Search Engine Strategies 2005 Chicago Archives

At this event's triple play coverage we covered 32 sessions. Huge thank you to Ben at Rank Smart and Chris at Instant Position.

Here is the roundup:

• Search Behavior Research Update
• Introduction to Search Marketing
• Video Search
• Earning from Search & Contextual Ads
• Reputation Monitoring & Management
• Podcast Search
• Targeting Search Ads By Demographics & Behavior
• Global Search Landscape
• ClickZ Forum: Ads Beyond Search
• Book Search
• Search Advertising 101
• KEYNOTE: The Search Marketing Community
• News Search SEO
• Creating Compelling Ads
• Business To Business Tactics
• SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging
• Meet The News Search Engines
• RSS, Blogs, and Search Marketing
• Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines
• Successful Site Architecture
• Working With Clients
• Shopping Search Tactics
• SEM Campaign & Project Management
• Working As A Team
• Search Engine Q&A On Links
• Future Of SEM
• Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan
• Local Search Marketing Tactics
• Meet The Crawlers
• Search Head or Tail
• SEO Overkill
• Measuring Success Case Studies

Also, Chris has more coverage at Instant Position and so does Lee Oden. Glad to be home.

I have to say, I always get nervous for Google and excited for the SEOs when Google sends a brand new representative to the search conferences. This SES Chicago, Matt Cutts was unable to attend, so in his place, Matt sent Charles Martin. The reason I get nervous for Google and excited for SEOs is because the new Googlers are more likely to slip up and say something that can get them in trouble. When Matt answers questions, you notice how he always throws in terms like, "in my personal opinion", "if I was to do it this way", "if I was you", etc. In addition, Matt has a tact of deflecting questions that he can not or should not answer. I believe the last conference I covered where Matt did not represent Google was SES Sweden 2004. At that conference, Google brought in Magnus and he said a thing that were misinterpreted as Google backlinks not counting anymore (or something like that).

So with this new guy, Charles, who I am told had two days of prep time, I did not know what to expect. When I first saw Charles, he looked like one of those guys who looks like he is from San Jose. Tall, longish blond hair (I think), huge smile, and very nice personality. Hey, he even had the same type of Apple PowerBook I had, so he had to be a standup guy.

I attended his two sessions, Q&A on Linking and Meet the Crawlers. Right away, Charles introduced himself to the other search representatives; Tim Mayer (an SES pro from Yahoo), Rahul (a lot less experienced then Tim, but still have conferences under his belt) from Ask Jeeves, and Ramez (MSN is a new engine, but he seemed to have done a conference before, normally its Etan) from MSN. Soon after, he saw me chatting with Tim and said that I looked familiar. Tim reminded him that Matt just posted a picture of me at his blog. So Tim took an other picture of me, I believe I was in the same outfit. And then the session started.

Charles gave the typical presentation. But the real test was the Q&A portion. Most of you know I don't stay for Q&A, but for his sessions, I made sure to stick around. Charles held his own. He answered questions accurately, as far as I can tell. He also knew his stuff cold. He told us he did his research by listening to some of the industry podcasts and reading some of the industry blogs. He even deflected the sandbox questions with tact. He made some funny jokes, such as when MSN's presentation wasn't working properly and Charles helped him out and got it working. Then Charles made a comment that Google can even fix Microsoft's products. The audience enjoyed that. The whole time, Charles seemed to have a good time and enjoy talking to the people.

Matt, nice choice on a representative to take your place this time!

Measuring Success Case Studies

Moderated by Mike Sack

Geoff Karcher, Karcher Group
Will cover what is important from management standpoint, a sales standpoint, setting up expectation with clients. Integrity in reporting and what can be gained from studying stats. What is important to a manager? Everyone’s priorities are different…increasing sales/leads? Branding? Traffic? Do they even know what to ask? It is your job to make sure they do. They should know what to expect going forward. You should outline all strengths and weaknesses of a campaign. Seeing ground rules and expectations: goals should be to increase rankings, traffic, and/or conversions. Once these goals are set, it is important to establish a baseline, in order to have something to measure against moving forward. How can negative statistics have a positive impact? This established and builds trust and the client will be more likely to trust you going forward. Also, it provides an opportunity to show what can be done. Real life example: FormPlusFunction.com had problems organically and with PPC. Karcher needed to set expectations and set baselines from natural and conversion standpoints. As a result of redesign, the site looked better and was easier to use. Search Engine referrals went up significantly, along with traffic and unique visitors. Bottom line conversion standpoint, however, was down. This led to questions about why? Used Click Tracks to help evaluate how visitors are using the site. They identified primary navigation problems, that catalog exits were high, and that cart abandonment rate was high. 4% of users were using primary navigation. Instead of adding products to their cart, visitors were getting lost in the category pages. The shopping cart abandonment rate was high…they needed to allow a different path for international visitors. This created a pop-up “stumbling block,” making people chose if they wanted international checkout or not…this scared people away, so they replaced it with a radio button, and also streamlined the entire checkout process. Result was that return visitors increased over the next 4 months, and the conversion rate increased by 56%! In conclusion: measuring failure is just as important as measuring success, and these should be reacted-to. (got as much as I could…he was speaking very fast).

Kent Lewis, Anvil Media
Case study of Aspen Investment Group, which owns 5 geographically separate properties throughout the country. A variety of nicer old hotels that have been overhauled. Describes their success measurement process: Objective, metrics, benchmarks, strategies, tactics, analysis. Objective: Traffic? Brand? Etc… Metrics: which stats are being tracked? Benchmark: ask clients “what does success look like for you? That way if they say a few months later that they are not happy, you can compare their expectations to the results. Strategies: “Validate your gut.” Fine tune the PPC, optimize the site, and implement ROI. Tactics: use K.I.S.S. rule. Create campaigns, leverage SEO, in this case, use CitySearch, which has been one of the top converting traffic sources for them. Analysis: do a little, learn a lot. Destinations, specials, and manage inventory (occupancy). They found that one property, Lucia, has mostly business travelers that booked on average 2 days prior. This allowed them to save money by turning off PCC 2 days before “no vacancy nights.” Also likes to use specific analysis of paid performance vs organic, and is not yet happy with conversion rate once people start reservation process (which is 7%). 90% of reservations done between 2 days, as mentioned before this allows them to turn off PPC and save money when fully booked. Their 2006 planning includes: a new site template for all five properties. New property management platforms. International SEM. Use of blogs and newsletters, such as a concierge’s blog describing events and happenings. Measuring PR and offline activity, optimizing press releases, etc… get more data and do much deeper analysis.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Rimm-Kaufman Group, LLC.

Says he will be speaking quickly, but his presentation can be found online. His presentation is primarily targeted towards SEM. A deceptively simple question: I bought some clicks, what did I get? Not as simple of an answer as you think. Some issues to discuss: Brand vs non-brand searches? With a brand search, they already know what they want, vs if someone searches for non-brand, this is the harder to get client. In the case of a brand, you do need to fight your channels for spots near the top. Another twist is that some people’s brand names are actually popular search terms, such as “cheap tickets.” You have to advertise on your brand. It should be broken out in tracking, because it is naturally a higher-performing search term. Report on your non-brand ad spend and resulting sales separately. Channels: affiliates, organic, paid. Email, etc… are the different online marketing channels. Different tracking needs to be used for these, as well as different allocation rules. Use an “order audit,” where you take all the parties that are handling the media and bring in a full list of orders. Make sure you are not double counting orders. They use Excel to do this. Also strongly recommends placing test orders, using both IE and Mozilla, use multiple items and quantity, and use some easily-trackable keyword phrases. Use a fake visa if you don’t use online authorization. Also, you should purge cookies between each order you do, and shut down the browser, in order to make it a “new transaction.” Compare order numbers, quantities and timestamps. Tracking idiosyncrasies such as site A gets the order and site B gets the (something different-he is actually going faster than Geoff).

Tracking leads into a sales force? He has seen the majority of online coupons using static barcodes. He would like to see barcodes for such coupons generated dynamically so that it actually indicates the search that prompted the visit and the coupon print. He knows that Staples uses specific barcodes in their emails to repeat customers.See rimmkaufmann.com/ses-2005-12 for his presentation.

Q&A
Where organic leads more powerful than PPC? Kent says yes, and that branded terms outperformed non-branded.

Michael Murray from Fathom. SEo is not a shopping spree. Yes, you need traffic but pace yourself. Even sound practices may fail if they're rushed. Domain stuffing; short domains are easy to read, multiple hyphens or forced capitalization looks like spam, visitors are suspicious. Managing too many keywords at once, pick your priorities, what are your profit margins, give main keywords enough attention. Folder and page name excess, yes keywords can influence rankings, make sure they match content, limit repetition to appease engines. Taming the title tag, long titles are useless. Meta description overload; avoid long descriptions, portion appears in the search results, laundry list of keywords may not match content. Over the top meta keyword tags; hard to avoid this traditional step, some search engines downplay this tag due to past abuse, limit to a few keywords. Meta bonanza, skip misc meta tag options, they do little for engines, dont waste your time. Overdone visible text, massive keyword repetition in a small space may annoy web site visitors. Heading tag misuse, dont overstuff, avoid overuse. Visible text is unusual places, looks like an amateur put the site together, text placed above the entire page should match design and read like a sentence. Watch out for sitemaps, don't pursue too many keywords and avoid major copy clusters. Watch out for the visible links blitz, links in content are useful, but too many may be viewed as spam. Anchor text gone wild, too many search terms in the same hyperlink dilute the impact of a favored keyword or phrase. Renegade programmers, know what your programmers are doing (hiding keywords). Link title attribute mess, prime example of overkill. Alt tag overflow! Be careful about getting too many links too fast. Hidden text. Micro sites, search engines hate duplicate content, add good content to your main domain. No frames tag, the no frames tag space is ideal for citing browser limitations, include a robust summary of the site and links to specific pages.

Matt Bailey from Karcher Group. Users scan content; 79% of users scan a Web page, 16% read word for word (from Jacob Neilson). You look at headlines, sub headings, bulleted lists, headers, content arrangement, and half the word count. Screen reader users scan by listening; listen to the first few words, list links, list headers, and skip navigation. He plays a screen reader of a keyword stuffed page. He shows that hidden text is shown also on a mobile device. Well designed pages and content = credibility. Over optimization; write for search engines versus write for conversions.

Heather Lloyd-Martin, President, SuccessWorks International (very peppy, in a good way). Title stuffing, think of titles like headlines, when they are stuffed, they look bad. Remember that the SERPs are your first opportunity for conversion (and that is where your title is shown), make that title as clickable as possible. Kooky copy to get clicks; its on thing to create headlines that grab attention, its an other when it has nothing to do with the ad, titles can be creative but make the content relevant. Linkorama losers, she shows a page with tons and tons of links on it. Lots of links isnt helpful, its confusing and will overwhelm your readers, think about the rule of three and use those links to pre-qualify powerful landing pages. Conversion confusion; she shows a page with tons of text but no way to convert on that page. Baby, don't stuff the keyphrases and shows an example... Bad, bad misspellings, she shows how Google has the "did you mean xxx" in the SERPs, customers will notice misspellings pretty easily...which makes your company look really bad.

Search Head or Tail

(FYI: This means how long a search phrase is in terms of modifiers/words. A “head” search query would be “hotel,” and a “tail” term would be “4 star hotel Dallas area.”)

Moderated by Misty Locke, Range Online Media

Kevin Lee, Dit-It.com

Surprised that people are in the audience since they are competing this session against “Meet the Crawlers.” Capturing the Tail – Going Broad. Millions of searches every day that are unique, these tail keywords & phrases are very valuable. Tail searchers usually know exactly what they want. Publishers can make more money because they meet the needs of searchers seeking these long phrases. Some tail searches could only occur once per month, or less. Many people are searching for the various obvious stuff, but once beyond that, people have their own ideas about how to express their needs/interests. So: how far out to go into that tail and make it worth it as marketers? Search behavior follows a power curve: if you remember geometry, it is a curve that never actually reaches the axis. Somewhat asymptotic, but flattens out eventually. Gives some related search distributions from “travel” down to “travel south America.” Knows that there are probably thousands more keyword permutations that can be considered. The value of a keyword is directly proportional to where it is on the curve. Campaigns and goals should line up with the profile of the searchers. Positive actions vary throughout the buying cycle.

Searchers using head keyword phrases have ambiguous desires and needs for several reasons. In addition to typed searches driving search inventory at the head, it also contains link driven traffic from directories and within the portal, as well as syndication partners. How far out to go? Aggressively distribute the tail keyword phrases that are worth it. Quite often, the bids are far lower in the tail than the head. How to set bids in tail? Kevin recommends starting fairly high, since searcher is a desired target since they know what they want. You need to make sure to have a high position to get a large percentage of the few searchers. This will help you get an opportunity to gather more data. Remember that in Google and MSN, you are competing with those people that are bidding on Broad Match. MSN has great demographic data available by keyword. At first glance, Google and MSN seem to have systems that are friendly, due to broad match ability, which “casts a wide net.” But, not all people who are doing the searches have the same intent. Specific creatives should be written within each ad group in order to increase CTR. How to find new tail opportunities? Web analytics software, Campaign management technologies and raw log files will reveal great tail keyword phrases. Tail keywords that are short benefit from the dynamic keyword insertion tool (DKI). Generally the CTR will increase with DKI, increasing efficiency. They have seen up to a 27% DKI efficiency increase.

MSN also has a DKI, but with a different structure and no ability to place a default keyword in case the phrase is too long. Yahoo Standard Match always trumps Advanced Match regardless of bid. This means for more work, requiring you to predict searches as far out in the tail as practical. When looking at the head, you probably want to segment differently. These people do not know exactly what they want. Use other parameters such as geographic, or day-parting. Hard to get enough data in the tail to day-part, but since ROI is so high in the tail you would never probably want to use day parting anyway. Between the high numbers of keywords in the tail and the high number of targeting options that make sense for the head, the data becomes significant. In the tail, competitive reactions are less frequent, meaning more elasticity in the market. When do you “kill a tail keyword?” Use statistics to “come to the rescue” cluster analysis can help. Good thing about looking at head and tail separately allows for reduction of waste, targeting of best customers, and increased profit. Improve your messages and offers, and be more aggressive when it matters.

Harrison Magun, Avenue A - Razorfish Search.

Will focus on the analyses that marketers and managers need to use to help decide which keywords/what to bid. His alternate title is “Bid down or bid up you moron!” To explain how to determine what a statistically relevant sample is, Harrison uses an example of “twins.” If there are 120 people in the room, and 6 are twins, that gives us 5%. What is the likelihood that twins are 5% of the rest of population? He shows some calculus-derived results that depict a standard bell curve that shows this probability that the incidence is between 4.5 and 5.5% is 20.5% This means if we act of the smaller sample of 120, there is an 80% chance we will make the wrong decision. How big of a sample do we need to be 90% sure that the incidence is between 4.5 and 5.5%? Answer is you need 5,044 incidences to make this estimation. To translate this into the kind of numbers to make accurate PPC management estimates, Conversion rates: 1%, need 25,000 clicks to make right decision, even at 10% conversion rate, you need 2500 clicks to make sure the conversion data is 90% accurate. So lets say you have 400 clicks and the actual conversion rate is 2%, there is a 60% chance you will make the wrong decision, Don’t waste your time on insignificant data. Sedate the screaming lunatics in your organization that are demanding changes – show them the data just described. Create accurate tests. Understand how many clicks you need for a good test. If you can’t sustain bad results, then don’t test in the first place. Spread the tests out. The idea of creating multiple keywords and campaigns and tests at a time makes it more confusing. Understand factors that impacts conversion rates.

“How can I use this sexy stats stuff?” Use Excel, no need for fancy tools. Use your own categorizations – this lets you sum up related keywords that don’t have enough clicks, and make a generalization based on business similarities, such as categories dovetailing together with respect to seasonality, for example. Use Bid Management algorithms and toolsets. This is heavy math. Add the knowledge into the four levers of search: Bidding strategy, keyword creation, messaging, business intelligence. In summation, when you look at tail, understand how accurate the data is, and take that into account when making your decisions.

Q&A
Could you talk a little more about clustering? Kevin: right after I took stats test, I forgot most of those things, so I hired people with bid foreheads. (laughs) The reason he likes to start tail keywords aggressively, is because if you make a quick decision, it takes even longer to prove things wrong. When thinking about decision process, you can go conservative or aggressive. Conservative would mean you may have a 50% confidence, moving up to an aggressive stance with a 90% confidence. How to create clusters? Think about it in terms of similar intent. Requires not only a good statistical basis but also a good business basis, to make the decision. Harrison agrees…look for keywords with same attributes to cluster. Not a statistician, but knows there are regression analyses that can help with this too.

Ramez Naam from MSN Search.
- New Kid on Block
- Launched Feb. 1 2005
- Web, Local, Toolbar, Deskto
- Windows Live
- Get external links or submit URL
- Ensure pages are internally linked
- Link to most important pages
- Use Robots.txt
- Keep URLs Human Readable (reduce query parameters, beware of session IDs)
- Understand redirects (301s and 302s)
- Don't rely on JavaScript
- Unique, High Quality Content
- Good Organic Links (descriptive text, links that a person would click on, the more natural a link the better)
- Beware of using images for text, flash, and any deceptive optimization techniques.
- Windows Live at live.com, shows how you can customize the page, search and add the search to your home page and search feeds and subscribe
- Windows Live Local at local.live.com. With a new feature named "birds eye view" with actual aerial views from planes, change the angles and so on, very very impressive.

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves
- About Ask slide
- Follows the Robots.txt rules
- Efficiency tips
- Freshness determines crawl rate
- Completeness (pdfs, html, flash, ms-office, xml)
- Date stamp content
- Simplify site organization and navigation
- Watch out for infinite pages
- Have patience when it comes to getting indexed
- JavaScript is a challenge
- Dynamic pages can be an issue
- URLs within images can't be followed

Tim Mayer from Yahoo
- Mission statement slide
- Link new URL from existing URL in the index
- Make sure all URLs have an inbound link
- Good authoritative links into a site to encourage deep crawls
- Don't make site depth too extreme (3-4 levels is recommended)
- Use the free addurl service if all else fails
- Unique content (page titles, metatags, unique pages, multiple domains only when there are distinct businesses)
- Avoid excessive doorway pages, keyword stuffing, keyword repetition, hidden text/link, link farms, cloaking
- Yahoo has many crawlers (they are exclusive to each service)
- Site Explorer Slide (talk about it here, here and here.
- Local & Navigational Active Abstracts (he shows local vertical integration into SERPs, also Quick Links, and so on.
- My Web product, social search, saving search and sharing results with friends (save to my web buttons can be put on your pages)
- Yahoo Search Blog and Next.Yahoo.Com
- He Mentions Answers.Yahoo.Com

Charles Martin from Google
- Freshness, Comprehensiveness, Different Crawl Rates
- Google Sitemaps, shows it off for crawl and error checking reasons
- Show how to remove content from Google at webmasters/remove.html
- Webmaster Guidelines slides
- What if my site is moving, use 301 redirects
- Googlebot uses too much bandwidth, respond 304 not modified
- I want Googlebot to stay away (robots.txt
- Gmail, Personalized Search, New Froogle Homepage, Images on Google News, Numrange, Google Local, Google Deskbar.

Q & A:

Q: On Rogue spiders, what are they?
A: Danny answers it, but if you want to hear what he said, comment and ill add the info, its basic.

Some realllllllllly basic questions.....

Q: Google Sandbox, how do I get out of it?
A: Charles said when he was listening to the podcast, he learned about the Jagger update thing. Internally there is no Jagger update, there are just improvements to the site. He said, whatever the marketers said, "i am behind it." They said that there is no google sandbox per-say, but its more about a series of filters that tries to figure out if a site is good or bad, etc.

Q: Is it cloaking to strip out session ids for just the bots?
A: They all said it is "no problem". Google added, "in fact, please do that."

Q: Images that are linked, are they followed?
A: MSN follows it, Google follows and recommends adding reasonable alt text.

Justin Sanger from LocalLaunch is up first. He notes that MSN came out with Windows Live Local, he shows it off, some more info about msn local live. Local Search Perspectives; To effectively address local search, isolating its constituents and components is critical. The Local Search User; Local search is changing out behavior- what did we used to do? yellow pages, newspapers, word of mouth. The birth of a new savvy local consumer. Three broad classes of LS (local search) users: (1) need driven business look-up, (2) Purchasing research activity (distance, price,, rating, products, coupons, etc.), (3) Community-driven activity (community city pages feature time sensitive activities, top user recommendations, personalization and social networking. All human activity is inherently local. 20% of all search activity is local in its intent. Local Search Content and Data: So where does the LS content and data come from? (1) offline derived local content, (2) internet-derived local content, (3) syndicated-authority content, (4) user-generated local content. Kelsey Group Survey; most people believe LS business data is poor, most people believe that user-generated content is critical. Focus on user-generated content; rich content beyond standard contact info, content that is not easily obtained by crawling the unstructured web, food for pure unstructured local search, content for qualitative, comparative buying decisions, enables meaningful compare contrast and filter functionality. The SME (small medium size) Advertisers; 10M SEMs in the US, 75% of SMEs do business within 50 miles, they spend $22 billion local ads, 70% of YP advertisers are service based orgs, 46$ of budgets go to YP, only 3-5% use paid search.. Local Online Ads and LS Marketplace; 4.1 billion wil be spent this year on local online ads, newspapers claim 41% of the total local online ad spend, in 2006 local paid search ads will grow 161%, but the marketplace is very fragmented. LS Sales Efforts; controlling margins and dealing with SMEs is difficult and costly (SMEs have less than $6,000 per year to spend, volume/scale, automation required, significant capitalization). Self-provisioning of local search ads, SME local search sales is actually a big man's game. For the aggregators, interactive is both an opp and challenge. The LS Facilitators; a new breed of facilitators are empowering large, traditional sales orgs. The birth of the agnostic local search marketing platform and fulfillment teams (locallaunch, reachlocal, webvisible, trafficleader). Facilitators consolidate a complex marketplace; different ad set up, pricing, algos, strategies, and performance requirements amongst inventories). The Local Search Providers; Yahoo Local, Google Local, True Local, Local.com, Windows Live Local. Internet Yellow Pages. Soon we will no longer differentiate between LS and IYPs. Local Search Providers; LS and Social Networking, Classifieds and Shopping (craig's list, shoplocal.com), pay per call and call tracking. LS Tactics; local seo and ppc are very important but here is a new form of local optimization; the accuracy and distribution of core business data is critical to local search optimization, businesses must pay attention to and help generate published opinions about their business and study the SERPs and ride the coattails of the LS authorities. Clean your core business data; offline derived local content furnishers IYP and local search engines. Generated from local regional phone companies and telemarketing forces. Focus on your Acxiom, Amacai and infoUSA data, they feed yahoo, google superpages. Think of this data as your foundation. Updating is easier than it once was. Distribute your business profiles as far as possible (he shows yahoo business profiles and shows the vertical creep of the local listings into the SERPs of a traditional search results, he also shows Google putting Yahoo local result in its SERPs. He then closes; no web site is required to do this, it helps but not required.

Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement to dive into tactics. Different types of local search engines, the big engines and local only engines and internet yellow pages. Bruce Clay & TrueLocal has a local search chart to show the syndication; bruceclay.com/serc-local.htm (i think). Big Search Engines; three ways to get into editorial listings; add physical address to every web page, submit business details directly and submit address to large databases. She shows screen captures of all these things. Local-only Search Engines; local.com and truelocal (powered by GeoSign). Business Databases; shows how to get into them, lists URLs which I can not type down fast enough for you folks (but you can figure it out). I also may have the info in my coverage of this session from SES San Jose 05. Lots of how to add to here and there, most of it covered in San Jose.

Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing. Err, I seems like a very similar presentation to the one from last SES. Google Overview; regional targeting is available as part of all AdWords accounts. You must have a Web site. Physical address is not required. Advertisers can target by state or city or metro, or radius from address or custom (polygon). Google serves ads based on searcher's IP address, search query and other factors. Yahoo Overview; they run it as a separate product, so you need to open a new account. Web site is optional due to hosted locator page. Must have a physical business address in the targeted region. One targeting option, based on specified radius from address (0.5 to 100 miles). Yahoo serves local ads based on; search queries, yahoo registered members address, and location of specific yahoo local site. She then gives a case study, which I believe is the same as SES San Jose 05.

Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan

**Note: apologies to anyone expecting coverage on two sessions this afternoon. I was unable to cover the Retail Forum due to a scheduling conflict, and the “Converting Visitors to Buyers” session was actually covered by me this summer in San Jose, so I chose to attend the “Future of SEM” panel that Barry covered. The content was probably nearly identical to the post from the SES San Jose 2005 Coverage.

Invites everyone to wear casual clothing for the last day of the conference tomorrow: pajamas or sweats suggested. First question: a gentleman was hoping Allan Dick would provide some more toilet jokes. (laughs) Danny gives a quick history…he gets about 500 requests a day to speak. Allan was an attendee that came up with some new session ideas that Danny approved. He suggests this is the best way to secure a speaking position at SES.

First time attendee said that she was in many of the basic track sessions, and asks what to do about conflicting information delivered? Danny advises to weigh the people you spoke with and try to get a gut feeling. He spoke to a gentleman who is in the gambling industry, and told him he probably didn’t get much out of the conference since so many of the more aggressive tactics are not really disclosed in the conference.

Question geared to the search engines: why do the SE’s attempt to prevent SEO’s from succeeding? It is his experience that as an SEO, he provides better content. Why are they mad at us and not “certifying SEO agencies” and promoting qualified SEO’s like IBM promotes their business partners, for example. Danny asks Tim Mayer from Yahoo to give his opinion on this. If he really did “hate you,” he probably wouldn’t be answering questions at the conference or on his blog as often as he does. He says: “the mission of Y! Search is to provide the most trusted results…has to balance the needs of users, publishers, or advertisers. For example, the “mortgage” space only has ten spots available on the first page for related terms, so many authoritative sites may not show up there. Everyone thinks that their content is higher-quality, and Yahoo’s goal is simply to determine which actually is. Danny asks what are one or two specific things he would like “more love” regarding? The question asker can’t come up with any real specifics, but feels that they should be more geared towards educating people about “good SEO’s.” Danny says he has a good point…consumers do want to know who to trust. Should/could search engines “blacklist?” Probably not, but perhaps offer a “certified white list” of trusted SEM vendors? Some one follows up with “is there a way to create a validation process for a particular page?” Danny says “ let me channel Matt Cutts…he then gets a big roar for his imitation of Matt’s probable answer to this, which involves something along the lines of “we’re working on it, it’s difficult to do this, etc… they may be adding more “advice” within the sitemap submission system that comes back and says things like “your robots.txt file is blocking the robot,” or “you are using text that could be perceived as hidden,” etc…Best thing to do is send feedback to Google saying you want feedback.

Next question: standards of validation have not really been touched on too much in the conference…what is the deal? Are sites that are validated easier to get ranked? Asks Tim Mayer…who answers that this probably is not really a factor. Danny adds that the reason the topic is not really covered is because the conference is about search, not design. Same thing about all the blogging questions. They have discussed CSS and why to use standards-based “Stuff.”

Are search engines starting to get more sophisticated regarding CSS? Is the value of an H1 traditional tag better than the “less ugly” look? Tim says that it is basically treated as plain text. The issue is that you are trying to tell the search engine what is important but not let users know, if you use the CSS div-tag-surrounded H1 in order to make it look smaller. Things should be consistent, telling both the SE and the User. Danny suggests going to the “Meet the Crawlers” session tomorrow to get “more goodies.”

What considerations are being made regarding the theoretical sandbox…Danny takes it away since many people will ask this at Meet the Crawlers” tomorrow.

Next question about duplicate content/scraper sites, and if people are doing anything about this? Tim says they obviously try to measure the amount of Spam on their index, and the creation of duplicates is constantly evolving to “get around” spam detection methods. Describes an essential “cat and mouse” game (my description, not his). Danny says this is a rising concern, and will be addressed in more detail tomorrow.

Who is hiring? SEM’s? in-house? Are we growing as an industry? Danny surveys the room and the majority of people say business is good. One person stands and says business isn’t good…a furniture manufacturer in Wisconsin. She wonders if they can sell online? Allan Dick stands up and says “I sell tubs online, trust me, is can be done.” (laughs). Danny asks a couple basic question…frames? Dynamic URL’s?

Next question: conversion tracking. His client took off compulsory sign-in forms in order for someone to download a white paper, and downloads shot up. He suggests analytics, which would work unless someone runs a program that strips out referral data, such as what Norton Anti Virus does. Also suggests attending the Measuring Success sessions tomorrow.

Next person would like to hear more about Google Analytics, and separately, how do they measure the feeds for the Danny Sullivan podcast on webmasterradio.fm? Danny says he is using Feedburner. Polls the audience about Google Analytics, and most people think it is a good product. Many people are saying that Google will use the data in a “bad way,” essentially causing the cost of high-converting keywords to go higher. The good news is that the price of analytics will probably plummet soon, Danny feels.

Last question…person first time at conference, and has learned a lot, but is overwhelmed because she feels that her clients may not be able to afford everything really needed to perform better. Danny advises to go for the low-hanging fruit, and starting with the more important factors that are affordable, and adding further budget as available. Greg Jarboe adds that if it was that easy, “we’d all be making minimum wage.”

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
Speakers:
Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC
Martin Laetsch, Manager, Worldwide Search, Intel Corporation
Misty Locke, President & Co-Founder, Range Online Media
Fredrick Marckini, CEO, iProspect
Dana Todd, President, SEMPO
Jill Whalen, Owner, High Rankings
Chris Zaharias, Vice President of Sales, Efficient Frontier

Danny introduces each person on the panel. Dana has been speaking at SES since the first SES. Martin Laetsch from Intel, he controls search for Intel to represent the in house perspective. Fredrick Marckini from iProspect is also on stage, the poster child for SEM company success, he knows him from 1997. Greg Boser from WebGuerrilla to talk about the black hat side, but not only that - he had the first FTC complaint, he will speak his mind fairly. Chris Zaharias from Efficient Frontier, they run client campaigns for really big companies with huge budgets, he has been involved in search since Netscape (industrial strength paid listings). Jill Whalen from HighRankings, newsletter, forums, etc. she has a lot of small and midsize marketers. Misty Locke from Range Online Media who started her own firm, she has seen the good and the bad.

Q: Major trends that will drive the future of SEM?
Greg said "not local" its the biggest thing that will not take off. Personalization is an other thing SEs wont make great gains in.
Dana said 65% said 100% of search budget will be brought in house. We as a specialty group will go away as a niche and be integrated into marketing teams.
Martin said you will see the integration of traditional campaigns into search campaigns.
Fedrick adds that what Martin hit on was what we will see in 2006, the offline with the online. You will see questions being asked at the cash register like, did you search online before buying this?
Misty adds its beyond that, but more about mobile, when you are away from your desktop.
Chris said Versign is trying to become the global registrar for RFID codes, as soon as you get that, you can now track offline impressions.

Q: How the SEM firms relationship with SEs evolve and what about conflict of interests?
Chris said you will eventually see the SEs moving to revenue share models.
Greg said that you all (you!!!) will be giving them the data (Google Analytics, etc.).
Dana said from the publisher perspective, they wouldn't do this on their own. She said that we are making 3% what people are making then the print counterpart, so stop complaining.
Martin said it can really go either way. If we say its ok to give the SEs my data, in exchange for something more from the SEs. If we take the view of not giving them the data, then we have to do the work and analysis.
Fredrick said its not just keywords we are buying, we will be buying other media online.
Misty adds that these guys become the SEs customers and not ours.

Q: Back to the SEM and SE relationships..
Fredrick said there is a huge improvement.
Jill adds that she believes the SEs still prefer that the SEOs do not exist. They prefer (the SEOs only) we go away.
Greg adds a nice little line in there, he said they do steal clients. There is a long history of unfriendly behavior between the two, but yet we hang out together and get along.
Dana joked that the SEs do not give commissions, instead they give out iPods, but I (dana) only cares about increasing client ROIs.
Misty said she was just in a panel with the retailers. She is usually upset with SEs stealing her clients. But she was listening and realized that we are also a major part of the problem. A lot of SEMs do poor work and its bad. So the clients go directly to the vendors (SEs), we are doing this to ourselves!

Q: How is the market share going to evolve? Google, MSN, Yahoo! etc....
Dana said the end users perceive the engines differently. Each user is loyal to their engine. As a society we embrace choice. Yahoo is more of a portal. Google is about technology and fast access. MSN needs to find its value.
Martin said as a society we do like choices but how often do you say, hmm what am I going to buy? Normally you know what you want. Dana added that is the difference between men and women.
Jill said people have yahoo has their homepage, but when they search, they use Google.
Chris said Google got their market share through its technology (and monetization methods), it will only grow, he thinks.
Greg said its great for us, because you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
Fredrick said you have to pay attention shifts in market share. He said Google is not a search engine, its the largest grid computer out there. Google is the only player that has both hardware and software expertise. Yahoo! doesn't, MSN is only a software company.

Q: You can track so much with search marketing. Will that fuel the stealing of budgets from other media and ads? Who is the big loser in this?
Fredrick said we see a lot of money coming from TV budgets. He said he had a client put up a radio ad and then the bidding agents adjusted the bids because people were clicking more on the ads. They all work together, they are not individual silos.
Misty adds that she told people not to kill their other ad methods.
Dana added that it still blows her mind that people spend so much on TV without being able to track it.
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Don't ask what the line above means. :)

Q: Spam Questions....
Fredrick said Greg had the quote of the day, "anyone is a spammer" "if you are below me, you suck."
Greg nods and says it again; the hat thing to him, is just silly. He said he provides solutions to clients, he gives them all options and explains the risks. Don't sit there with blindfolds on. "Dont bring a sword to a gun fight" quote from Tim Mayer is used once again.
Jill says there is a frustration from folks, that when they do see "spammy sites" above their sites, and reporting doesn't help. If you see others doing it (spam) and it's working for them and you ask me should you do it too, I can't really tell you not to, when it's obviously working for others.
Dana said she loves it when the big white hats snuggle up to a black hat at the bar and ask them questions.
Misty said that "we" named black-hats and white-hats (as an industry). She realized its about explaining what you will do with the site to the client. You must be upfront with the client.
Fredrick said some companies will go that route and some won't.
Martin adds Intel would never go that route because it can hurt the brand.
Dana said that for SEO work in the contract they have a legal binder to go by all the SEs guidelines.
Fredrick said, did you ever hear of a "black hat print ad agency"?
Greg said the majority of aggressive stuff is seo people doing their own seo work. TrafficPower cases, he said, are happening less and less. But SEOs doing it for themselves is the bulk of the aggressive stuff.

Q: Most important vertical?
Fredrick said vertical search is cool when its paired with other devices (i.e. iTunes).
Dana said a bunch of tightly nichy things, mobile is too locked in legislation.
Jill said she doesnt know what a vertical is (she was joking)
Chris said its more about search and not vertical
Fredrick disagrees with Greg's local search and explained a case study he did for his dad.

Q: Are we in a search bubble? Will it bust?
Dana there wont be a bust.
Misty said no, but clean up and continued expansion.
Martin agrees
Jill SEO will go up
Fredrick No
Greg No
Chris said YES because there is too much VC money out there.

Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies is the moderator of this fun filled event.

Kaushal Kurapati, Senior Product Manager of Search, Ask Jeeves
- Ask Jeeves info slide........................................
- General Link Analysis Methods (links to page a, to b, to c, yada yada --- see past presentations)
- Teoma Approach on Links (communities, subject-specific popularity, hubs and authorities)
- Be Cautious of reciprocal links and buying links
- Avoid link farms, cloaked pages, hidden links and links by images.
- Become an authority on a subject
- Focus on your business and content, the rest will follow

Charles Martin from Google
- He is using a Apple Computer, kudos to him
- First time at SES, he works in the search quality group (I guess under Matt)
- Links are a proxy for human judgement
- PageRank slide.... "Most visible factor of the ranking algorithm"
- Be the user when building links
- "Click here" links doesnt help much, use rich anchor text
- Encourage related sites to link to use, use unique relevant content to attract links
- Avoid; recip links, poor quality link exchanges, fishy looking sites, who you link to can affect your reputation.
- He specifically says "You can be held accountable for linking to people"
- No hidden or cloaked links
- He said avoid & % etc, "We wont look at them" (hmmm)
- Do not obsesses with back links
- Design site with user in mind
- He then shows off a bit of Google Sitemaps and its error tracking

Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo!
- There is this intense focus on link building, Tim says. There is very little focus on building quality content. If you build good content, people will link to it.
- A whole industry is built around linking strategies, but its not everything.
- He then said how tagging may affect this industry
- Links should be related and designed to help the user
- Add unique and useful content that invites others to link to your site
- Use appropriate and specific anchor text to describe the linked to content
- Don't use link exchanges or buy links
- Site Explorer slide comes up, shows the features (discussed at exhaustion at this site in the past)
-- new features include exclude the internal site links, and rss and atom feed submission support

Ramez Naam, Group Program Manager, MSN Search
- He expanded about the users
- MSN uses links to help them understand the popularity of the site and they use the anchor text for labels of the site
- Keep users in mind....

Q & A:
Q: How do you weed out artificial links?
A: No real answer.

Q: I asked Tim why they built site explorer, if he specifically wants people to stop focusing on links. :) I prefaced that saying, I wanted to give Tim a hard time.
A: Google backed Tim up and then Tim said that it will stop people using yahoo.com with automated tool to grab the data (which is a great answer).

Q: Depth of links...
A: A non issue on the generic level

Q: How often are the link data updated at the engines?
A: Tim said often, MSN said it depends, Ask said the same thing (depends on architecture, Google didnt say anything. Detlev said all it took was a link from me, to get indexed by all engines except for Ask and it wasn't due to add url form.

Q: Is there a limit to Google Sitemaps?
A: Yes, he thinks 50,000 URLs per sitemap, up to 50 sitemaps per account..???? see site documentation.

Maybe ill add more Q&A if anything is very interesting...

Q: Stolen Content...
A: Google and Ask Jeeves said do not worry, we will figure out which is the original source. Bold statement, don't you think?

Q: Do you penalize for people who link to me, I don't control it...
A: Tim said, I agree, you can not always control it. But Tim said, it may bring your site unwanted attention. If you were banned, you can always submit reinclusion.
Google said they only hold you accountable for things you control.
MSN said dittoed it.

Note: Google guy says that nofollow attribute is a "critical tool."

Q: How many links - too fast - do we have to worry about?
A: Google said it has nothing to do with the number or speed you get links. But it is about the link text all being the same anchor text.
Tim, Yahoo agrees, but also make sure to be relative to your industry, do not get a crazy number of links that way exceed the norm in your industry.

Detlev Johnson is the moderator for this session and opens up talking about how marketing needs to learn about the search space and bringing back those ideas to the IT department to help do their job better.

The session starts with Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International with his presentation titled: Working Together – Selling Your Plan. He will be talking on both points and covering another speakers material. He starts saying you need to start a centralized search marketing program. Your central team handles everything you need to do in one place in your organization. They build out a search engine marketing leadership council. They also put in place a management system for search engine marketing. Established to govern SEM activities and communications. This helps improves collective results and various expectations. The first thing they ask for with a new client is ask for a style guide. Set technical standards to control spider traps such as frames, pop-ups, flash, cookies, and so on. If the client doesn’t have a style guide, then they help them create one. They keep it up to date and keep it fresh. The other thing is the program needs to be broken down into layers such as a pyramid structure who tasks for each group. Infrastructure at the bottom, coding in the middle, and content at the top. He says to start at the bottom and work your way up the ladder.

You should also train your team. Explain why search is important they all want the site to be successful and they all search themselves. Training is important to help set the fundamentals. The specialists on your extended search team need different training in their own languages. Bill next talks about tops for getting your SEM budget. There is rarely any “new money” so give solid justification of what should be and the business case for change. SEM money usually comes from other projects that have been cut. Be sure to understand the goals of the current budget allocations and show how search can compliments or increase results over current spend. Also, explain competitive pressures and missed opportunities. Provide details of “total cost of ownership”. Often how much internal money is not accounted for. At IBM, they call is blue dollars. Prepare for turf warfare and budget battles.

The first things they do is try to explain search. Example, US paid search expenditures 2003 was 2 billion. He also explains that if we are not ranked well we will lose. Portals are the number one way customers find new web sites (Forrester). 55% of web users expect to find top brands in the top few results (iProspect 2002 Survey). 95% of corporate purchasing agents use the web to research products and services before selection. Also if they can’t find it, they can’t buy it. So how many search visitors come to buy? The right search result puts the visitor in the “learn” stage to view a product page. The other big one is that most executives are competitive. “The competition is doing it or doing it better”. Be sure to show competitors ad and positions.

One of the best ways to make people play along is a missed opportunity matrix. Is it a carrot or a stick? The matrix shows a list of keywords, there monthly and annul searches and also how much traffic they are getting. You can show areas for improvement and for flavor show where they currently rank in Google. So what is the best tactic he asks. It’s a more effective tactic vs. other forms? Tell them we’ll spend the money well”. We will experiment with small amounts of money. We can buy second teir keyword phrases at lower cost per click. Once we make the major changes major benefits. We will measure constantly for keyword, bad performing keywords, spend, and so on.

The second speaker is Marshall Simmonds from New York Times Company. When you think about the NY Times as a company its big and well organized. Instead he found there was a big ego, and a good deal of challenges. In there whole network of 11 million articles, it’s a huge amount of content. Most of it is unoptimized. The NY Times has an IT department and high security on their website. There isn’t much room for big changes, it has to be small changes. Some more challenges include working with “old school” marketing and getting them to “get” search. Coping with turf wars/budget grabs and egos.

Working together is important and this includes internally and externally. At the NY Times they are all about integrating search into the work flow. It has to be as common as email. They can not chase algorithms, and the changes have to be global changes, they can’t make page by page changes. At NY Times they don’t say “change” they enhance their writing. The change in words is big and works a bit better. They make everyone part of the SEO process so that each has a job or part. He says they get a hold of the templates for the site, no spider traps, and so on.

They sell the IT teams by showing them results. Example is titles writers use, they are not effective for search. Example: About.com 1095% increase in search refers since SEO initiative began in December of 1999. So how are they communicating? Getting them to move in the same direction. Example is that the NY Times told there writer to call the tsunami event as “Asia’s deadly wave”, so all writers had to refer to it like that. But in reality it’s a tsunami and a search engine needs to understand this. He says they send out a check list, and everyone gets a checklist to complete and it gets into the workflow.

Dave Willaims from 360i first up. Key challenges; organization knowledge, integrated search strategy and data optimization. Organization's Knowledge; If everyone in the organization does not have a baseline understanding of search, how is it going to ever be a strategic marketing initiative? People invest in what they understand and are familiar with and test what is unknown. Sometime using an independent 3rd party can help build org knowledge and buy-in. One Search Strategy; is there on overarching sem strategy that is integrated with other online and offline marketing initiatives? or is your search strategy in silos? Campaign strategy will drive tractical implementations, as related to brand, keyword bucketing, performance targets and optimization and messaging. Having one integrated search strategy allows for max campaign impact and growth. Data Optimization; Do you have ownership of your data and the ability to optimize campaigns based on all historical info? statistical modeling, algo optimization and predictive capabilities. Having ownership of data allows for marketers to make accurate forecasts and ROI decisions that have max impact across all search channels. Data management and optimization is the future of search, especially as search develops. Power of data for predictions and optimizations. Search marketers can now use sophisticated stats modeling to take advantage of current market inefficiencies. We typically see a 20 - 50% lift against actively manage campaigns. Portfolio optimization example; predictive capabilities using historical data (impression by keyword, click through by keyword, cost by keyword, revenue by keyword). Optimization; predictions about future performance based on historical insights and keywords similarities. Across entire campaign or across specific buckets. Keyword grouping guidance; they typically put core terms into one bucket and say that for branding reasons we want to always be number one. For retails clients they usually assign each product a bucket and within those buckets they further break things down into high volume terms... (1) Build org search marketing knowledge for paid and seo. (2) develop a fully integrated SEM strategy that does not look at the search in a silo. (3) leverage historical data and sophisticated stat modeling to take advantage of market inefficiencies and produce abnormal returns.

Harrison Magun, Vice President, Managing Director, Avenue A | Razorfish Search. He will talk more on paid search. "1st Rule of 4": (1) Define success (2) Make a plan (3) Measure results (4) Get feedback. He was going to show a funny commercial on "Axe" but the sound card is not available. (1) Define Success: direct response metrics (sales, volume, and margin of sales...), other metrics and key indicators (phone calls, buzz, etc.), dependencies (the price of your product, site design, customer service, etc.), what's reasonable (benchmarks are critical), define key milestones. (2) Make a plan: before you build a plan, understand what you have in your toolbox. You need a bidding strategy, keyword expansion and categorization, messaging, business intelligence. Now create that project plan; how much resources do you have? Which levers (toolbox tools) do you have? What are your objectives? Also take into account your business reality (seasonality, etc.). Take into account, statistical significance/testing time. He brings up a project plan example; week x do XYZ on week n do ABC, etc. Always stick to your plan! You can't always stick to the plan!!! If you cant stick to the plan; you can have a reactive strategy or a proactive strategy, be realistic about the tradeoffs needed to be made when you do not go on the plan, the plan is your currency. (3) Measure Results: measure about weekly, measure what you did, why did you do it? what was achieved?, what are you going to do next week?, what will be achieved? The answers should inform your project plan. (4) Get Feedback: Ask for it even if you know the answer. Know who your main constituents are. Ancillary constituents are important also.

Ani Kortikar, Founder and CEO, Netramind up next to speak about leveraging tech to use tools for the session topic. How do you identify a born project manager? It is the person who is able to juggle multiple priorities, someone who can maintain the balance, and someone who can withstand the pressure, someone who can handle the customers (some funny pictures explaining it). The most common roadblocks are; Organic Growth; unsure of required skills, unclear about whats expected, unwilling to be in unknown territory, and uncommitted to taking on new responsibility. Learning to Unlearn; education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. Key attitude adjustments; no longer a functional expert, lack of specifics, less flexibility with own time, no more instant gratification. You should create a roadmap for training project managers. Create many short learning units, so they can learn over time in small segments. He says use tagging to organize these notes, use webex or gotomeeting, and create a short quiz to test the knowledge. A typical skills profile for a PM; pre project, project setup phase, project continues, project roadmap and wrap up.

Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc. is last up. Initial client communication; set scope of work and get a PO, set expectations about deliverables and timelines, identify the multiple people within the organization. She explains that sometimes too many people are involved. SEO Deliverables; keyword analysis document, competitive report, ranking and traffic benchmarks, architectural, technical and source code reviews (SEO Audit), production of SEO guidelines (style guide for company), page by page audit and keyword mapping, recommendations for new content, development of unique meta data or formula for automated meta tagging. The biggest deliverables is educating people to be patient as to what is going to happen. Timeline: Deliverables --------------> Implementation --> Monitoring and fine tuning (you need to monitor during implementation) --------> Maintenance. Integration with other online marketing (competition). Education; come to a common terminology, talk about why you cant just do organic search optimization, provide case studies and suggestions as to how and why to integrate (sempo, marketingsherpa, iab research, clickz, sew, conferences). Overlapping budgets; tighten relationship with other agencies, talk about who owns what budget (you got overlapping keywords). Measurement; offline marketing effects online traffic volume, online marketing effects offline sales, attempt to merge multiple tracking systems and backend CRMs. Creatives; consistency but not the same (text vs images, keywords vs page location, ppc vers cpm, searchers vs. eyeballs) shared branding experience & responsibility for trademarks. Search +; All bests are off as Google moves to print ads, msn goes to demo targeting, local search, personalization, community based search and rise of vertical search.

Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath is moderator.

First up Laura Thieme, President and Founder, of Bizresearch. Clickz.com said mondays are popular for online holiday shoppers. (1) 12-3 daypart receives most online traffic, (2) tuesday 12-3 is also popular, (3) Research recommend marketers target at this time, (4) Non holiday shopping usually peaks during mid-week. December 12th businesses day, December 19th is the last day for peak online shopping. Post holiday shopping is expected in January. Post Holiday Shopping: Benefits of shopping search engines; product title, image, description, price from various vendors displayed on each search results page, easy to shop multiple vendors from one place, merchant ratings, upfront price and packaging calculator and so on. Creation of a Data Feed; excel doc or CSV file of raw data file of product database to include; title, description, price, delivery cost, image and category assignment. Recommend Automation, recommend after initial data feed is created, set up automation script to run. Third party programs also can help with this. Updates can be submitted automatically as product/prices change and begin optimization. She then flips through different screens of the shopping search engines results pages. Piggy back on shopping search CPC, determine if shopping engines are advertising for your target terms. Both pricegrabber and shopping.com to do this often. Case Studies Demonstrate Need for Close Monitoring. Seven retailers tracked and varying performance. Overall over the years there has been a diminishing return on ad spend (ROAS). She shows some total costs and sales figures for all the engines. How can you track shopping search ROAS? Shopping.com & Pricegrabber offer ROI tracking by cat, and others offer tools, but not Froogle yet. Click fraud concerns; review clicks by traffic software, review shopping search clicks, talk with your vendors about difference in tracking IP addresses. Improve ROAS: watch sales to expense ratios, note changing prices in some cats, get your customers to participate in shopping search surveys, consider adding your logo or phone #, one search engine may outperform the other in the same category, review interact, ranking and pricing, ask sales rep for recommendations, and if your site has poor ROAS, dont expect shopping search to be better. Closing recommendations; quality pics, accurate product descriptions and titles, monitor search term relevancy, monitor competitive pricing, monitor customer reviews, ensure rapid and accurate fulfillment, shopping search is form of customer acquisition = need to market to them to ensure your retain the customer (email, direct mail, customer service).

Brian Mark, CTO, Toolbarn.com up next. Reasons to use shopping engines; poor visibility on generic terms, few IBL's, additional; sales from value shoppers, large group of competitors in SERPs, looking for ROI based IBL's, high marking items were few, and organic SERPs algo change proof. Four Step Program; throw caution in the wind, then scale back, then tracking and develop technology. The engines they use; Froogle, Bizrate, Nextag, Shopping.com, Pricegabber, Amazon, Become, and others will be added. Throw caution into wind; listed as many products as we can on every engine, the highest costs and lowest return. Scale Back; best converting/ROI engines used to determine products to feed, limited feeds to all other engines, higher ROI but fewer sales. Scaling back needs fixing; each site is unique and different audiences, ROI still inst calculated properly at this point, its tough to identify hot new products, needed indepth analysis. Data analysis step; They realized bizrate was doing so well, because they had glowing reviews and higher rankings. They started to chart out by SKU all the data, clicks, charges, retail and ROI. Proper Targeting; tracked with everything turned on for two weeks. Started to turn off products at 2 weeks that had seen substantial traffic but no sales, also tested products at different times for seasonality. Trim as needed; when a product isnt over 100% ROI, dont be afraid to remove it from feed, remember the bottom line is your bottom line, not every product can be a winner in every engine, different audiences at search engine. Smart Feeds Win; re-evaluated ROI after 3 months, caution free ROI was 110%, scaled back ROI 185%, smart feeds ROI grew 135% first month to 1250% by 3rd month and still increasing to date. Overall effect on sales was an immediate spike after adding the shopping search engines. The normal sales on the site dropped, because the increased traffic caused issues with the support staff. Now they got things under control. They did a site redesign, and they were no longer listed in Google, he said, thank goodness for the shopping search engines. He quickly goes over direct sales and indirect sales. If you have the technology to track them the engines can provide a great many sales while being profitable. The more you know, the better you can track the ROI back to the source.

Craig Snyder, EVP, Marchex to give the SEM perspective. Retail e-commerce sales in the first quarter of 05, were 19.8 billion, up 23.8 percent from first quarter 04. He shows on that chart, the even though the nasdaq declined, the spend on the net still increased throughout that time. Physchological factors driving e-commerce; customer control is equal to customer satisfaction, imperfect service equals do it themselves, self service is cheaper and perceived as better, time to learning is much faster and e-commerce can be extremely efficient and improve margins. He shows a slide of growth by category of media type, showing that the internet is starting to pass other media areas in terms of spend. Then he shows that most of the spend is in the search marketplace on the net and not on banners, and so on. 3 Top Reasons for Underpefromance are; Product feeds or descriptions, product pricing, and the merchandising. Keys to success; start in high margin areas, actively manage CPC's across campaign, category and product, base performance after returns, charge backs and incentives, understand pricing, pricing changes and bidding, all required fields & recommended fields, shipping price /product availability, (Lessons From the Front: (1) Completeness; images, shipping info, tax info, product weight, inventory, other product specs.) favorable ratings, referable testimonials, non standard opportunities. (Lessons From the Front: (2) Non standard opps; bold inclusions and logo inclusion.) Lessons From the Front: (3) Store Ratings. He brings up a huge "Shopping Feed Matrix" chart that shows a list of the big engines and the required, recommended and optional fields required in there respective feeds. Now he puts up a "feed positioning factors" chart by engine, too much info to write.

Stephanie Leffler, CEO, MonsterCommerce, LLC is the last one up. Conversion rate; what is your conversion rate? how do you calculate conversion rates? How do you improve conversion rates? Your Store's Search capability. 64% of users were successful in finding what they wanted on the major retail sites with a internal search. Lots of people use site search, log your search queries and spot check them. Text on "add to cart" button is very important. Add to cart works best then any other text, in her opinion. Why does that text work? minimizes perceived commitment, properly describes action, common and understood. Dont be afraid to make the add to cart button huge. Shipping Specials; shopping specials are key to conversions, according to bizrate, free shipping with conditions caused over 40$ of buyers to make a purchase. The Fold... buy buttons and submit order buttons both should be kept above the fold, if its under you can lose 10% of your orders. Product descriptions; retool product descriptions to describe benefits, rather then relying on the manufacturers' feature-focused description. Load time; fast load times convert, time your landing pages, ensure homepage loads fast, optimize your graphics. Summary; try these changes, make them one at a time, track and record results, tweak site based on results. Issues #2, security and PCI/CISP standard. 75% of the 5,000 online consumers said they are more cautious when they buy online and 1/3rd bought less due to security concerns (i think). PCI = payment card industry, CISP = cardholder info security program. If you host your site yourself, your responsibilities are vast, but if you host outside your responsibility is cut in half. (Good thing I don't store CC info on my servers). Anyone accepting credit cards must be compliant. Why do this? its a good thing for the industry, to product yourself and your clients, and to protect your customers and your reputation.

Robert Murray from iProspect starts with some statistics from Jupiter Research. 64% of search marketers run into obstacles when trying to implement SEO recommendations. 48% of search marketers says they underestimated the resources required to implement SEO recommendations.

So what are the root causes of these obstacles? Its popular belief that client thinks they can handle all the work for the SEO. It’s the responsibility of both parties to get these tasks done. There is a lack of understanding clients constraints. Some of the solutions are an extensive discovery process, involve IT department early on, and build a realistic plan. The majority of times an SEO firm will recommend a significant change on the site and if you don’t involve the IT dept. then it may not get done. Lack of senior management commitment to SEO. Some of th4e solutions are to understand there are multiple constituents involved, senior management sponsorship and before the contract look. The next item is the inability to assess impact of SEO. Some of the solutions involve providing supportable forecasts, relevant case studies, and competitor examples. The next item is lack of prioritized recommendations. It’s a must for the SEO to have the IT department work on the high impact things first, do the easy things later. Rank items as low, med, and high impact. Also assess the effort of implementation vs. return. There needs to be understanding of a development schedule. The next issue is failure to set appropriate expectations. To do ease this you need to educate clients on SEO vs. P4P results. Provide a timeline with resource requirements. There are also internal vs. external requirements. You need to be realistic in your expectations. Robert did a good presentation, he mentions a url to see a report they did here: http://www.iprospect.com/about/free-sem-information.htm

James Gardner from One to One Interactive is up to share some insights from their work. His expertise is from pharmaceutical and life sciences clients. He says we are not in the business of delivering reports, its to deliver results. The responsibility as SEO there are some core expectations in order help our clients achieve success. Training clients to become great clients.

Awkward thought: How well do you really understand what goes on inside your client organizations? Think through how you can put yourself in the client’s shoes. He ask how many could step into there job and do it at the same efficiency? No one raised there hands. In his clients world, SEO success is not mission-critical. There are large complex organization with matrixed line of authority. Multiple internal stakeholders as well as multiple agency partners to deal with. He says they had one client to do an ethnographic study of their customers, it was amazingly revealing.

Managing internal resources is important. Sell SEO and make it a priority and sell the right expectations. Get (and keep) the right internal team is essential so that things can get done. If you are running a tight project with a client that is not involved you will suffer because of it. He also says have the client lead the charge, don’t delegate or outsource to an intern. He says he has seen it done where an intern is given the work. That will not work. Celebrate and share success with clients. Also conduct periodic review summits.

About managing SEO partners and his recommendations for people contracting an SEO firm. Ask hard questions early, and ask if they know anything about your industry. Encourage to share initial hypotheses you need to share with your SEO partner – then step back as you don’t want to limit your SEO. Let them explore and let them come back with creative thinking. Find out how SEO partner help us succeed with key stalkers. Make sure to recognize successes from your SEO. Expect and welcome new thinking. Don’t settle for a laundry list – insist on prioritized recommendations. Also ask about non-recommendations. These are things that usually don’t make it you, ask your agency why they didn’t recommend certain things. Engage an SEO as a long-term partners, not project based vendors. Share and escalate feedback so the agency can improve. He also mentions a matrix for deciding what the items are the most critical. Business value one side and how significant the recommendation is on the other axis.

Successful Site Architecture

Moderated by Barbara Coll, WebMama.com Inc.

Derrick Wheeler, Marketleap

Came in late due to speaking in the previous session…as I entered Derrick was speaking about making sure that you do not accidentally get a site that is still under development indexed. If your development server is not password protected, you should ensure that the Robots.txt exclusion code is in the site’s pages, just in case Google or another search engine was somehow to find it. This also applies to using Sessions IDs, but in the reverse. You should turn Session ID requirements off in order to not dissuade the spider from indexing your content. Be careful with cookies, they sometimes also attach session IDs, which will hurt. Some sites require cookies to be turned on in order to view content. If this is the case, the search engines will not be able to see the content. Derrick shows quite a few examples of sites that were well-ranked before sessions ID’s/cookies were enabled/required…the results in the “after” showed tremendous loss of rankings and traffic.

The use of “weird redirects” can also inhibit your ability to rank/be indexed. Uses the site www.omahasteaks.com, suggesting that you type it directly into the URL. Each time you visit, you will see a different URL in the browser bar. Another issue is JavaScript requirements. This can cause problems with search engines, which will index “were sorry, but you need to install JavaScript…” etc. Another issue that can cause seemingly duplicate content is how you link within your site. All of your links on secure pages should have the full path of the URL instead of being a relative link, otherwise SE’s may feel that all pages are under the https secure URL, and therefore not “indexable.” Also mentions that you should use descriptive anchor text in your links, in order to help the search engines identify the probable content relevant to the link.

It is good to have sitemaps, but if improperly created, this can cause for trouble. Gives and example of a site that uses a JavaScript link to its sitemap, which is bad. URL structure: 3 main factors: 1 is the number of parameters you have within your URL. You should use one or two parameters, or even three, but you should be consistent, otherwise you are dealing with a possible duplicate content mis-identification. Shorter URLs are also easier for people to link-to, remember, and virally distribute. Every unique URL should have specifically unique content. Shows an example of a jewelry site that uses duplicate content on different URLs, which is bad.

When selecting a domain, do a “lemon check” to ensure if any prior owner of a domain was not penalized. Also: always think unique: if you have two or more domains indexed with the exact same content, this is bad, most major search engines specifically recommend against this practice. Darren uses a 302 redirect instead of a 301 redirect, because he has had better luck maintaining all the current links. Also to avoid: invisible text, small text, link farming. Each page should have unique content, down to META information. He suggests using CSS to present content. Note: added after the speakers were done, Barbara Coll highly recommends the fee tools available for research purposes at the Marketleap website.

James Jeude, AskJeeves
Will focus on some things that he has learned in his own experience. Improving chances of being picked by users: visual relevance is critical in order to “get clicked.” Ensure that important keywords that you want to highlight are surrounded by helpful words, in order to be used in the organic search result “snippet” description. Also, don’t forget to organize and tag all of your images. Spelling is a weak suit? Decide a strategy if you want to go after a lot of keywords. If you feel that a particular keyword will be misspelled, try to find some way to place it in the content. Keeping it short because many of the topics were already covered by Derrick.

Rajat Mukherjee, Yahoo!
Will discuss a few new developments that Y! has in store. Why is it important to be indexed in the Yahoo search index? Because the Y! Network is the largest online audience in the world…yada yada (to quote Barry). Spidering and indexing are sequential processes. You should optimize for both processes, crawling and indexing. The Spider crawls, and the Indexer removes duplicates and Spam. Ensure you enable your site though the robots text inclusion for SLURP, the Y! Crawler. Navigation: always link back to your home page. Use unique content and avoid spam. What gets crawled: static URLs and dynamic pages with in-links from static pages. You can also use feeds to send your pages with dynamic content to Yahoo for inclusion into its index.

Site Explorer: was released at SES San Jose, and there are more new features being added. It was created specifically for webmasters, and it is incumbent on all developers to go “give it a shot.” It is a set of tools and interfaces that allows for webmasters to explore a URL from the point of view of Yahoo. Will show you which pages are indexed, your in-links, and many more “neat” things. He is very excited to announce that you can now submit URLs to the site using various feeds (see the announcement today at the Yahoo Search Blog). The tool is also now able to filter specific in-links by domain. They have also simplified the support process with a new URL: help.yahoo.com/search.

The session then moved into specific questions about URLs. I will not blog these comments…come to the next SES and you too can participate and gain knowledge about your site from the panel of experts.

I was looking forward to the "Google Print & The Copyright Debate" session but it was cancelled. :( So now I need to go to a session about blog and feed search engines; they are all filled with spam anyway. Detlev is modding up this session. I believe Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! was unable to make it, so someone may take his place.

First up Kaushal Kurapati, Senior Product Manager of Search, Ask Jeeves to discuss Bloglines. Bloglines has 1 billion articles indexed, feeds that matter include 1.3 million feed with at least one subscriber and there are 2 to 3 million new articles per day. Bloglines is a free online service for searching, sub, creating and sharing news feeds and blog content. RSS or Atom works. 10 languages supported. Track buzz. Track the future with search subs. New features; hotkeys, package tracking, weekly and monthly horoscopes and winning lottery numbers. He shows screen captures of bloglines. Average bloglines user visits 4x per day - very active audience.

Bob Wyman, CTO and Co-founder, PubSub is up next. Briding Light to the Gray Web: Visible Web, Hidden (Dark) Web, Gray Web (changing web and structured Web). PubSub takes the queries in and indexes the queries and then looks for the documents live (unlike a typical search engine). As they find what you are looking for, they store it for you and tell you about it. He gives an overview of the technical process. The second problem they work on is "structured blogging" where they allow you to specify more information about why you are writing this blog entry and it becomes more structured. They have about 20 million blogs, 50k newsgroups etc. He shows off the "LinkRank" feature which ranks blogs and sites based on how many links on a trend basis (time sensitive). Some cool stats. He actually threatened black hats that if they do think "unnatural" "we" (as search engines) would do "nasty things" to you (black hats).

Scott Johnson, Founder and CTO, Feedster. They are launching a new design soon, we are the first to see it. How does Feedster get data? end user submission, crawler discovery, ping server of our own, monitor industry ping servers (pingomatic, weblogs.com), feedmesh (distributed network of ping servers), and batch data loads (45k plus podcasts). What is a blog? Original assumption; 1 feed equals a blog. No that is not correct! A blog is a non reviewed, non edited publication that is generally the result of a single person's effort. Adopting a tagged data mode; feeds (blogs, news podcast, sale, forum, etc.) every feed has one master tag which defines its nature. They're also all tagged with "everything" tag. Its not just blog search tho; yahoo got it right (kinda), its search across rapidly changing data with easy access to the latest across categories. The all new feedster homepage is now revealed. On the top you see "master buckets" with search "blogs, news, podcasts, etc.") He then showed the new results landing page, which enables you to filter by language. the default area on the left are blogs, there is a tag button to allow you to tag, which flow into a pink box on the top right that says "my tags". They also have a best results box in orange, the brings up the best results based on your search. Then a blue box for "news articles" that has recent news articles. And a green box for podcasts. Everything is taggable, blog searches automatically search blogs, news and podcasts, search zooming (jump from blog search to news search, etc.) and 1 click end user spam reporting and there is more coming.

Nathan Stoll, Product Manager, Google. He said he is the product manager of Google News but he is here to answer questions on Google Blog Search and the new reader (lens) and Google news. You may notice there are multiple blog search UIs, it depends on where you come from, they serve up different user interfaces.

Q & A:
Q: Something about blog spam...
A: Bob Wyman says it will be under control soon, he calls splog generators, "scum." Then Scott Johnson said Bob is arrogant to think that it will be under control, he said just like