Search Engine Strategies 2005 San Jose Archives

Here is a quick recap of all the sessions we covered over at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2005 at the Search Engine Roundtable.

- Mobile Search
- Search Algorithms: The Patent Files
- Weird Science: The Next Generation in Media Planning and Buying
- Earning From Search & Contextual Ads
- Eye of the Storm: Lessons from Large Search Marketers
- Searcher Behavior Research Update
- Search APIs
- Personalized Search & Search History
- Vertical Creep Into Regular Results
- From Broad to Specific: Capitalizing on vertical search and other niche publishing opportunities.
- Competitive Research
- Keynote Conversation with Ask Jeeves's Steve Berkowitz
- RSS, Blogs & Search Marketing
- Fun with Dynamic Sites
- Ad Management: Do Humans matter?
- Should You Chase The Algorithm?
- Link Building Basics
- Landing Page Testing & Tuning
- Ad Reps: Friend or Foe? - How to Handle Situations with Search Engines Going Direct to Your Clients
- Indexing Summit 2: Redirects, Titles & Descriptions
- Search Engine Advertising Forum
- Converting Visitors Into Buyers
- Local Search Marketing Tactics
- Executive Roundtable with Search Engine Executives
- Advanced Linking Strategies
- Site ECG
- Buying and Selling Links
- Usability Clinic
- Search Engine Q&A On Links
- B2B Tactics
- Organic Listings Forum
- Spanish Language SEM

Thanks Ben, Chris and the SES team!

Chris is going to post daily recaps as well, day one, day two, day three and day four.

Moderator and first presenter: Barbara Coll - WebMama.com
Wants to talk about the long and short term look at this market segment. Offers the opportunity to ask questions at anyone's convenience.
Will talk about the buying power opportunities, for those who are advertising in Spanish, reaching out to the Spanish marketing segment online. There has been a major growth in the buying power of Hispanics in the US as well as growth overseas. 10% of disposable income by 2007 will be from Hispanic community. Recent study by Media Channel shows that 82% of Hispanic online users made a purchase in the last year. Example: Pedro Martinez of NY Mets. 25% of pro baseball players are Latino. 2 weeks ago, the Mets decided to focus on the Spanish marketplace. They realized that the original community which was the Jewish community no longer lives near the stadium and is now Hispanic. Shows a search for "boletos de beisbol ny mets." Results (mostly English) do not reflect search listings in Spanish, and PPC ads are in English too. Same thing with "boletos de beisbol" one of the top organic results has Spanish content indexed as description, but the title tag still says official site of MLB is in English.

English enters into media for Latinos, but still need to focus on supplying Spanish content. Search advertising industry milestones: First SES Spanish session was Chicago in December 2003. Now IAB has a Hispanic committee. More focus now on standards. Online portal milestones: AOL Latino, Yahoo Espanol, MSN Latino, Yahoo purchases Terespondo in April 2005, the largest PPC network in South America. (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002142.html). Recognition of the second language of the US gives credit to the launch of the new MSN search for having a tab for Espanol right on their search home page. For Google, you can do this, but you have to go to personalized home page. Problems: Is the search entered a typo or another language? "Camara" still interpreted as a typo instead of being Spanish. Difficult problem to solve for SE's. "Real estate in Denver" search: Hispanic market is fastest growing home sales in this market. All organic, 80% of the website (sorry missed it) traffic came through the Internet. Another thing to remember is that kws are different in another language.

Lucas Morea - Latinedge

Stared with monografias.com, now one of top 5 Spanish websites in terms of traffic, achieved thanks to basic SEO and original content. Wants to make an emphasis on the online to offline relationship. According to Jupiter, each dollar generated online, travel companies received an additional $5 in revenue from research that came online. "hoteles in Acapulco" search at Yahoo gives the option to change to English, but displays organic Spanish results. He also tried some searches at Google Mexico which showed that the total number of results found were approximately the same, but if the search is done in English, there is about 6 times the results.

Paid search landscape in Spanish? CPC and volume are both fraction of the cost of comparable English searches. Even though it is less volume, still certainly "worth it."

User sophistication: long tail example. In English the difference between one word searches versus multiple words: 3 times as many multiple word searches. In Spanish, the opposite exists where one word searches still dominate, but not 3 times as many. This reflects how Spanish users are still learning how to search.

How do they get on the net? In South America, many many people get online in an Internet Cafe, which makes it less likely to make a purchase online due to security concerns. How do they buy offline? In the US, phone sales can happen, and more accustomed to credit cards. In Latin America, cash is preferred. Human contact is very important to Spanish market. Must increase points of contact with potential clients. Need to provide email support. Users want to know that there are people on the other end. Good idea to reply with a name instead of just a company. If you can provide live chat: even better. Call center or support service very good too. Good way to make online work in Spanish market is by using lead generation forms in order to make the sale offline. People follow up filling online form. Another very successful marketing campaign has been email marketing to optin network in Mexico (only method used), which resulted in selling out of 10k units of stock, all offline sales.

Once again, important to increase points of contact, by adding a phone number to a site, sales increased by 54%. Also seeing the number there and knowing they could call someone if needed helped increase online conversions from 22% to 37% in one specific country of Hispanic origin. Other statistics point that the addition of the call center has increased sales. Conclusion: the more offline capabilities you have, the better you will do. Even with the perception of offline presence, people will be more likely to buy. Also, make sure your expectations are moderated because it is a small market. Goal should be considered as ROI of Zero in order to break even and gain future clients. ROI will increase thereafter. Make sure the site is consistent with your offers. Start right away: get ready to build reputation. Build landing pages in both Spanish and English unless targeting all Spanish speaking company. Provide alternate forms of payment.

Ignacio "Nacho" Hernandez - iHispanic.com (note this is a true leader in Spanish SEM. if this is your market, he, Lucas or Barbara Coll are three of the most knowledgeable people in this field, in my humble opinion). Nacho handed out a recent white paper discussing this topic. It is available at his website.

Announced by Barbara that Nacho has just convinced Jupiter Media to hold an all-Spanish conference in the near future: SES Latino 2006 in Miami, FL July 10-11th, 2006. (Applause)

Used an example of the empty chairs in the room to describe how you have a great opportunity to gain market share where your competition is not present. Why the Hispanic market? Covered by Barbara, but showed that total Hispanic population is 434 million, with an online pop of 61 million! Myth: US Hispanic don?t have credit cards. This is totally incorrect. Credit Card use among Hispanics had grown from 48% to 57% from 2002 to 2004. 13 Million online US Hispanics spent 5.6 Billion in 2003. Recent study (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002254.html) showed that 5 of top destination sites for Hispanic users were search sites. Should look into paid inclusion and PPC. Focus on creative of landing pages and ads, both ?en espanol.? PPC issues: although most niche industries are still unexplored territory, competitive kws in Spanish have clicks cost rising 10-25%. Be prepared to see higher page abandonment if landing pages and process flow are poorly created. Be careful to not use pictures of non-Hispanic persons (blonde, blue-eyed people on the site, for example). Conversions may occur offline, but prepare to offer alternate payment methods. SEO strategies. If you already have Spanish content, then get it indexed first. Gave example of Univision.com now having 1.3 million pages already at Google. Y! only 119,000 and even less in MSN. Search for ?casas neuvas in san diego? at Google shows a good first result, but another listing shows terrible title tag, snippets and missing keywords in url. What language should I use? In South America and Central America, you should use Spanish, but in the US, make both versions.

Case study about mexgrocer.com focusing on Spanish keywords used by Spanish users, such as for example ?salsa verde Mexicana" and bilingual landing pages for keywords that may be reached by Anglo or Hispanic users. They used to have mexgrocer in English and mexsuper.com in Spanish, and they were ?butting heads? for some terms. Careful when doing kw research-often backwards in Spanish from the English version. Marks in words should be dropped. Misspelling is very important because 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics start to forget the language, for example ?Pozole? original spelling vs. ?Posole? which is now searched more. Sea

Search Engine real estate.. Shows a great example of hw they have dominated the top 5 organic listings as well as paid listings for a particular term. They are using a distributor?s site that has been optimized for the same term, and fulfilling orders through mexgrocer as well as their alliance with Amazon to gain real estate from 43% to 86% above the fold. Build link popularity?same rules apply: high traffic and relevant sites only. Use press releases with PRWeb and AmbosMedios in Spanish. Local search is going to be very big in the Hispanic market. Apparently 71% of Hispanic households are in just 20 metro areas. An example San Diego/Tijuana shows 41.4 million dollars per day are spent in San Diego by total defined market. An example would be to shop for ?Car? keywords in San Diego. English CPC $3.43, $2.80, $2.20 and $2.30 versus same keywords in Spanish .22, .21, .35, .16...a 94% savings! Results=Higher ROI. Don't panic, use tools such as Google, Yahoo Search Marketing and Terespondo while it's still available (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002080.html) to find keywords. If you already have Spanish content, check your log files for kw's used to find. Look at SERPs for other relevant keywords.

10 tips: Have realistic objective strategy. Be committed to the market. Do a readiness assessment. Set aside enough resources. Do research as to what language to use. Use effective creative. Start with paid programs. Remember that organic results more competitive. Test. Hispanic market is not one size fits all. If you are ready to commit to this market, don't just target TO Hispanics, target AS Hispanics.

Q&A

"What about translations that are done poorly or translated into standard Spanish when the site targets Latin America. Would it be wise to translate it into regional Spanish. Would they think you are spamming?"

B: says "no"

L: Spanish from Spain is very different, and can be easily seen by Spaniards . There is such a thing as "neutral Spanish," which is what he would recommend translating-to.

Nacho: their services provide a process known as "standardization of the language." This is very intensive translation and works well by taking translations that have been done in multiple Spanish dialects and adapting them to a more common Latin American Spanish.

"How to start when trying to setup a call center in SA, for example?"

L: There are a lot of outsourced call centers that can do this.

"Any statistics regarding income level for local areas?"

N: Buy the Synovate Report (costs $1,000, but worth it)

Some attendees gave example of success stories based on the recommendations given by the 3 presenters in previous SES shows.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan
Welcome focusing on indexing and submission issues.

Kaushal Kurapati - AskJeeves
Brief intro of AksJeeves. They reach 25% of US audience. Crawler goals: follow robots.txt standards. We try to practice “Politeness“: be gentle to your servers, you can tell us where to crawl, not crawl. Use noarchive, noindex, no follow standards. Efficiency: compression saves bandwidth (up to 75% savings with gzip). Also avoid duplicates. Freshness: variable rates of crawling. Completeness: multiple file types: html, PDF, Flash, MS-Office, XML. Time/date stamp your content helps. Simplify site organization and navigation to ensure crawlers can reach all parts of the site. Use site maps. Watch out for infinite pages such as calendars serving the year 3001. Do not put session ID’s on URL’s. Can I submit my site for indexing? We have gone away from site submission, we are able to find site organically now. My site pages not in index yet? Patience please, various speed of crawling. there is a FAQ page for spiders. JavaScritp- parsing difficult. Dynamic pages cause for mores selection in indexing, screened for dupes before crawling. URL’s within images cannot be followed.

Debbie Jaffe - Google
Will tlk about sitemaps. Help people discover more of your web pages. G site maps: what is it? Free and easy way to help G discover more about your sites. Allows for direct informing to G about site changes. Enables G to crawl site more effectively. This is a collaborative program with webmasters. Intended for all sites large and small. Web masters and users get better crawl coverage, fresher search results, and a smarter crawl. How does it work? Create a sitemap using sitemap geenrator available at G if you want (search “sitemap generator Google”) Submit a simple text file with all your URLs. Can included relative priority of pages (not relative to other pages on the web, but relative to yours. Then submit the sitemap and update as needed. Ned to setup an account as a webmaster. You can then track all of your submissions via easy to use reporting system. They think it is a great BETA program worth trying out in order to help G provide more and fresher content. Wants to add that this is just a supllement to the standard crawling occurring already.

Tim Mayer - Yahoo!
It is great to see another company adopting feeds, Y! has been using these since 2001, and has great experience and good results. Overview of Y search vision enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge. Focus is on “Find.” Search not for sake ofs earching, but to achieve a purpose. Once you have found something you can share the knowledge with others. One thing people forget is to link pages from other pages. To encourage deeper crawling, would recommend not makji gsite depth too extreme (3-4 levels recommended). Use free addURL service if all else fails. Submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. Index friendly pages: Unique content with page-specific titles and descriptions. Separate pages only when there is separate content. Multiple domains only when there is a distinct business. Avoid spam such as kw stuffing, excessive cross linking, no cloaking, Yahoo crawlers include Slurp. Seeker, Multimedia crawler and audio-video crawler. Supports c command in order to stop caching. Can also add a crawl delay to help your servers. About to launch “Site Explorer” to see how many docs are already crawled in the index. Siteexplorer.yahoo.com (something else here) announced today. Find and save SS feeds available below search results. Add.my.yahoo.com/rss to add your RSS feeds within about 48 hours, then you will see the link appearing below your listings in the future. Search Submit Pro is a paid feed programs that allows for reporting and complete control over titles and abstracts. The paid Inclusion system is an entirely different content system than the main crawl. Over 99% of the index is crawled for free. Lists a fairt amount of support links available at Yahoo, including site questions like “I think I got banned, etc… the best is yet to come…see Yahoo search Blog at ysearchblog.com and go to next.yahoo.com to see new and future products.

Q&A.
“Is there a way to do the Google sitemaps type system at Yahoo?”
Tim: We just launched the feed to be able to do that. We will be expanding the products into the future.

Danny asks how many are using G sitemaps seemed as if a fair amount), Yahoo! Aid inclusion? (same amount) anyone using one system to submit to both? (none-seemed surprised by that.) Fair to say that the room would encourage you all to come together and do this.

“Does the sitemap feed effect the regular crawl?

D: No it doesn’t effect that. It does allow for additional information added.
.
Danny asks how many people that use sitemaps have benefited from it, molst have. Only one person ahd no effect, and no one raised their hand to “negative effect?”

“How to make sure country-specific engines pick up Yahoo content?”

T: No brainer way is to get a separate domain for each. Other way would be to make sure there are inbound links from that specific country to the particular content on the site. Somebody comments that you have to live in the country to get a domain. Tim says there are some services available that can be costly that provide this sort of help.

Danny ads that if you host in a particular country…it will help. Linkage is very important, especially if Authorities such as BBC in UK, for example

D: The index being generally the same is the same thing at G.

“anything in addition to using 301’s when changing a large site and changing many URL’s. Not root, but wanted to use the top fifty pages with 301’s?”

Tim: Why changing? They are going for more search engine freindlyness. Tim wonders why change if you already have good rankings. Danny answers to the idea that many search term appear in URLs in top searches, that many top ranks do not employ that. He thinks it is porbably other factors causing the content to be indexed highly. Danny ulls up a couple searches and shows that it is more important for the kw to be in the tile than in the URL.

K: They feel that content is the most important instead of the other stuff.

“What is the determining factor of how many poages get indexed?”

D: each individual sitemap allows for up to 50K URL’s. You can out sitemaps in individual directories if you have more than 50K pages. The re is no specific quota that she is aware of.

T: The importance is high quality signals such as authoritative inbounds links, no spam. There is no one factor that can be described as the largest. There are lots of things you can do to help the crawler want to dig deeper.

K: Two things that are factored are the depht of the site as well as if you have a dynamic URL that may block the crawler.

For the last session of the conference we have Chris Sherman moderating the My SEM Toolbox session. On the panel are Ken Jurina, Bill Hartzer, Jim Boykin, Paul Bruemmer and Todd Malicoat.

Jim Boykin from We Build Pages is up first. He starts off discussing the sandbox and brings up The Way Back Machine (waybackmachine.org) to see when the site was first found by TheWayBackMachine. He also uses 123promotion.co.uk/tools/age-of-website.php to find the day the Web site was first found as well. He also asks people if the site they have is a resource or not. So he uses a spider simulator, like www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go to see if the page has lots of text and pages with lots of text is more of a resource. Do you have unique content or not? There is a tool called copyscape.com where you can find if they stole your content or not. Where can you find all this and more? URL Research, back links, alexa, similar pages and so on, go to the Fagan Finder, faganfinder.com/urlinfo. He uses the Google allinachor command (allinanchor:keyword phrase typed into Google) will tell you the sites that have the most anchor text pointing to a specific page for a specific phrase. webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php is good for analyzing anchor text. Looking for related topics, kwmap.net is a nice tool for related phrases and neighborhoods. What about backlink neighborhoods...linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php helps you with this. Check your rankings; use digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords.

Todd Malicoat also from We Build Pages is next up. Domain/Server Level information tools: whois.sc/yourdomainhere.com, dnsstuff.com is great for doing IP lookups, ip-report.com gives you a break down of sites on the same IP block. Competitive information tools: GoogSpy.com will tell you what types of terms your competitors are bidding on at AdWords, extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/switchproxy allows you to mask yourself when you do your competitive research. Backlinks and off page analysis tools; webuildpages.com/tools/internet-marketing-google.htm, this tool will return the number of pages indexed in Google/Yahoo, backlink to site or page the pr and so on, linkhounds.com/link-harvester/ gives you good info as well. Keyword information tools; labs.google.com/sets/ Google Sets automatically creates sets of keywords in the same family, gorank.com/seotools has an ontology finder tools. Header and Page Level information; webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php tells you the server header http status. Spidering and indexability, home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html is a desktop tool to tell you your broken links and redirected URLs, gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go has Poodle Predictor. He also plugged rand, seomoz.org tools.

Ken Jurina from Epiar to give us 6 tools. Firefox extension tools: getfirefox.com, pros is tool works right and is very quick, critiques, none and cool (tons of extensions). Web CEO tracks SE rankings, comparing a sites performance vs. competitors, exporting reports to clients but it is a bit slow (free but can go up to $400+). ClickTracks is a web analytics tool, path tracking, ppc info, exporting reports is not too easy and has a wonderful interface and visitor clickstream tagging options (costs free to 10k). LiveStats (deepmetrix.com) good reporting options, easy to understand and good export options, a bit difficult to login, price ($195/month to 1795/month). Roboform.com is a good tool, it remembers all your passwords, fills in fields when campaigning a web site, include profiles, price ($29.95). MarketLeap is easy, online, free, does link pop, search engine saturation and keyword verification.

Bill Hartzer from Intec. Optilink, www.optilinksoftware.com tells you link pop, number of outgoing links, easily analyzes link text, its an offline tool. OptiSpider, www.optilinksoftware.com spiders one site, compares link text to page topic and title tag, discover which link text or page title needs improvement, great for analyzing someone elses site and this is an offline tool. Ranks.nl/tools/keyword_combinations.html allows you to combine two keyword lists into one and expands it. Ranks.nl measures keyword density where you compare two page's keyword density to each other. www.keyword-helper.com helps you find more keywords. URLTrends.com shows PR, alexa, number of incoming links, page info, dmoz status and so on but it has an rss or email notification system. More tools; seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, digitalpoint.com/tools/, seotoolset.com, seochat.com/seo-tools/.

Paul Bruemmer from TrademarkSEO was last up. Alexa: Reach, Rank, Page Views, Compare Sites and Similar Sites, Site linking in. Ranking Manager reports by engine, keyword and so on. LinxViewer: it shows you what a spider might see. Yahoo! Finance: client information and trends. Hoovers Pro Plus gives you details about client model, client competitors and so on. Print Screen Deluxe, capture screen shots (americansys.com) just any easy way to do screen captures.

Forum discussion at SEW Forums.

Michael Doyle from ThomasB2B is going to talk about B2B search and a issues with B2B search. There are a couple types of B2B search, name of the company is known but not much else. What gets interesting is a supplier search and you don’t know the name of the company who supplies this part. If you do a product search in general engine, it works great. Major search engines and shopping site provide good consumer results because of defined list of product codes. It’s a relatively small list of well known brand names. B2B search is characterized by lack of common product codes/brand names and millions and trillions of parts. Some manufacturers have millions of products in there catalog.

A typical person doing sourcing in the B2B space. The B2B searcher spends a good portion of her day looking to fill a critical need for a product. Time is money he says. Purchasing decisions are very important to the buyer and the selected supplier. Traditionally done with print directories and manufactures/distributors catalogs. Everyone had a proprietary classification systems to organize suppliers by the type of product made. The decision to create a product category is typically made by a human editor. He puts up an example of a Google search for twisted shank drill bits. Its shows an eBay ad (which is irrelevant), the organic listings are not relevant either as its catalog and nothing to help source the product. He puts up an example of how ThomasB2B search, and how they list companies and show how relevant the pages are and clean too.

Directories are only as good as the number of companies listed and the freshness of information. Print directories gathered information useful to print users, like phone, fax, address but many companies do not even have a website. #1 compliant of ThomasB2B is you can’t click through. The company product specification data needs to be published in indexable formats. They think there needs to be standards and tools are the solution. Product classification is important (UNSPSC started by the UN). Software tools for classifying product content and a general consensus about content/data types as well. This new index will allow companies to include themselves in a standard index if they adopt general standards.

Up next Jeff Coyle from KnowledgeStorm is a information technology directories and provides structured information to mainstream sites and magazines. The information technology directory is aggregated content from thousands of vendors. Over 2 million visits per month, with a network of 160 sites. Product and service listings as well as white papers, demos, web seminars, etc.. KnowledgeStorm looks at user behavior such as researching & staying current on technology trends. Supporting a buying process and decision. One of the challenges for them is not getting the searcher there, it’s structuring the information so people understand it and generating a lead for their client. They help develop a portfolio of marketing efforts to leverage current marketing collateral. Jeff next showcases vertical search for technology such as built in direct response to requests from our users.

Sarabjit Singh from GlobalSpec was up next. He starts with describing the evolution of the television. In 1941 the first 2 TV stations licensed, etc.. For 50 years 3 stations owned the market. Its very similar to search engines today with the mass market engines. They do a great job, but they believe a similar trend will happen, and their will be a specialized engines for specific needs. Globalspec was founded 10 years ago, and have about 150 people. He explains they looked at what people wanted on the web. They make the dark and hidden web visible by offering information in their search. He explain how their engineering search works. He says they provide deep parametric, technical part and service search. Appears they offer a good service for their clients. Submit websites to them, www.globalspec.com/submit-site

Brennen Beyer from Business.com is going to talk about what they are offering to the market. He says it’s a slow growth business, it’s a fragment audience, and they are trying to reach decision makers. Business.com lists vertical markets, they are also built on a directory structure. They do not crawl the web. He explains how the engine works, advertiser and content layout on Business.com. It’s a CPC based engine, and its all paid placement. They don’t necessary power search on other sites, but its does take up a good part of what they do. Business.com has a reach of 3.5 million users per month. He says they are here to understand the needs of users. There directory becomes powerful as it can help offer suggestions for problems such as a search for “employee performance”. The directory might suggest “performance improvement” categories. Why is it worth it build a vertical search engine? Its because it has a higher concentration of decision makers.

Mark Cordover from It.com. It.com is a vertical search engine that focuses on IT market. He says traditional marketing began in the ancient bazaar, as people where hacking their wares to people that based by. He says things have changed, its “core routers, and managed hosting” instead of beads and clothes. Search marketing provides consumer pull, not vendor push. He gives and example of a story about Madison Avenue magazine, has a sparkling water company wanting to creating an ad in a magazine to make people look at the ad. Apparently you get to the page, and its explodes in bubbles, causing you to look at the ad. Marketing on vertical search engines delivers a targeted audience. So if you put all the vertical search ideas together you get a virtual trade show. He ends with some advice they have learned. How best to present yourself in a virtual trade show. He gives an example of a great ads. “PalmSource delivers IBM Websphere Everyplace …importance of embedded java in a mobile device more than 3 million java developers can deploy applications, then the url”.

Chris Sherman introduces the panel saying that metric people looked at was simply click through. That evolved into conversions, ROI, CPA and so on. Today we have lots of metrics to use to see, plus we have the ability to track a customer over time. That is what this session is about.

Ben Perry from IProspect was up first. If you use an agent you get a big difference in results when compared to humans. He showed how the agent (software) was much more aggressive in bid prices versus the human. The agent brought in a 37% increase in ROAS and a 55% increase in conversion. Time matters in bidding. He overlaid clicks and conversions on a 2d graph, for a specific client, it was very interesting to look at. There are also weekly trends, especially with b2b markets. Then he plotted a monthly view, which showed a combination of weekly trends, but it doesn't always look the same way for each client. Then again he backed it out by year and you see the same trends, and seasonal trends. Time should impact your bidding strategy. For a low consideration product, 88% of all conversions happen within the hour (batteries, snickers bar vs. car purchase, home, plasma screen). For high consideration products, 46% of all conversions occur between 1 and 60 minutes. 46% of all the other conversions too more than an hour. He plotted a scale by days and it took up to 6 months or so. Customers who waited longer had an average revenue per sale of 329% higher then those buying within the hour. For this client, 44% of revenue is driven by repeat customers (life time value of a customer). So what if we did not consider the 44% of revenue as a life time value within the bidding. Non repeat revenue would have been 59% lower if we had not counted lifetime value.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman from Rimm-Kaufman Group was next up to talk about the time warp. 3 questions and 4 tips. How soon can we tell if something is working? Why do we care? How does this wait affect bidding? The sample: 1 million paid search click (random sample from 6/1/04 through 6/1/05 Google & Yahoo. 41,377 subsequent conversions (6/1/04 - 8/1/05. 85% / 15% split B2C vs. B2B advertisers. Long duration cookie. How long must we wait? many order come quickly, 50% within 28 minutes. But getting nearly all takes longer, 75% within 25 hours, 90% within 12 days and 95% within 4 weeks. Are they looking for you? Search phrase contains client brand: 50% in 28 minutes, 75% in 3 hours and 90% in 7 days. Search phrase down not contain client brand; 50% in 32 minutes, 75% in 1.5 days, and 90% in 13.6 days. Big ticket purchases? $0-99 1.5 days for 90% to order, 100-199 about 2 weeks, 200-399 about 2.2 weeks and 300+ over 2.5 weeks. Holiday affect, as the holiday season gets closer, they order quicker (they need it now). Vertical? Hobby supplies, 50% in 38 min, 75% in 20 hours, 90% in 6 days... Consumer electronics almost 16 days for 90%. And professional leads take about 3 days for 90% of those orders to close. Why do we care? On average it takes about 2 weeks for advertising to sales ratio to stabilize. Tip # 1: Be patient. Don't overreact to short-term results. Long cookies; method, long cookies 90+ days, order crediting in reporting; 14 days, 30 days as per client. Preserves full data, can recast history to show impact of max interval decision. Tip #2: Handle click to order interval in reporting, not in cookie. Bid management & day parting. Bid management must address click to order delay. Day parting must be on time of click, not order. Example; over 25% of Monday midday orders driven by pre-Monday clicks. Tip#3 compute economics on a P90 conversions. Tip #4: If day parting, day part on click date, not order date.

Finally we have Rob Gaudio from MEA Digital to discuss a case study for one client, Oakley sunglasses company. This is more specific about allowing enough time to measuring conversions for your paid campaign. Oakley, Inc. World's leading manufacturer of premium sunglasses. An expanding line of performance footwear, apparel & accessories, sold in more than 100 countries. Investments in Direct Busines; new e-commerce system in Q1 2004, paid search campaign in Q2 2004, redesigned site in Q2 2005. They only sell MSRPO. Brand conscious, historical focus was on brand image and not ROI focuses. SEM Program: They developed an extensive keyword portfolio, they implemented core metrics to track and optimized daily, weekly, monthly and compared to quarterly and annual data. Technology integration; Google/Yahoo PPC, Atlas OnePoint and CoreMetrics. SEM Test Plan: Objectives; optimize SEM program in time for peak buying season, discover optimal time to test creative. They executed a creative copy test, suing time as an additional variable. Used Google AdWords. Isolated other variables like keyword position, cost and daily budget. Selected a stable time period to avoid major seasonality. Success metrics; click to purchase, cost per sale, cost per order, conversions, etc. Consider outside influences; other media, world news, weather, internal company issues, holidays, and competition. Implementation. Creative tests: used top performing creative from 2004 as a benchmark. They ran 4 creatives at same time (did not use auto optimizer), for 4 weeks. Monitored results for 7 days periods, and cumulative. Compared data on 7, 14, 21, and 28 day periods. Results: Summary conversion data was consistent across all weeks to the total (would not have known that if we did not allow the time to past). Determined the best performing copy at the Ad Group level. More aggressive call to action creative performed best. Products are seasonal and require attention to the product level. Some creative did not have enough statistical data to warrant a change in Winter. Next on the horizon is to retest in Winter. Use learnings for future launches; international SEM initiatives in 2006 and new products and keyword categories. Monitor sales data from test period sales for repeat purchases. (1) keep good historical data, (2) seasonality is important (3) give it time, (4) keep it simple and (5) watch for outside influences.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Open Q & A under Danny Sullivan, to the panel which includes Mike Grehan, Bruce Clay, Todd Freisen, and David Naylor.

Q: I have a huge site, template driven, city, state templates, why do some search engines not index the whole thing? Like MSN?
A: They all say MSN has deep crawl issues.

Q: Please make comments about the last Yahoo! algorithmic changes? She has one whitehat Web site, which has disappeared from Yahoo!
A: DaveN said Yahoo! has been looking throughout the social network to find footprints. You might have some past issues. So email them and ask them to fix it.
Mike said that for his major clients, rarely anything ever changes. On the less frequent queries, Yahoo! has been doing all whacky things (tail keywords).
DaveN clarifies that he has been noticing that Yahoo! still ranks you well for a specific keyword phrase but it takes you to a more top level page, and not to the most direct page. Yahoo! is working on it now.

Danny then goes into Yahoo! MyWeb 1.0/2.0 features.

Q: I work for a site that has about a million pages in Google but a week ago, the homepage dropped out of the index. He spoke with Google and they said that his site is not penalized, but it will come back shortly. They just updated the index and it will come back.
A: Bruce said this does happen and it does come back pretty quickly. There was a flurry of this with 302 hi-jacks. Also if people have server issues.
Danny gets the site example is cardirect.com and if you search in Google for cars direct, the jupiter media affiliate link comes up.
Todd asks if he is 301 redirecting it, he is not.
Its nice to see them all review this stuff online.

Q: The SEs talk about how it is evil to buy links. But yet you can buy links from Yahoo! Directory. There is a directory of directories listed by PageRank. What do you guys think of those types of links?
A: Todd said picking up a link from directories will never be a problem. If you get 500,000 links overnight, that might be an issue.
DaveN said you have to realize that the search engines lie to you. DaveN said look at how Yahoo! Travel buys links on search engine watch to rank well for travel.
Mike said he used to buy text links in newsletters and now those are archived and they have links for $75 forever. He describes how to find these types of links, search for "gold newsletters."
Bruce said the only ad he buys is the one on SEW for $5,000 per month. Danny said he doesn't get a commission. He gets about a 120 targeted visitors per day. He said how he once moved many of his links from one site to a different one, and the site he moved them FROM actually increased in rankings. Bruce said, buy for the traffic.
Danny pulled up Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

Q: The delay in powerful rankings, i.e. SandBox. In New York someone said something about a 301 redirect from an existing page with pop it out. He did it, and it worked. Does theme matter when doing a 301 redirect to give that site a way out of the SandBox?
A: Mike said, if they link to a brand new site from one of the large brand sites, it doesn't have an issue. But without that link, it sits.
Bruce said, he is not a believer of the sandbox theory. He said the links the sites get are unnatural, he feels this is what is going on. On the flip side, if someone comes up with the cure of cancer and gets a billion different links overnight from all different IP addresses, then that is natural. Bruce said, it looks unnatural.
Todd said this worked for some, didn't work for all. Everyone has theories and no one really knows. IMO, Todd is dead right.
Mike said the search engines know which sites are popular, and they know user behavior.
Danny brought up hosingmaps.com, which didn't exist until april and shows how it ranks number one "housing maps". One reason they are not sandboxed is because it was Matt Cutts's old roommate (kidding) but its a popular site.

Q: Structuring a multi-language site, 14 languages, the problem is the .com, .co.uk and so on. How do I make sure they rank well in the respective local engines?
A: Mike asks where are you hosting them? In each respective country, and that is a good thing.
Bruce said get links from those sites ranking well in those engines and it will help.

Q: What tools do you use to check rankings, and make your job easier?
A: There is a session today named "My SEM Toolbox", go to that.

Q: Extension of multiple languages...We have an European site with the Queen's English. Is there a duplicate content issue? They are hosted both on .coms and they are both hosted in the USA.
A: The panel is unsure, depends.
DaveN: But you are doing it for a legitimate use. If you want to be safe, change file names, and so on.
Danny said move it to a server in the UK. But he said you should be fine.

Q: Site structure question, with local information, using subdomain. i.e. city.foo.com vs. food.com/city
A: Mike said If you go to about.com you will see that they use subdomains well. Use that as a guideline.
Bruce said subdomains was a great way, in the past, to boost PR. Now Bruce said it doesn't matter either way. It depends on the site.
DaveN said subdomain names scare him, he used them in the past often, but never uses them again. He said don't use them because spammers used it a ton and if they blow up the spammers, there will be collateral damage.

Q: Yahoo! Instant Messenger as being a factor towards rankings?
A: Yahoo! tries to use user data but you are probably confusing personalization. Danny said he is not sure if Yahoo! Messenger has MyWeb built into it. Danny explains that this stuff is now moving to your desktop. Mike adds that he was talking with one of the data guys at Yahoo! and he said that how would it be if you just types a query in and you got the answer right away. DaveN bought an ISP just to see user patterns. Google has larger access then DaveN. HitWise buys data from ISPs, its crazy stuff. SEOs screw around with their data, so they give us APIs and SiteExplorer. So they get as much data as possible from as many sources as possible. DaveN adds, if Google is reading my gmail account, he will have loads of gmail accounts where he has them talk to each other about all his wonderful sites ;). Mike said personalized search is changing the idea of having a #1 result.

Q: What are industry best practices for testing purposes? I don't want affect my rankings by testing.
A: Bruce said Just noindex those test pages, just for your PPC.
Todd adds you can add a referrer and serve up pages to test based on that. But if that page does well, you want to switch, then your worried if your rankings drop. Most of the time it won't, depending on how you do it.

Side note: Mike says duplicate content issue, do a search on a paper named "mirror mirror on the web" to learn about it.

Forum discussion SEW Forums.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson - Search Rank

Karen Breen Vogel - Clear Gauge talks about B2B Search Marketing, the “considered purchase”

Clear Gauge focuses a lot on their optin email efforts. An example of why you need to be holistic in Internet Marketing. Considered purchase: what is different? Goals are to start or drive relationships. They believe that the Internet is more of a relationship medium. Engines: major se’s and b2b focused verticals. Keywords: buying cycle and role based. This is the major difference, emphasizes buying cycle, buying cycle, buying cycle! The major difference between B2B and B2C. Messages: value proposition and offers aligned to buying cycle and role. Landing pages: options for interactions/content/next date. Must give them options since you do not know where they are in the buying cycle. Tracking ROI: Show ROI Pipelines. B2B people think of pipelines. Listed thing people may be doing. Including educating themselves, ID various solutions, etc…they are at some point in the buying cycle, so your goal is to place your desire to form a relationship into the prospects search path. Paid versus natural., be relevant, but filter the prospect in the messaging of your PPC campaigns. Use negative keywords and other methods of pre-qualifying clicks. Measure and optimize valuable business behaviors such as where the clicks come from and the following behavior. Goal si to be able to communicate again via email. Many variables that im pact paid search: campaign groupings, ad groups, content vs. search ads. Kws, negative kws, ranking positions, match types, bid price gaps, daily ad caps, bid prices, message titles/descriptions, display URL’s, multiple messages (A/B testing), Conversions. Google emphasizes placing higher priority on campaigns with higher daily ad caps. Guy with biggest budget will get most activity. Raising ad caps is a good signal to G that you are in the game to stay. Key Pillars: Find (kw list research, root term methodology, Case study: tactics (went from 47 to 1600 terms) versus results (400% increase). Second pillar is engage: use operative keywords (similar tho theory of “latent” keywords from the (Monday session). Matching strategy important in order to expand audience. Landing page relevancy is important in order t put visitors into your pipeline. Instead of just telling them that solution is “X,” you should tell them you understand their problems and have solutions. Last pillar: measure value. Tracking highly valued activities, optimization logs, continuous improvements, pipeline visibility. Advanced tracking architecture…gives example of a spreadsheet that covers many aspects of the web site and its users’ activities, in order to discover which keywords work best. Equating things such as optins and downloads to measure where they are in the buying cycle. Also uses scenario groupings of certain pages that work together to create a good end result, need to take corrective actions. A good sales person will walk out of a bad sales call and immediately try to discover what happened wrong, and then address that on the next call. In summary, must focus on entire buying cycle, engage all prospects at all points, be prospect-centric: use problem, not products messaging. Focus on most important business metrics. Optimize your program to what you care the most about: do not optimize to traffic or clicks, but instead to actual business results.

Paul Slack - WebDex
Appreciates us showing up on the first session of the last day. Agenda: B2B sales cycles, who to target, how they search, developing an Internet marketing strategy. B2B sales cycle: Figure out who is making the decision. Uncover the need, research possible solutions (they will do typical due diligence at this point), pair down to short list of vendors, go to bid, make decision. SEM is involved in both research and decision of short list. Enquiro study of SE buying funnel. Awareness 8.7 consideration/research 68.3, 42.6 decision, purchase 28.2. This is why it is so important to be present on the Internet during the second two stages. Influencers and decision makers will use SE’s differently. Influencers: website needs to be an “influencers-catcher>“ use specific words, they are more likely to respond to ca call to action, will typically “bite” on comparison matrixes, webinars, trials, demos, etc… Sources of content important to them: spec sheets, white papers, product pages, newsletters. This allows you to communicate effectively with the influencers. These things make the influencers’ jobs easier by giving them the info to download and show to their boss. Gives an example of a white paper written that was about a certain compliance issue, and now it is number ne at G for a search of that issue. Very targeted to people that search for this exact solution to their need for a software. Also, the white paper uses a conversion form to gather info at first (giving up info to get info is accepted). 17% conversion rate for this form. Decision makers: different because they are late-cycle. They search for validation. High level searches of 2-3 words instead of the 4 word phrases influencers tend to use. Less likely to respond to a call to action. Look for sources of content. They purchased the term “Sarbannes Oxley” for a client, and the positioning in PPC for that term makes the client look like “one of the big boys.” Very high level landing page geared more towards the decision maker. Developing an Internet Marketing strategy. Website don’t exist for their own sake, but to fulfill a specific purpose and to satisfy specific consumer needs. Define goals and objectives, understand audience, understand conversion activities, know budget, use measurement, refine and make changes for improvement. Circular pattern: define, refine, measure (repeat). (Technical difficulties - presentation computer locks up.) They use a spreadsheet in order to get as much info from clients/prospects as possible regarding their goals and prior activities. They determine a qualified lead is defined as someone with a eed and a budget. The more you can define this, the better chance you will have at success. Use their COA goal as a benchmark, and determine that they will be happy as long as you can stay below that. Then you can determine how man y accounts the website needs to close in order to match or improve on other marketing activities. Then figure out based on the conversion ratio, how many visitors are needed. To sum it up: “Begin with the end in mind.”

Christopher Grady - Merak Communications
Has done all SEM in house, thus invited to speak from that perspective. Four main issues: Turning business hurdles into SEM advantages ID kws and engine sin b2b2, biggest kw targeting mistakes, and Monitoring activities that lead to buying.. Turning hurdles into strategic advantages: disadvantage, you cannot actively sell a mail server, advantage: they do use the Internet to find a solution (a replacement for their faulty mail server. Identifying engines and kws used in B2B: conducted behavior usability studies and continue to find out info measuring sales cycle and after purchase. Kw analysis study included study of terminology used by competitors, related forums and usenet, technical books, categorical terminology, terminology used in mags and newsletters., wrote custom DB application to help with task. Ended up writing a kw ref guide for use by all their content writers to refer-to. This corporate dictionary helps them have the best possible kws constantly infused into new content. One big kw targeting mistake was accidentally ranking for the term “email.” since the product is B2B they fielded about 70 useless calls a day. They found that their largest customer found them using an 11 kw search, second largest used a nine kw search, etc…they actually ended up finding non-optimized pages. Largest customer used a core keyword and then a list of requirements. They have used a forum to help their communications with customers. Found that monitoring closing rate based on pattern of downloading and subsequent behavior.

We got Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Matt Cutts from Google and Kaushal Kurapti from Ask Jeeves on this single panel. No one knows what is going to happen now. Danny is modding up.

Ask was up first, he gives his company info slide, yada yada yada. He briefly reviews how the link analysis works here. Page A links to page b and c, that is a recommendation from page at to page b and c. More links, better you are, in short. Then he discusses the Ask Jeeves approach, the whole community & hug/authority thing....He then describes that all links are not equal. Be careful of reciprocal links and purchasing links. Avoid link farms, cloaked pages, invisible or hidden links and links by images - text based links can be understood, but not image links. Become and authority on a specific subject. Focus on your business and content and the rest will follow. Blog links do not mean too much from the blogrolls to Mr. Jeeves.

Yahoo! now. Tim announces a new product named Site Explorer, http://sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ where you can get your linkage data. It is a place for people to go to see which pages Yahoo indexed and to let Yahoo know about URLs Yahoo has not found as of yet (submit URL or URLs). He showed an example, you basically type in a URL into it (this is also supported via an API, good good), then you hit explore URl and it spits out the number of pages found in Yahoo Index and also shows you the number of inlinks. You can sort pages by "depth" how deep pages are and you can also submit URLs here. You can also quickly export the results to TSV format. Links have been very popular, he said Yahoo! has been moving towards the social community aspect and probably will go in that direction with link pop. He said, create natural links, make it look natural.

Google up now. Matt goes up with no presentation. He said Ask Jeeves covered most of the basics, and basically recapped it quickly. If Matt was someone starting out, he would get links from...HousingMaps.com shows you craigs list stuff on Google Maps. It has been around less then a few months and it got tons of links quickly. Also think about useful services to offer (validation tools for rss feeds, etc.) Matt ran across one that makes signs dynamically, he built his own "watch out for falling spam." If you don't have to ask for links, that is awesome. Add one new page of content everyday. Syndicate my content. Matt Cutts started a blog today, www.mattcutts.com. Make a community, reviews, forums, and so on. One of the best ways is to think outside of the box. For example, one of the seo contests (cant spell it).

Q & A:

Q: When I do comparison across the engines of who is linking to me, I see differences between the two. His answer he got was that the link command isn't full accurate.
A: Matt said that they used to show only important backlinks. But then someone suggested to show random samples of backlinks. They have never shown all backlinks. They do have all the backlinks at Google but they do not show them all.
Tim shows more backlinks then Google, they do not show all links but a more comprehensive link. The new system will "be very comprehensive" he wouldn't say it is every link.
Kaushal said you would see a difference, because different engines filter spam and dups differently. Also not everything is exposed and each engine takes a slightly different approach.

Q: I have a client that has a great site, lots of links but the anchor text being used throughout the web is the same.
A: Matt said that is very unnatural. Most natural links are not 100% one exact phrase to the site. It won't hurt you, there is no OOP, but all the links might be devalued.
Tim agreed with Matt on it being unnatural.

Q: Reciprocal links; we have them now, we have plans to do more, what should I do? There are 20 of them links.
A: Matt said here is my rule of thumb, pretend you are my competitor, what would they think of it? Plenty of people have reciprocal links but if its excessive, then you need to be careful. Editorial given links and independent links are best.
Danny then asked 4 people in the audience to point to each other and then asked several to point at each other.
Matt said if you go into "graph theory" you have a "clique", that clique is when everyone in a network is pointing at each other, that is not natural.

Q: How do you know when too much is too much?
A: Tim said that is the hard question. It is all about "intent".
Matt adds that if you take this to random 5 people outside of the SEO community, they would agree.

Q: Do none clickable links count as back links?
A: Matt said he has never been asked that, and he can see it both ways. Google has the code that they can flip the switch either way - but use the hyper link.
Tim said its best to get the hyper link.
Ask Jeeves said the same thing as Tim.

Q: PageRank; is it important or not? With the rel="nofollow" thing, if I cared about my PR, I would use nofollow on all my links to keep the PR within my sites. What are your thoughts? And is there a correlation between PR and number of pages indexed?
A: Most Webmasters say PR is not as important. Google has always said there are many variables in the algo and they keep evolving. Very few people outside of a search engine can say exactly how valuable a specific link is from a page. In Matt's opinion, the nofollow has been a very valuable thing for the search engines. It gives the Webmaster the ability to say if I vouch for this link. So now we have this new type of data the search engines can use, he said its being used very responsibly. If you can authenticate or trust a comment poster, then there is no reason to use the nofollow.
Tim just repeats what Matt said.

Q: Query strings at the end or URLs, when does that make it a problem for engines?
A: Matt said 3 or more, its not great, but GoogleBot sometime is smart. Don't use id= in it, and if you have numeric parameters, dont go above 4 numbers.
Kaushal agrees with Matt, but a limited set of parameters are ok.
Tim adds that if you have inbound links to those dynamic URLs, they will more likely crawl it. Yahoo! is less considered with duplicate issues.

Q: We build directories, what is the proper way to link out from those directories?
A: Matt said you love something, you need to set it free. It looks very weird to have tons of ibl and no outbound links. So static link those out.

Ok here is some fun. Danny was showing examples of high PR sites and Danny joked about sometimes Google goes up to a PR11. Tim Mayer then said, "Matt, that is only for advertisers." Good one.

Someone asked why Yahoo!'s PR went down from PR10 to 9, why did that happen? Tim said because of the index size announcement. Matt said we don't do that, we don't give ourselves (google) a 10 because we give a 10. He said, we are too busy for that.

Tired...Stopping...Good Night.

Forum discussion at SEW Forums.

Moderator Elisabeth Osmeloski

Site reviewers: Shari Thurow and Mathew Bailey

Came in fairly late…had to catch the rest of the exhibits in the expo before it closed. Sites are being analyzed for usability issues. Walked in on the discussion as the site actuate.com was being reviewed. Issues include using a drop down menu on top bar “tabs.” Shari feels that these bars can sometimes make people less satisfied, since they clicked on “Corporate” for example, in order to find out about corporate, they now have to make another choice. Instead , the sub-menu should be presented on the corporate “home page.” Recommends breadcrumbs in order to know where they are on the site. Someone in the audience mentioned that the use of capitals in the menus…

Tableandhome.com. Asked what the target audience is, and the owner wasn’t exactly sure. Drilled down to the toys>cool animal stuff>stuffed animals>sea life found “stop lights” and asked why? Those indicate in stock if green, legend is on bottom. Note that may be better to just put “in stock” instead of making the puzzle. Calls to action are good. “Add to registry” is excellent idea too. You can only buy one item at a time? The add to cart button at the bottom gives the choice of numbers. Once again something at the bottom that should be closer to top. If did a visual affordance test to find out what looks clickable, left nav bar doesn’t seem clickable. If you have to mousse over something to tell that it is a link, then it is NOT user friendly. Some pages seem better than others…the ones that have more info above the fold, primarily. Check out page. Should be using a 1, 2, 3, 4 idea to let people know what the process will be. Good thing is that first page doesn’t ask for personal info too soon. Shari noticed with a client that they had a large abandonment rate due to the fact that they asked for too much info right away instead of letting them place the order and then give payment info. Overall there is not enough color differentiation, which makes it difficult to see what is happening. Next stage in checkout asks for sign-in or create an account. Elisabeth asks the room how many people would leave now, and approx 90% raise their hands. This is bad because now you are asking them to go through all this stuff. The people were ready to buy, but no longer. Why do you have to enter info in order to find out shipping cost. The problem according to Shari is that the shipping does vary based on location. Shari feels that they need to hire a pro usability firm to analyze site using a heuristic process. Needs more color differentiation too. Landsend.com is Shari’s favorite example of a shopping cart page. Another point made by audience that once name and address is captured, the person should never have to fill that out during the rest of the process. ? Says people buy based on emotions, and if you make them stop to think, the feeling could go away. MPABS rule from Shari mentioned a couple of times: “Most people are basically stupid.” Remember this when working on usability.

Edgewisemedia, a Yahoo store site. Shop.store.yahoo.com/edwisemedia/index.html. Too many links. Good headings, not using the word products anywhere, which is something he likes. Shari recommends a three column layout, and feels that the products are not categorized as well as landsend, for example. No “Sony mini DV” heading on that page when drilled-down to, and also needs to use more keywords on page. That sales page also looks like the DV costs $290.00 since that is on the same line as “add to cart” and the rest of the sentence is the line prior (says 100 for 290.00.

Cisco-eagle.com Products page: categorize the products differently, the A through B idea makes it tough to navigate. People do nto search alphabetically. Usually people expect the products to be categorized. This would be a good candidate for a “card sort test” and a “reverse card sort.” This takes a while, but will be able to see how people would categorize your content based on one product per card. Detailed assistance on navigating is cool, but sounds a little ominous. Also, the “all” or “any” above the search button but well below the box is confusing. Needs breadcrumbs. No “mental model,” once again - bread crumbs make this much better. Navigation becomes difficult once in the shopping area…Shari says when she goes to the online catalog, she loses her “friggin ladder.” (laughs) Long term plan: find an commerce solution that is search-friendly.

Govisitcostarica.com. Google ads are too dominant. Distracting from calls to action of the site. This gives people four unique calls to action before they even see the content. They are off the site almost immediately. Need to get people to make a reservation, if that makes more money than the AdSense revenue. The comment made by the owner was he is having conversion issues. He then seems reluctant to want to move the AdSense. Shari says “that is the type of client that makes me crazy: ‘I am having conversion issues but I don’t want to change anything.’” Further…too many drop downs. Shari: “To put it politely, this is a navigation disaster.” Card sort and visual affordance test. Check and see if people click on drop downs in menu’s, if they do, keep them. Logo is nice, but the whole site needs potentially a few color changes. First fix nav, then determine what you want somebody to do, and call them to action.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan

Intro: Called buying and selling links, probably should be called buying. We have covered links extensively, but the goal of this session is to learn more about buying.

Patrick Gavin - Text Link Ads
“Evaluating links” what to look for on the buying side. This is really about buying a static html link to help with organic rankings. Many benefits: direct traffic, link pop, branding, spidering. Used links found at SEW as an example of excellent links because they are both text and images (to help with branding).

Criteria: theme traffic, incoming, outgoing, location, spider ability and anchor text. Theme: use topically related sites that are “on theme.” Many ways to still receive targeted traffic without being an “exact theme match.” Incoming: Look though analytics, and you may see a pocket of links from a small article or mention of the site. If you got traffic from this, it may be worth pursuing more from the same site by offering a little cash. Traffic: Use Alexa to get a rough idea of traffic, but best to get a media kit if available. Since the whole concept of buying links is new to some sites that you may contact, it may be difficult at first to explain that you need a fixed link for a certain amount of time. Keep an eye out for use of redirects. Traffic: single page vs. site wide. Some people have a concern that buying too many site wides will get you in trouble. Patrick’s opinion on this is that with a more established reputable site it may be easier to get away with this. Incoming links: general indicator: PageRank. Better indicator, using link command at Yahoo, which does seem to prioritize links in terms of value. Outbound links: the fewer the better. Be careful of getting into neighborhoods that are unrelated by linking out to those. Location on the page: probably best to place in main area of content if possible, but he hasn’t seen evidence that it being in the footer area, for example, is any detractor. Spiderability: do a cache check to ensure they are indexing the right domain and check for duplicate content, also cache search will show how much of the page is being cached. If links box is not cached, the link will not be found. Anchor text is important. Wrapping it up, the basic strategy is to “be natural.” Mix up anchor text, mix single page and site wides.

Eric Ward - ericward.com
Takes a moment to thank Danny Sullivan for everything he has done for the SEM industry. What not to do: use systems that you get in email offers that offer links in 750,000 websites for only $39.95 . Consider other places to buy links that you may not have, including, e-zines, blogs (recommends blogads.com as a very valuable service), newsletters (example: ivillage.com and their categorized newsletters) (remember that this is about traffic that is relevant, because these will not be crawled or indexed by an SE unless it gets archived), auto-responders, RSS feeds, PDF documents (example: approach someone with a specific white paper or something that they have which is relevant, and offer to “sponsor the document”) You can also use a PR service to buy links within popular publications. Session presentation online live at ericward.com/ses.

Thomas Bindl - OPTOP
Avoiding Technical pitfalls. First off, is the Google PageRank real? Shows an example of a page that shows PR9, but deeper research shows that it is cloaking content of Disney to gain the toolbar rank. Check cache, backlinks and use “related:” command at Google to see sites that G finds similar. Fake links: easy JavaScript redirect, no-follow, etc. Harder to see: Cloaking. Look at source code to see if there is a different URL being shown “on mouse over” than the actual destination. Redirects look for them too. Look for tags and also check META for Robots.txt. Flags for “harder fakes” include no cache at all, META tags different in cache, or cache different. Penalties - one way to tell if a site has been penalized is by using archive.org. Warning that link mat be bad: PR doesn’t get passed (should be the page‘s PR minus1). Links exists for longer than 8 weeks. Big rotation of sponsors. Don’t feel a boost after 2 weeks.

Greg Boser - WebGuerilla
Brief comments. He is very happy that there is now an actual session on this topic because it used to be considered so “bad.” The wild wild west of buying links is settling down and people are beginning to understand that it is advertising just like any other form. Sees that paid links will continue to be a part of their links in the future. Suggests adding it to your mix.

Debra Mastaler - Alliance Links
Brief comments: Good points made by Greg. You should make sure to spread your message across a wider audience that there is nothing wrong with buying links. The challenge now is convincing sites to host links, especially if they have not done so in the past. In regards to selling links, using the auto responders after a sale has been made is a good idea for that since they are already respecting you.

Q&A “what kind of investment should you make in link buying?” D: depends on the market. P: agreed, can be anywhere from $25 per month for a quality link to upwards of $5000. G: looks at competitor and helps to determine spend . Ie 3 competitors, one just buys links, one blog spams, and one uses keywords: in this case you may be able to just buy a few links. Natural seeding from just a couple of links from authoritative sites.
“How do you judge value of this and how fast can you see results, in order to be able to sell the idea of buying links to upper management?” G: it does take a while to get results from this. Benchmark, know where you are at to start with, build naturally (G is starting more and more “white hat” every minute)
“Are you sure we will not be penalized for buying links?” G: first of all they created the problems, doesn’t feel that they can come out and say “no.” Danny sells links and it hasn’t hurt him. Danny then describes that SEW has been selling off topic links since before G was even around. Some people have suggested that they use a there (in Internet Commerce box) but developers are reluctant to use that. In essence, we would be talking about this if it was just an AdSense box, which Google wouldn’t care about (audience claps) Greg agrees that G thinks the only sold textual ads should be AdSense. Danny speaks about the long history of buying/selling links when Stanford was the first site being indexed for links…
“Is there any negative reaction by se’s when they see content inside of a box that is identified as being sponsored? or if they are repeated” P: not really in our experience. Danny: speaks about how Google never answers a question “straight” but tends to speak in generalities, he mentioned that in relation to site wides, they are not necessarily going to penalize a site, but where they used to count 30K links, as Eric said, now they will only count one. P: says that he agrees, they have not seen any negative connotations from this practice.
“Do you use tools for information?” G: we have in house tools that do not necessarily follow all the rules, since we scrape results, etc to get more information. “optilink” is pretty cool. Debra: likes “Track Engine.” Eric: says you can track changes to a search results and use Track Engine (which is very affordable). Danny says that you can also setup any search result as an RSS feed. Other cool things are coming up.
“Do you have any sense that links that rotate will end up helping for SEO?” Danny (the questioner was speaking directly about SEW ads) did the sales people ever tell you that they would help your SEO? “NO” (Phew) He is being told that the links are not sold for any search engine value, but rather purely for traffic. Other speakers agree that this probably cannot hurt either.

Elisabeth Osmeloski is the moderator.

Rand Fishkin was up first from SEOMoz. I missed the beginning since some of the speakers go thirsty and I ran to get them some liquids. His presentation is at www.seomoz.org/ses2005-site-ecg.swf - Detecting Link Popularity Manipulation Schemes is done through search for "Spam Islands". Link Vault, DigitalPoint, TrafficPower/1P and private party link schemes are out there. He said dont use these if you're not prepared for the risks. Back link over optimization penalization; over optimized anchor text, speed of link gain (new websites normally do not get links quickly, there are exceptions) , link sources (site wides, community based links, off topic links). Google's Sandbox; He defines the sandbox. The penalty or devaluation of a site by Google resulting in a vast discrepaency between ranking at Google vs. MSN, Yahoo, Teoma and Google'[s own "allin" searches. The phenomenon first observed in March 2004. Does not affect site universally. No One knows exactly what causes it. Can affect 301'd sites as well. Rumors vs. Experience in the sandbox; it does not only affect sites with only unnatural links, it affects all types of sites - also it does not only affect commercial or competitive keywords. Analyzing Web Page Text; the goal is to discover the most important terms (the focus) of the document. Search engines go through these steps; linearization, tokenization, filtration and stemming. The Term Weight Formula is TF*IDF, basically helps search engines find out what topic the page is about. Automatic Topic Classification; search engines classifying documents automatically via text analysis and constructed ontologies vs. learned categorization and text quality analysis (training algorithms to find higher quality results, measuring reading level, flow, grammar, spelling and so on to judge text quality). Click Through Rates & Visitor Analytics; click through rates in the SERPs, time spent on the pages, data from toolbars, and log file and visitor stat analysis. How Best to Optimize Web Sites & Pages Based on This Data? Natural link and content building is best, judge the links and link services with great scrutiny, and write your own text. What to Watch Out For? Visitors tracking or log analysis programs that search engines have access to, toolbars and data collected through them, tools that claim to measure keyword density or page topic, and low quality links.

Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink was next up. What is your site's search ECG? Diagnostics & Forensics; index count, google cache, xenu link sleuth, seo-browser.com and server logs. The index count shows you a few things; look for the titles and tags showing in the SERPs with a site: command. You can tell if a page is having spidering issues with just the URL is listed. This will also show you dead links, 301 those pages (supplemental results sometimes). She then discusses supplemental results, anyone in the dynamic site business has seen some of these issues (Jake will talk more about this hopefully). Doorway pages built for search engines found with the site command. Signs of a healthy site; a good title, good snippet, cache, index count, back links and good 301s. Spam Penalty Symptoms; back links disappear, sudden drop in rankings, supplemental results appear, decreasing page count, "no information" for your domain. Avoid Risky Behavior; ffa links, doorway pages, multiple domains with different links to each, mirror sites and hidden text. ICU for Site Search Flatliners; clean up the wounded pages, excise those doorway pages, hidden text, comment tags and use Google sitemaps, yahoo site match, plead with the search engines to get back in and then be patient. She then brings up the form to contact Google, www.google.com/support/bin/request.py and type "Re-inclusion Request" in the subject line. Yahoo go to add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_urlstatus.

Jake Baille from TrueLocal is last up. He will give us specific things we can do. There are very few "hand bans" or penalties. What this means is that if your site drops X places you are most probably not banned. Why Ranking Changes Occur? A change (internal or external) in linking structure to/on your site, search engine algorithmic changes, link calculations, on page changes and so on. The canonical page problem; side effect of link architecture, first observed in October 2004, specific to Google and the cause is inconsistent link references to directory index page. He explains the issue with it with a diagram. Symptom: An important page drops completely for a term, being replaced by another page in a mediocre position. Solution: Consistently reference your pages. If inconsistent references are external,s et up a 301 redirect. 302 Hijacking; side effect of redirect handling, first observed it Jan. 2004, specific to Google, and cause improper decision making with respect to redirect handling. Source --> Destination. Google has an algorithm to make the decision on whether to show source or destination. That algorithm can be manipulated and redirect would be replaced: a "bait and switch." Symptom: A URL form another domain shows up with your title and description in a position you used to occupy. When you click on the link, it redirects you. Solution: contact Google. Duplicate Content Issues: This filter is totally intended. All three engines have these filters - Googles is the most sophisticated. Yahoo experiments often with this and now is pretty tight. Symptom: On a site command pages from your site have a little message after them talking about duplicate content or pages being the same. Solution: Change your pages enough so that they aren't all the same. Also consider 301 redirect form all duplicates to a main page. Slow Death; specific to Google, triggered by irregular link patterns: Google is smart enough to know that a million page site should have more than one incoming link. Slow death can be triggered by massive content copying. Be careful with affiliate feeds. Slow death is not the supplemental index, do not get them confused. Symptom: URL listed in a site query with no title or description. The URL only shows up. Solution: Get more links, or in the case of content copying, add content and get more links. Bugs: SE bugs do happen. Before reporting a bug, look at all your options to make sure its a bug. Report bugs to webmaster@google.com and ystfeedback@yahoo.com.

To be honest, I did not agree with everything said in these presentations. But I am just reporting on it without sharing any opinion or views. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This session is going to be moderated by Danny Sullivan. They have not done this session before to this extent. There is a lot of people in here, and I would bet that about 90% of them are site owners looking for help with linking. Its great to see such a response for this session.

Starting off is Greg Boser from WebGuerilla. He asks, how do I develop an effective linking strategy? Identify the most visible sites with your space. Extract and analyze the backlinks from all three search engines. (anchor text, unique domains, PageRank, and domain registration). Build a profile of each competitor that outlines the types of tactics being used. Evaluate the cost/benefits of the various tactics being used and then emulate the ones that make sense. He describes ways that viral marketing works very well. Web tools is an excellent way to grab links. You want to create a tool that is useful, give it away for free, and embed a link with descriptive anchor text.

He puts up an example of an RSS feeder that gets a large amount of links for news feed display. They rank up at the top for this and it’s a result of all these sites linking to it. He also suggests that doing software distribution is a good way to build links. You can distribute your links to many free promotion sites.

Affiliate programs are another way to build links. He says to avoid the big third party affiliate systems. Develop or use a system that enables you to get credit for your affiliate links. Avoid creating duplicate content. Develop guidelines that control how affiliates link to you.

Eric Ward was up next, and he talks about his experience in the link field and announcing web content over the years. He says the process is not much different than it is now. He works with small and large sites. He says content is rather important and that most people will not link to crap. Eric goes into his explanation of Link Reclamation. We have good coverage on this but I will detail it again. He says that if you keep the same directory structure but change the domain, then reclaiming links is easier. For large sites with hundreds of inbound links this can be overwhelming. When every url on your site changes that means every link from every other site to you site becomes useless, unless you take steps to prevent that from happening. The steps to take may vary on your location. He suggests a program call Link Survey, it’s a cheap program but lets you know who is linking to your old domain. The 301 redirect approach is the best bet.

He says links are a great way to build links, however there is a lot of misinformation out there. He says search engines can’t find all your links. Why? Many reasons. For a better understanding of how and why links might or might not be discovered by engines. He recommends a great article about invisible link by Chris Sherman. Eric talks about non-web based links. Some of the most valuable links don’t appear on web sites, they appear in email based communication (newsletters, discussion posts, zines, etc..). An example of this would be Forbes Picks of the Week, Yahoo Dailywire subscription.

Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link was up next. She asks whether anyone went to Google or not last night. She says she will be talking about Linking for Rank. What works, what we should stay away from, and what’s effective. Effective use of anchor text is one of the single most important tactics you can use to gain rank. You can use it in inbound, outbound, and internal links. She recommends optimize your site first. Work on including you links the navigation links. They put up an example of a site that she worked with and give an example of keywords in navigation links, and keywords in anchor text in content zones. The inbound linking structure is important as well. Sites need to emulate a natural linking pattern. Stagger link text, utilize all keyword phrases. Deep link into pages with keyword filenames. Secure links from a wide range of PageRank pages. Link with authority sites within your niche.

On getting your links on other people’s sites. Place links in content/editorial areas, avoid “typical ad spots” (footers). Link gradually, correlate with content growth. Avoid getting large number of links with a corresponding jump in search volume. Debra suggests to link out. Engines analyze sites by their inbound and outbound links. Build credibility by links to sites who mention you. Helps establish your site as a topical resource by linking to authority sites. Cross linking, how much is too much. “My rule of thumb is how it would look to a visitor or to a competitor. I’d be careful with brand new + lots of sites + lots of cross linking. Its okay to cross link” ~ Googleguy.

So how do you we attract links. Develop and/or distribute link embedded content to establish authority. DIY guides are good, article libraries, survey results, how to instructions, product reviews, and sample. She offers an example of a client she had who made an article library. Establish yourself as an expert and get on a journalists radar. Write and distribute optimized press releases highlighting content in your resource center. Keep up on trends and buzz words become cutting edge. Speak to a journalist once a week, become their expert source.

Are directories still good for links? Yes, they are still very good. However there has been some issues with directories dropping out of the index. What to avoid in a directory. If they have more search engine ads then content, categories are not filled out, and so on.

Chris Boggs from G3 is going to give some information about underestimating the value of links. He talks about the downside of links, such as ranking for unrelated words. He gives an example for a site that ranks for loan information and how powerful these directories or link can be.

Mike Grehan says he has a slightly different view on links these days. He says don’t be a link collector, be a business developer. Start to think about business development and think about the value the link has. He says PageRank is green fairy dust.

Q: On anchor text, does it matter if you have the same anchor text for all your links?
A: Yes it does matter, when they look at links, he says its very easy to spot unnatural and natural linking. When you try to force the issue and make all the link text the same, its real easy to spot. You want to emulate creating a natural link pattern.

Q: Quality of links, will Google refine their techniques to look at links?
A: More and more you see less and less of the “crap links” and because of this is the sandboxing new sites, which have a lot of these links. Also engines figure out they may be giving value to a site for something they don’t deserve and they remove the effect thus lowering their ranking.

Q: Affiliate software
A: Search on “naked link technology”
Q: Domains with hyphens
A: Anything with more than 2 hyphens the quality drops off. Yahoo reps have stated they look at domains with more than 2 hyphens and flag them possibly as spam.

Moderating this session is Danny Sullivan talking with a group of search engine executives about the future of search, what is going on currently and how they are making search better.

Yahoo spoke next and discussed Flicker first. Flicker’s content is all submitted and its discovery is by the overlay of social networks. They want to find and store these pictures. He says that is hard to show a picture of a horse and have a computer tell you it’s a horse. He says you can get people to do the heavy lifting and have human beings help determine what is importance and provide the information. The privilege to decide what is important should be given to the people. My Web is an example of this, and says the selfish motivation to grab this information and save it. Its works great. Flicker is a visual blog in a way, as they share their pictures and life with the community. Overlaying things like social search with general search is great.

Google talks about the Semantic web is getting a bit better. He says the next version of communities, is to have to have people tell the computer what they are thinking. There are ideas of communities and its lets people decide what voices are important of them. Trends such as semantics have been observed and that it looks promising for the future.

Yahoo: Personalization is important. The opportunity to change the user experience and slide into a new generation of experience. The challenge is to bring in new experiences. The history of personalization has been good. Some of it has been red herring, as you chase something and find out people don’t want that. Doing the tasks and capabilities to extend the engagement opens up a lot of opportunity.

MSN: They think a lot of community. To summarize community, there are answers that people only in there community know. Community is an important part of searches f