Search Engine Strategies 2004 Chicago Archives

Q: Nacho asks; How do you fix SEMPO?
A: Danny said no SEMPO questions.

Q: When should I start seeing conversion metrics on my paid search?
A: Danny said right away for the paid. Jill said, on the organic you should see it a good month or so after the page is indexed.

Q: Is it challenge to Overture in having people sign up for Overture's Conversion Tracking service, because of the data privacy issues?
A: Jonathan Glick from Yahoo said having that data opens up new pricing models such as CPA. But they won't ever use that data to increase your prices because its an auction system and the market decides the price.

Q: Someone asked if reciprocal links are bad?
A: Jill said reciprocal links in themselves are not bad. Link to who you think is good to link to. Yahoo agrees.

Yahoo also says that links in general to a domain name is looked at, not just on a page to page basis.

Yahoo also said it is not OK to trade links inside the industry if they are done to just bring up your rankings.

Q: This whole discussion on "themed" content.
A: Danny then asked Jon, do you look at all the pages in a site to figure out what your site is talking about? Jon said no.
Danny continued to talk about that this was a theory that went off. He doesn't believe in it. Basically he explained it worked because you now have 10 sites with super home pages on a specific topic, each targeting different topics. So now you increase the odds of getting hit on your homepage.
Jill agrees.
Jon agrees.

Q: I have stores in many of the major cities. Is it ok if I insert city name into a template system and repeat the content over on every page, would that be ok?
A: It depends if you have real reason for you to have those pages. They look for unique content, if that content is too similar, then you will have a problem. Yahoo is doing more work on local, and if you can add an address, hours of operation, phone, etc. to the page that will help with the local technologies being built today by the engines.

Martin Laetsch from Intel is in charge of all public search over at Intel. About 2 years ago he took a look at Intel's search marketing efforts and he was surprised about how distributed his SEM was. Each division was doing their own thing at a wide spread level. 19% of the keyword they were purchasing were in as many as 9 different campaigns, they were bidding against each other. This not only cost a ton of money but made for a bad user experience. It took about a year to centralize, he controls every campaign. Click through rates doubled, cost per click went down 50%, so things are going well these days.

Joe Morin works for AutoByTel had similar issues that Martin was having, in the sense of bidding on keywords and sending those keywords to the wrong landing pages. But he primarily works on SEO, and does ton of that fun mod_rewriting with his huge dynamic sites. He got 600,000 pages indexed and then when Google doubled their index, so did AutoByTel.

Marshall Simmonds from About.com talked about About.com's major issues in 1999. He was there to establish and SEO Strategy. They had a 573% increase in search engine referrals since 1999, with very minimal changes for low costs. SEO Strategy includes two people, his boss to manage internal search and himself to manage external search. The SEO Strategy (1) Communication (2) Design (3) Relevance (4) Visibility (5) Metrics. COMMUNICATION: Get them moving in the same direction, they had to teach the editors how to write for search engines. They repeat the message over and over again. And they continue to research and locate their new markets through log files and various keyword suggestion tools. They communicate with management with staff through; newsletters, search center, seo discussion board, dedicated email addresses, chats, frequent reports, and onsite training. DESIGN: The technical fixes. Standardize the HTML with templates; Check lists for IT people (dos and donts); Global search and replace of meta keyword tags, global search and replace on meta description, leave branding to the web site?, mininco.com and TQN redirected 301 style, and then cleaned up the code with CSS, JavaScript, SSI, etc. RELEVANCE: SEO Basics. No Quick fixes with small budget; focus on essentials, turn pagerank off, rules and regulations. VISIBILITY: Knowing your engines. He showed some screen shots of layouts and design and links and abstracts. METRICS: Establish Baselines. They run web positions reports, log files, index counts, link pop reports, google alert, spiders, referrals, talk to it, and more.

Bill Hunt from IBM has 83 localized language versions representing 31 countries. Millions of pages across 100+ brand sites. Numerous SEM programs centrally managed w/ local execution. He explains big sites are slow moving, multiple content and technology owners, site changes all the time, strict and complex development cycles, cant use the latest trick to rank better. But small changes have significant impact, can leverage internal assists, link building tends to be easier and more valuable, and many other advantages. Enterprise SEO takes the bottom up approach. They first start with the infrastructure (get more pages indexed), then coding (get more pages ranked highly), and content (more clicks and higher ranking). They have a step by step process to SEO on enterprise sites. They also do SEM Training and certification; they have 21 specialized training programs. The benefits to him is that so many people now at IBM are involved in this. (1) Remove Infrastructure Problems (2) Coding and Content Infrastructure; optimized those html templates (3) Keyword & Page Optimization, they built a tool to manage which division is bidding on keywords. He has to skip over the other steps, but I covered it in my past coverage of his discussions of this model.

John Tawadros from iProspect is focusing on how you get what you need from the organization. Challenges includes; expectations, big brands think they should always be number one. Competition includes; you have traditional and online competitors, partners who are authorized to use your brand, and simply be honest. Participation; there are many stakeholders , internal politics, personalities and just other types of things to delay you. Its important you set deadlines, be creative. Regiment and Process; "that's the way we do things". Understand why that is and then be creative. There is also opportunity; capitalize on your brand. Most organization has many vendors, integration of that is an opportunity. Execution and Flexibility.

Ethan Giffin from Allegis Group only has 20,000 pages indexed, so he is the small guy. They increased their SE traffic tremendously.

Jen Fitzpatrick from Google first explained the insides and out of PageRank, but it can obviously not be published here. :) They say their main index is composed of three main indexes; the news index, the fresh index, and the main index. She then talks about some basic guidelines for webmasters, you know the dos the don'ts. Some more basics on 301s, header commands, and robot.txt slides. She explains that Google prides themselves on telling the user what is paid versus unpaid results, and she explicitly says they do not do paid inclusion for that reason. Detlev sped her up and she had to run through some of the newer technology.

Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves gets right to the relevancy speech, the link community discussion and the other structured data components. :)

Tim Mayer from Yahoo Search starts off with next.yahoo.com and my.yahoo.com. He announced that they launched a new index Tuesday night, so you might see some changes. He goes over same deal as everyone else, but adds in the redirect information which I posted in that session. He explains that paid inclusion has no impact on the free crawl content.

Ken Moss from MSN Search starts off explaining that they use Inktomi for their current search (the Yahoo guys in front of me commented to each other - who owns Inktomi). He then explained that they have MSN Beta and wants our feedback. In addition they have a new beta tool bar for desktop search. They have a 150kb page size limit. MSN has a feature called "near me", that looks for local content and suggests it to the user.

See my past coverage of these sessions, they are pretty much all the same.

Q & A:

Q: I asked Ask Jeeves why they bury the Teoma results way under the Google AdWords results at Ask Jeeves?
A: Michael answered that is was not about not being more relevant, they feel Teoma is more relevant than AdWords. But it is set up that way from a monetization standspoint only. Fair answer.

To be honest, the reason I asked was to some how bring Teoma out. It is way to hidden and I find that to be a shame.

Lots of basic questions being asked, I think I will leave and see how Elisabeth is doing in the Site Clinic.

Ben Wills from KeywordRanking asked the audience how many of their clients have 10 or more sites, most raised their hands. A particular client of his operated in multiple global locations. So they looked at the internal org structure, the opportunities and abilities are available with the systems currently in place, who will implement the changes and most importantly what are the marketing goals of the domain restructuring. They have three divisions; corp, govt, consumer. They are divided in five regions in the world, working in 50+ countries. Each region has their own marketing and technology departments responsible for each country's web site. And each region would promote different products to their region. they had 21 sites with their own domain name. 28 of those sites run as a subsection of client.com, (i.e. subdomain.client.com/dir/country/home.asp?var=val. 5 sites run as a subsection of a different subdomain. Some country sites redirect to another country's web site. They recommended to move each country subdomain web site to a country specific tld (i.e. co.uk). Improves rankings in country specific search engines. Improves branding of client's division to consumer. Improves URL memorization for "mental bookmarking". What about other businesses? Companies with/wanting company brand recognition, product.company.com i.e. msdn.microsoft.com. Companies with/wanting product brand recognition, product.com, i.e. aim.com. International business operations. company.countryTLD or product.company.countryTLD, ex. google.co.uk.

Bruce Clay from BruceClay.com explains that there is never a one size fits all solution here. Different Products Confusion: Mixing different themes confuse the search engines, content does not make sense to a person. He showed an example of mixing white marbles with black marbles, so you are no longer about only about white marbles anymore. Linking / Navigation Issues: Very easy to have excessive navigation making it confusing for the user and the engine. 100 domains, same whois, same IP, same anchor text, etc. Those are two big issues. He then gives his "Jeff Foxworthy" line; "you might be a redneck", simple put - it stands out.IP Funneling; multiiple domains pointing at the same content, using DNS to map the site will result in duplicate content penalty, instead use a feeder site to have multiple domains go to a single production site. Basically map your dns records to one of your parked domain names and then point that one via a 301 redirect to the main production site. He said he has a dental association as a client that builds sites for over 2,500 sites. They went through all the sites, changed all the whois info and the IP addresses. Now they rank very well, before they did not.

Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves put up an example of a site, he did not have a presentation, only on the board for the Q&A. He showed an example of www.seneca.newsiowa.com, he shows off the content, and clicks on an article. He then flips over www.napoleon.newsalabama.com, which has pretty much the exact same information. So the same news in Alabama and Iowa... And then pulls up www.islandton.newssouthcarolina.com, same news here as well. Michael said this is domain spam, and search engines hate it.

Q & A:
Q: Why wouldn't you just filter out the rest of those domain names and put up the most relevant result?
A: Michael said that in this case, this was done as domain spam. Some sites do it unintentionally, and in that case, they will keep the most relevant system.

The evening session with Danny Sullivan started off with a discussion about what categories would you want Search Engine Watch to use in determining the number and types of search marketing awards to give out. So basically, Danny Sullivan, in conjunction with Search Engine Watch and Jupiter Media will be holding a search marketing awards, just like the Webby Awards but focused on search marketing.

There is no name for the awards show yet. The categories are still being defined. There will be a small fee to enter, just to have a small barrier to entry. You will self-nominate yourself or nominate others. SEMs will probably judge the awards (not those that participate).

This is all very early in the planning stages. One of the purposes is to drive more recognition to the industry but getting big and small brands to talk about their company's search marketing success.

This is just for fun, but I was able to spend some time today talking with many different companies in the Expo hall. I wanted to highlight some of the ones that definately had a lot of offer and would recommend to others to check them out. I will have to do a full report later as I am about out of laptop battery.

For fun, the award for best exhibiter at the SES Chicago goes to too (drum roll). MSN Search for their HUGE tower of search. It was the beacon of the expo hall to come test out the new search engine, walk on the plush carpet to rest your feet, get a wonderful display of their technology and desktop search which as I found out packs some really excellent features, in a single search I can find flight information from Seattle to New York on Expedia. I have to wonder what was in the huge tower?

Bruce Clay was first up to the podium. What is a redirect? To display another web page for the web address that you are visiting. Why do people use redirects? If you rename or move a page, if you move a domain, if you have multiple domains pointing to the same content. Types of redirects include (1) JavaScript (2) Meta Refresh (3) 302: Found Elsewhere (Temporary Redirect) (4) 301: Permanently moved. webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webapge.php has more information. How do I know if im using a 301 or 302 redirect? Bruce has a tool at bruceclay.com/checkwerver/htm and an other tool at searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/servercheck.cgi. How to implement a permanent redirect? On an apache server you modify the .htaccess or apache config file, use the redirect directive or mod_rewrite. On an IIS server; configure the IIS Web service properties or modify it through the program. IP Funneling works by taking all your domain names, you point to one of those IPs (not the production domain name) and that parked domain name 301 redirects to the production domain name. How to make dynamic URLs indexable? Rewrite URLs with query strings to appear as static URLs. On Apache use mod_rewrite on IIS server use an ISAPI filter product such as Qwerksoft IISRewrite.

Matt Bailey from the Karcher Group. He says which should i do? Redirect or Rewrite? Rewrite when you want to make an html to dynamic, rewriting content, user bookmarks. Redirect when you change the URL, also when your changing the index page to a deeper level page, changing pages within a domain name. Should I use a 301 or 301? depends on marketing objectives, not the same for every site and every situation. Case study #1, basic asp site, limited rankings for product terms, read for redirect was because the company had to go to a parent company's domain name. They made a custom 404 page, and then did a link campaign. In month one they had 2,000 visitors, in month 2 the new domain came in and then dived under 1,000 visitors, in month 4 they started link building and traffic was back to 2,000, in month 6 the traffic then doubled. Case study #2, they had a basic html site, #1 ranking for product terms, reason for redesign (CMS, ecommerce, increase conversions). Created a new site in .NET, created new keyword based URL and did rewrite for the old page URLs so that they got to the new page. Case # 3, existing site in Java, needed new site for increased conversions, had over 3,000 URLs linked in their PPC ads. they created a new site in PHP and created static looking URLs, used mod_rewrite to maintain the old PPC links, and added robot.txt for old PPC URLs and new PPC URLs were converted over time.

Jake Baillie from True Local (BakedJake) he said he will go through this very quickly, Ill try to keep up and it will be very technical. what are rewrite rules? Regular expression based statement that tells a web server to do something, most common use is to map a virtual URL to a physical resource, essentially provides a fast and consistent way to address URL issues of any type. Dangers of using rewrite URLs include; duplicate content, infinite loops and you actually have to do work. When not to use rewrite rules? If you site is fully indexed, then you do not need to rewrite. If you have a relatively small site, you don't need them. If you have an architecture problem to solve, try and solve the architecture problem first in the code. Installing rewrite rules he skimmed over, its very technical. He showed some really neat ways to use mod_rewrite for many purposes.

Rob Sullivan from Enquiro basically showed four case studies. Tiring out and I personally dislike case studies. One thing the studies showed was that (1) soon after the new URLs were indexed the traffic spiked up and then shot back down, and then soon after the traffic went back up again and (2) the number of indexed pages doesn't necessarily have to increase, the relevancy and uniqueness of those pages do.

Jon Glick from Yahoo was the last speaker, who will share the policies of Yahoo in terms of redirects. 301 is permanent and 302 is a temp move. A meta refresh that is less then 1 sec as a 301 and longer then 1 sec then its a temp move. I couldn't get the Yahoo! Redirect handling rules cheat sheet, but I will ask Danny to send me the slide so we can post it. He then goes into why rewriting URLs help.

Update: Aaron Ferstman, the outstanding PR guy over at Yahoo, sent me the slide. I saved it as a PDF for you to download; Download Yahoo Redirect Slide by Jon Glick

To introduce us to the space of contextual advertising is Joshua Stylman, from Reprise Media. He begins by talking about the value proposition of search. The goal is to connect consumers when they’re interested and engaged. He gave the example of a search for “hotels in Chicago” that within 2 clicks he was at an Expedia page for information on hotels in Chicago. He illustrates the reality of search marketing. Google and Yahoo only over about 5-8% of the targeting, where there are many many other sites that have a more targeted audience which enables contextual advertising to be a growing and huge market.

He goes into the directory driven advertising, these are such places like City Search. There is no technology in there to determine what is the most relevant. Its about navigating categorical content and drilling down to find what your looking for. Josh said that many of these companies realized the contextual ads were not scalable. The problem selling the ads and dealing with the people, it wasn’t working so well. About 2 years ago Overture and Google started to look at how to solve this problem. He mentions several other 2nd tier engines that have jumped into the landscape. He then gives an example of the non contextual ads, such as the weather channel. He did a query for weather in New York. Most of the results are for travel in New York for people that are outside traveling to New York. Not useful for someone in New York looking for weather information. He doesn’t think all the engines are there in terms of providing a broader effort to match the person with the content.

Big channels in 2005, in-content advertising, such as those found on Vibrant Media. One of the major SEO forums uses this same type of advertising. It is basically advertising or links inside the content. If you roll over the ads in the content you get a box with the ad information. The next big channel is in-feed RSS advertising. People can pull these feeds in from a variety of sources, such as Search Engine Roundtable. Bloglines for examples is one program you can use to read and gather RSS feeds together. He mentions that spam can be a problem in this channel. He ends with positive notes on the whole space.

Up next is Brad Byrd, from NewGate Internet, to talk in more depth about contextual advertising. Last time I heard Brad speak he was very good, I imagine it will be the same this time. He starts with some case studies in contextual advertising.

First case study, is looking at traffic numbers from major pharmaceutical company. He looks at % of content traffic, % of all paid traffic, conversion rate, and cost per conversion. He compares the following engines: Google Adsense, Overture Content, Quigo AdSonar, and Vibrant Intelltxt. What is shown is that Google return about 75% of content traffic. The conversion rate is better on Overture for paid search, where Quigo is higher as well with 6.1% conversion. The cost per conversion varies in this case study, it seems for the client Overture is return the best cost per acquisition.

He moves on to his next case study for a web technology company. What is found is that content traffic costs more, but its can be a better vehicle for conversions. They see this and want to reduce the costs the client is paying in the content network. So you discover that content totals are a problem, what do you do? You need to find the problem keywords, but you can’t get rid of just the high cost keywords. He says the solution is web analytics. They find in the analytics that keyword 1 and keyword 2 are generating a good amount of traffic. These will need to be tested.

Key points to consider in Google. You can receive Google URL reports attribute all content traffic to the default URL for an AdGroup, NOT to the URL assigned to the given keyword. Google SENDS traffic to the URL assigned to the keyword. This makes Google reports useless for tracking content performance, and requires tracking tools specifically to track this.

Brad says they find this by studying the target keywords. So what they do is created a parallel campaign, pull out the keywords. You create the new group, add keywords, and make sure the pricing is the same. Content wise they cut the pricing in half.

Some key points from this. Adsense matches content against AdGroup titles, descriptions, and keywords. Smaller AdGroups are better for targeting hot ideas. Adsense fundamentally matches and targets against individual keywords (eg. Dynamic keyword insertion). If building single-keyword AdGroups for content is impractical consider strategies to identify top “content keywords” and break those out into their own AdGroups.

Andrew Goodman was up to present an overview how effective the ads are going and where the space may be going. Andrew says we like search engine marketing because can you really afford to annoy 20 million people? He gives the example of a remote shower spy camera, that no one needs but you could probably sell it online with popups. It’s a terrible type of advertising. The clear results of say Google results are way more effective and clear. He gives an example of a search “portulace seeds”. Contextual ads are not really search, so why is Google and Overture going after this inventory. He says that for awhile there was not enough ads to buy. In the beginning CTR for contextual ads is much lower, but that’s no problem. Conversion rates were the same said the search engines, but what if they are not for you. Someone else conversion rates is NOT for you.

Take home from this: Bid lower for content networks. Leave bids on, but turn off “content targeting”. You may have to create another AdGroup but its worth it. What they found was that the content targeting workaround, worked great. It cost less but conversions stay the same. Significant savings by doing low bids for content targeting. Try it.

Andrew also mentions that they tested image ads contextually in Google Adsense, and they performed terribly. The end he says, they turn them off.. Interesting, there has been good talk about whether these would work or not. He also found that content ads began performing poorly for core words. There is some continued to work well for “tail” (lower volume) words.

He presents some painful truths to end, they are: Contextual ads don’t perform well if you sit on your heels. You must bid carefully! You must track them separately.

Two of the search engines Google and Overture had 3 minutes to briefly talk. Emily White from Google said they had one slide. She puts up a huge slide with Google on it to engrain the brand even further in our heads. ; ) She says that she is seeing an increase of about 50% with conversions since Adsense inception. Advertiser ROI has been steadily improving throughout the year as we have launched targeting improvements and, an automatic CPC discounting mechanism.

Barry Chu from Overture was up next. He works as senior manager of Content Match. He says that Overture is investing heavily in content match in the next few years. Content match is apparently a completely different product than search. Its not the same and Overture quickly noticed this. They want to make sure distribution is appropriate and you can get the leads that you want.

Danny explains that the idea behind this session is to turn your $1 into $2 and your $2 into $4.

Kevin Lee from DidIt explained the concept of self funding. As long as your spend is lower then your cost, you have a self funding strategy. Where it gets complicated is when you look at the different definitions of profit. Self funding is not ROI maximization, but rather you want (1) find highest converting keywords (2) use highest converting copy (3) use the best landing page and so on. Self funding campaigns are all about profit maximization. In paid search you are trading off your volume for conversions. You can spend more, more visibility, higher traffic, more costs, but more revenue, so higher profits. So it depends on your budget. It is also important to find your break even point, you do not want to loose money on every order but make sure you understand if you get orders over phone or via store how those play a part. It is also important to understand where people are in during the buying cycle. Generally the longer the query string the deeper they are into the buying cycle. So, for early stage keywords, you may want to use different metrics to define a goal, because you might loose the cookie over a lag period. He then explains other types of success metrics outside of buying including, registrations, lagged orders, multi channel retailer store lookup, phone order and order taken through reseller. Bidding on keywords is a zero sum game, your always bidding too high or too low, rarely do you have the perfect bid.

Next up was Cheryle Pingel from Range Search Marketing. She says its almost impossible to satiate the search marketing beast, there is never enough to feed it. Growing search funds organically. Problem; annual budgets do not account for great return. Solution; reinvest a portion of the profits back into search. Finding Your Sweet Spot: $30,000 to be tested over 90 days. $10,000 seed money, money taken from other budgets. For 10k they would get 200k returned. So they asked the client to reinvest a portion of that profit back into the search. By reinvesting 13% of the revenue they can generate a ton of revenue. They also reinvested the profit into other media areas.

Q & A:

Kevin added something of value beyond what I have heard before. Someone asked about how do you measure the metrics when you do not sell something on your site. So Cheryle said you need to assign a dollar value to each goal accomplishment. Kevin then added, why not try to score the lead based on the form they fill out. So if they answer A instead of B to a certain question, that might be worth more. So score a weight system to those leads.

Q: How do you make money of bidding on brands?
A: Cheryle said that with her, in this case, she targeted brands because they were her biggest conversions. The generic terms were less converting then the brand terms.

Danny jokes on a measuring offline conversions question that Google and Yahoo will have credit cards that collect this data automatically.

Rebecca Lieb opened up the session to introduce the panelists and explain that this would be an informal and fast paced session.

Measuring success according to Bizresearch, Laura Thieme opened up the presentation telling us that there are always ways to improve. Success comes in many forms and that with her clients online retail sales are up a minimum of 40% each year. She says small biz retailer acquires over 22,000 customers in two year period from search engine marketing (organic, paid, shopping search). She gave some more client examples, on how a law firm increased leads by 700% with one month of the newly optimized site (how many leads though?).

According to Bizresearch there are only 19% of online retailers that conduct ROI analysis. There are some lesions to be learned from this. Organic rankings outperformed paid search, where organic search sent over 70% of monthly sales. They also determined that Google Adwords outperformed organic search in terms of lead generation.

There is some good search engine visibility tools out there, such as WebPosition Gold and Ranking Manager. Laura says you should look at when a spider/robot comes to your site and how often. There are a good number of web analytical tools such as CoreMetrics, WebTrends, Hitbox, Netbox, NetTracker, Urchin, and Click Tracks. As a general suggestion you might check with you ISP or hosting company to see if they provide one of the web analytic tools. For example I asked one of the hosting companies I use to put Urchin on the servers I used, and they had no problem doing so. I just had to ask.

Laura asks, Who tracks ROI? Mostly its small businesses that seem to track it first, because every dollar counts. They need fast ROI and are more likely to stop ad campaign if ROI is not proven quickly. Are we selling? is a question business owners will have to ask. If not, then why, what is impacting our ROI negatively. She goes on to give some examples where price and keyword choices were influential in impacting the amount of sales that came in. Lowering the price helped one retailer compete with other retailers. Bad keyword choices can negatively impact the campaign.

She made some good ending points. There is no tracking tool that will do everything. You may need 2-3 tracking tools. Make sure your tracking tool is accurately collecting the data (good point). Great search engine marketers may not be great research analysts. Might need to hire someone else to interrupt the data.

Dave Cadoff from Future Now Inc. got up to show what these web analytic tools can actually show you. Visitors on the web leave a trail, and part of that trail can be analyzed, and it will. He says CLICKS are PEOPLE. Remember that. You can also take any piece of data and interrupt it anyway you want, you can mold that data into whatever you want it to say.

You have to plan, and know what success is, but not in a general way. Its looking at every page you have and figuring out what its supposed to do. You need to know this. You will need to plan scenarios intentionally on the site, and if its not working you can correct it. Recognize a problem on the site, do an information search to fix it, evaluate of alternative and purchase decision. Also, start backwards from the sale. Try to see if you can get back to the homepage. These are things that will help you manage. Web analytic software takes raw data and turns it into structured information in the form of reports. Once we understand the inter-relations of the data. You need to make sure the data is actionable. Look at the trends, because nothing happens in a vacuum. The relative value is more important that the static value.

Dave gives a very good presentation and none of the examples are directed towards a particular product, he remains unbiased, which is good to see. He is probably one of the best speakers in a session today in my opinion. He gives good advice that squeezing the efficientcy out of the site is what you will have to do. He asks how many people track their ROI in spreadsheets, from ISP, or with software? More people in the room use software to track their ROI. He says on these pages ones like what is given in WebTrends will not give you the answerd but give you the questions. So ask them. He says its very important to understand that. Dave said the homepage was the worst thing ever created or as mentioned in another session. People focus too heavily on these pages when they should be focusing on the inner pages.

He puts up a full list of content and commerce metrics. Excellent list. Here is sample of what can be tracked:

Take rates: newsletter, bookmarks, downloads
Repeat visitor rate
Heavy user rate
Committed visitor share
Committed visitor index
Committed visitor volume
Visitor engagement index
Reject page: Home Page
Reject page: Sub Page

Things to remember about web analytics. Use the metrics to provide action items and things you can improve on for your website. He ended by presenting a matrix of all the analytic tool landscape, and where certain tools fell in there.

Rebecca then asked all the presenters from the 4 major analytic companies to do a 60 second overview of their software. They are Jason Palmer from WebTrends, Akin Arikan from Nettracker, John Marshall from Clicktracks, Brett Crosby from Urchin.

Side Note from the Blog Room: Avoid the potato salad at SES Chicago, three days of it, is way to much!

Danny Sullivan explained the reason he started Search Engine Watch was because people were building web pages that worked for IE and Netscape but not for the search engines, which he called the 3rd browser.

Eric A. Meyer started us off with Web standards, he is from Complex Spiral Consulting. I think he was the guy who posted in his blog a whole big stink about the last SES conference, (meyerweb.com). Ahh, he confirmed this to be true by admitting why he was on the panel. He basically blew off the people on the panel, and then realized it was a miscommunication, he actually apologized to the panel. Web standards means no proprietary lock in and a wider support base. Page weights can be reduced by at least half or more when using standards. You can support multiple media and more accessibility comes through Web standards. And how do search engines like standards (he says he would like to know). He then lists out some big corporations are using standards, and talks about small sites deploying it. What about browser incompatibilities? Some problems do exist, but they are far less a problem than they were three years ago. The biggest stumbling block is Internet Explorer, but its only biggest by comparison. Various approaches to get around this such as "transitional design" (mixing tables and CSS). How do standards help your users? Page weights are lower, the number one factor in page response time is page load time. Users really dont care about your markup, they only care about is page load time. Reduced server load, bandwidth consumption and for example ESPN. ESPN in March 2003 moved to Web standards. ESPN at 2003 was getting one billion page views per month. Initial page weight reduction was 50kb, which turned out to be 720TB of bandwidth each year. They can not server more users per server (reduce the number of servers need). How do standards help you? Makes your life easier in creating and maintaining the site. Are standards always appropriate? Theoretically, yes. More practically, it depends on the situation. Always weigh costs against benefits. Look at your log files to determine if you should move. You can give certain functionality to different browsers. Webstandards.org, maccaws.org, w3.org are all good resources.

Matt Bailey from the Karcher Group thanks Eric for presenting with them. He comes form a company that has designers on one side of the room and seos on the other side of the room. How W3C helps a design company; - knowledge base, reference for building a common structure, training new programmers and checks and testing. How W3C helps an SEO company; interoperability (limited), semantic web and validation checks on new clients. Section 50a, from the Web accessibility standards. People with blindness need user access to style sheets, and so on. Low Vision complications; loss of central vision, loss of peripheral vision, blurry vision, any combination of the above and other. He showed some examples of what someone might see or not see. He listed some screen reading programmers such as JAWS, Window-Eyes, OutSpoken and Hal. How does Good SEO help standards and accessibility? alt tags, unique title pages, title attributes in links, text navigation, descriptive text links, reduce javascript dependence, reduce CSS dependency, create contingencies for user agents without flash, etc. He showed examples of some bad sites. How does good SEO help standards? WAI 508 priority checklist, 65 point check list and others. SEO that conflicts with standards? keyword stuffing in the alt text, title attribute, etc. He then showed how a screen reader reads one of these keyword stuffed pages, kind of funny. He said you have to look at the bigger picture, not just rankings.

Shari Thurow from Grantastic Designs was next up. Shari is a big fan of Eric Meyer. Goals of the presentation, she will define a good web site, css vs. graphic images, myths and misconceptions (web standards, SEMs, usability professionals). A good web site is a user friendly, search friendly and persuasive site that converts visitors to buyers. She explains that your site needs goals and goes through some text book examples, then she explains how search integration into those goals are key. Potential issues: Both SEMs and Web standards advocates advice against using graphic images. There are many advantages to using CSS; search engines love it, faster download time, time saver when maintaining site and for usability reasons. CSS problems include; end users must have font and typeface installed on their computers, text link navigation can dominate the content of a page, usability testing and focus groups might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers. Graphic images are better in terms of usability, remembered better, make a site more appealing and other advantages. If your users prefer graphic navigation, then use it. It depends on your users. She then brought up some case studies, which I will not mention here. There is a difference between actual download time and perceived download time. The perceived download time is reduced when a user accomplishes a goal. She said adding a title attribute to your links will not help your rankings, she said this is confirmed by the search engines BUT use it for accessibility.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo had a few comments to add. Speed is a major concern at Yahoo. Yahoo does focus on creating fast loading pages. Yahoo doesn't care about download speed on the crawling site, of course they prefer fast sites. In addition, Yahoo's crawlers do not care about validation. They have not seen a correlation between validated sites and good quality sites. The search technology will enhance over time to handle these new technologies.

Q: Using CSS to replace graphic headers with h1 tags, is that ok?
A: Tim said Google goes about it in a white and black attitude. Yahoo said it is primarily ok. Shari said that particular case might be crossing over the site.

They took down the sign about not being allowed to blog in the Press Room, which I am now call the "Blog Room".

Thanks Guys.

Bruce Clay had two minutes to talk. His view on organic is straightforward, the role of SEO is to reengineer the Web site to do well in search engines. Technical components, Copywriting, Expertness (linking).

Todd Friese, oilman, he said sometimes they don't reengineer the site but make the site work right away (i.e. cloaking). If they can, they like to rebuild the site from scratch. He said again, you do not want to stand out with your SEO tactics.

Mike Grehan said there is a fine balance between a site that is doing well with technical problems, and a site that has tons of links anyway. He said there is a balance, and it depends on your competitive environment.

Q: They are new to the SEO game but have been doing a lot of PPC campaigns. He asked if the panel can help define an allocation of resources towards the SEO campaign.
A: Todd said its very difficult to give a number, it can vary greatly depending on the industry. He said, you probably have a number in your head, probably double it.
Mike added, take a look at how you figured out the PPC and apply that logic to the SEO side. Take some out of PPC and move it to SEO.
Todd then added that there are many SEO companies that do a revenue share plan. Todd says he does it a lot and he loves it.
Bruce added that you will probably get different prices from all the different exhibitors. It is virtually impossible to have a one size fits all. Bruce said mostly on new sites, they pay him to just tell them what is wrong. And if they want to move on, they can.
Mike added he wrote an article last week, he said it is strange that people who come from the technical side, they can spend hours, days, weeks, months fixing things. But if you look at everything in your competitive environment, it might just be that you need more linkage.

Q: I came to this conference last year, and I am on the first page for most my keywords. I want to be on the top of the results, move me up higher. I have sites on the same IP address, what is the threshold of the number of links pointing to a site from the same IP address?
A: Bruce is not a fan of having tons of links from the same IP address, it will make you stand out more. It must look natural.
Mike added if it looks unnatural in a link connectivity map, those links will jump out at you.

Q: Can outbound links hurt or help you?
A: Bruce said there is a bow tie affect where quality sites link to quality sites. Bruce says he finds it important to link outbound resources.
Detlev Johnson said everything else being equal, if you link to quality sites it will help a little.
Mike said you need to think philosophically, you are in control who you link to, not who links to you. He explains the linkage within the community are very important.
Todd said in his jibrish pages, they always linked to the Yahoo Directory and top sites in those cloaked pages. He said do away with reciprocal linking as best as you can.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the Google Sandbox?
A: Mike said from a purely scientific approach, new sites have very little links.
Todd said a friend and him do a radio show and he spent a whole hour ago. He said he feels a lot of this goes with temporal link analysis. One way around it is a by doing a 301 from an established domain name. He said he puts out links a bit slower. He said he was talking about it with Mike, and one example of a new book that is released, if its not read that often then it wont be on the new release shelf anymore. So a new theory is, try doing a site: match and then click on it a few times. Mike then added, he knows search engines to click tracking.

Todd said what he is doing is putting the content on a subdomain of an existing site. He then throws links to the subdomain. After that gets rankings, a few weeks later, he will 301 that subdomain to the new domain name.

Q: How do you deal with directory listings such as DMOZ?
A: Todd doesn't submit there anymore. Bruce said he is really fed up with them. Mike said it is taking so much energy to submit to this one place, just go somewhere else with your time. Detlev said an ODP link does benefit your site, but it is not as important as it once was before. Bruce added that they had success submitting to local city.

Q: Whats the best url structure?
A: Mike said hyphen is a separator and underscore is not. Mike said he here no more then three. Todd adds that this is true. He tries to keep any hyphen out of the domain name, the page name he puts hyphens in those.

Q: Someone asked, besides for linking, what else would you recommend?
A: Todd and Mike said, nothing comes to mind. :) Detlev said there are things on the page that do have an affect. He said the title of the document. Mike added the meta tag is back for yahoo, not sure how much it helps, then add that. Bruce said do everything you do the best you can do it, so do on all the page stuff (meta, title, h1, etc.). Todd said sometimes you scroll for days in the source code, clean up the code, use style sheets externally, use javascript externally, etc.

Q: Some attendee has a problem with a CMS program.
A: Go to CMSMartix.com for information on that.

Q: I have a site with multiple tld's for country specific sites. The technical components are all in english, will that cause a duplicate content issue?
A: Yes.

Q: My PageRank dropped to 0 yesterday.
A: Todd and Mike said, drop the toolbar today. The toolbar information is not "precise". So stop looking at it.

Q: Plurals vs. Singular.
A: Todd said he just targets plural and doesn't worry about the singular. Mike explains that plural is great because it takes the engine to the Nth degree. Bruce said he uses both on the page, what ever is naturally used, he uses it in the content.

Allan Dick from Vintage Tub and Bath was first to present his presentation. He starts off by asking why you would want to check on your competitors? I think the number of people in the room answer that, because they are curious. They want to know what they are selling, marketing, and use it to their advantage.

His first tip is to take a look at Alexa.com. You can compare your site against the competition. You input your competitor and your url into the traffic data section to compare the traffic rank for each of you. Another site that is very helpful is Faganfinder.com that includes many little tools to do research on the web. He recommended checking in the Internet Archive to look at yours and your competitors sites over the past few years.

Pay per clicks can communicate information about your competitors. Look at what keywords your competitors are buying ads with. If they are buying ads on them they are important to their campaign (or they just bought bad keywords). Consider taking a lot at Marketleap.com to find out the backlinks of your competitors. Find the links from each of the search engines and discover where these links are coming from. He also covers how news articles and distributor information are good ways to learn more about your competitors. Often times you can find these in the backlinks of a website. Pulled up an example of a competitor of his that outsourced his linking building to a company in India. This information tells them how sophisticated they are.

Next tip to find more information is to do the following search: intitle:”manufacturer” + “product”, searching by phone number with and without parentheses, search by someones name such as “allan dick” +vintage tub and bath. I wonder how often Allan Dick checks his name and if this report will show up when he searches. : )

Ebay is the search engine that’s not a search engine. It offers a great place to find information on competitors that might be entering the marketplace. Its an instant store. You can find out who is entering, what they are selling, for how much, and what kind of feedback they may have. The feedback is valuable, learn how to use it. Allan recommends you find out what customers like, such as great price, beautiful faucet, and other information that customers will include in their feedback.

Copyrighted content are becoming a problem. There are pages on your site that are more likely to be stolen if they offer content that is valuable to them. These pages tend to be those pages no one else wants to write (such as history, info) and affiliates or competitors could lift the content easily. Check on copyscape.com to find out who is copying your content.

David Williams from 360i was up next. He starts off to go through the various thing he uses to do competitor research. He asks:

Who are your competitors? Where are people going to make there purchase? Is you site designed for success? Is you site designed to rank well in the search engines? What can you learn from links?

David offers up a good resource for checking links at http://www.linksecrets.com/optisite/ which spiders the entire site, looks at PageRank, keyword count, backlinks.

How competitive are the search results? Consider the number of competitors, diversity of competitors, keyword cost estimates, keyword difficultly, algorithmic ranks, paid listings ranks, paid listin cost per click cost, Hitwise keyword report, and tracking systems.

David displays how they look at competitors and presents a spreadsheet organized into what information they need to obtain. He looks at three sets of terms “Awareness, Shop, and Purchase Terms. So for example an awareness term is “tub”, shop term is “clawfoot tub”, and a purchase term is “acrylic clawfoot tub”. They also look at who is in the product results in Froogle, ads, and organic results to see how competitors are using these terms.

Next slide shows a list of helpful paid tools that you can use to check on your competitors, and then a page with free tools (that includes no links to these tools??).

I left the session a bit early to go to the Organic Listings forum which Barry should be reporting on shortly.

GooHoo!...

This room is very empty, I am surprised.

GooHoo! is our fictional search engine, Google and Yahoo! merged to form GooHoo. Greg Boser VP of editorial quality, Andrew Goodman VP of advertising and programs, Dana Todd VP of Revenue enhancements and Noel McMichael VP of content acquisition. Working the audience is Jeffery Rohrs. The modo of the company is "don't be too evil".

Statement: You got a religious organization and you send a cease and desist order and they want you to stop allowing your competitors from bidding on your trademark name.
Response: Andrew Goodman said they started to build technology to automate this decision. We are concerned about GooHoo's rights to publish what they wish. GooHoo opts to fight it in court between the parties. Trademark cases are led to the courts unless their lawyers say that if its illegal, they will be proactive to remove it.

Statement: Danny says he was doing a search the other day for toys and a bunch of sex toys came up. Also, he found results leading to illegal items where he can buy.
Response: Dana said if your doing a competitive analysis you want to be able to type in a company name and see the competitive sphere. Greg said he would look how and why is that site ranking well organically, and if they are doing something outside of the TOS then they would pull it. If it was whitehat, then it would leave it.

Statement: What would get you pulled.
Response: Greg would pull out all blog spammers and Google bombers from the engine. It would be largely human based de-listings.

Statement: One company was going to pull offensive listings and the other was going to leave it. Now that you merged, which way will you go?
Response: Dana said they would explore that culture and if it does not impact revenue too greatly, then they would comply.

Statement: Will you keep PFI?
Response: Noel said that they will keep PFI, because it is there, people are buying it, so why not keep it. It is making money, so why not keep it. Noel explains that people are looking to only buy something not learn about something when using a search engine. Greg has a very small office not even with a window. The real money is in Andrew's division. Greg wants to show the PFI symbol in the organic results. Dana explains the pricing model is a CPC model. Dana explains that if they call them out as PFI results, it will generated more clicks. They are also thinking about a toolbar that only shows all ads, all the time. They explain they are labeled because the PFI results go through extensive, extensive, extensive editorial review by Greg and his children.

Statement: Clickfraud, how are you going to handle it. He said that Dana calls click fraud as "non converting clicks".
Response: Dana said that "We have very sophisticated technology, I cant talk about the technology publicly but its very advanced." They have not really issued any refunds but when they looked into them it was never due to click fraud.

Statement: What percentage of your resources are you investing in organic?
Response: Greg says he feels he is the least important person here. He feels that he finds it very frustrating to not bring in money. He said there is this ongoing conflict about building better organic search software versus revenue generating programs.

Statement: Mikkel asks if GooHoo would like to partner with his undetectable click bot software.
Response: Greg said to combat click fraud they would like to move to a CPA model, after Andrew said a CPM model. Dana was prompted to respond to the CPA model, she said it is a much more time consuming model to operate. There is just too much risk and time put into CPA models, they will be investigating it but they will be splitting their network into two networks. One will remain at the CPC and the good portion will go at CPM. They want to leverage the graphic ad network, because that made more money in the old days.

Statement: Do the Non Converting Clicks (NCC) come from a bot or a Indian people?
Response: Greg says most is software driven.

Statement: Cloaking...
Response: Noel says if you use his patented XML cloaking technology (i.e. PFI) you will be included. Greg says its all about user experience. We wont say that cloaking it allowed, but if we find a case that does it for a good reason, then it will probably be ok. They monitor high volume keywords and highly hyphenated domain names. Greg adds they are ditching the spam report page. Dana said they are building a new tool to really "personalize" your results based on "behavior patterns".

Statement: Are you doing hand selected search result pages?
Response: Greg said that "hand jobs are part of the business." He said in certain areas it makes sense.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! just walked in.

Statement: Will the GooHoo Directory be around?
Response: Noel said it will be gone shortly.

Statement: If I took the advertising certification programmer, will that flag me as a spammer?
Response: Dana said that there is a chinese curtain between the ad and organic department. They might go to your clients directly, if they have big budgets. In addition that advertising certification programmers they use this as a method to study you and your customers.

By not have a CPA model, it encourages the web site owner to make sure their sites are good for their users. If they adopted a CPA model it would make the advertisers lazy.

Statement: Put on your thinking caps, what is the one change you make to make GooHoo better.
Response: Greg said pure artificial intelligence to know what you are thinking even with one word searches. They can use the toolbar data, cookie data, history, refinement searches. Andrew said lets look 5 years to where we are headed. He said right now we are relatively small in revenue dollars. He said if you look at a billboard, GooHoo will run that ad, TV ads will be run by GooHoo's bid network, most of traditional ads will move to GooHoo. Noel said besides for the paid inclusion disclosure, he would like to get the GooHoo search appliance more exposure by slashing the price. That same appliance can "phone home" to the main index to increase exposure. Dana said she would like to embed GooHoo in your hand, sell it to the end user as an optional implant. It will change your life for ever. if they can possibly send out small electric shocks, it can stimulate certain brand awareness that will be positive to GooHoo.

Statement: How do you protect your user's privacy?
Response: They have a motto "dont be too evil". Advertisers and searches dont need to use us, they can go somewhere else. So its a give and take. Greg says you can search anonymously but you need cookies and you need to login.

Statement: Tim Mayer from Yahoo was put on the spot to make a statement. He said, he submits to GooHoo Shopping and GooHoo Local, what would be a good way to drive traffic to those other areas of the GooHoo engine?
Response: Andrew said that it used to be word of mouth, they still believe in limited marketing. Dana added its a matter of trust. Greg said its about choice, we cant force people to click on it. Its a learned behavior.

There is a new sign that just went up on the wall of the press room. It reads...

Internet connections for checking presentations and filing storing only.

Please use the email center and refrain from blogging here.

Thank you for your cooperation.

hmm...

Chris Sherman, from Search Engine Watch offered some insight into how pay per call had changed since it was first thought up several years ago. Then it was dismissed as it would never happen.

Chris introduced Marc Barach, from Ingenio, who expressed how pay per call and other pricing alternatives offer more value to advertisers in the long run. He says that the SME market these days as segmented, it competitive and it depends on many different variables. He goes into how SME companies are segmented into several others. He describes that the type of business vertical, size, location, price point, customer value varies which in segments of the market. He then showed a graph of that showed the percentage of people that are buying advertising from companies like Google and Overture, these are all business with websites. Outside this market are businesses with brochure ware business website, and then about 9.8 million business without websites.

So what is Pay Per Call Advertising? It is performance based advertising that extends reach of a company through the purchasing of calls. Chris goes describing how product innovation drives industry growth. He says there are barriers in online advertising. One of the prime issues is ROI, or tracking. Also, a website that excepts transactions or is usable. He says one of the ways that pay per call is largely more beneficial is that ability to track and know the conversion rate. The phone has been around for 100 years, people are very comfortable using it. He makes a good point. Taking out the website eliminates some of the complexity of determining the ROI. \

He describes how his company takes pay per call orders. Customers can select the categories for which to display there ads. They can then set the amount they wish to pay per call, base rate appears to be $2.00 per click. He says some companies are willing to pay up to $35 per lead with average sales of $2500 per call. He says it works very well for many industry from auto to travel to industry.

Next up is Dan Ballister from Findwhat who will be describing how FindWhat is doing to integrate the pay per call option into their system. He starts with some history such as the first banner in 1994, then to 1997 that the yellow pages are dead, or if you’re not on the web then your competitors will be, or even better you need to reinvent your company on the web. Was its that bizarre that long ago? Times have changed as Dan just said. The lesson learned from the mid-90’s – Instead of helping advertisers to use the web to augment their existing business, we told them they needed to reinvent their business online. Now its 2005, we know what’s in front us. He says that most business are not ready to compete for or buy PPC yet. They all have phones though. Conversions improve from online to on-phone to on-premise. Some services and products require live consultation. Channel-agnostic marketers will leverage any worthy conversion vehicle they can find. Where was pay per call in 1997?

Pay per call is surprisingly uncomplicated product. All it requires is title, phone number and description. Findwhat gets there database of 1-800 from Ingenio apparently. Bizjournals.com is an example of one of the sites that has ads that use pay per sale ads in their search results. I see opportunity for this in a variety of areas, this session is pretty encouraging for the future of this product. He then goes into some websites that are early adopters of this technology. Such as web designers, career trainers, business, industry, and several others. He also goes to explain how the advertisers are seeing increased conversions for pay per call. They are renewing the advertising and are coming back for more. Findwhat says it’s working very well.

Some take aways from the session. Many of the largest internet advertisers already buy ONLY on a CPA basis. Isn’t that good enough for you too?

Companies to check out doing pay per sale marketing:

FindWhat.com
InsiderPages.com
ThomasB2B.com
Snap

Barry is going to be reporting on the Black Hat view point, and I will be covering White Hat. The room seems rather packed, and it looks like it will turn out to be a good session.

The queen of the White Hats, Jill Whalen, of HighRankings starts off with a presentation she has prepared. She is wearing a white cowboy hat. :) She says its rather simple the whole debate. White hats are good, black hats are bad. Unfortunately it’s not that simple she says. She asks: Who is better? Better person? Better at not getting banned?

Who are big time spammers? Jill says they are into the affiliate marketing stuff. She says if you get it in your inbox it’s probably spam you can find on the search engines. She says spam is not for most people, don’t do it, there are plenty of white hat methods that are great for you. Don’t feel you need to dive into black hat methods to be successful.

Alan Perkins, from Silver Disc Limited was up next. He said he had to think hard about covering this session. He puts up a slide that compares the white hat vs. black hat. You have to look at content and links. Black hats do it for the search engines, and white for humans. Likewise, black hats like information to remain hidden from the search engines, while whites prefer to keep it visible. He says a white hat is just as capable of doing a bad job. He says black hat seems to see search engines as enemies. He tries to treat search engines as they don’t exist.

More on White Hat comparisons

White Hats

• Content and Links are visible to humans


• Information is visible to both search engines and humans


• The quality of work is visible


• Search engines are friends


• Site relevance is actually improved with white hat techniques


• Results are for the long term


• White hats use ethical techniques


• Go by legal quidelines

Mikkel Svenden did some funny research into hats. You have paper hats, innocent hats, offensive hats, warrior hats, and a great hat for rainy days, fools hat.

He says SEO is not about hats. He holds up a book called Marketing Warfare. It’s a war out there. “There are many wars to fight, many ways to fight them and many positions to win.” He asks how “creative” is your bookkeeping. Do you always play by the rules in every business you do. How aggressive are your other sales and marketing activities. He gives the example of Enron, they would not do Black hat techniques, yet they had some shady accounting. Doesn’t make sense to him these companies.

Todd Friesen was up next, I have seen him speak before and gives a good presentation. He is representing the Black hats. He talks about referral log spamming and the problem is causes. The take away from this is lock your stats folder, don’t make your log available. More Black hat techniques, he uses auto generated gibberish. They would hide this in frame sets, and load up a nice page using cloaking. This is IP based content delivery, or cloaking. There is a good amount of screen scraping and repacking, put gibberish under a less optimized page, flash sites, and laundering your visitors via IP. If you are doing cloaking, you have to do IP based, not bot based. Google will bust your butt if you are just scanning for googlebot/2.l. There is also cloak busting, or white hats that are busting black hats. He says search engines do cloaking to.

Todd talks about how things have changed. Used to you would be able to buy links and it was considered black hat, now it’s the norm. Some example of buying site and PR. You can buy sites to pass PR onto another site. Buy expired domains.

He highly recommends you investigate to your competitors to see if they are doing black hat. If they are doing it, find out what they are doing.

Greg Boser, from WebGuerrilla spoke next. He says there is not enough honesty in our business about what we do. He says SEM stands for Search Engine Manipulation. We are all here to learn how to become better at manipulating search engines. He says that the sites in the top ten are those that are the ones that are best at manipulating the top 10 results.

Greg defines level of Search Engine Optimization. For white hat he defines as:

White – (TOS SEO) Content manipulation. Rewriting text, titles, and tags so that they include far more occurrences of your desired keywords than would ever come out of your mouth during a conversation with a potential client/customer.

He asks is aggressive search engine optimization bad for your brand?

No, he displays about 15 major companies that are using cloaking and a variety of techniques, such as eBay, eToys, Compaq, Kraft, British Airways, Fedex, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. Interesting. He says none of those companies had issues that were bad for the brand.

He asks who is evil? He says it’s any SEO company that does not tell their clients on what they are doing, or those companies that are not upfront with their tactics and strategies they use to get sites ranked. He recommends be honest with your clients and full disclosure is a must.

Karen Breen Vogel from B2BWorks was first up, but I was 10 minutes late.

Paul Slack from WebDex was next up to discuss how to target business to business traffic. When developing an internet marketing strategy you need to define goals and objectives, target audience, conversion activities, budget and resources. It is also important to measure goals, cost per lead, and cost per acquisition. And then refine to make changes for improvement and create new objectives. How will you measure success? Performance improvement goals; increase in site traffic, increase visitors, reduce site abandonment, and increase conversion rates. And also Comparative Analysis. When they sit down with a customer they figure out cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and then did a break-even analysis. CPC X (Lead Sale Radio) = CPA. Then Online marketing budget / CPA.
B2B Sales Cycle: (1) Uncover the need (2) Research possible solution for business problem (3) short list of vendors (4) go to bid and (5) make a decision. SEM comes into play with numbers 2 and 3 above. Influencers and Decisions Makers both use search engines. Influencers are early in the cycle, they search specific searches, and they are more likely to respond to a call to action. You need to think about how you can make the influencers job easier. Decision Makers are a little different, they do more high level, less specific searches. They are less likely to respond to call to actions. They want to go to your site to validate your for real. He then showed a case study on a wholesale apparel company. Most apparel buying in the wholesale market are done through sales reps, but by tapping into the Web they were able to bring in new customers at a lower commission rate.

Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro explained that he had a 22 minute presentation and had to cut that in half. They did a big study with Marketing Sherpa, the results of the study can be found on a white paper at enquiro.com/research.asp. They looked at usage patterns by analyzing the data. On the eye scan they divided the page into four sections. Top Ad space in A, the froogle feeds in B the organic in C and the right side AdWords in D. 62% C, 20% B, A 14%, D 4%. They noticed that the correlation between eye scan and link clicked on were very highly related. They looked at rank, page position, keywords in title, and a ton of other factors. They noticed a disjoint between what people say and actually do when it comes to clicking on a search result link. High confidence searches VS. Low confidence searches. High confidence searches; getting top rankings is vital, pop the relevant words in a title if possible, top is better than side in sponsored, the right landing pages are critical, little qualification done on the SERP, generally capturing higher in the buying funnel. Low confidence searches; ranks are a little less important, more qualification done on the SERP, relevant titles become more important, well written descriptions become more important, generally capturing the lower buying cycle.

Jeff Ramminger from KnowledgeStrom focuses only on the tech industry and they only want to develop leads, not clicks. Industry Example - IT; wide variety of industry segments (consumer vs business, SMB vs. Enterprise, SW, HW, & Services); Variety of "Searchers" (influencers, decision makers, it vs business); complex, multi part buy cycle, vision plan, evaluate, and select. The Knowledge Storm Model: (1) IT Directory; aggregate content from thousands of vendors, structured format easy access and comparison, product and service listing as well as white papers, demos and seminars. (2) Vertical Search (3) User Registration, higher conversions and leads not clicks (3) Campaign and Advertising Programs.

Todd Sims from Business.com which is a search engine that focuses only on businesses. For example, if you do a search on RAM, business.com will only return business related results for the same search. They use a CPC model. They have a directory approach to their business, with a 100,000 categories across 26 main verticals. Then behind that is their keyword library, advertisers buys a keyword category and not keywords. They power the search on many other business oriented sites like forbes.com.

Dan Savage CEO from ThomasB2B.com, they are connected Thomas Publishing and half owned by FindWhat.com. They are an advertising network, they are not the Google of the business world. They built a highly automated ad system that lowers the cost of advertising in the B2B world. They use standard categories, with about 11,000 categories in english, it was designed to be multilingual from the start. They are going the opposite way from local search, they believe most businesses are looking to go outside local.

Martin Laestch from Intel is telling you can use search marketing to bring in new business leads. He is running campaigns in more then 22 languages, and getting tons and tons of traffic. He said it is working for us, Intel, and it is working very very well. They are going to increase their multimillion dollar budget significantly.

Danny kicks off the session, wearing a tan cowboy hat. He said that they do not know if they have the answers to these questions, but they will begin talking about it.

Jill Whalen was first up representing the white hats. She posted a picture of Scottie and herself with halos over their heads and Greg and Todd with devil horns. Very funny. So who is better? She wouldn't and couldn't say. Big time spammers are in affiliate marketing, viarga and gambling are where the black hats are found. If its in your email as spam they do it. Black hats are not for most, real businesses with real sites should not use it. That was it from Jill.

Alan Perkins, an other white hatter was up, Danny says the white knight of the white hatters. He put up a chart to show the difference between white and black has.
- Black hats deploy content and links from search engines to see versus humans to see.
- Visibility to humans for black hats, its hidden, white hats its visible.
- Quality of Work for black hats are hidden, and white hats are visible.
- Search engines are black hats enemies and white hats friends.
- Domains and Brands are disposable for black hats and cherished by white hats.
- Site and relevance apparently not improved for black hats, and what hats they are approved (this is from his slide).
- Results are more short term for black hatters and long term for white hatters.
- Ethical techniques are not used by black hats, only white hats. :)
- Legal, Alan say "no?" for black hats and "yes?" for white hats.

Alan said he feels some tactics are illegal such as not having a site that is accessible to all (disabled) and deceptive advertising.

Mikkel Svendsen was next up, he is representing the gray hat. He showed some hysterical hats, just too funny. Mikkel, hook those slides up please. Mikkel quoted "It's a war out there". He said there are many ways to win a war. You do not have to be number one for a search on casino to be a successful casino company. Keep things in perspective, what kind of risk do you take with your brand today. Would Enron deploy black hat methods? :) Are you on the right path? He said more bigger brands should use black hat techniques and smaller companies white hats. Then Mikkel showed a picture of dark vander.

Todd Friesen, Oliman, was introduced as the black hat. He said there are very few black hats that are 100% black hats. He first explained a bit about referral log spamming. If you see that you have referrals from adult sites, that means your log files are wide open. Make sure to lock your stats folder or else he (or other black hats) will use it to link spam. Auto generated gibberish, a very good tool to generate content targeting content. They would take these content sets and cloak the content. They would screen scrap the content and repackage it. Then deliver different pages to the search engine and human. Flash sites is one area where the black hats travel into the white hat area. Laundering your visitors via IP, sending your visitors to the right page based on the IP referral. If your going to cloak, do the IP based method. An other good place to cloak is a member's access forum, and they did this with the supporters forum for WebmasterWorld. He then said the search engines cloak as well. Buying sites, PR and Link is no longer black hat only. Buying sites for PR to pass to your network. Buying off topic links for the PR the link will pass. Buying bulk links in large networks for the anchor text boost. At the end of the day be aware of the tactics competitors are using in your space, also be prepared to use those same tactics to compete. You must use SEO tactics (black or white) to a degree that is relative to your search space.

Greg Boser was the final speaker, to talk about the black hat side of things. His slides sport a black background. He said this is a long going debate, something he dislikes getting into. He said that there needs to be more honesty. SEM = Search Engine Manipulation. He said it is upsetting that our industry wont admit it. We are all here to learn here to learn how to be better at manipulating the results. My site or my client site isnt really the most relevant. the site sin the top 10 arent the most relevant always. After he is done with his job, he convinced the search engines that the pages are more relevant - but they are not. White hat SEO in Greg's opinion is content manipulation (if you write a way that differs from how you talk, then it is content manipulation). Gray Hat; technical solutions to overcome obstacles put in place by incompetent web designers. Corporate America does this all the time to make their sites more visible. Black Hat; full algorithmic assault. Finding and exploiting all possible algorithmic holes. SE guidelines play no role in determining course of action. He explains that he might not go full force black hat for a corporate client. Is aggressive SEM bad for your brand? He posted some logos of very famous companies that got caught spamming. He said a lot of people in the white hat spectrum use fear talk because they are afraid to get into the market. He said probably more white hat content has gotten banned, then IP based cloaked pages. Who is really Evil? The SEO companies that dont tell the client what they are doing and how they are doing it. He explains that you need to be transparent with your client about the risks and rewards. Full disclosure is a must!

Alan disagrees with Mikkel's war analogy because you can have lots of winners in business. He won't get into the "good or evil" debate.

Q & A:

Q: How is affiliate marketing black hat?
A: Jill says its because many affiliate marketing sites are extremely competitive. Jill won't take on sites that are extremely competitive. Greg says PPC, pills porn casinos. Greg says that affiliate marketing is not evil in itself, but it happens to be a very competitive area on search. He said eBay has a tons of spammers on the pay roll, meaning they provide tools for the affiliate marketers to spam. Danny adds that AdSense is not helping the cause with creating bad content.

Q: How do you know when you have been banned? And how do you correct it?
A: Do a site command at Google to see and watch your log files. If your banned, clean it up and email Google and the search engines for re-inclusion. Or create a new domain name. Also speak with the search reps at this conference.

Q: Can you differentiate between Yahoo and Google with black hat?
A: Greg said the person with the most links wins. Google now takes a bit longer with newer sites. The new MSN has new opportunities for you.

Q: Text links brokerage are in the exhibit hall, is that black?
A: He said it depends on where you buy your links, relevant versus non relevant links.

Greg said he has so little tolerance for those companies that do low class redirection and then call it ethical, high standards. Be honest!

Greg says that the search engines don't owe him anything, he has an AdWords budget waiting to be used for when they change the search algorithms. Jill says that Florida did not change the rules of the game. Mikkel responds to that saying Google in 2001 added the nocache option, so stupid cloakers used it and a few months later, Google delisted all sites that used the nocache tag. Todd also says that the search engines owe us nothing in terms of the organic listings.

I missed all of Greg Jarboe's presentation, this is really upsetting. Please check out PR Web, I also hope to have a write up about their service next week. I apologize.

Next up was Nan Dawkins from RedBoots Consulting. She explained that some of her clients are unique in that they want to target problems and not products. They reach unique target audience, the influencers. Who influences the influencers? Journalists and before them Bloggers. Blogs are an early warning system for news stories and often shape the coverage of big media outlets. So how does one use a search engine to research journalists and bloggers? She says you start with the basic SEO principles, optimize your press releases. You can use paid search to combat negative press , ugly blog rumors and message boards. Also use paid search to take advantage of breaking news. You must be willing to create/repackage content based on what is capturing the imagination of influencers at the moment (i.e. fahrenheit 9/11 and the day after tomorrow). News sites attract news junkies and contextual ads allow you to do that. You must also learn RSS, not how it works but how to set it up. Step 1: Distribute your press releases. The traffic does not go to your Web site, but to the PR Web or news site. Step 2. Create a blog, post to a blog and monitor blog chatter with Pub Sub or Blog Post. Step 3. Add a feed to your own site. Step 4. Advertise on Feeds, like on Feedster or other RSS news aggregators.

Ron Key from Converseon is now up. He started up to say that we are just beginning to scrap the surface of the potential of PR and SEO together as a tool. The missing element to what you are able to track with search engines is reputation. He asks how many people have Googled their company? Most raised their hand. Search Engines Impact corporate and brand reputation. Remember my "sunbeam water cooler" blog entry, with the customer service impact? A case in point includes; "home depot" and the 3rd result down is homedepotsucks.com (at least on the slide it was). There are about 4.1 million people searching on "home depot" each month, so this is major. An other example is "delta airlines" the number 6 results is boycottdelta.com. Today search engines have helped change the rules of the game by allowing a small player with a small site really make an impact on a large company's brand. The term being used for this is called "reputation attacks" with over 12,000 flames sites and growing. "Google has become the first page of corporate websites." David Weinberg quote.

Conduct a SERMA test (Search Engine Reputation Management) Go to the search engine and type in your company name. Review top listings. Ask yourself is there accurate and complete info, does it accurately reflect your company, are the descriptors coherent, is there false or misleading info. What can you do if you have a bad rep out there? You can go to litigation but that is hard. Direct outreach to the company directly, but it can end up worse or there can be no one there to contact. And some companies actually act like they are normal people and praise the company, we see it often in the forums. You can also build your own pages to knock off the bad press off the results. How do you do it? (1) Create a chasm in your org (2) Understand how your company and brands are searched on (3) Conduct an analysis to determine what keywords are leading to what kind of info (4) Once you got that, review your current pages and look at the full assets of company. (5) Also recruit partners and other 3rd parties to optimize for your brand. (6) Make full use of your domain names, use a minimum 5 domains. (7) Analyze the flame sites more closely, are they cloaking, etc.? If so, report them. (8) Fully optimize your content site wide and cross link. Avoid duplicate content, it wont help. (9) Continue to publish more content, i.e. press release (10) Stay vigilant.

Q & A:

Greg explains that you need to do more with your press release. If you send something out there and people read it and say, ok now what, then it does nothing. But with an airline service, he optimized a press release and said this is the first time they are flying to ABC and you get a special introductory offer at $X if you act within Y days. That press release exploded.

He then explained that Kevin Lee was skeptical about this. So he tried it out by optimizing a release for his wife's business. Within 24 hours Kevin's wife got a phone call from CNN to interview her for her speciality.

Black Hat, White Hat & Lots of Gray Preview
Both Ben and I will be covering this session. Ben is going to be reporting with a slant of white bias. I will report on the session with a tint of black bias. This is our strategy, I hope it works out to be a fun and comprehensive read.

Compelling your visitors to click through to your website can be a challenge. The speakers in this session intend to tackle the issue and address what you can do to improve your ads and landing pages for maximum effectiveness on any search engine marketing campaign you may undertake.

Misty Locke, from Range Online Media was up first to discuss her presentation. She is going to start with the creative on site and in the ads. There are 6 key reminder she recommends

• Who are you targeting? Know you audience!
• Conversion can vary dramatically for the same keyword depending on the landing pages
• Landing pages should directly correlate to keyword and placement
• Convenience of the online shopper
• Take a deep breath – Use 203 click rule. For every click it takes the visitor, you loose 30% of your business

Misty goes on to explain that you need to understand how it all works before you can use it. Determine the most relevant search terms. What do you do with them next? Consider the following:

Is the search term relevant to the page?
Does your page mention your desired search term in the content?
Is this a product search or a category search? If it’s a product, send them to a product!

There are many key things to consider when creating a good landing page. Remember to evoke emotion to create the sale. Misty talks pretty fast, so I am trying to catch everything. She quickly goes into a next example, and gives the example of the Wyndham Miami Airport Hotel. They went about by contacting the user to see what they were looking for. What they figured out was that they needed to target the customer. You don’t have a dream getaway at an airport hotel. They realized this, and reworded the description to reflect benefits, such as cheap rates, internet access, near the airport, etc..

Also, be sure to focus on the user. There are check point you should consider regarding the title of your landing page. Add the keyword in the title, add “official site” when relevant. For the description be sure to add a call to action, including benefit statements.
There is a interesting things that happens with the example she gave. Apparently cross selling is very successful. I have heard this on multiple occasions as well. Basically what was happening was those people that were searching for something like “Wyndham Puerto Rico Hotel” where actually booking a room in say a Chicago hotel. Why this happens? Not sure, but its effective to cross sell on the same page.

Misty is concluding with some final points. She recommend considering your target audience, and that conversions can vary dramatically. Build trust, and reduce the amount of clicks the visitor has to take.

Joe Agliozzo, from BetterPPC, was up and he asks the crowd how often they test there copy? He says that 2 seconds is the time that takes a searcher to click on something in the search results. In 2 seconds you need to stand out. Example, try to get terms bolded in your ads. You can also add credibility words to your ads. Example: guaranteed, lowest price.

Interrupters are something you should consider. He gives the example of an Apple ads, with a boxer that has nothing to do with computers, but it works. Joe goes on to give an example of his client Team America. They added wild card {KeyWord: Team America} to the ads and some compelling reasons to get to click, such as emphasizing from parts of the movie. He goes into a good number of examples of clients where improvements were made. He recommends to vary your ad copy a lot. Joe says that his company offers some software to help you test this at www.betterppc.com. I would like to check out what software his company is offering.

Matt Spiegel, from Resolution Media was up to present next. He goes into a brief company history and information about his background. He starts the presentation with an example client, Socrates who offers information about obtaining various documents and lease agreements. His example relates to real estate keywords, specificially real estate lease agreements. He explains that to improve the click through rates was to remove the cost of the product from the ad. They got more clicks when removing the price. They worked with the click on both the ads and the landing pages.

Landing pages are important, you need to consider where you are sending the visitor and if there are better pages for which could offer them more. Things he recommends make a good landing page. Highlight hot or good products at the top. Change some of the copy so that it speaks to the consumer, say “this is why you need the product”. They made sure the copy express a call to action and communicated with the consumer.

He goes on to give an example from a company that marketed to golf shop pros. They created a merchandising strategy to target these people. They created a holiday sale landing page, and also looked at the purchase pattern. He says its more than the landing page, and you can consider the purchase pattern several levels deep into the site.

He ends with some recommendations. Different copy recommendations for different situations. Landing page must deliver on promise of title and description.

Very good and helpful session, however it was quite rushed in my opinion. Slow down with the examples and explanations.

Question and Answer from the audience.
Q: How do you translate you Google test results over to Overture. Second, how do you test on Overture?

A: Overture has editorial policies, and its easy to test on Google, and have ads rotate evenly. From what many of our customers tell us that what works on Google also workings on Overture. You can also try to use different tracking url’s to test the various engines.

Q: We don’t do direct sales, and do lead generation? How do we test that?
A: Have a specific landing page per page or product, and work with the leads and see how many of those have converted to sale. Measure it by a cost per lead basis. Try a specific phone number, gather leads online with a tracking url. Its hard to track this, so no exact answer.

SES 2006 Schedule He starts of by saying they are going to have SES in December in Alaska and in August in a really hot place.

Paid Inclusion Turnaround:
- Every one was doing Paid Inclusion except Google
- Now it is just Yahoo and they still are doing it
- Yellow Pages, Audio/Visual and Shopping also offer PFI
- In vertical searches, Danny believes that paid inclusion will stick around but not in other areas.

Lawsuites:
- Trademark issue is still unresolved; Google is in court now about this.
- Even the meta tag law suit is coming back
- Click-fraud is a rising concern, even Google says it is
- Censorship, copyright, and so on. The industry is still growing and maturing.

Personal Search Arrives:
- Eurekster started
- But how's that search

Getting Personal
- Personal generally meant results reshaped by what you clicked on
- Eurekster joined forces with Friendster, that will be interesting
- Also there is Search Memory, Search History

Surviving Personal Search
- Great Content
- Great title tags and descriptions
- Grassroots? watching and seeing, multiple fronts will open

Google Dance Syndrome
- Last year's Florida largely hasn't repeated but everything is in the sandbox
- The dance is gone
- Will no doubt continue to have shifts in results

Share of US Searches
- Google has shrunk to 45%, Yahoo has grown to 32%, MSN has 15% (they will use their own soon), Ask jumped to 6% and other accounts for 3%.

Shortcuts & Direct Display
- Invisible tabs moving forward, with introduction or expansion of "detours" or "shortcuts" (AOL Snapshots, Ask Smart Search, Google OneBox Results, Yahoo Shortcuts)
- Web results wont be the only and premier item on the results page, how often do you see Google News, Yellow Pages, Froogle, Definitions at the top. The other day, I saw Google Books.

Surviving Shortcuts
- Watch the verticals
- Focus on the ones getting promoted
- Learn, prepare, aim to do well in those.

Battle of the Desktop
- October: Google Desktop Comes out
- Yesterday: MSN
- Tomorrow: Ask
- Jan: Yahoo
- AOL Beta

Desktop Search Impact on SEM
- They see you again and again and again
- Can you measure this impact on the bottom line?

SEM Firms Channel Money
- SEM Firms handle 1.3 billion - 50% of est. 2004 spending on paid search (jupiter research)
- Search advertising overall recognized as a major industry, especially "media owners"
- SEM firms now should get same recognition aren't a "Cottage industry
- Danny says Google is a Media company, I heard Google say they do not want to be thought of a media company but rather a technology company. Danny says no, you are a media company.

Evolution of Firms
- SEMPO says 74% firms flat fee based
- Jupiter says 50% flat-fee based
- But what about non paid because SEM firms do both (sempo says)

SEO is Huge - At Least to Firms
- SEO = PR; Search Ads = Ads; SEO + Ads = SEM
- Outsourced SEM is $380 million (9% of total $4.1 billion industry in 2004 est - sempo)
- Money they keep from running paid or organic (47% from SEO, 43% from paid search)
- He showed some more SEMPO statistics from last nights data

Search Not Paid Search
- Have to understand search is not paid search
- Failure to do so means
- possible misreading of where SEM firms will go
- upsetting firms but not providing support needed on the non paid side

What's Needed
- Algorithmic warnings
- etc. same slide from San Jose Keynote

He then discusses whats coming up today...

Last year's Chicago SES was bad, with no wifi. This year, again no wifi. But to make it worse, the Internet in the rooms are out. So I have to come down to the business center, that has room for 2.5 people to share two computers and an extra ethernet line.

According to the comments over at Andy's Blog, Rebecca Lieb said "The Wi-Fi problem is a union issue, I'm afraid. At least, that's what I'm hearing from our conference staff. More ethernet cables are promised in the press/speaker room tomorrow."

Andy is right, this is a SEM conference, the most dynamic niche in the Internet industry. How can we not have wifi, let alone not have 24/7 Internet access in our rooms. Don't take this as putting blame on Search Engine Watch. But maybe for a suggestion, we move SES Chicago to SES Florida next year. Who needs Chicago's Union laws?

Like to send Danny's blog a ping on this topic.

Gary Stein, the moderator of the session, told a quick story to kick of the session. He used to work an an agency, and they were hired to do the advertising for a movie for a super hero. They had to come up with an interactive experience on the Web for this movie, where the script has not been even written yet. They went through all the discussion forums to download people's opinion on the marketing they have done. They used online forums to measure their success with that campaign. He then showed an example of cruftbox.com, a site dedicated to reviewing products. He did a review of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, and it was an extremely long write up with about 30 comments on his entry. People are now looking more and more for "trust agents", they use people as authorities (consumer reviews) and also brand as authorities. Online research is deep and thorough; "I like to research all available products, price, and store options before I buy something online." To that statement, 26% strongly agree, 33% somewhat agree. Consumers pointed toward informal sources via searches. 26% of the results found for a search on a product point to a consumer review. If you do a search for "starbucks" in Google, ihatestarbucks.com comes up as number two. He then showed this outstanding mini iPod commercial and he explained that it was done by a school teacher who simply loved his mini ipod. The ad looked very professional and it fooled me. "Dynamic Attitude Analysis Flow", is a way to keep track of how consumers are reacting to products. He explains, what if someone built a spider to crawl the Web and figure out what people are writing about the product. Not only capturing words, but adding to that, the attitude of the language used in the post. Then you can plot the information and compare it over history. Very interesting concept which should be explained in more detail by the panel.

Pete Blackshaw from Intelliseek explains that much of what Gary described is coined as "consumer generated media". They used the word "media" because the consumers are generating this media. He explains that the majority of your consumers are going to "other content". What Intelliseek is doing is listening in real time about what consumers are saying about brands on the Internet. They only listen to the untarnished comments, how consumers really feel. He explains that this can be measured over time.

Jonathan Carson from Buzzmetrics explains that when people are searching, a large portion of what searches are finding is consumer generated content. That is why they are here, to measure that with a digital footprint.

Bob Wyman from PubSub, I discussed this in my blog a while back. This is a form of link analysis through time based link analysis. He explained that a "prospective search" is a search that shows results based on the most popular queries search on recently. An important part of this is attitude management and this shows you the buzz. They recently added www.pubsub.com/linkranks_detail.php, which shows you the linkrank for a site over the past month. It shows you the domains that linked to a site in the last 10 days. This tool is not linked outside as of yet, this looks real interesting.

Gary asks how do you validate or ensure the data you collect is valid and representative? Jonathan said they do both automated and manual data collection. They try to segment based on behavior and that helps build a perfect representation of the sample.

Gary asks how do you figure out attitude in posts? I.E. someone who cuts and pastes information and then says, I disagree with this. Pete said the technology is now smart enough to parse out that emotion.

Bob then discusses how at the Web 2.0 conference, Snapz.com released their new search engine, during the announcement, several bloggers were in the room writing about it. By the time the announcement was done, consumer buzz was wide spread and documented in these tools. Soon after, some other blogger noticed the terms and conditions posted on the site were silly (it was actually a mistake and fixed within an hour), but other bloggers picked it up and the consumer buzz was now on the negative side. Then the same bloggers noticed it was fixed and they were elated, and consumer perception was back to being positive. Where else can you get such a quick response?

I would like to see Bob from PubSub.com reply to this entry as a test. :) His service allows one to get into an interactive discussion with any announcement they make, instead of the communication going one way.

This session was led by Niki Scevak, who was on the panel earlier about the online advertising and search forecasts. He went into explaining that ROI is very important to a search marketer. Sixty nine percent of search marketers plan to spend more money on search engine marketing then in 2003. Niki explained that only one of four search marketers bids and measures intelligently. They are look more at profit contribution, but not sales. The differences between unsophisticated and sophisticated search marketers are quite large. Sophisticated search marketers annually on average can spend $100,000 on a search marketing for the year. They are able to do this because they have systems in place that will enable them to spend rationally and with results.

Niki describes how search advertising took off from initial banner advertising, in terms of cost per impressions and cost per click. Sophisticates he says are happier with SEM, and because so will increase spending by more each year. He relates that sophisticates have systems in place that enable them to do this. There levels of spending depend upon what they know.

There is a life cycle for search marketers. On the first level is the one that entered in as unsophisticated and have opened an account and bid on a few terms, for example 20. He may have looked at looked at his log files and seen how much search marketing contributes to his traffic. The next level is the person that builds confidence in search marketing, and they go the next step by investing in more web analytics to track the campaigns. They see the potential and are now able to somewhat track the process. However do they know what they should be advertising on? Should I be on both Google and Yahoo, or just one? Additionally they may wonder how broad match or some of the tools offered by the search engines can help them. Niki mentions that search distribution of search marketers depends on how quickly they can measure the effectiveness of these engines. Using more advanced web analytics will help them decide whether they want to use both Overture and Google, and go into second and third tier engine space. The next level of the search marketer is more sophisticated but realizes that there is a fork in the road. They are realizing that spending is increasing and CPC rates are going up in more competitive areas, it will be necessary to analyze other means for which to optimize the campaign. This includes landing pages, and how the website that is being used. As the search marketer becomes more intelligent in their spending and management, they will grow more in the current market then they will increase in more spending or more search engines. It’s about optimizing the current situation before moving on to the next. Additional factors in the development of a search marketer include the adoption of new technologies.

Niki states the obvious in my opinion, but he goes on to say the bidding on more engines increases search clicks. There appears to be a certain testing time in which unsophisticated search marketers test one search engine before moving on to the next. He gaves some interesting stats in that sophisticates use Google 96% and Overture 91% of the time, as compared to Findwhat 44% percent of the time. Sophisticated search marketers use the second tier search engines way more than unsophisticated. So this means if you are considering using Findwhat or similar search engines, you are giving up more clicks to those that that are more sophisticated than you.

Niki concluded with some key points that marketers must achieve sophistication in bid strategy and measurement to survive. They will need to concentrate on improving web site efficiency to thrive.

Good session, the room is pretty packed for a session right after lunch. Some last points, they mentioned that there is estimated to be about 100,000 search marketers in the US. This number is based on a 538,000 people survey. They did fail to mention the variations of search marketing, such as one that works as an affiliate marketer. However someone in the audience brought it up and Gary Stein did talk a bit on some of the early results from an affiliate survey they are just finishing. He mentions that to create a successful affiliate program requires two things; one is to create a competitive commission structure, and two to offer a data feed of products. I really look forward to seeing some results from

There are many decisions that will affect you bottom line, this session dealt with those decisions that effect smaller to moderately sized SEO companies. Both of the speakers explained in more detail on how they run their companies and the wide variation among SEO firms.

John Lustina, from Intrapromote was up first to talk about the large side of the SEO industry. He explained that the larger side of the industry often means only 30 employees. He explains that his firm deals exclusively with white techniques, and that has enabled his firm to attract and get larger brands. Basically they do not want anything that will harm their URL.

He goes on to say that he only uses full time employee, as there is a high margin, and he realizes that he will invest a good amount of time into teaching them about SEO and the industry. He doesn’t think it’s worth it to hire a contractor and invest that time. There seems to a good number of people that have gotten started with SEO in the last 6 months. I think the industry veterans decided to sit in the back.

John puts up a slide about the emerging cash flow management issues for SEM in 2005.
They are in circular fashion.

SEO High Margin -> PPC Single Digit -> Sequential Liability -> Terms -> Cash Reserves ->

He goes into more detail about sequential liability, a think that most SEO companies understand. Where the profit comes in and right back out the door, and its need to be the responsibility of the firm to make sure that clients pay on time. You do not want to turn your business into money out, money out, money out. I agree completely, he makes a good point. John stresses the importance of being very tight on terms. He says that Intrapromote has 10% of revenue in cash reserves. He says that it helps him sleep at night and allows him to take some extra risks. He explains that the way he came up with that number is he started with a certain amount of funds in the bank and they need funds to cover expenses for several months.

The next speaker was Laura Thieme from Bizresearch. She explains her story of how she got into the business. She said she started in 98, and her company grew out of her apartment. She says they gradually went to an office space, and got rid of any employees that would rather have remained home based. They used a book keeper a couple times a week, now as opposed to several times a month when she started out. She hired other people such as data entry, graphic designers, accountants, lawyers, temp staff.

She explains the benefits she offer employees. Such as 1 week vacation, offering a 401K, and other medical fees such as dental, training, travel, and 10% bonuses. One interesting and helpful way she mentioned to keep employees accountable was set an expectation of them to make 2-3X there annual income from the company. This worked.

Bizresearch has not been in the red. She has never hired a CFO, and doesn’t think she will need one currently. She had trouble getting the business a line of credit. They ended up financing software and equipment they had already bought.

She said they switched to a hourly model to charge clients in 2004. Prior to 2004, all clients were on retainers, and they realized that they were spending way more time than before, and thus needed to charge for it. Laura talked about contracts in that they are one year, and auto renew, and hire a part time corporate contract lawyer at $25 and hour as opposed to one that goes for $200 an hour. You can use DMB’s collection service to collect on money that is owed under a few thousands dollars. She concluded that her outlook for the future in 2005 is reducing the amount of outsourcing and to use technology to save time.

Jim Boykin, was up next. I am fond of Jim’s work, he is rather private in the forums, but is in my opinion one of those guys you should watch. He is a defining leader in his field. Jim’s presentation was extremely simple outline. He explains how he got started in 99, worked as a consultant, built We Build Pages, eventually moved out of home office, and eventually started to target “internet marketing”.

He explains that when Florida hit in November that several of his clients left. They realized they needed to change there offerings so if in the event that Google had another Florida then the client would still be receiving a good deal of promotion from other areas. His early goals for 2004 included consulting, on page optimization, link building, website design, website templates, pay per click, and shopping feeds.

Jim related that they experienced quite a few challenges. They needed to be more organized, organize billing, obtain and office manager, define roles, set contract. They are one of the only companies that publishes there contract online. Jims says he doesn’t have a business plan. One thing I know myself have rarely done as well. Things change daily in terms of the search engines, its hard to set that in writing. He also recommends that you can get insurance from the Chamber of Commerce for small businesses. Additionally he related that his contract style is monthly. If the client pays the contract renews. Plain and simple way of doing, but it works for them.

Overall the session was very good from a small business prospective, while the session was not the most exciting, I did notice a lot of note taking as there were many people there representing SEO companies that were looking for good ideas to increase the success of their own business. One of the interesting questions that was left in my mind at the end was if the era of high margin SEO was over?

This session is about how to outsource, hire people out.

Jill Whalen was up first, she has been doing SEO work for almost 10 years. If you are running your own SEM company you can do it all, get employees or outsource pieces. If you do it yourself you will find that there is not enough time in the day, you will never be as good as an expert in that niche, you will probably notice lower quality of work and bad client relations, and there is overall less money to be made. If you specialize and become an expert you will do what you like, you will learn your niche inside and out and outsource everything else. If you do outsource, you must be able to be a project manager, see the big picture, find good people you like, communicate your needs well, let go and trust those you outsource, and "be Donald Trump if necessary" (meaning, 'your fired" to those bad vendors). Benefits include; get to do what you like, higher quality of work, more clients, more work, have a network of colleagues, and no real payroll and no office. (Jill admits she works in her PJs; she said it but she said it with a ton of humor). Aspects Jill outsources, KR, Copywriting, proof reading link building and PPC management.

Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement was up next. She will go over how to handle the logistics of this, people, system and resources.
> People: Dealing with clients ; option 1, be a control freak as the bottleneck; option 2, trained account manager working directly with clients. She prefers to higher account managers and train them SEM to work with hers clients. She prefers to higher as sub contractors over employees. Full time vs. part time: SAHMs (Stay At Home Moms). She says that there are many women out there that are smart, experiences and eager to work from home. They make the most grateful and loyal workers. She recently outsourced SEO Research Labs (Dan Theis's company) for a really low cost. Training through online courses, books and on the job. You need to track time well; she says QuickBooks has a time module and you can use TimeFox or some other tool.
> Systems: Process manual, you need to document every step in the process, this is a must. This becomes a company asset, and it ensures consistency and standards. This is also part of the on job training process. Minimizes problems and saves time in the long run. All her vendors have her company email address (@mycompany.com), and they looked into the phone services and selected the local phone company with extensions with voice mail options, with conferencing and efax. Sharing data with people remotely is an other challenge. They tried to set up a VPN but they didnt want to make sure the network was up 24/7, so they opted out of that. They also didnt want to do colocation because of the price. So they decided to go with a 3rd party ASP solution named MarketingCentral.
> Resources to save your business and your sanity: The E Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Dont Work and What to Do About It. The Small Business Development Center (sba.gov/sbdc) to they can help you write a business plan.

Scottie Claiborne from Right Click Web Consulting and works for Kascher Group. Scottie will talk about it from the other side of the coin, being the specialist. Why Specialize; Humans tend to feel they need to be good at everything, but in reality you should focus on what your good at. Maximize your Talents, do what is natural to you and focus on becoming the very best at what you do. Minimize your Weakness, find other solutions. SEO Specialties Broken Down: Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis; Copywriting; Technical and Programming, Link Building, Usability and marketing; Statistical Analysis and Other Value Added Services. Reselling to pros and not the clients, so price your services at the wholesale cost (like Dan Theis), if you market direct to public then dont undercut your partners, should be a value to partners (save time, economics, quality of work). Marketing yourself; find the companies you want to work with, get them hooked, and let them find you (articles, speaking and forums). As you become an expert in your speciality you do not need to do it all.

Finally Ani Kortikar from NetraMind was up, he is at a bit of a disadvantage, since I got a cold call from one of his sales reps in India. He starts off describing his company, they have 45 people across the world. Pros of being small include nimble, personal service, personal relations. Cons; lack of scalability (lack of standardized quality process, lack of repeatable delivery process, lack of standardized HR) and unpredictable cash flow (lack of cost analysis and pricing power). Wrong reasons to outsource include; reducing costs and 24 x 7 operations. Right reasons; focus on core competencies, cost management, scalability, control over delivery, explore new profitable customer segments, etc. People, Process and Technology was pretty much covered already. There is a culture challenge, the "Us vs. Them". Also is there a local presence. Communication is hard. Time differences. Overall good presentation.

Q: How do you find these stay at home moms?
A: She sends out an email to her friends and it spreads virally and then she screens them with exercises. You can also go to the PTA or parenting forums.

Q: How do you get business early on?
A: Scottie said she got a lot of new business from forums by giving out free advice. Whenever Stacy competes against a big player, she says "do you want to be a little fish in a big pond?" Then for all, word of mouth takes control.

Q: How do you address the challenges from working in India?
A: His big challenge is conveying that they can get the job done. The second challenge was there needed to be a process. Trust fact was a big factor as well.

Dan Boberg from Overture, Jamie Crouthamel from Performics, James Hering from T:M Advertising, and Allan Dick from Vintage Tub & Bath were those on the panel, moderated by Niki Scevak. They all discussed their view points from their perspective objectives.

Dan Boberg discusses how important it is to share and build trust between the publishers and the advertisers. The more that Overture can optimize over time, the better off everyone is - so its not just the upfront work. A deep dive into the keywords on a quarterly basis. They always try to make it easier for the advertiser.

Niki then asked James to talk about the typical relationships formed over time with clients. James sees that its about building a relationship, one way is to bring them to a conference like this. It is important not to set absolute goals, but rather set ranges to help alleviate false expectations. Jaimie added, the way they look at it as an SEM is that for a typical "buy" there is a lot of upfront planning work. He said, they are just building out keywords, and then you focus on the execution phase. He said your almost doing your analysis on the fly.

How do you define expectations? Jaime said it has a lot to do after you start getting into it. You try things, until you get in and try it, you do not know for sure. James said he has seen a very different strategy when it comes to offline and online marketing. With search you can do it in almost real time. You can manage expectations as you go. Allan agreed. When Allan started he could not afford an agency, so they decided to do it in house. Once they started growing they hired an agency, they were good, but they did not fit his particular company. They then brought it back in house and it has been much better. He said he was disappointed with the follow through. (1) He likes to be educated, (2) he wants you to understand his product, how else can you spend his money on keywords? (3) and then set expectations. Managing expectations was the biggest issue he has with agencies.

Niki then asks the agencies how they set expectations. Jaime says that his first set of clients were direct marketers and did affiliate marketing. He took the direct marketing metrics and applied it to affiliate marketing. The cost per click, ROI dropped but it was still effective compared to other methods. Then more traditional advertisers came in and they explained branded concepts with search marketing. Education was key for them to manage expectations. James added that it boggles his mind how agencies mix the two (TV ad and search), when you do TV ads, you need to make sure that search is integrated with that.

Niki asks if you ever reject a client. James says they typically take 1 out of 3 clients. James said they turned down many clients because they were not willing to make changes to their sites. He says there is no sense is spending money when it will have a negative ROI, it will just make the client think search is bad and waste money. Before Allan modifies his site, he needs to know why it must be done. It is about education he says. He said he is willing to make changes, but you need to convince him. Dan explains that one side of the overture triangle is (1) driving leads (2) fine tuning to qualified leads and (3) sending traffic to pages that convert.

Niki asks how do you see pricing models change over time? James said its a bit like the wild west out there. He said he is shocked to see that there are those charging 20 - 30%, he doesn't know how there is a positive ROI on that. James approaches it as a retainer or consultancy fee. Jaime says he does use a percentage of media and they sometimes charge a consultation fee, but this works for them at this point. Allan explains that its all about value to him; its not only about what it costs. He said he doesn't like when you charge both a percentage of the spend AND a labor fee; don't do both. The more Allan thinks you know (the agency) what you are doing, the more value, the less price matters to him. Dan explains that if it was his choice he would have a small percentage of spend and then price tied in with objectives.

Q & A:

Q: Nacho asks where do you draw the line as to which services you should or should not provide? How far should overture go to help the advertiser?
A: Dan explains that search has grown tremendously, and increased complexity. The tool side, he explained, is great, both on the 3rd party side and Overture's own tools. They will continue to make it easier. The other speakers say that as long as they don't have a core competency in an area, they will not offer it directly.

Q: Does Overture have plans to offer SEO services, like Ask and Lycos both recently released?
A: Overture does not have plans to do so. Niki says that Ask Jeeves acquired a company, so they do not necessarily offer SEO Services directly.

Q: BakedJake I believe asked the next question, about using the engine's tools to track ROI.
A: James said they do not use those tools to track ROI. They had to build tools to summarize all the ad spends in a dashboard affect. Niki adds that this will come as analytics tools get more sophisticated. Allan explains that it is so easy to bid up a term, but he is not worried about it because the other company will go out of business and then he will be back in the number one slot.

Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink was first up to discuss profitable models. She starts off explaining that search is hot, so hot that is distracting. There is just so much money, but not enough employees and time. Traditional pricing models; PR 3x cost, Advertising; 15% of media, etc. They charge a retainer for SEO, a per keyword fee by PPC, they outsourced services they markup and consulting by hour. The more you charge, the more business they get. They have a 2 level SEO plan; (1) 60 - 90 day startup and maintenance and (2) Jumpstart, priced per page. Beyond Ink Algorithm; annual cost total/available hours = per hour cost. Market rate - per hour cost = margin. Total job hours x hourly rate - outside cost = profit.

Next up was Matt Trimmer from ivantage.co.uk. The first five minutes or so he discussed his company, his person experience and how things have changed in the industry. He said he even hired Danny Sullivan back in the day. He discussed how there is tons of misinformation; register your site with a 100 search engines for $99 and selling SEO as PPC. There is a lot of risky tactics out there and for those that dont know what they are doing, need to be very careful. They focus on measurements using web analytics and checking positions. They protect themselves with a contract and price everything based on time. They have an SEO Express, which is SEO on a CPC basis, a product that helps them do this is Your Amigo. They have an SEO Consult which is advice and training. They do SEO Implement where they do the work. PPC Management. Web analytics. Best model for pricing. Consultancy 950 pounds, account management is 500 pounds and I missed the last one. He then goes over the time based pricing and its advantages. Main advantage is that its easy to explain to the customer, easy to justify and easy to avoid a discount. Things that worry him include that he has no real control over customers leaving, PPC commissions and fees worry him, getting good people worry him and one day agencies might build SE Friendly sites.

Andy Beal from Keyword Rankings was next up. When they first started his first goal was to keep the lights on, and used a typical SEO pricing model (i.e. pay us $10,000 for the first 90 days and then $500 per month there after and we will get you top rankings). A lot of those companies left after 90 days, so they needed to figure how to keep the customers on. They kept on bringing on new clients but they needed to make more from the existing clients whom kept on leaving. They needed to remove the cost of entry (i.e. 10k to get in). They needed a pricing model to encourage a long term client. They changed their pricing model to a flat rate per month ($2,000 per month), and then Keyword Rankings knew what to expect month after month. They also did not have to pay a high commission as they used to with the lower monthly rates. No set up costs and easier to get approved. Removed the $XX,XXX for the first 90 days. Low cost monthly payment with 6 and 12 month terms. Clients see it as a long term campaign, and they see a very high retention rate (up towards 90%). The downside to switching to this pricing model is that they have sapped cash reserves for 2 - 4 months. Annual revenue per client increases. Higher retention rates allows them to increase service staff. They started off with about 800k, then 1.8m, then 4m, then 7m, and then 15m. It takes 6 months for Keyword Rankings to become profitable.

I have landed a couple of hours ago and I am not at the hotel. Ben (phoenix) should have landed just about now, I expect he should get to the hotel shortly.

If you have requests as to which sessions you would like Ben and I to cover, please post a comment here. There is a session list at the conference at a glance page. We will do our best to accommodate all requests.

This is the first time we are providing double coverage of the SES events. Last year was the first time I providing coverage of the SES events, here are the past archives (you can see we upped our standard of coverage since then).
- Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 9th – Day One
- Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 10th – Day Two (Part I)
- Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 10th – Day Two (Part II)
- Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 11th – Day Three

And for my article recap: Search Engine Strategies Conference Chicago 2003 Reviewed

This year, the Chicago SES Conference will be four days, instead of three. There are many new sessions, some that are a bit spicy. :) You will see. Get set for tomorrow!

Danny Sullivan wrote a blog entry today about a session that will take place at SES Chicago named What Would You Do?. The session description reads;

In this panel, a group of search marketers are put in charge of a fictional search engine and asked to make policies about spam, ads and trademarks, controversial ads and other tricky issues. Come watch them try to please all parties while under pressure.

As Danny points out, so far the panelist include:
- Greg Boser - VP, Editorial Quality, GooHoo!
- Andrew Goodman - VP, Advertising Programs, GooHoo!
- Noel McMichael - VP, Content Acquisition, GooHoo!
- Dana Todd - VP, Revenue Enhancement & Partner Relations, GooHoo!

They all are acting as if they are running a new search engine with "97 percent share of the search audience." That really should make it interesting. Some background on where I think the panelists will differ in opinion. Greg is known for his hard SEO tactics, I can see him taking the opposite approach and beating out all spam. Andrew Goodman is one of the PPC kings in the industry, I am sure he will talk about all the things that tick him off with AdWords and Overture. Noel, well he is one of the visionaries of the industry - he can go any way, but with the title of content acquisition, I suspect he will talk about PFI and trusted feed topics. Dana Todd has been the individual holding SEMPO together in these hard times, she has been leading the marketing side and the behind the scenes support (as far as I know). I suspect to hear Dana talk about how to leverage the existing market place to make GooHoo a money generating power house.

This will be a really fun session, trust me, I will be covering it. Danny is giving you the opportunity to ask the panel questions, just go to the Questions for GooHoo thread.

The Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference is taking place next week, December 13 - 16, 2004. Last year this conference was a three day event, this year it will be a four day event. There are many new sessions that I am looking forward to attending. Please expect live coverage of the sessions, if wireless, we will post these reports as they happen, otherwise there might be an hour delay. Both Ben (aka phoenix) and I will be providing detailed coverage of the sessions, so you are going to get double coverage. Alan Webb might be able to help out, and if he does, that means you will be getting triple coverage. There are about 3 to 4 sessions happening at the same time, we will do our best not to cover the same ones.

If you will be attending the conference, feel free to say hi. I look forward to seeing you there.