August 2008 Archives

I was in Boston for a bit this week, I have some pictures in the video. Google Suggest is now the defaul behavior on Google.com but how does that impact SEMs? Google AdWords make the quality score, more real time. Google might be paying less attention to anchor text? Was there a PageRank update? Yahoo started indenting search results. Yahoo Site Explorer is testing a new look and information. Google is testing displaying ads at the bottom. AdSense ads sometimes wont show up in the Google Cache. Most SEOs are scared of search penalties. Did you miss SES San Jose, we have full coverage of the sessions. Check out more details at SERoundtable.com.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Google Suggest Becomes Search Default
• Google Suggest to Change the Ways of Search Engine Optimization
• Google AdWords New Quality Score Announcement
• Google Algorithm Altered: Less Emphasis Placed on Anchor Text
• Google PageRank Update Observed
• Yahoo Begins to Indent Search Results
• Yahoo! Site Explorer Gets a Facelift
• Google Displays Ads at Bottom of Search Results
• Google AdSense Stops Displaying on Google Cache Results?
• Search Engine Penalties Are Scary, Says Most SEOs
• SES San Jose 2008 Coverage

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

I may not be able to mail schwag outside of the United States.

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: August 29, 2008"

Happy last week of August and happy 30th wedding anniversary to my parents! (Yes, it is today!)

While most of you are preparing for a 3 day weekend, we're hoping to give you some good reading material. This week, we've seen news about Google (surprised?) and IE8, among a few other smaller things. Here we go...

Google Suggest to Change the Search Landscape

We've received confirmation that Google Suggest is becoming the default for searchers. That is, Google will suggest keywords for searchers with a drop-down box. It's actually rather frightening for search engine marketers for a variety of reasons that have been voiced earlier this week. For one, long tail optimization is likely shot (though many of our commenters disagree). Additionally, if your visitors make a misspelling, you're SOL even though you optimized your site for that misspelling. Yeah, I know. It sucks.

Google's Anchor Text Algorithm Changes

SEMs are speculating that Google is reducing emphasis on anchor text for rankings, which is something that many people feel is the "biggest flaw" of the Google algorithm. For those fixated on anchor text rankings, it's about time that you optimize other parts of your site too!

Google PageRank Updates

This week, we also saw some PageRank updates for Google. It's a bit too soon as some forum members observe, but hey, it gives them something to talk about.

Google Runs More Ad Tests

Google is also testing ad placement and is trying something different: ads on the bottom of the SERPs. I'm waiting for the day when Google tests ads on the top, left, right, and bottom of the SERPs. Anyone want to make a mockup screenshot of what that'd look like?

Google AdSense Stops Displaying on Cached Pages

It seems that some people are no longer seeing Google AdSense on cached pages. It's probably a bug, but it's noteworthy all the same because Rae spotted the opposite, almost, when she blogged that Twitter may be cloaking to show AdSense in their cache. Interesting.

Google Analytics to Show AdSense Data

Cool news for many: Google Analytics may start showing Google AdSense data, a welcome change for those who want more integration. After all, Google has integrated AdWords statistics in Analytics since like, forever, and it'd be cool to empower publishers to see similar statistics.

Most SEOs Fear Penalties

We polled the audience and got some results: the majority of SEOs don't like Google penalties. I'm wondering if the minority is apathetic toward optimization or they feel that they are optimizing perfectly (or not at all).

Try Out Google Ad Manager Today

Google Ad Manager is now available to all publishers. It's a pretty nifty tool and something you should look into if you need to manage your website advertisements. If you don't know how to use it, read Barry's detailed explanation.

IE8 Beta 2 Out, but Yahoo Doesn't Care

Is it ironic that on the day IE8 beta 2 rolled out, Yahoo decided to launch a Firefox 3 promotion? I don't know if it was planned, but it certainly is interesting given the potential partnership we once talked about. In any event, IE8 is out and Danny has analyzed the searching features within IE8. Overall, I'm noticing that a lot of people want IE8 to include a download manager and publishers are a bit wary that IE8 will come out of the box with an ad blocking tool. I must say that even though I don't care if people use ad blocking software, this totally bites. People should be able to opt in for this -- it shouldn't be something Microsoft chooses for its users.

Have a great weekend!

Google has released a new Java Client Library for the AdWords API. In version 2.1.0, minor fixes have been made which include removing j2ee dependencies, fixing dependencies in build.xml, and reducing the size of the jar by 3 times.

You can download the new library here.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Google has confirmed that they are rolling out some tests to display different ad placements throughout the search results pages. In this particular instance, Google apparently is trying to display advertisements on the bottom of the SERPs. We're familiar with ads on the right side of the search results, but have you ever seen ads on the bottom?

I suppose not.

However, AdWordsAdvisor confirms that they are running a test on the Australian version of the Google search engine. Screenshots are not available but it'd be nice to see if they settle on it.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Update by Barry Schwartz: Google has tested displaying AdWords at the bottom of the search results in the past, we have a post from 2005 on that. I have also written a longer post at Search Engine Land on why Google may be testing this out and possibly, why this may become the default.

Also, Stephan Kopp commented with a link to a screen capture of this in action.

Tamar wrote a piece named Do Search Penalties Worry You? I had her add a poll asking SEOs if they are scared of search engine penalties.

The 98 responses are back and it is about split. 56% are afraid of search penalties while 44% are not afraid of search penalties. Personally, I would be afraid of a penalty, even if I was to be hit by collateral damage. I am surprised that more SEOs are not afraid.

Here is the break down:
:: Yes said 55 respondents or 56%
:: No said 43 respondents or 44%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread is requesting that Google add a negative keyword filter tool for Google Webmaster Tools.

Google AdWords gives advertisers the ability to tell Google, I don't want traffic for these keyword phrases or keywords. At least one webmaster requested that this feature would be useful for him on the organic SEO front.

Typically, most people don't mind getting traffic for any and all keywords, as long as that traffic is free. With AdWords, you don't always want to pay for traffic, especially if that traffic doesn't convert. But in the organic side of things, even if you rank well for a weird and unrelated keyword, it is not necessarily costing you much to be there (outside of bandwidth and server resources). So even if you have a horrible conversion rate, who cares?

I agree with John of Google, "I think that's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it would be something that would be feasible." Yes, this is an incredibly interesting idea. Implementing such a feature in Webmaster Tools can get somewhat complicated. Do you do it on a page by page basis or site level or sub domain level?

I assume the added hints provided to Google would be useful. Think about it, potentially a site is related about a specific topic, but is unrelated to an infinite number of topics and keywords. I often do see webmasters question why they rank for a particular keyword phrase, when their sites have nothing to do with that phrase. But they don't mind the traffic. However, providing Google with a negative keyword list might aid Google in understanding your site. Just don't let your competitors gain access to your Webmaster Tools account. :)

Do you think it would be useful? Here is a poll:

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

In July, we reported that Google is now able to better crawl and index content within Flash files. Since then, time has gone on but most SEOs continue to recommend that you stay away from Flash when building a search engine friendly site.

A new Google Groups thread takes a new look at how Google handles Flash content. In the thread Beu was able to bring back a former Googler, Bergy, to respond to some of these questions.

So if you are interested in getting into the details of how Google may index Flash content, check out the Google Groups thread.

Bergy's general recommendation is still to avoid using Flash when possible:

My advice is the same advice I've given for a good long while: Build your site first in HTML. Style it using CSS. If you must, do simple user interaction in Javascript. If you cannot resist, include multimedia content in Flash. However, remember that each of the standards evolved into their role for a reason, and while other technologies have fallen by the wayside, Flash fills the niche for highly interactive and multi-media experiences on the web. Don't use it for something when there's already a standard whose output can be easily parsed, easily processed, and whose openness makes its processing easier for browsers and searchbots.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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: August 28, 2008"

Earlier this week, we reported that Google Suggest was going to become more mainstream -- that is, that it would be the search default. Essentially, Google would "choose" the search phrases you were aiming to search for. This decision has been already challenged as search engine marketers wonder the consequences of this decision.

On Sphinn, lots of debate is cropping up about how this will change the face of SEM -- for good. In one post, we see 9 ways how the decision will impact search marketing. Some of these include the negative impact to long tail searches, more traffic to regional sites, and less opportunity to capitalize on misspellings, among others.

In another post, Google Suggest is thought to "completely change the query landscape" because the drop-down box may offer you suggestions that will change your mind on the search phrase you may have aimed to look for initially. The same concerns (capitalization on misspellings and long tail optimization) are brought up in this post as well.

However, that's not all. Martin Bowling explains that Google Suggest is a reputation management nightmare. Using an illustration for Obama, one sees that a lot of 'common' searches include 'obama antichrist' and 'obama muslim,' search phrases you wouldn't think of (or would you?). Because of effective reputation management, though, the actual SERPs for "Obama" hardly show any of those negative pages, but the bitter taste doesn't really leave your mouth. This can eventually grow over time and the reputation management dangers could increase. Indeed, that is a bit worrisome.

There are a lot of related discussions on Sphinn:

• 9 Ideas How Google Suggest Could Change Search Marketing
• Google Suggest Will Greatly Change Keyword Referrers
• Google Suggest(s), A New Reputation Management Nightmare

On September 16th in Trumbull, CT, Vanessa Fox will speak about how marketing will enhance your search traffic. It should be a good talk and this blogger may actually be there to liveblog it for the Search Engine Roundtable community.

Here's the information in case you want to see the famous Vanessa in the flesh:

Where: Trumbull Marriott Merritt Parkway - Trumbull, CT (Near Bridgeport, Milford and Stratford)
When: Sept. 16, 2008 from 6:30PM-9:00PM
Speaker: Vanessa Fox, formerly with Google and Zillow; Currently with Search Engine Land and Ignition Partners
Cost: Free to SEMNE Members and $39 for non-members until Sept 1, 2008 when it will be $49.

More information about the event is on the SEMNE website.

Hopefully, we'll see you there!

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Yesterday, Sam pinged me with a screenshot of Yahoo's explicit endorsement of Firefox 3.

The link takes you to http://downloads.yahoo.com/firefox/ which only seems to work on IE at this time (if you use FF to access that page, it will ask you to download the Yahoo toolbar instead).

Ironically, the same day that users spotted this Firefox 3 endorsement, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was released. On the IEBlog, users can see the new features available to them in the newest version of Internet Explorer. On a similar note, Danny Sullivan reviewed IE8 with how it relates to search functionality.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums, DigitalPoint Forums (#2), and Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread has early discussion on the topic of what to do about a penalized site. Should the webmaster destroy the domain and start on a new one or should he/she clean up the site and wait for Google to reinclude the site in the index? There are pros and cons to both avenues.

It totally depends on how bad your penalty is and what you did to warrant it. It depends on how new or old the site that got penalized is. It depends on how many quality links and trust you earned on the old site. Is it a throw away domain?

In most cases, I would say that it is best to clean up the penalized site, as opposed to starting new. But what do you think? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has a detailed discussion around the topic of Google spider, GoogleBot, crawling too much. Sometimes servers can be overwhelmed by all the traffic it gets and automated crawlers, such as GoogleBot, can add a tremendous amount of stress to a server that is already stressing. Most webmasters are not in the position of banning GoogleBot from accessing their sites, so what can you do?

Here are some of the tips from the thread, including tips from Google representatives:

• Make sure GoogleBot is really GoogleBot and not some spammer. More on that over here and here.
• If you have a large site, limit or instruct GoogleBot on what it can or cannot crawl via the robots.txt file.
• Some URLs might be more "expensive" to be crawled than others (i.e. static pages versus large dynamic and graphic rich pages.
• Do you have 2 or 3 times the amount of pages indexed by Google, as you have actual product pages on your site? If so, why?
• Redirect any temporary URLs or tracking URLs using a 301
• Set the Google Crawl Rate, in Webmaster Tools, more on that over here

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

About three months ago, we reported that the Google AdWords API Traffic Estimator figures were off. Since then, nothing much has changed, but Google announced that they have made changes that should help stabilize those figures and make them more accurate.

A Google Groups thread has a post from AdWords API Advisor saying:

I wanted to follow up on an issue that was brought up a few months ago. The engineering team has recently made a change to the Traffic Estimator service that could address the issues some folks were reporting regarding "spiky" results that varied too much over the course of several requests.

There has been no confirmation yet from AdWords API users that the numbers are fixed and looking to be accurate.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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: August 27, 2008"

On the Microsoft adCenter blog, we're informed that there is a brand new "keyword research tool to help you more efficiently find keywords and plan campaigns in adCenter."

The tool will provide suggested keywords, the ability to add keywords to an ad group, and also provides "audience insights" which are demographic tools.

All of these additions sound great, but the demographic information should be especially useful!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A few months ago, we reported on Google Popular Picks -- topics that webmasters are interested in but may not have an "official" voice from the Google Webmaster Team (yet!). In a Google Groups thread, the Google team asks webmasters again what they want Google to answer questions for.

The rules are simple: have a topic in mind that will benefit webmasters everywhere, don't focus on any specific website issue, and avoid in-depth discussions.

So far, people are asking questions relating to Google's decision to incorporate Google Suggest (which is a great question especially as it relates to SEO), reconsideration requests, sitelinks explanations, and others. Get your suggestion in today!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Several Google Groups threads have been created in the last two weeks from disgruntled members who are running into issues with Feedburner In particular, their subscriber numbers are plummeting, which often occurs when Feedburner stops recording a service (and which Feedburners are somewhat used to at this time). But lately, forum members are also complaining about their subscriber numbers dropping completely -- to zero.

Feedburner has stayed mum about any acknowledgment of the problem, but there are over 7 threads that relate to this issue, which puts the Feedburner problems in "serious issue" zone. Of course, the reduced number reporting doesn't impact everyone, but for those who are affected, it's indeed a hassle.

This seems to have happened for the past two weeks after the Feedburner Ad Network has shut down, though there are suspicions that this could have been happening for a lot longer than that. In any event, the reports gathered come from around the same time that the Feedburner Ad Network shut down. It's possible that the issues are related, but no one is absolutely certain.

The following Google Groups threads discuss the problems:

1. Has feedburner ever worked correctly?
2. Site visitor 0
3. my visitor stat counts stopped - AGAIN - mid-day, 8/19
4. subscribers have dropped to 0 for nearly a week
5. Subscriptions down to 0
6. Huge sudden drop in Subscriber count overnight !!
7. Zero Subscribers Again

People are disappointed with Feedburner as seen on Twitter as well.

This list is by no means exhaustive.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that many publishers have started to notice that their Google AdSense ads are not showing up when someone accesses their pages via the Google cache.

For example, a recent Google cache copy of my personal blog does not show the AdSense ad at the top right of my blog. It simply does not render on the page. Typically, it would show to the right of the linkedin logo.

Some theories are that it is related to the Allowed Sites AdSense feature, but I don't use that for my personal blog. Others just think it is a temporary Google bug. Time will tell.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's ad serving tool, Google Ad Manager (google.com/admanager/), which launched as a beta in March is now open to all publishers. If you are a publisher using OpenAds, OpenX, phpAdsNew or a similar product, you may want to strongly consider switching to this free hosted platform.

I personally use it on this site and I have incredibly happy with Google Ad Manager for a long time. Why? (1) I don't have to worry about my server hosting the ads, (2) I don't have to patch it for hackers, (3) I don't have to pay for extra server capacity and bandwidth and (4) it is easy to use.

If you are interested in giving it a shot, I strongly suggest you use my tutorial named How To Set Up Google Ad Manager On Your Site or Blog to get started. Google Ad Manager has a ton of features, but my tutorial should get you started and then, you can explore the other features.

Why is Google providing a free hosted ad serving tool?

(1) To get more publishers using AdSense, because they make it incredibly easy to rotate AdSense ads with direct ads.
(2) To get metrics and data from larger publishers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums.

We have been covering the issues with search ranking checkers since beginning of this month. At first, we thought it might be related to WebPosition Gold only, but it was not, it impacted most, if not all, scraper based rank checking tools, checking Google's search results. A week ago, WebPosition Gold hinted that a fix is coming to their software, despite that Google hates rank checkers. But no fix has come yet, as far as I know.

To make things worse for rank checking products that scrape Google, it seems like Google is dynamically messing around their HTML structure to confuse the scrapers.

The continued discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld shows signs of this. One member, pageoneresults, said:

Ah-ha, they've got some sort of dynamically generated thing going on with the output. Every 24 hours it is scheduled to generate a variation in the html output. Google just put it on auto-pilot after testing these past few weeks. < Me "Tin Hat" is always on during these types of discussions. :)

After that post, member sc0ttkclark said the format changed once again.

It seems like Google may have implemented a feature that is transparent to searchers but can totally mess up rank checking tools. This is not just impacted WebPosition Gold, but all scraper based tools, including the SEO Firefox plugin, which is being discussed at Cre8asite Forums.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

Update: Google's JohnMu directed me to a Google Blog post named Search experiments, large and small, where he said, "I imagine it might be more due to" that blog post. I was away when Google posted that, but as John said, it does look to be very related.

Google announced that the quality score metrics are more real time based on a per-query level, now. Not that this has been implemented on everyone's campaigns yet, but it will happen soon enough. Since then, advertisers have been noticing anomalies with the quality score being reported by Google.

For example, a minimum bid of $0.05 typically had a "Great" quality score in AdWords. But now people are seeing a quality score as marked as "OK." Here is a picture:

When I click through to see more details on why this keyword only has an "OK," I notice there is nothing I can do better here:

Keyword Relevance: No problems found. Landing Page: No problems found. Landing Page Load Time: No problems found. (Load time is faster than the average in your server's geographic region.)

Several advertisers have also noticed this and are discussing it at WebmasterWorld. They think it may be a bug related to the new quality score metrics that are coming out way.

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: August 26, 2008"

The Official Google Blog has acknowledged that it will begin rolling out Google Suggest, which will let you formulate queries with more ease, reduce spelling errors, and save keystrokes. An example screenshot is below:

It's about time, but one wonders if this is happening because of Yahoo's success with Search Assist. While Google has had this technology for years, are they playing "catch up"?

In terms of SEO, there are concerns that this will affect long tail searches and those looking to capitalize on misspelled keywords. Only time will tell if this is indeed to be the case.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Vanessa Fox blogged about her experience at SES San Jose last week. She attended the highly talked about White Hat, Black Hat session and explained her findings from the perspective of an individual who worked at a search engine. When it comes to white hat, she says that there are guidelines to follow and if they are violated, you may suffer penalties. When dabbling in shades of gray, she talks about the specific guidelines and gives you the opportunity to consider whether they make sense in this technological environment, whether the techniques work, and whether the techniques are commonplace. She concludes with an important point:

When people who aren’t experienced in the intricacies of SEO look for information and they see statements like “these are white hat reasons to cloak” and “all paid links aren’t bad”, they can be led astray and think that those things adhere to search engine guidelines.

Forum members consider her post "compulsory reading." One summarizes his own thoughts behind Vanessa's blog post: "To cut a long story short, if a website is optimized for humans it is sure to get high rankings."

On the other hand, should hat colors be defined by a specific set of guidelines? Halfdeck says no:

Its an interesting take, but I don't define hat colors based on Google guidelines. There are cases where a site owner doesn't violate any of Google's guidelines but still manages to publish 100,000 spammy pages for monetary gain.

This is a good point as well.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

In a Google Groups thread, a forum member worries that Google is spotting the wrong character encoding for his web site. In particular, he states that Google is finding that the site is US-ASCII rather than UTF-8.

JohnMu says that this is not a problem, however.

In general, especially for mostly English language content, there is no big difference since US-ASCII (7-bit ASCII) is a subset of UTF-8. English language content can be seen as either type, so it doesn't really matter which one we determine. Also keep in mind that while we trust that YOU ;) are able to give us the correct content-type, this is not always the case on the web in general, so sometimes we try to determine it ourselves. That could mean that we recognize it as being US-ASCII even though it could also be seen as UTF-8.

According to John, the only times he's encountered Google reporting wrong encoding was when there was an actual issue wrong with the site, so in other words, this should not be a serious issue.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Eric Enge interviewed Googler Maile Ohye relatively recently and provided an interesting summary of the interview on his blog. In the interview, Maile talks about the WebmasterTools API (especially with regards to extracting link data), using sitemaps for discovery, spam reports, paid links and PageRank, Flash indexing, and geographic targeting. Of particular importance to forum members was Maile's statement that Flash indexing has improved and now links that Google is able to discern actually pass PageRank.

Eric does a great job talking about all these features and functions on his blog post, and Maile also does a wonderful job explaining the variety of offerings, so have a read.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Are you a Google AdSense publisher? Do you have a Google Analytics account? If so, you may be in for a surprise, since there's a rumor circulating that Google Analytics may soon include Google AdSense data. This information comes from thegooglecache.com (where the post has been pulled) and Amit Agarwal, and this has subsequently been reported on Search Engine Land, where screenshots are available. One such screenshot is shown below:

Many forum members are excited at this possibility. One says that it "might "eliminate the hassle of comparing adsense impressions to google analytics page views," which is certainly true. It's better to combine the greatest features than to have them scattered throughout for sure.

The only concern is for those who share their analytics data with clients or colleagues; in this case, those sharing analytics data may not want others to see financial information. However, you can likely use a filter -- or Google may come up with a good solution to hide this information from those sharing the analytics account.

Forum discussion continues 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: August 25, 2008"

Back in the day when reciprocal linking was useful, some webmasters were trigger happy and aimed to link to everything that would link back, even if there was no relevancy from site to site. Over the past few years, many of those reciprocal links were not as reciprocal as they used to be, as other webmasters became savvier and realized there was likely no value in these links.

With this being the case, a webmaster has looked into his links and noted that it's probably about time that he should revamp his "directory" of links. Should he dump everyone (especially the irrelevant links) or just a few select individuals who aren't linking back and aren't relevant either?

Forum members at WebmasterWorld suggest to keep only the relevant links (and pages that actually exist) and inform all webmasters that these links are to be dropped. Additionally, you don't need to necessarily aim for a 100% reciprocal link ratio. Instead, it should be "somewhere between 30-80% [reciprocal link ratio] which shows the search engines you are linking for your end user and not necessarily for reciprocation."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld forum member decided to experiment with his title tags and made some slight adjustments. Consequently, he noticed a 65% decrease in traffic.

Is this the end for him? It's possible, as one forum member says:

Unless you are a super trusted authority site (ie you can throw up a page on a long tail and rank Top 3 in an hour), then Google is very cranky about title changes lately.

The particular forum member advises against changing a lot of title tags at once, as this could be very dangerous. WebmasterWorld administrator Tedster has agreed with this and says that Google is also sensitive to other changes, including keywords in the alt element and links in the footer (at least if it's a relatively new site which was launched several months before).

In this case, forum members suspect that this could be an over-optimization penalty.

It's best to make some decisions slowly before you do anything that can put your site traffic and rankings at risk.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Patrick Altoft blogged a recent finding that Google seems to have changed its algorithm and placed less emphasis on anchor text (versus on-site optimization). His theory (which is purely from observations at this point) is that Google is altering the algorithm because anchor text is currently the ranking algorithm's biggest flaw. There are a variety of reasons for this but Patrick specifically notes that the "best" link (as deemed by Google) for anchor text may not be the most ideal one after all.

Forum members are overall interested in this discovery and related developments. Since it may help thwart spammers, this may be a good direction for the algorithm to be headed. However, it may be related to the number of backlinks from a single source, as one forum member says:

It is more likely that Google would reduce value of backlinks with the same anchor text that come from the same domain, ie having 1000 backlinks from one domain using same anchor text could be worse than having 2-3 backlinks from the same site.

On the other hand, it may be that Google is starting to be a lot more privy to semantic indexing and matching up similar keywords with other anchor text. However, it's debatable that this is the case if Google is trying to reduce emphasis on anchor text altogether -- which makes sense in many cases (including in the paid links scenario which the blog post did not touch upon).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Just a few days ago, forum members across multiple forums started observing a new Google PageRank update. Forum members believe that Google is lifting PageRank penalties on sites that sold links, but I beg to differ.

It looks like a PR penalty lifting. At least this happened to one of my sites which sold links. No change on my white hat sites.

(Maybe that guy was just lucky.)

Others have confirmed that the PageRank penalty has been lifted, or so that's what they feel is the case. However, it's not necessarily the case that a penalty has been lifted as another forum member points out. However, everyone agrees for the most part that there are PageRank changes that have only come into effect in the past few days, though some are doubting that there is a PageRank update because it's just "too early."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and 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: August 22, 2008"

Can you believe the summer is almost over -- for real? And can you believe that SES San Jose is over? I can't--and I still wish I went! (As you could probably tell, I didn't. I'm moving in 2 weeks!)

Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2008

So what did you miss this week? Well, we had some nice bloggers help us with great coverage of Search Engine Strategies. All in all, the 4 days were packed with great informative sessions and we have the liveblogs for you.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4

Thanks again to our livebloggers, Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs, Sheara Wilensky & Avi Wilensky of PromediaCorp, Carolyn Shelby aka Cshel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, and Dave Rohrer.

Google AdWords Quality Score Update

Yesterday, Google announced that the quality scores were changing in real time. They also added in a relatively professional way that they'd be raising costs. Forum members are not particularly pleased with that part.

Yahoo Redesigns Explored

This week, we've seen Yahoo indent site results in a format that is similar to the layout we're familiar with on Google. It's not all that bad. Yahoo Site Explorer has also been redesigned with several new features. I recommend that you sign up.

Google Integrates 404 Widget Experience

Got a 404? Google has a widget points you to the proper page. Except it didn't work at first -- mostly because the server was returning a 200 response on our test page. Google then fixed it but JohnMu tells us that we shouldn't be returning a 200 response on any of these pages. So yeah -- it was our fault for the most part, but we has fun blogging that. ;)

Will Your Penalized Site Get Trusted Again by Google?

If your site is penalized for doing something wrong, does Google hold it against you forever? According to a recent discussion on the topic, no, if you clean up, you're given a chance. I like that computers are so nice to us. I wish people were just as nice. ;)

Desperate for Link Exchanges? Hit Up Google Groups!

If email fails you and you can't get those links you're begging for, you can always troll on Google Groups. But fortunately, the folks at Google have a good sense of humor and respond in kind. ;)

Is the Apple Store Cloaking?

As you may or may not know, RustyBrick is building a Jewish prayer book for the iPod Touch and iPhone. We've had a lot of success with it thus far, but Barry recently discovered that the Apple store may be cloaking. In this particular case, the Google cache shows information that is only available in the iTunes store. The big question: is the Google cache really crawling the iTunes store? (What do you think?) Thus, is this cloaking?

Google AdSense Font Tests Occurring Again

What do you think of a Google AdSense unit that matches the font of your site altogether too well -- or not at all? Well, Google is running limited tests on fonts for AdSense units. Google is looking for feedback as well, so be sure to give them your $0.02.

WebPosition Rankings Update Forthcoming

Do you rely on WebPosition? We've had a lot of recent coverage about the issue that ranking reports stopped working, and WebPosition is working on a fix that many forum members feel is going to be short-lived. We shall see.

Congratulations to Search Marketing Standard Magazine!

If you missed the announcement, we're here to tell you that Search Marketing Standard was acquired by iNET Interactive. This is a huge milestone for the print publication and great news for readers. Congratulations to you all!

Read This

If you're dependent upon the video recaps instead of the text recaps, I'm sorry to say but Barry is on vacation this weekend. Thus, you're stuck with me for this week's report. So sorry to disappoint! :)

A week ago, we blogged about the effectiveness of Google Base and the shopping SERPs. To reiterate, webmasters have wondered whether Google Base would help them achieve better traffic or if there was no change when utilizing this other Google product.

In a blog comment, an anonymous retailer says that using Google Base has helped him/her get an increase in traffic and the person encourages others to try it out.

On WebmasterWorld, many people say that it has helped them as well. Netmeg, for example, says that "everyone we've submitted a feed for is doing surprisingly well with it."

"What if you don't have reviews?" one member asks. A useful tip is provided:

Reviews are hard to get. We find that only 3% of the people who buy actually leave a review.

What you have to do is to break out the adwords budget a bit, get that nice badge and start driving traffic to your top 10 selling items. If you use two or three check out methods, offer some kind of discount for people to use Google check out for payment. We used a 5% off your order type of coupon we made in our Google Checkout panel if you placed your order online.

From there, service your customer and wait for the reviews.

As another forum member says that you don't have to focus your energy *all* on Google. "[T]he more shopping engines you advertise on the more reviews Google will pick up, assuming you get reviews on those other shopping sites."

Google Base program policies are here if you want to try it out.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

At the end of June, we announced the launch of Google Map Maker. Now, two months later, Google has its own update. From a Google Groups thread, we're told that Google Map Maker is now available in 57 countries.

Again, here are some features available to you when you utilize the Map Maker:

There's a Map Maker User Help document for more ways to use this tool and a Google Map Maker Group as well.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Google has new and important information about the Quality Score, according to the Inside AdWords blog. According to the AdWords team, the Quality Score is more accurate since it will be computed during every single query. Keywords will no longer be marked as "inactive for search." Also, there's a "first page bid" to replace the "minimum bid." The AdWords team explains:

First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They're based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad's Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.

Forum members are reacting with much cynicism toward this approach. On DigitalPoint Forums, a well-seasoned advertiser worries that first time bidders will "start raising bids to get on the front page when they should probably be bidding using an ROI strategy."

Over at WebmasterWorld, similar sentiment is expressed and there's a lot more confusion. What happens if an advertiser wishes to lower his bid from the first page bid? Google has yet to answer that.

Other people think this is a nicer way for Google to say that they're raising advertising costs. Surprised?

However, one advertiser says that the "first page bid" may actually help since it's saving time on testing. It's a good point but I still think the skepticism needs to be addressed as those points are a lot more worrisome.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The Yahoo Search Blog tells us that Yahoo! Site Explorer has a new interface with more dynamic features. Additionally, the redesign boasts a new Site Summary page that provides interesting statistics for sites that have been authenticated with Yahoo! Site Explorer. You can see this and more at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new/. (The blog post already has some nice comments, including a bunch of spam comments that I hope Yahoo deletes, like this: "Hi, This new tool is ok, though i haven't checked it but just uploaded my new website on low cost health insurance..." Enough said.)

Barry has already blogged about the new features on Search Engine Land and explains that the new Site Summary page gives you a nice bit of information as seen below:

+ Site URL
+ Number of pages known
+ Number of pages crawled
+ Number of host on this domain
+ Number of inlinks
+ Number of inlink domains
+ Number of outlinks
+ Number of outlink domains

Here's an image of the new interface as well:

It looks good. Thanks for the update, Yahoo!

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Over the past few weeks, my brother and I have been working on a side project at RustyBrick on building out iPhone Apps. During this process, I took detailed notice to how iTunes works, how their API functions, and how Google indexes that content and it has raised some questions in my mind.

Let me step back and take you through this. We build an iPhone or iPod Touch application for the Jewish community. It is called Siddur, which is a Jewish prayer book. In short, it has Jewish prayers and tools to aid in those prayers. The community loves it, so I wanted to share the "reviews" that are on the iTunes Store with everyone, so we looked into using the API or XML from the iTunes store. As you can see on the iPhone Siddur, we added customer reviews pulled dynamically from the XML. How did I find the XML?

When we were looking at some Google search results, I discovered this result. If you click on the link, it actually will open up iTunes on your computer but if you click on the cache link, it shows you the content you would find in the iTunes application.

Screen Shot Search Result:

Screen Shot of iTunes App in Store:

Screen Shot of Google Cache:

So I did some forum research, to find an old WebmasterWorld thread. The thread talks about Apple's relationship with Google but then interestingly enough has a link. The link is http://google.com/itunes, which then links to http://services.google.com/marketing/links/itunes. Now, that is interesting, but I can speculate on it or it can be something that is 100% unbiased and not "evil." Update: It appears that the Google iTunes link in this paragraph no longer redirect to Google AdWords. They did last night and they did in 2005. Update 2: Matt Cutts of Google explained below that the google.com/itunes link was an old promotion for music labels. Basically, Music Labels received a promo to sign up with Google AdWords to promote their music. The promo is no longer valid, so Google dropped the link. So it seems totally unrelated to this story.

So why am I uncomfortable with this? Well, not everyone has iTunes on their computer. By listing the content of what is found in iTunes, in Google, as if it was a document accessible on the web... Well, that seems not so useful. Why not label these results as "iTunes" is required, or something like that? Why not let other developers build this into Google through Sitemaps?

Yes, I know Apple provides these iTunes hyperlinks so people can easily send the link to friends to download music, movies or apps - but again, these are not real "web documents." Or maybe, I am just being too picky?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A question I get quiet often is, my site has been penalized, and I want to know if I will have to start from scratch, to earn Google's trust back? I often say that I doubt you have to start "from scratch," but I am sure you won't be at the level of "trust" you once had with Google, after they have learned that you once did something that was not so good in their eyes.

A Google Groups thread asks that question and Googler, JohnMu, responds. Here is the question:

While waiting to see if a recent Reconsideration Request is accepted, I have been wondering whether or not Google regards any domain that has ever been penalised as less trustworthy than a domain that has not.

Or is it the case that once a penalty has been removed and a site is placed back in the search index, it can compete on a level playing field - as it did before the penalty?

JohnMu of Google said:

If a site cleans up issues so that it complies with our Webmaster Guidelines, then there's generally no reason why we would treat it as something less trustworthy. Cleaning things up is always a good idea :).

I always wonder what this "trust" factor is. Can it visually look like some sort of trust slider? The more trust, the more the slider goes to the right, the less trust, the more it is to the left?

How I see it, if a site is penalized for links, the day before the penalty, Google has your trust at (let's say) a 8.5 of 10. Now, Google flagged many of your links as part of a link scheme and your site and those links fall in trust. Now your site drops to a trust value of 1.5 of 10. Now that you have been penalized, you work on cleaning up your links by getting rid of the bad links. As you do this, Google may say, okay, we now trust your site, so you slide back up to maybe a 5.5 of 10. But those old links, the bad ones, that Google once trusted, are now gone forever. So you won't reach the 8.5 of 10, like you once had.

Now that is how I envision the link side of things. I can be 100% wrong, it is just how I imagine it working.

According to Google's response, it is possible to gain all your trust back. But, for some reason, I don't think it is possible to get it ALL back overnight.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Here is the concise version of the live blogging coverage our volunteers put together at SES San Jose yesterday:

• Searching For Jobs in Search: Starting and Advancing Your Career in the Industry
• Search Advertising Tools
• Organic Listings Forum
• The Best Kept Secrets to Search
• How to Choose a Search Vendor
• Trademark Issues: What SEMs Should Know
• Fast, Free and Easy Tools to Get You Going
• Special Kelsey Group Presentation: The 3G iPhone: Local Search Demos
• Special Kelsey Group Presentation: Local 2.0: The Evolution of Local Search
• Effective Contextual Search Management
• How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively With Your IT Department to Get Stuff Done

Again, a big thank you to our volunteer live bloggers, breaking their fingers on their keyboards. Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs, Sheara Wilensky & Avi Wilensky of Promedia Corp, Carolyn Shelby aka Cshel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, and Dave Rohrer.

This panel of experts will discuss the qualities they look for in candidates, as well as strategies for career advancement in the search industry. The discussion will include:

• How have the criteria for a strong candidate evolved over the years? Are the sources that were relied on in the past different than they are today?


• How can you break into the search industry as a marketer who doesn't have direct experience with the medium?


• Can specific training jumpstart the experience necessary to enter into the search industry? What particular types of training are recommended?


• How important is training and continuing education to career advancement? What are other recommendations for career advancement?

Moderator:

Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce

Speakers:

Frank Watson, CEO, Kangamurra Media

Katie Donovan, Business Development Manager, SEMPO Institute

Ken Clark, EVP & Co-founder, Onward Search

Search Jobs: Demand is High. Look at SEMPO Job Board. Salaries are still fairly high as well.

Hiring Criteria/Skills

KC: companies are focused on what is your experience within the industry or segment they operate in as opposed to just are you a good search marketer. They want proven success in that niche.

KD: Need people skills.

FW: Someone that is going to be outgoing. Need to have certain level of confidence.

KD is finding that training sales people in SEO helps, they have the people skills and can help understand what problems the customer is having.

Audience member: better to have someone with narrow and deep skills, or wide but shallow skills. Need to look at size of company. Job seekers need to look at where they find a place they might like and what matches their skill sets and what their area of comfort.

Amazon person in audience: looking for horsepower, analytics skills and creative ability. They ask lots and lots of questions to help determine if the candidate has these skills.

FW commented to audience member that it is great to have someone that has both the marketing knowledge and the IT knowledge and can sit in the middle. KC: Don’t think there’s a perfect background to be a search marketer.

For new people, is training a good thing? KD said previous training is a good thing, SEMPO and one other are only ones with certification programs, some employers do give everyone training when they come in. Ways to prove what you can do: take a charity and do things for them. SEM Cares. KC: feels training/course does give an advantage. Be able to demonstrate something to the employer that shows you have initiative, even if it is a small project.

Breaking In/Finding Jobs

SEMPO has an RFP section, often has people with small budgets, but you might be able to get experience from them. Look at Craigslist and other online places to find small things to build up portfolio. Come to conferences like this to network with people. Affiliate marketing might be another way to prove what you can do, but may be difficult. KC: take active part in managing your reputation online. Recruiters do their research. Make sure you’re on LinkedIn.

Don’t have to write about SEO on a blog. FW wants to see your passion for something, write about what you know and what you’re interested in. DT asks panel how to do lateral transfers. How do you keep your advancement going after you’ve gone past the entry level? KC: There is an executive trail. He doesn’t have numbers to quote, but there is job creation in those higher levels.

Training

Online Training, Certifications (online courses, search engines). It’s a nice to have, but not a must have. Not like on IT side where you need to have an MCSE to get a job. Probably a couple of years to figure out which certifications will be in the highly desired. They are more beneficial for someone just getting into the field.

Advancing Your Career

FW: Become more known in the space. Get a moderator job on one of the forums. KC: ask yourself where you want to be in five years. Do I want to be a generalist or specialist? Agency or inhouse? Manager or individual contributor?

KD: just because you know you’ve done well, others may not realize. You do have to let people know about your accomplishments.

Thanks to Keri for this!

In order to get a leg up on the competition, successful Search Engine Marketers need to be armed with the latest tools of the trade. Join us as we explore a range of popular search engine advertising tools along with some important features you should be aware of. Whether you are looking for a free basic tool that will help you get started or a more advanced paid offering, our panel of experts will provide you with the insight and experience to zero in on the right solution.
Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
Yoav Izhar-Prato, Co-founder & CEO, Kenshoo LTD
Neeraj Kochhar, VP/Director of Search, SMG Search
Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
David S. Kidder, Co-Founder & CEO, Clickable

First up is Yoav from Kenshoo.

Keeping all the ingredients in place and correlation between them is the key factor. Must implement "quality management".

What is quality management? Understanding page content, behavior, and how conversions take place.

Under consumer behavior - takes 4-5 clicks on average for conversion to take place. Most of the systems in place today attribute the conversion to the last keyword used. You need to look at the whole path to the conversion. You need to be able to assign weights to first click, last click - weights needs to be allocated properly.

Another aspect is super structuring. Doesn't matter how many engines using, need one campaign management center. Use your structure across all campaigns.

Bid optimization - algorithmic and rule based. Believes in a combination of both.

Major aspect is path to conversion. Lots of keywords can contribute to the conversion. Again, assigning weights to them is critical.

Next up is Neeraj from SMG.

What is a holistic approach? Search in the context of broader cross channel communications. Looking at TV, and other channels collectively is key.

Talent - need search professionals with marketing mindsets that understand consumer behavior, ROAS, engagement and technology.

Innovation - we think of search as web based. Expanding beyond that to mobile. Agnostic to a particular device. Understand the motivation for mobile search. Understand the motivation for Google to present text results or image results.

Technology - generation efficiencies.

Methodology and approach - life cycle of a search campaign.

First piece is to understand consumers. Google Trends is a good tool for this. What other queries are consumers using? What are consumers thinking about your business? Mine search query data. Look at seasonality.

Connect - how to take the insights and build messaging, how do you target people? What mode are people in?

Measurement - key component - otherwise throwing dollars away.

Beauty of search is speed. Can do all this fairly quickly. All this happens in real time and in a dynamic way. Don't need to invest millions. Can invest small.

Holistic approach - two key components - paid and natural. With SEO there are no guarantees, but need to get all the work done. With paid search you can bid on keywords you can't rank for naturally. Want to maximize coverage on page 1. Drop off rate from Page 1 to 2 is 85%-88%. Page 1 is the true opportunity. Need to be there. Need to craft the right balance between SEO and paid.

Starts with KW list. Look at volume. Map keywords with content. Where do you need to supplement or get support from paid? Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, and other tools are great.

Must understand if search is always a meaningful platform. Can it help you if you are in the deodorant business?

Must look at entire cycle - the funnel. How are people moving on from keyword to keyword through the funnel and what do they do to prior to converting?

Finally, competitive analysis. What are you up against? What is the likelihood you will succeed?
What's your strategy relative to the competition? Always keep a holistic approach in mind.

Need a way to centrally manage all your keywords. How do you generate scale? May be running campaigns on 3 - 10 engines. Need to consolidate. Need to look at all the variables.

Measuring beyond the click. Are consumers completing the actions you want them to complete? Are they driving sales?

If doing something on TV, or radio, it's important to have search support.

That's all.

Last up is Thomas Bindl. Topic - "Tools that make SEM life easier".

Gives live demos of the following keyword tools:

Google Sets (great for generating keywords)
Digital Point keyword suggestion tool (Gives free access to WordTracker)
SEO Book keyword tool
Google Trends
Refine Labs keyword tool (pulls data from Google and shows competition and volume)
Spyfu
Keycompete

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

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

Moderator:
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media

Speakers:
Jerry West, Founder, Web Marketing Now
Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search
Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Google
Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Center, Live Search

It's the next to last session of four days at SES and it's a forum session with no set agenda, so this is a bit incomplete. My apologies in advance.

Singular vs. plural search phrases. How do they treat them different? Verma talks about search engines doing query rewriting. Buggia – sometimes will combine word into what they think is root word, sometimes they keep them separate. D'Souza also said that it shouldn't matter. Where it might be different is how much weight each term gets – should a stem get more weight? That's where you might get some variation, but not as vast as questioner found.

Variability of results among the engines. Missed explanation as to differences here. Each engine does have a different type of audience, they have different types of behaviors when they search.

Think about ranking about which types of pages to show for what pages. Indexing is what pages to index, but without any context. Try to figure out which pages are going to answers questions.

Question about searches / pages from different countries. Vanessa said it was good to set targeting for country in Webmaster Tools. There will be filtering in SERPs.

D'Souza Mentioned duplicating filtering at indexing level.

Grehan said ideal would be to have servers/host in country of target.

Buggia said top level domain is biggest clue. Having directory structure for each language does help

Vanessa: use meta language tag.

Title/keyword phrase combinations. Example of four words phrase, any subset of this would have a match, as would stems. Stuffing title tag less important than quality of content on site.

Displaying results on search engines. SERPs not showing meta descrptions. Meta descriptions are good to create a snippet when they can't easily find the text in the page (but have a lot of inlinks that talk about it).

Inbound links. Asks about page rank toolbar. Grehan says it's green fairy dust. D'Souza says it's not integers, much finer granularity.

Buggia all sites use page rank-type thing as initial base value, but so many more things go into ranking. Think of a search engine as a reputation engine.

Top five things you would focus on? You've got to be kidding if you're going to get a straight answer out of this panel for that.

Content.
Audience. Have a specific audience and people who want your content.
Internal linking
Do a site: search in Google using phrase in question, then adjust linking structure. Look at how other sites are doing this, make sure you also look natural in what you're doing with incoming anchor text links, etc.

Grehan asked what panel thought about PR sculpting.
Look at your problems, start fixing those first. Make sure you understand value to the business of things like page rank sculpting – how do you know that's what you should work on, vs. other things that would be better to work on.

Gerhan asked how important is an H tag. Diff't pieces of text on the page are rated differently. Other more important things though about content. Rainy day thing you may want to take care of, but again other stuff should fix at.

Be sure to use webmaster tools for each engine. You can get info from engines about problems they have, crawling info, and give them clues about what is going on.

Provided by Keri.

Secrets of paid and organic search? Sure, they're out there. Join us for a no-holds-barred interactive session in which veteran search engine marketers disclose some of their favorite search engine optimization and marketing tips, tricks, and secrets. While there's no replacement for old-fashioned hard work, getting the inside scoop and shortcuts to search success never hurt.

Moderator:
· Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce

Speakers:
· Katee Crawford, Online & E-mail Marketing Specialist, California Chamber of Commerce
· Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting
· Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

Q&A Panelist:
· Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready

Dana: I am so psyched about this panel. We are going to take about red hat – revenge SEO!

First up is Katee Crawford, with her is Jamie Smith, they work hand in hand so Jamie may pop in with some comments. Please welcome Katee Crawford to the stage.

Katee: I am going to be speaking to you about what we do at the California Chamber of Commerce. We are NOT tourism, everyone thinks we are. We are large business advocates and we also provide affordable and easy to use services. We provide labor law compliance info, books and software. For marketing we use PPC campaigns and started SEO as well. We do catalogs, direct mails and email campaigns – about 30 in the past year.

I am going to give you some tips in how to improve your ROI.

Educate your SEM company on all your marketing materials and products.
Joint efforts produce better results so work together.
Rethink the norm: Integrate marketing with promotional offers.
The "I deserve it" tactic works. We gave away free Starbucks cards.
Track often and evaluate honestly.

Jamie: PPC Insider Tips:

- Don't change your bid more than once every couple of days – when you run the reports, it skews your conclusions when you change your bids, and it defeats the purpose of testing
- Test special characters in your ad creative, such as TM
- Exact match all combinations of exact matched terms
- Test no spaces between words in a multiple word phrase
- Test placing phone number in ad – we found that local numbers vs. 800 numbers improve the call in rate
- Test placing .com at the end of some keywords.

Katee: We are looking forward to 2009 to improve our marketing plan. Thank you!

Eric Enge: I have 5 quick tips for you.

Syndicating content is a great way to get links, lots of websites are starved for quality content, so it solves the problem for them, and you in turn can get links with good anchor text. The bad part is that when you do syndicate content, the engines see duplicate content, and they will almost always recognize the original author – but not always.

But the solution is simple. Take the article, get a writer to work with it, and give it a spin – and you might get a different result.

Local Search: Search engine challenge: obtaining accurate data. So they use many sources, such as yellow page sites, syndicators such as LocalEze and local news sites.

Give them the data directly. All 3 major search engines give you a way to give them authenticated data directly. Give them accurate data.

Google Local: They will allow you to submit locations individually or by feed. The feed is useful for large numbers of locations. Individual submissions are verified by Google.

More on KML – "Keyhole Markup Language" – language for geographical annotation. Search engines find the location of your KML using your sitemap file.

It's good to be listed in many places. It increases the data accuracy problem. Invest the time and effort to get this data right. Services help with this but cost money.

In summary: Quality data drives rankings!!!

Getting free links from Google Webmaster Tools:

- If you don't have an account, get one!
- Add to your .htaccess file a 301 redirect from the incorrect to the right one.
- Look for malformed URLs.
- Look for the Not Found Report in the Web Crawl Errors section.

Make sure you find lost links! Sometimes sites list URLs but don't like them. Media especially is bad at this. If you can discover these situations and ask people to fix them it would be very good.

MSN Search Funnels – shows what the users intent was when they do a search term, what they search on next. You can go the other way, and see also what they search on before. You can also use search funnels to isolate problems on your website.

Dana: Next up is Richard Zwicky,

Richard: I work at Enquisite. If you don't know what we do, look it up. I will share with you today some basics about what you should know and then go a little deeper.

If you don't know this, you are missing a huge opportunity: only 1.8% of traffic comes from page 2 of the search results. Everything else comes from page 1. So spend a little of time on the pages that are on page 2 and you will increase your traffic.

Build out what the customers are actually trying to get from your site. Don't just focus on getting the traffic, but what do to with that traffic.

Links are probably the most relevant, non-page factor you can build into your SEO. You need to understand what's coming to your own site and what's coming to your competition. Also, identify sites that are citing you but not linking to you.

MSN has some great linking tools. Use linkfromdomains:www.yoursite.com.

Regional links – they matter. Think of links geographically.

Learn, learn and learn some more. There is no magic. You're competitors are probably lazier than you are. Take an active interest in continuing education.

So – when to consider going black? I have found that anyone doing SEO properly knows how black hat works, so they don't cross the line and do anything bad.

What do you do? Someone is slandering you or your business. They do it anonymously so you don't know who it is. So if you want to get rid of a bad site, do it at your own risk. Be very careful. I don't do this, but I know how to do it. Here are the steps.

Go buy a domain. Don't touch your own. Don't use your own name! Get a UPS mailbox near your opponent's address.
Go buy another domain. Don't use your own name! Put your opponent's address on your site.
Go buy another domain name with your opponents address. Go to the post office and pay for a mail redirect to your mailbox!!
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Do it again, host your sites all over the place. Never use your name.
Make sure none of your sites link to each other.
Start optimizing these sites and get good links. Link out to the same sites as your opponent. Get yourself in the same neighborhood as far as the search engines are concerned.
Link to your opponent, ask them for a link. Get indexed. Do some SEO work.
Start showing up in the SERPs.
Add more content, however you can. Reprint PR from within the industry.
Have a bunch of orphaned pages in your sitemap.
Submit the site map.
Now go out and start messing with all of these sites. Do everything bad you can think of. Go copy your opponent's content! Do it as fast as possible as soon as the content is posted and submit it as fast as possible!
Start messing up. Start copying their sitemap into your own. Remember, you look like them according to your registration info. You kind of look them as a website. It's confusing to the engines.
Keep doing more black hat and work really hard to get your site banned.
Just after you have pulled every stunt you can, and you know these sites are going to get banned, redirect to your opponent!!!!!!!!!!
[This gets a lot of laughs]

Now your opponent will get thrown out. Everything you have done looks like them and now everything bad will happen to them. But of course they bashed your site in the first place so they deserve it. Now all of what they did is going to get looked at. And if they happened to do something wrong along the way, now they are facing review. And if they get resubmitted, and they mess up in the future, the threshold for error is really low.

So what have you done? You have forced the competition to clean up their act!!!!!!!!!

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Marketers face a bewildering number of options in selecting their search marketing campaign tools and vendors, and making a decision will only become more difficult as the variety of players in the industry grows. Likewise, instead of just settling for the usual functionality, features, and pricing, search marketers are clamoring for more integrated tools and innovative solutions when they survey the various vendors. Join us for an enlightening discussion as industry veterans share insight into matching the best product offering to your company's individual search goals.
Moderator:
Jonathan Allen, Search Marketing Specialist, VNUnet.com
Speakers:
Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, DoubleClick Performics
Jeannie Moran, eCommerce Marketing Director, AutoNation

Eric from Doubleclick starts off.

Has an agency point of view. Will talk about natural and paid, and will give guidelines what to look for in a PPC provider. Also, guidelines for finding someone to bring pieces together.

8 Things to consider for hiring an SEO firm:

1- An understanding of your business, goals, and has a plan around that. Stay away from anything that feels canned, templated, or prepackaged. Need customization.

2- Alignment - someone with experience in your vertical. Need someone with expertise, or partners that have the expertise. Always question and test expertise and background.

3- Consider what your buying. Basically hiring a consultant when hiring an SEO or PPC firm. Looking for a partner to work with you in an integrated fashion. Look for someone with expertise in consulting. Find someone who is a taskmasker - will push you forward. Need to get recommendations implemented. Want someone who is pushy to get tasks and goals accomplished.

4- Equipped - Want to find a whole team that represents you. Folks that specialize in copy, keyword research, technical side - when you have that team - you get the best of both worlds. Good account management at the front end. Find a vendor that is balanced. Balance between technology and expertise is the sweet spot. Be wary of folks who tell you they have everything you need, but don't. Just like interviewing - ask for examples of work, tools they use and how they use them, and how they will help you move towards your goals.

5- Sound methodologies - SEO done right is an art and science. Need a good process, one that doesn't limit creativity. Find one methodology that is specific to SEO - like keyword methodology. Ask questions about it.

6- Leaders - you need an advocate for your goals. Having someone with the skills to understand how to talk to technologists, marketers, to digest this is important. Passion is very important. Need someone who can preach the benefits of SEO. Be careful that if they have these skills, they have the expertise to back it up. Good vision + good tool sets.

7- Education is vital. Good consultants share information. Need someone who is open about their knowledge in a simple manner. Someone who can speak in layman's terms and technically.

8- Trustworthiness. Hiring a partner, so honesty is so important. If you feel oversold or fabricated, try to trip up with questions. Get referrals. Find out the work they've done. Just like on a job interview - if you probe and ask the right questions, you will get to the right story. At the end of the day, you have to trust your gut. Have to feel good about it. Don't hire because someone is down the street. Need to find someone who matches your culture and can communicate well.

Choosing a paid search vendor:

Outsourcing is done for efficiency. Consider three things.

1- Are you going to get an account manager that will do everything? A generalist? Or will you get a specialist. Bid management is huge. Need someone with the skills.

2- Technology - need integrated API's with the engines. Frequency of reporting is close to real time. Want to know about tool sets. How do they do bid management? How do they structure campaigns?

3- Methodology - Ask what the typical launch time frame is? What goes into a launch? What is the process? Need to be as clear and organized as possible. Need consistent delivery on promises. Dig deep and ask tough questions.

How can we bring these together? There is a massive trend of clients looking for holistic search management. Old model was to find best in breed in SEO and PPC. If not working together - not thinking of it as one - leaving opportunity on the table. Need someone who an test rankings and ROI on both the SEO and PPC side.

Next up is Jeannie from AutoNation, Inc. AutoNation is the largest auto dealer group in the county.

Will present the opposite view - from the client side. What they look for. Goal is to share specifics of what worked for them.

The auto industry has been hit hard recently. There's a huge focus on where dollars are being spent.

Setting the stage. Has hired several vendors, and fired several. Can't settle.

Hiring a vendor is a partner. Going into a relationship.

5 Rules:
#1- Sign a prenup. A mutual NDA. Puts both parties at ease.
#2- Don't disrespect the family. Need to be aligned.
#3- Build trust. Set reasonable expectations. It's a two way street. Client has to build trust with agency. Need to trust what vendor is sharing. Lots of ways data can be manipulated.
#4- Be honest about dating others. Working with multiple partners can be tricky. They use multiple vendors, but they know what each other is doing.
#5- Keep everyone happy. Make sure it's worth the vendors time and your time.

Groundwork for Success.
Educate yourself in what you are buying. Need to be able to ask the right questions. Some players will guarantee positions. Must filter between pros and amateurs.

Purchasing considerations - never meet with the sales team only. Meet with someone who will be accountable with what will be done in proposal.

Make sure technology is compatible with applications already in use.

Confirm capabilities; Does the tool work on tier 1 and tier 2 engines?

Get all promises in writing.

Negotiate a trial period. A test pilot. Only do things that way now.

Always ask about hidden costs. How do you know what to ask for?

Technology is very important. Ensure that applications for tracking and reporting is not being duplicated or inflating.

Check if product works with foreign languages.

Verify API status to ensure that fees are included in contract, not additional.

Make sure you understand methodology for measurement.

Support - need a strong team. An available contact.

SEO Vendor Considerations:

1) Strong keyword research strategy. How will they determine KW's you will show up for?
2) Strong copywriting and link building.
3) Optimization plan for organic pages.
4) Measure organic conversion and ROI.
5) Proven results. Ask about failure, success, and referrals.

Paid Search Vendor Considerations:

1) PPC programs in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
2) Web traffic measurement tools to measure your precise ROI.
3) A/B testing of PPC ads and landing pages to identify the most effective campaigns.
4) Account managers that are Google Adwords Certified and Yahoo Ambassadors.

Social Media Vendor Considerations:

1) What channels are you currently active in for clients? (Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon)
2) Give examples of how channels might be used to bolster the overall SEM effort.
3) Proven results, failures, success, and referrals.

Key Takeaways:

1) Educate yourself to ask the right questions!
2) Invest time to find the right partner!
3) Agree and document billing model!
4) Start small - test vendor on small scale!
5) Monitor, measure, and optimize!

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

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: August 21, 2008"

In 2008, U.S. paid search advertisement revenue is expected to reach 15.52 billion. This represents a 31.9% increase over 2007. Despite this tremendous growth, uncertainty in recent court developments may discourage search engine marketers from purchasing keywords that are trademarked by others for fear of being found liable for trademark infringement. The presentation will include a discussion of the state of the law as well as legal ways to use another's trademark to enhance your visibility on the web.

Moderator:
· Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:
· Mark J. Rosenberg, Esq., Sills Cummis & Gross P.C.
· April Wurster, Attorney, Baker & McKenzie
· Eric Goldman, Assistant Professor & Director of the High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara University School of Law

Jeffrey Rohs introduces all the panelists.

Eric: Normally I have a strong biased opinion that I am going to try to keep in check. My goal is to outline a bit of trademark law in keyword advertising.

Trademark infringement is a popular topic. There are 4 elements of a claim in court:

1. Ownership of valid trademark.
2. Priority
3. Use in commerce in connection with the sale of goods services. There words come out of a statute. If the advertiser buys the trademark as a keyword but doesn't use the keyword in the ad copy, there's a huge split in opinion on whether or not this infringes on a trademark. We also have a geographic split – in New York it appears to be no, in the rest of the country it appears to be yes.
4. Likelihood of consumer confusion. A couple of courts say that if there is a purchase of a keyword without the keyword in the ad copy, it does not confuse the consumers. Another court says that consumers will always be confused and the plaintiff should always win. So we don't really have judges with consistent opinions. If consumers are confused, there are a variety of defenses; referencing the trademarked owner. In the Tiffany vs. Ebay case, Ebay was buying advertising on Tiffany trademarked products, and was excused because the use was nominative – "Ebay is a great place to buy tiffany products".

Some other regulations:

- State anti-keyword law: Utah spyware control act and a law in Alaska against popups. Neither of these statutes are dormant though.
- There was a frontal assault on keyword advertising in Utah, that was designed to ban keyword advertising, an assault on our entire industry. Utah screwed up a second time and they repealed the law.

Search engine trademark policies: the gist is that Yahoo and MSN have banned certain types of keyword ad buys based on the trademarks. As you know Google allows bidding on trademarked keywords, but does not allow reference of the trademark in the ad copy. This may be more helpful.

I am not a big fan of the trademarked policies. The cost of litigating is so expensive.

Jeffrey: Next up is April Wurster, a practicing attorney in the arena.

April: Good morning. I will talk to you about how a trademark owner can protect their rights.

First you want to know who is using your trademark, monitor your trademarks. There are some companies out there that do this. They are relatively inexpensive; they range from $200 – $500.

The second thing you can do when you find out if someone is using your trademark is send them a cease and desist letter. But talk to your attorney about this because it can get complicated. If it's strongly worded, the accused infringer can file a lawsuit against you and they then become the plaintiff. So be careful.

You can also file lawsuits, which we will talk more about later, and you can also address trademark concerns without going to court.

Google trademark complaint procedures:

US, UK, Ireland and Canada: won't investigate in keywords, but only in ad text.
Outside the US, UK, Ireland and Canada: will investigate usage in both keywords and ad text.

Google's complaint procedure is very easy, you can fill out an online form. Yahoo has the opposite procedure; they don't allow users to bid on trademarked keywords. Ebay has a complaint procedure, it's called the VeRO program (Verified rights owner) and they can and will kick people out. You just fill out a form, it's easy, you don't need an attorney.

So what if the self-help programs don't work for you? You might need to file a law suit. When an attorney looks at your case, there are a lot of different factors, but they will look at the type of trademark you have – common law, state registration, or federal. Common law trademarks are free and extremely limited – so you get what you pay for. They don't get any of the presumptions you get with federal regulations, like validity. State registration is a good alternative, very cheap, about $70, compared to federal which is $325, and you can get it fairly quickly. But they are limited geographically to the state where you register.

If you are really motivated to protect your property rights you should be seeking federal registration. Some advantages:

1 – you get nationwide notice of rights
2 – you can get increased damages
3 – if you use your trademark exclusively for 5 years,, it can become incontestable, meaning that certain challenges against your mark are taken away from the defendant.

How to use your mark so you don't abandon or misuse:

- Always use proprietary notices: "this TM is registered"
- Distinguish your mark in print perhaps use it in all caps, or use it with the first letter as the capital (though don't use it is a proper noun because then it becomes generic. For example, Escalator lost trademark rights because they used it as a noun, and now an escalator is the generic word for "moving stairs"). Also don't use it as a verb, like Xerox, you should use it as an adjective, like Xerox copier.
- Never change your mark. So if you update or modernize your mark, be cautious of the trademark implications.

Thank you.

Jeffrey: Next is Mark Rosenberg

Mark: Bad news: marketers can use your trademark. There are limits though on how they can use it. My goal today is to give you those limits.

Trademark use is prohibited if it causes confusion. But there are ways you can use it. The issue of what is and isn't likely to cause confusion - just ask yourself the question, why am I using someone else's trademark?

- To identify a genuine product or service.
- To let users know you are offering a product or service.
- To make a comparison between your product and another, for example, you are marketing a generic version of a product.
- There is no other readily identifiable way of identifying the trademarked product or service.

Infringement:

- To get a search engine listing when your website was nothing to do with the trademarked product.
- To get a more prominent organic listing when your website has nothing to do with the trademarked product.
- To get more traffic to your site.
- To divert a competitor's traffic to your site.

If you have the right answer to why am I using this trademark, here are some permitted uses:

- When your website sells the genuine trademarked product
- In a meta tag when the website sells the genuine product
- In a meta tag when the website sells the generic version of the trademarked product

Limits on use:

You can say, "We have the best prices on Rolex watches", or "Our burgers are better than McDonalds", or, "We sell the generic version of Lipitor".

You can't use the trademark more than necessary (Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra), or in a more prominent form than necessary (We sell VIAGRA). You can not overly exclaim a trademark (We are not Orbitz, We are not Orbitz, We are not Orbitz). You can't use a trademarked logo instead of the word and you can't falsely claim sponsorship.

Domain names: It's usually a bad idea to use a trademark in a domain name. Don't do it.

A new use is when a marketer writes about a product or service, and this comes up in the search listings results, when it has nothing to do with the site. The articles are usually written to drive traffic to the site. I have not seen any case law, but it will get the person in trouble.

Jeffrey: Thanks Mark, thanks guys, this has been a great overview. Now we'll open it up to Q&A.

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

This session will focus on free and low-cost tools that can help beginners get started with their search and online marketing campaigns. The speakers will all reveal their favorite "tools on a budget." This session is geared for beginners to help them to understand the areas they need to tackle first and which tools are available to help them increase rankings and drive sales, so they can afford to move to higher-level tools that require subscriptions or hefty investments.

Moderator:
Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide

Speakers:
Matt McGee, Director of Strategic Search, KeyRelevance
Scott Allen, CEO, Hybrid6 Studios
Joe Abraham, VP of Marketing, SageRock

Matt McGee
Don’t let the tools make the decisions for you, but use the tools to get information so you can make the decisions.

SEO Tools: Firefox and Friends

• SEO for Firefox http://tools.seobook.com for Google and Yahoo, it gives you lots of information under each listing in the SERP. Gives you page rank, age of domain, inlinks, where it has listings, etc.
• Search Status http://www.quirk.zib/searchstatus/ Provides some of the same data as SEO for Firefox. Instead of providing it in the SERPs, provides as you’re looking at an individual page.
• SEO Quake Lot of people use it, but Matt doesn’t like how it slows down the browser.

Keyword Research

• Keyword Discovery. http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. Shows search frequency of queries. URL is to free version.
• SEO Book Tool http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/. Tons of information here.

Backlink tools

• Site Explorer. https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ One of the best backlink tools if you don’t verify the site with the search engines, Google doesn’t give nearly comprehensive results for sites.
• Link Diagnosis http://linkdiagnosis.com/ Gives backlinks, anchor text, if it’s nofollow, lots of other data, repackages from Yahoo.

Link Building Tools

• Hub Finder http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder gives top ranking sites for the keyword, then gives sites that link to these sites.
• Traffic Marks http://www.trafficmarks.com/.

PPC Tools

• Local Keyword List http://5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php provide zip code, radius, and keywords. Looks up zip code database, concatenates list of keywords with city locations.

Domain Tools

• Domain Tools http://www.domaintools.com/ Whois record, title, meta description, internal and outbound links, dmoz listing, etc. etc. etc.

Spider Tools

• SEO Browser http://www.seo-browser.com/. Gives additional info about links, page load times, etc.

Scott Allen

Competitive Research
Compete.com

• Free tools let you compare traffic with competitors and get limited keyword data
• Premium tools provide detailed data on what keywords are driving traffic to specific competitors.
• Even though best data isn’t free, good site to have on your radar.

Google Trends for websites

• Similar to some of compete’s tools, but less in-depth
• Shows info about other sites’ traffic
• Regions visitors are from
• Other sites visited
• Keywords that other sites’ visitors have search for
• Can be used to
• Derive who competitors are
• See some top keywords driving traffic to competitor sites
• Drill down and analyzer further

Spyfu

• Excellent PPC data for competitors
• Find data by domain or keyword
• Find out what competitors are spending on PPC and see ad data
• Find out what keywords they rank for and are bidding on
• Ability to drill down and download data for further analysis
• SpyFu UKI recently launched

Google Insights for Search

• Google provides data specifically for marketers based on what people are searching for
• Decipher trends
• Locate appropriate regional markets
• Determine best messaging/phrases based on search data. Helps you determine what types of messages will be best received.
• Find competitors in your market

Competitious

• Store data about competition
• Create matrix to compare competitor features / attributes
• Pulls in RSS feeds
• Pulls in search results
• Clip and save anything that looks interesting from search or blog feeds

Wordpress as an SEO tool
Note: refers to Wordpress on your own domain, not the wordpress.com.

• Popular blog platform
• Well suited for SEO, even right out of the box. Modifications can help make it even better.
• Many plugins available to expand functionality
• Can be used by beginners/experts
• Free: download at wordpress.org
• Installs in minutes

Wordpress SEO benefits

• Helps user create basic optimized content even with little SEO knowledge
• Once setup all you have to do is write (for best results 2-5 times a week)
• Building links and awareness (ping)
• Social Media Marketing plugins and friendly content

Recommended settings

• Search engine friendly URL’s
• Settings -> permalinks -> month and name (or something more friendly than numbers)
• Indexable by search engines
• Settings -> privacy -> blog visibility “I would like my blog to be visible
• Communication with other blogs
• Settings -> discussions (look for way to ping)

Plugins: Caveats. Some plugins may not work with different version of WordPress. For security/integrity only download from author’s site or wordpress.org.

Where to find wordpress plugins. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins. Type exact name into search box (of plugins listed in this presentation

All in One SEO Pack

• On-page (Content) SEO benefits
• Optimizes Title Tags (still important to write keyword rich yet natural headlines)
• Prevents many duplicate content issues
• Generated meta description tags automatically

Internal Linking Important to improve internal linking throughout blog.
Wordpress related posts

Pagination Most blog platforms are weak in this area and requires a plugin to fix (both navigation and ranking issue). Adds page numbers.
WP-PageNavi

Social Media makes it easier for site visitors to submit your content to social media sites or vote for your content
Sociable

RSS Feed. Feeds are published but rarely optimized with out-of-the-box blog software
RSS footer: easily add copyright notice and other stuff.

Caching: Traffic spikes can cause server to buckle under the load (dig, etc.). Don’t want site down long time for both users and search engines
WP Super Cache

Joe Abraham

Google Keyword Suggestion

• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Now gives you approximate search volume!
• Search by specific term
• Let Google Suggest terms by URL
• Shows approximately how competitive the term is.
• See what Google thinks our site is about, see what it thinks other (competitor) sites are about.

WordTracker

• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• Up to 100 phrases
• Each term with an approximate search count

Keyword Discovery

• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
• Up to 100 free terms with estimated search volumes

Microsoft adCenterLabs

• http://adlab.msn.com/
• Free Demographics Tools! Comes from when people are logged into Microsoft products.
• Input a URL or a List of Phrases; Get Predicted Demographics Back!
• Demographics Prediction Tool. Gives you an idea of who is visiting that website, gender, age range.
• Keyword Forecast Tool

XML Sitemaps

• SitemapDoc.com (up to 500 pages)
• XML-Sitemaps.com
• Google Webmaster Central

What’s an XML Sitemap?

• An XML file that lists all of the pages on your site that you want indexed
• Lists relative importance of pages
• Allows engines an easy way to find pages
• Does not guarantee inclusion. NOT an excuse to use bad code, just because a page is in the site map doesn’t mean it will be included in the index.
• Google, Yahoo and MSN all support this protocol

Google Webmaster Central

• Directly submit your XML sitemap to Google
• Once verified, gain access to some Google Data on your site
• Content Analysis
• Top Search Queries
• Web Crawl Statistics
• Can be added to iGoogle
• Has great way to check robots.txt file. You can put in a URL and see if it would be excluded.

Usability
Crazy Egg is a Heat Mapping Tools

• Visual Stats program
• Creates different visual overlays of site with statistics. Gives some different information than Google Analytics heatmap
• Creates heat maps. Use of color indicates activity

By the time SES San Jose rolls around, we will have seen a torrent of application development for the 3G iPhone. Mobile local search will finally get its due, with built-in GPS functionality, combined with a feature set and price point that are mainstream-friendly. This session will get a first-hand look at how companies in the local search space are making good use of the iPhone's open development standards. Whether the search is for a restaurant, a flat screen television, or a crescent wrench, we'll see the applications that will lead the way for the next generation of local search on the mobile device.
Moderator:

* Michael Boland, Senior Analyst, The Kelsey Group

Speakers:

* Ethan Lowry, Co-founder, UrbanSpoon
* Scott Dunlap, CEO, NearbyNow
* Ryan Sarver, Director of Consumer Products, Skyhook Wireless
* Siva V. Kumar, Founder & CEO, TheFind.com
* Sonia McFarland, Head of Business Development, Yelp

Mobile local search is becoming more mainstream with new smarter phones like the iPhones. Third party application development is a great initiative moving forward in local mobile search.

First up is Ryan Sarver from Skyhook.

Skyhook is a behind the scenes product. GPS has been around on phones, but not used for location based apps till recently. Skyhook does Wi-fi based positioning. Instead of satellites for reference, uses 56,000,000 Wi-fi access points to identify location. Needs density to work - urban and indoor areas. Uses triangulation.

Consumer ready location - can return location much faster than GPS. Works indoors, and in cell phone dead spots.

Shows video of Steve Jobs plugging the product!

Looked at the apps in the store, and identified which Apps using GPS. Huge amount of apps using location, even AP news to serve local news.

Next up is Ethan from Urban Spoon.

Helps people find restaurants using the mobile phone. Pulls together reviews from critics, bloggers, etc. Wondered how could use search engines to create a business without spending a dime on marketing. On the web, Google and others are the natural gateway to find info on the web. Different story on the phone. Challenge to get traffic on phone without spending much money. Along comes the iPhone with location awareness.

The app store looks like the net looked years ago. Only a few thousand apps. Small pool. Can get noticed easier. Wanted to make something that would be fun and practical and toy like. The problem set to solve was indecision where to eat. The idea was to create a magic 8 ball to find a restaurant. The publicity has been great thus far, and over 500,000 downloads. A quick demo - first identifies location. Shake the phone and spins a slot machine that suggests a restaurant. Can tailor experience by price, cuisine, location. Keep shaking it to find a restaurant you like, and then shows you more info such as reviews, phone number, map, address, email to friend, and tweet. Not truly random, skewed based on popularity of restaurant. Also a social element to see what your friends like.

Scott from NearByNow is up next.

Nearbynow takes product data from stores across the US and geolocates them. Has a concierge service that will have someone call the store to locate the product. Developed two iPhone apps around this. One is a shopping mall map application. Common among iPhone users is to take photos of products in malls and get feedback from friends. iPhone users are in a higher income bracket, are more fashion forward, and more likely to buy products at full price. Business model is driving leads to stores.

With the new app, you can take a photo of friends trying items on, store displays, etc. and can send to a contact group with a message. When taking the photo, it identifies the store using the location based feature. Retailers get excited when see what people are photographing in their stores. Lots of photos of people asking interesting questions such as "is this girl cute", "should I ask him out". Works on other phones besides iPhones. Other features include locating products in other stores, and similar products based on tags.

Siva from TheFind.com is up next.

TheFind.com is a search engine. What they do is shopping search that comprises local and online products. They have a crawler that only looks at shopping sites. Crawl them very deeply, and there are 500,000 approximately. Index has roughly 250 million products. Also crawls the address location of the stores. Map the products with the store locations. Can search for "ugg boots" in Cupertino, etc. You can use the site as a Yellow pages or check inventory from Krillion and Nearbynow's concierge service.

Application for iPhone is still being approved, not out yet. First thing the app does is take the location of the phone. Then maps all the stores around you. Then can conduct a search. The map changes and shows store icons that carry the product. Also has comparison price feature built in, where you can cross reference eBay and other retailers.

Sonia from Yelp is up last.

Yelp is a local content community network site, as well as review site. 3.5 million reviews.
Restaurants are 1/3 of content. Boutiques, cafes, spas, and other types of business are the bulk.

Demos the iPhone app. Searches "coffee wifi". Shows results sorted by distance. Get photo of the business, and status if still open. Can browse reviews. User activity is a big part of who to trust when reading reviews. Alternatively, you can use maps to browse local businesses. Can filter search results by distance, price, etc. Next she queries "hair salon San Francisco". Shows us filtering by neighborhood feature.

That's all.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

What percentage of online searches are local? If you consider searches that end up having some influence on local buying activity, the opportunity is put into perspective. But there are still large gaps between the point of search and the point of purchase. How are online mapping, shopping engines, and directories starting to fill these gaps with user-generated content, video, or inventory data that funnel searchers towards local businesses? And how can marketers utilize these tools to get local searchers to pick up the phone, schedule appointments, or show up at their stores?
Moderator:
Michael Boland, Senior Analyst, The Kelsey Group
Speakers:
Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping
Peter Hutto, VP, Business Development & Sales, Local.com
Joel Toledano, Co-founder & CEO, Krillion
Steve Espinosa, CEO, eLocal Listing, LLC
Meredith Papp, Product Marketing Manager, Google

Local is a huge market opportunity with lots of challenges. Very fragmented, and lots of different companies emerging and improving the space.

Peter Hutto is first up to speak.

Strategy for Local.com is aggregation. Pulling content, functionality, and advertising from different places.

Most of the big players are all in the space - trying the same combination of strategies.

Engagement: Ratings and reviews. The big thing now is video, lead by Citysearch, 24 months ago. Every big player has a video initiative right now.

Technology: All the major directories, yellow pages, etc. are changing algorithms to cater to a local model.

Data initiatives - lots of local neighborhood info.

Functionality - mapping, shopping.

Google - most of us get our traffic from Google, so it's important to play the game figuring out the organic and paid side .

Core challenges - it's a fragmented and messy market. Huge market opportunity, but no single face.

A look at players in the space.

Oodle- doing a great job at classifieds.
Krillian- local big box retailers with product availability.
Nearbynow- covers the mall vertical.
Stepup- store inventory and promotion for small businesses.
Kriyari- customize online malls for major retailers.
Shopping.com- traditional portal.

Ian White is up next.

Comes from the printed map space. Where he started.

What percentage of queries are local? 80% of dollars are spent near the home. Up to 40% of queries are local - maybe. Data is a bit out dated. Came from an AOL study. Roughly 5% of search terms have the city or state. 2% of queries leverage neighborhood boundaries. .05% search terms use ZIP codes.

An early example of user generated content was a bunch of printed documents by two law students name the Zagats in the late 70's (of Zagat.com). Didn't do the work themselves. Packaged others reviews. Not something new, but good example.

Original local search - the Yellow Pages. Factoid - Why are they yellow? Because they ran out of white paper. 1857 was the first directory for local merchants.

Local search to do list - 1) take lessons from past 2) Get the data right (insights, spatial, and inventory) 3) Long tail geo modified keywords.

Geotargetting currently sucks. Bid on long tail geo modified keywords. Allows to target in a more granular way.

Thank you!

Joel from Krillion is up next.

Krillion does real time location based product search. Different from online search and online purchasing to the extent that they are completed in physical stores near the consumers. Work with manufacturers, retailers, publishers, and search engines. Reach the consumer who is researching online, and will go out to buy the products. Cover the major big box retailers. Over 1 billion SKUs! Has 85% US market share across the different categories.

Key is that consumers research online and buy offline. 95%+ of all commerce transacted is in a physical store. 72% of the research is done online.

Where are consumers researching? Manufacturer's sites. Retailer sites, search, and shopping engines. Go to a variety of sources so need to spread information everywhere.

Several years ago, this data did not exist. Krillion powers "in stock" availability for sites. Constant updates of inventory and prices. Real time in store product available. Key to lead gen and driving real time sales is real time data.

A case study: Panasonic - power the "where to buy" feature. Used to be a consumer dead end - just could research data. Now they can show you where to get the products and allow online purchases - with in store pickup. Great for mom and pop stores without websites. CTR's of over 70% have been shown. Quite significant for retailers.

25% of the time, products are out of stock or not located near the consumer. Last month, rolled out a product which now recommends related products that may be in stock. No more consumer dead ends.

Distribution network - launching with 2 major search engines soon. Powers a new iPhone app with all their data called "The Find".

Steve Espinosa is up next.

Local listings should stand out in rankings. Goal is to get lots of 5 star reviews.

Merchant verification - showed a 1.8x increase in calls for a client with a merchant verification icon.

You want to scan and analyze the Google and Yahoo! result sets. Often you will see local portals in the top 10 results. Instead of trying to outrank, take advantage of this and optimize on the local portals and engines.

Link to your local listing from your website. Use anchor text with a good key phrase. Google is more likely to rank a source like Yahoo! Local rather than your website if your site is new and has little to no links.

Video - SEO, conversions, and citations. Likes to create small commercials for customers.
When creating video for clients, create a new page on your site. Surround it with the same description or tags you would submit to Youtube. Standard optimization of the page. Send links to your Youtube videos. Will see videos get included in universal search. Video optimization is still in its infancy. Can take advantage of this.

Enquiro has a study showing that companies received 2.2x more attention on the results page if the company had Adwords and organic results on the same page. Their research shows that 3.34x more likely if there is a video on the page.

Web references - Local listings are not usually linked to. Rely on scanning the web, and see how many times the business is mentioned on the web, and that's counted as web reference. Videos can be attributed as web references if you do proper linking.

Research your competitors and look at their web references. Go there to create web references. The source of the citation matters. "Amount" of web citations does not guarantee rankings.

Bonus tip - free phone tracking by Google. Create an audio campaign - go through the process - right at the end there is a "call reporting" link - where you can generate up to 20 unique phone numbers. Can use the call tracking feature without charge now, it's a hole in the system. Don't need to complete the ad creation process to take advantage of list.

Next up is Meredith from Google.

Meredith works in the traditional media products division. Will share stories of advertisers who saw great results using print, TV, and audio through the Google network.

We know it's important to be found in search. But if you limit focus to just search, you are missing opportunity. Customers are not yet looking for you in many cases.

Within the Adwords console, you can place ads via these mediums, and can manage them within a single interface.

Case study: Blue Nile - a diamond retailer. Wanted to target 6 strategic markets. Ran print ads using Google. Used unique URL and unique offer. In markets where they ran print, revenue increased by 29%. They also tried a new ad format - the consumer response tag. When ran ads with this tag, revenue and engagement increased 6.5x.

Can target by demographic, geography, section of paper, days, time, etc.

Case study: Golf Now - sells unsold Tee times. Expanded into new areas in the US. Wanted to increase presence in a few markets. Ran print campaigns in relevant sections, as well as audio. Huge spike in sales by accessing print and audio in adwords account allowed efficient targeting within one interface and tracking it.

1700 different channels across the US, partnered with Clear Channel. Can target by state, market, format, zip code, and demographics. Audio ads offer event triggers - for example weather based products. Can create ads and have them played given the weather condition.

Case Study - the Hanley Center Drug Rehab Center. Goal was to reach new potential enrollers beyond local market. Ran national TV campaign using Google TV ads. Used day parts, and also targeted specific shows. Measured brochure requests. Saw a 40% increase. After the TV campaigns, identified what specific markets were most receptive, and able to up the ad buys in those markets.

Can access up to 96 cable networks in the US. Most excited part is collecting anonymous data from set top boxes, and share that data with us. Not only tell us impressions, but can also get data on second by second basis. What percentage of audience watched the ad till the end.

Google Analytics can also measure TV and Audio. Analytics will be able to measure Print campaigns very soon.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

This session looks at the way publishers can generate revenue by carrying contextual ads offered by major networks and effective tactics for managing paid search in the contextual advertising arena. You'll hear from publishers delivering ads and those who manage contextual campaigns.

Moderator:

Gregg Stewart, SVP, Interactive, TMP Directional Marketing
Speakers:

David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing
Cynthia Tillo, Senior Product Manager of Advertising Services, Adobe Systems
Jennifer Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com

Gregg Stewart: First up we have David Szetela, he's SEW's expert in content advertising.

David: Thanks Gregg. I write a column called profitable PPC that hopes to teach you everything about PPC. The contextual column I write is based on a lot of research and interviews at the bar with a lot of Google and Yahoo people. The available click inventory in the content network is growing at a much faster pace than in search. There is a lot less competition in the content network so if you are faced with rising click costs in search you should definitely switch to content advertising.

So the subtitle of this presentation is "content network doesn't really suck as much as people think it does". So why do content advertisers lose money?

1. The ads appear on irrelevant pages and they get bad clicks (low conversions rates). But my theory is that people will click on anything regardless of relevancy. So they get clicks, but no conversions.

2. The ads don't distract attention from site content – people are not looking for your ad so the ads need to distract attention from the content.

3. By default when you create a Google Adwords campaign, search and content are blended (shows image of Adwords campaign settings set up screen). Always uncheck the content network box for search campaigns and vice versa.

Contextual is not like search. People viewing your ad are not looking for what you are selling, kind of like a print ad. So the first job of every ad is to distract attention away from the content to your message.

Keyword differences: Keywords in content ad groups are treated very differently than in search - keywords are not discrete entities. You should not use more than 30-50 keywords. In most case your keywords for content should be different than for search. Match types are irrelevant (except negative). Individual keyword bids are irrelevant.

The most important keyword difference: if properly used, the keywords in the content ad group should describe the kinds of pages where you want your ads to appear. Keyword lists should equal the words that appear most frequently on such pages.

Ad copy differences: ads need to stand out – distract. Feel free to yell, use exclamation points (only 1 per ad of course) – you can afford to be a little bit obnoxious. Also, be a little bit more competitive. When people see a content ad, they are not in the sales process yet, so you need to lead people to the sales funnel and not assume they are in the sales process.

And of course you should test, test, test.

Ad position differences: magic positions for search are 1-3, for content 1-4. Below position 5, your impressions will drop off dramatically.

Quality score differences: CTR is the only determinate of quality score, which suggests an opposite bidding strategy – most people think to start bids low. But you should start high, buy the CTR, get the quality score love juice and then diminish the bids over time.

Always set up separate content campaigns.

Google reporting is essential. Regularly run the report and exclude the ads that are performing poorly.

That's all I have, this is a subset of what I wrote in my columns, you should check out my posts in SEW. I also have a weekly radio show called PPC Rock Stars you should check out. Thank you!

Gregg: Thank you David. What would you say are best practices?

David: A big bold message with a clear call to action works well. GIF or flash animation work well to deliver the message more than words. In text ads, go out on a limb and make strong claims about your product or service, make declarative statements and say crazy things.

Gregg: Thank you David. Next up is Cynthia from Adobe Systems.

Cynthia: Basically what I wanted to talk about today is an exciting new channel for you to advertise – PDF documents. Is it so far-fetched that someday the government might monetize the highly-trafficked 1040EZ tax form with advertising? Probably not.

So when Adobe was thinking about the advertising industry and how we can add value to the space, we thought about how to reach a highly targeted audience. There are over 256 million PDFs floating out there. This is a great way to reach an audience.

A service we launched in beta about 8, 9 months ago is ads for PDF, and we partnered with Yahoo. As you can see from the slide, we display the ads in a separate panel on the right. It's contextual. From the Adobe standpoint, we have developed some technology understanding what PDFs are about. A page can be anywhere from 1 to 1,000 pages (e-books) So our technology is able to analyze this and we can get some great ad relevance.

These ads are dynamically matched ads, like every time you visit a web site page. That means that all your targeting options can still be applied to the PDF content itself. With this new service, you can maintain these ads from person to person so you can still reach your target audience.

We are also letting publishers embed placeholders as well into PDFs – integrate ad content but make it look and feel like a magazine.

A few examples from a publisher and an advertiser perspective:

- Newsletters. We have one publisher that puts at a monthly PDF newsletter.

- Digital versions of a magazine or newsletter.

- E-books. Traditional publishers are figuring out how to get their content online, so they are making e-book versions in PDF because it's more practical than "next", "next" links in html. Also, people are expecting content for free.

- Digests and compilations.

A top use we have seen success in is archives. Some publishers are sitting on a hundred years of content that they are trying to move online. You might think, what types of ads would be served out to people reading 100-year old content? Memorabilia, perhaps.

Thanks.

Gregg: Any design implications on PDF sites with advertising?

Cynthia: not design, but we have been seeing high CTR rates – by the time people take the trouble to download a PDF they are highly engaged. And also, there are not a lot of distractions like in traditional websites.

Gregg: Next up is Jen Slegg.

Jen: I will walk you through tips and techniques from a publisher perspective.

You have to think about what you want to monetize, explore your options.

When you shouldn't monetize contextual advertising:

- If you are business site selling products, why do you want people to click on ads, you will be sending them to competitors instead.

- If you are an accountant, you don't want ads of do it yourself tax software, you want the people to be your clients.

- Any site with content against Adsense policies, like gambling.

Are you leaving money on the table?

Some people don't realize that if they put some thought into testing, they can do better. So think – why did you chose the Adsense network, there are tons of other programs. Why did you put the ad where you did, why did you choose the color scheme that you did? Did you consider the user experience? When people get too focused on making money they inconvenience the user.

What is your priority– for the users or for monetization? It's hard to achieve the balance, in the long term you should be prioritizing the user experience so you get repeat visitors.

Beyond Adsense:

- Image ads/graphical ads

- Video ads

- Affiliate ads

- Cost per action

- Cost per thousand

- Adsense for search/mobile/feed

- Other contextual companies

Don't just focus on Adsense. Consider the options because Adsense might not be the best choice for you. You need to test and try out your different options.

Some things you should consider:

- placement

- proximity – wrapping text around the ad unit – it could perform well

- size selection

- ad unit colors and borders, can have a huge effect

- borders

- keywords

- URL filters

- geo-targeting – consider how the traffic from different countries can affect your bottom line

Ad units that earn people the most money:

336 x 280

300 x 250

Are you filtering out your revenue? Be aware that your ad blocking filter list will cost you revenue. You really only want to filter out your competitors, ads that are grossly mistargeted or ads that are inappropriate.

Ad heaviness turns off users: don't have 3 identical image ads in 3 or 4 places on the same page. Don't make user scroll down 3 times to get to your content. And don't make the visitor feel that they are only there to click your ads.

Don't select ads just because they pay more CPA – carefully select cost per action ads. Must be targeted.

Some takeaways:

-always do A/B testing

-experiment with different placement, sizes, styles, colors, etc.

-consider the impact of being too ad heavy

-look beyond traditional Adsense text ads and experiment with other formats

Thank you.

Gregg: Thanks Jen, are publishers relying too heavily on one source of revenue?

Jen: everyone things Adsense is the best choice, but what if the account gets banned, or the traffic drops, it could have a major impact, so always have a backup, especially if 99% of your income comes from one source.

Audience Q&A.

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Are you in charge of marketing the website, yet have to deal with unfamiliar IT issues? How do you handle a mean IT department? Do you want to improve your relationship with your IT staff? This session provides clear advice and translates the geek-speak into real-life examples. Learn specific steps to analyze your website for potential search engine road blocks such as duplicate content penalties, canonicalization, circular navigation, and other technical horrors. We'll help you identify potential problems and provide clear advice on how to approach your IT department with your request and an olive branch of peace.

Moderator:
Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:
Matthew Bailey, President, SiteLogic
Chris "Silver" Smith, Lead Strategist, Netconcepts
Greg Boser, Three Dog Media
Sage Lewis, SageRock.com
Matt Bailey started. He started in IT, would deal with marketers wanting IT stuff, then went into marketing and had to go to IT to have them do things.

Robots.txt
Think of robots.txt as a welcome mat for the search engines. Welcomes the bots, but also says here is crap in our index that we don’t want you to look at.

Example of very basic robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /test

Do NOT just say Disallow: / as it will exclude all content.

Redirects

• Change or URL
• Change of index page
• 301 (permanent)
• 302 (temporary)

WebBug is a good software tool that lets you know if there is a redirect for a site. Redirects within a site is OK, but need to examine how they work on your home page (sorry, didn’t get exact explanation of this).

Inconsistent linking. Gives example of rookstone.com that has inconsistent URLs, multiple URLs for home page.

Duplicate Content. Shows Brookstone again with multiple URLs for same battery. Think of duplicate content as having 4,000 mailboxes in front of your house. You need to figure out which mailbox is getting the mail. Which mailbox is Google going to think is the right mailbox?

Crappy URLs. Long URLs are not user friendly, especially ones with a lot of numerical parameters instead of shorter with words in URL.

Favicon. Get a favicon, gets you more opportunity to brand.
Short. vs. long. Words in URL also help.

Diluted Content
Putting everything on one page, gives example of 200 gadgets on one page, not focusing on good categories.

Unclear Instructions
Need to give marketing information to user. Site may be technically fine, but not good for marketing, unclear to users.

404 pages
Marketing and IT both need to work on good 404 pages. Marketing needs to give users a friendly message.

Don’t point fingers, before you blame IT make sure that it’s not a marketing problem. Gives example of marketing complaining about no sales, blaming IT, but marketing had never gone and tried to buy a product from their site.

Chris Silver Smith

Getting in touch with your geek side

1. Check for problems: SEO health diagnostics
2. How are we today? Ongoing analytics
3. Watching recurring issues
4. befriend IT colleagues
5. Get company to Prioritize SEO
6. Still can’t win?

Check for problems: SEO health diagnostics
Get Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox (and a couple of other browsers).
View your site like a search engine spider would. Web Developer Toolbar lets you disable things like javascript, CSS, images, etc. Shows Coca Cola website without images, etc. sees very little information and especially keywords about Coca Cola.

User Agent Switcher: signals site that you are googlebot, slurp, etc. See what site looks like to googlebot.

Example of bad redirection: Coca-Cola. He shows javascript or meta-refreshes being used instead of server-side redirect. Need to use server-side redirect. Check the header, should return 301 if redirected, not a 200.

How are we today? Ongoing analytics

• Check daily referred visits for each of the search engines. If you get a huge drop from search engines, especially zero, work with IT and try to figure out what had happened.
• Track conversions from SEO traffic vs. other sources
• Track bot requests over time. Need to look at log files, Google analytics doesn’t help because it only looks at java script.

CMS Hell (recurring issues)
Recurring CMS/Legacy Issues? Check and re-check SEO factors – titles, metas, H1s, etc. Don’t assume once fixed, always fixed.

Befriend your IT Colleagues

• Befriend and collaborate with IT
• Give credit to IT where/when credit is due
• Understand that improvements can be handled iteratively, be satisfied with baby steps towards goals – all progress is worthwhile
• Follow standard IT process for prioritizing/scheduling SEO changes

Get company to recognize SEO

• Make business case for why SEO is needed. Look at news about money left on tables, competitors’ successes to help convince the rest of the company why SEO is necessary.
• Equally important to success are user experience, usability, legal requirements, branding, etc.
• Take every opportunity to educate others about SEO.
• Once worth of SEO is recognize, it can be prioritized along with other projects, and IT can take it seriously get needed work scheduled.

Still can’t win?

• Go to another IT department.
• Legacy system/hellish CMS? Build Parallel
• Use a proxy system – GravityStream.com

Q&A and comments from panelists.

Greg Boser requires IT to be a part of things. Marketers don’t have terms to explain to IT what it is that they want done. Take presentation to IT, show what they want done, and why they want it done. If IT is not on board, he won’t even take project.

Panelists suggest reading some basic books on website programming so you can speak to the IT  department with their language, to some degree. You don’t need to learn the language in-depth, but useful to learn the basics.

Have lots of employees go home and try to buy something on your own website (with dummy credit card), and take screenshots of any problems. Often users will not tell you about problems, this is a great way to get that information complete with screenshots.

Coverage provided by Keri.

Google AdWords API advisor writes at Google Groups that the Java client library (version 2.0.0) has been released at http://code.google.com/p/google-api-adwords-java/.

Version 2.0.0 has some major fixes. It removes support from v11 and updates the default version to v12, and there's also a document fix to remove the reference to "clientEmail" from AdWordsUser.

If you encounter any issues, you can always make updates to the list here.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Yesterday, we talked about the Google code to enhance the 404 experience. A number of issues were reported with the code in the Google Groups announcement thread, and Google has fortunately made tweaks to fix the issues.

Google representative JohnMu says that you should be returning a 404 error when using this widget (though it will now work if the page returns a 200 status too!) That's great, because in the example in yesterday's blog post, it wasn't working because a 404 wasn't being returned. Try the advertize.html page now and let us know what you think.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Congratulations to Search Marketing Standard Magazine for their recent acquisition by iNET Interactive. We first reported about the print publication in January 2006 and now it has gotten bigger as Andrey Milyan reports on Crea8site Forums.

In case you didn't know, the Search Marketing Standard magazine is a print magazine "with a goal to provide readers with practical, relevant and easy-to-understand information that [marketers] could apply to directly improve their search engine marketing campaigns." Many people in the industry have contributed to the magazine in the past with informative articles and good information. The magazine up until the acquisition was staffed by the following people:

• Publishers - Boris Mordkovich & Eugene Mordkovich
• Editor-in-Chief - Andrey Milyan
• Associate Editor - Frances Krug
• Advertising Director - Alex Lukashov
• Office Manager - Alina Vernikov
• Graphic Designer - Jonathan Limoanco

Will the magazine change at all? It's still too early to tell, but they are considering a more frequent publishing schedule since people love reading search engine news offline too.

Pretty cool -- congratulations to the entire team.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Publishers really really really want to have their sites accepted into the news search engines. The major ones are Google News and Yahoo News, but there are plenty of others. We have covered a few times, how to get into Google News and I actually have updated those articles in the past. Here they are:

• Getting Into Google News Revisited
• How to Rank in Google News

Now that you know how to get into Google News, what does it look like when you submit your application to Google News but do not get accepted? I personally received this in the past, but now we are thankfully accepted. A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a copy of a rejection email notice from the Google News team, which seems to be accurate. Here it is:

Hi,

Thank you for your note. We reviewed your site and are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We currently only include articles from sources that could be considered organizations, generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information. When we reviewed your site we weren't able to find this evidence of an organization.

We appreciate your willingness to provide your articles to us, and we'll log your site for future consideration.

Thank you for your interest in Google News.

The good thing is that you can address these issues, reply to this email and hopefully they will review your publication again, and include you in the index.

The rejection email is one step closer to getting your site included in Google News.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Here is the concise version of the live blogging coverage our volunteers put together at SES San Jose yesterday:

Again, a big thank you to our volunteer live bloggers, breaking their fingers on their keyboards. Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs, Sheara Wilensky & Avi Wilensky of Promedia Corp, Carolyn Shelby aka Cshel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, and Dave Rohrer.

Black Hat/White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO
Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
4:15p - 5:30p

Speakers:
Jill Whalen, HighRankings.com
Bruce Clay, BruceClay.com
Dave Naylor, Bronco.co.uk
Todd Friesen, "on sabbatical"
Greg Boser, 3 Dog Media

Moderator: Matt Bailey

(Town hall style debate. The initials preceding the comment indicate who is speaking.)

MB: Apparently, no one wants to be labeled, so let's start out by defining what "black hat" and "white hat". So let's start out by having Bruce and Jill define black hat and then let Greg and Todd define white hat.

BC: I think that black hat vs white hat are labels defined and applied by the search engines moreso than by the people in Search. The white hats tend to play in the middle of the acceptable area, the gray hats play near the edge of what is acceptable, and the people who are truly black hat are the people who consistently play in the truly unacceptable area. I think that if the only person you're hurting is yourself, you can be black hat all you want; however, people who do pain to their paying clients -- those are truly evil people.

JW: Black hat techniques are those methods that seek to decieve the search engines. There is spam and there are also "tricks" to make the engines believe your site is more releveant than it really is, or relevant to keywords that it's actually not. Those "tricks" are definitely black hat.

TF: White hat people are those who print out and laminate the Google Webmaster Guidelines, hang them on their wall and worship them every night.

GB: White hat is a euphemism for "SEOs with no game"

DN: I don't think I've ever seen a white hat site rank really really well in truly competitive verticals.

MB: It's come up a couple of times that black hat techniques can get you in trouble, so we know there is risk there. However, is there any risk associated with white hat techniques?

JW: White hat is making your site the best it can be, so really that's it, there's no risk with having the best site you can have.

BC: The way I look at it, if you're sitting at your laptop working on your website and Matt Cutts walks up behind you and your first inclination is to close your laptop -- quickly -- then you're probably not playing by the rules. I think that if you're doing things that are defendable in the face of inquiry and with the best of intentions, you can call yourself white hat.

TF: Look at cloaking, is it good? Is it evil? No, it's agnostic. It's a neutral technology that can be used properly or improperly.

GB: The crowd I run in, let's face it, we do some stuff that is "pushing the envelope" for our own personal sites and we look at it as R&D that sometimes pays us lots of money. Those learning experiences help us be better SEOs in general.

JW: Let's face it, there are white hats and black hats and then there are just plain old incompetent SEOs.

GB: There are a lot of people in this industry who just aren't qualified to do the work. They take jobs they don't have the experience or knowledge to handle properly and make promises they can't keep. Then they're in a position where they end up doing things they shouldn't to make good on their unrealistic promises.

DN: You know what's a big problem, it's when yer working yer nuts off on a site and then you find out that yer not the only SEO who's working on the site, and you start looking at it, and someone's been buying links in an uncontrolled fashion and thinking it's not leaving a footprint, when it's really leaving a big footprint. Most of the big mistakes come from someone within the organization who makes a decision to "help" and they don't really know what they're doing and they're doing more harm than good.

BC: People are looking at things like "should I invest the time building my site, making it expert, and building it into an authority site" or "should I just spend the money to buy 10,000 links and save all that time working on developing my site". If you

JW: I'd like to say something about "rules". You don't need to read the Google rules, because it's common sense. What's within the lines and outside of the lines is all known. We're all adults and you know what's right and what's wrong.

TF: I absolutely disagree that is common sense. If it were common sense, we wouldn't have an industry that's growing as fast as it is.

GB: Bruce is saying 3.5 years out versus 30 days out... I mean first of all I don't see buying links as bad or evil. The approach we talk with clients is this... if the client comes to me and I tell them it's going to take 3 years to get them to the top, that's just unacceptable, so we split the difference. We're always working with them to build a quality site so that when Google can actually accurately track and nuke the "bad guys" we will be the sole standing survivor, but until then we're simultaneously using "quicker" methods to stay competitive to not only start realizing gains sooner, but to also get the client on board to start incorporating *all* of the SEO recommendations.

MB: So is black hat SEO appropriate for every site?

DN: No! There are verticals that do not need it. I mean if you're in for the long haul and your industry isn't full of people that are buying links and stuff then you can go and be white hat all you want.

Audience Question: If you build a widget and it links back to you but it's on people's Facebook pages (behind their logins) do those links count?

Panel: No!

DN: I'd make a Wordpress plugin or widget and that would be great, but Facebook, no.

[Random questions...]

BC: I don't think buying links is essentially evil. It's commerce.

TF: The goal of buying links is essentially link acquisition. Buying links just jumpstarts the process.

MB: In other words, Todd, you're advocating "marketing".

JW: Yeah, go hire a traditional PR firm.

BC: I don't think a major, established brand should ever black hat.

GB: Yeah, you know, BMW did it and it totally burned them... for less than 48 hours. I disagree. I even wrote a blog post about it and said that big brands totally should spam search engines because they don't suffer any repercussions like little people do. Look at BMW specifically, no one ever went into a BMW dealer and said "You're cloaking! I'm going to go get a Mercedes!"

Matt Cutts: Ok, I just want to add a little disclaimer. I know the sites we take out, and not everyone outside of Google always knows who we take out. We don't always make announcements. We absolutely take action on big sites, we just don't always call them out.

GB: What about Forbes?

Matt Cutts: You'll notice they no longer have pre-sell pages. There's not always a need to call people out and pick on them. I think the question is, do you want to take that risk?

GB: Here's the deal, the BMW work was so amateur. They did it sloppy and they got caught.

DN: I know Google is holding back some companies in the UK that ought to be topping the SERPs for link buying and it's all hush hush.

Audience Question: So if we don't buy links, what DO we do?

DN: Content (obviously, I mean I don't want to say Content is King because that's so cliche at this point)

JW: There's public relations, there's social...

GB: Yeah but even with social if you don't pay someone to get it going on Digg it gets no traction anyway, so in the end it's all paid.

JW: and also, just because Google says it's evil doesn't mean it really is "evil".

Live blogged by Carolyn Shelby, co-host of SEO 101 on WebmasterRadio.fm

From Facebook to MySpace, Twitter to FeedBurner, social software and feeds are reshaping the world we live in and streamlining our online experience. Networking sites like Facebook and social messaging utilities like Twitter bring the human element to the foreground by enabling people to communicate and exchange information with everyone and anyone they trust. Likewise, feeds leverage the social graph by enabling instant distribution of content for publishers, while permitting consumers to easily aggregate and keep track of all their favorite websites and blogs. Join us for a lively discussion as our panel of experts debate the various dimensions of community-driven social applications and the future of how information and messages get shared.
Moderator:
Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch
Speakers:
Andy Beal, Consultant, Blogger & Author, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
David Snyder, Search Specialist, JRDunn.com
Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek

Andy Beal is up first.

Presentation - "Avoid Being a Twit on Twitter"

Taking a perspective of a marketer for this presentation.

First get your name right. Nicknames are mostly for teens. If you sign up for Twitter, use your real name to brand yourself. Important if people instantly recognize you.

If you are not ready for Twitter yet, register anyway to avoid getting your brand or name hijacked. Difficult to get it back. Do it with all social media sites.

Twitter pages can get juiced up nicely. Andy's page has a PR5. Profiles rank nicely for names.

Break the monotony by creating your own background to stand out. Pimp your profile. If nothing else, change your colors. Check out www.twitterbacks.com to download templates and customize your own background.

The basics:

Learn the commands.

@andybeal - directs a message to a specific user. Public - everyone sees it.

d andybeal - sends a direct message that is private. One on one.

#olympics - hash marks tag comments.

Favorites - doesn't use it much, but there is a star to click on to favorite the tweet.

Can delete the updates, but don't assume they will be deleted everywhere.

Definitely change the setting so that you can see replies from anyone - even if not following. Change the default. Helps connect with people.

Don't use protection! Can protect your updates with a privacy setting. Recommends not using it. Harder to promote yourself. Don't use it unless you use it for a small group or internal purposes.

Learn the "pidgin". You only get 140 characters. Reason is SMS text messages are limited to that. Learn to shorten words. If you use SMS you know LOL and BRB.

Tweet = to send a message.

Tweeple or Tweeps = friends, nicer word than "twits"

Followers = subscribers

ReTweet = when someone resends a tweet that someone else said.

Check out the Twictionary for more.

Don't follow everyone! Will be hard to keep up. Don't wan't to be labeled a spammer. Follow friends, employees, customers, press, or anyone that will bring value to network. Don't just follow everyone.

Check out tinyurl.com/twitmarketers to find a good group of marketers to find if you need a good starting point.

Twitter is a big cocktail party. It's dynamic. Keeps moving. Don't send Twitter spam to people you don't know.

Have conversations with people with large networks. Helps build up your network.

Don't always expect a reply. Might not be at your computer, or the message might fall to deaf ears. Will only be able to send private messages to people that are following you.

Start sharing valuable information like breaking news such as an earthquake, Google update. Live-tweet events and conferences.

80% social, 20% business - mix up your messages. Don't just be self promoting.

Cross promote carefully! Use www.twitterfeed.com to combine with your blog to post your blog post on Twitter.

If you get heavy with promoting your business, set up your business profile.

Tools of the trade. Don't have to use the web only. Twirl, Twitterific, desktop apps, iPhone apps, etc.

Reputation management / monitoring with Twitter. Don't get pulled into negative conversations.

http://search.twitter.com (formerly summize) , tweetbeep.com. Query your name, products, competition. Can subscribe to alerts via RSS feeds.

Go to www.tinyurl.com/SESTwitter to add Twitter tips.

Follow Andy at www.twitter.com/andybeal. Buy his book "Radically Transparent", which is the first book on reputation management.

And finally, MC Hammer is a Twitter user! If he can use it, you can!

Note: Kevin asks to be followed @KevinMRyan

Next up is Neil Patel from ACS.

Facebook is a lot more than just photos of Neil in socks. It's a place to interact with friends. Best way to explain it is try it.

Who uses it? Most people are White - 73% - 14% black - 6% Asian - 6% other.

Over 30% make over $100k annually.

43% have never attended college.

Why should you care about Facebook?

Over 90 million people on it. Can connect with others - friends, industry people. Build relationships. Great for branding. Spread a message to the masses.

Connecting with others - Neil lives in the OC. LA is really close. Wanted to connect with other SEO's. Searched for SEO's, and found groups to meet up with. Takes the online world to the offline world. Transpires into real world.

Great for birthday reminders.

Great for branding. Shows photo of him getting kissed by Chris Hooley. "Says" he didn't enjoy it ;-)

Great for uploading photos of SES and connecting with others.

Good for sharing information. On Facebook there are feeds similar to Twitter - updates. Also can use applications.

The "Facebook Effect" - one company tied their application to Facebook and it drives 100,000,000 pages views a month.

Visit Quicksprout.com for more.

Next up is Dave Snyder.

Follow him @davesnyder. He will follow you back, and reply to you.

Thanks Tamar for helping with his presentation on Friendfeed.

What is Friendfeed? A social aggregator that consolidates the updates from social networking sites. It's an RSS feed on steroids. Puts the data into one space.

What can you do with Friendfeed? Create content streams. Create imaginary friends to represent blogs, etc.

Track topics of interest. Search topics of interest from friends RSS feeds. Makes this a powerful online reputation management tool.

You can interact with your network's information. If a friend uploads a Youtube video, can see it all in the stream. Puts the social web into one place. Makes the dilemma of social media - the disconnect, go away. This allows a real time engagement with users.

Monitor your reputation. Establish a network, RSS monitoring, Mobile reputation management, social media profile for SERPs, building brand advocates.

Allows you to monitor who is monitoring you.

Third party tools - lose alot by not using them. Twirl is a great tool. More tools on the presentation slides.

Mashup video, photos, and other content into your stream, allowing instant engagement with content. Mashups are the future of the web, as we can see with Universal search.

Check out Dave's website at SearchandSocial.com or buy him a drink!

Follow Kevin @kevinmryan
Follow Andy @andybeal
Follow Neil @neilpatel
Follow Brian @bmorrissey

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp. Follow me on Twitter @aviw

When your catalog has 200 million products, grows at $3M per week, and contains content created by users, how do you optimize it?
· Capture the long tail by balancing a user-contributed folksonomy with a site taxonomy that works for both searchers and search engines.
· Provide tools for users to SEO their own content and use the power of community to edit the retail site.
· Measure traffic, model SEO revenue, and track performance across multiple variables.
With user-generated content, you are reaching customers who are ready to buy and customers who are participating in a community. Learn how to maximize SEO returns by developing an SEO strategy that satisfies both markets at all phases of the buying cycle and scales to huge sites.

Moderator:
· Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
· Mehdi Maghsoodnia, CTO, CafePress
· Benu Aggarwal, Founder & President, Milestone Internet Marketing
· Kurt Krake, Search Advisor, Bazaarvoice

Rebecca: Welcome our first speaker Mehdi.

Mehdi: I run the online operations at CaféPress. We are a 100% user generated content businesses. Users upload their designs and sell them to the community. If you want us to sell it we can sell it for you, and if you want to sell it to your own community you can set that up. We have 6.5 million active users, get about 2,000 new shops every day, our catalog of available product is close to 200 million, and every day our users create an average of 45,000 products.

So how do we manage our SEO?

It's a challenge for us because we are dealing with so many different products. A third of our traffic today is search engines, so Google hits us about 5 times a day.

When the incoming content comes from the consumer, we allow that to become a custom taxonomy within out site, by product line. We have to find a balance between conversions and how deeply we want to categorize things.

At our site, we are still growing at 30% on traffic which is incredible.

Every shopkeeper is tagging their products so they get found, and we deal with a lot of spam issues that we need to control.

When you search for a term and you have 4 million products, how do you put the most relevant designs on top? So we balance between how recently something is designed, how well it sells, and many other factors.

When you get to a PDP (product detail page), there's a balance between showing you what you searched for, vs. showing you our catalog.

Our business is part shopkeeper - someone wants to sell Go Green t-shirts, hats, etc. so we give them the tools to set up their shop, and this page probably shows up pretty high.

How do you manage all this with millions of searches coming in? The metrics becomes important. What are the vital signs you look at to see if you are succeeding? We look at where the traffic is coming from and where it ends up. We look at the top 100 keywords that drive traffic as well as a group of terms driving traffic. A/B testing is something we also do to increase our conversions.

Thank you.

Rebecca: Next up is Benu Aggarwal.

Benu: My firm focuses on the lodging industry and we face this issue all the time.

Why are customer reviews so important? How are they impacting organic listings? How do you incentivize your customers to post reviews?

Some stats: 1,200 consumers shop online at least 4 times per year spending $500 or more annually.

78% of customers spend more than 10 minutes reading reviews. Which reviews are they reading and where? Why Trip Advisor became one of the largest site in the industry – the credibility was so much more when reviews were posted on third party sites.

How do reviews help you in conversion? It increases credibility!

The impact of reviews is very significant, but just as significant is how they are presented.

Trip Advisor gives very easy access to different topics such as room service, etc. We have developed a tool in-house that allows users to post very easily.

So what are the things that are important to remember? Good reviews will help, as a site owner, to understand the preferences of the customer.

Make sure your reviews are above the fold on the page. Make product reviews attractive, ask customers to add videos and photos. Incentivize your customers – chance to win, free drink, etc.

How should you categorize your website properly so that when they land on it they know you have proper architecture? Make sure it's categorized properly. If you are on a product page, the user needs to know they are landing on a product page.

Check if site is designed for higher conversion: add contact info, maps, search box.

Focus on the product pages. If they are not available, don't take users to the home page, take them to another similar product page!

Programming best practices:

- Make sure you are doing re-writes
- Multiple entry points
- Use java script but make sure the download time is minimum
- Optimize your titles, meta data
- CSS for layouts and drop downs
- Server-side database caching techniques
- Provide videos, great way to gain reviews

Thank you.

Rebecca: Next is Kurt Krake from Bazaarvoice.

Kurt: I am a search strategy consultant for Bazaarvoice. We're going to focus on how product reviews really enhance product websites.

We did a study based on 21 retail brands (that you know) and we checked out different product sets from home supplies and sporting goods. We were looking at what the reviews did to the natural search traffic. There's a high correlation between searching and reading product reviews. We also know that purchases use search to use research.

What would a term look like towards the head for Bazaarvoice – maybe "jewelry research" and for the long tail, maybe "best men's watches". As we go down the list of the long tail, we get better quality keyword searches.

Graphical example of how a long tail keyword shows up in Google Trends graph. So the deeper you go, the more highly relevant.

So Bazzarvoice employs a segmented strategy for ratings & reviews. We use product-focused pages, and then reviews-focused page. We optimize around title tags and meta descriptions. The body of the page is user generated content and so the page is optimized purely for reviews. The great thing is that when people search using the keyword "review", it will take you to a page like that.

Type in a product into Google, then type in that product with the word review, and see what the results look like.

With Bazaarvoice, the average query is 3.5 - 4 words, vs. Google's 2.5 average.

Product search frequently contains product names; not laptop but Dell laptop. The research also showed a noticeable increase in conversions from referrals from the review page than the products page.

Thank you!

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

How can you best tap into long tail terms? Are there targeting techniques you're overlooking? This session examines these and other techniques to help you get more out of paid search.

Moderator:
Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

Speakers:
Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
Andy Atkins-Krüger, Managing Director, WebCertain Europe Ltd

Christine starts out with her presentation
Landing Page Faux Paux: 10 Mistakes That Can Cost You Sales

Technical Headaches
Broken Page Elements

• Are all page elements working properly?
• Broken forms
• Database-driven dynamic elements. Is it slow? Does customer leave because it looks broken?

Customer Contact Loops Broken

• Can the customer contact continue?
• Missing phone number
• VOIP phone number reliability
• Form submissions working?
• Form-2-mail – is anyone reading the mail?
• Slow servers can cause customers to assume things are broken, and the competition is only a click away.

Entropy
Things that can break when you’re not looking

• Check for things that break over time
• Rendering issues may cause site to render incorrectly in different browsers
• Rendering is typically tested rigorously when launched, but not when amended
• Broken links on landing pages can also lower customer confidence

Ad page existence often doesn’t get tested thoroughly after minor site updates

• Since landing pages are often not a part of the main navigation, they can incorrectly get removed (404 error) or placed behind a login
• Mass rewrite rules have unanticipated consequences for landing pages.

Site redesign/relaunch doesn’t include the ad pages

• Site gets republished to server without the landing pages.

Communication Confusion The landing pages doesn’t include the user’s keywords

• Keyword resonance
• Reinforcing the keyword used by the customer adds confidence
• Improves CTR
• Improves stickiness
• Improves landing page quality score

• Lack of keyword resonance will lead to poor CTR performance and wasted PPC spend when the customer bounces immediately out of the site.
• The landing page doesn’t reflect the ad message
• Watch out for inconsistent messaging
• The landing page appeal should reflect the ad copy
• Choose your appeal (cost, experience, availability, etc.) an d reinfore appeal on landing page
• The landing page is not persuasive

Analytics matters Failure to include/maintain conversion tracking code

• PPC conversion tracking allows better management of PPC accounts
• Make sure conversion code for all PPC campaigns are included
• Check conversion code to make sure it’s still there
• Failure to maintain analytics instrumentation
• Using analytics is key to measuring PPC performance
• Identify conversion funnel issues
• Track ROI
• Analytics code often missing or poorly maintained on landing pages

 

Matt Van Wagner

Negative Keywords: The strong force behind PPC Campaigns

Why you need negative keywords
Save money

• Reduces unproductive clicks charges
• Reduce ad impressions, improve quality score and lowers CPCs

Improves campaign performance

• Improves conversion
• Improves user experience

How to use negative keywords
Boxing Out eliminates costly clicks. You want to make sure that words you don’t want don’t get shown – your campaign becomes invisible to “bad words” in searches.

Boxing In – use negative keywords in broad and phrase match if you have that keyword in exact match. You can pay less because it is a longer-tail phrase. Example of Wood Ceiling, Wood Ceiling Panels, and Faux Wood Ceiling Panels. You want to use Faux as a negative keyword in the first two groups so that you drive traffic to the third ad group.

Google:
There are three negative match types

• Negative broad
• Negative phrase
• Negative exact

Negative broad works differently than you may expect (no stems, plurals, and other stuff I missed)
No limitations on number of negatives
Apply at campaign/ad group levels
Important for content campaigns
Tip! Don’t forget the (-) sign when editing online, you don’t need it in the offline editor. Can lead to confusion

I have incomplete notes for Yahoo and Microsoft – use at your own risk, and look at the network for the correct information.

Yahoo
“excluded” keywords
For advanced match only
missed rest

Microsoft
Has interesting implementation
Negative is sort of like broad match, but not quite – need to add plurals, misspellings
Maximum 1022 characters (1k total)

Cascading negatives (missed explanation)

Evaluating Negatives

• Keyword Discovery for negatives– similar to positive keywords
• What is the real volume?
• What is the real impact against your keywords?
• Be selective about negatives
• Contain your impulse to add randomly
• Implement in batches, measure impact
• Document your negatives
• Why did you choose it?
• What impact did you expect to have?
• If it didn’t have an impact, try others.
• Focus on high payoff words
• Even 100 keywords are a lot to manage
• Create a hierarchy of importance

Best practices

• Add negatives conservatively
• Be selective
• Think portability

 

Thomas Bindl
Mastering Google AdWords

Analyzing log files
Log files are good for SEO and paid search
You can get the following information:

• Keyword searched
• Rough position
• Country
• Language
• Exact date and time
• Geolocation

He explains a log file and how to analyze it.

Using dynamic parameters

• {keyword}       which keyword triggered the click
• {ifContent:Content}      Content Network
• {ifSearch:Search}         Search (network)
• {creative}         Which AdText triggered the click
• {placement}     Which website triggered the click (only for site targeted campaigns)

Shows example of a landing page URL.

Measuring broad match

• Don’t measure what you wanted, measure what you got
• Add {keyword} to every landing page URL
• Compare value of {keyword} and “q=” referrer
• Assign tracking values to {keyword}+”q=”referrer

Example: books -> buy cheap books.

Going from broad to exact

• Analyze results of bought vs. delivered
• Positive ROI goes into phrase match
• Negative ROI goes into negative keywords
• Positive ROI goes into exact match
• Negative ROI goes into negative keywords
• Profit margin goes up

 

Andy Atkins-Krüger spoke about international paid search advertising, but I was not able to see the slides well and take good notes.

Moderator: Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst, Monster.com

Use comscore Conversational media category
- dont forget that the numbers are panel based

Let google do it for us
- Trends down to the site are now available

CMO’s will end up being WEB analyts or havint them nearby, high on the organizational food chain.

Bake in analytics to all marketing campaigns by auditing them, changing the campaigns before anything else is done. Right now, Social media has no

se place in most organizations

- whenever you sit down in a campaign, sit down and think about if this is something you can measure.

Web 2.0 is about empowering users. Its not the technology, its about letting people have a voice and communicate with each other.

Measure conversations - it can be done and this panel shows some examples of where we succeed.

Tools like Radian6 and others can measure certain things.

WAA is working on stadards for social media and the beginning drafts will be available this fall.

—————————————–

Rob Key, CEO, Converseon

Social Media Measurement

*warns that he is going to go quickly*

Expanding social media universe
- 45% of adult interenet users have created content online
- 1.2 million blog posts per day

Designing Social Media
- Phase 1 - listen
- Phase 2 - engage
- Phase 3 - measure/optimize

First know what you want to know
- how are people feeling about our brand
- who is influential

Reports: Voices

Reports: Product attribute tag clouds

Limitations of Automation
- a pure machine based solution cant pick up sarcasm
- technology is a long way away, you will need human intervention

How to use it?
- Extension of Customer Service
- some companies are mining data on a daily basis. They are looking for venues that they can firefight and avoid dell hell type issues
- its a mix of PR, CS, and marketing all at once
- Search results
- *shows chart that has social venues ranking well for big keywords*
- Engagement
- built blog strategy based on 6 months of listening
- positive sentiment increased 15%

Where does this all go?
- Trending
- disparity of capabilities in social media monitoring and analysis will fall
- are all metrics really part of the same elephant

Start to look at how these things work together: sales, traffic, brand trackiing, conversation mining, conversion tracking

—————————————————–

Breanna Wigle, CRM Manager, Military Advantage & Todd Parsons, Co-founder & CPO, BuzzLogic.com

Social philosophy
- profiles and communities
- discussion boards

Have found that social media traffic converts 6% than non social.

Strategy: isolate the influencers and reach passionate readers of military defense news and information
Campaign goal: increase product awareness to (new) influencers and their (audiences) convert visitors into rss and newsletter subcribers
Challenge - finding influencers and advertising to their audiences manually is daunting, given the fragemented nature - there were 1000s of sites

and all in the long tail. They wanted to know the top areas to spend their time.
Step 1. Uncover conversations - started looking at same keywords they used on the site. They then went out and found sites that were about those

keywords. Other site targeting: same terms, different outcome. Networks in google adsense were forums, photosharing sites and reference information.

In the data, they found active conversations that linked out to other locations.

Step 2. Rank the influencers. How often do they blog on a topic? what is their reach? They targeted the influencers.

Campaign overview
- creative was compelling, informative and had a clear call to action

They ran on a cross section of 250 blogs which included influencers and sites linking into the conversation

Results: 86% higher CTR campain compared to historical average for targeted banner campaigns. Direct conversions: 5.32% lift from pre to during. The

goals included newsletter and rss subscriptions. 90% of visits were new to the site. Users from the campaign stayed on the site 6.25% longer.

Key observations and learnings:
- active conversations about specific topics attract passionate audiences. Highly targeted display ads can perform in this environment.
- influencers and their network relationships
- this can get you closer to a search like intent
- the nature of conversation can impact ad performance

They say there is a ton of inventory. The problem is that there arent a ton of quality ad networks that work with blogs.

Q. price wise - how does it compare to yahoo/google?
A. blog content is less expensive, but what they do is go after the influencers

——————————————————–

Edmund Wong, Vice President, Strategy, iCrossing

Case study - tech forum engagement

Problem: unhappy customers were online talking about how unhappy they were
solution: worked with client to identify, monitor, and develop an engagement strategy. The goal was to be helpful and not market.
outcome: negative sentiment is decreasing. Alot of traffic was going to the postings where they were reaching out. Program learnings and

recommendations are being shared with the entire organization. Management, Development, and their knowledge base are all being updated.

Measuring and reporting
- Monitoring metrics
- tonality of user postings
- site traffic for the forum sites
- Engagement metrics
- direct metrics: number of company postings, number of converstaions engaged
- indirect: page views of postings, number of links posted to clients website, amount of traffic from the links

track links posted and clicks received by site - they are using Omniture data and combining (by hand) a count of which links are creating

visits.

Categorize and analyze discussion topics
- non technical (they dont engage) or technical topics(they do engage)
- decide when and where not to engage

Example: forum users were complaining about confusion about being over charged for customer support
- one path took you to a free self help, another took you to a fee based.
- Solution: they created a landing page that explained the two

Key takeaways:
- there is no one killer metric
- track anything possible
- its not just about the numbers
- its all relative (focus on benchmarking)
- view monitoring social media as a social intelligence program involving the worlds largest focus group

————–

Live blogged by Dave Rohrer

How many keywords do you need in your paid search account? What keywords are your customers searching for? How do customers find products after they reach your site? How to target the right terms in your paid and organic search marketing, and where these keywords should be used.
Moderator:

* Cory Treffiletti, President, Managing Partner, Catalyst:SF

Speakers:

* Jill Whalen, CEO, High Rankings
* Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
* Frederick Vallaeys, Google AdWords Evangelist, Google
* Jorie Waterman, Lead Program Manager, adCenter Keyword Research Platform
* Jason Dorn, Senior Director, Network Quality Team, Yahoo! Inc.

Christine Churchill takes the floor.

Will be talking about keyword research. The idea is to have better ways to talk to customers who will be buying and create relationships with. Biggest mistake is when people become myopic and use words that are internal jargon or in house terms while not thinking about what the customer might be using.

Why do it if keyword research takes a lot of time and commitment?

Search engines are text based. Sure they can read other formats, but text is key. Keyword research is the fundamental step in search marketing. It also helps us correct mistakes. Back when Christine was at Net Mechanic, made a big mistake and had a site rank for the wrong terms. Terms the customers couldn't even spend! Started looking at the traffic to help make proper keyword research decisions.

Another reason to do research is to increase conversions. Increase conversions by speaking the customer's language.

Develop list of relevant terms to target in SEO, PPC, Blogs, Videos, Social Media, and offline documentation.

Competitive intelligence - insight on competition helps you identify key opportunities.

Keywords and usability. Helps give ideas for site design and navigation. Very overlooked part of the process.

Favorite reason to do the KW research is to discover new opportunities. If you have a content site, the more KW opportunities - the more chance you have for a sale, donation, or conversion.

The long tail - Based on frequency graph. Coined by Chris Anderson who wrote a book about it. What you find with this graph is that the popular keywords are in the front of the graph, and then reduce to infinity. It's a way for small sites, and sites such as Amazon or itunes to capture lots of unique traffic. Tail phrases are very descriptive queries that people use to search. It's been reported that 20% - 25% of queries are new to Google. People are using unique phrases all the time.

Brainstorming and building a keyword list- Goal is to cast your net widely and generate a broad list. Don't have someone negative in the room to ruin the creativity of group.

Another overlooked opportunity is to look at keywords within the company. Look within press releases or current site copy. But be careful of insider jargon. Product reviews, company reviews are great resources.

Log files - catch 22 situation. You need to be found first. But may give you a core phrase to give you insight for others. Google Webmaster tools and other similar tools are great too.

Site search box - Terms thrown into internal site search database.

Competitors - good place to get ideas.

Learn the lingo of the customer. So important. Customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, blogs, forums, discussion groups are great resources.

Keyword research tools - lists many different products out there - see lecture slides for entire list. Wordtracker, Trellian, Spyfu, Nichebot, Hitwise, Trends, etc.

In sum - the success of your campaign goes back to your keywords. Takes time and is an ongoing activity. Requires continuously looking at your lists. Use a variety of sources.

Thanks!

Frederick Vallaeys of Adwords takes the mic.

Adwords evangelist for Google. Talks about tips and tools to grow your business with keywords.

The agenda:
-Best practices for keywords
-Keyword tools at Google
-Business intelligence tools

The long tail phenomenon is real and advertisers are aggressive. Shows a graph of two studies that were done. Strong correlation between long tail keywords and conversions. 2-3-4 keyword phrases is the sweet spot.

How many keywords do you need? Different for everyone. If have thousands of products - thousands of keywords. How do you structure this? Use ad groups. Recommends 10-50 keywords per ad group. Helps you break words into themes and match ad text. Mistake is having one keyword or ad creative per group. People think its more trackable, but not the case. Also a mistake is to duplicate the keywords with multiple match types. The reality is that is not the best strategy.

Finding words - use the Adwords keyword tool. Don't need an account to use it. You can put in terms, and it will generate similar terms. Gives up to 150 keyword refinements. Now has keyword volume data! Audience claps. Was a big request and finally implemented it. The other option in this tool is "keyword broadening". For example, "wireless router" will produce the suggestion for "linksys router". Great for finding negative keywords. Another option is to use the landing page URL to find keywords. Suggests new ad groups. Should use the search query performance reports. Tells you which queries people did when they saw your ad. Say you bough the term "anniversary flowers" and the ad is coming up on "anniversary gifts". Can help make a decision if you want that term or not.

Discovering new opportunities - Say you are watching the Olympics and you sell sports memorabilia. You see that Michael Phelps and Kobe Bryant are related terms. But in the last week, there was a huge spike for Michael Phelps. It's real time data that happens every day and lets you capitalize on potential seasonality and regional trends. Shows which month has highest volume. If you have a back to school campaign, you can use this data very effectively. If you look at the reports, you can see the differences amongst different regions. Can use different keywords in different regions to address what the market needs.

A new tool called Google Insights for search was recently introduced. It's a version of Trends built for advertisers. Plug in "north face backpack". Shows Canada is demanding this product and great place to unload them. Shows up-and- coming queries. Shows lots of interesting buying trends. Uses the term "breakout" which means a major spike in query volume.

Jorie Waterman from MSN is up.

Adcenter keyword research tool for Excel 2007 is what she will be talking about. This tool is great not just for Adcenter but for all SEM efforts. Jorie is a real keyword junkie. She loves keywords.

Why is keyword data important? It's a real gauge of user intent, a lense into your audience and a great way to help improve ROAS and expand reach. Highly recommends looking at different tools and comparing information.

The MS Excel add-in. There will be a version for 2003 coming soon. You can use it for up to 20k keyword per day, per account. A great way to be creative about keyword research. Delivering absolute numbers on exact match queries. Not showing unique users, but how many times has a term been searched. Fully committed to transparency.

Where does the data come from? Keyword services platform. 3rd party developers can tap into it. Comes from MSN, Adcenter, and the web itself. Can see monthly traffic, buzz, monetization data, and by vertical, extract keywords from URL - tremendous amount there.

Shows the demo live. There's a tab for "Ad Intelligence". Type in a URL in cell A1. Click Keyword Extraction. Extracts keywords. Great tool for competitive research!

Can see up to 100 keywords per URL! Another way to expand keywords is with "Keyword Suggestion". Returns data very rapidly within Excel and gives lots of long tail terms. Can easily create thousands of terms. Uses "travel" for example, and gets thousands of keywords. How do you prioritize terms? You can click on "Monthly Traffic" to forecast, and see how words are affected by seasonality. Great for budgeting. This data comes from exact match vs. paid so more representative.

Because it's in Excel, you can rapidly total things, sort, etc. You can also type in similar terms, and there is a great way to get concrete info to help which terms to prioritize. Couch vs. Sofa. Helps decide which gets more volume. Monetization data shows paid search info for specific keyword. Can look at data from last 30 days from specific position, or by match type. Puts data in a pivot table. Shows average CTR, CPC's for data range.

Encourages us to play with the tool and dig in! (Sorry, there is no Mac version yet!)

Next, we have Jason Dorn from Yahoo!

Talks about pitfalls to avoid.

Where to begin? The answer is - your business - your website. Content on your site. You know about your business to dig in and extract meaningful information.

A case study of a credit card merchant who bid on "loan", "credit card", "new car", "restaurant". Too broad. Audience laughs.

Keyword research tools - these can be great but can't tell you relative value of keyword to your business. Tools show search volume, and that's seductive. But with high exposure is high cost, and can also be over broad and more difficult to convert. It's important to match your budget with what you bid on. Shows an example of plugging in "Mac" and getting both computers and cosmetics. Important to review the generated terms.

Use internal search query logs is very attractive but also presents pitfall. Example of an auto dealer who imported everything from his logs into his PPC campaign. The term "discount" got in there. Maybe not the best term to bid on. A travel advertiser did the same thing and bid on "Italian history". Context is key. Might be a traveler, but most likely a research query - non commercial term. An electronics dealer plugged in "wwii" - World War II instead of Wii! And there was a lawyer who had the term "atomic bomb" in his list!

Collect all the right keywords but can still fail because of a poor ad group structure. Ad group structure is the foundation for success. Once you find the right keywords, structure them tightly so you can craft compelling creatives.

Lastly - chronology is important. Bid first on what you know you should bid on. Also, keyword de-selection is important. If something is not working - remove it. When content changes on a site - update your keyword inventory. Make sure you drive people to the best and most relevant landing page because people expect that nowadays. Don't pay for clicks to send people to the wrong landing page.

You can always check out help.yahoo.com/ss for tutorials, tips, and webinars.

Finally, we have Jill Whalen of High Rankings.

Switching gears. Keyword research is the cornerstone of a good SEM campaign. Jill specializes in organic, but can apply these strategies to paid.

Where do you put those phrases when you have these terms? Put them in title tags if nowhere else. Anchor text, alt tags, headlines, body text copy, and meta descriptions.

Home pages and main category pages - that's where you want to describe the site in general. Great to put your competitive broad phrases from your research. Homepages are great for competitive terms because get more PR. Don't just stick your keywords in the top where it doesn't make sense for people.

Product level pages are great for very specific phrases. Put good headlines and make sure that the anchor text uses the product name in the text.

Websites are not brochures! Assume visitors knows nothing about you! Many websites Jill reviews make the mistake of assuming all visitors know about you. SEO and paid is about getting people who don't know you. Make sure users know they are at the right place! Even just a sentence or two.

Good content - what is that? Don't need to always create special pages for SEO or PPC. Speak to your target audience. Solve their problems. Answer questions. Provide information.

Content that is king is written for users first, while also keeping engines in mind. It's a balance. It's about writing for both.

Don't fake real content. Don't write about the history of door stops. Fix your site. Don't use doorway pages that aren't part of your site. Still amazed people are using them.

Write clearly and descriptively for target audience.

How to be descriptive? Don't use words like "our product" or "our solution". Describe it. What is your solution? Avoid generic words, but don't stuff words.

Edit current text and replace with appropriate phrases. Sometimes you might have words in your existing copy, such as "restaurant" - can become "Martha's vineyard restaurant" or "Martha's vineyard cafe" or "where to eat in Martha's vineyard". Don't have to guess right keywords any more.

Have enough copy to support the phrases. No maximum amount of word per page. How many you need to say whatever you are trying to say.

Use plurals, past tenses, and -ings. Don't rely on "stemming". Better writing uses different forms of words. Don't be afraid of using variations.

Sometimes words have different forms or spellings. "websites" or "web sites", "email or e-mail". Be consistent though. Google is now smarter at detecting these discrepancies.

Writing really does matter!

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

More and more site owners are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content. If you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS and feeds? Will other sites be considered the "real" site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results? This session looks at the issues and explores solutions.

Moderator:
· Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
Speakers:
· Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch Expert & President & CEO, VIZION Interactive
· Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com
· Benu Aggarwal, Founder & President, Milestone Internet Marketing

Amanda: First up is Mark Jackson.

Mark: First we will jump in to what we are going to cover today.

-why do search engines care about duplicate content
-identifying duplicate content on your site
-correcting duplicate content
-copycats

So why do search engines care?

Removing duplicate content allows search engines to provide variety for users. It brings up the issue of spammers, creating millions of useless pages as well as the ability to identify authority and ownership.

So how do you identify it? Google takes an automated approach to finding it and look at identifiers to tip them off, such as similar or identical URLs and title tags.

How do you find it? Do a site:domain URL search; look at pages indexed across the search engines and see if there is a large disparity between Yahoo and Google. You can also just copy a phrase on your site and do a search! Same thing with blogs.

Here's an example (screenshot) and you can see there are 9,380 copies of my article on SEW. But since SEW is showing up first, it shows they own it, were the original publisher. You can run the same search on copyscape.com.

Finding duplicate content on your own site: look for mirror web sties…how many domains do you own? Look for similar title tags, similar meta description tags, similar meta descriptions. Look for pages that are light on indexable content, i.e. ecommerce site with short descriptions tend to have duplicate content.

Look for print versions of an article or page, "email to a friend" pages. Canonicalization issues. Session IDs (multiple URLs for the same content).

If it's a domain name, redirect with 301 permanent redirect.

If someone is copying your content, first determine if it's hurting you. Are you getting the credit/link? Look at the cache date to see if it was indexed first. Determine if it is worth your time to get the content removed.

Preventative measures: have your content copyrighted. If you hire someone to write content, make sure their content is unique.

Lazy content: By industry and by geographic region. The same content just replacing all the city names.

When content is close, what do you do? Title tags, focus on first paragraph of copy.

Bottom Line: Duplicate content can hurt you. Remove, redirect, no-index. Deal with copycats efficiently and effectively. Don't be lazy.

Amanda: How many of you are in ecommerce? That's a really unfortunate place. This poses a fascination challenge. Next up is Mikkel who will deal with such issues.

Mikkel: there are unlimited ways you can create duplicate content!

1. Multiple domains – choose one brand domain. You can buy multiple, but implement a 301 re-direct.
2. Sub-domains – make sure you can only access the content through one of these domains.
3. Test-domains – always password protect so they don't get indexed.
4. Issues with www. Vs. no www. – most engines seem to be able to handle common use of both. But if not a solution is to redirect one-to-one.
5. Server load balancing – it confuses the engines, don't do it.
6. Secure and unsecure pages: http vs. https: engines often mess up with this, links do not seem to benefit both. Solution is to use full URLs on navigation links if you have both pages. Also, redirect one-to-one.
7. Session IDs – a way of storing information rather than using a cookie. The problem with that is the engines cannot handle this and every time come back, they assign a new identifier. So dump all sessions into a cookie.
8. Permalink Structure – especially if you blog using Wordpress, you can set the way you want the way you want the URL structure to appear. There is a good plugin – Canonical URL.
9. Forum issues: different threads can be part of different URLs. When you can rate a thread that will add more parameters to the URLs, now you have 2 separate pages with the same content. So do a redirect.
10. Sort order parameters: it will index the content several different times. So redirect everything to one version of the page.
11. Breadcrumb navigation – problem for shopping sites. You can end up in a situation where you get to the same product in a few different categories, and because the breadcrumb nav is replicated in the architecture, you can have the same content on two different pages.

Amanda: I work with a lot of clients that have serious content issues. You think you've solved one layer but then you find another way it's leaking through to the engines. So there are several ways for duplicate content to occur. Our third speaker will be Benu Aggarwal.

Benu: I took 3 problems that most of the businesses face:

1. Multiple domains, identical homepage, different URLs for the same content:

You can solve it in 2 ways: you can use Google webmaster to identify the primary URL, or you can do a redirect.

Multiply entry points for the same content. You can solve this easily by adding more re-write scripts.

2. Syndicating content – authenticating ownership of content.

Make sure you have easy access to edit meta-data and images. Use tools to check content, especially if you are getting massive amounts of content.

3. Website done in multiple languages.

Make sure meta data is absolutely unique in country specific sites, don't just copy and paste all the same meta tags.

Best practices to avoid duplicate content problems:

- Disallow folders in robots.txt file that have same version of site in different format for exp print friendly sites
- User preferred domain setup in IIS or webmaster tools. Work on redirects.
- Always use the same link to link to any page on your site.
- Syndicate carefully.
- Authenticate your content, use unique snippet content per page.
- Check and double check your rewrites. Mange your URLs.
- Avoid publishing stubs.
- Use top level domains to handle language specific content.

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Discover how search engines rely on link analysis as an important component for rank web pages. Learn also how to increase traffic to your site by building quality links in an appropriate manner.

Moderator:
· Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch

Speakers:
· Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
· Jeff Quipp, President & CEO, Search Engine People
· PJ Fusco, Natural Search Director, Netconcepts
· Jody Farmer, VP, Strategic Marketing, CreditCards.com


Kevin Ryan: I see some new faces here and also some very old faces. This is a session that many years ago a guy names Mike Gray decided that links were going to be the next generation. Many of the people on this panel are experts on the topic. So I would like to thank Mike Gray for this and let him take it from there.

Mike: Thank you. What we used to do back in the Alta Vista days was keyword stuffing. And it got to the point that when you have thousands of keywords on a page, how do you know which is going to be the most authoritative? So back in 1998 a computer scientist John Kleinberg did a search for Alta Vista and was stunned that it didn't come up in the results! He realized after doing research that it's not what is in your page but rather what it is that other people say about you. And then the guys over at Google took that, and developed Page Rank, and that's when link building became very important.

And with that, let me introduce PJ Fusco.

PJ: I'm with Net Concepts with offices in Madison Wisconsin and New Zealand. I used to be the in-house SEO for Jupiter Media. And now I have the gig for writing for ClickZ. Today we are going to talk about the strategies of link building.

Quick tour of link popularity – true popularity comes from acts of kindness, which can correlate to "you attract more flies with honey".

What is link building? It's an activity – an ongoing activity (not set and forget) of increasing high-quality inbound links to a document. Not web page, but a document. And obviously it's all about relevancy.

There are 3 things you should have in mind when starting a campaign:

Set some goals – increased search-referred traffic always assumes that more is better than less – and with links, it's more about quality than quantity.
Improve your search engine visibility for targeted terms – assumes your stuff should rank better than other people's stuff.
Improve relevancy signals to the search engines – presumes your stuff is relevant for specific search queries.
Getting started – this looks like a monumental task – so we will walk through some free webmaster tools and understand that PR is not the only thing that matters. We will also look at free and not-free link analysis tools. The caveat of course is that tools are tools, you have to be smarter than the tools, know where the data comes from. Webmaster toolsets have come a long way in the past few years and months. Yahoo Site Explorer is still one of the best free ways for scoping out backlinks to your site and to competitors sites. Google, with its webmaster tool, has recently expanded on what they are showing. MSN, relatively new – we used to be able to count on them until advanced queries were blocked. Now they have a filter option, and the results are limited, but we can expect to see some expansion on this soon.

Other basic free tools - and there are many:

- Robots.txt
- SEO for Firefox – goes way beyond back link analysis, had a lot of other features
- Marketleap popularity checker – good for determining which competitor links you want to raid

Net Concepts is a player because we developed a plugin for Wordpress so we are getting links just from that.

If you are a more visual person use the more visual tools. Quintura and Kartoo are good visual search engines, and of course Google Visual Search.

Hubfinder is a good free link analysis tool.

There are a series of subscription-based tools: Advanced Link Manager is great for anchor text insight and backlink diversity data. iBusiness Promoter is another one.

Time Investment: Is it worth it? Absolutely.

Kevin: Jody is up next.

Jody Farmer: I work for a company that relies heavily on SEO – CreditCards.com. We are the leading online site for credit card seekers. We are earnest SEOs, not looking for shortcuts. We have also some international domains as well. We've done a good job of high rankings for pretty competitive keywords.

Link building is a tricky business because you need the cooperation of a third party.

6 Tenets of Linking Theory: Quality, Quantity, Relevance, Anchor Text, Steady Pace, Link Deeply.

Now that's all theory – let's talk about PRACTICE.

Link building is a basic marketing discipline. It requires specialists with expert knowledge and understanding and a special skill set. Would you let your event planner buy your media? I think in practice there are 4 Ps of link building: Practice, Purpose & persuasion, personnel, patience & persistence.

1. In terms of Planning, there are 6 distinct phases to go through:

- Keyword selection and URL designation.
- Set baselines and goals – SERPS rankings? New links/week?
- ID target opportunities – who competes on those keywords. Where are their links from and how did they earn them?
- Think about your bargain – what do you have to offer (not money and not reciprocation)
- Evolve some campaigns to run simultaneously. Got a strategy for .gov? Directories? .edu? Blog comments? Social media?
- Outreach – the hardest part. If you build it they will NOT come – force discipline around how many emails will be sent per week, how many directory submissions will occur etc)

2. Purpose & persuasion: Give your targets a reason to link – i.e. link bait. For some targets, likle directories, your simple existence or scale will be enough of a reason. But more likely, you'll need content or tools. Also, find the links you didn't ask for and fix them, reach out to the webmaster regarding anchor text.

3. Personnel: this to me is the most important thing – dedicate researchers to link building. They should be persistent, detailed and goal oriented.

4. Patience & persistence: there are so many shortcuts available. Avoid the temptation to build too many links to quickly, build sporadically, focus on one keyword, and be cautious of paid links.

Kevin: Jeff is up next.

Jeff Quip: Today I will talk about myths and mistakes on link building. At some point there has to be some guidelines.

Myth #1 - PR matters. There are 2 types: the kind that Google knows about and hides, and then toolbar page rank. Real PR is viewed only by Google. In Google, a page with a PR 3 is ranking #1 for ranges…think about that. If it really mattered, it would be a PR 8 or 9. So don't take it at its face value.

Myth #2 – reciprocal linking is dead. It's not! It's a natural pattern when used in moderation. It should be a component of your linking strategy.

Myth #3 – PR sculpting is not the best use of your time (forcing links to more important pages and away from the less important pages, like contact us). PR sculpting uses no follow. Set up your linking structure properly when you set up your site, and don't really worry about it after.

Myth #4 – More links is better. In reality, it's about quality not quantity. Think in terms of trust and authority.

Mistake #1 – Not using text links. Text links hold 10 times the value of image links.

Mistake #2 – Link farms – free for alls. It was a creative strategy at the time but ended many years ago. The engines figured it out pretty quickly and started to penalize. That could lead to bad search engine karma. If it seems to easy, it is. You will be punished.

Mistake #3 – Links to the homepage only. Make sure you build links to content internally. If you have too many thinks to the main page and none to the internal pages, it shows as unnatural and can raise a red flag.

Mistake #4 – Using 302 redirects – use 301 redirects instead, which are permanent, and it transfers the link power to the recipient page.

Mistake #5 – No follows - Google is trying to enforce the use of no follows.

Mistake #6 – No valuable content on the site. The more content you have, the more opportunity you have for natural links.

Mistake #7 – Not socializing content. Socializing content creates media opportunities.

Mistake #8 – Buying links. Be very very careful. If you have to buy links, make sure you know what you are doing, and buy them embedded in relative content on a site.

Here is a tip: Submit your blog posts to social media sites. But the content must be good otherwise it's considered spam.

Kevin: Thanks Jeff. Google developed the toolbar about 5, 6 years ago. I came across a page that was PR 0 and this page has Catherine Zeta Jones in her underwear. Could be the most important page I have ever seen. That's a 10! (gets laughs).

Michael Gray: I like to make things simply. Everything you need to know about link building you learned in high school! If the cool kids say something nice about you it's much more important than if the AV squad likes you. And if the principal says you a smart, it's better than if the janitor thinks you are smart.

So it all comes back down to quality and authority.

Keep your core focus to where your website is.

A good place to start is directories. You should have a well rounded link profile. Directories are one of the core link building exercises you should engage in. Such as BOTW, Yahoo, Business.com. Whatever your niche is, find that directory. And look at the stats to see if it's worth it. Look at what page you will be in, you want to be closer to the top of the page rather than the bottom. And see if the page in that sector is ranking. And check to see if it's in the index! If it hasn't been spidered in a while, it's not worth it.

Look at popular and frequently visited sites in your sector. Look at who they are writing about and linking to and why. Create content that these sites are looking for, what will make them happy.

Look at the backlinks of everyone who is ranking. Those are the kinds of sites you should try to get links from. Look at trade organizations as well.

Local groups, local government resources are great as well for links.

You want to have a well-rounded technique. Use article syndication sparingly. Use it to identify people are looking for content and filter for quality. Create unique content specifically for the website. Trickle out content slowly over time instead of dumping it all at once.

Publish full posts!!!!!! And put links in your posts, whoever scrapes you will copy those links. There is a Wordpress Plugin called RSS footer which you should use, it adds links to the bottom of your posts.

Rotate your keywords every three-four months.

Look for guest blogging opportunities, blog carnival opportunities.

Link building and viral content – it works. It will give you links from places you will never get on your own. Go after niche sites not just the big sites. It is easier to get noticed. And don't go after Digg 20 times in one week, go after different sites to become more well-rounded.

Satellite and remote content – content sites like Squidoo and Google Knol. Image sites like Flickr. You Tube, Meta Café. Put your links at the bottom.

Spread your efforts around.

The currency of the link economy is attention. Don't obsess about Page Rank. It's more myth, an illusion. Trusted links are worth much more than anything else. Get deep links, just links to the homepage is not enough. And try to get 10 quality links a month rather than 1,000 random links.

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Searcher Behavior Research Update

How do searchers interact with search engines? New research is constantly coming out revealing how searchers act. This session explores the latest studies and findings to provide tips and tactics for search marketers to consider.

Moderator:
Bill Muller, Chief Marketing Officer, iProspect

Speakers:
John Marshall, CTO, Market Motive  jmarshall@marketmotive.com
Pavan Lee, Research Manager, Microsoft
Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
Bill Barnes, Co-founder & EVP, Enquiro Search

John Marshall speaks on DIY Search Behaviour Analysis.

It’s difficult to get good data on behavior on people searching on the web. You can get data about what happens on your website, but you also want data about what happens outside of your website.

How does this impact you on Monday Morning?
Looking at keywords in Google Analytics provides a good place to start. The problem with this is that it is a very narrow view of what is happening on the web. You get data about what people searched on, but you only see the results that ended in that person coming to your website. You don’t see when you showed up in SERPs but people didn’t click on you. You want to know broad intent of people, not just those who came to your site.

How can we really see the intent? Having a site search on your page gives you lots of good data. It gives you a better view of the user’s intent, conversion rate information, and more. People don’t often use this data because it is free and is ignored. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean the data is bad. People use Hitwise data because they paid a lot for it, and the organization wants to make sure they get their money’s worth out of the data.

A lot of his time is spent fixing things that go wrong with data collection.

Things that go wrong

• Mixed case. By default, GA does not convert all site search queries to same case. You need to convert the search keyword into all lower case so you can have valid data, rather than having same query replicated in several results and makes it difficult to evaluate the data.
• Multiple results pages. Need to make sure that your “no results” page has tracking on it.
• Usual JavaScript breakage
• Injected terms. Common mistake is to make query for “digital cameras”, then give that query URL to affiliate marketers. You have that included in your site search results when people did not actually type that query into site search. You need to filter this out (he did not explain how).

Next is Pavan Lee

“Power of Three” – Cross Channel Ad Effectiveness on search display and content ads.

Background
Search listings have a branding value.

• Exposure to search listings has a positive impact on branding
• People exposed to search listings are more likely to visits store than before

Paid search listings have a strong branding impact than organic search listing

• Exposure to paid search listing consistently demonstrated strong impact on key branding metrics
• People exposed to paid search listing also reported a more positive shirt on brand favorability than those exposed to organic listings.

In-lab study with Enquiro Research, included eye-tracking in a lab, then surveyed with questions.

Key findings
Strongest impact was when both content and paid used.

Lift in Ad Recall

Search Index 100

• + Content 121
• + Display 130
• + Content & display

Life in Brand Recall
Search Index 100

• +content 115
• +display 117
• +content and display 127

Lift in Purchase Intent
Search Index 100

• + content 113
• + display 113
• + content and display 127

Relative Visation and Gazing
Single channel
Display + 7.4%
Content + 5.3%
Search + 9.9%

Multiple channel
Search + display +10.8%
Search + content +7.3%
Search + content + display + 11.3%

Take away:

“Power of Three” = Synergistic Branding Impact. Good correlation between search lift and multiple display types in Microsoft search. I missed her exact wording here.

 

Thinking Beyond the Search Results Page
Larry Cornett

Beyond the SRP

• Search is just one point in time. Lots of activities that happen before and after this point. They’re doing a task. You need to understand what their task is.

Types of Research at Yahoo!

• Search editorials
• Bucket testing
• Metrics and analysis
• Search science
• Focus groups and surveys
• Eye-tracking research – gives a lot of answers that users cannot always verbalize.
• Ethnographic field studies
• Usability lab studies.

How users experience search

• Starting context
• Quick scanning (spend very little time on page)
• Information scent (ex. keyword bolding)
• Matching intent
• Quick decisions
• Looking for answers
• Feeling safe

Crafting Searches
How to help people complete their query, get at what is in their head. People don’t know how to enter query, not sure what to do to start. The predictive search is so people don’t have to work so hard to get information from search engine. It’s not just a problem of being in an artificial environment in the lab, they saw this in the field visits too.

From “to do” to “done”
How to get them to their goal, get them to the answer. He talks about Search Monkey. Owner can tell what is most important about their site. Gives more information than would just be in a text link.

What does this mean for you?
Before the SRP

• Starting context – how is the user going to ask for this in the search engine? What do they want?
• The “real task”

On the SRP

• Intent and information scent
• SearchMonkey!

After the SRP

• Fulfilling expectations
• Being their “answer”

 

Bill Barnes

Both search marketing and research company. Research born out of search marketing, which gives insight into research. Obsessions with wanting to know why is why they started research

Why

• Why is the first listing seen as so important
• Why do we scan in groups of three or four?
• What branding is important

Another picture of heat maps and the golden triangle!

How important is the area of greatest promise? They played around with top sponsored listing, ad copy, did a/b test – one good text that was targeted to the search, one generic text. Everything else on the page was the same.

A good ad vs. bad ad influenced user’s answer about if they would use the search engine again.

Why do we scan in groups of three or four? It has to deal with the way the brain works.

A 16% point increase in brand association when brand is in top sponsored and top organic results. There were lots of graphs here that I couldn’t replicate, but they can be found at this presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/studentlamarketing/enquiro-white-paper-the-brand-lift-of-search/

Yes, do buy branded terms!

• Brand fixations occurred in the URL and title of the listing, not in the description.
• Place your brand in the title, URL, and as close to the start of the description as possible in your sponsored and organic listings
• Subjects with established affinity for the brand spent 25% less time on the top sponsored listing, jumping down to the organic listings 73% faster than the non-affinity group
• Sponsored listings appear to have a great opportunity to lift brand affinity among new customers, write and target them as such.

Key findings

• Understanding intent is key
• Top sponsored and top organic combined give the greatest brand lift
• Be aware of who else and what else is on the SERP
• Play with the enemy
• Missed the rest of the key findings, my apologies.

Liveblogged by Keri Morgret

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: August 20, 2008"

Kendall Allen, Former Managing Director, Incognito Digital, Digital Marketing and Convergence Media Consultant

The advancement of integrated media

- silo days of search and social media
- integration vs. synchornization
- cooler yet, really integrated digital

Search and Social Media - the early years
- do you remember the ancestors of what we now call social media?
- listservs and user groups
- message boards, chat rooms, auditoriums

- Later more robust chat, file sharing, emergence of social media centers

Integration vs Synchronization
- marketers began to tlak the talk of integration more often
- bigger agencies bred online difisions
- not necessarily smooth, perhaps an unnatural act
- represented a move toward a more integrated….
- paid search emerges

The playground for integration: digital
- with platforms beyond pure online advancing, digital means more today
- tiered markeitng and media plans that deploy digital to hit branding as well as performances objectives and metrics
- the onset of web 2.0 aptitueds, the advance of rich media technology

Social Media coming of age
- community building is no longer disticnt from a good marketing plan, but part of it.
- consumer-centric speak has moved from talking to walking
- the state of tools availalbe is at an alltime high
- the blogosphere is showing up in integrated media plans
- smart marketers are develiping well knit cross platform or integrated social media initiatives with optimization in mind

Integration Illistration - big brand goes for it
- kellogg’s offline advertising included tv spots, pring tads, and pushed you to search on yahoo
- searches on “special K” increased 754% from the year before
- 1500 people joined the community in the first 2 weeks

sCRM -
- polls, surveys, other engagements
- example: Reach Social

Social Spark
- is a social marketing network that connects advertisiers and bloggers through an oline advertising marketplace

—————————————

Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance

Social media’s rise

Why do you want to use it??
- Links are by products
- Wisdom of the crowds
- sharing and conversion - free advertising and WOM
- it gives your consumers a voice

Who is in your target audience?
- you need to know your audience prior to jumping in.
- what do they do? what do they like to do?

Types
-Social news
- social sharing
- social networking
- social bookmarketing
- everything else

Dell’s blogging and social collaboration
- *talks about Dell Hell and exploding batteries*
- Ideastorm -> where products are picked by the people

Houlihans and Communities
- they found out via their community that they shouldnt have taken the fajitas off the menu

Del Monte
- Dogster -> snausages

Loblaws ratings and reviews
- filmed them winning a BBQ contest
- they found out that people hated the bottle but loved the sauce
- the packaging was fixed

Dont let this happen to you?
- Sony psp
- Walmart fake blogging

What social media isnt:
- dont let interns do it
- something you just jump into

What social media is:
- its difficult
- its time consuming
- is not the same for everyone
- complement to seo and ppc

—————————————

David Snyder, Search Specialist, JRDunn.com

77% of all searches are branded

Social Networks - some due to varying factors (internal linking structure, domain trust) can be indredibly useful in your serp battles.

When you create your profiles for your company in twitter, myspace and other networks, they can become heavily weighted, especially for branded

terms if you add them to the same link neighbourhood as your currently ranking site

Optimize your profiles - create a lot of content
- talks about TNT and their NBA Live as examples

Go out and engage -

Images - The Flickr model
- flickr profiles are indexed and searched. the profiles and photostreams also pass link equity.

SMO tips for image sites and images
- set the username of r the account in connection with your business or product
- you will want to tkae care when naming your images, creating descriptions, and tagging them. Utilize your keyword researcher

Video - the Youtube model
- be the first one in your market to create video
- make sure you optimize your video and feeds

Case study - Barack Obama
- #6 is his myspace
- #8 is youtube video
- #9 is youtube channel

What else does this do for you?
- selling SMO to your CEO
- manage your online preutation
- improve long conversion funnel sales

————–

Live blogged by Dave Rohrer

Not yet running a blog? Not syndicating your content through web feeds? Then you're missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. Learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization.
Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
Chris Boggs, Search Engine Watch Expert & Manager, SEO, Brulant, Inc.
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
Daron Babin, CEO, Webmaster Radio

First up is Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit.

Blogs, SEO, and marketing. Blogs should not be just part of an SEO play. They are a real part of the marketing program.
They create alternative keyword media. Not just the ones you are chasing, but an opportunity to find new keywords. Allows you to extend the reach of your web communication - its marketing and SEO. Building a community deepens SEO relations. Build business or brand - connect with consumers particularly with products that address a particular issue. Any kind of marketer can enjoy the benefits of Blogs.

Lets get tactical! Things you need to think about "before" you launch. Will it be an official blog? Or a personal blog? Will it sit on a subdomain on the company's website, or sit on its own and take on a new life. The look and feel - will it before personal, or company branded? Will it be a multi-blogger platform or a lone blogger platform? Amanda is very pro multi-person blogs.

Will it sit on Wordpress, Movable Type, or open source Drupal type platform? Arguments on behalf of each.

The optimization process - four key steps:

1- Customize and optimize the CMS
2- Customize and optimize the RSS feeds
3- Conduct and apply keyword / tag research
4- Socialize the blog and create a community

Shows a large slide that will be available to download which keynotes main points.
- Tweaking CSS
- Title tag optimization
- Permalinks that show real titles, not the text "permalink"
- Use a robots.txt
- Use favicons,
- Sitemaps
- Widgets - "don't fidget with too many widgets but plan for blidgets". Widgets break - don't slow your blog! "Blidgets" - stands for "blog widgets" - can be helpful and useful.
- Validate, tweak, and stay put.

Use the blog plugins! Every blog CMS has plugins for every activity - sitemaps, 301 redirecting, etc. Then - optimize the feeds. Will there be enough content to populate feed? Don't want reader to unsubscribe. Amanda likes full text feeds. Increase items in feed from default 10 to 20 if the blog has frequent posts. Decide how to handle multimedia - if you have audio or video. Manage feeds with Feedburner (personal recommendation).

Tips:
1- Optimize the RSS feed - use keywords in feed in title tag, less than 100 characters.
2- Most readers display feeds alphabetically - helps to be an A or B.
3- Write description as if for a directory
4- Use full paths on links and unique URLs
5- Provide email updates

Process for content production.
1- Write post
2- Review keyword research list
3- include a keyword in the headline
4- Review the body of the post

Make socialization easy for people with buttons. Cross link your blog and website aggressively. Notify other bloggers via comments and emails. Join the blog community.

Keeping the mojo going!
-Develop a mindset that this is a long term, continuous effort.
-Build a battle plan to maintain quality of blog.
-Use analytics to guide editorial choices.
-Post original material often.
-Weed out comment spam.
-Keep blog fresh.
-Build blidgets for social media to drive traffic back to blog.

In summary:
-Use software as a powerful marketing tool.
-Leverage the assets by customizes the templates and feeds. Get the most out of it.
-Socialize it.
-Build content based on keyword list for SEO benefits.
-Plan to keep the mojo going.

Email Amanda for lecture slides.

Next up is Lee Odden from the Top Rank Blog.

Will show us a few case studies. Started a blog in 2003 - Top Rank Blog. Wasn't big until 2007. The growth was outstanding.

According to Technorati, 100,000,000+ blogs have less than 20 in bound links. 400,000 blogs have more than 20,000 links. The top 2,500 bloggers have > 1000 links. Illustrates that its not a monumental task to get to the top.

Blogs on their own do well as a marketing tool. When optimize and socialize, and link out to other blogs - software will see this via trackback or linkback. Will often elicit a response. Optimize content that's great and relevant that you promoted.

Blog Case Study 1: A senior citizens housing developer. Strategy was to create a communication channel to target a market that's less formal than on the corporate website. Tactically - upgraded the blog, optimized it according to Amanda's advice, and reached out to other bloggers in the space. Within a few months, became a top source of traffic to site: rankings went up, visitors increases. Very nominal effort with very tangible results.

Blog Case Study 2: A book and game retailer. Wanted to generate sales. Many are passionate about games and brain teasers. Wanted to create a place for people to play games. Tactic - created an SEO'd blog, created communities on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Stumbleupon. Mined Twitter data to find out what people are talking about and to friend people. Result - great top 3 rankings for target keywords. Did a social promotion for an old style carnival game. Created a Flash version and promoted in social media. Many wrote about this game and create a big spike. Then was another spike as a latent effect. People started searching for the game. Traffic, pageviews, quintupled. Now the blog sell ads in addition to products.

Blog Case Study 3: Top Rank Online Marketing Blog. Strategy - increase thought leadership - cover news, and generate leads.
Tactic - create unique content on a regular schedule via interviews, agency insights, etc. What happened over time? Became the #31 blog on Technorati. But the he good stuff was the media coverage. In 2008 - as a result of visibility - many top journalists and book publishers contacted Lee. That visibility was priceless. Couldn't have paid for this. Lost mojo in July and traffic slowed down. Got 26k visits from search in that month over 12k keywords - shows the long tail distribution. Result - Rank in top 10 on Google for "online marketing" and "blog optimization". Most important is the many advertising inquiries and business inquiries, as well as press inquiries, that continuously pour in.

Key take aways: Goals drive content. Automate SEO as much as possible. Socialize. Measure. Refine and repeat. Make sure you focus on end objectives.

Email Lee Odden at lee@toprankblog.com.

Next up is the amazingly awesome Chris Boggs, who also is contributing live conference coverage for the SERountable.com.

One thing to touch upon is to make a fundamental decision where to host the blog - probably the best practice is to host on your own domain - in general, with some exception.

We're going to talk if a blog will work for your industry.

Some tips: Keep links live from the start. Fix any broken links. Choose words that belong in text.

Chris shows us a content rich "Destin Florida Real Estate" blog. Shows the top 10 results for the term "Destin Florida Real Estate" and that particular blog does not rank. The top 30 has few blogs on the SERPs for that result in there. Key take away is not to count on blog - particularly in industry where rankings are not dominated by the blogs such as this one. It's a nice compliment for link generation and to build authority, but for this example would recommend content within the main site vs. the blog.

Moving on - looking at an old Yahoo! blog that links to SEW with a dead link. Who's at fault? Was it Yahoo! or SEW for not redirecting? Many would thing it's SEW's fault - but falls both ways. How do you ensure a link will stay alive? Pay strict attention and take time to identify best links. Look at Yahoo! news. Picked a random topic of Scientology. Went to an older result. Yahoo! news did not archive the old post. Asked PR-Web if press releases stay forever on the site. They said yes. Hopefully the site will house the copy of the press releases. The reason we focus on PR is because typically they are problematic compared to links from static content.

How to keep blog links live? Try for the brand site if linking to press releases. Keep track of links - loves Xenu Link Slueth and w3.org/checklink. Fix your broken links - don't be lazy or sloppy. Be proactive - tell bloggers their links are broken and consider redirecting pages you remove from site that may have inbound links.

Lastly - since Chris writes alot on search, his name is semantically associated with search. His name appears on a lot of spammy sites. Should probably study this even if you are a pure white hat.

Crackpot Theory #317 - people use Chris's name to spam. A great forum post on SEW about it by Dr. Garcia. See the lecture slides for the link to it.

Finally, check out Chris's column every Friday called Crossfire on SEW with Frank the Tank Watson.

Next up is Daron Babin, our gracious host for Search Bash tonight.

Approaches this topic from a different angle. Hates blogs, the technology around it, hates open source. Has to trust what others know. When started in the mid nighties, was black hat all the way. They are testing this all day, and kicking butt. Take a risk - build something on your own - build it - test it.

Will give examples of how WMR uses feeds. Has a new site with 122 top level categories which every feed needs to be optimized. Has a customize CMS that is organically supercharged. When publishes a page, goes to the website and writes it to the sitemap.xml and robots.txt. Try to control how the engines ingest content off the feeds as well as spider bait and link bait off the homepage.

Be careful what you put in print, because it may rank. Term "rock stars" ranks top 10 in Google because RSS feeds are highly optimize on the "SEO Rock Stars" show. They are Feedburner whores at WMR! Write content in Feedburner fields very carefully.

Another hidden secret - MeFeedia.com. Drives more traffic to WMR than Yahoo!

Shows slides where WMR kicks ass on the SERPs for many high quality terms. Many top 10 rankings for ultra competitive terms. Rate of growth of 2k - 3k traffic driving new terms per month because of feeds.

Article promotions- another way to syndicate content through feeds. Very important how articles are written and inserted into the feed. A bit about automation. Years back we said - automation would kill SEO. Today, we build automation to make it idiot proof. Anyone that can fill out a form field to optimize content.

Feed analytics - best way to do this is via Feedburner. When shoving lots of content through feeds, need to measure effectiveness. With typical web stat packages today its difficult.

Use the auto-discovery tag which is very important. Engines are looking for this tag and will help improve TrustRank inside site over time. Doesn't happen overnight.

Curve ball about doing things on one domain - if you have a huge media database. The WMR article site is 5x the size and it's just text. Imagine passing the PR through those two databases. Cross pollinate between the two. Very powerful.

That's all, thanks everyone!

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

More and more, ranking well in paid search listings is less about how much you pay and more about the "quality" of your ad campaign. But what goes into making up your quality score? In this panel, we'll take a closer look at quality factors and give tips on increasing the perceived relevancy of your campaigns.

Moderator:
Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
Speakers:
Brad Geddes, Founder, bgTheory.com
Ron Jones, Search Engine Watch Expert & President/CEO, Symetri Internet Marketing
Kendall Allen, Former Managing Director, Incognito Digital, Digital Marketing and Convergence Media Consultant
Misty Locke, President & Co-founder, Range Online Media


Dana Todd: How many of you out there are advanced advertisers, meaning you've been doing PPC for three years or more? How many of you have been doing it less than two years? So, the panelists will first go over the basics and then we will get more and more granular, and provide some tips for you all to take away.

First up is Ron.

Ron Jones: What is a Quality Score? The old model is kind of a bid to position situation. Quality score essentially is a dynamic value assigned to each keyword, and is the basis for defining quality and relevancy of your ad. So the higher your quality score, the lower your minimum bid and the higher your ad placement.

Google rolled out Quality Score in 2005, and they revised the algorithm in 2007 to incorporate landing page relevance, and then later on allowed their users to see it. Yahoo Panama launched in 2007.

A key thing is that we believe that delivering more relevant ads would create more value for users. If search engines can deliver more relevance that makes them look good and then you look good.

So Quality Score a way to bring more relevant situations.

Where to find the Quality Score? You need to drill down to the ad groups and specifically shows each of the keywords, you need to click on "customize columns" and then quality score. So it gives you a feeling of how good or poor your keywords are. In Yahoo, you can see it right away, you don't need to turn it on or off.

Historical click through rate for each keyword affects your Quality Score, the relevance of the ads and the quality of landing page. Also your account history, history of all click through rates and ads in your account. Of course there are factors as well that won't be revealed to us.

Relevance and landing page are the key things.

Case study: we had a client come to us, they were managing their own campaign and they currently had an average minimum bid of 40 cents, and 5 ad groups, and each ad group had 100 keywords. It turned out that 72% of their keywords had poor Quality Scores.

So the first thing we did was come in and create more, smaller, more relevant ad groups. Then we developed more relevant ad copy for each group. Then we optimized the landing page using Google's web optimizer. And we tested to see what was and was not working. So some results: the average minimum CPC went down to about 8 cents, click through rates went up about 11%, conversions went up from 2.6% to 4.2% within 2 weeks, the quality score for over 50% of the keywords went from poor to great. And then after a month, anything that still had a poor rating, we just deleted them altogether.

So the key thing is you need to test and keep an eye on quality score. Many people miss out on this.

Hot tip: You probably should allocate about 10%-15% of your budget specifically to testing. You will learn what's working and what's not working.

Dana: Brad is up next. Brad has been working up to the minute to get some insight directly from Google on this. You will now get as close to Google level knowledge as possible today. Welcome Brad.

Brad Geddes: I will talk specifically about Google. Their Quality Score permeates everything in the account about what it affects. Your bids. Your position. Your placement targeting. Ad rank.

So we will walk through how the Quality Score factors affect everything.

Why is Quality Score important? It affects your ad rank, where your ad appears.
Ad rank = keyword Quality Score x maximum CPC.

So often you don't want to change your bids, you want to see if you can raise your Quality Score rather than your bids.

First Google determines your minimum bid. The minimum you can pay to have your ad shown. And if your bid is higher than the minimum then you can show on search, but if its lower you can't show up in search but you can show up in content network.

Minimum bid is determined by:

- Historical click through rate on Google.com – not on the content network
- Relevance of keywords
- Landing page (goes into the min bid calculation)
- Other factors

Don't get caught up in other factors.

So viewing minimum bids: you can see them right away. Take your minimum bids and export them into Excel so you can see them more clearly.

Quality Score factors chart: look at particular factors as a reference when you start diagnosing issues.

The higher your minimum bid, maybe you have a landing page problem. Start playing with them and see what's working. Go into your Adwords accounts to see more information. Load time of your landing page and other factors.

Account organization is the number 1 factor to get a good jump in quality score. The more granular the campaigns, the more relevant everything will be.

Dana: Kendall Allen is next, she is currently a consultant for Convergence Media.

Kendal Allen: I put together a review of history and some considerations from my perspective that comes from my background. For me, it's interesting to look at the progress in the conversations since the 1990s when I started out here.

The progressive conversation on relevancy:

With the onset of Quality Score, relevancy is much more scientific if you want to approach it properly. The conversation has been going on for quite a while. I am going to focus specifically on the landing page and the collaboration that needs to occur to get this right.

Relevancy: what it used to mean, you had this bucket of keywords and you had the same titles and descriptions for everything on your list. Maybe you categorized them in Excel, started to map keywords, either way it used to be extremely manual. Then, the tools started to get better, standards started to raise, and relevancy became increasingly part of the conversation when it came to do quality search marketing.

We got more aggressive on bidding strategy, handling text ad methods, titles and descriptions, keyword landing page, and getting more serious about what we wanted the consumer to do.

Landing page: we have always been delivering this to deliver on consumer demand. Where you land on the page is one thing but now there are many more things to look at. You want to look at the account history, content and layout, usability and navigation and load time.

If Quality Score is well handled, it will force the tightening of relevancy to occur earlier on. We want to deliver on relevancy.

Guidance: when it comes to content, content rich strategies in search have always been wise. Use tags when necessary and be descriptive.

Usability: it should be useful, relevant, and deliver.

Navigation: direct connection to what is sought. Make it clear how to get there. Ease of passage.

Transparency: make sure the nature of your business is crystal clear.

Load time: this can be smooth with the right kind of collaboration. Minimize the number of redirects and come up with creative workarounds of slow servers.

So in sum, if you are serious about relevancy, you need to take Quality Score seriously. It does I believe represent an opportunity to hang your interests on. As you go about making site modifications and dealing with all the other factors, understand what the threshold is and what your efforts should be. Know that your efforts are going to be re-evaluated by the engines over time, and will get better and better.

Dana Todd: last but not least is Misty Locke who will give you some great tips.

Misty: we are an SEM and we focus on paid, SEO and feeds. Emphasize digital assets.

Quality Score takes search back to the basics, back to the fundamentals. Providing the user direct access to finding the content they want at the time they want it.

5 basic steps:

-keywords
-organization & structure
-match type
-creatives
-landing pages

Keyword building: most people bucket them and go off on the long tail. You should have several different groups and categories of brands. It will really improve your quality score. They are not necessarily tail terms, they are product specific. Don't chase every keyword, chase the right keyword. If you can build out your campaign you can really lower your CPC – if your keyword is profitable, make it more profitable.

Structure: don't build thousands of useless keywords. Be organized when you put this together. Yahoo limits you to 10,000 ad groups. If you have not reached that limit you are not working hard enough!

Match types. Every keyword you run should be on every single match type. Every keyword should be running on exact. When you break it out, you will start to see a decline in your phrase match spend. Put in your negatives.

Creatives: go down to the specifics where you are not even using Dynamic Keyword Insertion any more. Be so specific. We use color type, size, etc in every creative that we do. Let the user find the exact creative that they are looking for. It will increase your Quality Score and lower your CPC.

Landing pages: In MSN and Yahoo, your ad could/will be disapproved if you do not have great landing pages. Everything in your landing pages should be in your ad copy and everything in your ad copy should be in your landing pages.

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

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 & Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, IBM Corporation

Speakers:

• Erik Qualman, Search Engine Watch Expert & Global VP, EF Education
• Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras
• Vanina Delobelle, PhD., Global Product Director, Monster Worldwide

Vanina Delobelle is up first. She works with social media and user generated content at Monster.

What are Social Media?

• Virtual Universes (Second Life, World of Warcraft)
• Social Networks (Myspace, Facebook, Xing)
• Blogs and Livecasts (Blogger, Justin.tv, seesmic, etc.)
• Forums (Phorum, phpBB)
• Microblogging (Pownce, Twitter
• Diggs
• Multimedia Sharing (YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare)

A user centric approach

• Social Networks
• Blogs
• Forums
• Microblogging
• Diggs
• Multimedia sharing

The use of Social Media

• Connect with people. Reach the people where they are in the way they are used to.
• Keep brand positioning. Keep brand awareness to relay offline marketing campaigns.
• Generate more traffic
• Enlarge the targeted segment. Different type of people use different types of media.
• Increase the use experience
• Plus leverage current marketing results, get better brand awareness, get better brand management, get better user stickiness, get better quality products, get more sales.

The requirements for Social Media

• Global means local. Because we deal with communities we need to be close to them. The communities are still local, if you want to go global, you need to be where they are an in their language.
• Resources. Community managers need to get more focus.
• Consistency. The effort should start and last. Be sure to keep users with your community.
• Content. The content should get more focus and be relevant.

Towards a (global) user centric platform. This is what Monster has done for social media.

• 2007
• Blog (US)
• Twitter (US)
• 2008
• Forums (EU, CAN)
• Twitter (CAN, UK)
• Others (UK)
• 2009
• Forums (Turkey, Russia…) Others (EU)
• …and many more Social Media to be integrated all across the site.

Screenshots of the search engines’ golden triangles. Golden triangles are now dominated by social media.

Create user centric products.

• People share, comment, communicate, rank…the product belongs to users. Give the users what they want.
• An example: Monster UK
• YouTube: 250,000 views
• Facebook: 990 fans
• Created one month ago. Bebo, Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Friendfeed, hi5, Identi.ca, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo, Plurk, Pownce, Slideshare, Tumblr, Twitter, Xanga.
• Increased page views by 24% in nine months on content.monster.co.uk.

Next is Erik Qualman.

He’s with EF Education and gives an overview of their company. He states you don’t want to be “that company” that’s two years behind social media. His company was “that company”, and he gives examples of what they have done and what they learned.

They did a Facebook application, but required people to give their information to add the application. A user complained, the company didn’t listen, so the user went and started Where I’ve Been, which was quite successful. He gave example of TripAdvisor and Cities I’ve Visited. You don’t need to have a totally unique application, showed how both are successful. But you can’t take the same traditional type of marketing to social media. Don’t require people to fill out forms for example.

 “Field of nightmares” – they built it (social app), but nobody came. Usually best to leverage existing community rather than trying to build your own in many cases. They did learn from their mistakes, and launched a social media product that actually was successful.

They started thinking about what it was that only their company could provide to the customer base. “Find who’s on your tour” Facebook application was a way for students to see who else was on their foreign country tour (many of the student tours of foreign countries are run through his company). Part of it was to be helpful to student, but part of it was also bragging to friends about where they were.

• Where should I start? (Facebook, Myspace, etc.)
• When should I start? Today! Don’t try to be perfect before your launch. Slap beta on it, figure out what people like, get out bugs, do this for a month or two, then learn from mistakes and make marketing push.
• Can search engines crawl social media/networks?
• Does Facebook PPC work? It depends. In his case, better to not put filters on. Don’t treat it like direct response. Build your community on Facebook initially.
• What’s the easiest way for my company to use Twitter?
• What else is exciting?

Brent Csutoras
How you can use social media to benefit you in conjunction with or independently of your search marketing campaign.

Social media is really broad – Twitter, IM, Facebook, etc. He’s found the most viable part of social media is to increase your visibility, ranking, links to your site, etc.

Important factors are Domain Age, On Page Factors, links. Links are harder to get these days, especially with problems with paid links. Social media can really help you here with links, traffic, visibility, and branding.

How it works: create content on a section on your site, find specific communities that will react well to your topic (don’t put your political content on a dog site), engage the people in these communities. People with blogs are looking for content and look at these communities. If you get your content on these sites, you get lots of exposure. People write about you, link to you, even talk to you outside of the web (TV, newspaper). You’re getting two types of links – community links (profiles showing what individuals voted on), and sites like Wired and others that write about you. The second type usually has better visitors, and you get long-term influx of links (weeks/months).

Case study of two campaigns that were simply images that they found and pushed out to the social media sites, especially Digg. Got over 8,000 quality inbound links (over 30 PR8 inbound links), would cost a lot of money to have bought these types of links.

Social Media Tips

• Have a site that is social media friendly. Don’t plug advertising and marketing stuff. A week or so after you’re successful, then you can put advertising back on.
• Pick communities you relate to. Research these communities, see what communities are appropriate.
• Check what worked before. Do more research, see what was successful for others in your field.
• Create high quality content.
• Understand how to submit and push social campaigns.
• Understand what to do with success.
• Be social! Treat it like a real life social event.

Q&A Time

How do you deal with the time management aspect of social media? How do you not waste time? Social is not one of those things you can just spend a small time on. If you don’t have much time, focus on smaller things like bookmarking and bookmarking items that are high quality that others might pick up in social media. Another way to deal with limited time is to pick just one social media site that you want to participate in.

What about reputation management? You don’t have a choice, it’s going to happen. You need to participate. If there is something negative, address it, comment on it, then bring it back to your platform and your site. In a couple of months, they’ll often delete the original negative press. Offer people products, that often helps, or give them a phone call. Sometimes it’s not necessary to respond if it’s just one small mention, see if you can get a couple of down vote the comment.

Where do you see social media going in the next two or three years? Many panelists responded. You need to be going the extra mile, give people more power with what they can do on your site. Go beyond just social media, but integrate it into your marketing mix in general. TripAdvisor for example might look at where people have visited via their Facebook app, then use that data.

Coverage provided by Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs.

Philip James, CEO, Snooth, Inc.

What changed? Web got big
- search engines index small portion
- poor results for focused searches
- endless tweaking of search terms

- need for specialized search
- videos, jobs, medical data, blogs, etc

Its easy when you are a niche
- smaller = high relevancy
- balance specialization vs market size
- dominate your space
- room for 1 to 3 players each

Getting the word out
- From a search engine
- SEO - if you have content
- SEM - if you have a fast conversion cycle

OR

- SMM - depending on the business

How scalable are these?

Delivering better search
- new content search - blogs, images, bideos
- canned search - dog friendly employers
- parametric search - more like DB queries (example: weather.com or kayak.com or searches that you select a price or some range)
- semantic search - implied meaning
- filters and relevant post search tools

Killer combo: parametric/semantic
- no need to disco er intent, its already clear
- parametrics and semantics in action

*showed financials of what you will need eCPM and page views and went over it*

———————————————————————–

Paul Forster, CEO, Indeed

vertical search charactersistics
- specialized data
- hidden web
- structured or semi-structured
- time sensitive
- comprehensive search

Examples?
- travel - kayak.com
- jobs - indeed.com
- shopping - become.com

Why does this matter to marketers?
- are you looking for people with specialized intent?
- focused audiences (ex. search indeed for search engine marketing jobs and search from SF… you know their location and intent)
- Google is bad at it
- spectacular growth (shows a growth chart where vertical search engines are way above other sites)

How do you market there?
- organic inclusion (can you provide a feed?)
- optimize your feeds (check to be sure its complete and correct)
- accuracy
- reliability
- dedupe
- paid inclusion
- emails, subscriptions and more
- kayak has ppc and sponsoring

Questions to ask?
- what audience am i trying to reach?
- what kind of vertical search sites to use?
- does a prospective site get enough traffic?
- how significant is their partner network?
- is free organic inclusion on offer?
- have I optimized my feeds?
- what ad products does the site offer?
- how can I track results and ROI

———————————————————————–

Jonathan Dingman, VP of Marketing, Digitally Imported Inc.

Vertical Search

How do you stand out? Be unique.
Content is king - with a lyrics site you are going to have the same content. What you need to do is make yourself unique.

Can you keep up?
- fast moving results
- staying on top of SEO
- SEO? links
- SEO? Keywords
- SEO? Stay relevant

Whats the bottom line?

- be unique
- bring visitors back to your site
- be memorable
- be unique

———————————————————————–
Q. Why should I choose vertical search over just trying to optimize for Google/MSN/Yahoo?
A. Traffic is growing very fast on Vertical search engines. *said a stat about the growth but missed it*

————–

Live blogged by Dave Rohrer

Daniel Scocco has written a really great blog post at Daily Blog Tips of the importance of domain names--that length and quality do matter. After looking at the Alexa top 250 sites (and the "last 250 sites on the front page of Digg," he concludes that good domain names are vital in the long term success of the site:

All other things being equal (e.g., marketing budget, content quality, design, affiliation with larger websites and so on), a website with a good domain name will always outperform a competitor with a bad or average domain name.

The blog post is a great read, and is especially helpful on a personal note to convince a few people I know that their domain names of choice have been less than ideal.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post about new widgets that Google has created that allow you to "embed a widget in your 404 page that helps your visitors find what they're looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL."

At Search Engine Land, Barry illustrates how this works:

For example, I set up a page at the Search Engine Roundtable at seroundtable.com/advertize.html, notice I spelled advertise, with a "Z." Google automatically notices that I have a page at advertise.html, and offers that as an option for people to visit. Here is a screen capture:

However, if you're using a Windows computer, it seems, that advertize.html page doesn't work at all and brings up a blank page instead if you're using Internet Explorer or Firefox. (It does, however, work in Safari for Windows and apparently Opera too.)

I'm not sure if that's a coding issue or what, but I'm assuming that wasn't intentional. (Two different users have already reported this issue, and I've been able to reproduce it. Thanks, Tom!)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Tony explains the issue is due to the page not actually returning a 404 response. So it is my error and this should work fine.

Update #2: Google has fixed the issue and the script should work even on pages that return a 200 response.

At Search Engine Watch, member abbotsys notices that the Quality Score for low volume keywords is good -- but if you look closely at the keyword analysis, the ad isn't even running!

According to Google, those ads are not showing because nobody is searching for them:

Ad Showing - No The keyword phrase you've entered has a low search volume and isn't showing any of your ads. If more users start searching for your keyword, your ad will begin to show. You don't need to do anything

Should Google be doing this? Forum member Gooner151078 says that "In my mind, you as an advertiser have the right to have your advert showing against any term, regardless of the volume." (But one can argue, then, that an ad with a low quality score should still be showing up!)

However, others understand (and have encountered) this issue. One says that matching terms for that keyword should be added (surrounded by quotes or brackets) and that you should keep in mind to utilize long tail keywords to create more opportunities for your advertisements to show up.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I am tracking the large WebmasterWorld thread on the topic of WebPosition Gold no longer working on Google's search pages. It seems like WebPosition Gold is releasing an update today, that will address the issue that is preventing the scraping of the Google results, which stops the tool from building Google ranking reports.

WebPosition Gold employee, Scott, said in message number 3726633, yesterday:

I have an update going out today which should improve things for WP users...

That clearly implies that they have reworked the program to properly pick up the Google search result pages and document rankings again.

Member, pageoneresults, feels this fix won't last too long. He feels Google will counter WebPosition Gold's update with a slight change themselves, which may cripple the software from documenting your Google rankings.

Clearly, Google is not happy with people using these tools. But it doesn't seem to be the top concern for Google at this moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is the concise version of the live blogging coverage our volunteers put together at SES San Jose yesterday:

• Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
• Global Search for the B2B SEM
• Shopping Search Tactics
• 7 Proven Ways to get Your Website on Page 1 Organically & then Convert
• 5 Things No One Will Tell You About SEM
• What's new with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer?
• Advanced B2B Marketing
• Search Advertising 101
• Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers

Again, a big thank you to our volunteer live bloggers, breaking their fingers on their keyboards. Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs, Sheara Wilensky & Avi Wilensky of Promedia Corp, Carolyn Shelby aka Cshel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, and Dave Rohrer.

Many companies find it difficult to use web analytics for more than reporting and ad hoc investigations. By defining requirements, roles, tasks, and benchmarks, an efficient process replaces one-off requests. This session covers practical workflows that you can quickly implement to see improved, consistent returns from your data. This sets a platform for experience-based learning that helps a company to set standards, anticipate a build-cycle or campaign refresh, and prioritize search marketing efforts.
Moderator:
Chris Boggs, Search Engine Watch Expert & Manager, SEO, Brulant, Inc., recently acquired by Rosetta
Speakers:
Craig Danuloff, Founder & President, Commerce360, Inc.
Brian Cosgrove, Site-Side Analytics Engineer, AvenueA / Razorfish
Heather Dougherty, Analyst, Hitwise
Michael Stebbins, CEO & Founder, Market Motive
Brett Crosby, Senior Manager, Google Analytics, Google

First up is Craig Danuloff.

Roadblocks and challenges are the topic we'll be discussing. Lots of challenges in paid search, based on data, organization, bad habits.

Three factors of evil - what your up against - when digging into analytics.

1- Invisible info - data we want that's not there. Lots of pieces that we can't quite get to.
2- Deception - things are not what they seem to be.
3- Unlimited powers and resources.

Invisibility - most important is the full spectrum of what's going on in search process. The start and the end of what your measuring is missing. The queries that match the text ads are vital. This info is not as available as it should be. Want to know every query paid for and that's difficult.

Profitability is also difficult to measure. Done on an ROI basis non on ROAS basis. In order to do that must enter margin information. Sometimes hard to come by. Lots of times positive ROAS does not correlate with positive ROI. Want to enter margin for each good enter, and take that against true cost to make decision.

Deception: Can you trust what you see? Lots of keywords, and campaigns - what comes back in reports are averages - rollups. If you haven't carefully constructed grouping - without looking inside. Brand terms vs. non brand terms are a great example. Need to segregate.

Accuracy: It would be nice to know if the sample is statistically significant - tools don't take this into account.

Unlimited power and resources - massive amount of data and a time frame that's ever rolling. Really need to watch where you put energy and effort. The tool set does not give you direction on where to make decisions. Also, always making lots of changes with keywords, creatives, bids. Competitors are doing things. Often make changes without recording them. Tool sets don't provide this today. We need to watch our tests, otherwise we are just guessing day after day. Sometimes need to be disciplined and not make 50 changes a day.

What can you do to deal with these issues? To deal with missing information - demand to get the info on the query and ROI. Adwords for example does not tell us which keywords were connect to queries. Omniture has a tool that helps with this. ROI and margins - same thing. All a matter of awareness. Understand that averages and aggregates must be segregated into homogeneous piles in some level - so that they are meaningful. Low performers, high performers need to be segregated. The rollup must be a narrow component of info to be useful.

Lastly - better math we can apply. Take the data and put it into Excel. Make records of changes. When you go back and see which change was positive.

One tiny tip is to organize keywords in groups with exact match, phrase match, and broad match separately.

Next up is Brian Cosgrove of Avenue A.

Started out as an inhouse SEO and has an engineering background.

First topic is implementation. Poll: How many are running paid and organic. Almost everyone. Who has a base feed? A local feed? Videos? All these things are on the same page and any analytics package will record this as organic if not configured properly. It's going to bucket them together. Need to know ahead of time to make sure that the system can separate that stuff out. Especially things like paid inclusion.

Filtering: Many do not take into account that a lot of internal traffic comes in for many reasons. Important to filter. Look at reports and look for things you don't understand. Very useful for SEO campaigns. To get good statistics, need to take action on your site.

Data driven organization - people within an organization will request different reports. Many are not using this to drive business decisions. Comes down to roles. Analysts are good at deciphering the data. Come up with insights to feed to developers, PR teams, specialists (PPC/SEO) and lots of other individuals in the organization. One role is missing - the operations person. The project manager. Someone needs to have the foresight to get developers together, content writers, and line it up ahead of time with a concrete list of recommendations to act upon.

Case study: A company changed their site every six weeks. Spent first four weeks going through data. Next two weeks were dedicated to handing off the business requirements to hand off to other team members. When that's handed off, the project manager takes over. The analyst switches gears and move into another mode - maybe landing paid optimization or other areas not addressed. The analyst is putting together action lists all the time.

A few specific reports you should look into- landing pages for organic search. Looking at those pages is extremely important. How landing pages relate to keywords is fundamental in paid and organic. Often the page that ranks well for the word is not the best landing page. Sometimes you get lots of traffic to pages that are not bringing people to their objectives.

Conclusion:
-Implement platform correctly
-Identify actions you can take
-Coordinate with other resources
-Separate the analysis cycles
-Staff people to manage changes

Heather Dougherty from Hitwise is up next.

Using CI to identify and maximize SEM Opportunities.

Identify and maximize SEM Opportunities. Identify trends. Shows slide of a retail brand. Shows Christmas and "back to school" patterns. Be able to plan ahead for trends instead of reacting.

Look at the breakdown between paid and organic within specific industries. Learn competitiveness and pricing. These ratios help you get a benchmark of whats going on. Knowing what competitor is doing is critical. Look at which search engines are sending traffic to competitors. Learn about their strategies. Look at ratio of paid vs. organic traffic. Identify branded terms and volume of traffic that comes from them.

Compare where people are searching to where they are clicking. Look for lower cost keywords. Improve keyword list efficiency. Prices are going up. Identify who is doing well in sponsored listings and learn from their copy. Look at how competitors are getting organic traffic. Is it the content? Maybe you can partner with competitors for ad buys, licensing, etc.

Determine user intent. Purchase or news? When looking at intent, can learn about what users are thinking about their brand. Case study: American Airlines. What are people typing in addition to the keyword? There was a major spike when all the planes were grounded. Queries showed that some searchers suspecting there was a conspiracy, and this was vital for reputation management.

Integrate search findings across the organization. Search is not just about SEO and PPC. Take advantage of findings to identify other marketing opportunities such as affiliate partners.

Next up is Michael Stebbins of Market Motive.

Will share own process for web analytics and how they shape paid campaigns.

What's in your data? Bounce rate, average time on site, and pageviews are good foundations for measuring basic interest. But make sure you are collecting conversion rate, cost of visitor, and revenue per visitor. Crucial. Cost per visitor is more difficult to measure. If revenue comes from off the site, its no excuse not to measure it. Need to put the data in analyics, even though it will never be accurate.

The Grim Reaper Approach: Tactical question - which 10% of my ads are not performing? Possible answers: Campaigns with low engagement, low ROI, low conversion need to be cut. People often cling to ads hoping they will perform. Better to create new ads. Can sort by ROI and eliminate candidates for deletion.

Check commercial intent tool at adlab.msn.com. Put in 2 terms and tells what the likelihood is for purchase. Adwords keyword tool is great too. Now shows search volume. Check forecast and demographics. Read Bryan Eisenberg on how to tune message to the user.

Placement - Google Ad Planner- free. Tool tells us sites that have the traffic we are looking for. Next you test. Create 3 copy of your ad. Don't want to cut a performing ad in half. A neat trick. Set ads to perform evenly.

Takeaways - Collect, Question, Cut, Create, Place, and Test.

View slides at http://www.marketivemotive.com/ses

Next is Brett Crosby from Google Analytics, formerly of Urchin.

Plugs the new book - "Always Be Testing" by Bryan Eisenberg.

More and more businesses and people within companies are demanding reports and analytics. The back end guys found themselves all of the sudden pumping reports. With GA, analytics jumped into the mainstream. The audience changed. No longer a small group within the company, but the entire company. Launched a new interface to put the data in context. As you use the tool, you get smarter. There is still data for the pros, but also for everyone. Allows people to get feet wet and just touch the surface.

Formalizing the process - getting the right data to the right people. Set up goals and funnels (for both ecommerce and non-ecommerce). Many people he encounters do not set up goals. Build customized dashboards, and customize email reports for different job functions (webmasters, executives, SEOs).

Goals and funnels - set up in the admin interface under "edit settings". Even without ecommerce, can set the goal value. Say a lead is worth $1,000 - plug that data in. Define the funnel steps. Can tell us goal value per visit. With ecommerce, the data is really rich. .

Custom dashboards - every report has an icon to add it to dashboard. Get the most important metrics in your face.

Custom email reports - get the data out to the guys that need it. Can run schedules. Customized data to the right people at the right time. Do this for each major role, and everyone is happy.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

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.

Introduction by:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ

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

We started with Dana Todd, who is the chair of SEMPO.

First advice was to take the time to look at the help and training from all of the search engines, and reach each engine’s blog regularly for updates. SEMPO.org also has free webinars.

If you love data, you’ll love PPC.

• The most successful pc managers are highly analytical.
• Microsoft Excel is your friend. You can have expensive tools, but it does a lot for you.
• Linear progression:
• Start small
• Test, measure, adjust, test it again
• Expand on your successes

Dana shows screenshots of several search engines and vertical/specialty search, and outlines which areas are paid and which are organic. Feeds, mobile, white paper, and lots more have opportunities for PPC.

How do you buy search?

• Flat cost-per-click
• Yahoo search submit (Paid Inclusion)
• Directory programs, white paper networks, etc.

Understanding Hybrid Auctions

• Blind Auction – you can’t see other max bids
• Ad rank is determined by a number of factors
• What you want to pay per click
• Competitive landscape
• Quality score
• Value of the ad space

What is quality score? It’s the keyword’s Click Through Rate + relevance of your ad text + historical keyword performance + other features.

Pre-flight checklist for building campaign.

• Good tracking software. At least install Google Analytics. You’ll need two pieces of code, from both Google Analytics and from Google AdWords. Might take some time to get this set up.
• KPIs
• Set Values
• Establish baselines
• Strategy (goals)
• Money
• Rules

Setting base values and goals

• Conversion: can mean many different things
• Absolutely required homework
• What are your target goals?
• What are the actions you value?
• What dollar values can you set? You can even do something like value an email lead at 41 cents, as that’s the cost it saved you on a stamp.
• It’s OK to guess. Use your gut if you’re not sure. You can always modify your assumptions.

She skips a conversion funnel, figures that we’ll get it in all of the other sessions here.

Finding Keywords

• Where?
• Your site, competitors, trade literature, vertical sites, lots of other stuff.
• Brand names are typically best performers if you have a known brand. You can control the message this way, much better than in organic SEO. You’re taking up more real estate on the page.
• Find “negative keywords” during this phrase as well. Use lots of negative words to filter out random impressions which hurt your quality score. Start with “free” “cheap” and “naked”. Look in your referral logs to see what is bogus traffic.
• How many?
• If you have a low budget, don’t spread yourself too thinly across a zillion “tail terms”. Start with just a few and get them good, then expand from there.
• 80/20 rule. 20% of your keywords will drive 80% of your traffic (and budget!).

http://adlab.microsoft.com shows upstream and downstream of visitors. If someone typed in Compaq, shows if people then next searched dell computer or Compaq computer.

Google’s keyword tool. It’s a lot of fun, and can save you a lot of time and effort. Set your match type first, as the default match type is broad.

Building the ads

• Because CTR affects your position, do NOT get lazy. Don’t use one ad for everything. You do need to put the effort into writing your ad, you want quality score to be good.
• Use keyword in title and/or description. Users follow scent trail.
• Must pass editorial review.
• Choose appropriate landing page URLs (usually NOT home page), though sometimes home page can be best. You might want to do an A/B test.
• Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion
• A little complicated to explain here, so check out the tutorials on each site. Usage is different between engines.

Searchers prefer uninterrupted logic. Make sure that the ad text and the landing page all talk about what the person is searching for.

Schedule

• Don’t just set it and forget it.
• Map out a calendar in terms of:
• Campaign rollout
• Reporting/analysis
• Testing period(s)
• Other promotions (offline, online – trade shows, etc., like editorial calendar)
• Budget changes (e.g. overspend on Google during kickoff)
• Schedule promotional and seasonal messaging
• Dayparting – time of day, days of week. If you are only open during the week, you may not want to advertise on the weekends.
• Overlay any expected seasonality
• Schedule quarterly “housecleaning”.

Budgeting

• Daily budgeting technology isn’t perfect, so engines usually under-deliver or over-deliver. Set it for a little more than you want to spend, so the engines don’t under-deliver. Do look at your spend.
• Put your high-traffic or high-dollar words in their own campaign with their own budget
• Start out with a bang so you can lock in a high CTR which will help your quality score – then pull back
• Google has different ways to manage budgets:
• Conversion Optimizer (average CPA)
• Budget optimizer (most clicks for a defined budget)
• Preferred cost bidding (set average CPC preferred)
• Manual bidding (you control it.)

Managing Bids

• Bid management software helps
• Popular tools: search engines’ tools, Atlas, Keyword BidMax, Omniture, SearchRev, Performics, Clickable, Adapt
• Note: “bidding rules” don’t work well on hybrid auctions
• Low volume keywords won’t have much data to optimize automatically against ROI or other projected values
• People are still required!
• Paying too much? Improve your CTR and landing page
• Delete low performing keywords, or pause/isolate them so they don’t bring down overall campaign. Don’t have pity, get rid of them if they don’t help you.

Final thoughts

• Don’t be afraid to start small and grow your success
• Build a risk portfolio for yourself – set aside some budget for experiments and branding. Be creative, try some things, see what you can figure out.
• Reinvest a portion of “profits” back into the budget.
• Leverage the engines for knowledge, but don’t believe everything they tell you. Changes occur, ad reps aren’t always talking to the engineers, etc.
• Provide enough resources to support the campaign.
• Strive for integrated strategy across all media.
  

Matt Van Wagner is up next.
PPC is really process-oriented. You’ll keep getting better as time goes on. He starts off by showing an ad for Bebop Baby Shop. Their only goal was to get people to go into the store. They did a bunch of ad impressions, got some qualified visitors, and it cost $185. Their sales were three months ahead of projects. They refined their ad to just a specific geography to make it more relevant.

Another reason he loves PPC is so many things are measurable. Investment, revenue, percentage of ad spend to revenue.

PPC and SEO are complementary.

• Get going quickly
• Discover what words convert
• Reduces risk of major ago changes
• Predictable, dependable flow of traffic

PPC allows you more control over messaging

• You control messaging through ad text
• You determine what pages ad visitors land on first.

Process creates sustainable advantage

• It’s not just about keywords, ands, bids, and “secretes”

Use systems-level thinking

• Align PPC campaign, goals with larger company goals.
• Increase s ales, not just clicks

Track performance, Make adjustments

• Be methodical, measure and test everything you can
• Don’t react too quickly, but don’t get analysis-paralysis. Do write a note as to why you are doing what you are doing.

Set good goals and work towards them.

He showed graphic of the structure of a PPC account. I won’t replicate here, as you can find it on the help pages for PPC vendors.

Google/MSN keyword match types.

• Broad
• Phrase
• Exact
• Negative

Yahoo Keyword Match types

• Standard Match
• Advanced Match

Broad match

• Queries in any word order
• Likely plurals
• Likely equivalents including misspellings

Phrase Matches

• Exact query order

Exact Matches

• Only if query matches keyword exactly. The keywords will be the exact search only.

Yahoo
Standard Match

• Exact query order
• Common misspellings
• Singular or plural forms
• Words in your ad, even if they are not in your keyword list. Warning!

Advanced Matches:

• Queries in any order
• Common misspellings
• Singular or plural forms
• Words in ad text or website. Warning!

Use broad/advanced match to generate traffic and discover new terms

• Stick to two and three word terms
• Use one word keywords only very rarely if at all
• Watch conversion rates and web logs

Use phrase and exact match to hone in on important high-traffic terms
Use negative match to reduce ad impressions on non-productive searches.
Negative match keywords

• Prevent ads from showing on non-productive searches
• Subtle differences across PPC networks
• Improves CTR, quality scores, and reduces costs.
• Good to exclude type of traffic you don’t want. If you want to sell wool capes, think of a negative of costume, so someone looking for a Halloween costume doesn’t see your ad.

Click-Through Rate = Clicks divided by Ad Impressions
Reduce unproductive ad impressions, improve CTR

Gives a case example where looking at logs and adding in negative words helped reduce ad spend.

Where do your ads show?
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

• A user types n a query
• They are actively seeking answers

Content sites

• User doesn’t type in query
• Users encounter ads while doing something else. Reading a newspaper online is one example. It’s interrupt advertising.

Search:

• More directly relevant visitors
• More control on placement
• Content ads
• Less control over where ads are placed
• Can be “spikey”, which could be good or bad
• Traditionally where more click spam lives

Tip: look at your spend of content versus search. Reduce content it is higher than search.

Example of ad designed to draw clicks:

• Make the ad relevant to the keyword.
• Ad includes keyword
• Good, strong offer
• Local campaign gives you a fifth line (Google only).

Ads designed to filter clicks

• Ambiguous keywords like “home care” need ads that clearly identify purpose – is this for lawn services, or senior care?
• Impacts quality score, unfortunately.

Get a variety of ad styles, have a contest in the office, or look at the SERPs and see the types of styles.

• First person story
• Trusted authority, uses quotes
• Price Appeal
• Convenience – toll free number
• Get information
• We’re different from “them”

When looking at ad performance, look at conversion rate. One can have higher CTR, but doesn’t convert.

Please forget everything you just learned about ad rank. Please remember only that ad rank exists.

Coverage provided by Keri

Patricia Hursh, President & Founder, SmartSearch Marketing

10 Tips for b2b

1. reach prospects early in the buying cycle
2. advertise in “the tail”
3. include non banded keywords
4. pre qualify clickers
5. focus and align ad copy
6. creave very specific landing pages and microsites
7. test pages continuously

8. offer multiple action options

9. simplify registration forms

10. turn web inquiries into sales leads

Buying Cycle

- shows forester chart

Advertis in the ail

- example is software: the tail would go to software…. enterprise software… erp enterprise software and so on

- conversions happen in the tail (shows a chart) 3-4 word phrases was the winner

Non Branded Terms

Use adcopy to prequal clickers

- address your specific target audience

- pre qual clickers

Align ad copy with search query

- align ad copy with search query

- modify copy across buying cycle

laptop computer -> laptop information -> laptop user reviews -> ibm laptop models -> ibm thinkpad t61

- for this example, change each ad - DONT use the same ad *she shows some examples*

Microsite

- typically between 3-10 pages

- focused on a solution or client type

- it eliminates the political stuff that comes with changing a coprorate website

Test page elements - landingpage testing

- they run a/b or multivariate constantly on microsites

- Items to test

- page layout

- action triggers

- images

- registration form placement

- names and descriptions of downloadable assets

- registration form fields

track & improve results

- shows a chart of 60 days

Secondary actions

- allow for more than just one action

Registration forms

- showed some examples of good and bad registration forms

————————————

Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.

How to deal with an enterprise salesforce:

A -B - C

- ratings for leads

- how full is the pipeline, and whats the % close rate

Priority order of trust
- free trial
- demo

Sales reps go into the CRM and cherry pick.

Search needs to drive potential customers thruogh high priority, high trust lead generation channels

- How?
- optimize for more than home page and product category pages
- point paid search clicks at aggressive lead generation pages
- and….

Make Search an A lead
- force it into the A lead bucket if it is a high converting paid search word
- ignore other rules for bucketing
- cant treat all search traffic the same
- educate the reps by showing them the paid search numbers
- check to see what the reps are following up on when search leads come in

Review sales success meaures
- close rate
- time to close

- average selling price

- quarterly quota

Feedback look into search buys and site optimization

Challenge

- low end priced products

- high end enterprise products

- who gets more of the attention?

- upsell

- final revenue numbers

- company goals

- quality of store experience

————————————

Adam S. Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, Clearsaleing

Wrong metrics = wrong decsisions

*shows example* and says that CPL isnt what marketers should use

*shows chart with profit, sale price, product name, leads/sale, CPA and CPL*

You need to watch profit, not CPL.

*shows a slide of the Advertising Ecosystem*

Purchase path - watch the buying cycle. Being able to see this will help you see the full cycle and what keywords help.

Life Time Value - what is the real value of a conversion? You need to connect the dots from orders to ads/keywords to help you know what really is

the most profitable for the company.

Phone Call Tracking

The Last Click Fallacy
- Problem recongiition -> information search -> evaluation of alternatives -> purchase decisions -> purchase

*shows 3 slides of the Purchase path attribution) - dont give all the credit to one ad/search, decide how far to go back.

We need to take the Wisdom of the Crowds line of thinking (its a book)

————–

Live blogged by Daver

Google continues to innovate around bringing power, flexibility, and accessibility to web analytics and web content testing. Join us for the latest news about Google's free web analytics and multivariate testing products: Google Analytics and Website Optimizer. Learn straightforward, data-driven techniques to enrich your website and increase your ROI. Come early to grab a seat. This is an event you won't want to miss!

Speakers:
Avinash Kaushik, Author, Analytics Evangelist, Google
Tom Leung, Business Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer

Avinash starts by telling us bounce rate is a good indication of how much you potentially suck. Use it as a first step to find out what you should be potentially fixing. Many of the measures in Google Analytics will let you see bounce rate. You can see which referral sources are sending you traffic that bounces, which landing pages bounce most, etc. If you don’t do anything else when you go home, look at your bounce rate. You don’t control your home page, the search engine does. If you have 10,000 pages on your site, you have 10,000 home pages.

Avinash goes over sources to traffic to his blog, how many keywords, etc. Most analytics today are data pukers. He shows a screen of very very very tiny type with the 9,500 keywords. It’s a data puke that tells you nothing.

If you don’t rank high for your brand time, it reflects your incompetence. The brand names are generally the head. The long tail is a lot more generic keywords, and “virgin” keywords. I’m just starting to look for something, you’re the first site I see, convince me how wonderful you are. Search term example of best car insurance California.

How do you get beyond data puking to actually get useful information?

Two problems, two solutions. Head and Long Tail are two different two different problems, and have two different solutions.

Head: Obsess efficiently. Keyword position report is good for this.

Stop looking at visits, look at goals and conversions.

There’s a button for who sent me unusual traffic. Keywords that have sent you 20% more and 20% less traffic over the last seven days are listed. You can look to see what the trends/changes are. These keywords won’t show up in top ten, but can still be helpful. This report can tell you things like what new keywords to bid on. These reports can show trends before you see them at the top of the results.

Most marketers make the mistake of thinking of version in very basic terms. Don’t just look at one goal, but your website is solving for many different reasons.

Even though Avinash doesn’t sell anything from his blog, he does have three goals for his blogs. He spent a lot of time thinking about these goals. The pages are All Posts, About, and Speaking Engagements. Quantify your goals. You need to take into account more than just the profit of a hard good, but there are other monetary benefits that you need to take into account, will help show the value that these goals bring.

Visitor Loyalty measures. Visitor recency, depth of visit, length of visit.

You need to define how you measure success. It’s not just page views, or just the money made solely from a sale.

There are many add-ons for Google analytics. Outside people write Greasemonkey scripts that do lots of fantastic things.

Google Docs data:  http://bit.ly/gadocs
Show raw numbers instead of just percents for goals:  http://bit.ly/gagoals
Open report in a new tab: http://bit.ly/gatabs
What has changed report (things that aren’t easy to generally find):  http://bit.ly/gaiceberg.

 

What’s new with Google Website Optimizer

• Momentum
• Resources
• Partners
• Product Updates
• Case Studies

Why is testing becoming mainstream

• Advertisers are focused on ROI and CPA, especially with economic climate we are in.
• Leading agencies are offering landing page testing services
• ~10x the resources available vs. last year

It’s all about after the click. Nobody takes impressions to the bank.

• Visitors have lots of choices – their expectations are as high as ever.
• Best practice landing page designs are the minimum ante.
• In today’s economy, CPA and ROI are king. The CFO is just as interested in your effort as the CMO.

New Resources

• Google Trifecta Webinar
• Landing Page Optimization  and Always Be Testing books have been published.
• Google Website Optimizer Blog
• Website Optimizer Support Plans
• Website Optimizer Tutorial Videos

Go to google.com/WebsiteOptimizer for lots of resources

Many more new industry partnerships.

For those who want the VIP Treatment
Authorized Consultants

• Outsource everything
• Help with tags and tech
• Help with design
• Analysis

Woops! Missed some stuff here about how organizations can quality to be an authorized consultant, and what benefits they receive from being an authorized consultant.

New Product Updates:

The most requested feature is pruning. You can stop sending traffic to unlikely winners.

Improved reports.

• Color coded confidence intervals
• Color coded conversion rates
• Winner’s box
• Offline Validation for A/B tests.

The New Bill of Rights
We have a right to:

• Convert as many of our visitors as possible
• Challenger the HiPPO’s with science highest paid person in org.
• Landing pages that don’t suck
• Grow sales without growing ad spend
• Free testing technology for all our traffic on all our web pages.

Designing your test

• Basic
• Does it look legit?
• Is it intelligible with partial attention?
• Is it simple to convert?
• Advanced
• Is it compelling?
• Does it handle top objections easily?

Three things to do this week

• Evaluate top PPC landing page
• Set up A/B test
• Make it fun (they have internal contests to see who can get the best results).

Live blogging provided by Keri.

Finding keywords, trying different ad copy, testing landing pages, bid managing – blah blah blah. You already know what managing SEM is about. But if you crave the new SEM tactic, the unknown search story, the changing market dynamics of SEM that few understand and even fewer talk about, come to this session, where Omniture and an SEM "dream team" panel will push the conference envelope and make you — yes, even you— all-stars: better, more knowledgeable, and aware of what's really going on in search.

Moderator:

· Chris Zaharias, VP Search Sales, Omniture

Speaker:

· David Rodnitzky, VP, Strategy, PPCAdBuying.com

· Terry Whalen, SEM & Internet Marketing Expert, Founder, TDW Consulting

· Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Best Practices Group, Omniture

· Vinny Lingham, CEO, Synthasite

Chris Zaharias: I work for Omniture, our goal here is to tell you things that you might not otherwise have heard, stuff that does not get covered at the show. I did not know much about Omniture until I joined about 6 months ago; we are the leader in web analytics and headquartered out of Utah. We have about 500 SEM customers.

I will introduce the panelists and then speak a bit myself. Here are the topics:

- the assumption that the long tail is eternal

- the notion that there are 1001 things to do in SEM

- the assumption that SEM is always the right channel – where it is and isn't the right channel

- fine line between search engines and what they try to sell

- is search is really opaque or are there methods to make things more transparent

The first point is the assumption that the long-tail keeps growing, that finding more keywords is the critical activity (shows some data from HitWise showing percentage of total search volume for the top 2000 search queries). The reality is that search is becoming more navigational. The growth in brand and trademark queries shows that search is become less "search" and more a method of direct navigation. That's why revenues for the search engines are going more towards trademarked and navigation terms.

Any questions on this data so far?

David: Google is not encouraging people to buy the multi-token keywords, and encouraging to use broad match for the tail keywords. Search engines are reducing the efficacy of buying long-tail keywords.

<