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 SEW site and highlights the nav and ads and said, you would block out those. He said there is also the possibility of using link level tags (more granular control), <a href="..." rel="content-public">. That is the Yahoo! proposal.

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves was next up, remember Ask did not join forces with Google, Yahoo, and MSN. He gives a brief overview of Jeeves and how Ask Jeeves works. Crawler goals: (1) follow robot.txt standard (2) politeness; crawl delay, noarchive, noindex, nofollow; (3) efficiency - use compression methods and do not crawl duplicate pages. Indexing overview: they index html, pdf, flash, ms-office, etc., freshness through date stamping content, and completeness is important (site maps help). Some generic tips on how do use links and content. Challenges include; JavaScript, Dynamic Pages, and Long Pages. They removed the paid site submission. They say, don't buy links, it wont help. Do park domains help, nope. They want unique content. The trends for Jeeves; personal indexing with My Jeeves which is a personal crawl (in a sense). Social tagging, how people collectively refer to a page and more fodder for indexing.

Eytan Seidman from MSN Search was last up. He was not asked to bring slides. So he is running off some notes. They support nofollow starting about 2 weeks ago. They have full support on robot.txt and crawl delay. They first think about "discovering content" and can they leverage RSS to better discover new content. Once they have the content, how do they do a better job of interpreting that content? He said in email spam, there is a community approach to blocking it, can we do the same in web spam? The last thing is that people in forums have been asking for more tools to see what was indexed and not indexed and why. Please send feedback via the results page or contact page and keep it coming they are reading....

Q & A:
Danny asked Qs to audience (percentages are all my estimates, I wonder if Danny got the same numbers):
- 40% in the room said they want better support of 301s
- Most said they want more feedback about their site, support.
- 10% Express indexing
- 10% Many tools are stripping out referral info (toolbars)
- 90% Duplicate content handling
- 20% Domain identify, i have 50 domain names all to the same place
- 40% Weather reports, tell us when your changing the algorithms
- 0% robot.txt more standardized
- 0% on finding search result pages on the search results
- 5% nofollow stuff
- 2% on dynamic url issues
- 0% trusted dates (page date stamping)
- 50% feel meta data should come back, is it coming back, should engines now support it more
- 40% are in favor in web spam reporting

Q: I asked a bit about block level link analysis based on Yahoo!'s proposal.
A: Tim Mayer said they are moving somewhat in that direction.

Q: Nacho asked, how do we authenticate your crawlers? Sometimes people spoof the crawler.
A: Tim Mayer said that you can authenticate via the IP address. Ask Jeeves agreed. Um, hire fantomasters's ip list.

Q: How about a relevance authority tag system? Like eBay reviews, etc. An independent score, authenticate. And then you want to quantitatively score that. And then a qualitative assessment.
A: Interesting ideas.

Q: Webby asked the next question. He thanked Google for the nofollow tag. But he still gets spam. Can you put a logo on a page that shows its a nofollow tag.
A: Matt said it will take time and people will learn.

Q: How do the crawlers actually treat the nofollow tag?
A: Matt said its a good question. He said, this is a vote abstain. Google specifically does not allow its crawlers to follow those links AT THIS TIME. Tim adds that when the agreement was made, the engines did not decide on the behavior of the engines. Tim didn't answer the question, I think he didn't know.

Q: Danny Sullivan said its sometimes easier to send you a plain text document of the page instead of tagging everything (hinting cloaking).
A: Tim said its a trust issue. MSN adds that with a programmatically method its allows the engines to determine the content of the page and not the publisher.

Give me my "Link Love" - Matt Cutt's quote. Classic statement.

There were probably three questions about "commenting out the navigation". Its not commenting it out. Its basically telling the engines where you navigation is. So now it can be used to better determine the content on the page versus the crawling of the page (links).

Make it your goal to make your paid listings perfect. This session covered the aspects of ways to optimize your PPC campaigns. He opens up by asking who in the room runs Google or Overture campaigns. Matt Van Wagner from FindMeFaster was up first to talk about the various thigns you can do to create better ads, better campaigns. He mentions the process to create sustainable advantages. He says you need to approach this campaigns through system level thinking. Which means you need to align the campaign goals with the larger company goals. You should increase sales, not visitors. He also stresses that understanding random variation versus real changes. Matt next goes into many examples of some campaigns that need some help. For example, you may be in position 5, paying 40 cents a click, with a CTR of 0.4%. He goes through an Overture and Google example.

So how do you create a better campaign? He first says you need to slow down and not try to organize and manage these campaigns to fast. There is a large amount of detail and data available in large campaigns. He says first thing you do is organize you campaigns into keyword themes. This is important as you can have a real mess on your hands if you don’t. Next create measurement and reporting statistics. Define key metrics to track. You will next need a way to track conversions, because without it you will not get anywhere. Google and Overture tracking options are great to start with.
He mentions an excellent way to manage search and content campaigns. Instead of lumping them together create unique ad groups for each. Label the group “S-Sports Cars” for Search campaign, and “C-Sports Cars” for Content campaign. He allows mentions in more detail about realizing why your conversions might be down. He says that one example of a simple mistake that lower conversions was the addition of a phone number on the conversion page. They found that when you removed the phone number, conversions went up.
He next recommend that creating a change log is a good idea to get methodical about your campaigns. Use Excel to create these control run sheets. You can maintain what changed, when, and why you make those changes. This will make you more thoughtful about changes. You can also create rules for making changes. This helps you track causes and effects of actions taken.
Matt then goes that if you first create a campaign. Don’t play with the ad copy first, he says you don’t have data to change these yet, and creating better keyword lists is the best option to start. You will increase traffic and can start getting good data on what keywords works the best.

Next up was Tim Ash from Epic Sky, who opens up asking if we had seen costs per click rise. He gives us a warning that today we will work with numbers. He is going to give us three keys to success. He first gives up a pop quiz and ask if the following is a good PPC campaign. The point he was illustrating was that you don’t know if spending $2600 is actually just causing you to loose $1000. You have to dig deeper. Next quiz, he puts up two example with one having an ROI of 100% and another 2%. The best way to determine which is better, is the one that make more money. ROI is not always reliable indicator of success in a campaign. He said you should find the highest profit point. Very good point. See how your profit varies and then adjust you highest profit margin.
Key to success #1, sort your keywords by profit in the campaign. The bottom line is the bottom line. He presents an important concept. Its called Expected Value Per Click. Take your conversion rate x average value of conversion. This will allow you to compare value to CPC. You can directly compare what you are paying for the keyword and the value to you.
Pop quiz number three. You have 5 visitors and 1 person buys with a 20% conversion rate. The answer is that you don’t know the expected value, as you could have 100 visitors and no sales.
Next good suggestion is not to adjust bids without enough data. Set a minimum threshold for traffic. He says you also have to deal with uncertainty. He mentions you can use standard deviation to determine the variation of cost. He then asks about what we know about keywords that might get us only one click and come from those sets of keywords in very niche areas. He says they there is a very wide ranges for this, but we know it came from our portfolio of keywords. So keep it.
The next key to success he says to properly handle uncertainty. Bracket standard deviation on expected value. Use “synthetic data” campaign averages for low data solutions.

Action Plan:

• Set up a web analytics package


• Tag all inbound traffic with keywords


• Eliminate low traffic keywords


• Sort by profit


• Concentrate on the winners and losers

He then goes into a case study for a client who over airport parking. He mentions Urchin in particular as one that they used to track the campaign. Tim gave a great presentation with some very good suggestions in perfecting the use of your campaigns.

By the way, this is a smaller room and much more roomy.

Shari Thurow was up first, she is one of the biggest white hats out there. She quotes Tim Mayer from Yahoo! saying search engine spam are pages created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor quality search results. Questions to ask: Does the content benefit your target audience and site visitors? Who should you ask this to? Your target audience. Would I implement this optimization practice if the Web search engines did not exist? Am I building primarily for search engine positioning? Technology is not spam, but it can be used to spam (user intent). She lists 19 types of search engine spam: keywords unrelated to site, keyword staking, keyword stuffing, hidden text, tiny text, hidden links, link farms, page swapping, redirects, mirror content, doorway pages, cloaking, gibbirsh, domain spam, mini sites, typo spam, affiliate spam, forum/blog spam, and CSS spam. She then goes over some other types of hidden text spam; black on black, white on whiote, noframes, noscript, hidden layers. She explains that cloaking is not spam, but it can be used to spam and gives examples. Shari then tells us someone took her content, cloaked it and she caught them, because she is as technically savvy as the cloakers. She then showed examples of cloaked pages, some were cute and showed how some were banned from Google. She then showed a very legitimate looking page from a university, but as you dig more, there is a site map with link spam for misspellings. I call this type of spam, high-class spam. Shari's favorite quote from Google from the Web-master Guidelines, where she highlights the part about spammers looking for loopholes to exploit. She explains that we do not control the search results, we only the control of the content. She explains that white hats follow the guidelines and black hats do not. She warns that anyone "guaranteeing" search results, its something to worry about. She then shows a slide on where to report spam, Greg Boser is shaking his head in disappointment, too funny - there are threads on the ethics of reporting spam.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! is next up. He asks how many in this room have been banned? Some raise their hands, including Mr. Boser. He then defines spam, yada yada ;). Spam is more about the INTENT with which you use a technique and the EXTENT to which you use a technique... If search engines did not exist, would you use a technique this way, then you need to worry a bit. When Yahoo! recognizes this, they will "treat" it, lol. Where is that fine line? He said the lines vary by industry. He is basically saying that he understands that in some industries you need to compete. So link spam is OK in some industries (I am putting words in his mouth here). Its important to look at the site as a whole, if you pop then you need to be careful. I am sure Greg Boser will explain this more later. He then shows some example of black text on black background, blog comment spam (50% of blogs are left to die), he showed hidden keywords in a div, he got a phone call and the person who called had tons of links at the bottom of his footer. He showed some types of doorway pages. He then showed affiliate spam, in the background is a real site, and on top of it is a cookie cutter content template and it floods the search listings (all redirecting to the same site).

Matt Cutts from Google to present next. He talks about how NY has real weather, great, he didn't bring a jacket. He explains what is not spam? He asked who can afford to have his entire portfolio of sites removed, I was the only one who raised his hand, I think. He followed that up with, DO NOT SPAM. He said half the battle is making sure your site can be crawled, he kinda drifts into white hat SEO...He then pulls up some quotes from the Google's Webmaster Guidelines page. He said most of this is supposed to be common sense. He then shows examples; first one is a cloaked page (but cheap cloaking because its visible in the Google cache). Then he pulled up a doorway page, really ugly looking page, with content filler and read it to us and it sounded funny but got a very small chuckle. Then he showed more advanced doorway pages, he showed good looking pages, and he showed how people use databases to replace keywords within the same context. They call this spam, "mad lib" spam - so it has a name. He said it is a lot of work, so just make real pages (my comments, its a lot less work in reality). He then shows guestbook spam, link exchanges done in the wrong way. He put up a slide: SPAM = Sites Positions Above Mine. White hat = optimized within guidelines. Black hat = optimized outside guidelines. High risk/low risk. Then puts up his slide on how to report spam. I think its important to note that Tim Mayer did not put up that slide for Yahoo!. feb05feedback@googlegroups.com is the new special way to report spam to Google for this conference. Google handles spam by indexing -> detection -> corrective action -> re-inclusion request -> then reindexed. In 2005 Google will be working hard to increase relevance and reduce spam. "Grandslam spammers" is a term used in Google for those who violated every spam method.

Greg Boser from WebGuerrilla will be sharing the "consequences of spam". He started off by saying, Good morning, I am Greg and I represent the spammers. He got an applause for that. He said it really bugs him that small companies are terrified by the engines and thus don't do anything and don't rank well. He said, most of the time it is not the case. There are industries (PPC - pills, porn, casinos) where spam is the only way to rank well. He does lots of white hats stuff, also works with the engines sometimes. He said he has sites banned and your not a real SEO until you have - Shari hasn't so she laughed at it. The examples you saw (by the engines) were very targeted he said. Someone typed in a search phrase and didn't notice the spam, and they ordered, then its a win-win. His guideline is that he never violates the end user. He will never cross that line. He said all that stuff you saw, viagara pages the engines showed, make 50 - 90k per month working from their home. It is not going away, Greg said. What has changed is that people are spamming to drive relevant, targeted traffic as opposed just getting "eye balls." When you rank for terms that don't relate to your page, it is just a waste of time and hurts the end user. Shari is shaking her head no the whole time. He said, its all about what Tim Mayer mentioned, "stay what is in your space" - well he didnt say that directly, see notes above, but he did mean that. He said many big companies play on both sides of the fence, they have their white hat side and black hat side. He said how many times have you clicked on an result and get redirected to eBay? eBay hasn't been banned and sometimes the redirect pages are but so you start again and make a new domain. It is funny, he did not really discuss the "consequences of spam" as he was introduced to speak on or maybe he did ;). The bottom line is that we all think we have the most relevant site, the reality is that there are only 10 spots on the first page. Too funny, Shari and Matt keep shaking their heads no, Tim is drinking water. If you hire an SEO, make sure they tell you exactly what they are doing. He said he first pitches doing it the "right way" but that is not always an option. Just make sure to do it smart and know who your competition is.

This is going to powerpoint free. Jerry Yang invented Yahoo! in 1994 as a directory. Danny said it is Yahoo!'s 10 year birthday and Danny had people bring out a cake for him. Danny said he will cut it up into 3,000 pieces for everyone in the Room and Yahoo will be having a party tonight that everyone is invited to. Yahoo is the granddaddy of Search. Danny asked how does Yahoo! stay innovative? He said there has been a lot of changes with Yahoo!. He said right away there has been many challenges for Yahoo! from day one. They always felt there was an intense competition from day one. So they have always looking towards innovation and how to compete. At Yahoo! they are not only focused on feature based innovation but looking at trends, i.e. more about relevance, more verticals.

Danny then asked what does he think is the better innovations in search at Yahoo? Jerry Yang answered that Yahoo!'s local product is great, the desktop product is good and his personal favorite is Y!Q (more on that at my blog or in the forums). Search is not just a destination by itself its more of something that is now being embedded.

Today Overture is now named Yahoo! Marketing solutions or something like that. How does this benefit the advertisers in the room? Jerry Yang said he feels the branding of Overture into Yahoo! is good, because when you think of search, that includes all of Yahoo! Its unifying the way we think of Yahoo! search. You will see Yahoo! to start developing more solutions to smaller publishers (my thoughts...hmmm, RSS, AdSense, etc.).

Today they released the Yahoo! Search Developer Network, they used to have the Overture API. Why?... He said that the more they can engage publishers and developers, the more Yahoo! can become a larger part of the industry. (my thoughts...UPS did this). Google API, now we have a Yahoo! API, this is great. Link building tools here we come. :) Good work Tim.

Danny asked will you start to monetize Y!Q? Jerry Yang answered that yes, it will be tied somehow to monetization. It is about putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

Danny then brought up RSS and ways to monitor Web sites, what about the blog tools themselves? Jerry Yang answered that they are doing this big time in Asia. Yahoo! feels the more they can do to generate, nurture and expand the blog content, the better off the search community is. Following up their experience with Geocities, you can look to Yahoo! to be open in leveraging these tools towards blogging. Part of Yahoo!'s focus is about a community aspect and that is what blogs are about, how do they tie this into the Yahoo! package.

How do you see personalization changing for Yahoo!? Jerry Yang said that the relevance of search is the main component of any search. He said its not just about algorithms anymore, like PageRank or Link Data. Its more now about personalization and tying into that preference based searching. This adds a tremendous amount of value. My Yahoo! is a piece of this but you will be seeing it more.

Danny asked Jerry Yang to look back 10 years. Jerry Yang thought a bit and he said the whole notion of search was essential from the Internet experience. If you look at it from the rest of the Internet, its pretty big. He said nothing surprised him from what happened and as it did. He said the only thing that did, was how fast this industry grew, even looking back three years.

Jerry Yang said the most appealing thing Yahoo! has done is that people trust Yahoo! and that the internet is playing a huge role in support for disasters, communities with blogs and that Yahoo! is part of people's everyday life.

Danny said that as Yahoo! grew they built Yahoo! Travel, etc. Yahoo! has so much. How do you see search linking all of this. Jerry Yang responded when people find one area of Yahoo! to use, and they choose not to use other parts of Yahoo! to use, its important for Yahoo! to encourage the user to use it. Yahoo! ID works amongst multiple Yahoo! portals and they leverage this to improve the Yahoo! experience. Jerry Yang sees this being used to improve search, any type of search. If your going through the music experience, listening an experience, to be a finding experience --- interesting. He said the conversions aspect is a huge point in search.

Danny asked what do you think is the most important thing to happen for Yahoo!? Jerry Yang said again, he thinks everyone should use Yahoo! Search. The dream for Yahoo! is to focus on the user base more then ever. Take mass media and make it "my media". The user proposition is so important to Yahoo! The question is, how does Yahoo! get there first.

Danny asked if he ever had an urge to go back and hand enter in sites into the directory. For old time sakes. Jerry Yang said he is no longer qualified to do so. He said its more about doing this in an open way.

That is it. Wish you an other successful 10 years!

“End users want to achieve their goals with minimum of cognitive load and a maximum of enjoyment.” ~ Marchionini. Why? Because search users are nitwits. Mike asks us to consider the following. What if someone goes into a travel store and when asked what he is looking for, he answers “travel”. He goes on to describe it takes to get ranked in the top ten. Social sciences and bibliometry is also mentioned on the screen and have existence for a long time, even before search engines. They are being applied today in the algorithms that are created for search engines. The web is a social network he continues. Social networks have been extensively researched long before the web. He describes citation analysis and the how this is applied to in search engines. There is a difference between a citation and a reference.

Hyperlink analysis algorithms make either one or both of these simple assumptions. Assumption 1 – A hyperlink from page A to page B. Co citations, if a page C cites pages A and B, then A and B are said to be co-cited by C. Pages A and B being co-cited by many other pages is evidence. There are two main algorithms based on links. PageRank (Google): Each page on the web has a measure of prestige that is independent of any information need or query i.e. keyword independent. Roughly speaking, the prestige of a page is proportional to the prestige of the sum of the prestige scores of pages. HITS or Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search. Problem is that neither of these algorithms work.

The problem with HITS. Topic drift, nepotistic linking, and runtime analysis. Mike says there are three steps to success. They cracked the problem relating to time of a search from 11 seconds to instant. He describes Teoma and subject specific popularity.
Adventures in search algorithms: What happened next? Both Krishna Bharat and Monica Hensinger join Google. Mike believes that Florida that moved from keyword independent to keyword dependent.
Ending joke:
There is a guy trapped in the desert and is looking for life. He finds a man face down in the sand, with a bag on his back. He thinks what was in the bag that would have saved him. Answer: Parachute

Next up was Rahul Lahiri he presents some of the properties that Ask Jeeves controls. Today they are ranked #7 on the web and have done exceedingly well since this time last year. What is their mission: relevance. He goes into general link analysis methods. The challenge is to discovering what the links are about. A link from page A to page B (or C) is a vote or recommendation by the author or page A for the page B (or C). The problem is that if you have a link with the anchor text budget, you don’t know what the budget means. Was it a budget for Budget rent-a-car or budget for someone’s companies?? That’s a problem obviously. He continues that organizing into local subject communities of sites. This is how Teoma views that web. Some of the challenges that they face is that solving the problem in real-time. 200 ms (milliseconds) to do this computation for each query, millions of times per day. You also have to identify the communities. The link structure of the web is noisy. Hubs link to topic specific pages. An example of topic focused vs. broad topic areas. Topic focused is a search for “buffalo” and broad topic areas is a search for “bay area airports”. Some of the benefits are that smaller enthusiast sites get a chance to come up to the top of the search listings (example search: fantasy football).
The power of communities is a better vision, expert validation, contextualization, and better user experience.

Next Dr. E. Garcia, a pioneer that has allowed us to better understand the search engines as marketers was next to present. His plane has been delayed till tomorrow because of weather (its snowing heavily here), BUT there is a voice over for his presentation. Tapes starts. He is going to discuss grasping co-occurrence. Co-occurrence suggests association of relatedness. Side note: People are leaving because the audio isn’t too great. But not too many as there is a good amount of interest for this. Back to co-occurrence. Co-occurrence can be: Global, Local, or Fractal. This presentation is highly technical, and while I understand his work, it’s hard to follow. I am trying to get what I can, as its requiring very detailed listening and comprehension at this point. I apologize for any errors in this document.

Example of the case of “Hawaii” which is semantically connected to aloha, Hawaiian, Maui. C-indices can be used to estimate the relative presence of targeted keywords across search engines. He gives another example of “comida + mexicana” that are semantically connected. Example: C-indices can be used to monitor keyword trends, word patterns and topics in time. He goes on to talk about competitive words. Based on his research the example suggest that many competitive queries in Google tend to exhibit C12 indices. His research indicates that overused queries tend to exhibit unusually high C-indices while unrelated terms in a query tend to exhibit very small c-indexes. He gives the example of “guacamole optimization” with a low c-index of 0.12. On to term sequencing: EF-ratios. He talks about various types of queries such as a findall and exact and how order and frequency matter. He goes on to give the example that EF-ratios can be used to estimate the relative frequency of natural sequences and phrases in a source. So what about candidate sequences? These EF ratios can be used to examine how easy or difficult would be to rank for a given sequence in a given search. Keyword competitiveness is specific to each search engine. Some search engines return documents whose sequence can be found. When queried in EXACT mode, some searches return docs in which the queried term can be found. What is it separated by, delimiter (hyphen, underscore), space, or stopwords (in, of, with). So to recap, co-occurrence theory can be used to understand semantic associations between: terms, products, services.

Q: Interested in how we will be searching in 5-10 years time? Personalization?
A: Where is search going? Mike did an interview from the founder of Teoma. It was interesting he says. The most interesting is that he said they need to get up 10 steps up the ladder, currently we are 3-4. The one thing that will change this, will be personalization. It’s misunderstood, personalization. It’s not giving you a search just for you. Its about returning results for your peer group. They can start to tailor the search specifically to you. There is data now using genetic algorithms and others set that are using these to create search engines. Mike concludes the more information we give the search engines, the better our experience will be.

Orion couldn't make it due to a mud slide, he will be here tomorrow. They will try to present his presentation with voice overs.

Mike Grehan was up first, he deleted his presentation last night. So he had to restart from scratch, but everyone sympathized. He shows the SEW Forums, and explains that people are very interested in "this stuff." He highlights the keywords co-occurance thread that had 46,401 views, so there is a lot of interest. He said Orion deserves a ton of credit. What are the ages of my three sons? He starts a story that all of his three sons are having a birthday today. He then gives clues to figure out his sons ages, the product of the ages of my sons is 36 and the sum of their ages is equal to the number of windows in the building and the last clue is one son has blue eyes. Mike then gives down a break down on how to figure with equations. the answer is 9, 2, and 2. The last clue, about the blue eyes, said there was an oldest son so the 6, 6, and 1 wouldn't be the right answer. He explains that engines want the most relevant results, which is hard "because end users are search nitwits!" He explained that someone who walks into a travel store and tells the clerk "travel" he will kick you out but search engines respond. The "abundance" problem, too many results, which are the best results, which are the most relevant? Social networks have been extensively researched long before the Web. He briefly explains "Citation analysis", so we have a Web graphic, directed edges and undirected edges (co-citation). If you have questions about this, let me know. Then he discusses PageRank and HITS. PageRank he sums up, PageRank is keyword independent. HITS (Teoma) which is keyword dependent. Great way of explaining the difference. He says there is only one problem with these two solutions, "Neither of them work." He said the problem with PageRank, well they don't use it, so he skipped it. He then went on to HITS and said topic drift, nepotistic linking and runtime analysis are the three issues. The first two were corrected, but runtime analysis is still an issue. He said how AG from Ask Jeeves (Teoma) cracked it. He then put up a graph on the hubs and authorities. So what happened next? B&H algorithm died with AV, then those two went to Google and Hilltop came out. Then in Feb. 03, Google patented Local Link (Bharat). Then he went into Florida (nice little graph), he said it had a lot to do with Google moving from keyword independent to dependent. He throws up some links to advanced papers on this about the future. He finishes off his presentation with an other story. A guy is walking in a desert, he finds a dead guy on the sand with a bag on his back. What was in his bag, a parachute.

Next up was Ask Jeeves named Rahul Lahiri, he helped me out once with a relevancy issue a month ago. He said there is some overlap with Mike's presentation. He goes over the Ask properties and growth numbers. Ask's mission is relevance, index completeness, freshness, and structured data (smart answers). Algorithmic drives are content/text analysis, and link analysis. He focuses on the link side; and shows a graph of page a linking to page b and page c (mike showed something similar). Ask looks at what the "links are about". He goes into the hubs and authority thing. The key challenges are solving the problem in real-time and identifying the communities. He then gives examples of queries such as "buffalo" vs. "bay area airports". They need to weed out the noises from the good stuff. He explains that small enthusiast sites get a chance to rise to the top, which is great. They then can do a better job of identifying different communities, refine search.

Now they give Orion's, Dr. E. Garcia's presentation a try. It sounds like Nacho. Cool, its working. Nacho introduces it. Co-occurrence suggests association or relatedness. I'll summarize it later, very technical.

UPDATE:
First excuse me if I make major mistakes in my interpretation of the presentation. I hope Dr. G. (Orion) reviews this and makes any necessary corrections.

Orion's first slide went over some of the basics of co-occurences. Orion explains that co-occurences shows a type of "relatedness" between words. So if you have two terms that are often discussed or found on the same document, they tend to be more related. He then gives an example of the term "aloha". What does aloha make us think of? Hawaii is the correct answer. Orion then explains that this is important when conducting "keyword-brand associations." In Orion's second example he shows an equation he discussed in the forums; c12-index = (n12/(n1+n2-n12))x1000, he overlays an example of a k1 and k2 showing the n12 overlap in the middle as well as explains how an example of 3 keywords makes for a much more complex query in AND mode (n123). He then brings back the old example of "aloha hawaii" to explain "term associations". When you compute the values in Google of "aloha hawaii" versus "aloha indiana" or "aloha montana" you will notice the the C index is much higher with "aloha hawaii" (28.11) versus "aloha indiana" (3.23). This shows that aloha AND hawaii are more "semantically connected" then the other examples. He then shows how you can use the C-index computation to determine which engines would it be easier to target a specific keyword phrase, the higher the c-index, the more competitive that keyword phrase is in the engine, relative to other engines. Orion then explains that c-index can be used to monitor keyword trends over time, showed some very interesting slides to prove it. Orion's benchmark for a "competitive query" is one that has a c-index of above 25 points, he lists a number of those submitted to him via SEW Forums for a stufy he did several months ago. He then computed the c-index of some spam related keywords that were way above the 100 mark on the scale, neat stuff. Orion then explains that most engines use AND (FINDALL) mode as opposed to EXACT. When you look and compare both, you should find the results for EXACT mode within the FINDALL mode. The reason has something to do with order and proximity, where exact mode it does matter and findall it does not. Using this information, Orion defined a new ratio named "EF Ratio" which is equal to (n12 Exact Results/n12 FindALL Results) x 100. What the EF Ratio shows us is the "natural sequences" of words used. Meaning, how are words used in language, documents (real life). EF Ratios can be used to determine competitiveness of a keyword. The lower the number the less competitive it is. In fact, he showed that competitiveness for the same keyword phrases differ from search engine to search engine. The last slide we will save for those who were at the session.

Q & A:

LSI - Mike said that engines will use it, but he implied they are not at this time.

We spend a lot of time and money to get people to visit our websites? But what do we really know what users behave like. The room is really packed again. This looks like its going to be a great session to report on.
First up was Dr. Bonny Brown from Keynote Systems. She is going to be talking about customer experience management and how people use the web to conduct searches. About the concept of customer experience management. She asks if anyone out there has tried to interpret log files? This can be very difficult to intererpt their behavior. What are they doing? Did they not like the offer? Was it the wrong ad or audience?

To get the complete customer experience, you need a more complete picture. You need to start what the cusomter has already been exposed to. They have certain expectations. The gap is what creates the delight or disappointment. You need to understand their attitudes and reasons. Lastly the last compenent is to relate this information to making decisions. She has competitive benchmark studies that show the strengths and weakness. The mission is to help the companies understand what their strengths and weaknesses is. Understanding the why behind the strategy will help you apply it their websites. An example is vacation packages, they monitor their behavior as they navigate the website. Back to competitive benchmark studies. She took the leading search engines, and their were 2000 panelists, per site. That’s a lot of response! They have run this study twice, and see how these search engines are comparing against each other.

To get a view of how they see the behavior, is they invite panelists, and they login and search and surf the web using a browser compenent. They capture feedback and keywords they use. The customers viewpoint is that Google is #1. This is what customers are telling them. Then Yahoo #2 and MSN #3. They are seeing Yahoo and MSN closing in on Google. Ask Jeeves is also a clear success and has achieve clear gains in the space.
Ad clicking behavior is directly related to customer satisfaction. Interesting indication from the study. They do not take volume driven statistics. Ask Jeeves has resulted in the best click through rates. I am wondering if this has to do with the 10 sponsored ads they had in the natural results, which has since been tweaked.

Approx 1 in 5 users express frustration with search results relevance; product search yields fewer problems than other types of search. Some other findings from the study, say that 95% of participants use Google “sometimes or “often”. 64% use Google as their “primary search engines:. Other findings are that 3 in 4 have a primary search engines. 1 in 2 use another search engine if they cannot find what they are looking for. 1 in 3 use a search engine toolbar on their browser.

On the behavior side 3 in 4 participants began their search through a search engine or Web portal (source: clickstreams). 48% of participants used Google at some time during the task; 29% used Yahoo and 8% used MSN. 22% of people searched for a specific website they had in mind. They were also able to see how much time was spent on each website. You have the search engines, but you also have eBay and Amazon. She shows that eBay kinda sucks people in. Customer experience management helps you understand the “WHY” behind customer behavior. Sites that drive clicking behavior, may not drive a satisfying customer experience. People want relevant search results – marketers can be a partner in that goal.

Next up was Gord Hutchkiss presents some new findings about possible influences that can help us understand searcher behavior. Was hoping to see how different types of people search. They went through thousands results and manually coded them. The rank and page position were the only things that matter to users. They considered t values greater than 2. Of all the click throughs they monitored 51% clicked on the number 1 listing. There was a discrepancy between how searchers behaved as opposed to what they told us.

They created a theory, and found that a users confidence level gradually went down if they found it harder to find something they were looking for. What’s the best way to find out what they are seeing. Eye-tracking. It gives them a map of how someones eyes move across the page. Very interesting, he put up a page that showed the eyes move. These are high level finding. What was discovered was the behavior indicated that the activity on the search page show up at the top of the page. What they found that the majority of the activity happens right above the fold. “Searches golden triangle” meaning the location on the page where most people see and look at. It’s the Park Place and Broadwalk of the search page. The study also showed that the #1 paid listing also gets a high percentage of activity. If you move down beyond the page you are determined and educated about finding something down there. Back to the triangle. If the listing catches the attention to the user they will read the first listing. If not, then they scan the right side where the paid listings are. This pattern will be repeated down the page. About 50% of people are going to scan down below the fold, and the process starts over. So this scan pattern, what does it mean when building listings in the vertical space.

You need to put something that will pop and catch attention. If you do so you will get a better chance of a click through. For visibility, there is a drop down after listing number 3. After listing 8 there is a huge drop drown again in scanning behavior. Seems to level off 20-30% down at the bottom (9th and 10th) positions. 28% of people click through on the #1 paid listing. It drops off below the 3rd paid listings. If they can see the ads, why does it drop. When people where asked about how they click, they said they would click on the first thing that interested them. Asks how many people have seen rankings slip down on less popular terms. He mentions something about using click popularity as a part of how they rank. They capture how they interacted on the site. If you are above the fold you have a good chance of getting someone to click. If they are in the search triangle then they will click on the first listing. Incredible presentation!

Next up was Cam Balzer, and is discussing search before purchase. He goes into some company information. There goal was to look at the behavior up to the purchase and several areas they wanted to dig deeper. What kinds of search activity precedes the converting search/click? Search ROI usually considers only the last click before purchase. They identified 30 ecommerce website that had enough traffic to give them some reliable data. The looked at buyers and how they behaved. The findings of their study, one of the most powerful was roughly half of all buyers made a relevant search before their online purchase. They also found that marketers have a way to reach users at each step of the buying process. Travel for example had a high volume of people that did 10+ searched to find what they were looking for. Another finding was that majority of buyers searches and clicks are on generic terms. Brands do well in search, and they wanted to see how brands performed with other searches. There is a lot of people searching on generic terms to find what they were looking for. The other finding was that 30% of searchers only used a brand search. It was curious that so few users only used a branded search. Another findings, if someone was searching for a winter jacket or something in the spring, they may spend a long time in order to complete the process, sometimes up to 4-6 months. Another finding related to how the investment put into paying for generic terms also resulted in positive return for the brand name.

Room is really packed, and I am passing out yo-yo’s. Barry is also attending this session and will be covering it. So we will probably have to compare notes at the end.

First up was Jason Lamberti from comScore Networks. He runs the search marketing group of his firm. He is going to cover various segments of the market. How does comScore get their data?. They use passive tracking of actual consumer search activity. There are 1.5 million member panel of online consumers who have agreed to be continuously and passively observed. There are all kinds of data sources, and they cover the marketing thought a variety of angles. He goes into the search consumer development by country. The intensity and penetration in the U.S. lags major behind EU markets. Google dominates worldwide. You need to go through the Google network in order to market to those in countries besides the US. Search is a key marketing method to reach the working user. Overall search growth of 22.4% is driven by 25.3% increase in work audience. U.S. search and share trends have fluctuated in several areas. Recently there have been a flat amount of growth in certain areas. Reason, each search engine comes out with the same thing (desktop search, etc..) Branding is going to take a critical role in which search engine they use. He gives the example of William Jung and Ask Jeeves. Obviously we all saw this commercial. He goes on to say that search engines each have its strengths.

Local search trends, there is a conservative view of local web search suggests huge opportunities exist for marketers. Why are people searching locally? For the vast majority of the time, its searching in the area that they live, nearly 60% of local searches are for this reason. He mentions that searchers want a convenient and integrated experience. There are some reason why you might want to use a toolbar. Trial is strong – 58% of searchers have installed a toolbar. 12% of these users have uninstalled the toolbar. There is also a group that don’t even use the toolbar at all. Heavy users dominate search. There are 20% of users contribute 68% of the volume of search daily. There is the 20/30/50 rule. That 20% of searchers (meaning actual people) take up 68 percent of searches. 30% take up 24% of searches, and 50% of searchers only take up 8% of the searches. Meaning more sophisticated users do more searching and more frequently.

He next asks what users think is more important for a search engine to consider? Privacy ranks the highest as most important. When asked what would make them switch search engines? A large amount said they would switch if the relevancy is better. Jason mentions that with no barrier to switching, all search engines are vulnerable to something better or more convenient. Switching is very common and easy to do on the internet. Some 52% of Google searches are conducted on other places besides the Google site. It still contains a wide open market, and something can change.

He repeats that 85% of online purchase conversion occurs in subsequent user sessions. Consumers have a long buyer cycle, with a great deal of conversion occurring after week 4. He says this presentation is not online as the data is very valuable. I was impressed with the data and the level of coverage. If you are reading this, consider yourself privileged.

Next up was Bill Tracer from Hitwise. He wants to talk and give an overview of search landscape. On to the data, he put up a graph of the market share of the search engines against all internet sites. He talks about stats that pertain to search volume. Search volume indicates that Google is currently driving 55.5% of all U.S. search traffic. Bill next presents some click stream data, particularly the upstream traffic. The data shows that there is a clear difference between Google and Yahoo/MSN Search. Both Yahoo and MSN search benefit from portal parents. Could origination of visits explain difference in search yield (i.e. convenience search v. search mission). He mentions something called the “Mom Factor” He gives the example of his mom, and how she will go to MSN and type in www.google.com in the search bar. He then tells her she can do this in the url bar, and save the time. He asks why she did this, and she answers the internet is a big scary place. I guess you have to be here to get the joke.

He mentions psychographics of local search. Psychographic analysis of visitors to local search reveals differences between Google Local and Yahoo local search. Google Local: a slight skew to smaller second-tier cities. He then goes on to mention desktop search versus main search engine reveals a skew towards mature users. Yahoo Desktop search demonstrates the strongest skew in segments M1 and M3 (being the level of age and maturity). He mentions that older (50+) use desktop search more often. Reason: Older people loose things more often.

Next up was the Kenneth Cassar from Nielsen/ Net Ratings. He starts off by saying that innovation is not an option. He wants to imply that innovation is imperative. Covered in this session there will be the state of the competitive market in the search space. Where is tomorrow’s growth in search supply going to come from. Google continues to enjoy dominance in the search marketing share. Google takes up 47% of the market. So what about searchers? Google covers 28.7 million searches, Yahoo 13.7 million, and MSN 12.2 million searches. He then overlaps the charts and shows that there are a lot of overlapping between the various engines. One person might both use Google and Yahoo. I completely agree with this assessment. Why not use more than one? Example is that Google and Yahoo share 18.3 million searches. In the total universe of daily searches is 102 million between the three main players.
So where will tomorrows growth in search supply come from? I am enjoying Kenneth’s presentation, very well organized and clear. He describes how they looked back two years. Even though the markets has grown 100% each year, the amount of pages being added hasn’t been as much. These are interesting statistics, and very good for search marketers to hear. The online audience has been entirely responsible for the new growth year to year. A look back in history. There has also been historical threats of supply storage, innovation will create new supply. There are various segments for incremental growth. They are: advertising, new kinds of advertisers, and local search. New advertisers that are brought in the search fold. There are a several significant groups of advertisers have not yet embraced search advertising.
Local he says is one of the single best opportunities. Innovation is clear, Yahoo has developed many new innovations on this front. A9.com is an example. He says that local search opportunity is a nascent one.

They moved us all from a smaller room to a larger room and it is still a bit small. So they are moving walls around to make it even larger, movable walls - nice. Danny reused his normal joke about committing to the session and "we will commit to you" and people laughed (I guess we have newbies here).

Leading off is Dr. Bonny Brown from Keynote Systems (from Vividence), who will talk from the customers perspective. Keynote's mission is to improve e-businesses worldwide by focusing on the technical aspects and customer experience management space. She explains that there is often very little insight when tracking users as to where people get lost during the clickstream. To get the "complete customer behavior" you need more detail. Customers have expectations, and you need to understand and measure them. Then you need to understand the "whys" actions of behavior. Keynote measures industry metrics to get a better picture for benchmarks. They invite panelists, they logon, they ask you to search the Web with a toolbar (which does all that fun tracking). The results... Google is number one from a customer's experience ranking. Yahoo is number two and MSN is number three BUT Yahoo and MSN are both closing in on Google. She says, Ask Jeeves it a clear success by showing substantial gains. Ad clicking behavior seems to be INVERSELY related to the above numbers (search experience). Just keep in mind that Ask Jeeves gives you very little choice but to click on the sponsored ads (rumors are that they are going to limit that). You find a lot more frustration with searchers on complex searches. 95% use Google sometimes or often, 64% use it as their primary engine. 1 in 3 are using a toolbar. 17% use different search engines for different types of searches. 92% said they used the engines to find products. Relevance is #1 factor in search loyalty, including sponsored results. On the behavior side, they are able to see what people actually do. 3 of 4 of the people who they sat in front of a computer and asked them to find information used a search engine (wow, 25% didn't use an engine). 48% Google, 29% Yahoo!. They also measured the time they spent on the sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Amazon, eBay in that order are the time spent on those sites but eBay has a lot more pageviews then Google.

Gord Hotchkis from Enquiro was going to share some eye tracking studies with the help of Did-It (Kevin Lee). He explained the possible influencers include type of user, presence of brand, trusted URLs, demographics and trusted sources of information. And they expected to see a strong correlation between these sources. But what they saw was that the most important influencer was ranking. Of all the click throughs on organic listings, 24% on number 1, 19.5% number two and 12.8% on the number three listings. They came up with a theory named, the search confidence theory, which means, you trust the engine you use to give you relevant results. As you hit that back button, throughout a session, you lose your confidence level. So as you hit that back button and go to new results, you expect them to care more about the influencers listed above as opposed to just ranking. So to prove this theory, they did some eye tracking studies. They ran 50 people through in their labs, they aggregated this information at this time. He showed a slide of red, orange, blue, black, etc. The bulk of the red orange is at the top left, right where the top three results are. The majority of the eye activity is at the top, they called it "Search's Golden Triangle" which appears to include the sponsored listings and the "hidden tabs". The number one listing gets a high level of activity. The eye goes first to the top left point, then it moves to the right, to read that one listing. Then they scroll in a vertical line down on the left side, if any of those results catch someone's attention they move right again. If they don't find anything, 60% will scroll down and continue the pattern - the other 40% will look at the sponsored listings on the right. This study was only performed on Google. So you need to put something at the beginning at the title, that will catch their eyes (@#%$$). In the "golden triangle" visibility is huge up to ranking 3, then you drop off to about 60% in 4th position, and then 6, 7 and 8 go to 50% and then at 8, 9 10 drop big time 20%. Now clickthroughs, number one position 28% CTR, and then on #2 12%, and #3 11% or so, and then it drops to 6% for the remainder. So why aren't everyone clicking on the top three (numbers two and three have a much worse CTR then #1)? They click away. Sponsored results differ that the first two at the top are high visibility, and on the right side, it is very low visibility. He then summarized and told us what he wants to do more with these studies.

Last up, Cam Balzer from Perfomics (DoubleClick just bought them in July 04). They looked at search activity that lead up to the purchase or transaction. Most search tracking just looks at the last click before the purchase and most people look at the same session value (latency isnt being used). The methodology was to use ComScore's panel, identified 30 e-commerce sites in four verticals, and they identified all the buyers on the panel for a 30 day period and finally they weeded out all the random searches done. They basically weeded out a ton of irrelevant searches. They found that there are a lot of people using search before they buy. In all four verticals about 50% use search before they buy. Marketers have several opportunities to reach buyers, around 6 - 12 searches per user (interesting). They also looked at how brand keywords perform versus generic terms. Majority of search activity is around generic keywords all through the buying process (triangle searching?) Most buyers never search on a merchant brands, less then 30% on the computer vertical searched on a brand. Branded search activity peaks immediately prior to purchase. But on the computer vertical the brand search peak is much lower right before the purchase as compared to the other verticals. Almost 55% in travel space, did their last search almost two weeks before they purchased something (two weeks!). People who buy off a brand term normally start off with a generic search, but those who buy off a generic search don't normally search brand in the process. He says search is getting more competitive, to capitalize on this opportunity, you need to fully understand the value of search (not just a two week window).

This room is packed, people standing out the doors, siting on the floor and hanging from the ceilling. Three firms are up on the panel who collect data all across the Web on search related topics.

First up was James Lamberti from Comscore Networks and he runs the search group there. They get their data from 1.5 million consumers, who have agreed to be continously and passively observed. They collect all search activity, actual purchase, and other transactions. They capture everything. The data sources are many and he didn't go through them all. Search development by country, the US is lagging behind in terms of searches per searcher available. Meaning, there are more internet users in the US, but as a percentage of those users, less are using search then other countries. Google dominates around the world, but in the US, Google does not totally dominate. 22.4% search growth from Jan 04 - 05, but Work consumer group has frown 25%. Google and Yahoo have gain share at the expense of AOL, within the US. But since May 04 or so, everything has pretty much remain constant in the search area. He then broke down the share of market by segment, School: Google 42%, Yahoo 32%. Work; Google 37%, Yahoo 30% and MSN 19%. Local search trends show a slow growth from 8.3% to 10%, meaning searchers using Google and adding in state or local parameters in the query. He points out that most of it is happening at many search engines and not at yellow pages, etc. Growth in toolbar searches have grown 136% in the US since Jan 04. He said 17 - 18% of searches are coming from toolbars, WOW. 58% of searchers have not installed the toolbars and 12% have uninstalled the toolbar. In search there is a 20 - 68 rule, 20% of the users contribute 68% of volume. Heavy searchers are less likely to click on the sponsored links (27%). He noted that there is "impression value" in having your result come up in the sponsored links. 22% of the people who do not search represent 4% of the buyers online (hmmm). Satisfaction is high from most search engines. Most important search attributes for search engines at this time is privacy (Google toolbar). When you ask them, what will make you switch, the top answer is "relevancy". 49% of the searches powered by Google is happening outside of Google, which is interesting. He notes that this is still a wide open market. A vast majority of converts, are done offline, meaning lots of people doing research online will buy offline. So its very important to be able to somehow track offline conversions (a session on that later).

Bill Tancer from Hitwise, and he introduced himself as "I Love Data". He called himself a huge geek, he said finally numbers and data have become cool. They monitor the largest worldwide sample of internet users. They categorize them into 160 cats. Market share of visits to all internet sites on the Web, Google 3.1% Yahoo 1.7% and MSN 1.5% - Google has grown the most. Search volume indicates that Google is currently driving 55.5% of all US Internet searches, Yahoo 30.8% and MSN 6.64%. He gathered some clickstream data, its interesting to see that most of the search traffic is coming from the parent (yahoo.com, msn.com) but Google's upstream is coming from a wide share %, which differs from the rest. The top search from Yahoo and MSN are more navigational (www.site.com) and Google is not like that (more internet savvy). The demographics between the engines are very close, Google has a slightly higher male pop and higher income pop. He is popping up some really cool and informative slides, wish I can type faster. Google skews slightly to smaller cities compared to the other engines. Google Desktop vs. Yahoo Desktop, there is a strong skew towards the mature users, the 55+ group are more likely to use Desktop search. Verticalization of Search, will the shopping engines, etc. cannibalize the main search business. Health and medical search verticles have gone up 10% and 45% come from the main engines. 10.23% of the searches from Google go to shopping and classified sites of that eBay is the top, then amazon, etc. But when looking at other engines, it was extremely similar in the percentages. The theory is that over time, people will start have brand identity with these vertical engines and take away some traffic from main engines.

Ken Cassar from Nielsen//NetRatings was the last one up. Google's market share is at 47%, Yahoo at 21%, MSN 13% and AOL at 5%. They define a search as someone entering in a query and pressing the enter key. Google also has the largest audience of exclusive searchers; 29.7m. Yahoo has 13.7m and MSN has 12.2m and then he overlapped them (which is nice, there is an ton of cross usage of the engines). The search boom has been more driven by advertisers than consumers. Demand is not the main reason for growth, it is the supply pushing it up. This all highlights the need for innovation, in his opinion. There has been many people who talk about running out of supply. He feels its more about building more cost to switching, that should be interesting to see. MSN is advertising, Yahoo! was doing ads on local offerings and Ask is doing some ads. He said several significant groups of advertisers have not yet embraced search advertising, including; high consideration brand advertisers and low consideration direct marketers (oh so true). Is there a brand impact on people seeing paid listings? They did some tests and they saw a statistically signification different with paid listings. He won't go as far to say that brand building is better done with paid listings then through TV spots (would you?). He believes local is the single biggest opportunity there, and he points out Yahoo!. He does a query and shows some nice search results from Yahoo. A9 is an other engine focused on this he says, "Click to Call Business" (pay per call?). Local searches 3% versus all other searches 97%. They define local by using a local property, unlike Bill's or James figures which use the query term to determine local searches.

Niki Scevak from Jupiter Research opened up the Search Forecast and Outlook: Profiting from Growth Through 2009. I have attended this session about 2 times before, as I believe it provides some of the best information on the first day of the conference. He mentions that by 2009 paid search growth remains strong but beginning to slow eventually. Search will reach 5.5 billion dollar industry by 2009.

He next goes into the elements of paid search, with the first being pricing. What is seen is the increasing cost per clicking will be driving spend up and ROI down. The willingness and confidence of marketers to spend is the return on investment that paid search can return. He mentions that paid search cost will eventually stabilize. As retailers, travel merchants, and online merchants improve conversions rates some of that price is passed down as a higher CPC price. The primary aim is transactional, and if you peel away the effect, the primary goal is to produce successful sales.

The other driver of search dollars is the growing segment of households adopting broadband access. Search is the second most ambiguous activity next to email. As broadband increases from 27 million households to 46 million households will mean that users are spending more time online. This is a conservative outlook, and mentions that the forecasts for last year were short of what was real. In terms of the impact of broadband, the convenience is one of the things that will provide benefit to the people using it. Having access more frequently will allow more people to easily go online.

Relevance is improving and because so will help users make better decisions. Niki next goes into Local Search. He sees that in 2004 local search was a 408 million market, and by 2009 it should cap or exceed 879 million. This market is a long standing challenge that many companies have invested heavily to realize the full impact of this market. He says this market is in its very early stages, and there are barriers to adoption by users. One of the things they are very bullish on, is vertical search. There are many broad based online properties such as a lot of major online magazines and news sites. Search engines will launch around these categories in order to bring a broader selections of options for users. He mentions an executive survey they do yearly to investigate the amount of search spending tied to online transactions. The primary goal of the search spending is online transactions, and the dollars spent is tied directly back to instant online sales. Where there are transactions are going on, paid search marketing will be eventually tied to its success. They conducted a study that indicated that select categories (travel, media, entertainment, financial) are taking 80% of search spending seen today. Examples of these companies include Bizrate, Monster.com, and many other companies under these categories.

So what will the future hold for these categories? He says that new search engines will launch and that existing players will restructure their pricing model based on CPC and lead based acquisitions. There are a number of players that are gaining traction in the vertical marketing. 1/3 to 1/5 of users of vertical search engines come from broad based search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The role of vertical search is to further allow better searching for the user and make the transactions easier in the change. Often the users find better information and the retailers get better quality leads. We may see more companies spending more money on vertical search engines. Vertical search will not replace Google or Yahoo or one of the broad based search engines. Its an added layer to the search experience. If you go to Yahoo and type in “digital camera” you might end up on Amazon or Shopping.com and then back to Amazon to make your purchase. The process is not complete yet.

Niki next goes in a forecast of search that will profoundly impact display advertising. The advertising placement is expanding and there is a critical mass of advertising available. They have a large amount of reach, but very few frequency in terms of behavioral marketing. Its hard to measure the exact behavior. Will they use Google or Yahoo. The decision to search for a product or service can last for several months instead of just a short amount of time. He then ends and opens up for questions.

Q: How much are search engines are getting into display advertising? Where is mobile search headed?
A: Once the inventory of search sites becomes mature, where people can plug into a network. Example is Friendster, where they have a huge inventory but little behavior tracking. They are willing to share their revenue to reach a better display. If someone searches for a car, car ads may appear on the Friendster network next time they log in. Mobile search is increasing, Yellowpages is one example as it appears he is implying this is the one way people might use it. He also mentions that mobile search is not that convenient yet.

Q: What the limiting factors facing search?
A: The maturity of the online population is an issue. The improvement per months will be based on new broadband users, and one that is tenured. He says that in coming years, cost will be stabilizing, not that they will not increase, but it will be slower. As long as conversions improve, so will cost of advertising, as their many industry where there are still undiscovered keywords and inventory. This has also contributed to the large amount of growth, and it may become more flat as the inventory plays out over the next few years.

He mentions an interesting fact from the yearly survey they do, is that surveyed individuals have said that print based yellowpages (big yellow book) is more effective and easier to use than online listings or yellowpages.

Q: Where are the assumptions behind the growth through 2009 coming from?
A: Around 23% of queries have a commercial intent. This has been trending slightly upward. There are significant efforts by search engines to identify their organic results. The relevance between paid and organic should not change dramatically. He says that organic results offer more opportunity to describe more information about the site. This information helps drive more people to use organic listing, whereas paid search is limited to a certain amount of words in the copy.

Q: If Google examines the people that use paid search and only lets in the most relevant, will this improve conversions?
A: Niki says that you can not restrict the view just to a US market. Within the last 18 months, companies have tripled their budgets for paid search as they become more sophisticated.

Q: Someone in the audience mentions that paid inclusion is included in the forecast and asks why this is?
A: Yahoo is one of the players still using paid inclusion. This is evolving into some kind of transaction form. I don’t know what he means here. It’s a niche opportunity. He says that paid inclusion is certain misunderstood. Where paid ranking vs. the guarantee that your site will be spidered daily. People may be willing to paid a certain amount of money for this certainty that their new products will be spidered.

Q: Question on budgets
A: People should not look at how much should we spend? The expectation level is unreal. When you have the contextual pricing tied to search advertising. This is confusing for advertisers. I do agree!

Q: Contextual advertising trends, where are they headed?
A: Direct sales forces are becoming better. Contextual advertising networks are constrained by the success of the direct sales force. This is on one side. There are remnant inventories, based on a yield management surveys, that advertisers are looking at. It’s hard to say that basing the ads on what is on the page of the website doesn’t tell much about conversions or trends. I am sure he is directly talking about the contextual properties that are under Google’s and other search engines control (eg. Adsense, Content Match, etc..).

Ben and I thought it would be fun to hand out these funky yo-yos that light up when you use them. The slogan of the Search Engine Roundtable, "The Pulse of the Search Engine Marketing Community", is imprinted on the yo-yos. Since the SEO world is filled with such ups and downs, we thought it would be clever to give out yo-yos. Then we added the glowing aspect to the yo-yo to make it "pulse" a bit.

I admit, its not as cool as having William Hung at a party, but we are not on the same level as Jeeves.

So if you see Ben or myself at the conference, please ask for one or two. After the conference, I will probably mail out a bunch to some dedicated readers. Any left over, might get some at the Toronto SES show.

Well, the SES NYC show is coming to my home town Monday, and Ben and I will be providing live coverage. Ben and I will try to attend different sessions, this way we can provide the widest coverage possible. Also, there will be a few guest authors attending the conference, who I will bug to pitch in as they can. Our goal, to provide the most detailed and unbiased coverage of this SES show.

Here are the sessions currently on my list to see:
Monday: Search Forecast and Outlook: Profiting from Growth through 2009; The Search Landscape; Searcher Behavior and Search Algorithm Research & Developments.

Tuesday: Jerry Yang Keynote; What Is Spam?; Indexing Summit; News & Webfeed Search; and maybe Branding Tactics For Search (I probably will have to leave early this day).

Wednesday: Search Convergence; Local Search Marketing Tactics; Brand Summit: Life After Google-Geico; 3:45p - 5:15p Undecided; and Evening Forum With Danny Sullivan (anything you want me to ask?).

Thursday: What Is Content?; Integrating Search Into Other Marketing; Final session undecided.

Any requests, feel free to make them. We will see what we can do. Thanks for reading everyday!

The Search Engine Strategies NYC 05 is a week from today. We will have extensive coverage at the blog. Ben and I will be covering the sessions we attend in detail, feel free to make requests here. Also, Andy Beal is giving away 50% coupons!

Danny Sullivan has confirmed that "the big four" (Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, & MSN) will be at the Indexing Summit on Day 2 of the SES NYC conference. Although I only see three individuals on the panel, none from MSN. It happens to be the same day Yahoo!'s Yang will be giving the Keynote (big thing for SES).

Danny Sullivan has started a thread at the Search Engine Watch forums asking to "please share what you'd like considered" at the indexing summit. So far there has been great feedback. I'll bullet point some of the points shared in the thread, but if you have any ideas, join the ideas for the indexing summit thread.

• Future of search
• Temporal link analysis on its way?
• Responses to questions about organic search for specific sites
• 302 Issues
• Park Domain Indexing
• Including pages without content but with linkage data
• The new no follow attribute
• Discuss Referral String Issues
• Issues with linkage data and abuse.

And so on...

A post at Search Engine Watch forums, shows that Yahoo!'s Cofounder, Jerry Yang is to speak at the upcoming SES NY 05 Show. This information comes by way of the latest Search Engine Report released last night. Yahoo!'s founder will be speaking in the Keynote Address Tuesday morning. Of course, I will be providing detailed coverage, with Ben (Phoenix).

I wonder if Google will put up their founders at future shows? Great work Yahoo!, simply smart!