Search Engine Strategies 2005 New York Archives

Remember the New York City Search Engine Strategies Conference in 2005? If you were there but your memory is a bit foggy, Kim Krause posted her NYC SES 2005 Excellent Adventure to spark your memory. She linked to her narrated SES NYC Pics, and you can catch my nose in the first picture.

Forum chatter beginning at Cre8asite Forums.

About a month and a half ago we reported on the controversy over the SEO Inc. The controversy was over have "Expo Babes", women in attractive attire standing by the both to promote SEO Inc. Danny Sullivan was able to track down SEO Inc.'s people and ask them a few questions in regards to the "Expo Babes". He posted his Q & A session, at the SES NYC Expo Center a Joke? thread. I will just reprint the first question and answer here:

Question: Did they find in the end that it was worthwhile to have these women in the booth?

Answer: SEO, Inc.'s purpose at SES was to raise brand awareness for our company and overall interest in Search Engine Optimization as an important and growing segment of Search Engine Marketing. We feel these goals were accomplished, and done so within boundries approved by Jupiter Media for this trade show.

As a final recap to the SES NYC 2005 conference, I thought I point you in the direction of a Jupiter entry named SES New York Final Numbers. In that entry, Alan Meckler says that total attendance was 50% higher then last year's NYC conference with almost 6,000 attendees, but "Paid attendance was 1734 (52% greater than 2004)," now that is huge, do some of the math.

How did the exhibitors do? Well, most of the first floor of the exhibit hall were very happy. I believe some on the second floor felt day one was slower then day two. But what would SES NYC be without some controversy outside of the session rooms? A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named SES NYC expo center a joke? discussed the controversy over SEO Inc.'s booth, showcasing "booth babes". Search Engine Journal has a picture of the babes in their tops that read "Want To Be On Top?". There are many in the forum thread that believe it was inappropriate for such a conference. Some of the women find it insulting and degrading to the women leading the SEM industry, and some find it in good nature. Some of the men also find it degrading and some do not. Makes for a fun thread.

I have never seen Danny Sullivan so busy before at an SES conference. The first three days he was like a machine. Moderating sessions, reporters and session attendees following down the halls, it was pretty cool. Normally, I can get a hello in on the first day, but I really didn't give an official hello until the 3rd day, towards the end of the day. But he seemed very relaxed by the end of the conference.

Danny is due a ton of credit for what he has done for this industry. Everyone knows that. He truly impressed me more then ever before, at this conference. I wonder how the San Jose show will be. Oh, and next year, in NYC, I simply do not know how he can manage it but I am sure he will.

This industry is on fire. Outstanding conference, Danny, Chris, Detlev, Rebecca Lieb, Karen and Steve (who make everything happen behind the scenes) and the other jupiter folks (including Frank Fazio). Outstanding job. Next SES, let's get a session on the history of SES. :)

The conference is over, it was long but good. I'll probably write a recap. To be honest, its getting more tiring. Not because of the sessions, but between the sessions.

For some reason, the public relations people at the search companies feel that bloggers are important. I tell them we are not, but they don't care.

Due to this, the breaks between sessions for me are a bit like this:

(1) I leave the session right before the Q & A (I used to write on the Q&A portions as well).
(2) I run to the official press room (used to be a speaker/press room, which I named the blog room, in chicago).
(3) I pray that the Internet is working and then post my notes.
(4) Then go to a scheduled or unscheduled meet with someone from Overture, Ask Jeeves, Google and Yahoo!
(5) Run from the meet to a session.
(6) Takes notes
(7) Start over again from step 1.

But I got to spend some quality time with people like Jim Lanzone from Ask Jeeves, Matt Cutts from Google, some Overture people, of course Yahoo!'s Tim Mayer and (I am a huge fan of) Aaron Ferstman (the Yahoo PR guy for this area).

Today at lunch, I sat with Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and Matt Cutts. Matt told us how to get out of the sandbox, of course I am kidding. I had coffee with Jim from Ask. Overture took Ben and I out for lunch. But Tim and I could not connect for more then 5 minutes, but I spoke with Aaron a bunch.

Some of the forum folks there included: Danny, Elisabeth, Webby, Phoenix, Egol, Randfish, Nacho, Orion, Mike Grehan, Joseph Morin, Jill Whalen, Scottie, Christine Churchill, Kim Krause (cre8pc), Bill S. (bragadocchio), bradbyrd, Mikkel, Andrew Goodman, Dan Thies, Detlev, I am sure I left some people out - sorry if it was you. Feel free to comment.

Of course, I saw some of my favorite 'spammers' (not all spammers but they are in that clique) as well: Greg Boser (WG), Todd (Oilman), Daron (SEGuru), Jake (BakedJake), and I am sure I left some spammer's names out.

Oh, there were plenty of white hatters like Shari Thurow, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Jill Whalen, etc.

Others, Amanda Watlington, Bill Hunt, Bryan & Jeff Eisenberg, Brett Crosby (Urchin, best analytics), Bruce Clay (wait I didn't see him this time), Andy Beal (respect a ton), and others...

Again, sorry if I left anyone out. As Nacho says, he considers SES events like going to Disneyland.

I'll write an official article on this event some time in the future, I hope.

Christine Churchill from Key Relevance was first up. KW Selection considerations; relevant to site, keyword popularity, stage in buying process, competition, and feedback. Stage in Buying Process: keywords indicate where consumer is in the buying process (problem recognition, information search, select alternatives, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision). Search behavior: navigational, informational and transactional. Getting inside the searcher's mind; understand the "why" behind the search and you can better target how to respond. Competition, from an SEO perspective, she liked to look at it from a pricing perspective. She looks at the number of campaigns in Google and Overture are running on a particular term. NicheBot is an other tool for competitive research, it gives her real quick backlinks, indexed, pagerank numbers. She also uses Google Traffic Estimator. She loves using PPC for testing purposes. Its not about the keywords that you want to be found on. It's about the keywords the end user.

Dan Thies from SEO Research Labs and a guest author at my blog. He does some pitching, as he calls it, "SEO Fast Start" is his book. Search Engine Marketing Business Kit, SitePoint.com will publish it soon. His company does great keyword research, advanced SEO/SEM coaching. Keyword modifiers, i.e. the tail end of keywords, half of search terms are 3 words or more. When it comes to the longer searches, you can easily rank for those organically, so do some keyword research. He showed a slide of words highlighted next to a term he plugged into keyword tracking tool. 8,539 for "web hosting" and an additional 12,281 with modifiers and thats just the top 30. The tail is bigger then the head. Assessing relevance, he gets the count of searches on a term, and then they go through and assign percentages to see if its relevant and then use a multiplier to give a "score". Keyword Density - ranks.nl. Then he mentions Dr. Garcia (Orion) for the second time, and discusses the EF Ratio (see the search algorithms research and development session, I explain it all pretty well there, I think). He then goes into term frequency, which I also summarized in that other session. Then c-index review, same deal, in my summary. STAT (Search Term Analysis Toolkit), keyword density analyzer, relevance assessment tool, keyword modifier and more too come with this tool.

Ren Warmuz from Trillian was next up, keyworddiscover.com is an advanced keyword research tool. NeedMoreBeer.com was the case study site he used. He typed in the term "beer" into the tool and it came up with over 7,000 unique beer related terms, and it shows the # of searches per term. Then you can cross relate the terms to a specific page, to see if you are organically optimized for a term. They also have an advanced "related search terms" function; type in related shoes, you get things like "sneakers" and even "socks." Once you got the keywords, you can do keyword analysis & KEI, it shows searches, occurrences, KEI and predicted daily traffic. Then he moves on to the seasonal trends page, where it shows you a graph of the ups and downs of a keyword like "valentines day" (funny; I am writing what he will say, before he says it, why? because I saw it before. well, I find it funny and it makes it easier to report on). They also have a spelling mistakes function; misspellings and typos. They took this one step further and added advanced phonetic algorithms that do sorts of soundex matches (I believe). KeywordDiscovery has an API as well and its sold on a monthly subscription. They have added language support in spanish, german, italian, french, dutch, swedish and english. He claims everyone uses the free tools, but not the paid ones, so to be competitive you need to pay. :)

Steve Dennen from ComScore is now up, with some damn cool tools (expensive too). Passive tracking of actual consumer search activity. He says there is a ton of good tools out there but there is a gap in knowledge that ComScore can fill (really looking at your competitors is a big one). They have two offerings; (1) "search marketer planning:" share of search term, searcher target demo profile, searcher target visitation and search term rankings and (2) "competitive search marketing:" He shows some screen shots of both. (1) He shows on the first offering the share of search term report which shows where are these searches taking place and how does that share compare to the overall market?. Searcher Target Demo Profile tells you about the demographics of these searches and how do they compare to all searchers. Searcher Target Visitation Report, what are the top sites visited by those who search on these terms? Search Term Ranking Report, what are the tip performing search terms within my evaluation set? (2) Competitive Search Marketing Module; sponsored ad share of voices, source of search traffic by term and source of search traffic by engine.

First up was Chris Copeland from Outrider. Outrider is a business that has been around for 9 years, they are a large ad agency with a large global client base. Integration occurs because businesses see a need for consistent interaction with their audience while at the same time leveraging the multitude of opportunities to gain increased efficiency. He challenged the audience to launch a new brand for a car company without TV or paper ads. Reasons against search integration; lack of time, lack of understanding, no desire to share budget, no desire to share spotlight with other marketing activities, and it takes effort. Multi Channel Retailing; 65% of online consumers have researched a product online and purchased that product offline, of those 51% have cross channel shopped in the past three months, consumers spent over $93 billion online in 12 months and spent over $137 billion offline on internet influenced purchase. People buy offline because they want to see it, feel it, etc. but they want to do their homework before going down to the store. "Smarter consumers" poor sales reps... Keys to success; use pre-existing relationships to strengthen search efforts. So he used offline relationship, for nascar, to drive online traffic, "nascar schedule" , from offline sponsorships to online initiatives (funny I was talking with someone about this exact case, but it was just a make up scenario, the convo was this morning, kind of creepy). Offline to Online, consistent brand messaging creates familiarity with consumers, unique tracking at multiple levels allows for integration into offline programs. He recommends to talk to same language in offline and online. Offline spending is based on Gross Rating Points (GRPs). People gather buts of data from different sources to construct the whole picture. Each impression builds on the other by reaching the consumer in a different frame of reference. Daytime is primetime on the Web, he crossed the TV usage patterns throughout the 24 hour time day, versus the Internet usage. Internet during the day is a huge time to reach and then it dips a bit at night, where you might want to up the TV spot. Online exclusive usage day-parting is also very interesting to look at - when compared to offline. Its essential to find the right times of the day to market a specific message. It cost 23% more to encourage consumers to purchase colgate toothpaste using TV alone vs. TV + online together. Understand that there is a bigger spender at multiple channels. Using messaging that targets the dominant offline buying tendency is essential. Integration is a two way street; 1 million searches done in 30 hour period on super bowl commercials.

Andy Beal from KeywordRanking.com was next up, I'll try to give him a hard time ;). SEM is vital component of any traditional marketing campaign. Your targeted customer does not always immediately react to marketing when received. With direct mail costing around $10 per lead, search is a low cost safety net; 27% of all retails ales are influenced by online research (all - source: IBM). Identify the messages contained within your existing ads. Phase One to sync with traditional marketing is to Match SEM to Traditional. compliment the two, identify the existing buzzwords and phrases used in your email, mail, tv and print. Launching a new product? Sponsored ads can get your message out quickly. You can use PPC to build brand awareness. Phase Two is to map the future campaigns together. Sit down and map out your next 6 - 12 months. Identify seasonal offline campaigns so you can prepare SEO campaigns in advance (this way you don't do last minute things). Plan to start paid search campaigns 1 - 2 days before offline campaign - remember set up times. Role reversal, Phase Three: match traditional to SEM. Use your keyword research to help identify targeted keywords for offline marketing campaigns, its your chance to guide your consumers to search for your preferred keywords. Analyze the keyword frequency data (get ideas for new products to stock, find new campaign ideas and use won web site stats), place your offline marketing 'online' in html or pdf versions. Utilize local paid search options. Matching competitors campaigns, sponsored ads can be used to avoid letting your competitors get a jump on you. If they launch a new product or service, bid on phrases that match their marketing. Avoid bidding on competitor's trademarks. Read your competitors catalogs and emails, etc. Expert satellite case study; Direct email campaign to attract new DIRECTTV subscribers, assisted in identifying areas with the highest search frequency, plan to match SEM campaign to attract the "researchers" and the "can't remembers." So they did a local campaign, they matched the direct mail target to the local ppc campaigns and the search terms were matched. They created targeted landing pages to match up with the offline, and the local targets.

Brad Byrd from NewGate Internet was next up (SEW Mod). Search is a unique marketing medium: don't expect it to operate like your other marketing mediums, have different expectations, online and offline differ greatly, Do leverage its unique characteristics toward your specific marketing goals. Some of these unique characteristics are: (1) Fast campaign setup and launch; allows reactive campaigns, based on market opps (2) No long term budget contracts; pay as you go model; flexible search budgets can be adapted to larger org goals. (3) Market Driven pricing; open marketplace model creates a level playing field for advertisers; expenses can sometimes be unpredictable. (4) Tangible, Trackable Results; every campaign can be evaluated midstream, and fast feedback lets you build upon success or problems; budget can more easily be justified. (5) The emergence of performance marketing (higher expectations). Retail example, search as a merchandising tool. Search presents unique merchandising opportunities (proactive customers, search also allows you to "feature" every product). Identify and promote competitive advantages (price, warranty, shipping, etc.) Promote proven winners as they emerge (products become self-selecting and leverage unforeseen demand in a timely way and catalog winners aren't always the same as online winners). Liquidate inventory through search (adjust price points on the fly). Capitalize on opportunities (take advantage of favorable manufacturer pricing - he gave an example of a "bow-lingual" or a bark translator. In summary, everything is in its right place; search is a new marketing model, dont fight it. adopt it.

I figured since the "What is Spam?" session was so popular, I would attend the "What is Content?" session. Spam and Content are basically the same thing. Ok enough with humor.

Chris Sherman mods up this session, for you forum junkies, Jensense is on the panel. Chris said that content really works, "content is king."

Kent Lewis from Anvil Media Inc. explains what content can do. He will give a case study on some pharmaceutical company that hired him. So he created a content site on melanoma condition and its an objective resource site, they are not pushing a sale or a specific treatment. But the client does offer services to treat the condition. Unfortunately the projector is not working at this moment, so bare with me. He said he had to deal with a lot of legal loopholes. Now his own computer went blank so we took a moment for the speaker to dance on the stage, while waiting to get things back online (I would describe his dance but, I am not good with those types of adj.). So what they did was speak with people with this condition, and they can up with a FAQ to use. Then they organized their content into seven basic categories and then further organized it into sub categories. They did a ton of bolding, hyper-linking and underlining. They did not yet get to go live with custom title tags yet, due to politics, but he hopes it to come. He then showed (in words) what a site map was, and he recommended using that as your custom 404 page (but I like to make it a variation of the site map, not exactly like the site map). They have a FAQs, "What is melanoma? Melanoma is..." good keywords. In the end, they ended up with, a reasonably strong visibility percentage. They are #1 for melanoma in Google and #4 in Yahoo. They are in the top 10 and 20 for most words without unique title tags, impressive (he didn't say anything about links). Keyword research he said is key, when you talk about each page, each page needs a theme with stemming. Finally, someone pushed in a cable and the projector popped on. So now he slides back and shows us what he so eloquently described in words. Ok back on track... Balancing objectives with optimization, he rather have a number 5 spot that reads well versus number 1 listing with a site that reads like gibberish (he adds he is a white hat). Source code optimization is important but you can get #1 placement without it, like this site. Leverage content, syndicate to boost link pop. Top performing content types: press releases; articles, FAQs, blogs, directory listings, and glossary.

Jennifer Siegg from Jensense.com, she has a cold she said. She said she has a lot of web sites in all types of web sites. She generates content to make them work, basically. Content Creation Tools: statistics program (give you great ideas), customer service requests and questions, copywriting books, dictionary and thesaurus and professionalism. Don't always focus on the competitive things; dont go after just the primary keywords - look for the secondary words you can capture a ton of traffic from it. She then showed showed some examples of Google searches on primary versus secondary keywords. Seasonal topics, such as "cashing out your 401k can be expensive" and lots of referrals came in so she added more content. She said catchy titles work: "I've been bad in Google, now what? it creates an action for people to click from the SERPs to go to your site. Article length, good content doesn't mean you need to have 3,000 words, all you need is 250 - 300 words. Content ideas; look at your emails and customer service requests, she added what may be basic for you can bring in bring in good traffic. Message boards as content, people write it for you, just make sure its search friendly, watch your forum referrals fly. If you find a particular forum page is very popular, create an article on it or something. Bam, the projector went blank again, they are messing with the same cable, but doesn't seem to be working, so she continues without the PPT. Things she found did not work well were; submitting your content for free content areas but what she found was that the people who were taking the content and not linking. She had an other issue with the duplicate content filter issue and it seems to be a big issue these days. You need a lot of time to track people down, send out letters, contact hosts because Google ranked the content thieves above her - all writers have this issue. She recommends that you take an 10 word abstract and put it in quotes and then search on it. It will bring up all the sites that took your article. To know if you have been dup filtered, just click on that link in Google that says something like "some results have been omitted from the results to see them all...." something like that.

Anthony Garcia Future Persuasion Officer for FutureNow, he is short so his first joke was that "yes I am standing up." You literally can not see his face over the podium. He has been involved in the Internet community for less then a year. Bryan and Jeff Eisenberg, sitting on my right, work with him. Most people write content to reach the masses. Persuasive online copywriting is different, your audience is one single reader, its easier to write in that style. How can SEO non expert optimize content? Its a process of knowing your customers, a customer centric methodology. He brought up Leo Shachter, the number one diamond brand in the world, he showed that the page has one link in and it ranks well. He showed a beer machine site and the site has been live for 11 months and ranks well for home made beer or something like that. Search engines love deeding us relevant content. The major search engines are eager to deliver the most relevant content. Algorithms will change, not the search engines end goal. So work with that in mind and it will work. Content is not king when it exists for its own sake, when it attracts unqualified traffic, etc. Content informs, persuades and relevant content does both. He then showed examples of how content query searches drive the next action after the click. How do you start writing this copy? He said its about knowing your customers and walking in their shoes (persona). They gather data on topographics, psychographics and demographics. They developed 5 user persona for Leo Shachter. He showed examples of 2 of those 5. One was of a nice guy making 32k named David Commonsense, and the other was of a girl named Ms. Goldigger (the name says it all). How can they create the pages of content that work for those two people? Description words appeared on the page 72%. There are two types of actions they plan for (1) macro actions are the end goals and (2) micro goals lead to the macro actions. There are two types of hyperlinks (1) call to actions and (2) point of resolution. Optimize relevant content. They map all the click throughs for each user persona, very detailed. They have a process for keyword research, but how they differ is they map keywords and phrases to their implicit intent. For David Commonsense, they wanted to help him learn about diamonds and how to buy it online. So he showed us a page on "how to pick a diamond" "how much to spend on diamonds" etc. They also have a "find a jeweler" page, on how to find a reputable diamond. Goldigger is a bit differ, they target "perfect diamond" taking you to a page "which is the most perfect diamond he can GIVE me?". "Diamond settings" and they have #1 and 2 ranks for these types of keywords. Secret forumlas for call to actions. What is the micro action I want them to take, what person wants to be persuaded and what do I need to persuade them?

Good session...

Harrison Magun from AR Search presented an overview of European search. He asks, why do US companies want to market on European search engines? Frist there is increased distribution, competitive advantages, more receptive marketing sometimes, and first mover opportunities. He continues that you can leverage foreign exchange possibilities. There are about 190 million internet users in the US, combined in Europe there is about the same. An important fact is that you can buy a listing on yahoo, but users in foreign countries surf on specific sites such as Google.it, etc.. Trying to reach foreign users on Google.com is probably not going to happen. Who are good travelers? Downloadable apps, hotel and air, fragrance & beauty, b2b/wholesale. Who are the poor travelers, such as those things that can’t be shipped to that company. They are consumer electronics, automotive, online/offline education, leads for US-based services (credit mortgage). Another note is that trademark law is quite various from country to country. He gives the quote “My hovercraft is full of eels” (its from Monty Python). What the quote supports is that the wrong translation can end badly. It makes sense to have the ads written translated correctly, valued propositions are offered, and landing pages correctly translated as well. He says that the entire site has to lead the user through the buyer cycle. Elements that are important. Merchandising/pricing and realizing strengths and weaknesses. He gives some examples of bad examples of sites and ads that were lost in translation. He summaries saying that you need to realize whether your business really has customers in Europe. Analyze competitive landscape and barriers to entry.

Ad Maiora representative Massimo Burgio presents on what Europe is like these days. We may not know what its like living here in the US> There are currently 25 countries, with a market of 450 million consumers, and 20 official EC languages. He says you want to find the languages that are spoken most often. There is an active population that is comparable to the United States. The language spoken online varies widely, there are many spoken online even down to Dutch. Search queries with European languages are 1/3 of searches in Google. He goes to explain that UK users have a good relationship with search engines. Massimo continues to talk about European search engines and the data without the presentation. It’s hard to understand what everyone is saying. Harrison jumps in and asks about how many are already advertising in Western European. About half the room raise their hands, about 5 ot 6 people raise their hand that they are selling products in Europe. He then goes around asking about what other people are advertising, everything from boats, heavy equipment (even thought difficult), insurance, timeshares.
Success, presentation system is fixed. Massimo continues to talk about search destinations that are used by Europeans. Quick note: The data in each of these presentation is a bit old (1 year old) and I wonder why its not more up to date.

The UK is the #1 country in terms of SEO/SEM services and awareness. The search advertising spend is on average about 15% (UK is 50%). There are many rising stars, with Scandinavian countries. He breaks into something called e-readiness, developed by IBM, about the likelihood of adoption of internet and the use of online advertising. There are also many search events that are taking place in Europe.

What is going on in the Local Search arena? There is already a good amount on inventory available in local search. Local search data comes from two different content areas. The offline derived local content, which is list compilation vendors, business mailing lists, sales lead generation, and other direct mail. The next local search data is internet derived local content. 20% of websites out there have a local address designated somewhere on their site. Google for example takes a unique approach by spidering the web looking for local content and then verifying this information. Justin Sanger from LocalLaunch! adds an additional content area and that is user-derived local content, or content provided by the user, business owner, or customer. There are also competitors out there can provide content that dictate how your listing is displayed. Some of the local offline players in local content. They are Acxiom and InfoUSA provides the data to many of the search utilities. What you can do is have people search locally and get a bunch of paid advertisers. With local search there are a good number of variables to consider, such as proximity. There is a good push by the providers to enrich their content.

Local results sets changes in the content. Offline content has constraints, this we know. Local search is pure search requiring rich and structured content beyond standard contact information. Content for qualitative, comparative, local buying decisions including the following: proximity scoring, rich & structured data, user reviews, business ratings, and mapping features.

Business profiles is user generated meta data is a source of rich content, revenue, and “spider food” for pure local search. Many are free such as Yahoo, Superpages, and A9. Additional traditional keyword analysis should be employed. SEO should be factored in. Accurate, consistent, and distributed business content will have long term impact on your business. More content means a better user experience. Justin says that much of the local information is dependent on us. He says InfoUSA has a large team of telemarketers just to verify data. He next goes into business profile examples from Yahoo. They are implementing user reviews (Google isn’t doing this) and an extended company profile for a very small fee. He recommends to go to Yahoo and find your business.

Considering ratings and reviews. He says he often has people come to him saying that listings can be changed by someone else. With paid search you control the ad and the listings. Ratings provide this extra level of information. Yahoo also allows you to search by user review. There is time in the marketplace to take advantage of this. You can provide a lot of advantages by considering local search.

The new group, is Small Medium Enterprises (SME’s), he says this a great group. 60% of SME’s conduct 75% of their business from customers with a 50 mile radius. 22 million small medium sized businesses. Problem or opportunity is 3% of SME’s are using paid search. There is a challenge here. SME’s have less than 6,000 a year to spend on marketing. Controlling margins and dealing with SME’s is difficult. This requires product simplication, scale, automation, customer support structures, capitalization, and relationships.

There are also new sales requirements sales. We need to remove the complexity of paid search products. They don’t understand pay per call, SEO, algorithms. Must bundle the products and sell them. For SE’s establish local sales channels and embrace agencies. Example: Feed on The Street Sales Force. Going from traditional yellowpages ads to selling clicks.

About the local marketing mix. Pay attention to enhanced profiling offerings, internet yellowpages (IYPS), Local PPC. Cleanse your data! Other areas include pay per call, local web page development, user review and ratings strategy, and local authority identification. He talks about authority sites gets thrust to the top. When you think about the local search, its more than SEO. Find out who is rankings and the top and get your clients in there.

About depth and horizontal coverage. Is there room in the local marketplace? Yes definitely. He thinks there is room for players to aggregate this and expand this information, because search engines can’t do it. For the same reason vertical search is so hot. Segmentation is about specialization. SE’s inability to rich experience across verticals. Understanding a vertical/geo-targeting is critical. Really incredible presentation, the best I have attended today or seen yet on the industry of local search.

Next up was Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing, who is going to present ways on how to promote clients locally and present a few case studies. One of her clients is a large local ISP. They need to pre-qualify visitors using zip codes. They approach search advertising 3 ways, local (ip targeted), national, and national w/ local keywords. The ads they are standard, with the only addition is the term “national” to “local” when locally targeting. They concluded from the study that they could reach more people with a IP-targeted local campaign than a national campaign with local keywords. At least in this category, average CPC for the local campaign is less than average CPC for the national campaign with local keywords. IP-targeted ads deliver the best conversion rate and the best online cost/order.

So why do national advertising? It turns out the client loves the national ad for getting good visibility and its inexpensive. Also, if you are only doing IP-targeted campaigns. People searching from outside your specified locations such as people moving into the area, researching options for someone else, and traveling. Running all three campaigns works well. What about Overture – Local Match? Well its great for companies without a website. Works well for business wanting to drive calls or foot-traffic into a store. Currently targeting is based on a specified distance from a physical business address. What they found was the Overture works well for people who want people to walk physically into their store and get that foot traffic. The way they target your ads is the physical address, and surrounding radius. Some comparisons: If you don’t have a website you only option is Overture. If you don’t have a local address you only option if Google Local. If you want to reach the entire state you only option is Google. To summarize, they found that Google and Overture are completely different products. Overture serves ads based on people indicating location.

Robert asked for it, so I am here. I've seen it before, hope they mix it up some.

Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing. She will present two case studies. Search advertising generated by phone conversions and estimating results when you cant directly control or measure offline conversions. (1) Tracking phone orders: Client is an online retailer of homeopathic cold remedies. Goal was to understand the "true" ROI for paid ads. Approach was to create a unique landing page with a unique 800# and this is how they tracked the sales. 27% of their orders came via the phone and 73% bought online. She said this is the typical distribution in most industries (maybe I got that wrong, doesn't sound right - that it is the typical dist.) Implications: assume you spend $100 to drive 73 internet orders and 27 phone orders. If you are blind to the phone orders (cost per conversion at $1.37 versus the $1 cost per conversion with the online orders). So what they did was make a unique 800# for google, overture and findwhat, respectively. They also added a customer reference code on the site and the reps on the phone asked for that number. There is a "new kid" in town, ingenio, pay per call. Pay Per Call advertising, same concept of PPC but its a call instead of a click. They show a 800# from findwhat and when they call, and you answer the call, it says, lead from findwhat preceding the transfer of the call. The second case study is a national chain of childcare centers, and the goal was to convince management that ppc does drive enrollment. People research childcare options online but all people enroll offline. They came up with options to track these conversions; enhance center's enrollment processes and tools. Train directors to record and report "lead source". Landing page encourages prospects to print an enrollment discount coupon, which is redeemed at centers. Landing page encourages prospects to find their local center and register for an enrollment discount. The client said they will not do any of these. The solution: (1) implement periodic, non-consecutive search ads campaigns. (2) Try to run campaigns when other marketing efforts are at a minimum. (3) Correlate search and ad spend. The results, 157% increase in traffic, 78% increase in online leads (lead defined by a search for a local center - center locator), lowest cost per lead then anything else, in 3 of 4 cases search campaigns were directly correlated with a 2.5 - 4% lift in overall center registrations.

Jon Schepke from Proceed Interactive was next up with two case studies. Great Expectations is case study one. They have a $400,000 monthly internet marketing budget, 20,000 raw leads generated online, 50% from SEM efforts. Solution, work with the client to build an integrated web based lead tracking system. 800# with IVR phone system for tracking. Ultimate goal for everyone; marriage of frontend marketing data and backend conversion to measure roi. The IVR system is www.databasesystemscorp.com, there are many good systems (i love these systems and the flexibility with web integration). 3% of all leads came from IVR system, the cost of IVR is $.35 per minute, so very affordable. He showed a screen shot of the custom lead reports system. Next case study is a LA Weight Loss company. They built an online lead tracking system and 30% of internet leads came from the 800#. Custom landing pages and promo codes are great. Pay per call model he is a fan of.

Mike Sack from Inceptor was next up to show some research first. Over 90% of online searches result in an offline transaction (consumer electronics category). AIC survey concluded that a $180.7 billion in offline spending was do to online research. MSN Media Accountability study in 04 said the results suggest significant impact on brand (no figures disclosed by MSN yet). Methods to track offline conversions; call tracking, lift measurement, post purchase surveys and promo codes. He goes on to explain each, questions, I'll answer them (fingers starting to hurt :)). He then shows a "p-code" which is a code they want the phone call to mention. Results for a specific diamond client; online conversions 1% and offline only were 9%. Combined was a 10% conversion rate. The next step was to start applying formulas, Offline CR + Online CR = Actual CR. Actual CR * Visitors = Sales. Sales * AOV = Estimated Rev. Value and so on. They took that data and improved keyword grouping based on the online and offline data. They changed bid parameters, and they were able to bid more then competitors because they knew they were making money. And then they had more money, so they expanded the keyword program to by more generic terms. He feels that businesses with offline components appear to benefit more from SEM then online 'onlys'. As businesses begin measuring impact of search on offline sales expect to see significant increase in online spending. The price that can be paid for keywords, generic keywords, will rise. You need to track offline conversions, you need to be prepared to spend against ROI metrics that incorporate offline conversions. PPC ads will cost more money, bottom line.

Misty Locke from Range Search Marketing is going to show us how she fought to get a bigger budget from clients. She goes over the ways to track offline conversions; focus groups, in store pickup of referral, coordinate with call centers, track sales locator pages, and only advertise online (scary). She then showed some slides; 61% shop online or research online, 66% utilize both online and offline to buy, she then get a bit more detailed - too much to type it all out that quickly (i am quick but not that quick). She designed a Pier I Design U one page interactive site. They used Google, Overture, MSN and local and findwhat. They did some rich media. And they have a discount that gives 15%. They only put the promo on the rich media (flash). She spent big on generic keywords that were not directly related to Pier I. 76k opted in, 63% of unique registrants 12k avg unique registrants per week. The stores said they drove of 343k in store transaction, 79% increase compared to last year TV ads. Net sorre sales were up 62% and online rev up more then 40k.

The Geico case with regard to Google.
- Oral ruling to be followed by written opinion
- Google's motion for judgment granted with regard to paid listings triggered by GEICO mark but did not include TIM in title or copy
- Judge also held, however, that paid listings triggered by the GEICO mark that included the GEICO mark did constitute TM infringement
- Second phase of trial will determine Google's extent of liability & damages for this second category of listings
- Fed court decision - non-binding precedence may influence future case.

If you do not find "use" for trademark use, then there is not trademark issue. So Google/Overture said that they allow people to bid on it, but there is no use in the ad text. Most of this basic information is in my coverage of the past SES conference.

Through this session Jeff Rohrs (moderator of session) put up slides on some definitions of trademarks, google's policy and overture's policy.

What is the difference between a "brand" and a "trademark"?
A trademark is a word, name, symbol, color, scent or sound used in trade to distinguish goods or services. A trademark is a legal construct designed to protect consumers from confusion as to the source of the goods or services.

Barry Felder, the lawyer on the panel, said that he has clients call him and complain about a competitor using their trademarks. But then a day later, they tell him to do nothing, since they find out that they are bidding on their competitors keywords as well. Charles Ossola (counsel for Geico) explained that geico spent so much money on its brand, and someone searching on geico and someone searching on geico wants geico.

Danny then asks Charles, based on his definition. What about someone saying that they hate Geico, why can't they put up an ad for that. Charles responds, that the court has not yet decided. He said, this case was against competitors and nothing to do with free speech, comparative ads, or hate ads.

What is a brand? Part art, part science, brand is the difference between a bottle of soda and a bottle of coke, the intangible yet visceral impact of a person's subjective experience with the product - the personal memories and cultural associations that orbit around it. A brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality. A brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of consumers.

What does it take to establish a trademark? Use in commerce in connection with goods and/or services.

What does it take to establish a brand? Time, money, sweat equity, consumer experience, consistency of experience, advertising, marketing and PR.

Barry added that it is ok to benefit from someone else's trademark but what is not ok is to cause 'confusion.'

Jeff typed in "faucet" into the Google AdWords Sandbox tool and it came back with moen and other brands of faucets. Now AdWords defaults to broad match, meaning, Google is actually automatically making you bid on moen, etc. He then puts up a slide that shows that branded searches deliver high high success rates (success rates are ctr? conversions?)

Who is bidding on branded search terms? trademark owners, franchisees, retailers, affiliates, agents, competitors, gray marketers, information sites, comparative shopping portals. A Best Buy affiliate manager said that its hard when it comes to managing affiliates, they can be kicked out for abusing TOS and then sign up again under a different alias. But the affiliates do go the extra mile and find new ways to find you targeted, high converting traffic. Personal note: If this was a WebmasterWorld conference, the convo will be going the other way. Not sure how many affiliates are in this room. ;)

Charles said that the Google folks are creative. He said Google made a case that the brand image of having Geico on the page some many times (in the ads) in brand dollars WITH the vast majority of those clicking on the organic first results on geico.com, outweighs the losses of any sales. Danny adds, that he would make the case that since most people see the #1 organic listing and then go to the paid listings, are actually looking for competitors.

Then they moved over to the french case of Louis Vuitton and Le Maridian and Google is losing bad. So US vs. France differ greatly. Danny Sullivan is mocking the French legal minds that they don't understand technology. Google simply can not press a button to make this go away.

Again, I apologize for being late. I spent too much time chatting with Jeeves between the break, but I think it was worth it. So I'll just jump in.

Justin (WMW mod) is on the podium. 60% SEMs conduct 75% of their business from customers within a 50-mile radius. 22 Million small and medium sized businesses. SEMs spend $22 billion on local ads annually. 46% of their ad budgets on Yellow Pages. Only 3% are utilizing paid search. The SEM challenge: SEMs have less then $6k per year to spend on marketing. Controlling margins and dealing with SMEs is difficult. Requiring product simplification, scale, automation, customer support structures. Its important to remove the complexity of paid search (small biz do not have time). For SEs establish a local sales channels and embrace agencies. "Feet on the Street" sale force (google and bell south // dex media and SEM global). Aggregators will simplify pricing and complexities and consolidate set-up, billing, and reporting. Now there is agency support like Google AdWords Pro, APIs and so on. Local marketing mix; enhanced profiling offerings, internet yellow pages, local ppc (geo), data source cleansing, pay per call, local web page dev, user review and rating strategy, local authority identification. There is room in the local marketplace. For some reason, vertical search is HOT. Segmentation is about specialization (rich and specified meta content, vertical depth vs. horizontal range), SEs inability to rich experience across verticals (understanding a vertical / geo vertical better, understanding the indent of the user and the user needs better than an SE can).

Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing was up next. She shared a client case study from a ISP company. Client is a national ISP and the goal is to reach a prospect in a regional service area (they service 40 cities only). So if you go to the client's web site, they ask you to type in a zip code or phone number, so local targeting is important. They run (1) national campaign (2) national campaign with local terms and (3) geo targeted campaign. (1) Target = US, Keywords - broadband cable, broadband provider, etc. Ad is very national targeted. (2) National but with local keywords, US target, Keywords = STATE keyword and Ad = STATE ad content. (3) Local (geo targeting), so you specify the locations in Google, Keywords = same as 1 and ads same as 1. So the results: National spend is lower on purpose, clicks 13,500 /month, lowest conversion rate. The National campaign with local words had the most expensive CPC, but a higher conversion rate (more then double) but the cost per order is higher then 1. The Geotargeting is the best method, the CPC is lower then national, lowest cost per order and highest conversion rate. Conclusion, they were able to reach more targeted people with the geo targeting then the national campaign. She ads that geo targeting is 80 - 85% accurate, I am glad she added that. So why do national advertising if geo worked best? (1) The client loves the branding of the national ads. (2) You will miss some prospects with an IP targeted campaign (the 15 - 10 %, or they are in NYC searching on local barber shops where they live in la jolla, ca.) She then shifted over to Overture, she said they are two really different products. Overture does not use IP targeting to serve ads, they rely on the words you use in the query. Overture Local Match is great for companies without a Web site. Works well for businesses wanting to drive calls or foot-traffic into a store. Currently targeting is based on a specific distance from a physical business address. Works well with Yahoo! registered members and Yahoo! local (where searcher has specified their location). Which is best for you? if you don't have a site, you must use Overture. If you do not have a local address you must use Google. To reach an entire state you must you Google. Target a city or DMA, Google is preferred. Encourage calls or store traffic, Overture is preferred. Appear as a regional/national company, Google is preferred.

Last up was Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement. She is focusing her presentation around news and announcements. Some stats included projected at 10.8 billion dollars worldwide by 2009 and half of that is in the US. Local commercial searches represented 25% of all searches. Estimated paid search advertisers globally: 200,000-250,000. Estimated SMEs globally: 25 - 30 million. She put up a chart by Bruce Clay, the Search Engine Relationship Chart for LOCAL. She then moves into Amazon's A9, storefront "block views". She showed an example of a local cafe picture in A9 in Atlanta, the page also has multiple pictures, reviews, business next to that business, related business and upload your own pictures. She then showed the "click to call" and her phone rang, she picked it up and the voice said please hold while we connect you and then a few seconds later someone picked up and its free for the local store! SMS Search was the next topic up, send data to your phone from your PC. Yahoo local "Send to Phone" link on all of Yahoo!'s pages, she didn't like the text message that came in. You have to plan ahead to use Yahoo!'s. Google launched SMS search, pure from your phone SMS search, before Yahoo!. GPS-enabled phones will rock. Pay Per Call, 98% of all US businesses dont buy PPC yet - but they all have phones. Some marketers are willing to pay up to 15x more then PPC for a phone call. Allows companies reps to have a human touch. Easy to understand, compared to PPC. AOL announcement late Jan 05 to launch something like this. FindWhat was the first to announce this. Ingenio is a major provider of this with AOL. FindWhat or CitySearch are the only ones that have something you can use right now. Mapping sites, what do mapping sites have to do with search? entry point into local listing, most carry PPC ads, search engines are integrating them into SERPs. Mapping sites usage is up. Google maps is launched mid-Feb and Yahoo! has been around for a long time now. Social networks like linkedin, orkut, etc. now there are yellow page social networks, like insider pages (yellow pages written by friends), right now there is not much data there. Resources are kelseygroup.com and localsearchguide.org. Truelocal, localdirect.com, payperclickanalyst.com, forums SEW and WMW have forums.

How search is going to be taken to other places by the engines.

MSN Search was up first, Oshoma Momoh, and wished Yahoo! a happy birthday. He said they think a lot about this topic, this is where they are excited about. Search today in 2005 is you find what you need in a fraction of a second, but you often need to do more, refine your search, click and more - taking a lot more time. Today's reality is you don't get the right answer right away. The dream is to answer, discover, recall and publish any information anywhere and at anytime. He said you want the answers on anything, PC, mobile, game console (xbox), on things that you would not image. What might convergence world look like? He said that all things (advertising, shopping, research, blogs, people, music, tv, video, sharing, email, messaging the list goes on...This will all revolve or resolved around search. He then spent a few minutes showing off MSN Search and the desktop product, which was nice, he showed some relaxing pictures. What's different in the "c-world"? Search as an ingredient (search in context, enhanced user experiences, entirely new experience), Natural computing (computing, storage, ram, cheap, voice, ink, gestures, devices), Online everything (pictures, video, tv, music, news, blogs, rss, advertising, worldwide). He said imagine asking the search to bring back pictures of my sister, it will figure it out based on knowing visually who your sister is. Happy one month birthday to MSN Search.

Next up was Ask Jeeves, Jim Lanzone. He explained that ask started off as a question/ask service in 1998. He said there are currently certain things we can't do, like answer the question as to "where are my keys?" Then he brought up when they bought Teoma, which was a first big step for Ask Jeeves. They stuck with the original premise of making it very easy to use. They started along a path that is beyond mere html documents. "The Staircase": Step 1 is the Web with billion of pages. Step 2 is PC & Media and Step 3 is Mobile. He then pulled up a book named "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte from 1995 and quoted a few things. "Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living." In Q2 please expect Ask's first mobile product, Mobile Smart Answers. He then showed off some of Ask Jeeves structure data, smart answers (they started doing this in 2003). He said that smart answers are exactly the right way to deliver to mobile environments. They just recently purchased Bloglines that has a mobile product right now. He then showed off Ask's desktop search. He showed how embedded video works well in the desktop search tool, he showed a T-Mobile commercial plugging Jeeves. He quickly moved from desktop, to web to my jeeves. He said Ask is currently looking to integrate the desktop results within the Web results but its a challenge. He then showed Bloglines and explained the importance of monitoring the Web.

Google was next, Marissa Mayer. Google thinks search is the most important aspect. It is a way to navigate information, on the Web that is the way people do it. Google local had more pageviews then Froogle during the holiday shopping season when it was not linked from the home page, which says something. They introduced Google Maps - its a cool tool, she said they are very user friendly. She then typed in Hilton and it showed the results on the map that were brought up, its pretty cool. She showed how direction in NYC can take you around the world, because of all the one way streets, so she clicked a button to "reverse directions" which made it quicker in distance. Marissa then moved over to personal information. In Oct. Google announced Desktop Search, and she showed examples. She then move over to the communication space. Email is the #1 application on the Internet. Search is a great way to organize your email, hence the announcement of Gmail. Don't worry about organizing your email in folders, in fact, she said there are no folders. She then showed some usability aspects of the gmail application, you know the way they thread email conversations together, which is really nice. They recently acquired Picasa Photo Organizer and Marissa shows it off. The most popular feature in Picasa is to share photos. Noticed that she did not wish Yahoo! a happy birthday. ;)

Gerry Campbell from AOL thanked Danny for letting him speak, he loves search. He gave a story on marbles, and how to find your marbles (sorry for not providing the context). How is search changing our lives? People have access to content, there is a ton of content, publishing is easier, and the technology is bringing it all together. Users are taking control of their information, and search is the fundamental tool for navigating the digital life. Generation One is search the Web for text. Generation Two is searching images, audio and visual AND local. Generation Three is about intelligent answers; AOL calls it snapshots. Query driven programming, better answers, faster. He typed in "vince carter" and bam, he has all the information about him. And he went through a ton of examples of "snapshots." From local, sports, music, movies, cakes, stocks, calculators, and games. He explains that these things are all built on the building blocks to make convergence possible. So in the future, it needs to be "me" focused. The real convergence is in the realm of ads and content. He said content and ads in the future become one and the same. Generating "auto leads" directly from search and content.

Last up was Yahoo!, Bradley Horowitz, he said today is the literal 10 year anniversary. Provide the world's most trusted search experience for users, publishers and advertisers. Yahoo! also considers themselves as a media company. In the past it was all about "mass media", today we can easily do "micro media." At Yahoo! they think a lot about "my media", its the ability to do both mass and micro based on the user. Digital Media Dartboard; music and the ipod, TV and tivo, movies and netflix, and publishing and my yahoo. Yahoo! believes that search lives at the center of this world. He said when he uses his tivo it takes him forever to find the content he wants, search would work well with that. He showed The Apprentice image as an example of mass media and then some viral marketing piece that is more micro media - hence "my media". My Yahoo! Search, next.yahoo.com - this tool allows you to define "my web." He then shows Yahoo! Desktop Search. Then moves on to Y!Q, which springs open a DHTML search box and results up at the "moment of inspiration." (Which makes me think, why didn't Google discuss the new "auto link" feature in Google Toolbar 3.) Then he shows off Yahoo! Mobile and throws up dozens of new products, features they added. The last slide read, "We Are Just Getting Started."

Oshoma Moma from MSN Search presents the overview of where search might be headed and the various fun projects they have planned to work on. So what will search be like in 2005? He says today’s reality is billions of web links but it can be hard to find what you need and there become many needs unanswered. The dream is the answer, discovery, recall, and publishing of any information anywhere, anytime. Search engines and portals are great ways to publish data and they will continue to be beyond 2005. He says we might see devices that don’t even look like mobile devices. The example that is given is about how people in Japan do things with their mobile phones that we only do on our desktops. So what might that convergence world look like? He says search will kinda fade into the background. All the things such as communication, productivity, entertainment, learning, commerce, will come along with search. You will not go to a search space to complete a search, it will already be integrated in to our existing activities. Oshoma gives examples from MSN desktop search about the possibilities of search. He shows you can organize you music, photos, etc. Search will just be an ingredient of someone else’s navigation. What’s different in C-world? Search in-context, enhanced user experiences, and entirely new experiences. We may also see natural computing such as cheap plentiful networking, voice, ink, gestures, and devices. Online everything…pictures, video, TV, music, news, blogs, RSS, casting, advertising worldwide. Online everything would be a complement to the other two things. There are trends to use new devices.

Jim Lanzone with Ask Jeeves opens up talking about how they started with trying to answer questions. He asks how we can ask a search engine to find out keys. In 2001 they purchased Teoma, and it was the first big step to what Ask is today. They stuck to the original premise, was to utilize a world class search strategy but also make it simple. One of the things they look at is a staircase approach working their way up the stairs. They look at the two different data types and devices. He quotes from the book Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital. He quotes the author, “Thomas Jefferson advanced the concept of libraries and the right to check out a book free of charge. But he never considered the likelihood that 20 million people may checkout the book for free online.” He continues with the quote “Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.”

He goes into what they call smart answers that rolled out in late 2002. It gives the user more information such as weather on the location, etc. They also have something called Direct Answers, for searches that might require a full answer directly on the site. It appears Ask is trying to answer you question as soon as it can. If you can get it there, why would you click elsewhere?
Jim talks about their desktop search and making it easy as possible to use the tools in the desktop search. He gives examples of using desktop search, you can find the document you are looking for. They are developing a music search. He says in the future desktop search will be fully integrated into the web. He says people are haven’t fully adopted it yet.

Google and search convergence, they think search is obviously important. Users already navigate the web by search as opposed to categories. What they find is that more information demand, search is the way they want to access this information. They are seeing a large amount of demand for Google Local. Google local had more page views than Froogle during the holiday shopping season when Google Local wasn’t even linked from the homepage. She puts up a map of the United States, and types in New York, NY and instantly a map pops up. She says the maps are colored like old European maps to make it clear and easy to read. Search is also integrated in the mapping technology. This is impressive. You can search for the Hilton, pharmacy, etc. But how do you get there? They have incorporated directions in to the mapping technology. You can get walking directions or driving directions from wherever you are at. Search will become a paradigm that will develop more into the future. There is a lot of information on our computers. Searching our desktops will be important. The one thing people are asking, is “Why can’t I search my computer like I can search Google?” You can now.

On the subject of communication, email is the #1 application on the internet. In Gmail, there is no classic way to create a folder, they want you do a search instead of create folders. Right..but why? Marissa goes into how threaded conversation was one of the ideas they had. Concluding she believes search will continue to grow and provide unbelievable opportunities for improving our lives and experiences.

Blogs can have a powerful influence. Amanda Watlington from APR presented an overview of the blogosphere. This looks like its going to be a great session that is moderately attended. She asks what are blogs? There are 8 million bloggers, 7% of 120 million of internet users. Blogs enable conversation. One to one conversation is critical, and they are the reality of one to one marketing, the marketing that we envisioned several years ago. Blogs and RSS are a new information paradigm. Use to you submitted you website and waited for it to get submitted. Now with blog content and RSS you avoid that. RSS is instant and the user is pulling the content daily. Blogs have many uses and there is are many media uses. Publishing content with a personal voice is important. They also social networking and conversation. They allow dialogues with your market on a local and international basis. They create fans and are wonderful collaboration tools. Its not all just about publishing, it’s about the facilitate of the conversation of the one to one marketing with your audience. Communities are often comprised of linked sites of a topical nature. She explains that you blog and its feed is an admission ticket to a community. Building traffic through links requires a strategy. She presents a link network to give us the scope for which blogs gather links. Amazing. “Sorry if you do a marketing site and you don’t have an RSS feed today you should be fired” from Robert Scobel of Microsoft. He is making a point, that if you website is stale, you are missing the boat. Its all about fresh content and feeding this.

There are many flavors of feeds and formats. You need to think about making you blog visible. She gives an example RSS feed, and that we need to separate our thinking that its an technology. It’s just like a text document. If you think about it as a file it becomes demystified. There is a whole host of independent feed creation tools, many of which are include in packaged blog services. Now, managing you RSS feed, you need to create it, validate it, disseminate, and then eliminate it. She next goes into measuring RSS results. What would you like to measure. You can track aggregate feeds. Tracking aggregator visits as you would spiders – directional only. Use something called FeedBurner, its good but not completely accurate. Remember it’s a file that links to other files. Now what are the keys to power blogging. Keep you content fresh, topical, and keyword rick. You archives, go beyond just using a calendar. What is in calendar? Create a great navigation, use anchor text to guide reader. Give links freely, and make sure people know you give links. On the template side, keep it simple. All of this is simple technology. They give you a url for each post and is spidered rapidly.

Success can come quickly for a blog. She says that you need to plan you blog for power. Add fresh and quality content often. Remember to give and receive links freely. Amanda ends with mentioning a book that is coming out about business blogs. Great presentation!

Next up was Stephen Spencer, who is an evangelist of RSS. He starts by explaining the types of aggregators. There is the client side vs. the hosted applications, and presents several different types. So how do we work our RSS to the limit. Make sure to give it away, make it easy to subscribe. You will want to track your user behavior to understand what is going on. On the subject of giving it away. What will help subscribers keep their finger on the pulse of your business/industry and compel webmaster to disseminate to their visitors? Use new alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new arrivals, new articles, new tools, & resources. Furthermore, consider whether you should be giving away full text, not just summaries. Watch out for SEO’s using you feed content as search fonder to build links. He shows an RSS feed for various searches on MSN. You got to make you RSS easy to subscribe. 1 click add to your favorite aggregator, such as Add to Buttons, Ping Yahoo with your updates. Add you feed to you My Yahoo account. (eg. http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://www.myrssfeed.com).

On how to track subscriber behavior, make sure to personalize the content. What is the best practice for users. Subscription form with interest tickboxes. Allow the user to stay anonymous if they so choose. Also give them the option of subscribing via RSS, or email, or both. Personalized feed not ideal from an SEO standpoint. Because you not reinforcing the same items across multiple sites. He gives an example of a personalized RSS feed. He goes on to explain that you can capture the search juice (links he means). Encourage links through RSS directories/engines submission, trackbacks, pings. Click you links and pass the search juice. You can do a 301 (permanent) redirect, not 302, or the juice may not flow. Most ads and affiliate links suffer this fate. Warning for bloggers Feedburner and Simplefeed use 302 redirects. Pay attention to each items title, as they will become link text. He offers an ebook called Unleash the Marketing & publishing power of RSS at marketingstudies.net. He ran out of time, but could have gone on about podcasting, screencasting, OML.

Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR, he ask how many in this room was ready to go and start a corporate blog. He says you need to be a bit of a marketer and a bit of a techie to succeed. Search engines and blogs value relevant content and important links. He admits that he doesn’t have a blog, but his daughter has 3. He has discovered that many people have a passion for blogging. What he found out was that there were many people getting a lot of traffic, but didn’t make any money. They were up all night, had no life, but didn’t know how to make money at blogging. Some do though. Some stats, in 2004 blog readership jumped 58% to 32 million internet users. The interesting thing is that 32 million are reading blogs, and there are 8 million new blogs. So for each blog there are 4 people. So detach yourself, as you will have to wade through the chaff to get to the weeds. He gives an example of a successful blog. He shows some keywords stats for keyword “ voip architecture”. So what do pioneers have to do? They have to experiment or die. There are lessons to be learned from the pioneers of the experiments. Back to the case study, he gives a great example of building credibility. Create a list of top bloggers in the space you are covering. This says who is also in the area. Create briefing channels (each a keyword), which creates massive amounts of links. Greg says the clients blog gained over 1,441 links without spending any money. The blog saw a good amount of success in the search engines for competitive phrases. Even though Greg doesn’t have a blog, he knows his stuff. Good overview of what you can achieve in this presentation. He ends asking about whether we would like to visit some of the following blogs, and his point is taken, I and you would want to visit them!

Lastly up on the blog panel was Nan Dawkins, she doesn’t have a presentation but will talk briefly talk about RSS. She gives a great site right off the bat, http://www.rss2anything.com, which will allow you to create an RSS feed from anything such as emails, newsletter, etc.. Very useful. Another way to experiment with blogs is to create a website that is a blog with an RSS feed. It serves the purpose of a website, with the benefits of a blog. Also make sure to consider your strategy of the blog. Overall great session.

Q: To subdomain you blog or not?
A: Don’t try to fool anyone. Chris Sherman explains why they used a subdomain on Search Engine Watch. He says that people use the Google Toolbar to search the site inside of on-site search. So people who search with the toolbar can get both blog content and articles on the site. Works well. Greg jumps in and explains that transparency is important to consider. There was a funny example he mentions about a blog called RagingCow that Dr. Pepper created to promote chocolate milk, who then hired bloggers to blog and talk up chocolate milk. How ridiculous he says.

Q: One of our corporate executives thinks we need a blog, but we don’t know where will find the content, writers, etc..
A: Greg says this is a common problem. He goes back to the example of his case study, that none of the people at the company are good writers, they even have trouble with emails. They are tech people. So hire a writer! They are very expensive it seems up to $1000 possibly or more. The writer then finds about you company and writes on several areas that work for you. But this works. Some of the speakers goes on to explain that its risky not to take part in the conversation (blog). Gives the example of Kryptonite, a lock manufacturer, who stayed out of the communication and paid the price. Their locks apparently could be picked and opened with a Bic pen. Obviously a problem. If they had a blogger who noticed this early on it would have saved them 10 million dollars to recall all the locks. Big mistake to illustrate the potential benefits to a company.

Mark Fletcher from Bloglines and now owned of Ask Jeeves. Bloglines is the first service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing the news feeds, blogs and dynamic content. It is basically the "real time web." and products many opportunities for publishers. The challenge for consumers is the amount of content out there, they help you manage that. Most news readers are desktop bound. No blog creation tools fully integrated with news readers. The challenge for the publishers is to build, sustain and track audiences. Increasing thread of "distributed denial of service" like attacks from desktop news readers. And hard to monetize content for small blog publishers. The challenge for advertisers are traditional web advertising venues dont cover to reach new dynamic content. Lack of rich historical targeting information. The bloglines solution is the 1st fully integrated service for all 4. They are free. Consumer friendly. Web based. And support mobile devices. Bloglines search; keyword search, search into the future feature (save search, i use that)}, service provides "most popular" and personalized recommendations, advertising opportunities for targeting real time content. Bloglines subscribe; lets users select and organize the feeds in folders and save searches. Integrate email content through disposable email addresses. Easy for publishers to accurately track feed audience numbers. Integrate of email provides additional advertising opps. Subscription information provides excellent targeting information. Blogline publishing; they have a blog service, easiest way for new/avg users to create a blog, one click articles. Bloglines sharing ability to share subscription with others, share favorite news, email others and word of mouth. He then showed an example of a screen.

Jim Pitkow the CEO of Moreover technologies. Founded in 1998, pioneers in XML and RSS. They are the behind the scenes people, that power others. In 1950 they have several newspapers and some tv and radio. But now in 2005 there and so many newspapers, thousands of online newspapers, and hundreds of TV. But now we have 8 million + blogs. Internet news is the only trend increasing over time compared to other news venues. Yahoo! News was one of the first and then lots came into the game, Google News was a bit late, MSN Newsbot later and now SNAP. Most of the news powered on the net is from Moreover, except for Google News. In 2002 CNN was #1 for news places and in 2005 Yahoo! news is number one, and CNN is #2. They power lots of professional news sites and now they have a blog subscription service. They add value through editorial control. And then he shows some meta data including; source rank, pub date, name, author, cate, etc. Just ping www.moreover.com/ping to get in - they do not charge for inclusion.

Scott Rafer from Feedster was up next. They spend a lot of time ensuring they get a lot of feeds, they are at 5M+ feeds, but they increased it in months by like 4 million (I think). He said feedster is just like regular search, type in your search query and you get results. They have ads in there and you can subscribe to this search. He then gets into what an "RSS Headline Ad" looks like. Basically a text add marked as an ad pushed into your normal rss results. The other case is inserting ads within the individual blog postings, but for that you need permission from the publisher. He went on to explain about how much "we" know about the advertisers. He plotted a calendar view of all the entries on a blog by day, kinda neat. So he can define to only show ads on topic A, with X entries per day, etc... Feedster has jobs.feedster.com and they know the difference between news, jobs, audio, etc.

Chris Tolles from Topix.net, which is an other news aggregator, previously from ODP. He told the history of internet search on one slide. So now we have 8 billion plus pages publicaly available within search. So now what? He said, lets search the "incremental web". You search on "chronologically ordered" sites, RSS feeds, discovery relevance from freshness, economic model is the newspaper. The "long tail", basically top 100 searches are 2%, whereas the top 100,000 are 40%. 50% of the searches done at Google are brand new. How do you program for that? So how do you get all the information on certain information that I personally want on a daily basis? He showed examples of doing this with topix.net. The opportunity is massive, aggregate all news on one Web site, appealing to all audiences, delivery format is wide and topic focused ads works very well.

Jeremy Zawodney from Yahoo! Search to talk on this topic, since he is a big blogger. RSS Drives traffic: RSS is the ultimate opt-in. Readers featch content frequently (fresh). Syndicate summaries and send clicks back to your site. Add to My Yahoo! Button increases subscriber base. He said compared to email newsletters, the more you send it, the more annoying it gets and they want to unsubscribe. But with blogs, they want more and if you don't give more then they unsubscribe - so it is an opposite affect. RSS Can Help Rankings; bloggers love RSS feeds, there are a lot of active bloggers, they link to sites they like, they do this every day and quality links help rankings. Then he shows RSS on My Yahoo interface and shows you how to add content, without talking much about RSS (which people might not understand). They also expose RSS in the Web results ("RSS "Add to My Yahoo!" View as XML). They recently released a toolbar for Firefox that has an "add to my yahoo" button. Yahoo! News Search and RSS moved to the #1 spot. They have over 7k sources, provides RSS feeds to these feeds, and also by query based feeds. Yahoo! Search Web Services announced this morning allows you to program it (developer.yahoo.com). What you can do today; create good content, provide feeds, add them to my yahoo and then use the add to my yahoo button to your site.

This is Danny Sullivan's pet session. He introduces the session as talking about the issues with link spam and other types of spam. Danny said he wanted a noindex tag for a specific sections of the page. Instead of the nofollow tag. Matt Cutts spearheaded the nofollow tag. He discussed the forum thread on this. On the panel is Ask Jeeves, MSN, Google and Yahoo!. By the way, I have Kim Krause & Bill S. on my right from Cre8asite, randfish, orion, Mike Grehan and Christine Churchill on my left.

Matt Cutts from Google was up first and showed a slide of guest-book spam, he explains that this link is not a true vote. What they needed is to allow webmasters to mark up links on their site to say "I did not vouch for this link." Danny then had an indexing summit article and then they contacted Weblog companies, then asked Yahoo and MSN and Ask Jeeves for suppore (MSN & Yahoo supported it). It has only been 6 weeks since it has been implemented and they have already seen a positive impact. He then shows the no follow tag which looks like <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmacy</a>. He then showed about 20+ companies (search and blogs) that support this tag. They have already seen positive impacts. Its better then not having it he said. Spammers hate it he said, just like wearwolves hate silver bullets (I believe he made a comment towards Nick Wilson about his blog and spammer followers hating it - Nick, eat that up please). Spammers are shifting towards different types of spam. Spammers are moving toward smaller blog packages. Better lines of communication with software makers and search engines. Yahoo hosted a web spam "squashing" summit last week. We're open to future cooperation.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! was up next with his "Comment Spam Proposal." He said Yahoo! came up with a slightly different proposal then Google. Yahoo! just rolled out support for the nofollow tag LAST NIGHT, so see changes in the index shortly. He talked about the summit they held at Yahoo! and said it was weird having Matt Cutts on the Yahoo! campus. The key thing is to solve the exploitation of publicly modifiable areas on prominent sites. He says the nofollow is not a semantic tag, its not descriptive of the content. Yahoo! recommends blocking of certain components of the pages. They are proposing <div class='content-public'>...</div> Content within the tag is publicly contributed by anyone. So he showed you should put this tag for blog entries. Additional ones are <div class='content-nav'>...</div> and <div class='content-default'>...</div> He then highlights the SE