PPC allows you more control over messaging though. You can determine what page the user will go to, unlike in organic listings.

Your real advantage to PPC is your process! Other stuff like ad copy and bids get discovered. Just fine tune your process.

Make sure you align your PPC goals with larger company goals.

Be methodical. Google keeps a history log for 90 days of all changes you have made to your campaign which is great! You can see what you did when. Don’t be too trigger happy on the campaigns though.

Here is a structure of a PPC campaign: ad group, keywords, ads, landing pages. You need to think about the landing pages.

Keyword stuff: one of the biggest problems you can make is to not understand how the match types work.
Things like broad, phrase, exact and negative need to be your friends.

Broad match: present ads to greatest number of people with greatest keyword combinations. If you are getting too much traffic that’s unfocused, you can tighten it up with phrase match. It shows for less searches – shows the exact order of your query but you can have words before, and words after. If you really want to tighten things up – exact match: only and if only your query matches the keyword exactly.

Yahoo works in a similar way, they’ve got standard match which is sort of like broad match except you can’t differentiate between singular and plural. Advanced match will do queries in any order.

Use broad match to get going and then fine tune. I would recommend using one word keywords rarely, if it all, it will be too unfocused.

One you have the traffic you see what works, you narrow it down.

Negative match reduces ad impressions. Google gives you an infinite amount of negative keywords but be careful with this. MSN gives you 1,022 characters worth of negatives. Yahoo gives you 250 negatives at the ad level and 250 more at the account level. They just increased the number from 150 to 250.

Let’s talk about how we use this information (gives client case study of “sockmonkey.com”).

Where do your ads show?
There are 2 places. SERPs, and content sites. With the content sites users do not type in a query for your product, users encounter ads while they are doing something else. When you first start your campaigns, if your spend is equal, kill the content campaign right away and get the search part right. Unclick the content button in Google and move on, because you can rack up a lot of clicks.

Search ads give you more control on placement and more directly relevant visitors.

Content ads you have no control over, and traffic can be spikey – good or bad. Traditionally more click-spam lives on content sites.

Ads serve 2 purposes: They are designed to draw clicks, and they can also be designed to filter clicks! You want to make sure you use good descriptions that filter out irrelevant clicks. So it’s not always the case that you want the highest click through rate.

Writing ads: Which is the best ad? There are a lot of different styles. Price appeal, convenience, informational, we’re different from “them”. Get other people involved in ad writing because you have a specific style. Then test.

You need to take into account Conversion Rate. Not just CPC and CTR. Conversion rate will tell you what’s really the best-converting ad. Don’t get caught in this click through rate thing because it’s a partial result.

What is the primary goal of your campaign? Leads, sales, brand building?
How do you define success? Offline vs. online sales conversions.
How do you measure success? Google, Yahoo, and (soon) Microsoft Free Conversion Tracking. 3rd party web analytics tools. How much the phones are ringing. Hybrid reporting approaching using Key Performance Indicators.

So, how does PPC really work? What’s the best position for your ad? Does the highest bid always get the top spot? How much do I really pay? What is all that stuff about Quality Score?

In general, the higher ads appear, the more clicks you get and the more you pay. You don’t always need to be in the top spot though. Men and women search differently. Women will take a look at the page, scroll over a couple of links, take their time, and then they will chose. Men come to the page and click right away, they are fast clickers. So there is an anthropological basis. Women’s behavior translates into the online space! While men try to spread their seed as fast and far as they can! So if you are selling to women, maybe you don’t need to be in the top spot!

How the auction works: So you have a bunch of ads competing. The order should be the most relevant results on the top first, right? But advertisers always want to be in the top spot, so whoever pays the most is on top, right? So there is this hybrid auction to control this. It takes the maximum bid multiplied by the quality score and other factors.

So who wins this auction? It’s a combination. Maybe the most relevant is in the 4th spot because he is not paying the highest bid. Also, someone in a top spot can be paying less per click than someone in a lower spot.

When you organize campaigns, don’t name things “Campaign 1’” and “top keywords”. Give yourself a break. Put in the effort.

Geo-targeting is a really good tactic as well. Cool stuff.

Day parting is also cool. If you can’t do anything on the weekend, take your campaign off line! Google makes day parting very easy. Microsoft gives you the ability to do demographic targeting. Be aware though that Microsoft uses fractions while Google uses percent.

Use cool text manipulation tools which will help you.

Choose your battles and win.

Some wrap-up stats by the moderator, Allan Dick:

1. About 30% of searches have a local search modifier.
2. Start a campaign with exact match, then expand as you get more comfortable. Don’t start looking for all the taffic in the world.
3. Landing page optimization. Huge.
4. Capitalize the first word of your URL in your landing page! Makes it easier to read.
5. Misspelled words. Be careful.
6. Go through the SEMPO training. Just a tip.
7. When you have a question, ask people.

This session is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promedia Corp.

Moderator:
Erik Qualman, Search Engine Watch Expert and Global Vice President, EF Education

Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance is up to talk to us about video sharing and rating/review sites.

(1) Social media is not new, it starts with message boards

Why Care About Social Media?
- More Opportunities in SERPs
- Creates an Engagement Opportunities
- Traffic to Site
- Links to Site
- Creates Buzz

Video Sharing Ties in How?
- How To Videos work well (she shows stats on search volume for some how to queries).
- "How to tie a tie video" query brings up videos in Google web search
- She shows examples of why videos with more views can be outranked by videos with better quality links

She now shows the Bare Escentuals video...

Li, don't hate me, but I am linking to your recent presentation at SMX, cause some of the content is very similar.

She explains that if Bare does videos on "how to apply makeup" they might be able to convert on that.

She then shows the hsn videos search results at Google. She notes the myspace profile ranks number one for "hsn videos." She then shows the Yahoo results for the same query. She then drills down on how YouTube, MySpace all show the HSM Videos. An HSN rep is responding to comments on videos, engaging with users.

It's not just YouTube, there are a ton of them out there...

What Matters with Video Sharing:
- Ratings
- Comments
- Title of Video, Social Media Profiles, Images,
- Keywords used
- Links to Videos

Social Ratings & Reviews
- People without blogs will blast you hear and people will listen
- People respect honest reviews
- Good reviews are great and have an impact
- Bad reviews have a worse impact
- Misinformation can be corrected
- Great place for a qualified and relevant link

She then shows the Yelp front page. Yelp pages can drive nice traffic. She shows how the reviews work, and so on. She then moves on to TripAdvisors reviews. Then she shows you how Yelp and TripAdvisor come up in the SERPs.

- Participate
- Monitor Reputation
- Track with Analytics

Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide to talk about Flickr and Twitter.

Why Flickr?
- She shows how a picture can change your emotional reaction to content
- Flickr is doing well within image search (technorati uses Flickr)
- Yahoo loves Flickr images (they own them)
- Flickr has an engaged community, their are groups, comments, rating, etc.
- She showed one group about "edible gardening"
- Flickr allows you to embed links, which leads people to click on them (now nofollowed)
- You can email pictures from your camera phone to Flickr
- Join or create groups
- Publish from Flickr to Most Blogs
- Good privacy options
- RSS feeds
- Pro account is $25 per year
- Subscribe to comments on your pics so you can respond

Twitter:
- Micro-blogging (140 character limit)

- Networking Made Simple
-- It's an open form of eavesdropping
-- You can get both sides of conversation and expand your nrtwork

- Twitter is a great news source
-- Sites Twitter breaking news
-- It can go to your cell phone also

- Power of "ReTweet"
-- People might broadcast your twitters to their networks...

Twitter:
- Expand your network
- It's not stalking, it's observing
- Powerful traffic source
- Instant feedback source
- Free
- Limited by your creativity

Tamera Kremer, Founder, Wildfire Strategic Marketing to talk on social bookmarking.

It's kind boring compared to Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. But its part of the social media mix.

Social Bookmarking 101:
- Tag any page on the web
- Browser, blog, facebook, rss
- View how popular an article is
- Tag article with terms relevant to you
- Browse user tags by keyword
- Share links with others in your network

Delicious:
- 4 million users
- Over 100 million web pages bookmarked
- Yahoo bought them in 2005
- Tag clouds are prominently displayed on blogs
- Many A List bloggers use it automatically

Use Social Bookmarking to:
- Keep tabs on your brand reactions
- Augment your keyword research with delicious
- It optimizes your title tags (bookmarklets grab those title tags)

Case Study:
- They made a quick start guide for users to teach them how to use delicious for a client
- Participation increased ten fold after the quick guide

3 Ways to get Started:
- Set Up RSS Alert for your URLs
- Set up a personal account and start tagging
- Search through they keywords you associate with your brand and see what types of articles are tagged with that folksonomy

William Flaiz, Vice President, Search Engine Optimization & Web Analytics, Avenue A | Razorfish is last up.

The client web site is central to what they do.

- Social Bookmarking
- Wiki's, be careful with wikipedia, be active in the community
-- Take advantage of reference links
-- Other links, but they may be edited quickly

Photo Communities
- Loves Flickr (mostly same reasons as above)
- PhotoBucket been around for a long time, but not SEO friendly

Video:
- YouTube offers biggest benefit
- - Use the about this video section

Social NEtworking Sites:
- Facebook have fan pages or company pages
-- Facebook ranks well in SERPs so backlinks in those pages help
-- They used Facebook pages for a reputation management issues

Blogs
- ...

Content Creation SItes
- Like Squidoo

Marketing to and through social networks means humans are hot again. Not as directory editors; it's Web 2.0 and your customers are in control. The old-fashioned media buy has gone bye-bye. Social Media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. Learn about the social search revolution, and hear case studies of how marketers have successfully promoted brands and products with it.
Moderator:

* Pauline Ores, SES Advisory Board and Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, General Business, IBM Corporation

Speakers:

* Conn Fishburn, Director of Social Media Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.
* Don Steele, Director of Digital Marketing, Comedy Central
* Chris Winfield, President, 10e20, LLC
* Jory Des Jardins, Co-Founder & President of Strategic Alliances, BlogHer
* Chris Beland, Partner, Director, Interactive Marketing & Social Media Practice , Ogilvy Worldwide

Conn Fishburn talks about the New Now (or How Social Changes Everything). Social media is the aggregate of human activity. You can't talk about social media without the people involved in it. He calls this the rise of the people. There are 6.5 billion people; there's a lot of crowding. Technology is improving.

There are over 800 million people online--there's an inflection point. In the last few months, the web is not modeled on existing behavior. It's a new medium in itself that has tremendous power and processing and lets people connect throughout the world. When you overlay that ability with people and their habits and behaviors and desires and passions, you get a fabric that creates a new experience for users -- and marketers.

10-15 years ago: We had dialup. We now have broadband. The youngest generation today doesn't know about the world without the Internet. We've evolved. They just are.

This is about a cultural change over technology. Social search changes things - layer people onto a technological system

The Killer App of the Web has always been other people. People create content and share them with other people. This is the backbone of what's happening. Humans are social animals and this has happened all throughout history.

What does this mean in the future?
We've gone from an evolution of "mass media" to "we media." It changed the way brands go to market because of the democratization and dialogue. Brands and companies are part of the cultural fabric now.

What is social media?
- Media is made by and for users in communities: posts, dialogues, etc. - over a shared cultural passion or interest
- A business model in which "our customers are suppliers"
- An advertising system in which people articulate their interests and passions and share marketing messages with each other. If you see your friend is a fan of a product on Facebook, for example, they are endorsing the product and it piques curiosity
- A new netowrk approach to soliving hard problems in networked information systems.
- Platforms, systems, and applications that connect media, technology, and people together into a processing and value-creation network

Influencers play a huge role in social media. However, a big influencer and a regular person has no better predictive evidnece in making something tip. Neither is a better indicator of what will catch on or what won't (according to Duncan Watts). What matters is the condition of the network.

People need to work together holistically. In terms of the conversation, you need to consider all other channels in search and put social into the match.

What to do:
First, listen
Second, become part of a story
Third, always bring some wine
Fourth, be good to your mother - have conversations with real people.
Fifth, think holistically
Social media is here to stay.

[Sorry, Search Engine Roundtable readers, if you've read Conn's earlier presentation that I liveblogged, this is all redundant information. He only added one new slide. :( ]

Chris Beland from Ogilvy is up next. His presentation is - web 2.0 and social media - why? What is this emerging proliferation of UGC and conversational marketing? We need to connect the dots so we looked at this.

Look at the numbers - the top 3 sources of credible information
- Recommendations from other people
- Newspapers - experts and pundits
- Consumer opinions posted online
Takeaway: Peer to peer or user generated is the number one source for "trusted" information and traditional sources continue to decline.

Does it make sense to tap into it as marketers? How many people are doing this?
- Emerging Vehicles - blogs, online games, social networks, virtual worlds, widgets and wikis are on the map as marketing tactics.
- They're also considered mainstream by the user audience. People expect brands to be very participatory on the web.
- Digital ad spending continues to increase and scale. These tactics will only roll out more.
People like it? Does it make sense? Is there a future? All yes.

Is it relevant to everybody? We took a look at B2B. 70+% of people when trying to make a business decision look at search engines for information. They are still looking for facts, features, functionality, where to buy, etc. They also look at contextual relevance and their peer groups.

What allows us to scale that is the fact that like-minded people allows us to target different groups and to establish that relationship and to start that conversation.

Does it work? Sites that utilize this technology (positive reviews, comment on experience) are converting more and are heavily trafficked.

There big plays as a strategic umbrella.
1. Listening as a disciplined marketing practice
2. Advocacy as a deliberate marketing channel. Use advocates.
3. Unlock and unleash content for wide distribution. There's a lot of great content so unleash it in a way that's relevant and credible.

Specifically, we mean:
1 - Listening as a marketing practice: passive listening (who is saying what, where, when , why)
- Active listening = engagement (transparent, commitment, context/value proposition)
2 - Advocacy as a marketing channel: measure, impact, and activate audience's propensity to recommend the brand. You need word of mouth marketers and give them a platform to evangelize for you. There are a lot of ways to do this; give them early access to a new piece of content.
3 - Unlock and unleash content: earned media to accompany paid plans: enable and encourage audience to share content. Aggregate it, make it available, etc.

What a new plan might look like:
Current: DM/media, email, landing page, content syndication, and search
Tomorrow: Listening posts (listen to what people are saying), search/content syndication, influencer engagement, advocacy activation, DM/media, email, dynamic landing pages (multivariate) rich media, earned media, other emerging channels, and closed with a listening post.

Quick example: Cisco - engaged 14 bloggers in the technology space about the human network. It became often talked about and dominated search rankings. It even had a Wikipedia for awhile.

Quick story: I stopped my phone in a puddle. It died. I realized I'd buy a new toy. I went to the Verizon site and saw features and functionality but it doesn't tell me if I can hear it on a rainy NY street. I went to Google and got as much inforamtion I could. Google gave me a lot of information -- too much. I went to Technorati (blog aggregator) and checked the phone models - lots of great information but it wasn't really relevant to me. Then I saw videos at the bottom of the page. The information I found was exactly what I was looking for. Some guy was passionate about it and put it on the web. You might ask "who has time for that?" If a small amount of people does this, though, it's still incredibly valuable. There are a ton of videos like these that are contextually relevant! Pull that into your product's web page and put a spotlight on the individual. That's pretty powerful. If you combine that, you have an influential program that crosses across different channel.

Payoffs
- Domination!
- (and some other stuff he said really quickly)

Chris Winfield is up next and he's talking about tagging.

Social news and social bookmarking websites are great for discovery. A lot of people don't know you exist and they're not even considering searching for you. The most important thing is influence: millions of people are on these sites everyday and they want to hear from you. You should leverage that.

Three sites: Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg

Delicious is a social bookmarking site that's part of Yahoo. There are other sites like Clipmarks, Blinklist, and Furl all work the same way.
How does it work? Save a page you like. You can add notes and tags.
It also works for discovery: people can discover pages by tags/network/popularity.
What works? Lists (which have worked throughout time), resources (how tos), tools
Advantages for marketers - why you should care: influencing people, look what people have saved (e.g. Steve Rubel's RSS feed)
There are 2 things that are important in del.icio.us: homepage and popular page, which has frequently tagged pages. Those are very popular methods to drive traffic to your website.
In the future, delicious might be integrated into search results.
Example: AJAX translation tools - 667 people bookmarked it. 9500+ visitors in the first 24 hours plus a few hundred per month since. It helped to build over 800 links to the page.

StumbleUpon is a web browser plugin that allows you to find cool new things. It's owned by eBay and has close to 4.5 million users. How does it work? The toolbar can be downloaded and works for FireFox or IE. You stumble pages, you say I like it or Not for me and you can network with people based on similar interests.
What works? A great thing to look at is buzz.stumbleupon.com. The bigger the word, the more interested people are in that content. There's a really wide variety of sites featured there. SU is important to apply: catch people's eyes very quickly. People click the button over and over at work so you want to keep them on your page. It's so easy to click that button!
Videos and images work really well as do eclectic pages (humor).
Advantages for marketers: rapid and consistent traffic quickly. Increase your audience base. It also increases RSS subscriptions. Also, tags show up in the search results.
Example: a company that sells customized magazine covers - most bltant use of photoshop in magazines and ads. It did very well: 68,522 visitors out over 90 days. 38,000 of those visited more than 3 pages. It helped build over 600 links to the page.

Digg is the last one: user driven social news site--democratic news. Over 1,000,000 registered users and 25million uniques per month. Reddit, Propeller, and Shoutwire are similar sites. Yahoo Buzz is a relatively newcomer to the space.
Articles, images, videos are submitted by users, and based on the algorithm, if enough people like it, it's going to go to the homepage.
What works? Lists (top 5 mythbusters segments), technology/politics/health/business, self help/how to get around things
Advantages for marketers: traffic (typically between 10k and 60k visitors in a 24 hour period). Exposure: getting in front of thousands of new people who probably wouldn't have come into contact your brand normally. It is also able to influence. People blog about content on Digg. It then goes to another social site (Reddit, SU, shoutwire, etc.). Then it goes to government websites, mainstream press, forums, non profits - everone keeps looking.
Example: Top 11 Underground Transit Systems in the World. 151 comments with the majority being positive. Over 20k unique visitors in 24 hours. Spread to other social networks. It spreads to influential blogs. Over 1000 natural links. Over 100,000 visitors over 24 hours. Over 200 new email list signups, 12 new bookings directly from blog referrals. 75k visitors from Google in the past 9 months.

Tips:
Promote great content.
Build your networks. Be social!
Contribute to the communities. Don't churn and burn. Long term relationships will suffer.
Make sites work together (save site on digg, delicious, etc.)
Have good hosting

Jory from BlogHer (she's an evangelist there) is up next. She talks about Managing the Unavoidable - building a brand in the blogosphere. The biggest fear of any brand is that someone will say something about your product. If you avoid the blogosphere, you miss out on opportunities and people will talk about you anyway, so you might as well approach the blogosphere with defense, not offense.

Bloggers like to ego search. Jory searched for her name on Google. She was showing up in results 2, 6, 7. Blogs show up first. Commenting on blogs can help - do a search for your name.

She used to write about products that upset her (Chase identity theft). She called Chase and told them and they ended up sending collections on her. This was 2.5 years ago, and even though it's old news, she's #25.

Example Elise Bauer - she ranks very well for terms that trump brands. Blogs can trump brands.

How do you deal with bloggers in a way that doesn't hurt your brand, or if you don't want to engage bloggers, how do you deal with them in a way that makes you look good?
Big gripe: I do not want to put out my product in case a blogger may say something negative. Fear of "brandicide."
What's the worst thing that can happen when you put your brand out there? Harper Collins had BlogHer promte their books. They provided 50 copies of books to bloggers. Not every blogger wrote about it and not every blog was positive, but sales still shot up! People were talking about the books and that was good enough.
Example: Dove - give away schwag - People review it! (Hello!!!!!!!!!!!)

You do get credit for trying.

Takeaways:
- Avoidance is not a strategy.
- When in doubt, engage.
- If touchy feely just isn't in your DNA, play defense

Don Steele is next. He usually talks about Wikipedia. Not this time!

Comedy Central likes to let fans and people rise to the top. That's part of their SM strategy.
Audience: 18-34 who live in digital space. CC as a brand must understand how, why, and where they're doing it. The audience is not necessarily finding CC by searching for "comedy central." Realization: don't just build a walled garden. Talk about it, engage, and benefit.
CC people in programming perspective - funny, engaging, suprising, and smart. From digital marketing perspective: discoverable branded, portable, smart
We are producing professionally produced content so it has to be branded. Understand what it looks like, that it's tagged correctly, etc. Be smart - transparent in what we're doing - identify yourself as a CC person.

One of the things they used is to talk about their social media plan: it includes Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Funny Or Die, Break, MySpace, CollegeHumor, DailyKos, Fark, Perez Hilton, and the Huffington Post. Look at all these sites and see how our audience is being represented there. FB has groups about all of our shows; make sure we're building applications in these spaces. Make sure we're addressing concers. CC content is on Digg, Reddit, SU - we don't advertise there.

Examples:
- Facebook application (Root of all Evil show - Which one is more evil?) - brand participation
- Outreach: talking to bloggers all the time. Embed content from CC.

Equation: CC programming + (online advertising + search) * social media efforts = smart digital strategy

Kevin Ryan is the moderator of this panel. I just made it in from crazy NYC traffic with 15 minutes to spare. Love that Hilton parking, incredibly convenient, trust me a I pay for it. Ryan introduces the wrong person first but we are back on track.

Speaking of widgets, make sure to add our Search News Facebook Widget.

Jeff Williams, Associate Director, Creative, DIGITAS is now up.

Advertising Perspective:
- Is it advertising? Yes, Widgets hold interesting creative possibilities with consumers, a branded lifestyle experience, and create brand awareness and direct response objective and widgets are tactics that advance a broader online strategy or concept.
- Realities Are, every pitch concept now includes a widget, they can leverage Facebook, Google and Yahoo, the hottest trend right now is the "grabable banner," big brands seeing value in these widgets, and viral metrics are the most compelling aspect of widgets.

He then shows an example of a 'grabable widget.' You can place these on many pages easily.

He shows an example of a Google Gadget for Kraft. The Gadget takes content from the web site and ports it to the iGoogle page's Kraft widget. It gives you a recipe every day.

Next is an American Express "members widget." They made a widget for "Members Project." People would suggest projects to AMEX and the widget would show the new projects. One person wanted to plant a million trees, etc.

Promoting - Key Factor
- 'Grabable banners' media
- Existing marketing CRM
- Corporate web site
- Offline
- Social networking platforms (facebook apps)
- SEM
- Mobile

Jeff's Widget Quick List:
- Is the widget to brand or for direct response?
- If branding, hwo does it enhance the overall campaign concept or brand strategy?
- If direct response, does it create a response?
- Is it useful to end user?
- Does all the functionality exist in the widget?

Marc Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer, Hitwise is now up.

He first shows his Apple Dashboard widgets...

The Hitwise widget has a "3-in-1"combonent:
- Targeting broad data enthusiast market
- Extension of dashboard, blogs, rss
- Example of technology leadership

He then shows examples of the three different versions of the Hitwise widget.

Results:
- Since launch in August 2007
- 2,021 downloads of widget from hitwise.com
- 1804 Google gadget downloads
- 3,919 Yahoo gallery
- Total 7,744 total downloads

Christian Oestlien, Product Manager, Google AdSense is next up.

History:
- Konfabulator in 2003
- Yahoo Widgets in 2005
- Google Gadgets in 2006
- Microsoft Gadgets in 2007
- Facebook Apps
- Google Gadget Ads recently

Gadgets let you move into a delivery mechanism, like your mail comes to you, so should marketers (they should come to you).

He then showed the nissan live traffic gadget, which has live traffic. It is useful and free.

22% of marketers in 2007 said they used gadgets. 47% in 2008 said they will start using these gadgets. So the eye balls are there.

James Welch, Head of Research and Development, GetUpdated is next up. They advertise here, so they must be good at what they do. ;-)

He is talking more about the Google Gadget Ads...

What are the early adopters and ad creator saying?

We are in the infancy right now. The ideas are being lead by the technology people, but the ads are very easy to create. The driver really needs to be from the marketing department, not the tech people.

Current Examples:
- He showed the Nissan Example that Google showed. He pointed out the zip code feature...
- Most famous gadget ad is the "kickin it old skool" ad, see here.
- He then shows an interactive example of CareerOne (over here)
- Peugeot ad is cool (see here)

Results:
- High interaction rates
- High CTR
- Everyone is Happy

Use Gadgets For:
- Brand Awareness
- Generate Leads
- Introduce Your Site
- Improve Reputation
- Collect Data/Content

Creating a Good Ad:
- Do not mislead users
- Conform to IAB standards
- No Audio on load
- Keep ads under 40k
- Keep animation under 15 seconds
- No downloads within ads
- Create an easy to click outgoing link
- Keep outgoing links underlined

Future:
- Open Social will increase delivery
- Mobile
- Geographical and context awareness
- Improved use of rich media
- Intelligent APIs etc.

Search engines have forced an entirely new dynamic in how connected humans access information. Successful traditional brands along with new entries into the space learn to roll with the changes... even if that means a transformation in how they do business. The death of traditional information sources is often grossly exaggerated. In other words, winning in the Interactive world means combining the best of the old and the new. Mr. McLeod will discuss how a world renowned and highly respected publication changed how they do business in a search driven world. You'll walk away with a better understanding of making the right moves can help you make the most of our dynamic universe.

* Gordon McLeod, President, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network

The theme, Gordon says, is about "old content guys catching up to search," specifically about how traditional media has approached search.

He talks about the Wall Street Journal Network which includes MarketWatch, FiLife, All Things Digital, and Barron's Online. 25million unique visitors. "Financial news with some tech put in there." They are aiming to build the individual brands within the network.

A brief history: in 1996, Google was a glimmer in Sergey and Larry's eyes, we had no idea what we were doing. There were 50k subscribers and paid pages were prevalent. There were 4 firewalls around the site so you HAD to pay to access the content.

In the early years, they got a sense that while search was not part of the conversation, they needed to grow. They spun out classified sites and other real estate sites. Some of the content was outside the wal to drive sales. Relatively small efforts were made. They got serious in 2003-2004 when people started talking about search. They spoke with Google/Yahoo and SEO became part of the language. The initial reaction, however, was not so much about search; it was more about acquisitions and they acquired MarketWatch at that time. The Journal was a paid site; MarketWatch was free. They also filled out the network. Barron's is a paid/free site which was rolled out during the time. eFinancialNews in London was also rolled out. Most of what was launched was free content as well during this time. There were 800k subscribers.

Last year was "our big year, but then again, we're a content company first." Dynamic sitemaps were implemented. URL structure changed. There were proper redirects especially since they kept changing headlines on some articles. They realized that they didn't know exactly what they were doing so they got a consulting expertise. Search was not part of the sweet spot.

Last year: AllThingsD.com was also launched on a WordPress platform. It's a free site on an SEO-friendly platform. Again, we're thinking more about search and free content especially where it can be found and indexed. For Barrons, it wasn't growing that much - it was a relatively specialized journal. It's a weekend publication for investors. Their model is that everything on Monday at 3 gets free, but subscribers will get a 2-day head start. MarketWatch community looks for high quality links. They still get nervous about user generated content but are getting over it.

Also, last year, free content on the Wall Street Journal became more prevalent. "Business of Life" was offered as free content. "Snippet" page has 2 free paragaphs. There's one click free access from Google and Digg: you'd get the article for free before getting the subscription wall. Slowly, and relatively quickly, we rolled out new approaches to drive subscriptions. It's not a bad businesses because there are 900K paid subscribers at a market price of $99/year with a 77% renewal rate.

Essentially, it's working. Content companies often say that WSJ is the best but it doesn't rank as high. Things are getting better, however. He shows a search engine traffic graph of organic growth but says "we don't do any SEM." REferral traffic from search engines has more than doubled since October 2006.

2008 and beyond: There are no excuses; you need to be really aggressive with search. In the last year, there has been a lot of talk about making the WSJ free. It isn't quite playing out that way; they like ad sales growth, but the traffic grows more than the sales. They are building a hybrid model. There's a greatly expanded sports section and other expanded free content. They attribute growth to being smarter of servicing content and enabling it through growth.

The other big change is that they have been rethinking site search. They are selling subscriptions, but that's really it. "People are not on our sites to buy. In terms of our environment ... how can we think about the site ... to drive a better user experience?" The site search feature is being rethought. In MarketWatch, they call it "universal search" with blog content, videos, articles, articles from other sites in the network, and the goal is to drive a strong user experience.

He talks about his competitor, CNN, which combines web search with site search. It's very user friendly with sponsored links. He shows us the NYC crane collapse search which combines results from other sites, like NYTimes. As we all get a little more flexible, not only are we letting our content show up on other places but we also let other people's content show up on our site. We know that we don't have the best stories on every subject so we are open to that exposure for other mediums.

If Google or Yahoo or Ask are in the search box, people may use it more often. He's thinking about that. He wants people to stay on the site to perform search. He thinks that the Google branding of the search box may improve search loyalty within the site.

The reality of search, especially for site search, is that you only use it when you fail -- like when you hit a brick wall. It's a notion of using search as a key platform. It's a smart way to go - rethinking the way we deal with our content.

What lessons have been learned? A lot of it had to do with catching up. We don't use SEM on the content side of the business (at least). Our most recent lessons:
It's taken us a little bit longer to realize that our content can be in other places. They have RSS feeds. "We do very well with Yahoo." We use this content to reach new audiences. There's a Lumia application with Facebook that helps expose the network to different users. Cell phone usage is expanding as well. Most of this new distributed content isn't search friendly but it helps reach other audiences. Video is great because you can put it on your blog (he calls this UDC = user distributed content).

"SEO is not a project" - all developers are going through SEO training and it's starting to become a way of life. It's an evolution of what the content companies are going into.

There's a debate still about "free is good." There are 1.1 million subscribers (paid) and 14.7 million monthly visitors (as per Omniture, not subscriber). He likes those numbers and wants them to grow. The Journal publishes over 1000 pieces of content a day. Serving that content is such an upside for us, he says. "Yes, I want some paid content, and yes, we want free content."

Do you hire SEO staff or do you do it internally? Do you build your community or does someone else do it for you? There are about 100 people on the engineering and technology team, but "a lot of things we don't do very well - and some things we do very well." They had to talk to a lot of vendors and realized that it's better to build internally. When Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg wanted to do this (for AllThingsD and MarketWatch), they wanted it to be light and flexible. They went right to WordPress with a loosely aligned team and it took less than 6 months to get it up and running.

He is showing a graph from Hitwise that indicates that content is back. Great content is important. I think we're catching up. I think the journal has by far the best business content. I think we want to be ranked high on search engines and I think that they want us to be ranked up there. It's really up to us to catch up. We've changed the way we process content and we need to serve the CMS in a way we've never thought of before. We're far more aggressive and are far more open about seeing our content in other places. We're not growing fast enough to pay for that expensive content but we're confident that it's growing in the right direction.

A WebmasterWorld thread has isolated a tip on how to increase one's Google AdSense earnings. One tip was bold enough to say a faster server can increase your earnings as much as 25%!

Most publishers in that thread are skeptical about the 25% figure. It is obviously dependent on one's start and finish point. If my server is incredibly slow, then of course, if I speed it up, people might wait for the content to load and they might click on some ads. If they can't see the content or the ads, because the server takes to long, then you would see a 100% spike in earnings. So the numbers are all relative.

Do any of you have more solid statistics on page load time and how it comes into play with AdSense earnings? I would love to see a study done on that on more than just one site.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google recently improved the Webmaster Tools "message center" by having messages wait for you even if you are not verified.

But a few reports are coming from Google Groups that the message center is not displaying open messages. Users are seeing they have a message, they click on the message and are presented with the following error:

Your messages are not available at this time. Please try again later.

Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, Jonathan Simon, responded saying:

This appears to have been a temporary issue.

But another user came in an hour or more later saying that he also just received that error.

I was unable to verify or replicate the error myself, because I don't have any messages waiting for me. Google, want to send me a note so I can test it? ;-)

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google recently updated their AdSense terms of service and one publisher asked AdSenseAdvisor if Google AdSense is or will be using "web beacons."

After about a week (March 18th), AdSenseAdvisor replied to a WebmasterWorld thread saying:

In the future we may begin to serve new ad tags that may use web beacons to help advertisers track their metrics.

Is this a huge deal? I am not one to talk about privacy and stuff like that (I am one of the most public people out there). But I do know that Facebook and other companies received a lot of flake over web beacons. Not sure if this would or will make much of a privacy difference in Google's case. Google already uses plenty of tracking mechanisms with Google AdSense.

But the addition of adding new ad tags via web beacons is a new implementation to AdSense that might be coming soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums has reports from dozens of webmasters that their link counts in the tool are way down.

Some users are reporting as much as of an 80-percent reduction in the number of links Yahoo Site Explorer is finding for their sites.

Lost about 75% on all sites today.

Ya! This was a huge drop though..not the usual slight fluctuation. i lost like 12k links.

I don't track my links on a frequent basis for this site, but I was able to dig up a past link count that I posted here back in October 2007 where I found I had 216,880 inlinks reported. Today, Yahoo Site Explorer reports I have 271,196 inlinks. So I don't see any reductions and I also checked some tools that might have been tracking this for me on an automated basis and I see no reduction.

(1) Either this site was not impacted or
(2) This was a temporary bug that is now fixed.

Are your Yahoo inlinks report down drastically?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Warning, clicking on the following Google search result may return an image of extreme pornographic nature. The image is of a woman's vagina and is found on a pornographic site, but the image appears to be hosted on Google's Blogger network.

The search phrase is a common search in Google Web search for hot celebrities (warning, there may be an image that you don't want to see or don't want your kids to see). The image comes up at the top of the page, above the organic results, in the top universal search spot. I will not share a complete screen shot, but I will share a very censored version (just so it is documented), if you really want a full screen shot, go to this blog.

I have notified several of my contacts at Google before writing this post but told them I would blog it.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

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: March 18, 2008"

How can you build a web site from the ground up that pleases both crawler-based search engines and your visitors? Discover how "search engine friendly" design can tap into free traffic from search engines. This session is especially suited for beginners who need an overview of important design issues to keep in mind.

Moderator:

Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch Expert and President and CEO, VIZION Interactive

Speakers:

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, Performics
Matthew Bailey, President, SiteLogic
Craig Hordlow, Chief Search Strategist, Red Bricks Media

Contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

----------

Mark Jackson:

Wanted to start of with a couple questions – how many people here would describe primary role as web designer? Marketing? Just SEO’s? I think we’ll have a good amount of information here to digest, as well as some entertainment value.

Here is Eric Papczun:

Eric:

How many people are new to SEO? OK, good, we have a little bit for everybody here. Let’s first understand the basics of search friendly design, which covers indexation, making the crawlers able to find the great relevant content you all have. Some of us forget sometimes that the job of crawlers is extremely difficult and we don’t make it easy sometimes. They have a one size fits all tool that needs to understand each website, but the reality is all websites are unique, life snowflakes.

So we will also talk about content and making it clear and organized so the engines understand it, as well as some of the friendlier design techniques.

The first things we want to do is get crawled and indexed. Think of each website as its own town. You want to make sure it’s all compliant and within code. So take a look at the Google webmaster guidelines which is a great place to start. Also if you are building a new site the best thing you can do is find a link to a site that has already been crawled and link it back to you. For the designers, I urge you to go out there and read about sitemaps and robot inclusion files and things related to that.

First I want to go back to the metaphor of a town. We want to make sure it’s easy for us to navigate and understand where things are, a good address system to follow, so we can find any geographical location within each town. So the big test is when you create a URL, is it unique, meaning there is no other page that has the same URL, and there is no page that shares two URLs. A lot of sites have this problem and make it difficult for the crawlers.

Parameters are variable, not constant. When you get domains that start passing dynamic variables through the URLs, there’s a chance the URLs would change depending on how you navigate to that page. If you are tracking visitors on your site, you don’t want to necessarily track it through the URLs because that could create problems. Also, no session IDs!

Flatten the folder structure. Most important directories and pages should be as close to the center as possible. Whatever the first or second layers, are easier for the search engine’s to find and rank for content. When you get 5, 6, 7, 8 directory levels down it gets harder for the search engine’s to find that content.

We also recommend – don’t let URLs die. If you do a redesign, instead do a 301 redirect which is a “change of address” form for the engines.

We also want crawlable navigation. The infrastructure – make it easy for folks to get from A to B, not just in one way, but let them have multiple paths. The better the navigation, the more success you will have with the crawlers. I love breadcrumb navigation. It makes it clear to humans and to engines where you’ve been.

We love global footers. We recommend you put your main sections of your site that are most important to you and to users.

Avoid basic mistakes like duplicate content, dead-end and orphan pages. Duplicate content is difficult for the search engines and your page can get dropped.

Build the most robust and comprehensive site map which is a wonderful way for content to be found. Read more about it online, I highly recommend it, if your infrastructure fails, at least they have a file they can go to that lists all the URLs.

Robot.txt – gives instructions to the search engines when they come to your site. They are rules saying what can and can’t be crawled.

One of the greatest things is that Google has provided us with a reporting dashboard to show how crawlers are seeing your site. If you haven’t done this I would strongly recommend doing so.

Content:

Let’s assume now we’ve done everything right. Now we want to make sure we are optimizing the good relevant context. Put your pages to the test – do I have clarity about what this page represents? Look at the title and meta data. If it doesn’t have a focus to you then it doesn’t have a focus to your reader.

Alignment: once you distill what that landing page represents, make sure you put that description in your title tag to show how your page is unique, then make sure the design is neat and consistent.

Make sure when you do your title and meta tags, that you not only think about ranking, but also when someone goes to a search engine results page, you want yours to stand out. Ask yourself how are you different from all these other listings that might show up for a keyword.

Tips:

I love flash, javascript and ajax, but we have to use these things judiciously. We love lakes and rivers, they are beautiful, but we don’t want to flood out city! Surround them with HTML.

Next up is Matt Bailey of Site Logic:

Search friendly design is one of the most critical parts of building a site and SEO. You can have the best staff of SEO, bit if ain’t crawlable it won’t matter! The first we look at is the architecture and the programming. You gotta fix the foundation before you fix the house.

It’s important to allow access to your site to EVERYBODY.

I wan tom talk about target,com who is being sued because they don’t have a good site for the blind!!!
1) lack of alt tags. That’s all! That’s the number one thing people are asking for!! And they won’t do it!!!
2) Image maps without alt texts
3) You need a mouse to navigate their site.

So this site is not only blocked to users, but to search engines too because search engines see the same as the blind!

Google wants your website in their database. The more info they have the better info they can present to users, who are their customers. So their guidelines tell you how to use it! So if you have an artist who is being difficult, tell their boss to make them read Google guidelines! Who is right?

Search for the web accessibility checklist by W3C and see how your website measures up. It’s almost point for point the same as the Google guidelines. Why? Because search engines can’t see, hear, click – they are the most disabled thing that will come to your website!!!

My definition of accessibility is that your site should be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Target – the alt attribute is necessary because if you have info inside an image, the search engine won’t know what it is! Look at what’s contained in the image – the sales info! If you can’t see it you won’t know where to click to get the sale price! So Target has gone to extreme lengths to not let people use their website!

There are other sites that make a user select a country or a language on the home page in order to proceed on the site – from a drop down box – and that stops the search engines in their tracks!

Cluttered URLs – before you start an SEO campaign, look at the URL! My rule of thumb is if the URL is longer than the bar…you need to do something! Not only shorter, but use a favicon! It’s a great way to brand your website! It’s just a little graphic icon that appears next to the URL which makes it easy for branding and bookmarking! Do it.

Education on CSS –

I love it. Because it puts the emphasis on the content rather than the markup - all that geek stuff goes in an extra file. So now the search engines don’t have to parse through the code, they can just get the content.

Linearization – search engines read from left to right and tables go top to bottom so it’s a mess for the search engines. If you use a table-based layout you will get a chunky website in a mobile device. CSS is great b/c it’s cross platform.

Check out CNET – they have gone completely CSS – no smushed together table structure and the search engines are reading the content exactly as it appears on a page, and looks beautiful on a mobile device.

Validation – helps find mistakes, tags that are left opened etc. fix them and the rankings will go up by the search engines will read the site properly.

Architecture (breaks down navigation of gobreck.com)

How do I get where I want to go? Make sure the path of information is consistent for the search engine and the searcher. This site is a mess.

RapidCity South Dakota – they have a good navigation structure, breadcrumb navigation which lets us know where we are. We know where we are because the page is highlighted and there is an arrow. We can rely on the navigation structure which is crawlable and keyword rich so it’s great for users and search engines. Don’t ever ever change your navigation midway through the site, keep consistent throughout.

---------

Next up is Craig Hordlow.

An intervention happened to me because I had been sending a lot of negative emails to the creative services team at my company telling them flash has no value at all. So I stand here now before you as a recovering flash hater. I was cured by learning about the workarounds! It’s all about exceptions.

Why did I end up in an intervention? There are two audiences on your website. Search engines and humans. But we also have 2 producers - the designer and the SEOs. You typically hear an SEO say don’t use flash and avoid it, and designers say use it, it’s cool.

Rich Intenet Applications (RIAs) are here to stay. You need to be prepared to deal with them. Last year Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were interviewed at a conference, and Bill Gates said about RIAs – “We’ll look back at this as one of the great periods of invention”. So SEOs can’t keep saying don’t use flash and emerging RIAs!

I spoke at an adobe conference about RIAs and SEOs. I reviewed techniques to accommodate rich internet applications. Here is one I came up with that I call my CSS Silver Bullet. Ironically the first time I implemented this was on Adobe’s website. If you look at the Creative Suite 3 homepage you will see tabs, navigation elements that if you were to click it would lead to a whole new page, but the URL doesn’t change. A first reaction by an SEO is – that’s bad, we need a unique URL on every page! Well, yes, but no. You can have a page that is largely in flash, but the flash needs to be embedded. The workaround is that there is a tab you can click that can have a degree of visibility that does not compete with flash, or the SEO content just unravels when that is clicked. All you need is one little tab to maintain the SEO integrity of a flash page. We are using JavaScript to toggle through that search engine friendly content. The content is typically kept in CSS. Unless the user hovers or clicks, the user does not see the content. So how is this CSS table thing useful? All you ask of the designer is to create one SEO tab!

So what is the objective? To let the RIA developer or designer have their freedom.

However, there are some considerations:

- Do not abuse this technique.
- Never make the trigger invisible
- Have integrity about the content you place in your tabbed area.

Developers are way ahead of the search engines’ ability to index this content. So it beckons the question – when the hell are the search engines going to catch up?

I think we need the text-based sites for another 5 years or more. Google will rely increasingly on its Google websmaster tools to handle issues in general. The engines will eventually (way in the future) rely on a hybrid model of personalization, click-metrics, RIA indexing, and text-base indexing.

Coverage was provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promedia Corp.

Contextual Ads Track
Earning Money From Contextual Ads
This session looks at the way publishers can generate revenue by carrying contextual ads offered by major networks. Learn about some programs out there and tips on getting more from the ads you carry.
Moderator:

* Chris Boggs, Search Engine Watch Expert and Manager, Search Engine Optimization, eMergent

Speakers:

* Bryan Vu, Manager, AdSense Online Sales and Operations, Google
* Cynthia Tillo, Product Evangelist for Advertising Services, Adobe Systems
* Jennifer Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com
* David Singh, Head of Search Practice Area, Underscore Marketing

JenSense is up first.

What are the most common sites for monetization? COntent rich sites, blogs, business sites, UGC, social media sites, forums, password protected pages, and searches

How do you want to monetize? You need to balance user experience with monetization. If your goals are that you want repeat visitors, you need to make user experience the priority. If you just want to make money, your priority is monetization. It's difficult to achieve both but it can be done.

When shouldn't you monetize with contextual advertising?
If you're a business selling products, why would you entice customers to click ads rather than buy from you? Similar, business sites that sell services have the same problem.
Any sites with content that is against AdSense polices: hacking, gambling, adult, designer imitations, weapons, etc.

Beyond AdSense text ads - there are more than just text ads: image ads, video ads, link ad units, CPA and referral ads, AdSense for search, and AdSense for Mobile.

Common AdSense problems and solutions:
- Section targeting - emphasize a section on your site and deemphasize navigation, for example
- Add meta tags - this can be helpful
- Proximity keywords
- Contact Google: use this as a last resort (only if you're seeing golf ads on a site about knitting, for example)

Low CTR Rate - how can I ge a higher CTR rate?
- Get better positioning but consider user experience priority
- Change title colors - hyperlink blue and same as other outgoing links
- Borders vs. no borders: it actually works better sometimes.
- Image ads: especially on pages that are very text heavy.

AdSense Secrets
- Enable image ads on AdSense for an image-only secondary placement. Add a second ad unit that is image only - not many text ads on the page - different visual for people on the site.
- Also helps you take advantage of CPM ads.

Ensure that the ad unit with the highest CTR appears first in HTML code.
- This ad unit will generally have the highest earing ads.
- Use multiple channels to confirm highest
- Don't confuse appearing first on the page with appearing first in HTML - look at your code
- In a case study, there was a 25% earnings increase

One ad unit a page can make more money than two or three combined
- More is not always better
- People end up clicking on the 2ndand 3rd ad units, it may mak less EPC than if they clicked on the first ad unit
- Longer pages are the exception
- Do A/B testing

Be aware that your filter list will cost you revenue
- Blocking ads will result in lower paying ads appearing, it will not free up ad space for more higher paying ads to appear
- Use the filter to block ads that are competitors, are grossly mistargeted, advertising something inappropriate for audience
- Case study: publishers with 150+ sites on filter list increased earnngs by 35% when he reduced the list to 14

Use your allowed sites with caution
- Will no longer show ads on cached pages
- Adding google.com and yahoo.com will not work
- IP addresses only for all cache IPs
- Only use in specific cases

Show AdSense on pages hidden behind a login: if you have a members only or premium content section, you can allow the media partner bot to view the content to display targeted ads.
- "Site Authentication"
- Fairly new feature

Using Ad links on your sites
- Navigation
- Footer

Carefully selected referral ads
- Must be extremely targeted
- Don't simply select high $ CPA

Takeaways:
ALWAYS do A/B testing
Experiment with different placements, colors, sizes, styles
Consider impact of being too ad heavy
Look beyond traditional AdSense text ads and experiment with other formats

Next up is David Singh.

Brief history of agency side, how to make it better, and the future.

Brief history of agency side:
- Reach was ing and the age of arbitrage
- Search marketers drove contextual buys
- Search marketers applying same principles in a media buying environment

How to make it better
- No more silos!
- Communication/education
- Approach as media buying
- Agencies filter out poor sites and publishers filter out poor ads

The future?
- Behavioral and contextual merge
- More control on the agency side
- More control on the publisher side
- Users have a voice

David Ogilvy "I do not regard advertising as entertaiment or an art form but as a medium of information." It's all about relevant information. Better information is shared when agencies and networks come together and we have that information to give to consumers.

How did we get here? Back awhile ago, reach was king over quality and user experience. We didn't have affective audience measurement and it was all about maximizing impressions.
Users rebelled: banner blindness. We couldn't ignore the users but the users could ignore us. Contextual promised more.

What are the consequences? Rise of arbitrage. People would buy cheap clicks and send the users to a website that had nothing and force them to cick on an ad. It was traffic but bad traffic. It didn't help that agencies used search tactics in contextual.
Fallout: less targeted ads and less targeted placements.
The bottom line is that advertisers view contextual ads as less effective.

How can we make it better?
- No more silos. We're getting to a point where the user is going through many different applications from email to search to social media. They have different needs and wants. We need to understand that and what is really relevant for them.
- Communication: break down barriers, networks should take the lead, publishers and agencies should educate each other which improves the quality of placement
- Agencies need to take responsibility. We need to look at contextual as its own channel. A unique channel equals unique metrics. Some tactics don't work the same way as for other sites.
- Utilize control mechanisms - utilize site filters and ad filters.

The future: convergence with behavioral and contextual. Google acquired DubleClick, Yahoo has RightMedia, Microsoft has aQuantive. With this, we can give them more quality ads. The upside? Quality = paying a premium for that click.

Agencies - quality control: no blind buys, better targeting and filtering features
Publishers - quality control: choose ads, give users a voice
Algorithmic maturity: know good from the bad, better ad matching to sites

Next up is Cynthia from Adobe. She talks about how to monetize your PDF documents.

Adobe realized that there are valuable PDF documents out there. When we publish the content online, they're often doing it in PDF format.

A few months ago, Ads for Adobe PDF was launched. You can generate revenue for your PDF documents just as you can for your website. This was partnered with Yahoo. You can earh money and it's contextual ads. The ads are also dynamic. It also supports a viral mode for distributing content.

Top 5 inspiring ideas to take advantage of the service:
5. Digital versions of articles
4. Newsletters
3. Ebooks
2. Digests and compilations
1. Archives

She ends with a quote: "As for editorial content,that's just the stuff you separate the ads with" - Lord Thomson of Fleet

Brian Vu from Google is next: Earning money with AdSense

There's an ecosystem and Google is still learning about it. He doesn't support these books that want to advertise AdSense cash machines or AdSense domination tools.

The thing that's tricky is maintaining the balance. Some things include the switch from the background of ads to be nonclickable to be clickable. That reduced the percentage of accidental clicks. Also MFA sites are problematic.

There's a decision making hierarchy: There is no president of AdSense.

Transparency - publisher performance reports and ad review center for publishers, more blog updates

Expand the ecosystem: using DoubleClick, Feedburner, Video, Mobile, etc. - expand opportunities for publishers