Search Engine Strategies 2004 New York Archives

Paid Inclusion & Trusted Feeds - BAM!

Dennis Buchheim, Director of Search Marketing Solutions, Yahoo! was up first. He discussed he new content acquisition program which includes free web crawl, site match for commercial sites and the public site match for non-commercial sites. Overture is the brand that will be used for SiteMatch, the program with the flat fee and CPC. Existing programs are closed (Inktomi, AV and FAST), they will last until they expire but no new customers. There is a customer migration plan that you can contact them about.

Michael Palka, Director of Search, Ask Jeeves announced that they have made some changes to the program. Site Submit allows users to submit URLs for a flat fee. The second program, trusted feed program, they decided to eliminate. The most important thing to them is relevancy and they feel everything else will fall into place based on that.

David Turner, Director of European Operations, Position Tech compared yesterday's spam as today's trusted feed. He gave some basic information on what a trusted feed is. I think his presentation should have preceded the two previous ones. He summed up saying trusted feed is not spam, its normal algorithmic search.

Gour Lentell, Search Director, Decide Interactive who discussed optimization tactics for trusted feeds. You need to decide which content to include, then group and organize that content, then implement optimization strategies, deploy good creative messages, create landing pages, utilize geo-targeting, keep seasonality in mind and always conform to editorial guidelines.

Eric Neuner, Marketing Manager, Medscape/WebMD. They have a deal directly with Inktomi. They have multiple types of content distribution areas, some free some paid. WebMD was built a long time ago and was not search engine friendly. When they first talked to Inktomi they had only 10 pages indexed organically. They came up with some paid inclusion pricing solutions would be $x CPC. PFI was an excellent avenue for WebMD based on this information. They jumped from 10 to 65,000 URLs. The recent Inktomi migration with Yahoo increased WebMDs traffic 70%. He would like to see a maximum monthly spend with the CPC model. WebMD also ranks #1 for "animal porn", not bad.

Adam Jewell, Search Engine Marketing Manager, NetPlus Marketing Inc. presented a case study on Toll Brothers.

That wraps up the New York City 2004 Search Engine Strategies Conference. I hope to have an article written to summarize the conference. I hope you enjoyed my notes on the conference.

Measuring Offline Conversion seemed to have an interesting title, so I attended the session.

Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing was up first. No one is arguing that online, influences offline marketing. The major question is, how much does online influence offline. She took us through two case studies. Case Study One: They sell goods online, and they wanted to understand where the sales came from. So they created a unique 800# for each search ad they made. They found 27% of the orders came over the phone and the remainder were online orders. So you are now able to track those offline orders and you can better understand the cost-per-conversion. Case Study Two: Childcare company. They tracked what a searcher did after they got to the site. They can now say, they sent X people to site, they went to a page, then made an assumption on how many people actually called (like 25%). Based on this assumption, this was the lowest cost-per-conversion methodology. Its not an exact science, its based on assumptions and guestimation.

Steve Schepke, VP of Marketing Services, Meandaur is going to highlight cases where he is managing offline conversions for his clients. Great Expectations is a dating service, the only way to sign up is in person at a center. How do they measure these leads? They built a custom lead tracking system that manages all online and offline leads. Next example is LA Weight Loss. This case is all about inbound calls, so it was a bit less sophisticated the Great Expectations.

Glenn Alsup, President, Viewmark was the only one that i have seen do a full Flash presentation at this SES conference, very fancy stuff. He works with a lot of companies that can not change the content on their pages nor tag pages. He takes this three axis graph (campaign, customers and content) and looks at it in a sales funnel way. Then they link up the offline information much like the others do.

I will throw my company a plug here, RustyBrick does this for several clients. Its truly not a huge deal, you really need to set up policies and procedures. When it comes down to figuring out who, what and where the sale came from, if you set up strict rules in your application and guidelines, you will be able to get the data.

The Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic, which was an interactive session where people called out their site name and it was critiqued in real-time.

They started off by collecting business cards for them to be able to randomly go through sites and talk about their pros and cons.

A1Vacations.com: They clicked on the internal page for Colorado, this is the landing page for PPC Colorado campaign. Its just confusing to look at, you need to peak interest. Use images and add some call to actions to encourage a click deeper. In to break this down more into cities. Its a very hard page to look at. Misty Locke recommended bidding on individual property names, no one else seems to agree. I believe organically he should rank well for those very specific terms anyway, so if thats working then do PPC - if its not working on the organic level leave it alone.

motivational-celebrity-speakers.com: Type in baseball speakers in Google you will see the ad on the right. DO NOT CLICK ON IT. Anyway, on the homepage - Lee Mills first recommendation was to bring up the featured celebrities and make the phone number larger.

Jessie Stricchiola gave us a Google AdWords trick. Use {keyword} and it will automatically fill in the search phrase dynamically in the place of {keyword}. This helps increase click through rates, because it serves up the exact keyword the person is typing in. This hint was given to Jessie by Dana Todd, who learnt this from a Google AdWords representative.

sandals.com: Put pricing and booking information at the top and not all the way at the bottom. Win a free honeymooon, make it higher and more noticeable.

gunbroker.com: The EBay for guns site. People can't find the help section at the top. Add a pop up to encourage people to register.

ABCLeads.com: Lee Mills said spread out top navigation more, make sign up now in middle of page a lot bigger. Put a phone number out there.

WhaleCommunications: keyword "ssl vpn". Goal is to download VPN white paper for free. Suggestions: Change it to "Download Free SSL White Paper" on the landing page.

jitpackaging.com: Type in Boxes. Its like $5 per click. What was extremely effective was to put "Boxes Save 50% vs. the "U". That helped increase the CTR dramatically. On that landing page, put pricing. The referral URL is excellent.

As some of you know, I am a huge fan of Web analytics tools and how they can help one achieve an increase in ROI on the Web. That is why I attended the Measuring Success Case Studies session. There were very few people who attended this session, which is one of the reasons I made sure to write on this session. Must be because the popular "Meet the Crawlers" session is now. :)

Jarid Lukin, E-Commerce Manager, from LEGO Group discussed LEGO's Web site and PPC campaigns. They use WebSideStory's HBX product for Web analytics, formally known as HitBox. They use special tracking URLs to track LEGOs campaigns. They have some nice looking campaign conversion reports. They have a plugin that allows you to export to Microsoft Excel (not a big deal, most do). He said that its important to look at vendor data (Google and Overture) with your own Web statistics.

Rob Gaudio, Director of Client Services, MEA Digital, presenting St. Bernard Software Case Study is presenting a case study on Urchin. This company does not sell online, they focus on lead capture. Reasons for choosing Urchin; (1) accuracy, (2) granular level measurement, (3) cost efficient, (4) high level of support, and (5) Useful reports and extremely easy to use. With Urchin you can track a sale or lead conversion over repeat visits. He then showed some reports, I love Urchin's reports. They can see the visitor to the lead to the sale.

Dan Noyes, President of Zephoria spoke next and they use many tools. WebTrends, HitBox, FunnelWeb and ClickTracks. ClickTracks advantage is the ability to merge in usability with SEM intelligence. It is a client environment. Ability to convert complex information and data into graphical and easy to understand information. ClickTracks does a nice job of digging deep into the results. They selected ClickTracks because (1) ability to graphically display information, (2) cost-effectively address diverse site configuration, (3) increased opportunities and (4) helped manage PPC.

Jeff Cram, Web Marketing Manager, NetIQ Corporation, presenting a company case study (WebTrends). He gave a case study on the same site as last time, so check that review at the Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 11th – Day Three.

What does the Future of SEM behold? This session delves into where SEO/SEM professionals feel SEM will be beyond 2004.

Fredrick Marckini, CEO and Founder, iProspect was up first. He sais this is the year of the Paid Search Marketing. 2004 will be defined by PPC, PFI, SEO, Analytics, Conversion Enhancements (this should go in reverse order of importance by this he means start with Conversion Enhancements, then Analytics, etc.). Paid Inclusion is going to increase in all fashions including specialized feeds in terms of PR and news related items. PPC expectations will continue to evolve, for example 1996-2000 SEO was it, 2001- 2002 SEO+ Metrics, 2003 SEO + PFI + Metrics, 2004 PPC + Inclusion + SEO + Analytics are all now expected. SEM firms will all be building or choosing a PPC bid management tool. Campaign Optimization: (1) Traffic Optimization, (2) Scenario Optimization, optimize based on Web logs. SEM is here to stay and will not be going away.

Cheryle Pingel, Chairman & Co-Founder, Range Online Media feels the future is that there is more money available. They no longer have to say I am spending X for get Y. They are now saying I can spend X but the return is beyond conversion numbers. Now you are seeing a niche within this niche of Search Engine Marketing. For example, just local search will hit 2.8 billion dollars within the SEM market. SEM was a niche of Marketing, she feels its amazing.

Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media Inc. For the immediate future, it comes down to 3 principles (1) better targeting, (2) non intrusive advertising method, and (3) control of the details on how they run their campaigns. Advertisers want more distribution. Consolidation of the industry versus innovation (convenience is going to be more important - feature sets will be removed). You will see better customer service from your PPC representatives.

Michael Sack, SVP and Chief Product Officer, Inceptor, Inc. He believes that advertisers desires this year will affect SEM. SEM industry will also be changed by technology, for example RSS, embedded contextual links. Also market behavior and response will make an impact on this industry. Currently, the big guys compete directly with the mom and pop shops. Expect the big guys to completely knock off the little guys like they do on TV. Think about natural language and speech technology - as to how they will apply to search. SEMs will need to learn how to control the users click-paths. Figuring out how to connect online and offline marketing and transactions.

Jill Whalen, Owner, HighRankings.com talks on the future of SEM. Jill is going to look at it from the tactical SEO perspective. Jill said SEO tricks are on the way out this year. SEO is not just about page optimization or link building, its going to me also about conversion rates. Jill feels that its not going to be all about paid search, there is plenty of room in organic results. She said about a month ago you saw in Google that you saw a lot of directory information on left and paid on the right. She said if you can get that right, then you might see more of that. Partnerships will be huge for the small SEOs.

Q & A component:

I have no doubt that the legal arena in the SEM field will begin to grow rapidly over 2004. That is why I have selected to attend the Leggo My Trademark: A Search Engine Legal Update session. Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Director of Account Management, Optiem moderated this forum. Jeffrey was a lawyer but now is in SEM.

What is a trademark? A word or symbol or slogan used in trade to distinguish goods or services. It should always be a noun and not a verb. With a trademark, there should be little source confusion. ® is a registered trademark, TM or SM is an unregistered trademark. Trademarks are not global, only federal or state protection.

Trademarks in search can be found anywhere you would put it in your on page seo elements.

"Trademark infringement is use of another's mark that is likely to cause consumer confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to source, affiliation, sponsorship, origin or approval." Trademark litigation can run in the ballpark of 1 million dollars. Generic terms are not up for trademark. Example, Apple (big apple, apple macintosh, apple pie). International law is similar, but the consequences differ.

Example: Google versus Booble. This case is going to court.

They took us through a case, American Blind. When doing a search on American Blind you will see the results. Notice the organic and paid results at top and right of page. This sprung a law suite "American Blind versus Google". American Blind sells blinds, they spent over 50 Million dollars to build their brand name. Initially Google said they would not sell American Blind 5 trademarked names on AdWords. Google refused to the bidding on "American Blind(s)", etc. saying its a generic term. AmericanBlind believes there is consumer confusion and is taking Google to court. They will probably sue the people who purchased the keywords later. Overture is not selling those keywords, so they are not being sold.

Danny put on an Ad for American Blind Lawsuit, no problem with that because he does not sell blinds. BUT, when he tried to put "Google" in the ad copy and it would not allow him because of trademark issues. So he published it with Gogle, instead. The ad went up right away and no human review.

FYI - there is someone on the board representing the International Legal community who gave examples of the same things happening in France and Germany.

The moderator then gave an example of the Google Sandbox where he put the word "faucet" and the results were shocking. The suggested terms included, Delta Moen Kohler Faucets, all of those are trademarked names. Keep in mind there is zero human interaction here, and Overture's suggestion tool does the same. He then did a search on Danny Sullivan and people are paying for his names in AdWords.

What should an SEM company do to avoid this?
- Avoid using Broad Match blindly (use negative terms, exact match and other options)
- Overture has a Trademark Fair Use Exceptions policy

First example is a search on "Yahoo Store" an Ad should come up that says "Alternative to Yahoo! Stores. Which takes you to a comparison page of the alternatives to Yahoo store. The argument is that since it clearly states that this is an alternative. Legally it is allowed but business ethically it is not nice to allow someone else to use someone else's brand and picky-bag off of it.

Very informative session, glad I attended.

The next session I attended was the Competitive Research. I was getting a little tired of all SEM and SEO related topics, so why did I attend this conference? :) Anyway this topic seems to be on how to use the search engines to learn information on your competition. Curious as to what they might say that is worthy of its own session.

First speaker up was Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath to speak on competitive research. He covered, (1) who is your competitors online (2) links (3) Google searches and (4) EBay information. He looks first at alexa.com. He then looks at PPC ads, Organic listings and Froogle results to see who is out there. DMOZ or Yahoo directories provide this information as well. Once he finds his competitors he goes to market leap and uses the tools there to compare his competitors versus him. He then jumps over the competitors Web site and reads up on their corporate information and other pages. He also looks up newspaper articles and the company's distributors information. Find out who supplies your competition. 4 Quick Google searches, he selected these search queries to really narrow down his searches. (1) insite (use this to search the content within your competitors site), intitle (this restricts just to see what your competitors are putting in their titles), phone number search and by name. Now Ebay, he called it the forgotten search engine. His company started on EBay, so he researched what his other competitors were doing on EBay. The most interesting part of information is the feedback section. You can see what time and day people left feedback. His rule is about 30% of people leave feedback, so multiple that percentage to figure out the number of sales. So you can then see which items were being sold, and why they are buying it.

Next up, David Williams, Chief Strategist and Co-Founder, 360i - the company that does SEM for Vintage Tub & Bath. Allan came to 360i after the Florida update, he was affected. He then critiqued his clients site. They do very comprehensive keyword research and then optimized the pages to help increase rankings. They then looked at the internal and external links. On topic links and the anchor text in the links. He looks at who is linking to the competitor, which URLs and which IP addresses. Its important to see the anchor text that these external links have as well. He also looks at what it costs to rank well for certain paid listings.

Cam Balzer, Director of Search Strategy, Performics, Inc. focused on the PPC method of learning about your competitors. First thing you need to do is identify the search savvy competitors. Expropriate their keywords from your competitors pages, look at the titles and anchor text (etc). Do the same for PPC and look at the links they are actually using (the link will show you the exact keyword they are bidding for). Based on this information, you can guess how much they are spending on PPC. Then estimate Google CPC. Then you need to figure out how well they are doing in terms of conversion rates and average order value, which gives you an estimate on their ROi. This information gives you data on if they are a savvy competitor, are they focused on ROI. You can then see what it will take to compete.

Bill Tancer, VP Research, of Hitwise went through his product, they monitor the largest worldwide sample of the Internet. They do online competitive intelligence service. I am not going to pitch the product, just check it out at http://www.hitwise.com/. He did a case study on Vintage Tub, so it was interesting. This tool is extremely powerful, data on your competitors that you thought you can never obtain is not obtainable.

Roundtable: The Future of Search

Gerry Campbell, Vice President and General Manager of AOL Search and Navigation was first up and he went into how they have 23 Million members at 85% of those use AOL search (which is really Google now). They have grown 73% in terms of search activity whereas the whole industry only increased by 40%. AOL feels the future search is going towards: (1) localization and personalization (2) Content Integration (when you do a search, real paid content comes up) and (3) Broadband, people who search with broadband, search differently. AOL delivers a client named SmartBox, which is a navigation related search tool. Nothing too exciting here but lets see what others have to say.

Paul Gardi, SVP of Search, Ask Jeeves was next to discuss the future of search. He believes the needs of the users and the needs of the searcher will converge over time. From the user perspective you will see personalization increase and privacy increase (contradictory?). They will have to find new ways of access more and better information. And content is going to be huge. Technology front, Teoma is able to look through a lot more information faster and the user wants the answer faster. Information delivery will be any where and any time. The real future of search is understanding the intent of the user and give them what they really want. The last thing is personality from the user's perspective. On the commerce side, Teoma has not even scratched the surface of hitting all the advertisers. Dayparts to nanoparts, instead of the part of the day - they will feed up results based on the nano part of the day.

Tim Cadogan, Vice President, Yahoo! Search. Mission is to provide the best most relevant results. Understand what the user want and then how do we better deliver to better to the user and how do we extend this to all users. Personalization is going to be huge, tons of those people have signed up with Yahoo! so they have a lot of information to provide this personalized search. They feel it is critical to show the user, here are the results based on your preferences but if you want to step outside of this box, you can. Second area is how do we get more content? He first said that 99% of their 7 billion pages were captured for free BUT...They want to partner with content providers, that is why they made this new PFI program that everyone is going 'Yahoo!' about. Third area is to have multiple types of search engines and integrate those engines and deliver that information when relevant. Yahoo! Yellow pages, do a search in Yahoo! search for map or something. They utilize all their engines and will be working hard to deliver the most relevant answers through their network at Yahoo! search.

Craig Nevill-Manning, Senior Research Scientist, Google. He discussed the history of search 300 years ago, that you used a Bible to search or something. Now we know how silly that view was. He proposes the future of search would be 'search pets'. Why did he say this? Because pets understand emotion and how people work. So if Google can understand the user emotion, then they got it. Examples, Search engines of the future should be able to figure out diplomatic sayings versus straight fact. Search engines need to infer more. An other example, you ask your wife "What is wrong, Honey?" and she says "Nothing". Here the search pet would help with the answer. That got a few chuckles in the room. User interface is also going to be very important - usability. Thats all for him on this.

Continue reading "Roundtable: The Future of Search"

Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology from Google, started off the Advanced Link Building Forum. Same slides as last December, just a different person behind the podium. He basically discussed how PageRank works, and all of you reading this knows how it works.

Paul Gardi from Ask Jeeves, the man who inspired me to write my Teoma - The Superior Search Engine? article. He said they currently power about 25% of the Web (no source provided). Read the article for what he basically discussed... Subject Specific Popularity and Community Hubs. The concept is beautiful!

Debra Mastaler, Owner, Alliance-Link.com spoke about the power of anchor text and links. "If you want to rank well...you need to incorporate solid anchor text in your linking campaign and partner with authoritative sites." in addition, you must deploy marketing savvy terminology in those links. She then explained what anchor text is. She states you can rank well without content, :). She discusses the OOP (over optimization penalty) that some believe in, I don't believe in that. She said to use the keywords in your title tag in your anchor text to link to that page. Having keywords in the domain name helps, an other bold statement for a hotly disputed subject. Be consistent with the URLs you give to people to link to you, i.e. www versus no www. She said that anchor text does best when on authoritative sites, this goes somewhat against what John Scott said here (scroll down to John's second post on the thread).

Eric Ward was next and he quoted the Google guy on his new term "Link Skank". He came with new material. Discussed the issues with people losing their links because they change domain names or url structures. He outlined some steps on what to do (not going down the path of 301 redirects), he said capture 30 days of data in raw form - this way you can really check your real backlinks. Order by the highest referrals. Also if you already have the problem then look at the highest 404 error pages and relaunch the pages. Make a database of the old versus new url structure.

Greg Boser was next and he discussed how he does link building. First goal, do whatever it takes not to do reciprocal linking. The next thing he does is build an internal link structure that will help impact the SERPs. The other thing is to do something that lets links grow on their own (i assume a blog or something like that). Content syndication is an easy way to generate links, like this blog. If you get published in a press release, ask for a link to your site in the article. Develop RSS feeds, people will link to you. Web tool distribution, like some of digitalpoints free tools and have a "powered by ...". Desktop applications help build links. Buy links from non profits, they will sell and they are good links. The dark side of building links include guest book spamming, log file spamming and blog spamming (if your a site owner, watch out for them).

The Dynamic Web Sites session was pretty much the same as the other Dynamic session. All presenters were excellent, they all clearly illustrated the real problems with dynamic sites. Its funny, Laura Theme went through a to-do like list of what to do for a dynamic site that is not optimized. Let me tell you, it was almost a duplicate copy of this 7 page report consultation i wrote for this client. She went through the home pages, category pages, sub category pages and product pages. She explained how to use the database to serve up unique copy for each page. She was not big into URL rewriting but she was clear in stating, 3 or more variables in the URL will kill you.

This is the first time I heard Mikkel deMib Svendsen speak, you know the guy who always wears that red suit :). He is also the VP of Marketing Technology at Marketleap. He was very good and discussed many of the issues and solutions with dynamic sites.

Jake Baillie from Priva did a great job as well. He went over the how to re-write your URLs and the major issues with dynamic sites from a technical standpoint.

But Laura Thieme from Bizresearch gets props for bringing up a solution I did not think of. Program into your CMS a method of over riding the dynamic generation of the title and meta information. She said something that is so true, give the flexibility because it will come up. I have some clients that would benefit from this and will get my developers to begin work on that.

Good job!

The Search Engines & Web Server Issues was a session I wanted to attend at SES Chicago but did not. So here I am.

Shari Thurow:
- Pay your hosting bill
- Renew domain name
- Do not password protect key pages
- Check your robot.txt file
- Add a site map
- URL structure, simpler is better. She said that the domain extension (i.e. cfm, php, asp) do make a difference. She knows the Search Engines say they do not treat them differently, but she believes they do. I am on the side of the search engines here.
- Use 301 and 302 redirects when you redo your URL structure
- When moving a site to a new server, keep both servers up and running
- Get a quick server

Went into Q&A for the board, see the speakers at the above link.

Greg Boser is "a huge fan of mod_rewrite".

For those of you really into PR, stop it! PR is old, outdated and doesn't even update when there is a back link update.

We had a little discussion on cloaking, the people on the board do it to "help the search engines". Do it when you need to, but do not abuse it.

Bruce Clay makes sure all his clients have their own IP address. He said its worth the $2/month.

Domain names with more than 2 hyphens in it, you are considered skeptical. They are not sure about the file extensions, its only the domain name parts. They expect the new Google to consider underscores the same as hyphens.

Many basic SEO and server related questions...

The next session I attended was the Organic Listings Forum. They just added in Tim Mayer from Yahoo to the session, so this should be good. Other interesting people are Mike Grehan and Brett Tabke. This room is so packed and really hot.

Tim: started up with his free crawl and said it will be available this week. They are targeting the "hidden web". And third, re-launching the paid inclusion. They feel the paid inclusion is going to be Yahoo's competitive advantage. Paid inclusion is there to give the SEMs more of a say. He basically reiterated his post at WMW.

Paddy Bolger said now you can be hurt from links. For example, if your site is linked to by a major authority, Google might remove your site because there is no need for you to be there, since you have a link from the authority site. Its not a penalty but more of a filter. This was a bold statement, what do you think?

Some woman took off at Tim Mayer about the CPC plus PFI concept. So you pay to be included AND you pay per click. But you do not bid, you just pay if someone clicks on you. Everyone clapped when she said this and Tim blushed. ;)

Then we had a lot of discussion of themeing and authority sites. The agreement is that Google is practicing this. So links from non-relevant sites are less important then links from relevant sites.

Regarding Geo-filtering, they said they look at language, domain name and links. Yahoo said they do not look at IP address, but I find this hard to believe. Google looks at the IP addresses - or at least based on my last study in December they did.

Yahoo differs from Google by utilizing the keyword meta tags. On page factors are very important. Yahoo also does not have stemming on by default like Google does. Google will index only 101k of your page, Yahoo does 500k of your page.

Danny Sullivan, in his Opening Keynote discusses the Search Engine Industry and what he expects to happen in the future. He discusses the current state of the industry and says we had Google, Ask Jeeves. Gained Yahoo, lost MSN for now and we will lose AllTheWeb.

Danny feels the major search players will be like the major TV networks. He feels there will be few players with a broad reach. Ups and downs of each engine are:

Google: Brand
Yahoo: Brand and portal lock in
MSN: Browser and portal lock in
AOL: Browser and portal lock in
Ask Jeeves: Brand

He does not believe you can simply buy an engine to build a brand. Word of mouth is the best method and it was the only thing that worked in the past. What else is important is that your search engine is damn good. 52% say relevant information is most important, 34% credibility is important.

Microsoft will be spending a ton of resources developing their own search and Danny is not so confident they will succeed.

He feels Google's "monopoly" is over but they will continue to succeed. He discusses some of the problems people are having with the current Google. He said that Google has been trying out new algorithms over these months.

Answers are:
- Buy PPC to supplement
- Do what is best for the human, not the engine. Do not worry.

Yahoo released a CPC model only. This can be a major problem, look at what happened with LookSmart. But Yahoo is still going to list free listings, so it is kind of different. He would like to see Yahoo show which links are pay for inclusion by adding a symbol next to the link or something.

Danny feels that the future of PPC will be...I want to target people who want to buy sofas. Google and Overture will say, ok we sell you a bucket of these search terms for $X per click and you will be covered.

Google is getting personal (look at Eurekster for what this means). They run Orkut.com, Yahoo will and AOL knows it all.

Lots of information in 30 minutes.

I first wanted to attend Writing For Search Engines but after sitting for a while, I left. Its a great beginner course but I am not a beginner, so I had to leave. Heather Lloyd Martin and Jill Whalen give great presentations. I think Phoenix was there, so he might give you some detail on it.

I am in a Q & A at Cashing Out: The Preparation and Implications, this is the only room the Internet works in. I'll post a recap later.

Check back for more and also check back tomorrow for the new sessions. Any requests, post a comment.

Thanks.

I just got out of the Broad Matching & Other Ad Targeting Options which discusses when to use the new Broad Match options given by Google and Overture and when to go for the standard options.

Broad match, for those of you who dont know what it is, is the ability to type in a broad keyword and let the technology match more specific keywords for you. For example, if you want to rank well for "cheap", it will figure to rank you well for "discount", "low cost" and "not expensive" as well. Saves you huge amounts of time when managing your PPC campaigns.

John Slade from Overture spoke first on how it works and showed it off on Overture. Richard Holden did the same, but he did it for Google. He went into the different match types (broad, exact, phrase, negative, negative exact). He also discussed how Google's Broad match is smarter b/c they utilize their Google search to match up broad matches on a daily basis. (not much time so skipping a bit).

Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch gave a two case studies on how Broad Search helped her clients. One point is that broad search for both Google and Overture do not work globally across their distribution network. Also overture always lists broad match under exact matches.

Matt Van Wagner from Find Me Faster gave a nice presentation on the differences between Google and Overture. Basics are: Google ranks based on Bid X CTR; Overture ranks based on Exact -> Phrase -> Broad and then bid. Important to keep in mind. He went into more topics but again, not much time - so i am only giving you the take aways.

Finally Kevin Lee from Did-It said the same thing everyone else did but added. It is a good idea to use broad match to see what you can use for your exact matches. You do a broad match and then you look at your referrals logs and see the full query, then optimize your campaigns for the best keyword phrases. Google rewards you for high CTR (remember, Google ranks based on bid X CTR).

Nice session for you PPC heads.

The session I just attended was Search Term Research & Targeting. The presentors were Andy Beal, Dan Thies and John Slade (overture).

I was a little disappointed in the presentation because it was pretty much exactly the same presentation as last December in Chicago. Andy's slides were exactly the same, I do not remember any new examples. But, the room was packed and he does explain basic SEO concepts well. He did state a few things which I will make a point to mention here. (1) 58% of people use 2 or 3 word search terms. (2) When describing which tools are available for keyword research, he did not throw DigitalPoint a plug :) (3) He said you should target 5 - 8 keywords for your homepage, but then said he prefers 5. I think 5 is a bit too much, but its doable.

Dan Thies was up next. Funny guy. Oh and he posts here on occasions. He introduced himself and one of the points he made on that introduction was that he was the guy "who wrote that report on Florida". I found that funny as well. Here are some keepers from his presentation. (1) How do you know a keyword is competitive? Do a search in Google on the term, then do the same search in google but narrow it to the title only search and then narrow it to title and links. The first thing that is done when optimizing is putting those keywords in a title of the page. You know a keyword phrase is competitive when its in a lot of page titles. (2) Dan was stressing relevancy and what a keyword phrase in a search really means. Funny example is Paris Hilton - the girl or the hotel? Check out Danny's site this week for some free spreadsheets to help determine competitiveness of a keyword at http://www.seoresearchlabs.com. (3) And Dan publically admitted that he can not compete with Yahoo and Google on the keyword phrase "top keywords", just because Yahoo and Google come out with their top keywords on a yearly basis and those pages rank better then his pages. I'm just messing... His point was, if its really really competitive, it might make more sense to utilize the PPC - sometimes optimizing costs more then PPC.

SEM companies discuss how they handle there business and growth.

John Lustina from IntraPromote is the first guy up. He is discussing how its important for his company to hire the brightest people. He said they can work where ever they want, as long as they are the best and get their work done. His employees need to have skills in either keyword research, seo coding, seo copywriting, technology, stats and reporting skills.

Cheryle Pingel is now up. She simply discussed that business used to be more fun, now its more like a real business where lots of money is involved, making it more serious. The industry is growing and its great.

Fredrick Marckini from IProspect. Stage one, your working out the the home. Stage two, you hire some people. Stage three you are the senior manager, stagge 4 hiring success and growth, stage 5 you cant be the top guy anymore, stage 6 is growth. He said "Employees Quit Managers, Not Companies". He basically discussed the principles of growing any business.

Continue reading "Coping with Growth: What's Keeping You Up At Night?"

I have arrived at the search engine strategies conference. Wireless Internet is working and its free (not sure if it is suppose to be free).

I am at the Coping with Growth: What's Keeping You Up At Night? session.

I will post during and after its done on this session.

FYI SEO Chatters, I met up with Phoenix just a minute ago. He is at the Contextual Ads session.