August 20, 2008 Archives

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.