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 there is email spam, it will forever be an issue. Bob retracts his statement. Then Kaushal compares it also to search spam, its a never ending battle. Nathan adds that his colleague Matt Cutts recognizes false positives happen as well.

Danny opens the session saying this is the “Blogging is Dead” panel, nice joke to jumpstart the session.

Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit is up first to discuss all three elements of the session. Blogs in the last year have gone from the warm puppy to not so much. She quotes some humorous quotes from places like BusinessWeek and Forbes. Next there are quotes of the same places slamming blogs as evil. So why the debate about Blogs? The good is that they can rapidly spread the “meme”. They can provide a personal or human face to corporations. Can provide valuable feedback through comments and trackbacks. They are bad because they can spread misinformation, rants, and wrong information.

She puts up a graph from Technorati about how blogs have been doubling and doubling and finally doubling. 70,000 blogs are created each day, she doesn’t know how long they will continue. Only 13% are only updated daily. There is about 1.2 million legitimate posts a day. The news people say that “aren’t blogs use teenagers or politically charged people posting?”. No not necessarily. She puts up a list of the top mainstream media sites. There is a good mix of blogs in there.

There is a message to use from the blogosphere. Blogs are extending and changing the tasks and role of the search engine marketer to include: Brand and reputation monitors and management, content strategy and development, and link development and site publicity efforts that include consumer-generated media.

Blogs are not the only force that is changing our role in the search marketing field. RSS is the high octane fuel is changing things. But isn’t RSS just some geeky thing and no one cares about the orange box? Well the data says different. People are using it in places they don’t know they are using it.

So why add RSS to your arsenal? You build stronger relationships, end cross platform content delivery problems, avoids email spam, and strong traffic generator from the traffic side. The best part of RSS is when you break down its uses. Such as affiliate communications, syndicating your content on other sites, new products, security alerts, product types and tips, customer communications, and so on. Its good stuff.

So if I want to use RSS for content syndication? She puts up examples of LifeTips, and they have hundreds of tip sites. You can use there RSS tip of the day feed, and get a tip each day. Smart retailers are using RSS as well. You will hear that RSS is a proven driver of valuable traffic. A simple feed could improve click thru rates.

There are some steps for managing your RSS feed. First you need to create it, then validate it, disseminate it, and finally eliminate old content. There are some great feed creation tools – trade offs out there. Tools like List Garden, NewzAlert, Composer and so are in the middle to help you. Amanda goes into optimizing your feed. Its basic SEO type stuff, I won’t go into it. Some tips though, how many feeds do I need? She says find out what your customers want.

The next horizon is going to be RSS advertising. She says watch out for it. Why RSS advertising? RSS advertising can outperform email advertising, by as much as 26%. There is a storage of online ad inventory is creating interest in new resources. RSS advertising is complex and compelling.

Stephan Spencer from NetConcepts is up second. He says he is an RSS junkie. There are two main areas he sees offering capabilities. It’s better than an inbox, and it produces interaction. So how do you take RSS to the next level. What will help subscribers keep their finger on the pulse of your business/industry and compel webmasters to disseminate to their visitors? If you are writing a book you can include revisions into the RSS feed. There is a wide range of things you create RSS lists on. Give it away, be sure to include the full content. Watch out for SEO’s using your feed content as search engine fodder and hoarding the link gain.

He puts up a few examples of RSS in action such as Yahoo news, Dealnews, marketingprofs.com, and itconversations. You also need to make it easy for subscribers to add a feed to their aggregator. Also make sure that auto discovery is also happening (Safari does this). Also be sure to have My Yahoo listings appear in search results. Create My Yahoo account, and then start pinging Yahoo with updates or use Pingomatic.

It’s also important to track user behavior and capture the link gain to right place. Track your subscribers as well if you can. Some aggregators will track the amount of subscribers you have. You can also track click-thrus which is helpful.

Up third is Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR and asks some audience questions. The bad news he says is that there are 18.5 million feeds out there and there are 22.2 million blogs out there. There are 22.2 million tv channels out there, how many are tuning into your tonight? You have 20 million competitors, that’s the bad news though.

Basically you have no choice in order to take this to the next level. Taking it to the next level can be difficult. Consumer Reports thinks feeds as text broadcast of site’s content. He shows a picture of a girl from 1938 testing a bizarre hair curler. RSS can be like that some how. The is real story is the much larger population of “unaware RSS users”. Consumer Reports magazine has 4.2 million paid subscribers. ConsumerReports.org has 2 million paid online subscribers.

So what kind of RSS feeds do people want? They want World News as number 1, and National News as number 2. You need really compelling stuff and create more than one feed. Having a feed is useful, but getting it found is a different story. People find them different ways and it’s important to distribute it as much as you can. You can use RSS Submit or Press Feed to do some distribution for you.

Create your feeds and create your blogs but create them for people. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

There are about 25 people in the room. Andrew Goodman jokes about how we have a small by hyper interested group. I have attended this session before, and it’s been good but I hope they present some interesting information this time around..

Nathan Stoll from Google is up first to talk about Google News. He is going to present some historical background for Google News and where it came from. He will continue to discuss how Google News functions, no trade secrets unfortunately, but a nice overview of how it works.

His first screen shot is a demo shot of what Google New first looked at. Google wanted to provide a level of introspection to present new articles. The styles then (2001) are similar to what it looks like today. There is the example of Indian and Pakistani news, and he asks what perspective these articles were written from. What is the best article to present from these various sources from similar locations.

Google News hosts a conversation around stories in the news. All news publishers are invited to participate. They want to offer a comprehensive coverage of online news. He says they want users to become more passionate about news from what they do. It can change the perspective the way people use news. They are scientists and don’t want to editorialize the news. The interface has gotten more complex over times, by adding RSS and Atom feeds, you can customize the interface and so on. Google crawls thousands of news sites and there is an ongoing challenging to find the best content. They want to be able to accept the broadest amount of news out there. They are always looking for new news urls. Once they grab the html page, and extract the new article and images while obeying the robots exclusion protocol, it goes to be sorted. There is some specific aspects for new articles that can be problematic for Google. They want to do it accurately as website varying and so does structure. One of the mistakes for news site is to use the same url over and over. The crawler may not recognize the article if its from a url that has been used before. He says be sure to use a unique url each time your do a news article.

So how does Google group articles by story. Google looks for the words in the articles and groups them together (clustering). They build a cluster of articles that have a high degree of commonality. Some are put in different sections, but at the cluster level they are in the same place. The search engine classifies the articles into section from clustering.

What is the most important news story of the day? How does Google decide? How do they look at a cluster to do that? A big event causes a lot of articles to be published at once. A smaller article has lesser sources. Within the group of stories, what article will be shown first? They use different signals to determine this from a web search aspect, clustering, and so on. Google News homepage changes often. They rotate between a bunch of different viewpoints. Originality is important. Google wishes to include opposing viewpoints as much as they can.

Google News Search is based on relevancy, such as the importance, recency, and relevance. One of the problems they run into is wrap ups of articles, or several news articles on the same page. Users really do understand brands very much in the news space he says. They understand brand, but also speed, reliability, and cleanness in the space. Those things can also help with publishing news articles.

Chris Tolles, VP of Marketing from Topix.net and is going to talk about the business of online news. Online news is driving major traffic. News is the second largest driver of traffic. 41% of Google users are looking for news. Online news is very sticky, a lot of return users. 39% of users at online news sites visit two or more times per day. Key 18-24 old demographic reads more news per week than any other. MySpace generate 10 billion page views a month. How do they do it? They let users create there own news.

The online transition rough for print. Online growth vs. print revenues is an issue. Is online news growing fast enough to affect offline news. He says no. There are natural monopolies breaking down due to online news from accidents in geography. You are competing with sources from around the world instead of just a local area. The business of journalism is changing. The trust of main stream sources are in flux. The audience wants to join the game. The internet you heard about in 1996 is here. The audience to support it is here. A cheap publishing system for everyone. Advertising networks turn traffic to revenue.

Search is kind of like the yellow pages. People want to come find something, and its easy to monetize. For example, you are not going to Google before you go to lunch, to find the lunch specials. It just doesn’t work yet. The monetization of news is different than the yellow pages. The user problem is the proliferation of content sources makes it difficult for users to survey the entire pool. Example of this is Palo Alto, CA, there are so many news sources. There is a tremendous amount of growth in news search. If there is a free way to publish anything, people will use it.

They are finding now that there are 8-16 million blogs that they can add as new sources. People are changing the way they view news. Why do you include them as news? They are different yes, but the people that often matter are in conversation in the blogspace. Entertainment and business are better covered on blogs than on traditional news. If you tag the news, it happens to monetize a whole lot better.

There is a huge investment ongoing in the online news area. Yahoo and Google both investing. People want to read more, they get to the end of the page and want more. There is opportunity there. This is no longer a niche, it’s a conversation. Need to create a system of participation. There is no way to tell if a emerging article will have influence on the news. The new generation expects a voice and one of the keys about the internet is that is interactive. People expect to participate and interact. A newsroom should also support itself. Weblogs point to new content models.

Very nice presentation, lots of good information in this one.

Q & A

Q: Have you had people refuse to publish? How do you monetize Google News?
A: They don’t monetize Google News at this point. Maybe in the future it seems. He said he can’t comment on things going on. Google will also not pay for royalties. You either request to be added or not. By in large the vast majority of people want to be included in Google News. They usually don’t see it as a competing source. People still use there CNN.com homepage. Its not a competitive space in that regard. Topix says they have an opt out option. In 2 years they have had only 4 people request not to be spidered. You should want the traffic.

Q: We work with organizational products. If we were to try to include links in the news source, can you do that? Or would be better to approach your (Topix) sources?
A: If you publish information that is useful to your users, you will most likely get found. You can do promotional editorials, or buy link based advertising with them. It needs to be clear to get picked up correctly.

See Andy, now I have to blog it. Andy asked if I am blogging someone's request to pump heat into this room. Danny invited the woman to his hotel room, which he said had all the heat in the room. Then Andy said I am blogging this.

Jeff Watts from National Instruments. Traffic = Community + Search + Content. Content (delivery/meta data) -- ROI --> Search (traffic & conversions/ most wanted) --continuous improvement--> Community (readers/creatores) --collaborative innovation--> Content... Buzz: The conversation is going to take place (you choose whether or not you take part). Engaging with the community allows you to respond to criticism, educate, be transparent, discover leading users (apps and trends), and grow mind-share (when customers think of you instead of the competition). Getting started with Wikipedia... They have started back about 1.5 years ago. They first tried to put an article about LabVIEW in Wikipedia. They didn't understand how to use wikipedia at the time, so there are mistakes. They originally posted a 40 word document about a product they sell. But basically, in his wiki entry he was doing a link building campaign. He did not add content to the community, he just put links. The article was not neutral, it was from the NI point of view (which is bad). Since then, the LabVIEW article is huge, has tons of details, about it. Its extremely detailed. Focus on info and community reputation. Do not focus on link building or preventing negative info from being published. Respect the community rules, especially NPOV. Benefits of Wikipedia is the traffic you get, and the quality, 3rd party, unbiased overview. (Done with wiki talk now) Better syndication through Search: syndicate your content for more traffic, self-selection, and better conversion rates. Allow & encourage users to build their own feeds/alerts (your enterprise search engine, a free search engine, third party tools like Feedster). Offline communities; use the web to distribute info to groups, slides or discussion topics, and prospective speakers or guests. Drive follow ups as well.

Nick Wilson couldn't make it last minute, so Jim Boykin and Aaron Wall jump in for him. Why is tagging is important: Search engines have tended to index and search a global space not on a local space. My space comprises the documents I am interested in and the documents of other users that I trust and want to follthw. Tagging allows you to relocate info quickly. Yahoo! My Web caches pages you tag... Brief history of tagging and info retrieval (bookmarks, dmoz, yahoo, search engines, self regulating, and then tagging itself). Just slap a tag on something and now its value become social and not individuals. What tags do really well is aid social discovery. What is tagging? Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense. The real time web, organized for you. Tag clouds are pages that show the most popular tags, the larger the word, the more popular. John Dow posts a link, people who read it may tag it, enough people link to it, it becomes more popular, tons of people read the popular feeds and then start over again. Major tagging web sites; delicious, digg, yahoo my web, technorati, flickr. Tagging to build links; you have to write good info that people want to tag. RSS makes it easy to subscribe to your site. In addition to gaining links getting tagged gives you greater share of market attention. More readers equates to more comments and more links. They talk a bit about wikis and bookmarklets (sorry, very hard to cover, maybe Jim and Aaron will post the link to the page.) Wait, go to http://blackhatseo.com/ses/wiki-tagging.html There you go, enjoy.

Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads, who is filling in for Nick W as well. A few practical tips; he approaches these sites as a marketer. He is not looking to give back to the community, he wants the free traffic and free links. :) funny. First advice, do not spam these services, its not worth it. Use your best content towards this. The one Andy concentrates on is delicious (it feeds into many of the secondary services). Learn delicious first before others. If you have blogs, put a link at the bottom of each blog post, for your readers to tag it. He doesn't want to suggest for you to game the system, but dont be afraid to ask your friends to help boost it, to get it up there and that will enable others to see the page.

Danny Sullivan is going to show off Yahoo My Web. He said he dislikes tagging, he finds it backwards. Some technical difficulties. Ok, now we are on delicious's Web site. He said now that Yahoo does it, it is much more out there to normal users. Go to my web. He shows how my Web tagging works. I covered this at the last SES conference. Saving results in the Yahoo! SERPs. The reason this is important is because Yahoo! needs better measurements. Links has been devolving and tagging may be Yahoo!'s answer to this.

Pretty disorganized session due to speaker non-shows.

Chris Sherman opens up the sessions discuss briefly about the B2B space. Is search marketing effective in this space? Is it counter productive? He says yes it is effective.

The first speaker up is Karen Breen Vogel from ClearGauge, and starts by talking about her company and what they do. They help leverage the internet to acquire and retain customers with a focus on establishing benchmarks and improvements to ROI. They are not technically a search marketing company, they are an eMarketing company.

So why is there a B2B session? There are some different issues with B2B, it’s a longer sales cycle, it can be more difficult, unique and complex. The goal is to establish a relationship with B2B that lasts several months to several years. There is also some good vertical search engines for B2B, where you can go in and do things like you are doing with Google and Yahoo buy bid on keywords and get a more qualified audience. The samller more vertical engines like Business.com and KnowledgeStorm allow you to buy traffic that is already cleansed. Keywords help determine where someone might be in the buying cycle. This allows you to tune your efforts to where they are in the buying cycle. The other thing about B2B is that tracking is more complex, we can’t optimize clicks because of the length of the buying cycle. There are points in the pipeline to sub-conversion that you need to see.

For decision makers and influencers at all stages of the buying cycle utilizing the internet to further their decision process. Allows you to educate on trends in market category and also identify and research various solutions. So how do you take advantage of these people? Place your desire to form a relation into the prospects path. Look at behavioral, contextual, demographic, and role paths. Try to be relevant, but filter the prospect. Provide multiple next step options for the prospect that create learning, route, and qualify. Be sure to measure and optimize valuable business behaviors such as registrations, downloads, specific requests, and so on. You goal is most likely to obtain permission to communicate over email or opt-in. You can’t afford to send a whole lot of traffic to your site, and not collect some emails, to bring the conversation over to email, and then bring them back to your website.

Karen next puts up a list about the various variables that impact paid search. These are such as campaign groupings, negative keywords, daily ad caps, broad match, ranking positions, keywords, message titles, message descriptions, display urls, destination url, ad groups, match types. In B2B you deal with a lower volume of traffic, its not like B2C where you have a large audience. It’s a quality problem, not quantity. She goes on that there is more demand, then there is searches available. So if you are smaller marketer with smaller ad cap, you probably won’t get shown. Large advertisers will get the better ad placements and exposure. She says they slowly raise the ad caps for smaller clients slowly till they hit a good point.

She covers the key pillars of paid search. Keyword research is one of the first. They do something call root term methodology, which reduces the words to its root. Its helps them come up with a myriad of phrases to support there lists. Next go through a process of who, what, and how. Influencer -> Decision Maker -> Purchaser.

The next pillar of search is the engagement process. You need good messages and good landing pages. They use a technique called “operative keywords”. Which are keywords that are most important to you. You know what they are if you looked at them, but building a list is helpful. She says to get more granular messaging. They built a decision tree to help clients place offers most effectively into a prospects path. Where is the tip sheet, white papers, things to know, value lists, and so on. You need to have those on your site, as content is not the only thing will draw those people in. She provides some example of her client Skyline.

The last key pillar of paid search is measuring value. What many companies has found is that many people left the homepage once they got there, or they got visitors internationally they couldn’t do business with. The key is: always get to a benchmark. Even if you not a six sigma type company, use a benchmark. Drive those benchmarks down, and you will be able to attract better prospect for a lower cost.

About measurement. She talks about maintaining an optimal lead generation funnel. There are 4 different types. Nice idea. There is poorly targeted promotions with a wide front end of the funnel and so on. She next provides and example of advanced tracking architecture examples. Take the raw data and encode it logically. Any activity is listed to track it. There is also a point systems and she goes into more complex descriptions that I won’t try to keep up with. Great presentation, lots of good information.

Paul Slack from WebDex is the last speaker for this session. What happens when you think of the typical business 2 business sales cycle. Like getting new equipment, reduce expenses, and so on. The next thing they will do is research possible solutions, get s hort list of vendors, go to bid on a company, and make a decision. The B2B oppourity in the middle of the cycle. There are two critical players who will use search engines… and they search differently. The influencers and also the decision makers.

Influencers are the most important group he says. They often begin the sale cycle, and so they are the first one to come to your website. Influencers also understand the problem and will search in detail with often more than more than 3-5 words. They are still in research mode however, and most likely to respond to a call to action. They are not the decision maker, but rather the grunt that is doing the leg work. Paul gives an example, for a network security company doing a white paper for Nerc 1300 standard in the industry. They wrote an executive brief, put it on the website, optimized for the phrase Nerc 1300. After a year, they had a 13% conversion rate. It worked.

On the topic of internet marketing, websites don’t exist for their own sake, but to fulfill a specific purpose and to satisfy a specific consumer need. He says they have a hard time getting that across to his customers. Overall another good presentation from Paul.

Creating Compelling Ads

Moderator Andrew Goodman

Vic Drabicky, Range Online Media

Creative evaluation is all based on goals. Are there two main types of creative, Google or YSM? Or many more? The answer is only the two main formats are important, they can be recycle into MSN and others. Step 1 of 3: Titles: Most important part of a listing. If you do not catch the attention of the searchers, all is for naught. Use KW in title, but recommends against Dynamic Keyword Insertion tool…it can hurt as much as it helps. At YSM, simple: customize all keyword titles. Always be grammatically correct! If doesn’t read right, can hurt brand and results. Differentiate yourself from competition as frequently as possible. They like to repeat keyword as often as possible, such as Cole Haan client example where they use Cole Haan in the Title, description and obviously URL, for a search for the brand.

Ste 2: you have user’s attention. The description has to “weed out” converters from non-converters. Again, customize description for keywords. At Google, customize per Ad Group, as focused as possible. Once again, take the time to create individual descriptions for every single keyword phrase at Yahoo. Tell your story: include your brand, clearly indicate your value proposition, and use a call to action! Step 3: Use display URL that is most “valid” so people don’t feel they are being duped into going to a wrong site. In one case, this resulted in a .43% increase in CTR, and 25% increase in conversions(!) when they switched the display URL from niketown.com to nike.com.

Best practices: always be grammatically correct, careful w/keyword insertion tool. The more customized the title and description, the better. “Think like Rod Roddy”- he always read what the product was without any sales intonation when describing sponsors on “The Price is Right.” Tell people what you have, don’t try overly to sell to them. Nobody’s goal is to get every click, only to get every profitable click! Lastly and most important is to Test, test, test, This is easier at Google to do this than at YSM, but can be done there too.

Andrew comments on very full room… Never have so many people been in attendance to hear about how to write so few words.”

Darren Kuhn, Resolution Media
Will walk through case studies. First, their approach to performing PPC Tests: Select ad groups w/strong ROI and low CTR at Google. Always a good idea to get industry average CTR. Next, test keywords that are very related to each other. Keywords and ads should link to the same URL/landing page. Minimum that each creative within test gets at least 50,000 impressions and 500 clicks during the test period…thus the duration should be at least until these numbers are reached. But definitely important to test for at least two weeks.

Test phase: typically create 4 to 6 creatives with differing message types, such as product guarantees, price points, free shipping, etc… Next, use a specific tracking tag. Disable Google Optimizer (Dana Todd also said this in SE Advertising 101 yesterday). As said before, go at least 2 weeks and until you reach minimum threshold of click and impression volumes. Analysis phase: outperforming is not only CTR, but a combo of CTR and ROI. If there is a clear winner, go with it! Extend your findings to other portals if applicable. If no clear winners, restart the process with new themes altogether.

Study #1, Client in Home Décor space - 3 week test - 5 creatives. Key Findings: Ad #1 was the winner despite not having best CTR, since its conversion was greatly higher than the others. While ad 3 had the highest CTR, it did not bring any sales during test period…this was using the keyword insertion tool, ironically (the only one that was). Test number two focused only on URL changes, and in all cases the ads with the keyword in the URL outperformed the others. 3rd study was all about content match. 2 creatives, one using brand name –Official Site, #2 used “Find” followed by keyword insertion tool. In this case, the keyword insertion tool actually worked and yielded a very higher CTR as before, but a statistically equal conversion rate. They feel that since these were for contextual ads only, the use of the keyword as often as possible helped more than the use of the Brand. Test 4 was a test of automated proportions, creating 54 ads through the use of software. The limit on this test was that Conversion could not be tested (or they chose not to use the Google Tracking tool to do this). So they recommend using an automated test to determine the top 6 or so high CTR ads, and then running a manual test to go through and find the highest conversion rates.

Q&A
Now that Google is offering web analytics, will they have more specific tools able to measure click-throughs-to-conversions? Vic, doesn’t feel that it will greatly affect the ability to provide this kind of data than many of the third party tools already have available.

Should I use PPC to combat “bad press?” Vic, if you need to beat bad press, it is a good first step. Darren: yes and you should consider working on ways to organically improve as well. Andrew: comments on a search for Vioxx performed at MSN which yield the investor relations page as #1, just above a “Vioxx Recall results. (Chris note: Funny thing is, this content will probably be hosted on a page that now presents ads for Vioxx or lawsuit-related information…is it just to the right of this?)

Recommendations on use of TM symbol to increase CTR? Darren and Vic both have seen mixed results using this strategy. Vic also mentions that that is one less character you have to work with.

Are there different guidelines writing for service site versus retail site? Certainly, says Vic, he feels that there should be customization for every single brand or service. Darren: if it is a competitive service offering, especially remember to state exactly what you do in the description and differentiate yourself from the others.

What tools do you use in order to exhaust your spend mostly on keywords that are performing best? Vic, separate campaign into different budgets, placing the good performers in an ad group with a higher daily budget.

Came in a bit late...

Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR is on the podium talking about how many fixate on Google News and ignore Yahoo News and AOL News. Now Yahoo! news is number one! Yahoo! news is number one. SEOs and PR people need to focus less on outputs and more on outcomes. Getting high rankings helps, if searchers read your release. Having searchers read your release helps, if it enhances your brand awareness. Enhancing your brand awareness helps, if it drives traffic to your site. Driving traffic to your site helps, if it generates leads. Generating leads helps, if they convert into sales. Optimizing press releases activity varies by industry from 1% to 18%. The number one industry catching on to SEO PR releases is the computer/electronics industry. Sports PR releases are only optimized 1% of the time. 62% have PR releases optimized inhouse, 14% do it by an agency. Copywriting for SEO used by 31% of marketers and 13% of agencies. Copywriting for SEO used by 35% of B2B marketers, 17% of agencies. 44% use site traffic and 41% use press mentions as success metrics. B2B Case Study: Jeanne Hopkins, directory of outbound marketing, Symmetricom. Even search term, atomic, clock, was too broad of a keyword phrase for Symmetricom. They optimized the release for "chip scale atomic clock" and other very niche terms ("portable precision timing"). One lead turned into 200 million dollars or something, from a lead they would have never anticipated, but that was only one of the eight leads. C2C Case Study: Linda Rutherford, VP PR, Southwest Airlines. The initial attempt to optimize a press release ran into turbulence. They used the word "Cheap" in the title and it went to the chairman and he was upset. But Linda showed the keyword research for the "cheap" keyword and he changed his mind. The next effort mixed optimization with prices as low as $29 one-way. So a combination of search terms in headlines and marketing verbiage is critical. Release generated over $80,000 in revenue from that release. Southwest made four big announcements on July 15, 2004 and sold 1 million dollars with a competing PR release, about the CEO leaving. The other news release about the CEO brought in more views on the other release! There are writing a book with Anne Holland at MarketingSherpa on PR SEO, if you have case studies, send it to greg.jarboe AT seo-pr.com.

Nan Dawkins from RedBoots Consulting next up. They targeted journalists to get the word to Washington. Blogs content appears in all types of search engines (news, normal web search, rss search, etc.). How does new search deal with blog content? Google says "no blogs" in Google news, but they kinda do as we all know (but not my blog). Yahoo! separates out blogs in news search. MSN gets blogs from Moreover. AOL does not have blog content mixed in. Which blogs are included in Google? Only two of the top 10 blogs are included in Google News. But Google does have lots of small blogs in Google news (she mocks one specific example). Yahoo! puts all blogs into their blog search results, including lots of spam. Blogs are listed on right hand side. Tips: Establish a blog outreach program. Make contact/develop relationships just as you would with journalists. Send your release to trusted bloggers prior to releasing it through wire service. Send bloggers the optimized press release. Pay attention to images. Dont skip the wire service!

Sally Falkow from Expansion+ is now up, the final speaker. She comes from the traditional PR background. Publicity is seen as third party endorsement. An article in the media has more perceived value than material that comes directly from the company. Building trust and credibility is the basis for PR. Media placement building trust and credibility. TrustRank - links from trusted media sites can influence your organic search results. (side note: She is talking about devaluation of links and how press releases help, its like listening to my mother talk about links, im like "what!!!!") Traditional media relations: company -> wire service -> reporter -> target audience. Now we have online news, we know where it is coming from, we can track it. Also, we have our trusted media source, in these online media locations, and now we again are trackable. Keyword strategy: find the best head and long tail words. Write newsworthy, optimized articles based on these words. Editors are looking for excellent content. What is newsworthy? new research, stats, tie into a current news item, money, harm or damage, and timely info. Find sites that get picked up in Yahoo! news for your keyword. News search and rss: use rss feeds! She shows Google BlogSearch. Resources: expansionplus.com, falkow.blogsite.com, press-feed.com.

Lee Oden from Top Rank is on the Q&A panel.

He explained that when he originally gave keynotes he had search engines involved. But people want to be inspired by keynotes. So he decided to start with some "rosy view of our industry". He posted a link of a guy in a spam guy (jason duke, in the spam suit). He quoted Seth Godin's quote that SEO is worthless. Then quoted Anil Dash, who won that contest. Quotes as criminals and cockroaches by others. He then put up a slide, to:

"blame the black hats!" You should see this picture he used. Blog spamming, keyword stuffing, scum sucking lazy content thieving no goods ruining the industry with their cloaking actions!!! But now, NPR and other companies can cloak, without being black hat. Hijack victims have largely the black hats to thanks for raising awareness of the problem. Large, respected publications selling links. Web site of respected blog software hosting doorway pages stuffed with AdSense. Bloggers fretting that nofollow ruins the trackback link love they "deserve."

But really "blame the white hats!" slide, with an angelic like cartoon image. "Algorithm ignorant, simple tips overselling, non competitive industry best practices excuse giving naive goody two shoes..." The simple tips are not really simple to those outside of the industry. Working with designers and others to do content SEO is not easy. There are differences and degrees between content driven tweaks and aggressive methods.

Blame the Organic! Black arts dabbling, unclear line walking, low margin grubbing, whiny unpredictable depending small fry drivers of the search industry that bring down the real driving force (PPC). But, paid search is boring, the relief that finally there's something other then search (WOMMA), and that successful organic puts people in the prime position that money still cannot buy.

"Blame Search Advertisers!" Machine driven, money rules all thinking, getting all the search engine attention and swag for selling the less important search results page real estate..." Paid gang isnt whining about the latest Google update wrecked their business. Without paid, search might not be able to offer the organic results. Paid can instantly start generating results today!

United By Search!!!!
- We're all very different people
- Black, white organic and paid
-- we mostly do mix, some do paid and organic, etc.
- But we have one thing and common; we are stupid enough to be in search.

Who Loves Ya Baby?
- Anecdotally, search of all types in demand
- Recent articles talked about the difficulty in hiring good search people (its not just the search engines fighting for the talent, also SEM firms
- Search was born in the depths of the ad downturn, so todays not a bubble. Search is now a fundamental ad medium. Search will be everywhere!

Communities & Community
- We all have our handouts
- Mailing lists: I Search, SEM 2.0, Search Return
- Conferences: SES, PubCon, Ad:Tech
- Forums: WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, SEW Forums, HighRankings
- Blogs: SE Roundtable (thanks Danny), SEO Book, ThreadWatch
- Organizations: SEMPO, SMA, Dallas, Atlanta
- But we grow across our cliques; he brings up an example of ian turner missing and uses it as example of how we all came together to help find him. We all came together to act.
- Yahoo Search Blog, Google Blog, the search engines posted about Ian!
- SEs Part of our Ecosystem (they like us).

- He posted my marriage proposal on the screen, via Ask Jeeves. Wonder how red I turned. :) But he explained how the search engines are friends with the search marketers...

- Friendly Rivals
- another first, Yahoo! made fun of Google for running out of beer at the Google Dance (ses party rule)

Community Rewards
- Weather reports from the engines
- Nofollow - love it or hate it - we got more control
- Google Sitemaps
- Yahoo Site Explorer
- Google Sitemaps Stats
- Google Base

Love it But Want More
- Blogging community can monitor all their new links in Google Blog Search
- Why cant the longer established SEM community get more important web search info
- Maybe further indexing control to come
- Yahoo Site Explorer gives some but needs to give much, much more info
- Time to go past the URL feeds and into content feeds for all, esp. with rogue spider issue
- Ad reps as friends, not foes.

Outside Recognize Community
- The focus is not only on the search engines so much, anymore
- Search marketers are getting the spotlight
- Quotes in Wired, etc.
- Shows Bruce Clay's photo, about him in Wired

Search Not Odd, Unusual
- He is a tech entrepreneur, not simply an SEO
- Martha's apprentice, before the seo was fired, he said, when i search for "recipes" i dont get marthastewart.com.

But Rep Problem Remains
- Despite gains, many will still see us as the used car salespeople of the Web
- Two challenges; scummy companies (the law will sort them out) and trespassing content (it has to stop, but it wont).

End to Comment & Link Spam
- I'd love to see it become deemed unacceptable, frowned upon, downright rude behavior...
- Posted up a forum poll (t=7872)

It's The Right Thing Not to Do
- If not because it's just wrong to trespass, consider the consequences
- Google PageRank Lunacy by Mike Grehand
- He shows examples of sick guestbook comments (its rude and wrong)

Foot Soldiers / Fuel
- I've spoken before of search marketers as the foot soldiers that have built search
- More to the point, you're what fuels the search engines.
- He puts up a theme song we can sing
- He shows a Google Maps plot of the SEMs in the world from SEW forums

In Conclusion:
- Add yourself to the map
- Be pumped up; 2006 will be great
- Please pick a day for Search Marketing Day (and its search week, coming to NY)
- Next Time, let's see a search marketer win the apprentice (no we want the apprentice to be one of us, running the show). Fredrick Marckini is the poster child of success in our industry.

Search Advertising 101

Moderated by Andrew Goodman, who introduces Dana Todd.

Dana Todd, SiteLab
Starts with an intro to general terms. SEM does not equal PPC. PPC buys are on Search Engines, sites, networks. Pure form: search ads appeared only with related searches. Next generation: recycles PPC and places them into contextual or content networks- adds are relevant to the page’s content. Shows the difference between paid an unpaid listings. How does it work? Direct buying, ad auctions that use max bids. Bid Higher = stay higher, system corrects bid gaps: you pay a penny more than the ad below you. Ad auctions, “Google style” is more difficult to define.

Direct buy examples: Knowledgestorm, Earthweb (owned by Jupiter).

Auction model: Yahoo… mind the bid gaps, and remember that you only pay one cent more than the next highest bidder. Defines bid trapping (forcing the top bidder to pay their max bid if they are trying to “corner the market”). Auction: Google style, This is a blind auction – you do not see competitor max bids like In Yahoo. Ad rank determined by various factors: max bid, quality score, geographic targeting, behavioral targeting. What is quality score? Keyword CTR + relevance of ad text + historical keyword performance + other relevance factors. Top positions above organic must have highest “Actual” CPC, sometimes they will not appear on top, but only on the right, based on their actual CPC.

Getting started: have to have a project plan. Account organization, kw selection, control distribution, set values and goals, tracking, building the ad, and going live. In order to perform well at the contextual level, ad groups in Google should be tightly clustered together semantically. For example, keep roller skates and tennis shoes in different groups. “Buckets” are defined as keyword groups, usually grouped for reasons of data analysis Things to watch during keyword selection: competitor sites, trade literature, vertical sites, software, suggestion tools, etc... Look for both “head” and “tail” terms. Buy brand names! Consider competitor names or trademarks. Controlling ad distribution factors: Match types include Broad, expanded, phrase, and exact match. Use negative keywords to avoid unqualified visits.

Setting base values and goals: think on a business level. What actions do you value as a company? Leads? Visitors? Phone calls? What does "conversion" mean to you? What metrics to use? CPA? ROI? ROAS? Setting up tracking: Website analytics such as urchin-now Google, Omniture, etc.. Ad serving software such as Mediaplex, Doubleclick, Atlas - this works on a third party redirect, and can be good for integrating various campaigns along with search advertising such as banners, etc. Offsite tracking? How can you track this? Call (phone) tracking, coupons, promotional codes. Post click behavior…look at lifetime customer value. Building the ads: because CTR affects your position at Google ( and will soon do-so in Yahoo!), creative text is critical. Use kws in title and/or description. There are limited text requirements, which make it difficult if you are not experienced in writing search ads. Cool tip: Use the shortcut keyword insertion tool, known as dynamic keyword insertion, {keyword:default title} automatically places user keyword in the title. (this tool only in AdWords)

Searchers prefer uninterrupted logic. You should land people on specific page, such as the “pug dog” page instead o\f a general page about dogs, if “pug dog” is what they searched. Schedule: map out a calendar in terms of campaign rollout, reporting schedule, testing periods, other promotions, budget changes. Schedule promotional and seasonal messaging. Use dayparting to target best times of day or week for conversions. Overlay any expected seasonality. Schedule a quarterly “housecleaning" - Stresses this in order to clean up the account and improve performance at least once a quarter.

Goes through an “under the hood” of both major portals. Suggests not to use “bulk sheet” download at Google unless you know what you are doing. Budgeting: Google and Yahoo are setup for daily budgeting, but this doesn’t work too well. Uses prior day’s stats to try to project a spend for the next day. Tip: do not use daily budgeting feature at if you are on CC payments, because this can cause the system to not work (note: I will try to update this as soon as I speak w.Dana- I think she is speaking about YSM with a daily CC charge instead of a "different amount specified"). Most “Tier 2” engines are on a monthly budget. Managing bids: Bid management software helps. People are still required! Bid rules…don’t use too many on a particular kw as it may cause a “freak out.” Rules can include ROI values, dayparting, keyword behaviors, “bid wars,” and others.

Optimizing and maximizing: once you are doing well, you should consider expanding buy to include more kw’s or contextual, for example. Fin d the “sweet spot” for each keyword. Use Search marketing for cross-channel marketing.

Matt Van Wagner, Find Me Faster
There is no “perfect campaign.” If you spend the time to build a good process, it will create a sustainable advantage. Use system-level thinking: align campaign goals with larger company goals in order to increase sales, not just visits. Track performance and make adjustments: be methodical, measure frequently, but don’t get “analysis paralysis.” Also, searchers are “informavours” – wild beast looking for information. If they lose the scent, they will leave. It is important to remember this when thinking of landing pages as well as your content.

Matt gave a few examples of how PPC Campaigns can be structured in order to perform better. A site providing “pet bereavement” products had a low budget, but needed to maximize their sales. They found that the majority of their clients were women that owned cats, so they switched their focus to related keywords and increased their overall ROI. When measuring data, it is important to measure actions, not just CTR or CPC. There are a variety of measurement tools. The portals have their own, but Matt highly recommend the use of third party independent analysis. Another sometimes forgotten performance measure is the number of phone calls a business gets. If these increase after any campaign, it is a good sign. The best measurement strategy is to use a hybrid mix of conversion tools and other methods of measuring offline conversions.

Another case study spoke about Flutter Fetti, the “Cadillac of Confetti,” as Matt described them. After Hurricane Katrina, their business was demolished. They instituted a new PPC campaign, but were spending too much on one broad keyword: “confetti.” By adding more specific keywords and some negative keywords, they greatly increased their performance. Matt goes on to recommend against using the “Ad Optimizer” because this skews the results of particular ads - eventually using only the higher CTR ad, which may not necessarily be the higher converting ad. Do your own research and manage your ads instead of letting Google do it for you.

On organizing campaign: once again, make your campaign think like your business thinks. Take the time to give your campaigns and ad groups significant names: for example “men’s sweaters” and “women’s sweaters.” Not only does it make it easier to group your keywords, but also easier to shut off particular campaigns or boost up the budget based on current inventory. Another good tactic is to organize keywords around the buying cycle. For example: in the “pre-aware” stage, use “PC printers;” then during the “aware” stage, use “laser printer;” then during the “shopping” stage, use “color laser printer;” and finally during the buying phase, target specific models such as “HP1234.”

Closes with stressing the importance of knowing your market. Some performance will vary based on position. For example, if women are more likely to look at all the top 5 listings and check each URL by waving over them, perhaps it is better to bid lower than if your target is men who may be more likely to simply click on the first listing.

This room is pretty empty, maybe people will come in a bit late. Seriously, maybe like 25 people right now, at 3:48. Danny jokes about the number of people in the audience. He introduces the book search deal.

Dan Rose from Amazon was up first. He is talking about "Search Inside the Book" program. It allows searches to look inside the book, instead of just title, meta or description. Launched it about two years ago, they work closely with publishers (they do not scan books, u must submit the content electronically). This product leads to increased book sales. Amazon and publishers are cool with this because it increases sales. He shows a screen capture of a search at amazon on "energy swaps" and how it uses inside the book to find this result, "excerpt on page 35" is where it is found in the context. He shows how you can scan pages. Access is limited to authorized Amazon customers. Viewing is limited to 2 pages forward and back, not more then that. Search inside also allows them to innovate new features like; first sentence of the book, SIPs (phrases found in this book at a higher rate then other books) and CAPs (phrases in caps). Then other features like books on related topics, concordance (visual demo of the 100 most used words in this book) and text stats (interested text stats on the book). Pretty cool stuff. Nov 3rd they announced, Amazon Upgrade; which enables those who buy the book to buy an upgrade to search inside the book with unlimited access. Also announced the ability to purchase individual pages of the book.

Tom Turvey from Google. He goes over Google's mission of making the world's info accessible, yada yada. Online channel is increasing its presence in the book market. 13% of all book sold, are sold online. The book market itself continues to publish more books each year, 195,000 books published in 2004, it increases every year. Google already drives traffic to online book sites. Google is the global leader among search engine referrals for book sales (~60%). Google Books Partner Program; thousands of publishers already on board. Its not just about most popular searches; its about everything. The partner program philosophy enable consumers the ability to search, discover and then buy and then provide publishers reports. Google wants to make every page searchable. Google Users can search just books, books.google.com or at Google.com. They are looking to add "buy this book" links and add partners' brand on each page. They also allow publishers to place ads at bottom of page. When a user views one of your books scanned pages, Google reads that page and adds text ads for related products and services. Reports on Partner's Programs, total page views, total clicks on "buy this books", CTR, total clicks on ads, ad CTR and net ad revenue. Content is protected; protected by the same high level security as Google's own data, Google monitors for large scale attacks. They also have page level security, restricted pages and login with google account id. Google Print; Publishers provide PDF of physical copy of books to Google, Google digitizes it, User searches Google, User is linked to the book and user can buy it. Library Project; more than 80% of published books are now out of print. the goal; 20% of books are in print; 80% of books are out of print; goal is to make them visible. A typical library collection is where 60% or more of books are unclear copyright status; but 20% are in the public domain and Google has those 20%. Three user experiences; there is a full view (up to 20%), there is a snippet view (copyright views) and Full Book view (no restrictions). He goes into more detail on the snippet view, (controversial view), that only shows a snippet of the content.

Sumir Meghani from Yahoo to discuss the Open Content Alliance. Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. Expanding the amount of content available online and making it accessible in an open manner. The OCA represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, tech, nonprofit and govt organizations... from around the world...that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Founding contributors were 9 in total (Adobe, HP, Internet Archive, OReilly, University of California and Toronto, etc. OCA Policies; Content is only made available on an opt in basis, Accessibility will be huge, anyone can index it and search it (meta data accessible via oai and rss), Third parties encouraged to build services on top of content in the collection, Existing digitized collections can be included in repository with permission of content providers.

Thiru Anandanpillai from MSN Search, without a PPT. MSN is doing book search because vast majority of very complex queries go unanswered and it takes up to 7 - 11 minutes to get the answer. There is also an element of trust and people want trusted sources. They want to make it easier for people to find answers. MSN took the approach; they figured it was important to work with the publishers who know what people want in books and its also easier to work together with others to digitize the content. So they joined the OCA (Open Content Alliance). They will ensure the end users can interact with the book as much as possible, they wont say when. And from a publisher perspective, they will ensure there are monetization methods. Publishers care a lot about control.

Tony Sanfilippo from Penn State University Press. He discusses all the published papers by universities. He goes over the long tail when it comes to people who buy books, of the top 150 or so, 50% of books are sold outside of that. His main market is library and then students (libraries want hard cover books). His director asked how are people going to find these books. That is when Google Print came by. Of the 1,000+ titles, they signed up 972 publications with Google. They have great success with this. 300,000 accesses to their site, which they are amazed of. He discusses netlibary which brings in $600,000 per year. ebrary isnt great because it requires a proprietary reader. They got a 130 titles in a program named Questia (spelling?) and get about $2,000 per year on that. They are looking into joining the OCA, they have some internal politics. They have issues with Amazon's license agreement; specifically Amazon retains the right to decide which content comes down if there is an issue (that is a deal breaker). Google offered a 45 hour take down on content. They wanted to make the content more accessible.

Where is Gary Price? We miss you in this session. Chatting with Gary now, here are some live virtual gems from our link to the library world.. Some additional resources from Gary:

• Public Domain Books: More than 25,000 Full Text Books in a Single Database
• More Online Books Resources
• Book Search Without the Fuss

Danny just beat up on bloggers, kidding... And then embarrassed me... kidding again.

Update: Also check out Lee's coverage on Advanced Search term Research Tools.

Rebecca Lieb opens the sessions discussing that this session is something new for SES. They will talk to some extent about integration and there will be plenty of time for questions. How many people do other advertising beyond search. A good majority of the people raised there hands showing there is other success beyond search.

First up is Tessa Wegret from Enlighten, who is a column for ClickZ that writes on media buys each Friday. She will talk about integrating different competent with search. Blogs can help boost search engine ranking and there are many benefits to using them. They are dynamic, interactive, sincere. 50 million Americans (30% of American internet users) visited a blog in Q1 2005. The effect on search engine rankings is caused by frequent updates and unique content. Many companies are linking the blog to their corporate websites. She gives an example that she contributes to a Toronto newspaper. Sh found a small real estate firm, trying to compete with the Remax and big budget clients. The small firm started a blog, in several weeks they were able to achieve top rankings for “Toronto real estate”.

There is a downfall to the blog/search relationship. 4.12 million blogs created to date. 66% of blogs not updated in last two months. Over 1 million blog maintained for one day only, never updated again. Splogs (spam blogs) are also a problem, as they serve as link farms, and senseless text and creating a lot of search clutter. Organic/natural optimization is more challenging. The solution is to combine a blog marketing with enhanced search marketing efforts.

Her next topic is about rich media multimedia search. There are ad campaigns part of brand identity, and the good one evoke pride in being associated with your brand. There is increased broadband adoption fueling consumer search for online video and audio content. What a lot of marketers are doing is posting there rich media on there websites. Some do this as a directory or make it searchable. They make sure the advertising is accessible to “trend disseminators”. The major search engines will also be able to spider the rich media and make it available to users. Many online advertisers still not integrating search. There is a disconnect between online marketing campaigns. Search isn’t only scientific, there is a real art to writing the ad copy in your campaign. Use the PPC copywriters for your organic copywriting. She quotes (Bernstein?): “The essence of your competitive advantages lies in the mental capital you have built up in the buyers heads.” Good presentation.

Hollis Thomases from Web Ad.vantage is up second she starts to explain about her company and go into what happened in the Old Days. Then there was no text ads in search, only display ads. There was a place called GoTo, but no one really went to GoTo or Overture to search. Yahoo used to have a hybrid logo text ad that did very well. She says its shame they did away with that as it was very successful for clients.

Non-search supporting search is brought up. You begin with PPC search and she says there is limited inventory on these engines. You can’t manufacture more searches. You serve re-targeting pixel. It records if there is no purchase by consumer. They will later on and see same consumer served display ads. There is a behavioral competent to this as well, by using keywords to trigger behavioral targeting. The last part of non search supporting search is niche/affiliate audiences. The long tail search terms will drive traffic & / or sales to identify new sites on which to advertise. Additionally you can use offer sites as fertile testing grounds to reveal what language and offers will help drive traffic and or sell product (example Cool Savings).

The next areas she covers is integration, considerations and best practices. Be sure to consider character restrictions in search. Look at lead time for new keywords. Altering landing page content to meet with search editorial approval. You may also want to hedge your impression based ad spend, such as testing responses to offers in search before display. Many keywords, not so many variations on display. Display is more expensive to produce (especially rich media). Another tactic is to keep exclusive, stronger special offers for non search to increase likelihood of response. Finally, she recommends to not be afraid to test.

Some pitfalls to avoid. You access to/control of organic & PPC campaign such as performance data, ad copy, client side division of labor into silos. So can display ads impact search? For online “generic” “non-wow”; ads impressions have to be really high and very visible. For every creative, clever ads these tend to be more viral.

Global Search Landscape

Came in very late (at the beginning of Q&A) because I was accidentally covering the Demographics and Behavior session, which Barry did.
Moderated by Nacho Hernandez from ihsipanic.com, who kindly spent a few minutes with me after the session to go over this information. He also reminded me about the great forum section at SEW forums about the Multilingual Search market, where people can go to find out about a lot of international search-related issues. Then he mentioned that SES has expanded the World Tour to include SES Latino- focussing purely on the Latino SEM Industry- for two days in Miami in July 2006 (that leaves two days for the beach :), and added a show in China in March 2006.

Speakers were Andy Atkins-Kruger, Web Certain
He spoke about lots of opportunity especially in terms of lack of competition in some countries. For example the amount of population versus Internet saturation. More opportunity exists because it is less saturated. He spoke of a model about how to measure a new market: Probability of Ranking + Internet Audience + Market Size. Also spoke about domain targeting, and “trans-optimization.” Use the following order : 1. Keyword research 2. Glossary 3: Translation 4. Optimisation. Spoke about European market and its opportunities.

Lucas Morea, LatinEdge Inc.,
Another leader in the latin Search industry, Lucas provided his usual excellent insight. His highlights: online to offline is critical…do not assume they will buy w/ cc online…focus on lead. Providing a call center can be a huge lift. How there is a much bigger "head" in Latin America versus huge "tail" in the US (see this coverage for an explanation of Head/Tail search terms). Latin Americans are much more likely to search less specific terms. Talked also about cultural aspect related to conversions, and finally the opportunity of broadband growth and population growth.

David Temple, Top-Rank

Spoke about the opportunity with Asia, and the difficulty there since languages, although seemingly similar, are very distinct. China has largest percentage of growth opportunity.

Q&A

Interesting question about using (dot)eu versus individual country domains in Europe. Andy: not sure, still uncertain . (dot)EU is not very specific but still should be used to protect trademarks, etc.

Organic language optimization for Chinese language websites? There is very little kw research available, so the best way to do it is to work with someone in local market, or at least compare the [popular keywords in English. Nothing like a Wordtracker exists for Chinese yet.

Are search engine stemming accent marks? Looking for an exact match? Andy: it varies between search engines…Google has changed a few times from one direction to the other. Can’t really call it “stemming,” instead maybe a better term would be “normalizing” the result with our without an accent.

Has a publishing term that covers computer and IT industry…is it still important to translate even though many in this field speak English? Andy: would be wise to translate in order to increase the reach. Lucas: some instances exist where different forms of Spanish will identify something slightly differently.

Nacho pulls up Google Zietgeist to shows lots of various search metrics, but only from May 2003 did he ever find reference to what language people used to search in Google.

Lucas: Screen resolutions can vary greatly from Country to Country, based on age of monitor and video card.

Should national URL’s be hosted in local country as well? If you go to a local domain, it makes life easier. In general, it is more about where the site is placed, and the easiest way to do that is by having the domain. Nacho ads that you have greater control in fixing issues with a server, etc, if it is hosted where you are. Consensus seems to be that you do not have to host in in the actual country.

How difficult is it to enter the Asian market vs Europe? Much more diffcult because of greatly different character sets. Look at target countries and target languages, and start there.

Wondering if any data regarding how many people search globably vs choosing “only UK results,” for example. Unfortunately, there is no current data source for those Metrics that Andy knows of, and he would appreciate any such data.

First up, Jed Nahum from MSN Search and he explains that targeting is what it is all about. He went over some of the highlights of adCenter, they piloted in France and Singapore earlier in 2005 and now they have a US pilot. Audience intelligence drives ROI. Learn about your customers and connect via rich targeting and then refine your campaign. Learn about your customers, he shows a slide about a keyword research tool that has all these cool demographic tools within adCenter. He compares Oprah versus Dave (letterman). Oprah has more female centric, Dave is more male centric for searches. Dave's is a bit younger and Oprah's is older. Dave's audience is a bit richer. But in fact, Oprah has 20x more searches then Dave. That is why Oprah, herself is a bit richer then Dave. :) Connect through targeting (bid boosts); demographics, geographic, day of the week and time of day. He then pulled some comments from customers on how cool the tools were. Refine Your Campaign; he shows a rich report with lots of data.

Next Up Roy Shkedi from AlmondNet. 40% of internet ads dollars are spent on search engines where people spend less than 5% of their online time. On the majority of the sites where people spend the other 95% of their online time - the ad supported content is sold for very low CPMs. After people search, Almondnet presents people with additional paid ads. So basically you do a search in Google, lets say on "health insurance", then later, he is on fox search, the ad space on fox news is then served up to the banner space on fox news. It basically tracks your searches and then serves up ads on other non-search sites through contextually relevant banner ads. Advertisers can now serve up ads after the search, there is less competition on these pages versus the search engine pages, free branding, reach consumers at multiple stages of the purchasing cycle, clicks originating from behaviorally target ads convert much higher. The ads must be targeted based on a recent purchase intent versus what a person happened to read.

Kevin Lee from Did-It now up, he is really tall :). He shows the heat map of how people look at SERPs, golden triangle. Why targeting matters? Marketers get to put more of their budgets towards their best customers, searchers only see the ads that the marketers really want seen, and publishers get a higher yield on their search and impression inventory. The key is to find out what your power segments are. MSN adds increased targeting options by allowing you to raise your bid by demographics (age, gender, geographic), the additional targeting allows you to be more effective. Same deal with day parting. Behavior Segmentation; better conversion from click to lead/sale, higher immediate value, better lifetime value of the customer, offer responsiveness (look at your data and determine if behavioral targeting makes sense). The engines are also targeting text and graphical ads behaviorally based on prior search behavior, prior click behavior and content preferences. Its a lot of trafficking work to restructure campaigns to market differently to segments. Leads to better conversion from click to lead/sale. Higher bids may get you additional volume. Higher lifetime value... Offer responsiveness, does one segment respond to a different offer? The perfect storm, happens when the different segments overlap (you can bid much higher). Choosing demographic - behaviors; look at your immediate conversions rates by geo or time, do an analysis of your current customers as they convert. If MSN or your conversion data indicates a power segment uses certain keyword phrases, you can media buy against the keyword; which sites show up high organically, what contextual network do they belong to? do they sell ads directly. You may be able to get the visitor one click after the SERP.

Danielle Leitch from More Visibility next up. Do you know who your customer base is? Is your customer base very niche or learning towards a particular subset group within the categories above? Why not do this in search; you are probably doing it offline now. PPC Evolution; chose keywords, bid prices and added ad copy. Since then there are many new options; bid by ROI, demo, behavioral, by engine, local, day parting, contextual, and advanced tracking. Research just gets better daily, incredible enhancements can be made to your keyword analysis and selection process. She also shows off MSN adCenter screen captures. Make bid boost decisions, aid in keyword research selection, start using it to identify areas of campaign expansion or optimization. Geography profiling is very exciting, shows off MSN adCenter again. She then tells us to expect more from Yahoo and Google and see more enhancements in targeting. She said its not all 100% accurate, because hotmail info may be fake. But behavioral search will continue to improve.

Dana Todd from SiteLab, not too tall, but does had really red hair. She said that its funny this is not called adware and spyware buys, since this is what it was called a year ago. All of a sudden, now its legit. She talks about Yahoo! Fusion Marketing. Targets consumers with specific affinities & interests derived from online behavior (terms searched, pages visited, ads clicked and product bought). Display behavior 3 or more times in a 28 day period is how Yahoo's product works. You can buy "channels". Impulse targeting reacts towards search. She brings up a case study, hot spring spa; they were buying keyword targeted banners in search in the old days. Performance was dropping. they decided to give behavioral units a try. They ran monsters, LRECs and other units. She shows a graph of the decline and improvement later on.

One thing, seems like all the people on the panel love the data from MSN adCenter. FYI - I believe Chris and I overlapped, so we only covered one session this track...sorry.

Podcast Search

Moderated by Chris Sherman. Podcasting has “caught fire” over the last year. Provides a brief intro/definition of podcasting, and says there are lots of new services aimed at helping get podcasts found.

David Ives tveyes, inc.: creators of Podscope, a spoken word search engine.
They specialize in solutions involving word recognition, word-spotting. Stared working with mostly defense/ intelligence, so remained “under the radar.” Now has gone more public, and has partnership with Yahoo and AOL. TVeyes professional version used for a variety of tasks. Launced podscope in April 2005, currently indexing over 50,000 podcasts. 75% audio 25% video (typically video blogs). They believe that Meta data alone is not enough, uses Pinpoint Audio, allows user to listen to a 10 second snippet that contains a particular keyword. Thinks that this technology will also help advertsieers place ads within best section of the podcast. They have a search box for podcasters, and use RSS feeds/subscriptions/alerts. Podscope will soon power podcast searches at AOL.

Suranga Chandratillake, blinkx
No PowerPoint, because it was “so painfully simple that it seemed obvious.” Didn’t want to insult anyone. (laughs). (See Video Search Session coverage for intro to blinkx). Podcasting much larger than video blogging. Blinkx uses same methodology to gather content as with Video Search…crawls, submissions, RSS, etc. They also use speech recognition to automatically listen and understand content that is found. Agrees that just meta data is not enough, this the importance of speech recognition. Suggests use of submission system in order to allow blinkx to index your content. They are tracking about 30,000 podcast channels currently.

Joe Hayashi, Yahoo!
No slides either, his CPOU gave out on him. Yahoo! Podcasts BETA screenshot. Podcasting is an interesting problem of for a search engine since it has both audio and video attributes. Designed to be consumed and delivered in a very specific way. When the did research, found that the number one request was to find good content, worthy of listening to. People also sought the ability to search specific content. Has taken an approach that they feel is unique. Uses their community tools such as tagging and rating system. High scores do influence the search results, so you should get people to vote for your content. Feels that community data can help resolve the content of getting only “good content.” Flickr is a product that helps with this, being a community that creates data around content such as photos. Has an “interestingness” feature that uses the META data added by the community to vault the most popular to the top. Neat example of how it works for photos. Shows a similar content search at Yahoo Podcasts and shows how a particular photographer has vaulted in the rankings for photography search.

Dick Costolo, Feedburner

They manage RSS feeds and thus many podcasts: 27,000. Knows that it is still early in the industry, but there is fast evolution going on. It started like the web: directories. No insult to other presenters, but they keep hearing “submit your podcasts here,” etc… like the old days of submit your website. Takes months not years to evolve, and will be far more sophisticated by 2006. Podcasters want all their podcasts to be properly listed at iTunes. Has also seen many people focused on monetizing podcasts, which has caused some issues. More people are trying to find ways to monetize them than to better find them through search. Feels that this is changing positively, however, with more companies working towards getting podcasts found. Tips: Promote only one feed, otherwise duplicate content issues more likely to happen. De-duping is the biggest challenge. Include all Meta data: iTunes, Media RSS and others coming allow for detailed addition of such content. Ping on updates, which helps to quickly distribute new content.

Amanda Watlington, Ph. D. Searching for Profit
What should we being doing as SEM’s to take advantage of these tools. Slide: Podcasting = Sound + Portable Audio Player + RSS Syndicated Distribution + Tools to manage. Most podcasts are still very niche, but growing very fast. Fusion Group analysis of market place indicates that there will be 56.8 million consumers by 2010 compared to 800,000 in 2004. Echoes that rush to monetize has appeared in this space like seen in no other space by Amanda. Lists the podcast value chain steps: content, advertising, production, publishing, hosting, promotion, searching, catching, listening. Will focus on steps most crucial to marketing. Note: Avoid “Gadget Seduction.” Podcast should focus on “findability,” not gadget seduction. If no one is listening, all the elegance of the gadget is lost. Focus on something people want to listen to.

If getting into this field, start by listening, and survey how others are doing this. Use the community ratings tools offered to help generate more data for research. Next: experiment and evaluate. Blogging by phone is a good place to start. Shows TelCaster Beta as a good free trial Podcasting portal. Tips for Podcasting and SEO: Good Title. Optimize sound files – tags do have meaning. Use a separate landing page for audio content. Optimize landing pages for each new file. Provide subscription info on landing pages. Build correct and valid feeds – RSS 2.0/iTunes/Yahoo! (This is a big problem) Submit your feeds. (What to do with transcript? Should a transcript be included or just a summary? The answer is based on the content…but typically, a nicely optimized summary is all you need for the landing page.) Optimize your Sound – ID 3 tags used for MP3 exporting. Use RSS and Feed Managers such as List Garden, FeedForAll, Feedburner. Use tools to manage your feeds. See podcastingnews.com/topics/podcast_directory.htm(l?). Ends with a recap of these tips. Make your mistakes now, play with it use it try it before everyone else is blocking your way.

Daron Babin, Webmasterradio.fm
“The Truth About Podcasting!” Describes Webmaster Radio. People were asking for a long time for archives and podcasts, and they now are using them. Will describe some numbers heard in recent meeting: 68% of people interested in podcasts actually subscribe to RSS feed. Overall satisfaction: 8.5/10. (sorry didn’t catch all these numbers…no slides). Estimate by 2010 that 76 mil+ people will have listened to a podcast. Essentially, people are slow in adopting that Ipod is not just for music. Also, technology is still lacking when it comes to speech-to-text. Using Dragon, which is a great product, still takes a long time in order to “teach” the software to recognize a particular voice. Be on the lookout for new technologies. Feels that VC’s will help drive this growth (CB note: makes sense since there is such a push to monetize Podcasts). Suggests doing what the other speakers have said…use meta data, and by the way, spell-check!

Q&A
Which is it…recommend use of only one RSS feed or multiple? Dick: use only one feed in order to avoid dupe content, he says that obviously Amanda has differing views on this subject.

How long does it take for a podcast to be indexed? Joe: takes Yahoo 24hrs.

How does background music affect ability of speech recognition? David: it does, good question. Most software has been trained with “clean audio.” Mnot to say that it will make results terrible, but it will diminish the accuracy. At leats make sure voices are higher than music. Daron says that “stopwords, accents, slang, ghetto, etc. are all issues with speech-to-text.

What is business model of future? Amanda: Pay for content, product placement, sponsorship, premium subscriptions, etc. Suggest looking at beercasting.com, or coffeecasting.com, for an example of sponsorship opportunities. Daron also adds to look for info about David Lawrence and the “BidPass” subscription model he uses. This “DRM-wraps” content and forces person to subscribe. There are tons of ways to monetize. Joe: adds that one of great things is that it was totally built on open standards. Evolutionary work needs to occur before there is a full advertising model, full premium model.

How is imaginary audience measured? Dick: it is hard, and there will be tremendous disagreement over measurability. Things that can be measured: downloads being started, which could be counted as twice if an error occurs, or may not be completed. The other thing that can be measured is the number of subscribers. All metrics will be slightly inaccurate, much like people still find errors in Comscore numbers. Daron: adds that measuring the amount of transferred content. He has started to shift everything into limelight networks using live streaming (measurable) but then separate and better measurements can be derived from interaction with archives and podcasts. Speaks about a company named “Pod Tracks” that he feels provides excellent demographics information (he looked at reports). He feels they just make this available to co-branding.
Amanda: also need to make sure you are identifying what it is you want to track…what goals or actions should be measured. Joe: adds that measurability is hard because of multiple feed issue too.

First up was Rob Key from Converseon, Inc. He goes over some quick stats. There are 1.2million people searching delta airlines each month. And they see a negative result in the SERPs. He explains that how you are defined is often in the hands of third parties. He shows examples of brand names that have competitive and negative results. Blogs are a major issue for reputation management. 39% of the top 100 SERPs is driven by Consumer Generated Media. He explains there is no "truth algorithm" what is #1 isn't always true. Brand and product reputation is a discussion that creates a perception. So what do you do when your brand rep is hurt? Lots of people sue! What they recommend is managing your SERP "Shelf Space". Shelf space is the first page results. 75% of users dont go beyond the first page. YOu first need to understand and map the conversation out there. Once you map the conversation, you then need to minimize the visibility of those bad rep by mobilizing allies on your half (affiliate marketing, contents, blogs, communities, etc.). You need to optimize a partnership of sites, blogs, partners, etc. Ten Key Elements of "SERMA"; create a cross discipline team that bridges the chasm between corp communication and PR and online marketing. Understand how people are searching on your brand. Bucket them. Optimize your network around them. Continue to publisher relevant content. Engage partners and affiliates selectively. Initiate conversation mining to monitor new brand incidents. Be vigilant, continue to monitor, be proactive and stay transparent. The conduct a SERMA test; go to search engines and type your brand in, review top listings, and review those results.

Next up Rob Garner from Agency.com. Why should you be concerned with reputation management? There is a bounty on brand terms (engines and affiliate programs provide incentive for aggregation of traffic through various means). There is third party manipulation of SERPs. SEO techniques; content theft, site scraping, typojacking (misspellings), and page cranking. Resolution; report a site to the engine, consult your legal team. He gave a case study; client could not determine why a competitor site was ranking so well for trademarked names, they found they were cloaking, and legal action was taken. Domain registrations; domain aggregators have 100,000s of domain names, they serve up contextual ads, engines and domain aggregators split text ad fee revenues. He shows a sample of this. There are trademark issues with this, where advertisers are unknowingly placed on these competitor trademarks and visa versa. Plus there are relevancy issues with some publishers have control of which ads appear on these landing pages, and they dont choose the most appropriate ads. best defense is to use a keyword research tool to find what others can bid on your trademark. Compare terms against .coms in whois and acquire those domain names, some how. He then showed a case study of MillerBrewingCo.com, which had those contextual ads on it, and on that page there was a picture of children with beer (bad bad bad).

Next up Nan Dawkins from RedBoots Consulting. They work with advocacy clients. Identity is negotiated in the online space, not managed. The negotiation takes place primarily in the process of engaging. The blogosphere levels the playing field between David and Goliath. Blogs are important microclimate in CGM (consumer generated management). Source of problems on SERPs for broad, brand searches. Source of long term, consistent buzz and synergistic relationship with mainstream media. What can be monitored? Total buzz, influential, detractors, supporters, positive versus negative, conversations topics and trends, new versus existing voices, demographics of voices, sentiment, competition, conventional press citations and message pick up. You are looking for patterns. You can do this with free tools, blogpulse.com or feedster or technorati but it can get overwhelming to manage. You can also track the conversation to the original source. She also likes clusty, which breaks it down by category, and also take the info into icerocket and see trends. The problem is it takes too much time. There are companies that do it for you; cyberalert, customscoop, intelliseek, moreover, factiva, visimo, cymfony, umbria, lexis/nexis, interlliseek (other product). Solution Providers key distinctions; methodology, metrics, sources, balance of technology, delivery, spam, end use and cost. Tip #1; what you see depends on what you take into account; you need the long tail, detractors are not the only, or most important, "pick up" of your advertising PR... Tip #2, data is only valuable if you know what to do with it. She explains that a guy used FedEx boxes for his home furniture and it got written up, but then FedEx sent a DMCA, yadayada. Tip #3; sometimes you need a mediator and not a marketer. Sometimes you need to know when to step back. Productive one to one responses may boost you. PR firms should not be having the one to one conversations. Tip #4, what you call a thing impacts how you respond to it.

Last up is Andy Beal from Fortune Interactive. He showed some examples about how bloggers can hurt your rep. But he also shows how it can help your reputation. Technorati reports 87k+ blogs include "kudos" and 65k have "boycott" and 104k contain "scam". Create custom RSS feeds based on keyword searches and use an RSS reader to keep track of them (I do this but its getting to be overwhelming). What to track with RSS; track every related to your company, track competitors info, monitor industry related news. News and Web alerts; Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts, track all industry and competitor keywords and track news and web and groups. Watch competitors press releases and look for plagiarism. Track the untrackable; you can use copernic, aignes.com and so on. Where to use it? Every page of your competitors Web site. BBB, Alexa.com reviews, forums and ripoffreport.com. Laying forum foundation; identify most popular forums for industry, join the forum and become respected in the forum, consider sponsoring most influential forums, build alliances and partnerships with most influential folks in forums. Respond to criticism; monitor your rss feeds and email alerts hourly. Identify the author of a blog, owner of a forum. Read authors previous work and understand them. Under the threat level. Tactics for blogs; if a blog post is factually incorrect, send them evidence, ask for removal or retraction and offer to keep them informed of future news, and only if no action by blog author, add comment. If it is true but its negative; still send your side of the story, explain how you are handling the situation, add comment to the post, indicate your willingness to receive any info offline via email or phone. Will it accomplish anything? 94% of bloggers will remove, edit or add correct info to any incorrect blog posting. Tactics for forums; investigate facts, offer to resolve any complaints personally by senior person, take the high ground (suggest there are two sides of the story but dont disclose that info publicly), be honest, rally your friends, clients and peers.

Jennifer Slegg was first up and asks some questions on who was using Adsense and YPN. She goes into comparing the two publisher networks. Both have large pools of advertisers. Offer similar ad formats & advertising in RSS feeds. Both has real time stats with identical metrics measures. Neither reveals the cut of revenue earned. The networks differ in that Google allows nearly all international publishers and YPN only US publishers currently. Adsense has smart pricing, and YPN hasn’t acknowledged any type of smart pricing. She moves fast, and next throws up a list of available companies offering contextual publishing options.

She moves in Chitika as a new form of advertising that gained recent popularity. It is compatible with YPN & Adsense when using keywords instead of contextual targeting. MSN will jump into the game? Yes, will do some in the future possibly.

Next consider the placement of your ads. You want to make sure that if you run multiple ad units, that the 2nd or 3rd units make you money. She has tested a lot of this and found that when the 2nd or 3rd ad unit was removed you can make more money. Always place ads in best more visible spot. Avoid ad spots, this is where users are accustom to blocking out ads. Don’t use what is rumored to be the best ad unit. Adsense released a list of top performing ad units. Try these. She is talking too fast. The majority of publishers have found that making the border of the ad the same of the background increase revenue. Geo-targeting for highest paying ads is also possible and figure out what makes you the most money.

Sweet spot on one site does not equal the sweet spot on another site. There can be significant difference in the sites and use of ads. She recommends using custom channels instead of URL channels. There are a couple third party tools such as Google analytics hack for tracking adsense & YPN. Know what specific ads are being clicked, what page they are located on and so on. Keep track of changes and results. Note what you are testing and changes you have made. Wait to do testing on “non-holiday” times as you will get the best data. She also recommends to test image ads to see how they work and can be quite profitable.

Some questions she gets often is about 2nd or 3rd ad units sometimes the ads don’t show up. Wait till they do. She also adds watch out for people that are framing your page. People surfing with javascript turned off may not be able to see your ad. Great presentation, but way to fast.

Next up is Will Johnson from Yahoo! Publisher Network. So what is Yahoo Publisher Network. For many years they have had relationships with larger quality publishers. Now allow smaller publishers to make some money. He explains you need a website to put ads on. You can buy a domain at Yahoo Small Business (don’t buy your domain here). Next you need to build content such as access product information and Yahoo maps (?). Now you need to acquire traffic (RSS My Yahoo!) or Sponsored Search. Then he goes into how to monetize the traffic you are getting. Put text links on your site, or ads in your RSS. He mentions Search Engine Roundtable blog as an example of a site using YPN!

Who is going to provide the most revenue? What control will you have over ad layout, placement, and targeting? What other valued added content and pucducts will be offered to make your site more valuable? How will your account be serviced? So in terms of revenue, Yahoo will provide competitive revenue against the industry. They have a very large advertising network, over 100,000 advertisers. They bring in new targeting methodologies. Will explains they just released a way to add ads into an RSS feed. Nice.

He goes into how ads are targeted, such as crawling your page and the presenting relevant ads to your users. They have a feature called Ad Targeting. You can select a category or subcategory to present to your users. Yahoo has approximately 3000 publishers are participating in the YPN program, expanding and lots of good stuff ahead.

Satya Patel from Google with a few reminders. He helped create the Adsense system. He presents a slide of the Internet Ecosystem, it’s a fragile place and at Google they want to make sure that all parts are thriving. There are Advertisers <->Publishers <-> Users <-> Advertisers. The explains that the Adsense helps publishers make money from there traffic which gives them a lot of time to spend on quality content.

So how does Google help you meet your objectives? They help you monetize traffic, and it occurs one of two ways. Adsense for Content and also Adsense for Search. Overall Adsense for content is a good platform. Uses combination of contextual targeting and site targeting to deliver the best ad for a page. Uses click feedback to deliver high performing ads. Large, comprehensive base of advertiser. Maximizes revenue by displaying relevant ads. A lot of Adsense is all automated, there are people of course but the bulk for the system is automated. Adsense technology understand the content of each page and dynamically matches ads to it. An important part of the Adsense program is site targeting, whether its target by affinities, flexible bidding options, and creative control.

Patel also talks about a new feature called Onsite Advertisers Sign-up, allowing you to generate advertiser bids for your site. It means great revenue. Allowing to your to promote your brand to advertisers and leverage Google’s. Promote site with a customized message to advertisers. He also talks about link units, which is a 2 stage process. Once a user clicks on the link unit it takes to a larger page of ads that people can click on. He says there is a good benefit from using these. Adsense for Search is also another program they offer. It’s a way for search imbedded on your site, but also include advertising in those searches.

Video Search
First session of the first day! Woohoo. “New” Sponsor banners (to me) apart from the regulars (Jupiter, SEW, ClickZ): incisivemedia andSEMList.com.
Moderated by Chris Sherman
Intro remarks: Welcome…we in for 4 days of new and interesting content. Video Search (VS) has been around for a long time, but starting to grow more effective. VS is hot and getting hotter.

Suranga Chandratillake, blinkx
Blinkx.tv is a VS Engine. A destination and syndicated service. A video delivery platform. A monetization platform. Suranga will focus on how to get content into blinkx. The system uses spiders for general Internet and RSS. Online submission for individual files and feeds. They use: META, speech recognition, Visual analysis, text on page, date, and more. Also moving into a “new game” of having Content Partners. This content program is open to everyone and they are working with full range of distributors from Broadcast stations down to individual film makers, etc. “DirectPlay” product coming out which will help gain more content. Will have free hosting, does a “direct play” of your content immediately on search. Monetized by paid placements. Finishes with an impressive list of partners to date.

John Thrall Head of Mulitmedia Search Engineering Yahoo
Is very passionate about video search, and knows this is the “early days” of VS. Yahoo! VS Launched 12 months ago, it is now in 15 countries. 1000’s of channels, millions hours of content. Gets content by crawling, RSS, and content providers. Works as a KW search index which allows for some advanced search. Goal is to be comprehensive. Shows old picture of “boxing monkey” which was the type of content found just 2 years ago. Now there are products including Atom Films, CNN, PRNewswire, VH1, Reuters, CBS, ABC News, CMT. Recent trend is finding particular scenes from movies and trailer: “The Pirkinning” (sp?) the number one Finnish film of all time. Has over 5 million downloads already.

Just getting started: Multiple disconnect standards. Many forms of discovery: Discovery: get it indexed in Yahoo search and it will be found. Use crawler friendly links. Ranking: quality and topic is most important page must be relevant to the video in order to rank well. Media RSS: and extension to the media RSS META Standard, does allow RSS with enclosures to be supported by creating Media RSS. Feedburner and Flicker generate Media RSS automatically. Using this is “ a good way to get listed quickly”

Karen Howe AOL
Audio Video search. Gives a quick overview of Singingfish: 60 mil streams indexed, including Real, Windows media, Quicktime and MP3. Since medium is dynamic, they have to constantly go back to ensure content is still there. Nott all 600 mil, streams are searchable because of this. Flash not yet searchable. Like Suranga, they also crawl the web. The do focused directed crawls into content areas where they know they will find “deep pools of content.” “Have META Data, will travel” AOL syndicates Singingfish AV Search to 20 different AOL and non-AOL properties, this has resulted in remarkable increase in queries. Also mentions these are the “early days.”
Fields most important for accurate recall: META Title. Author, perfomer, creatot of content. Uses Description field that comes from META Desc. Use copyright Information also. Second level of META data also used: Publisher, album desc, notes, etc… about 70 different areas. Recommends adding as many fields as possible for most likely chance of ranking. She is making an “evangelistic plea” for the META Data side. AOL’s goal: to get your content indexed. Sfmedia RSS 2.0 Module Specifications: rying to get a conformed standard method to submit large numbers of streams (if you have just a few streams to submit, can be done directly through Singinfish). This RSS Specification is designed for sites with hundreds of streams. Works for audio, video, podcasts, videoblogs, Flash. Full engineering support.

Jon Leicht SiteLab
2 Questions he always gets: 1 are people searching for video? (obviously) 2 how do I do this? (to follow)
How to “do it right.” They use a “Meta Toolkit” that they have created for developers. Meta selection can include campaign kw’s, but should be very descriptive of the content of the video. File naming is critical. Page content appears to have an effect on media search. He echoes other speakers in saying that the page’s content should contextually match up with the video in order to get better rankings. Recommends production of transcript of audio for use in Google. META should be added during encoding. Most encoding engines allow for META fields, but most important are Title, Desc, and KW’s (sounds familiar). Cautions against kw stuffing because searchers are getting tired of seeing those types of desc. META must be embedded into video when encoding. Can be done in-house and he recommends “Discrete Cleaner for the PC” or Media Cleaner” for Mac. Allows for encoding of all formats. Shows a couple screenshots of “Media Cleaner” looks easy to learn, lots of options available.

Like submitting a site to a SE, Video needs to be submitted. Recommends using Singingfish. They suggest putting all media elements in a single directory on your site in order to be quickly found when the crawler returns. Also great that everyone seems to have RSS feeds. Google has a proprietary desktop app that you need to download, good if you have lots of content. G also asks for “their mold” of the already encoded information (Meta). You can also update Meta information any time you need to update the campaign. Good and bad: have to have Google Player to view video. Blinkx has a very cool way of indexing info. Allows for podcasts, streams etc. Allows in a Wizzard-based form the simple submission with a short description. If you are low on bandwidth, you can also upload the content to them to “get rid of it” (like Google). Yahoo and Alta Vista still has a standard site crawl, which does pose a problem if you are embedding the video ina pop-up window, etc. Optimize the links, don’t use “high Bandwidth/Low Bandwidth” anchor text, instead be more specific.” Include a link to an optimized “Video map” Page on your site, especially when embedding video. You can place shorter versions of the content on this “Video Map.” Future of VS: Content drives demand. More and more players getting involved. Specialty media SE’s emerging. For example, AOL is starting to encapsulate content by type. Competition=Spam. TV/Mobile/iPod deliver and search of media will help this to “take off” popularity-wise. Monetization of video.

Q&A
Wondering how many queries per day in normal web search versus VS. Suranga: 80 video, 20 audio. Karen: hundreds of millions of searches a day on the web search side, very small percentage of that # for VS. One of the reasons is many people do not even know that the Video Tab exists. John: can’t give an exact number, but he says you can get the public information from Comscore, but he thinks 20-30 percent of searches are for images, and the search for video will keep growing. John: sees a blend between VS and traditional media opening content up to more people and thereby increasing the numbers as well. Describes the types of mergers such as AOL/Time Warner being a good thing.

Chris Sherman adds that no one has really touched on the whole idea of conversions…will this eventually be more of a “buy a video” system? Suranga: it is difficult to judge if users want a more TV-like experience or a more Internet-like experience when doing VS.

Dana Todd asks if they are aware of the new content standards being developed, and are there any legal limitations to anyone just starting a video channel? Karen say it is already being done, but the quality of production runs the spectrum. Mentions a TV channel in texas that is essentially an Internet TV station with pretty well –produced content. There are legal limitations such as not allowed to use someone else’s unlicensed media, such as “PodSafe(sp).” Suranga says that the problem is not only a legal one, but also technology problem. John adds that the illegal content issue is a hot topic, but many more people are creating their own content. He states you don’t “have to have that much talent to create something that will be of interest to someone” An example would be to create a video of his neighborhood, etc… Jon reminds that having information embedded into the video, you are protecting yourself at least rudimental…currently not available in jpeg but “they” are working on it.

Nacho ask if there is such a thing as video analytics…Karen says there is a tool to find out if someone who downloads a movie/segment watches the whole thing, but is VERY expensive. Currently too many reasons for things to go wrong…but people will put up with a shocking array for technical difficulties to finally get access to the content. Jon has seen people using proprietary systems that use Active X controllers to talk to the file and collect data. Karen adds that with Omniture they can tell how long people are on line during sessions, has seen an increase in Average Time Spent.

This is my first time attending this session, its always nice to go back to the basics every now and then. It seems as if Danny is having some technical difficulties. All dressed up in a nice dark suit with blue ties, I think. As you can see, I have this urge to type, so I am. The room seems to have about 300 people in it, total guess. One noticeable thing you see, is that the JupiterMedia logos are all replaced with IncisiveMedia. Now walks in the extra tech support to assist Danny. He swaps computers with Danny, presto, up comes the dell.com Web site. And then they swap computers back, and we are almost ready to go. Just 5 minutes after, not bad at all for the first session. :) The slide is live and it sports the old colors of the SearchEngineWatch.com logo. Very few people in this audience have come to this conference before, a bunch have no idea what search marketing is, and even more need to know the basics.

He explains there are many ways to be listed on a search engine. it is not just about being number on on Google. There is Web search and vertical search. There is free versus paid. Understand, search engine PR. There is also search advertising. PR + Ads = Search marketing. He shows a Google free listing, also called editorial, natural or organic listings. Then he shows the paid listings, "Sponsored ads." He then shows local listings, the vertical creep of Google Local results, and he shows the Google Local maps and stuff. Danny explains that what is number one, is not always number one, because those results are pushed down with vertical results (news, local, etc.). Being number one is changing and will continue to do so. At some point, it may even be the vertical results showing up by default! Good news is a focus on web search - free and also paid. Major search engines all have free listings that come from crawling the Web. Search engine PR is about influencing the free listings. This is perfectly ok! While your efforts may help improve your free listings there is no guarantee. If you want guarantee, then buy sponsored ads. Search engines can and will list what they want. Dont depend on your free listings, make sure to balance paid and free. As with PR, know your message.... To do so, list your top ten phrases for your entire site. The phrases should be at least two words long. He shows the keyword research tools; wordtracker, overture keyword tool, Google AdWords, Country Specific Tools and other session on this topic. You can not anticipate what everyone is searching for. By having good content, and hopefully that content will contain other natural, popular terms. Hits for "less important" terms do add up. The "search tail" predates the "long tail". Danny also explains that you can think of your site as a pyramid, when it comes to search terms. Danny then explains the crawler, spider, bot. They jump from link to link and read pages found. Text of pages is stored in an index. When you search, they look for pages with matching text in the index. Other factors involved in ranking those pages; based on page content, title tag, design issues, link analysis, other off the page criteria (age of site, ctr, and the neighborhood). Crawlers should find your pages naturally, the more links, normally the better, you can use paid inclusion or simple submission. Submit your homepage and some internal pages (turnaround time, a few days to 2 months). You can use Google sitemaps, yahoo has bulk submit, and msn doesnt have it. Look at each page of your site, make sure the words on the page have what people search for. Graphics wont do it, you need content, real html content. You need pages rich in text. He copies and pastes the content from a nike page into a word document and he shows the text is very lacking. He shows how Google didn't pass the front page of a flash splash screen, even though good content was within the sub pages. He explains title tags, every page should have a unique title tag, use the most descriptive words for that page in the title, keep it short and attractive. Yahoo uses meta tags, Ask Jeeves unofficially supports it, beginners - danny said skip it. Meta description tag is supported, its a way to describe your pages, it should be about 200 - 250 characters. He explains that search engine do not always use your meta tags in the SERPs (sometimes content on page, sometimes dmoz, sometimes meta). He then goes into the meta robots tag, you can use it to block the search engines, if you want them to index you, do not use the tag. Best method is the robots.txt file. Both described at robotstxt.org/exclusion.html. Meta revisit tag means nothing. Search engine prefer big, ugly pages, they do not like splash pages, frames and dynamic delivery (typically). Leverage links; more difficult for web site owners to manipulate links than their own pages. So link analysis is a great advance in relevancy for the engines. Major component of Google. Link quality; you want good links or number of links these days - also the context is also key (text around or in the link). He said, PageRank has nothing to do with how important a link is. Use the search engines, take the terms you want to be number one for and see what comes up - get links from them. Request links from these sites; Danny promoting these link request emails (oy :)). Danny said he loves to link out and he shows that most of the emails he gets are template driven, bad. He then goes through the process of finding pages to request links on. He explains PageRank on the Google Toolbar. It is a pure measure of link popularity. He explains its not the do all end all, search for books, amazon comes up but not for the search term cars. He explains how PR is funneled downwards based on the number of links on a page. Do all links on a page count? Guestbooks? links in the less clicked areas? Links within your own web site count less? This may be true. He also simply explained Ghost Page Rank. Golden Rules on Link Building. (1) Get links from pages that are read by your audience. (2) Buy links if visitors that come solely from the link itself will justify the cost. (3) Link to sites because you want your visitors to know about them. He then goes over the nofollow attribute; it gives some of the engines (yahoo, google, msn) a method of not counting that link.

Directory listings & Why bother. He explains human edited directories. Yahoo Directory, Google Directory (free). Directory listings can help crawlers. Detour traffic, is helpful (i personally bought at least one big thing via a human edited directory). He shows how Yahoo results do have category links linking to the Y! Directory. He explains how to submit to the directory, title, description, and go to the category you want to be listed. He then goes over search engine advertising. Search ads give you coverage (its guaranteed), search engines ads do give you good coverage. Good companies run PR & ad campaigns in "real word" and also should in the SE world. Paid placement listings are mostly sold via CPC. Success of ad depends on description of ad, landing page and quality of search network. He shows paid placement on Yahoo! that is based on CPC, on Google they use CPC x CTR/quality score.

Interpreting searcher behavior can be a subtle science, the experts in this panel plan to address the issues of how much we know about the user and what we can gain from looking at their behavior. First up is Mark Neal from Galleon Systems. I am looking forward to the presentations in this session, the last several times I have attended they have failed to disappoint.

Mark discusses the data they will present they have been tracking since 2002. Is it increasing important to be on the first page of the search engine results? Seems an obvious question, but it’s really a no-brainer. Is the importance increasing or decreasing over time. He goes into talking about Galleon, they sell brick and mortar type products selling computer equipment and maintain primary B2B business. Couple years ago 82% of sales where offline and not over the internet, they needed to change this. They wrote there own tracking system, monitoring search page delivering each visitor. Things have changed in the last 3 years. Over the next three years there found that the first search result page has become more and more important as more traffic arrived to those on the first page than those on other search result pages. They want to look at the numbers, is the 5% of traffic going to first search result page matter? This is primarily with organic traffic, and PPC relates similar results. So in essence he is saying over time more and more people have visited the results on the first page than those on second or third pages. He puts up a geographical reach chart, saying 74.37% are from United States, and UK next and so on. He says he doesn’t know why it’s important to get your website on the top page of the search engine. I am confused with this guy’s presentation, not what I expected. There determination is that 90% of all visitors delivered from search engine will be delivered from the first page results.

Gord Kotchkiss from Enquiro is up to present about the Eye Tracking Studies they do. Love this type of information. He goes into talk about the Golden Triangle of a search result page and how to read an eye tracking map. They used 48 participants and 5 scenarios and limited interactions with Google only to begin with. The initial findings were released at SES NYC this year. He presents 3 eye tracking maps from each of the major engines. With MSN the eye pattern stretches further down the page. Yahoo data showed that participants navigated further down the page, it became an elongated F shape. He says the scan activity of the participant was more diverse. The take home is that results indicate that the search engine cause different scan activity and not the people using the search engine.

With MSN, there is a lot of bouncing around the page, looking at sponsored listings, too much stuff to look at. He calls MSN users the “accidental tourist”. He goes into Yahoo and says the those users typically look at the sponsored listing and quickly move down the page. MSN and Google are similar in terms of their one-box results. He jokes that MSN obviously spent some time looking at Google when building there engine. The question asked is which is more relevant. Typically results show that Google is. The research backs some this conclusion ups as scan activity is more concise. Yahoo on the other hand showed quite different results, the users navigated and scanned down the page below the fold, which is not typical. Gord then explains they lined both the search listings up and compared them. Yahoo pushes organic results further down the page, which pushes scan activity further down the page as well. Interesting.

Entry points are also important and generally when you come to an entry point your eye traditionally stays at one point in Google. With MSN is a different story, it’s a lot more confusing. There is a correlation with where the eye starts at the entry point and where the eye begins when given the search result page. He says they looked at where the eye rested once they clicked the submit button. Conclusion is that if the search engine can give the user what they are after then they will not search to far. If they have to search for what they are looking for then it’s a possibility they will search elsewhere. Scan patterns on MSN and Yahoo seems to indicate deeper scanning on the page than on Google.

Jonathan Mendez from Digital Grit is up to present some case studies and analysis. Jon presents a pathway analysis of searcher goals with a detailed chart of where they begin and where they end. Its starts with a goal motivation, moves to whether the search is a recovery search or a discovery search. Is the searcher using the search as a navigational tool or information search? There are many things people have reasons for using a search engine.

The first case study was on the Sony Vaio notebook. There was consistent creative messaging across all channels. The goal of the campaign was to increase awareness of the notebook. The performed some rich media buys on WSJ, weather.com, and so on. Complete different types of ads and banners. The messaging is consistent between all the creative. The landing page has no calls to action, its only to educate the user about the laptop. Sony spent 83% on media, and 17% on search. The clicks however told a different story, media was on 46% and search got 53% of clicks with only 17% of the budget for the campaign. Even though this was just a branding campaign, they received a good deal of orders. The continued to do some more campaigns and each time search continued to outperform regular media. The missed opportunity for Sony was they they didn’t spend enough on search and less branding and more on selling. People online were ready to buy and they would have experienced a better ROI is the landing page wasn’t just a branding website.

Jonathan goes into explaining on how they “get behind the keyword”. The way he does is, is a strategic focused behavior observation. He sat down with small business owners to find out their behavior. What was behind the keyword? 9 of 15 users began their search looking for box software. Incredibly valuable business insight. The learned that they can’t judge the goal by the keyword, you really need to listen to the searcher. Good presentation.

Search as the New Portal is presented from Jon Stewart from Nielsen/ NetRatings. He presents an overview for his presentation. First up is looking at search engine, portals, and communities. Search along with portals and communities has a huge reach. Over the last 3 years search has remained saturated. Portals and communities has seen steady growth over search. Roughly 40 per searches per searcher occurred according to their data, this is increase from month to month. Moving forward this year, 28% more people at home started their web session with a search. At both home and work, 49% of all active searchers started a session with a search at least once in October. From a year to year comparison, active searching when up at both home and work places. Direct navigation searching has increased as well. Some of the surprising things is that some of the type search terms is “www.yahoo.com” or “www.google.com”. Kinda funny when you think about it. So why is this happening? Is the search box so compelling that people feel they need to type something in there. People don’t want to be wrong, a search result page won’t give you an error or disrupt your good mood as you are searching. Search becomes more of a comfortable activity.

Jon goes into some case studies by looking at content aggregation. He said that a lot of people don’t know they are looking at an RSS feed or such. For the user they thinking all they are doing is searching. Personalization is another factor. Amazon has done an amazing job as this, and have entered the search space as a result.
Tagging is also important, and allowed user generated indexing. Next is the OS, such as Windows Vista. Search is no longer used only to find web sites. The sedarch landscape is being dramatically shifted as it moves toward personalization, content aggregation, and user community collaboration. Ultimately, search will serve to drive a user’s session.

Dannu Sullivan posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Need Your Questions For "Future Of SEM" Session. The session can be found on Day Three; 4:00pm - 5:15pm Slot.

n this roundtable discussion, a diverse panel of search marketers examines where search marketing may be heading in the years to come. Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com; Speakers: Dana Todd, President, SEMPO; Jill Whalen, Owner, High Rankings; Fredrick Marckini, CEO, iProspect; Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC

Danny's request;

Next week at SES Chicago, I have a panel called "Future Of SEM," where I have a range of search marketers who will discuss where search marketing may be headed. I'm looking for your help. What questions do you have about the future of the industry? Please contribute them here, and I'll see about putting some of the best ones to the panel.

Post your questions at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Like we did at SES San Jose 05, here at the Search Engine Roundtable, we will providing triple coverage of the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago next week. Ben, Chris and I will be doing most of the coverage. Below is our tentative and not guaranteed schedule of coverage. Here is the key for who will be covering what; Chris Boggs (CB), Ben Pfeiffer (BP), and Barry Schwartz (BS).

Monday, December 5, 2005 - Day 1:
~ 9:00am - 10:30am
Video Search (CB)
Introduction to Search Engine Marketing (BS)
Searcher Behavior Research Update (BP)
~ 11:00am - 12:30pm
Podcast Search (CB)
Reputation Monitoring & Management (BS)
Earning From Search & Contextual Ads (BP)
~ 1:45pm - 3:15pm
Global Search Landscape (CB)
Targeting Search Ads By Demographics & Behavior (BS)
BP is a wild card for this session. :)
~ 3:45pm - 5:15pm
Search Advertising 101 (CB)
Book Search (BS)
Ads Beyond Search (BP)

Tuesday, December 6, 2005 - Day 2:
~ 9:00am - 9:30am
Keynote: The Search Marketing Community (BS)
~ 10:15am - 11:30am
Creating Compelling Ads (CB)
News Search SEO (BS)
Business to Business Tactics (BP)
~ 1:00pm - 2:15pm
CB Break
SEM Via Communities, Wikis & Tagging (BS)
Meet the News Search Engines (BP)
~ 2:45pm - 4:00pm
Link Building Basics: Speaker (CB)
BS Wildcard
RSS, Blogs, Search Marketing (BP)
~ 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Successful Site Architecture (CB)
Google Print & The Copyright Debate (BS)
BP Wildcard

Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - Day 3:
~ 9:00am - 10:30am
Linking Strategies: Q&A Speaker (CB)
BS Wildcard
Working With Clients (BP)
~ 11:00am - 12:30pm
CB Break
SEM Campaign & Project Management (BS)
Working As A Team (BP)
~ 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Retailer Forum (CB)
Search Engine Q&A On Links (BS)
Developing Your SEM Niche (BP)
~ 4:00pm - 5:15pm
Converting Visitors Into Buyers (CB)
Future Of SEM (BS)
BP Wildcard
~ 5:30pm - 6:30pm
Evening Forum With Danny Sullivan (CB)

Thursday, December 8, 2005 - Day 4:
~ 9:00am - 10:15am
Break (CB)
Local Search Tactics (BS)
Wildcard (BP)
~ 10:45am - 12:00pm
Search Head or Tail (CB)
Wildcard (BS)
Measuring Success Through Phone Calls (BP)
~ 12:30pm - 1:45pm
Measuring Success Case Studies & Tactics (CB)
SEO Overkill (BS)

Chris posted a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named SES Chicago 2005: "Triple Play Blog Coverage" where you can post comments and questions in a forum setting.

Thanks.