Search Engine Strategies 2004 Sweden Archives

The Advanced Link Building Forum was the next session I attended. Dixon Jones from Receptional Internet Marketing (I think also a WMW moderator). He started off by answering a question asked in the basic session. How important is internal link structure? He feels internal link building is very important, including the anchor text. He explained an example of how links internally with specific anchor text can help your rankings for a keyword. The next question he answered was should you buy or sell links? He said, no, think of it as buying or selling traffic. Because, you will only buy "relevant" traffic as opposed to buying any type of link. He said not all links are treated equal, some links cant be read, some dont pass pagerank, some pass less pagerank then others, etc. How can you create incentives for people to link to a site? He put up a chart with a list of incentives one can offer, a few being; money, giving content, free downloads, etc. Is buying links wrong from a search engine's point of view? He said this is not the best question, buying PPC links is an example of buying links and directory listings is not wrong. But if you get irrelevant links, then that is wrong. You can get links from different 'channel' web sites, I think he means different communities. By that, he means that a link from a site sites that both talk about your topic can be good. Well, maybe you can consider that one big community but sub communities within that big community. How far is too far in link building your internal link structure? If you get de-listed, the more competitive a search phrase the more likely there is a filter, be careful with over optimization. Always look at internal link data, who clicks where on your site? Can natural interlinking be perceived as link spam? Yes, but its difficult to know for sure he says. "Tribal Linking" is how he named his summary slide.

Next up was Warren Cowan from Greenlight, whos first slide is named the "Wheat vs shaft." He discusses how links are no equal, just like the previous speaker. He says its important to look at the page relevance that is linking to you. The placement of the link on the page is important as well - he brings up the "block level analysis" topic. Anchor text is very important. And the document's authority level or expertise is important. He goes over which pages link to that page and is it the homepage or sub pages, he looks at the links of the pages that links to him. He then pulls up a "Radar Link Graph" where he plots the links to a page based on the types of characteristics of the link.

Paddy Bolger from Top-Pile says you should buy links, even Yahoo! directory, be choosy but buy. He is strongly against reciprocal links, not that he might hurt today but it will hurt in the future.

Google and Ask Jeeves gives the diplomatic speech on links.

Q & A:

Q: I asked Google (Magnus, new Google speaker and engineer at Google), why do you bother updating the link command if its not really statistically sound?
A: Google pretty much avoids the question, sorry. But then Danny backs me up and says, if you have the command, it should be 100% accurate - otherwise do not give it. Thanks Danny.

The next session I decided to attend is Search Term Research & Targeting, normally you would find Andy Beal and Dan Theis on this panel, but I bet this will be focused on European search term research.

First up was Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance, she is an admin over at Jill's HighRanking forum. She began to discuss what keyword research is and then described how too generic words are hard to compete on, and too specific words might not be searched on. She explained that logs files provide a good source of keywords for you to begin optimizing for. Instead of using company terms, try to think about how searchers will query your products, it often differs. She listed the adwords, overture and wordtracker tools as how she does keyword research, she cautions the audience that these numbers are inflated. She also recommends testing these keywords in a PPC campaign, its quick, and budgeted. SEO differs from PPC in that she targets more focused keywords for SEO whereas with PPC she goes broader.

Next up was Tomas Axelsson from Trellian to discuss there tool. I spoke with Tomas last night, he is an SEO who partnered with Trellian to resell the tool and represent them in Sweden. The tool he will discuss is Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com). He shows the keyword discover tool, then shows the KEI analysis, which was popularized by WordTracker. He then shows the real goodies within this tool, the season trend graphs - Trellian uses 12 months of historical data to graph this. In addition, they have a common misspelling tool, related terms tool, a keyword density report. He showed the regional breakdowns of searches based on country specific search, very useful here.

Tor Crockatt from Espotting was up next, who will focus on "user intent" as it relates to keyword research. She said, "always see keywords as question" - understanding the motivation behind the question. Multiple audience, meanings change over time, synonyms with differing user intent (vacation/holiday), related in theme but not in vertical (car/car insurance). Break down the meanings of the keywords you want to target. for example, "cheap web hosting" is 3 words with two meanings (cheap + web hosting). "Gebrauchtwagenleasing" is one German word with three meanings (used car leasing). Seven elements for keyword research; (1) Comparison/quality, (2) Adjective (price/product qualifiers), (3) intended use (4) product type (5) vendor (6) location and (7) action request.

Ola Svensson from Overture Nordics. Paid placement works because they drive traffic, quality traffic and converting traffic. He discusses the concept of "tail terms" with the overture keyword suggestion tool. He recommends segmenting through the buying cycle (information, shop, or purchase). Explore new opportunities/terms, experiment with new titles and descriptions, and optimize your efforts.

Q & A:
Q: Why not show search terms with 0 searches in the keyword research database?
A: They sometimes do, but often its not helpful for the Overture user. This happens with seasonality searches. They are moving to gathering more data towards storage of seasonal data. Espotting tries to predict search patterns before they hit main stream, most of it is seasonality but they change from year to year.

Q: Mike Grehan asks how skewed is the data based on the automated ranking tools being run 24/7 by SEO/SEMs?
A: Espotting said they are not too bad, Overture kind of agrees, Christine agrees with Mike and says you need to look at the keywords on a conversion/roi level. Trellian said every keyword is some what equally inflated, so it balances out.

Again, I have some time - so why not talk about my trip here and my thoughts on Sweden. I left NY via Newark to Copenhagen, then the Copenhagen to Sweden (Arlanda). The Copenhagen to Sweden flight was interesting, the pilot said he was late because he thought the flight was to leave 35 minutes after he planned. So he apologized and promised to make the time up in the air. I don't think you would hear an American pilot admit to that. The pilot's comment, about making the time up in the air, reminded me about a Seinfeld episode where he joked about how there are no cops in the sky. So why don't pilots go as fast as they can always? If they can "make the time up in the air" that means that they can always go faster. Anyway...

I took this clean "train" I would call it a subway, named Arlanda Express to Stockholm from Arlanda airport. Very convenient, thanks for the tip on that Chris Sherman. Saw some horses during the 20 minute trip to Stockholm. I will post them at a later date. I then got to the nice hotel, went to my room and hooked up to the net. I had 30 minutes until the second session began. Read the sessions for reports on that...

After the sessions, I had a discussion with Mikkel and Danny about some search related topics. Said hello to Mike Grehan, Heather Lloyd Martin, Shari Thurow, Chris Sherman, Joseph Morin, Jill Whalen, Christine Churchill, Bill Hunt from IBM, a guy from Trillian and others - it was nice because the conference was relatively small compared to the US shows. Then I went outside the hotel and walked around to check out some of the scenery of the city. Maybe it was the location of the hotel, but there was very few people walking around. I am from New York, and its almost impossible to walk down the street and not be brushed up against by a two or three people within a 5 second interval. It was peaceful, nice weather and the air felt clean. The hotel often had a stench of cigaret smoke, a European thing I guess - NYC hotels never smell like that (no one is allowed to smoke in NYC anymore anyway).

From a dress code perspective, I was the only one wearing a baseball like hat. It seems like corduroy sports jackets are popular here as well. If you're not wearing a corduroy sports jacket, then you must wear some sort of jacket. The US conference seem much more less formal, but maybe I am wrong.

I will be leaving Stockholm for a 6pm flight to London, to connect to my next destination. I might update this entry tomorrow with pictures and more information.

The first session of the morning I have attended was a basic one, but I wanted to hear some of the speakers, the session is named Successful Site Architecture.

Alan Perkins was first up and he went through many of the common issues with Web sites that are not search friendly. Navigation issues, URL issues, domain issues, JavaScript and others. Very good summary.

Shari Thurow was next up and she will go through specific examples, as opposed to overall conceptual issues. She then discusses what she will discuss; your Web site directory, site nav, URL, types of pages, the page and some linkage. She then goes over what is the root level of a site, the search spiders look for your homepage or robot.txt file first. Exclude test pages in your robot.txt file, exclude scripts (cgi, java, etc.) and pop up windows, exclude redundant content pages. She then gets into the basics of the URL, and defines which URLs are the most search friendly and which are the least. She then goes over which pages are the most important to optimize, i.e. no need to optimize a privacy page but it is important to optimize category pages and product pages. She goes over the 404 page and discusses why Apple's 404 page, she loves it from a usability purpose. Then moves on to why a site map is so important and tells the audience that having short descriptions about what is found within each section under the link, as oppose to just having a link. Now she is discussing the breadcrumb trail, but keep in mind, she is showing screen shots of real sites - so this information is being communicated clearly (I think). Cross linking pages internally is very important, and using the correct anchor text relevant to the page is as important, she shows examples of a good way and bad way to do this.

Ask Jeeves, Michael Palka gives his quick presentation about the basics. And then Magnus Sandburg said hello and said will answer some Q & A.

Q & A:
Q: Any good tools for keywords?
A: Action Outline is what Chris Sherman uses.

We got off on a dynamic content question string of question, but that is covered in a different session.

Then moved onto a discussion about optimizing pages versus optimizing sites. Any questions on that, feel free to ask below.

Q: Tables versus CSS?
A: Google said tables are not better then CSS for ranking purposes. Shari Thurow agrees, but she takes the usability spin on it.

Heather Lloyd-Martin was up first, her grandparents were from Sweden. What is successful SEO copywriting? (1) Boosts rankings, (2) increases conversion rates and (3) increases site ROI. She finds that most prospects are missing a focus on a specific keyword phrase for an individual page. Heather also finds lots of short and stubby copy, which is bad for many reasons. An other common downfall of many pages is that the pages do not convert, due to the content on the page. An other issue found often are pages filled with links, just too overwhelming. The most common problem are pages without text, flash pages, or pages with text but in an image.

Heather's three tips, (1) picking good keywords, (2) longer text, and (3) smart writing strategy. In addition, the bonus tip on how to control the description found in Google's SERPs, as much as you can.

Jill Whalen was next up and starts off with some basics about how to do keyword research. She then goes into why each page needs to target a specific keyword phrase. Don't use text in graphics, users come first, be descriptive, location is important, keyword phrases (not just words), plural and past tense, and bonus phrases. Search engines dont read graphics, alt attribute can help, html editors stink (might turn all text into a graphic), flash is not too readable, comment tags is not helpful and PDFs are indexable.

Michael Palka was first up in the Link Building Basics session. Michael is from Ask Jeeves and he begins with a bit of stats on how well Ask is doing. He goes over the Subject Specific Popularity and Community concept, this was discussed in my blog and in this forum several times. Read more on that here.

Magnus Sandberg from Google was next up. Again, this is pretty much same old, same old. Good content and everything else will come.

Mike Grehan was next up, fashioning his new company Smart Interactive. He starts off stating that Danny, Chris nor himself are the leading experts in this industry. He then puts up a picture of a cartoon like person, and compare its propeller hat with those of the people at the engines, who tell you to spin your wheels. Mike, I guess its safe to reuse some jokes, is it the first SES conference in Sweden? Anyway...

He then moves into how triangular linking works, and how a search engine can spot it. Ammon Johns and I had a thread about this at Cre8asite. Then Mike brings up his "GAS" Google Anxiety Syndrome to describe Florida. He then brings up that people in the forums feel like its going to happen again. Basically, he said, get links within communities. And gives us his ten essentials about linkage, I have this noted in a previous session, I will link to it shortly. He then says, from a link building perspective, its best to not break up articles on multiple pages. Throughout the speech, he comes right out and says to get links, you buy them (see his article). He ends off with a plug to the new orgs SMA-UK, etc.

Thomas Bindl from Optop was next up, after Mike hitting him with a joke or two about how he sells links (or not). Thomas goes through the process of asking for links. Use a search engine to find links, relevant to your site, based on the query you want to rank well for. Use directories, newsgroups, magazines, forums, adwords, help charities and look at your competitors. What are "Swedish Reindeer Food", I think Thomas has a client that sells packaged Swedish Reindeers. Ok, he recommends not sending automated emails or using terms like "cross-linking", "link exchange", etc. He then gets into (and I quote) "the dark side of the industry" or buying links. Directory links, ad links and "sponsored links" aka high PR links. What are the link building risks? Bad neighborhoods, too many links in a short period of time (sandboxing - he stares down the Google rep) and a penalty for buying links.

Q & A:

Q: How are internal links weighted?
A: Google says that it wont get you more "PageRank" but that doesn't mean its not useful, he says. Google said its good because people can navigate to your site, and more accessible to the pages.

Q: What is up with the Google link: command?
A: Google says they are not reporting all your links back to your site. So think before using it.

The next session I thought would be interesting to report on was Search Engine Marketing: Outsource or In House?. Chris Sherman is moderating this panel, which includes Drew Graham from Kelkoo, Bill Hunt from IBM, Joseph Morin from Autobytel (SEW Forum Mod) and Jan Rencke from Destination Stockholm (former WMW Mod).

Jan Rencke was first up, he described what he does and how competitive his industry is (he compared hotel reservations to porn, and gambling). Its pretty amazing, Marcia (our new mod at SEW) told me about a post that Jan placed at WMW and he actually referred to it on his first slide. He created 20 web sites, with 150 pages each, rich cross linked content in 19 languages, translated from english, self loading frameset for easy maintenance, simple no frills homespun coding, external style sheets, and optimized only for Google (not others).

He then said, only 8% of the world's population understand english, 28% if all Europeans understand english, and 41% in western-europe understand english. He then listed the 20 sites, with the domain names he created, its in his slide but some were stockholm.at, stockholm.be, etc. He said he has good keywords in the domain name, and this was what he wanted to illustrate. Each page on the sites, printed to about 1 - 2 full pages. They linked the content richly, if you look at one of his sites, you will see a listing of flags across the top. If you click on the flags, you will be taken to an other site, for that country. So instead of just requesting the language request on the index page, they did it on a page by page basis.

He then displayed some source code from the page and discusses how using Frontpage and other editors can tarnish you code. Then he went into how to reduce duplication, i.e. pulling same images, using relative links, giving access to translators, etc. Simple SEO for Google; (1) keywords in URL (2) keywords in title, (3) different title descriptions, etc. (4) h1 tags, p tags h2 tags, etc. (5) use external style sheets, (6) all pages crossed linked not just top level, (7) keywords in link text, (8) no links in scripts and (9) ODP submission. In addition, he performed SEO and PPC together.

Bill Hunt from IBM was next up, he is a well known speaker in this niche topic. His task was to optimize ibm.com for specific language search marketing, not an easy task. They developed a methodology, which he will now go through. First thing they did was develop a search marketing committee, which started out at 5 people and now is up to 150 people involved in ibm. They first analyze the site, they first remove crawl barriers, then educate the players, they fix templates (optimize templates), keyword management, then create scorecards, then page audits based on scorecard, train the PR teams (for link building purposes, blogs, news sites, and where they link and how they link (anchor text, specific pages), develop partner links and monitor & promote search metrics.

He said, he first targets infrastructure and then coding and then content. Most SEOs start with content, then code and then build infrastructure. I am a big fan of Bill's methodology here. They hold training sessions for each stage in the methodology. He showed how he pulled the product name in the title, h1 tag, description area, and meta information. Then he reviewed the scorecard he developed, its way to detailed (but also simple to look at) for me to write about here. Maybe we can convince Bill to discuss this scorecard in the forums. :)

Be on the look out for Bill's book to be released soon, to be named "". If he writes as well as he speaks, this book is going to be well worth it. His presentation is at www.globalstrategies.com/stockholm/.

Joseph Morin, SEW Forum moderator and is the SEO master for Autobytel. They do offline ads (they did a superbowl ad), affiliate marketing, PPC and SEO (which is Joseph's area). Before the SEM campaign they had 800 pages listed in Google. He discussed the challenges he had, politically, optimizing big company sites. Now the site has 300,000 pages indexed and traffic is way up. He discussed the "value of a visitor" and discussed how a search visitor might be worth more then an affiliate visitor. Shopping sites, high number of SKUs, constantly evolving (adding), heavy content sites and location factors all make for good candidates for in house SEM. In house advantages include; better knowledge of product/industry, industry contacts, day to day operations is easier and typically bigger budgets. Advantages to outsourcing include; pay for SEM as you go, your agency might be more up to date with the latest SEO news, SEM industry contacts are in different industries (so it helps take strategies from other industries to yours).

Drew Graham represents Kelkoo, the largest shopping search engine in Europe. He focuses mostly on the PPC side and not on the SEO side. They are active in 10 European countries, including Sweden. Kelkoo's business model is to make money on the margin between the spend and the sale of PPC ads. They keep SEM in house, it works well for them. He feels that pretty much anyone managing many keywords should do it in house, and not outsource. They built some internal tools to manage spend (KOBO, keyword optimization back office). The program (at least the way I understand it) automatically logs into Google or Overture and acts as a human, in other words - a bot sophisticated. This KOBO system basically puts all the data into one place to help manage the keywords across all advertisers and logins.

Q: To Jan, what are your thoughts on having your sites on a different server?
A: Jan says he has all his 20+ sites on one server in London on the same IP address for over two years. He has not had a problem yet with rankings. He thinks people discussing this is and putting sites on multiple servers are paranoid.

Q: About keywords in the URL, how important?
A: Bill explained it as it helps people link to you with those keywords. The main benefit is that they will link to you with the URL. Jan disagrees with Bill and says that having the keywords URL helps. He quotes Brett Tabke as agreeing with Bill. Jan says its one of the most argued topics, and its a religion.

Q: Do SEM firms know what they are doing?
A: Joseph says it depends on the firm.

I was a bit late getting to the conference, but I made it here for the second track. I decided to attend a new session named European Search Landscape. Here are my notes, please excuse any typos, this was done in real time.

Stefan Forsberg discussed some statistics relevant to the European market.
- 77.4 million users of search engines per month in Europe
- 2003 to 2004 you will see a 19% growth in search usage
- Google, MSN, and Yahoo are the major engines in the UK, but Yahoo is number 8 in Sweden
- Sweden is also lacking behind in search usage compared to the European market.
- Sweden is growing faster then france, Italy and the other European countries
- 57% of Sweden search users are male (expect an increase in female usage soon)
- A popular local search is named enrio
- 90% of search users are satisfied with the results (yahoo, google, msn) measured in the US market
- 77% of users in the UK use sponsored links

Massimo Burgio from ad maiora was up next. He spoke at the San Jose conference in 2004. He discusses the pros and cons of Europe being a growing market. The cons included unethical practices and bad business practices. But there is a lot of push towards paid search, not really on the organic side. He said that Google and Overture (and others) are staffing the paid search departments with local people who speak the local language. Big brands in the European market are "fully aware of the potential of our industry", not so in the US market. The local competitive market varies, some countries you find friendly collaborative business environments and in some countries you find fierce competition. He briefly then touched on the different cultures in Europe and how it affects how SEO firms operate.

Per Koch from Pandia Search was next up, he started off in some language (maybe Swedish?) but then went to english. He discusses the difference between "search sites" and the companies that power the search sites. His first slide started off reading "Search engine optimisation with an "s"". He says the major search engines that power the search are Google and Yahoo and in Britain add Ask Jeeves. He then moves into the language component; selecting keywords, colors used on the pages, letters differ, etc. He then goes into some search usage based on France data. An other search engine that you do not see in the US is Voila, which powers 6% of the French market. Poland is growing, and Google is taking over the market that was once held by Onet.ol (not at 22%).

Steven Taylor the European Overture representative here. He echo's everyone else's claims about the European market growing. (1) Scale; Overture is the largest internet advertising business in the world. This enables Overture to innovate and role out new products quickly. Overture has a large reach, he said "like 80%" to this market. They are also able to see the differences of search usage between the different sites, "diversity of search traffic" (yahoo vs. AV vs. MSN, etc.) (2) Management Structure; they have people here in 12 European markets to work with the local community. (3) Putting them all together (i.e. #1 and #2).

Fabio Selmoni from Google said he will cut his short, since most of what he was suppose to say, was said by the people before him. He started off saying that Google is first most a search engine, a technology company. Google is only successful if their end users are happy. Google has over 55 million unique users. They have 12 physical offices in Europe and they are in the process of making a Scandinavian office shortly. He discusses the Google network, T-Online, Ask Jeeves in the UK and an other 100+. He then gives a few simple rules; (1) make sure the campaign is relevant, (2) take advantage of the targeting opportunities (local, regional, etc,) and (3) keep in mind, no one gets it right the first time.

Q & A:
Q: When will Overture & Google allow for geo-targeting in the European market?
A: Early 2005 for Overture, Google says the same but they have been beta testing it.

Q: The next question went into the trademark issue with bidding on trademark names. A person from Hilton asked how do we control the usage of these words?
A: Google said is has been a challenge, they ask trademark owners to let them know. Google needs the direct involvement from the trademark owners. Overture said that they operate a lot like Google with this in the European market.

Early this afternoon, I will be leaving for Sweden to report on the sessions and after sessions events at the SES Conference. I hope to have wireless access and be able to report in real time, wish me luck. I will be missing the first session, sorry about that.

During my SES coverage, I won't have much time for forum coverage. I will do my best to find some good threads and I am sure Ben will be posting here more often. Nick recently started a blog that finds good search related threads, as well. Just don't take everything Nick says too literally, he often is sarcastic. Nick does do a good job finding neat threads. :)