Search Engine Strategies 2006 Chicago Archives

Hello all...this is a late addition to the Chicago SES 2006 coverage we did last week. I apologize for not getting it up sooner, but I have been lagged like Barry. :)

This was gracefully submitted to me by my friend Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement (Search marketing firm in Atlanta). Thanks for the great recap!

Moderator: Dana Todd, Founding Partner, SiteLab International, Inc.
Presenters:
Phil Stelter, Director of Business Development, Range Online Media Isabel (Schoenberger) Sopoglian, VP of Search, Newcars.com Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placement, Inc.
Josh Stylman, Managing Partner, Reprise Media

Dana Todd opened the session by saying that in addition to introducing the presenters with their real names, she would also use our "porn names." (Porn names are devised by taking the name of your childhood pet and combining it with the name of the street you grew up on.)

So Dana...I mean "Periwinkle Cuthbert"...talked about what's on her mind regarding buying search ads these days. She ran through news at Yahoo (Panama being rolled out, the Peanut Butter Manifesto, the newspaper partnership - which is a big deal). She's excited about Amazon and Clickriver's partnership, as well as AskCity. She asked MSN/Microsoft/Windows/Live to pick a name already.

Dana said that early results from SEMPO's big survey (not too late to participate - go to www.sempo.org) shows that there may actually be fewer people buying local PPC ads than last year. Her money's on mobile search. Gannett - a traditional newspaper company - is getting with the times by using crowdsourcing (utilizing citizens to do reporters' work) and "mojos" (mobile journalists - they don't have an office but work out of their cards and post news live). Apparently immediacy is more important than quality or accuracy - but Gannett is only doing this with their online news.

A recent MediaVox announcement of Google's "secret" ad network was mocked (it's only banner advertising, people!), and Dana noted that the quality score issue is hitting people hard in their wallets. (That was a theme throughout the session, and indeed, throughout the conference.)

Dana's still a fan of several "search engine underdogs," including AOL (Fullview is cool, and AOL still has significant market share in the content space), Miva (quality of their traffic is increasing) and LookSmart's vertical play.

Next up was Phil Stelter, that is, Maya Jackson, who noted it was hard to follow Dana as a transvestite. He noted that everyone agrees that CPCs are rising, but few advertisers have hit their upper limit thus far. The engines will continue to add more options, such as MSN's demographic targeting.

Why are costs increasing? Click fraud, targeting options (again, MSN), algorithm changes, distribution changes, competition with affiliates and more. Phil gave a case study of a financial services client whose CPCs were doubled when the company's affiliates entered the market.

Phil noted that with Panama, bid management tactics like bid jamming and gap surfing are gone. Bid management tools, as they're used today, are becoming irrelevant. What we need to focus on is creative testing and landing page optimization. Those must outperform in order to get ahead.

Advertisers must reconsider how they measure their return - use an integrated approach and analyze it across channels.

Isabel (Schoenberger) Sopoglian, also known as Benny Osterender, presented on "Mastering the New Bidscape." She began by covering four major changes on Google:
* Landing Page Quality Score algo update
* Position "Normalizer" algo update
* Google toolbar update - suggested searches
* Refined Search Option on results page (affects organic results)

The latter two suggestions from Google takes traffic away from the keywords they're targeting and sends it elsewhere.

Isabel showed several examples of core keywords before the algo updates (Sept. 9) and after. They got 5,000 fewer clicks on "Honda" with the same CPC, and lost clicks on other keywords where they increased their CPC. It's had a huge impact on them. Their great account history is no longer important due to the position normalizer. Isabel thinks Google created these changes to increase their revenue and have better control over ad position 1.

Yahoo's Panama and MSN now are less transparent and more complex. They require more human intervention and less automation.

Isabel offered Tips & Tricks, including:
* For Google's landing page quality score, use dynamic landing
pages to create relevant content. Reflect the content of the landing page in the ad creative, even more precisely than before.
* For Google's toolbar, test the keywords Google suggests first in
the drop-down and focus your strategy on those.
* For the position normalizer, increase your CPC (and suffer from
lower ROI), optimize your ad copy and expand your keyword portfolio.

Tier 2 search engines - Newcars.com had been using Miva's network at 5 cents a click. Miva approached them with a "premium" option that would be 25 cents a click. They were hesitant but tried it and found it had a great conversion rate. Isabel noted that expanding into additional networks comes with an increase in costs - human resources as well as additional automation, tracking and licensing.

Regarding click fraud, they've analyzed their own results and found that 5-23% of their own traffic is fraudulent. Industry average inflation of CPC due to click fraud is 17%.

Next, I presented. You can call me Stacy Williams or Funky Ridgeway, your choice. Dana suggested I title my presentation "Search Engine Relationships," but I had a hard time being that diplomatic. It's called "Search Engine Meddling." I come from a traditional advertising background, and I'm used to buying media and getting what I paid for (what a concept!). Examples of the PPC engines meddling with our campaigns fell into three categories.

Think all Google ads marked as "Active" are actually running? Think again! We've been running a campaign for the TBS cable network since June of 2004, bidding on "Sex and the City" keywords. We recently moved them from one AdGroup to another for a short-term promotion. They were listed as "Active" in our account, but after a week, our account manager noticed they had generated 0 impressions, which wasn't normal. Our rep confirmed that the word "sex" had tripped a filter somewhere.

For our client Bradley-Morris, we bid on 60 versions of their brand name, including misspellings. These also showed as "Active". Six weeks into the campaign our client "Googled" their own name and didn't see an ad. Turns out "a technical glitch with the approval process" hung up these keywords.

We're bidding on "second hand as/400" for a client who sells used mainframes, bidding $4.25 a click. The keyword is listed as "Active,"
but when you roll over the magnifying glass to use the new Ad Diagnostic Tool, it's not running because our "quality score and CPC are too low."
There is no way to know which keywords are inactive unless you roll over the magnifying glass for every keyword in your campaign.

Think your match type settings are actually set and kept? Think again!
A recent Yahoo campaign for TBS' new show "My Boys" included the keyword "My Boys pictures." Yahoo apparently decided to display this ad for the query "boy picture," which we only knew because Yahoo emailed us to tell us it was removed due to a low Click Index. I don't know what someone searching for "boy picture" was looking for, but I don't think it was us!

Similarly, we had a Yahoo campaign for TNT's medical drama "Saved." An overzealous staff member included some overly broad keywords such as "doctor" (on Standard Match - Yahoo's version of exact match). We got an email saying that due to its low Click Index, the Yahoo system changed the match type to Advanced Match (Yahoo's version of broad match). This means that someone searching for "eye doctor in Chicago"
would see our ad. We immediately removed the keyword from our campaign.
Glad Yahoo emailed us, but they had no right to change our match type.

Google serves up ads for "synonyms and related terms" if you use broad match, which many people are unaware of. We bid on "refurbished as/400"
(an IBM server) and our ad appears for "rebuilt Calcutta 400" (a fishing reel). We bid on "used Sun" (as in Microsystems) and our ad appears for "used heat pump." We only know about this because we found a slew of unrelated keywords in our server logs - meaning we paid for these unqualified clicks.

Think the creative you wrote is actually running? Think again! On Google, we used keyword insertion so that the title of an ad running for the keyword "massage school" (geotargeted for Georgia) would read "Atlanta Massage School." While running a few spot checks, I saw that the actual title displayed was "Marietta Massage School." Marietta is a suburb of Atlanta - while we are using that title for the keyword "Marietta massage school," it should never have been displayed for someone not searching for "Marietta." Google told us their system found the alternate title "more relevant."

Yahoo's editors will rewrite your creative without telling you, although this may happen less frequently after Panama is rolled out and they rely less on editors. We ran a short promo campaign to drive clicks to funny spoof videos of "Lord of the Rings" on TBS' site (keyword = "Frodo").

Our copy:
Lost Lord of the Rings Video
Witness Sam and Frodo's secret love!

Yahoo's editor rewrote to:
Frodo
While you gear up for the premiere of the Lord of the Rings movies...

...which isn't compelling and isn't on strategy (the goal was to drive traffic to the videos, not drive viewers to watch the movie). The client discovered this one (how embarrassing!).

What can you do?
* On Google, look for keywords marked as "active" that have 0
impressions
* Be very careful with broad match in Google
 Use negative keywords like crazy
 Watch your web analytics for keywords actually used
* Be very careful with keyword insertion in Google
 Run searches and look at creative
* Ask your Yahoo rep to "flag" your account with instructions not
to change creative
* Keep a closer eye on your campaigns than you think you have to

The session was wrapped up by Josh Stylman, otherwise known as Otis Oakville. Josh said that when most people think of search, they think of Google. When most people think of search advertising, they think of a text ad. But search isn't just search anymore - you can search on eBay, Amazon, ESPN and all kinds of sites not thought of as search engines. There's contextual advertising everywhere. There's also demographic targeting coming into play, behavioral targeting (where you search for a car one day and see an ad about that car on another site the next day), and RSS.

Search is more than Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are second-tier PPC engines (Ask, Miva, pulse360, Enhance and LookSmart). There are also vertical players (SiteStep, Shopping.com, Business.com, AdSonar, indeed, and Kayak).

New formats are emerging, including images, rich media and video ads.
Search won't just be online - you'll be able to go to a search engine and buy print, radio, mobile, TV and more. Common themes we'll see will be that search across media will be:
* Targeted
* An Auction Market
* Measurable

Finally, search is not an island - if you want to get your message out to key markets across the US, you'll be able to go to Google and buy print, radio, TV and online ads in one place.

In case you missed it, we at the Search Engine Roundtable covered about 40 of the sessions at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I would like to thank again, Chris Boggs, Kim Krause Berg (Cre8PC) and Robert Kerry (evilgreenmonkey) for their huge contribution to the community here. I know, I appreciate it, and I know many of you do.

I am currently in the airport, yes - my flight is delayed again. So here is a quick roundup of our coverage over the past four days.

Monday, December 4, 2006

• Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft)


• Business Issues For the small SEM Shop


• Drive traffic to your site with Google


• Session: Business Issues For The Big SEM Shop


• Ads in a Quality Score World


• Putting Search Into The Marketing Mix


• Working with Ad Agencies


• Podcast & Audio Search Optimization


• Ad Testing: Research and Findings


• ClickZ Forum: Advertising In Social Media

• Video Search Optimization


• Keynote: Jason Calacanis & Danny Sullivan


• Bulk Submit 2.0


• Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic


• Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues


• Getting Traffic from Contextual Networks


• Local Search Marketing Tactics


• Earning Money From Contextual Ads


• Mobile Search Optimization


• Bot Obedience Course


• Beyond The Single Site Mentality


• Mobile Search Engines


• Successful Site Architecture

• Social Search Overview (Google Custom Search Engine, Yahoo Answers & MyWeb, Flickr, & Ask.com)


• Images & Search Engines


• Search Arbitrage Issues


• Dealing With Affiliates (Pepperjam & Performics)


• Linking Strategies


• Buying & Selling Links


• CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines


• Converting Visitors Into Buyers


• Link Baiting & Viral Search Success


• Search & Regulated Industries


• Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One


• Keynote: Danny Sullivan

• Meet the Crawlers


• Search Engine Q&A On Links (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com & Windows Live Search)


• In House: Big PPC


• Organic Listings Forum

We tried to cover everything on the schedule, but sometimes that was impossible. Thanks again to the contributors and our readers.

This session is moderated by Detlev Johnson who is Director of Consulting for Position Technologies. It turns out that this was a purely Q&A slot, so I've included some of the Questions and Answers below.

1. What can I do to quickly rank a new website with no history or links?

Mike Grehan - There is no sandbox.

Dave Naylor - I agree with Mike, it used to exist although not so much now. Get a few .edu links and you're good to go (joke).

Todd Friesen - As long as you start up with some links from trusted sources such as Best of the Web, a site will start to get noticed and indexed.

Bruce Clay - I don't think that a sandbox ever existed, SEO/algorithms has just changed.

Dave Naylor - Don't chase after the golden link such as CNN, look for conduits (links from sites which CNN links to).

2. A lot of sites getting good positions seem to be using cloaking, what's a good software app?

Dave Naylor - Ralph's cloaking at fantomaster.com is a good IP Cloaking sofware. You really only need to use it though if you have lots of valuable content and want to show a subscription page or have another stumbling block which only humans could navigate past. Cloaking does not increase your search position alone, simply makes the site's content accessible.

Todd Friesen - IP Delivery (ip-delivery.com) is also a good cloaking app.

3. Should I split sites which I host with similar content across different IP addresses?

Dave Naylor - I have a large cluster of servers using only 4 IP addresses. Hosting white labelled sites, this never used to be a problem until about 6 months ago, although now it seems to cause issues. I recommend spreading the site across different IP addresses now, personally I use proxy servers to detect bots and serve sites from different IPs.

4. When launching a website, how quickly should I build inbound links?

Bruce Clay - If you have a site giving the cure for cancer, you'd get a million links in a week and won't be counted as spam. As long as it's all natural and on topic you'll be ok. Your site should be something new or interesting and look for sites, which you would link to, for inbound links.

5. What really is the key to SEO, is content still king?

Dave Naylor - Search Engines don't go to your page and say "That's the best story I've ever read, I'll put that as #1", You want everyone in this room to say "The best story I've ever read is - Insert Anchor Text Here Please".

Detlev Johnson - With people buying links and using them for spam, the typical kind of link is becoming less important.

Dave Naylor - If I had 1,000 pounds to spend on a super cool design, super cool content or super cool links; I'd take the link package every time.

6. I have a main basketball site and sub sites for 30 different cities, where shall I concentrate my SEO efforts?

Bruce Clay - I would pool the sites all under one main site, all that content under one domain would be very valuable.

Dave Naylor - Just use subdomains or subfolders and point the city domains you've already bought over to the sub-domains/folders and use them for print advertising.

7. What do you think about the ODP (Open Directory Project - http://dmoz.org)?

Todd Friesen - It's not as important as it used to be - submit your site and then forget about it.

Bruce Clay - Submit your site every quarter if you haven't been added, although if the category doesn't have an editor you're unlikely to get in. Alternatively, submit your site to a category for your city/town and the editors are more likely to move you into the correct category.

8. Is the keyword Meta Tag still worth adding to a web page?

Todd Friesen - We spend a lot of time working on Page Titles, use the description Meta Tag for a sales message and haven't use the keyword Meta Tag in 2 or 3 years.

Bruce Clay - We think that every tag available is worth using and spending time on. There's hundreds of variables which make up the search algorithm and if keyword Meta Tags make up even a minute percentage of that algorithm, why not use it. Yahoo has said already that it takes notice of the tag, so that alone makes it worth it.

Dave Naylor - I agree with Bruce on this. Even though it's not the most important thing to concentrate on, even something which is 0.00001% of the algorithm could be the difference between position 2 and position 1.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

I would like to thank my fellow SER bloggers for the support given to me on my first conference reporting, and also for providing this information resource which allowed me to follow sessions which I was unable to attend.

In House: Big PPC

Moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs.

First up is Beth Morgan from Red Bricks Media. She will discuss internal competition, units competing against each other. Gives a list of potential ways that can happen, including “generation gap,” when bus units compete against each other. The main thing is that you do not want business units to compete each other in bidding. Massaging: different divisions may have varying marketing approaches. Tracking and reporting…what are you going to track? Depends on how broad the products of the business units are. She is going through slides super quick. How are you going to track it? Discusses some different analytics tools. What should you report and how often? Varies. Keyword research and categorization. KW research takes time! Without coordination, divisions can duplicate efforts for kw research.

Bidding is the one most people think about. G, Y!, and MSN generally have a policy that only one paid ad from the same company will run at a time. Lack of coordination can lead to irrational bidding.. She goes over how engines handle multiple bids. Google is hardest, and historically it has been easier to bid with multiple ads at Y! and MSN. Of course Y! is changing with Panama. How can you beat these challenges? Centralize processes. Think big right from the beginning. Assume that the campaign will eventually spread out across division. Shows a very quick case study of work with Adobe systems. They went through coordination of messaging, moved from multiple tracking system to one streamlined system. This dramatically reduces the time spent repairing reports. Sat down with key players to identify which data needed to be analyzed.

In the KW selection area, they built libraries of similar terms that could be reused across similar campaigns. Example: graphic designer terms as well as brand terms. This minimizes changes as well as inaccuracies within campaigns. They created “categories of categories.” The system was flexible enough to run across all divisions. Showed a snapshot of a kw management system that was very categorized. One of the drawbacks of using common kws is that you have to focus on bid management. Suggests consolidation, then to identify duplicates, then to prioritize, then sort and strategize, then monitor.. Easier to do an ad group basis than kw basis. To implement and monitor is most important. They are developing an in-house tool to help better manage the process.

Matthew Greitzer of Avenue A | Razorfish is next. I think that’s a really awesome company. :) Says we have about 60 clients nationwide, most of which have multiple business units. He will discuss how to manage PPC in a way that avoids internal competition (or competing with other business units in the same organization). His four “Fundamentals of Managing Internal Competition” are 1) Build an organization and service structure to support collaboration; 2) Implement unified tracking across campaigns; 3) Allocate keyword ownership through testing; and 4) Protect your brand name.

Recommends a structure for success…using centralized vision for search marketing strategy. Companies with a central marketing team is able to manage conflicts within business units easier. If not, there needs to at least be a culture that supports collaboration. Unified management of campaigns across divisions. Use a master keyword list, Keyword allocation, and beware of competitive bidding conflicts.

Enforces the idea of bringing Visibility into interplay between search marketing campaigns. You need a unified view of your customers – AA|RF uses a Unified Keyword Report – Quantifies “Halo Effect” of each business unit’s search marketing efforts. He discusses allocating keyword ownership through testing. Case Study: Retailer with multiple business units vying for relevant keywords. Challenge: How do we assign keywords to the right business unit? Solution: Test comparing individual listings with multiple listings. Shows how one company has an 18% lower cost per order, and another has a 23% higher order volume. Obviously you need to make decisions based on this type of granular data.

He then goes over Trademark Protection and Affiliate situations. He reminds that all three major search engines offer some form of trademark protection. Use it. Also, you should restrict affiliates from bidding on your brand name. Shows a chart with pre and post affiliate bidding on trademark terms, and the volume increase after restricting affiliates is huge: average CPC was down 91% and the order volume was up 104%. Cost per sale was reduced from around $75 to around $4. Summarizes by restating the four rules.

Next will be Tim Daly from SendTec. He goes over a case study from Intuit’s QuickBooks division. They started with Intuit about a year ago. They have major issues with competition internally. There are 17 different subdivisions of QuickBooks alone. Each division was doing their own SEM programs, and each of them was bidding on the term “QuickBooks.” They had 13 sub-divisional campaigns running independently, with 7 management teams involved. Also, some were managed in-house, and some were outsourced. They found some major issues, including that CPC’s on branded terms were uncharacteristically high. The Google rules change on URL’s were causing problems too. He turns it over to Olivier from Intuit to discuss the immediate steps taken.

The two main areas that had to be focused on was organizational, and the outside agencies being used. There had to be one person to bring things together to share information. It is good to have a mediator, but who owns the results? So they consolidated to a central team. This gave then a more holistic view of how things were working. This delivered a more relevant search experience. In many cases, the targets overlapped. Hard to tell at what level of QuickBooks each needs to be. If you can determine this through their search behavior, you will deliver more relevant results. They used complimentary bidding practices across management teams. This allowed for faster sharing of best practices versus when teams were acting in silos. They then consolidated their agencies, by switching to SendTec.

There were many benefits to their reorganization, especially giving them more control over their campaigns. The results included in increase in orders of 31%, a lower media cost (-11+%). The next step was kw management, and then creating new rules of engagement across divisions. BY grouping in themes, you can be smarter about how you work with keywords. Tim Daly comes back to discuss the actual tactical implementation. It is great to put together a new system, but how do you implement changes. He feels that they are actually his best client because they have caused them to discover how to deal with these types of issues. They designed a de-duplication custom tool to help provide better analysis. They used an excel spreadsheet with a Windows based programming solution.

Once they worked out the details, they had to move into testing, which will go live January 2nd. They will truly find out then the impacts of multiple listings in various ways. “ Stay tuned.” Come to NYC SES next year to see results.

Chris Sherman mods the panel with:

Yahoo's Tim Converse
Google's Adam Lasnik
Windows Live's Eytan Seidman
Ask.com's Vivek Pathak

Q: For promoting a new web site, you run into problems with the sandbox or trustbox. What is more trustworthy, etc.
A: Google said they use a greater amount of trust for those "who is closer to the front of the conference." Kidding... Adam said there are a lot of signals they use. On the whole, have patience and over time get natural links and make sure you have good navigation... etc.
Yahoo said there is not explicit sandbox at Yahoo, they do use a lot of signals that determine trust. They look at linkage. They are trying to mirror the web in terms of trust.

Q: How does internal links affect your rankings?
A: Yahoo said it does, so make them descriptive.
Google said are those links useful to your users, then Google will probably find them useful as well.
Ask.com uses expert ranking and they must be meaningful.

Q: Is there a number of links you can have from a certain resource without being penalized?
A: Google said the answer is 42, obviously joking. They apply the "smell test" they see you get a ton of links, but they wont necessarily hurt your site, but the links might not be worth as much.
Yahoo agreed

Q: On how they identify primary site when it comes to RSS syndication
A: Yahoo said it is a big issue these days and they are working on that. Expect to see improvements in this regard.
Google said he doesnt see it happen that often, so please let him know. Splogs are a concern, but thankfully the splogs have little trust, normally.

Q: Use absolute or relative URLs?
A: Most say either is fine, just make sure they are valid.
Google says try to use absolute, because they can be a safer option, especially with splogs scrapping the sites.
Ask.com said do what is easier for you.

Q: Someone pulled up a site that has one set of navigation but in the source code, it has two pieces of navigation source code. One for firefox and one for IE.
A: Yahoo said just having two instances of the link on the page wont be an issue for them.
Google said dido

Q: Cars.com said they have many co-branded web sites and they ask co-brands to link back to them with an aff value. Some of the co-brands are pointing first to a redirect, through a tracker. What implications does that have?
A: The SEs really didnt know what to respond to that.
Yahoo said they will crawl through that like a human
MSN said a 302 redirect is different than a 301 redirect (temporary versus permanent). Also because 302s have had issues with hijacking, so be careful with that.

Q: Sitewide links from multiple sites, does it hurt, etc...
A: Diminishing returns.... It is not abusive in Yahoo's case, but doesnt help much more than one link.
Google is looking for what is really a vote of confidence via a link.
Yahoo agreed also.
Ask.com gives the expert rank thing.

Q: What if you had lots of clients and getting site credit links (designed by, sponsored by, etc. links)? Is there a penalty on that, from several hundred sites with the same link?
A: Google said two ways to look at this; (1) lots of great software packages that have a link at the bottom that say powered by and that is not manipulative, they wont ignore it either. (2) If 40,000 people say I love this product, all within two minutes, you would be a bit suspicious, especially if they all said the same thing....
Yahoo added that if you have a powered by link showing up on different sites at different sites, even if the link text is the same, they would discount the culmitive affect of that, using Diminishing returns. It gets abusive if you build out sites to do this for you with that intent.

Got to leave this session early... Sorry.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

I probably covered or sat on the Meet the Crawlers session dozens of times. So not sure how much new stuff you'll get out of me from this panel. This used to be the go-to panel, until people realized the presentations were all pretty much fluff.

Chris Serman announces the session, and says that this time to change it up, it will be Q&A pretty much. Cool. We got Google, Ask, Yahoo and MSN on the panel.

Q: Is there a particular order or pattern a crawler goes on your site?
A: Yahoo says anything that anything that works for your users, we have to add to our crawlers. Yahoo doesn't want to recommend things to webmasters. Do what is best for you. Optimize for users and not spiders.
MSN said, "no" as the short answer. Most spiders will look for all links, not the links on the top left or right, etc. Do not wrap links in JavaScript, etc. Make your links simple. Page size is also a factor, so keep it small.
Chris Sherman said your comment was valid in the early days of engines. So if you read this somewhere, make sure that SEO tip stuff is recent and updated.

Q: Will Ask.com be supporting the standard sitemaps protocol?
A: They are using sitemaps for select sites. They may, they are currently looking to see how well this is being adopted and they may in the future.

Q: Duplicate content in terms of appending tracking variables to URLs
A: MSN said those pages are redundant, so you dont want them in the index. Try to take them out of the index.
Ask.com said the search engine wont get confused by it, but you are wasting your bandwidth.
Yahoo said look at Site Explorer, see where the URL was found at and get rid of it.
Google said, I agree with MSN, its best to remove those IDs in the URL. You wont get a penalty, but Google will pick a URL for you, if you don't.

Q: Buying text links, does the crawler know this, do you downgrade those links?
A: Google said he recommends that editorial links are better, don't really worry so much as purchased links, so get editorial links.
Ask.com said you wont get much value in terms of crawling the page.

Q: PHP generated links treated differently?
A: MSN said no matter what coding language you use, it generates HTML, so the crawler will see the HTML...
Yahoo added the thing about looking at your site through the eyes of a user (kinda getting old Yahoo)

Q: If I have a 95% flash site with content in XML, will the XML file be read?
A: Ask.com said XML is not human readable, so not right now.
Yahoo said if all the content is also available in text, if the person has flash off, then ok.

Q: What are the most significant steps I can get my new site doing well, as opposed to the old site. Old site to new site? Domain the same, URLs are different I guess.
A: Google said, 301 the old URLs to the new URLs. Make a new sitemaps file.
Yahoo agreed with Google. Submit an old site map if you have the 301s to the one to one mapping.
Ask.com same.
MSN said they MSDN network, and they did tons of work to 301 from old URLs to new ones (live.com)

Some more basic Qs that I wont cover right this second. I am sorry, Ill save the battery on this computer for others. I will leave early. Hoping the next session is good.

Q: Are misspellings a black hat thing?
A: MSN said it is based on how it was designed and the detail. If it was done for search engines, then don't do it. If it was done for users, then possibly, it is ok. Also search engines invest in spell checkers.
Google said, he agrees, if you are adding text to the bottom of the pages just for search engines then avoid that technique.
Yahoo and Ask agree.
Chris added, if you have misspellings, then it is not professional.

Q: Someone asks Google about how do I get Google to show site links under the main listing?
A: Google says it is purely algorithmic and he doesnt know a way to get them to show up.

K I am done with this session...

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

He starts off with some jokes, I think people giggle to be nice. ;-)

He explains that January 2005 was a huge month. With the CES, Google, Yahoo, etc. were there and it made him think that it is not just web, it is searching for anything. (I like to note that Ask.com was not at that show). As search marketers this might be scary. But don't be. If your a search marketer, you understand Google, and it can be applied to other things. Microsoft was at CES, and this is Microsoft's show and Google and Yahoo came in and there is this war there. He goes over Microsoft claims on search. Yahoo, Susan (CFO then), gave some realistic guidance, saying that it was not Yahoo!'s goal to be number one.

Danny now realized that his slides were not up. I honestly tried making faces and hand gestures at Danny to tell him, but I guess he did not notice us little people. :)

Yahoo said they are happy being number two and maintaining market share. Danny said that is a victory for Yahoo, to maintain share against Google and others.

Danny shows slides on which search engine has what number of share and he compares hitwise, netratings and comscore's data. He then shows Google's data alone. Google is getting incremental gain, a general slope upwards, based on all three data aggregators. Yahoo held share and maybe gained a bit, that is good. Microsoft did not have a great year, downward slope. No slide for Ask.com?

The Microsoft Challenge:
- Building From Scratch (Erik Selberg said we are not yet better, bit no longer laughable)
- Will IE7 help produce gain?
-- Danny doesn't think so, but Google and Yahoo is worried. Danny is sick of this topic. He gives his reasoning that he has given time and time again.
- Will verticals help?
-- Maybe live local is hot, image search scratchpad innovative.

Video Killed the Search Star?
- Search is boring, hard work, pennies on the dollar (Danny doesnt find it boring)
- There is suspected money in those videos
- Google Video launched in January
- YouTube popularity explodes, leading to Google's $1.6 billion purchase last month

Video Search = Video on Demand
- Video search not to spidering or reading "inside" of video
-- Instead, it's about video on demand
-- That Colbert Report you missed, I want to find it now
-- That viral video I heard about, where it is?
-- Google and Yahoo, you submit video, Yahoo did spider, but they now also allow submission
- Make bandwidth available
-- Encourages new content people can't afford to boost

Video Ads Not Search Ads
- Search ads you want to see
- Video ads you do not ask for it
- You may get top dollars on video ads
- Same with Google Audio, Print ads, etc.

- He showed the Time Warner quote about auctioning things, and makes fun of it, see Danny's past presentations for those thoughts...
- AdWords Versus AuctionWords :)
- Search is more about wanting things now and not being given something to want later...
- S'more repetitive slides, Ill link to the WebmasterWorld PubCon show or go to the archives to get the most recent Danny Keynote from PubCon Vegas 2006.

Reverse Broadcasting... see previous session...

Skipping here a bunch more, all covered in keynote from a few weeks ago.

He shows Google's stock quote over 500, now its a bit low. In January, people were saying Google is done. It is no bubble, Danny said. Then all the legal issues will kill Google; click fraud, copyright issues.

Video Disputes
- Money set aside from YouTube in case settlements needed, $200 million
-- Copyright over video will get solved
-- DMCA irony; studios don't like it, since it's so easy to copy and time consuming to file.

Crawling Disputes
- AFP sued over news content
- Belgians sue over news content
- Smaller markets
- He jokes about this, how they want Google, but in fact, they want Google to pay them
- Two groups already made a deal with Google over content

My Indexing Wishlist
- Search Engines, PErmissions and moving forward in copyright battles (on daggle.com)
- Allow indexing without permission
- Make caching opt-in
- Stop scanning books that are in copyright
- Work to extend the system (ACAP)

Amazing Changes
- Google Sitemaps & Webmaster Central
- Yahoo Site Explorer
- Search engines have united around common format (robots.txt, nofollow, sitemaps.org)
- Weather reports keep coming
- Bot identification and authentication from Google and Microsoft (Ask also allows it also, i think)
- An entire new ear, all from site owners speaking up
- Google does not see all SEOs as the enemy

January's Privacy Surprise
- Bush administration wants search records from engines
-- Google says no, and Ask.com complains they weren't Ask (everyone laughed)
-- Danny makes ABC's nightline
-- It can't get any bigger than this...
-- NY Times with AOL story on that woman who they tracked down by unique ids of search queries, big slip up

Privacy Challenge
- AOLs release of anonymous search data
- Still, nothing really has changed

Danny was way over time so he jumped a bit.

- Censoring China
- MLK link bomb
- BMW banned for cloaking
- Stanford does paid links, so does Washington Post
- Issues with ranking ads by "quality"
- Search trends via Google Trends
- Yahoo Answers grows while Google Answers closes

- Rebecca Leib is now editor and chief of SEW
- Search Engine Land is new venture
- Daily SearchCast
-- Podcast
- Search Engine Strategies
-- Charing NTY, co chairing San Jose, and will participate in Chicago

Open Forum now..

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Measuring & Converting Track

Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One

Build a user-friendly site and chances are you've also built a search engine friendly site. Learn how good usability can help your human visitors plus bring in the search traffic.

Moderator:
Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink - scheduled but not here

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director, GrantasticDesigns.com
Matthew Bailey, President, Site Logic Marketing

Gord Hotchkiss moderates. In early days seo and usability were at war. SE's are smarter and marketers are smarter. Whats right for SE's is right for users as well. Introduces Shari, as a "guru of usability" Shari is wearing the princess hat, it looks like, that Liana Evans had in her pile of Hatbait hats.

ST= Shari Thurow
MB = Matt Bailey

If you do it for the users, its good for the engines. Goals are search usability overview, components of search usability and a case study. Search usability vs web sites usability. Myths and misconceptions. User confidence. Website usability. She's a big of Jakob Nielsen. A quality attributes that accesses how easy user interfaces or web pages are to use. Website usability is not about a focus group. Focus measures peoples opinions. There's a group mentality and they'll say things they don't want really believe. Assign a task instead. Do they complete the task. Web site usability is a balance between user goals and business goals. Addresses all search behaviors, not only querying behavior. Your website has to meet business goals but you have to make people happy too. Search usability addresses all types of search behaviors. Querying, browsing, surfing, foraging, scanning, reading, berrypicking, pogo sticking,...these are search behaviors. Not a linear process.

Search usab. scent of info, sense of place, user confidence...scent is textual and graphical cues that people use to decide what path is interesting or desirable. SE's use term highlighting is to help users feel confident. They highlight from meta descriptions, title tags. Its not part of the algorithm. It's a usability aid. Relevancy and encourging clicks to your site are how website usability serves engines. Where are you, what are you viewing, whose site are you visiting, are parts of an 8-second test she uses for a page to test for good usability. She found peoples eyes go to the center of the page, not the top. How do you get back and where have you been are other things to test a page for. Embedded text links are related keywords in the content. Does a page appear keyword focused.

Information archit. always should come first. Do keyword research and categorizaton of info. People are looking for information. Site nav is part of the user interface. It should contain keywords that people use when searching. Does a page provide a sense of place without the content? Look at the navigation, headings, highlighted link labels. She shows second and third level groupings of information. She tested for sense of place. Get rid of navigation and ask what page are you viewing? The navigation scheme should support the information architecture.

Interface. Every site should have horizontal and vertical cross linking. Page layout is important. Cross linking is internal. Link development is external. Breadcrumb links are vertical links (hierarchial). Provide you are here cues. Make links keyword focused. Help visitors form a mental model of your web site. Don't remove underlines in links. It communicates it is a link. Horizontal cross links are embedded text links. Related links to news, articles, etc. Alphabetical links (the abcdefg, etc). They provide access and are appropriate for glossaries. Alternate links. Sitemap should part of global sitemap. When you create one, describe to visitors what these links are for. Put keywords on there. URL structure is important. Hypens are better than underscore. Characters are problems. Urls with words are easy to remember, rather than the ones that are dynamically generated. Directories vs subdomains. Both are SE friendly. URLS are part of the interface.

"Web site usability is extremely important for receiving high quality link development (popularity)."

MB:

The perception is that usability and seo don't get along. We both want people to find our site and do what we want them to do. If they can't find it, it doesn't exist. If the user can't find it, its not there. If not in the SE's, its not there. Usability homepage should have clear directions. SEO makes homepage links out to the rest of the site. Keyword focused navigation. Use keywords for how to name categories, name products, help users find your stuff. People should see a reason to stay on your site and get their question answered. Shows a site with two choice - shop now or enter my site. Everybody laughs. This creates fear in the user mind. Things they'll go to the wrong place. If you click go to shop, you get directions on how to shop and review policies before you buy. Shows a slide on Fish ' Flush, toilet aquarium. Its one big image. No content. Won't rank well in SE's. Some sites focus on one specific product on the homepage, even if they sell a lot of them. What do your users look for? Whats important to them? You want to match their expectation. If you have Adsense on your site, you business model confused. Why display your competiters sites? Shows a site that sells wine racks but the right column is adsense. The navigation links can't be seen due to poor colors. He shows the Cingular site because it is focused on what its customers are looking for. It has a section for existing customers and new customers. It doesn't rely on the main navigation as sole way to get around the website. Shows a wine site with lots of links that are very descriptive, offer ideas on how to better find you are looking for. SEO offers multiple cat links w/ keywords. Usab. shows established heirarchy of categories. You want to do customer based navigation.Know what they're looking for. Text size is not an SEO concern but is vital for people, like if you have a senior market. SEO is the alt att's. Don't try to stuff product categories on one page. It dilutes the page. User will think what they want isn't there.

Shows a page with lot of different fonts and various images in unorganized layout. Distractions. Page full of noise. Shows a product page that forces user to use back button or back level link to start all over for a new search. Not easy to find sub categories. You can expose more products by organized groupings. Product pages. Call products what they are. No fancy names. Offer information about products. Specs don';t sell products, benefits sell products. Show how to meet or create a need. Then fill it. Use keywords when you write this content. This is the SEO side of usability. Use problem solver keywords. Help them solve problems. What did I help you overcome. Ask your users how you helped them. Do not send PPC people to your homepage. Go to the page for product you are trying to sell. Users will stay and follow.

Shows a page for Boudreaux's Butt Paste. Its really a page for diaper rash. It's optimized for butt paste. You have to call the product what it is. Not just the brand. Shows a page of USB Sushi. What is being sold, usb or sushi? Repetition will cause people to overlook. Get into your analytics. Drill down and separate keyword groups. Find conversion rate for each group. How did they find you and what are looking for. People use different terms to look for the same thing. International sales, don't get lot in the translation. Add address and shipping.

(Even after Matt left, people were still laughing at his slides.)

The room is so empty right now, modding is J. Rohrs.

Heather Frahm, co-founder, Catalyst on-line

She showed an example of a high cholesterol paid search ad, by pfizer. She shows examples of the ads, who uses what text and keywords and trademarks and terms in the ads. Using diseases in ads, can be an issue with FDA.. ?

Fair Balance Act
- Make sure your landing pages have all the safety info for that ad
- There are many rules here

Anything that is visible or not visible needs to go through regulatory in the pharmaceutical business. Most regulated healthcare have guidelines on how the content is written. There are cases where you need to have big words in the page, but that may be against rules (the language, by rules, need to be very simple). Misspellings can also be an issue with rules. There was a large query volume about a disease that doesnt have symptoms, so they made a page that said there were no symptoms. You need to explain search to marketers, regulators and legal.

They try to only get links from US base sites, because most these companies are set up in the US. Make sure the links you get don't make bold claims about you. All text links must be approved.

Press Releases can generate a lot of links, but typically the regulators dont like to link to the main site. It is dangerous to make those bold statements, that link to the brand site. So try to convince them of the importance. If not, then make sure to optimize the site that is getting those links and add call to actions on those pages to the main site.

Pharma has tons of assets. So make sure you leverage all those assets, but through the rules set forth by the FDA.

Ward Tongen from Medbonic is now up.
He posted an FDA Warning letter he received back in 2000. He said you do not want to get one of these letters. The FDA regulates the medical industry, and other organizations may regulate yours. Go to the FDA Warnings Letter Archive (I think over here.)

Before they developed an SEO process they had an "over the wall process." They wrote copy, sent it to legal, legal sent it back and they would then try to optimize the content after it was sent back. But this was not ideal. They had poorly optimizes pages, and reapproval was needed often. Expectations were often not met. So they...

After- (higher up the food chain). They worked with the copyrighters directly, before they even put pen to paper. A lot of time content is repurposed, so they have to get involved early. If you can work within the business process, it will help.

PPC - The Approval Sandbox
Anything inside the sandbox goes through legal, anything outside you do not need legal (such as budgets, etc.)

They use blogging as a tactic, believe it or not, because of all the regulatory issues. This also goes through legal.

The blog is at http://www.insidespine.com/, last updated October 30th, I guess those legal people are slow.

Martin Murray from Interactive Return to talk about the Drinks Industry
Starts off with the company pitch...

Industry Regulatory Bodies:
- Century Council
- Distilled Spirits Council of the US
- The European Forum for Responsible Drinking
- The Portman Group

Ethical Marketing Guidelines
- Alcohol strength of it should not be the main theme
- Don't promote buy one get one free
- Age should be kept into mind
- No association with drugs, sex, anti-social stuff, etc.

When his client moved from marketing to online marketing, they were in for a big shock, he said.

Google has a content policy, part of that, they do not allow you to market alcohol in AdWords. But AdWords for wine is ok, not wine or hard liquor. Yahoo does allow allow it, so does MSN.

With organic search marketing, all pages need to go through an age verification form. Search engines can not submit their age. He said there are black hat things you can do, but its not so good. It is a big challenge for them.

There are responsible drinking messages throughout the web site...

Search Marketing vs Branding Objectives, there is a conflict often.

Search Marketing Techniques include;
- Organic
-- content
-- linking
-- etc
- PPC
-- Yahoo
-- MSN
- Blogs
- Newsletters
- Offline marketing

Success:
- Shows some queries they rank well for

Liana Evans from Commerce360 from the retail industry
She has a slide that shows the area the FTC regulates and she will touch on some.

She promised to send me her slides, Ill post it later, lots of good details in it.

Update: Here is Liana Evans great presentation as a PDF document.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session is moderated by Detlev Johnson who is Director of Consulting for Position Technologies.

Detlev begins by welcoming people to the session which aims to shed some light on what link baiting and online viral marketing is, and more importantly - how it can help you. He introduces Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz who takes the stand.

Rand starts by discussing "Linkbait Portals" which are commonly targeted as a platform for performing online viral marketing. The portals receiving the most traffic include Digg, Fark and Slashdot. The Linkbait audience is driven by very specific passions, on some sites - a few key people decide whether you're mentioned or not. No matter what your marketing, make sure that you do not lose focus on the target audience. The design and feel of a baited page should be attractive although not too promotional. Create a reputation - a strong profile at the social media websites can control what gets published. Use attention grabbing headlines; highlight topics within the bait which might be particularly attractive to the audience. Don't shoot yourself in the foot - spamming Digg from the same IP or geographical area can get you blocked from the portal; the same users "digging" the same material looks suspicious and is tracked by social networks.

Resources for the Dedicated Linkbaiter:
www.pronetadvertising.com
www.seobook.com
www.seomoz.org
www.wolf-howl.com
buzz.stumbleupon.com

He thinks that the search engines including Google do endorse link baiting as it's about building great content which the internet community will love.

Cameron Olthuis from Advantage Consulting Services is up next. Track your buzz and make sure that it does not get out of control, good buzz could end in bad PR. You can track your "buzz" using tools such as Technorati, Feed Reader and many comment tracking software. Whether the buzz about your company is good or bad, respond to the comments and help the users to understand your point of view or correct any misconceptions. You can also monitor competitor buzz, by using their negative PR to promote why your company is different and better. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to check people linking to your site and finding out what they're talking about. Linkbait is not just for the techie geeks, ringtones for example was plugged on Digg using a "How to create ringtones from MP3 files" viral post. Linkbait should be a continual process and not a one time campaign.

Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Guide starts a presentation explaining why to use link baiting. The cost of link baiting is getting the perfect idea, not the marketing. Once you get the idea, there's almost no cost to release it into the world. When starting off with brainstorming, ask yourself - What sparks passion in your customers? What hasn't been done before (be original)? How will your idea benefit your users? Ideas spread because the audience think they are important and want others to know about them.

You can give away products for people to test, such as giving free trials/samples to bloggers. Make it easy to spread the word, Hotmail for example added a promotion for the service to the bottom of each email sent by the user. Embrace a successful campaign - Starbucks release a coupon offer which spread more then they expected and then cancelled the coupons, a competitor then turned Starbucks bad PR into good PR for them by accepting the Starbucks coupons in their stores. Be prepared for large growth - that your website can handle all of the traffic and that you can honour every offer that you advertise. There are 2 blogs per second being created, these are the perfect places to get your name out to. Learn from the news, don't repeat the mistakes of other companies.

Quick Tips:
- Offer a genuine resource for free
- Play off of people's ego's
- Consider a "Blog Carnival"
- Become a regular commenter on blogs
- Offer limited time exclusive offers (such as at Woot.com)

Chris Boggs takes the stand and explains about the company Avenue A Razorfish and gives a shout out to Search Engine Roundtable and also mentions the "link farm" page on Cartoon Barry which lists all the industry websites. Rand is also given credit for his blog post listing the top destinations for Search Marketing information. Mentioning a number of search sites, Chris shows that in the marketing vertical, sites and blogs aren't afraid to share link love. The "My Super Bowl Proposal" viral is a great example of viral marketing - someone in the community reaching out for their help.

Some less successful examples of viral marketing include the Did-It CEO quote that SEO is not worth spending time or money on. He then goes on to show how to check who links to you so that you can find out what people are talking about - good or bad. When Neil Patel from ACS wrote a post on "My 50 Favourite Blogging Resources" he received over 4000 Diggs, it doesn't have to be controversial to be controversial - just interesting. ShaveAnywhere.com was a website build off the back of a survey which discovered that 50% of men use a razor to shave place other then their face. In 4 weeks they received over 750,000 unique visits and they cancelled the rest of the marketing campaign as it could never match the traffic and buzz already created.

Chris gives some great other viral marketing examples, which can be found at http://avenuea-razorfish.com/presentations/linkbaiting/

An excellent Questions and Answers session which turned into a mini baiting "Site Clinic" then followed.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Measuring & Converting Track

Converting Visitors Into Buyers

Getting visitors to your web site is only half the battle. To be victorious, you need them to convert into customers by making purchases, signing up for services or fulfilling whatever are your goals. Learn about making this conversion. The latter part of the session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about changing them to improve visitor conversion.

Moderator:
Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers:
Michael Sack, Director, SEM technology & Development, Idearc Media Corp.
Howard Kaplan, Vice President of Strategic Development, Future Now, Inc.

AD = Allan Dick
MS = Michael Sack
HK = Howard Kaplan

AD is moderator and launches into the session. How to persuade users when they ignore search marketing.

MS - No power point presentation available for download. The challenge is to go back to job and put principles into action. Alot of information to cover in a very short time. He wants to outline problems we face. Marketers are concerned channels are eroding? 80% of businesses will invest in the web. Perhaps its the customers not responding to marketing? Customers are tuning us out. There's an erosion of mass marketing model. Costs on the rise. Cost of traffic is on the rise. Cost per click is up over 80% than last year. Customers are actively avoiding marketing and hype. Traffic may increase but conversions are low and disappointing. Customers leave w/o getting what they came for.

Study the top exit pages. Look at data, Look at scerario analysis reports. Highly recommended to get the data but what does it tell us about the people? Their fears, dreams, needs, wishes. How do we define conversion. The only thing they care about is how they want to buy. Shows a hilarious example from Joe Dirt movie where the seller isn't selling what the buyer wants. The marketer is selling what the marketer wants to sell because its what he likes.

We're moving away from push to pull marketing. Word of mouth is "Muscular beast". Aim for interconnectivity. Talks about behavorial sciences, like Pavlov. Behavior studies factor into marketing. Take your consumer, your marketing, ring the bell a number of time and you get the conditioned response. He used dogs becasue their digestive track is similar to humans. Runs an audio file of comedy skit on Pavlov and his tests on dogs. Why not cats? Day one, cat fu...ked off, day 2 rang door. day 3 cat had eaten earlier, day 4 cat stolen bad cheese, day 5 cat put a paw on bell made a thunk noise, day 6, I hate food. Customers behave more like dogs than cats. The cat has a staff, and a dog has master. Who controls the bell? We do. We do what we want, when we want. We are a volunteer in this process.

If conversion is important due to rise in traffic costs and consumers are ignoring marketing and they are in control, how to convert them? Conversion is a choice your visitors make. They click or not. Persuasion is a different story. Conversion is a reflection of customer satisfaction. They must achieve their goals. Give them the answer to their question. Help them scratch their itch. What is relevance? He talks about the scent of information. Talks about Jared Spool study and study he did on information scent. If words were desc. they clicked on it. If prices, they clicked. If generic keyword, no click. Trigger words are important here. A web page gives them what they seek or gives link to where it is. If not relevant to user goals, they click the back button.

The problem is "users". Usability is a software metaphor. Users are clearly volunteers in the process. What's the intent behave the keyword? Example, "web analytics consulting" doesn't convert. Describing what that is, will. Add words like "Fully customized" to the description. But what action do you want them to take? The goal is create positive scent. Scent fuels persusasive momentum. It keep consumer engaged and moving thru the process. Study drop off data. Why do they bail after 1 or 2 clicks? What is ave number of clicks in a shopping cart process? Likely more than 80% more than 3 clicks and consumers bail. Make offers clear, precise. Keep reaffirming they are in the right place. It's not just eye candy. It's a formula you are trying to aim for. How do you plan persuasive momemtum.

who are we trying to persuade? What is the action? What does taht person need in order to feel confident? These 3 things are key to persuasive momemtum. (try typing that fast!) There are ways to plan the user experience. Uncover your personas, plan their journey through scenerios, story the creative, test effectivness, implement, measure scenarios to optimize results. Personas help predictive models. You need to understand motivation and can plan for the outcome. Create persuasive scenerio funnel. Driving point to funnel point to way points to points of resolution. (Had a diagram of this.) Do they know what they are looking for? Try to figure out the angles of approach they have? He describes a few user personas. He uses a storytelling technique (I happen to know this. He doesn't call it that. Instead, he read the "Story" of each persona.) It's a good example of how you can create someone like a methodical persona. How would he react to what things on your site? Will they read copy? Or will the persona want the image? Some want copy written to them. Two people will look at and approach and respond differently to the exact same page. They have planned in advance for these two people by creating user personas in advance. Measure actual behavior to expected behavior. Customer satisfaction is key.Give them what they're looking for. What motivates that cat? What makes them decide to buy?

Resources AB Testing white paper, email him for a copy.

MS:

Apologizes for not having video and audio in his presentation and won't take as long as preceding speaker. Two sides of lifting conversions. Outside - in. Target keywords. They need to be able to find the site. Find right keywords. Make content findable by SE's. Other marketing avenues. It's more like pull vs push environment. You have to get them through the site. Correctly target your visitors. You will need to keep working on this and improving on it. What works today will not work tomorrow. Put time in testing and analytics. Get the site ready. Target your traffic and landings. Track and learn. Fix your shopping cart. These are 4 steps to improving conversions. Do not make it 20 steps to buy a hat (he had a client that did this.)

Compare your site to the best of the best sites. What makes their site converts. They will brag. Take them apart and try to learn what they have done. Copy them. No rule against that. Don't steal code. See their structure. Navigation.Messaging. How can you adapt this to yours. Emulate best practices. Don't be proud. Identify conversion points. Measure them all. Do you want them to call you? Every magician knows in advance the card you are going to pick.

Control the Experience. Why is the milk in the back of the supermarket? He asked a manager why that is. Because we paid consultants hundreds of thousands to tell us to put it there. This is science. Every store is watching you. They are studying your patterns. They are controlling your experience. What happens online? Can we emulate this? People want a similar experience. They don't want complex navigation. They don't want to get lost. Few companies have gotten homepages right. They are usually a poorly implemented idea. We assume people will click all the way down. They can be info overkill. Too many links, like over 50. Confusing navigation doesn't match the experience in the store. Imagine a store doing this to you. If they had a very large shelf with every product on it at once. This is what ecommerce does.

Showed KMart site. There are over 100 links on the homepage. Where do people go? It was hard to find the search button? Its easy to get lost. If you know Mike is walking into a store and he is more likely to buy if the milk in aisle 6 then you put the milk in aisle 6. What if you satisfy every single customer? You can't know what every sgl customer will want. Leverage the medium. Web is dynamic.Use landing pages. Put the milk anywhere, anytime. Don't need to know who walks into the store. The web enables other methods of ID. Use virtual doorways. one door in real world. Many doors in virtual world. We can use several keyword phrases in search engines to attract the different types of users. Route them this way. Personalization doesn't worl. Groupings of people does. We all behave in similar ways in choosing products. Understand what brings groups into your site. Use good layout, clear purpose, limited options, self id, good search function. Those are elements of a good homepage. Let people search your site. Use market research, make your site fit peoples searches, you will not change how they search.

Target right keywords. Use specific search phrases. Makes for higher conversions and better ROI. Target more search keyphrases. Stem popular keywords, use match type options, comb your logs. It's what they think, not what you think. How are people searching today? Majority of search terms are still one and two word phrases. The long tail is more desc. phrases, lower cost, higher predictability. Expand the "tail" by expanding the keywords. Target more and more phrases. Try to understand WHEN they are shopping for you. Time of day matters. Days, weeks, months have seasonality to them. You can target certain terms for certain times of day. They use heat maps to understand hot zones. They spend more money at certain times of the day on certain words and less at other times. Identify when you get the most conversion times. Target landing. Direct traffic to specific destinations. Direct users to desired content. Control how they navigate the site. Implement test analyzi adjust cycles. Determine best click paths. You want to understand the path people use on your site. Target landing by their intent. DVD players, not saying much from that searcher. Test different landing pages to see if they need more education. What is the best content to show. If they search for model, show them the model of that model. If they add "compare" to the search phrase, show them the list of all DVD models with different pricing. But keep testing the landing page results. He showed an example of testing 3 different versions of a product page to see which one converted better. Keep the one that converts the best.
Must be able to track keywords, see click path, track direct and deferred conversion. Understand the impact of keywords as they relate to conversions. SEarch stacks and assists are terms used prior to conversion. Relative contribution. List of terms and how often used to help convert. Track offline conversion too. Include that into your data. You may be doing then you think you are. Elements of a good shopping cart. Few steps, 4 or less. Ask for the least info as poss. Privacy. Let people know where they are in the process. When will they get it. Don't hide things from people. Don't hide charges. Make it savable. Let them return. Give option to enter email to remind them about it. Giftable. Be nice about error messages. No surprise handling and processing fee. Huge reason for abandonment.

Q & A (some quick points)

Show of hands for first time visitors to an SES showed a large number.

You can put tracking codes on site to track online shopper who calls. Free shipping really boosts conversions. Offline presentation notes are available by MS at his email address. Email him to get the info on tracking offline conversions from a website. You can track how many times someone searched for your site by certain terms and the additional terms they add to the keywords they use. They call it a search stack. By use of cookies and other things, they know how people are finding them, and refining their search terms to get to the site.

Human contact is very important on sites. Add a phone number. People wonder why Live Chat and email and phone and etc. The reason is that people have many different preferences for making contact. Don't ask for a lot of information from them beforehand. How to people choose to interact with you is important to understand. They want to feel confident about it. Let them know the types of information you can provide if they make contact. For law firms, increased calls for no charge and anonymous calls. No personal information. Other incentives are no risk, no obligation.

Shari Thurow from Grantanstic Design

CSS is an html addition allowing webmasters to control design, placement of elements, etc. You can use it to change the look of a site very quickly and easily. It also decreases the download time of the page. It is also easier to control the exact positioning of elements on a page. CSS formatted text links easily communicate visited/unvisited links.

CSS Disadvantages:
- End users must have font installed on their computers or the page will not display as designers intended
- Usability testing and focus groups might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers
- CSS formatted hyperlinks can dominate the content of a web page, making the content appear unfocused.

Issues with CSS:
- Text formatting
-- Text wrapping
-- White on White is dangerous
-- Don't make all your content H1 tags with CSS
-- Alt text in an h1 wont work
- CSS Layers
-- X, Y, and Z coordinates
-- Ways of hiding text and links inside of CSS invisible layers
-- She said the search engines know the position of all your text on your page, so don't try to trick them
-- Stacking content on top of content, typically with a flash box on top of a text box

She then shows examples. She then says do not exclude the CSS style directory in your robots.txt file because it may raise a red flag and search engine reps want to be able to get to that content...

Jim McFadyen from CriticalMass is next up.
Everyone wants AJAX on their sites, but they don't necessarily know what it means. AJAX is Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It allows the browser to communicate with the server without refreshing the page. It may improve user experience. AJAX is comprised of the JavaScript CMLHtttpRequest Object. It uses XHTML and CSS often. AJAX is not a programming language.

AJAX is nor supported by search engines.

Search Engines and AJAX Do Not Mix, spiders do not run JavaScript. Search engiens cant see AJAX delivered content. AJAX created navigation wont be crawled.

Every page must be HTML, every page must have its content on the page, all links must already be in the HTML, and test this by turning off JavaScript in your browser.

Web developers can use (non-AJAX_ JavaScript to update the anchors on the page, and change the functionality to AJAX calls. This ensures that the AJAX will work, we know it will work because AJAX calls were set up by the JavaScript, which search engines are not capable of...

Ensure baseline application is built first and then you can take AJAX to take the user experience one step forward.

AJAX breaks the normal browser refresh
- This means content not necessarily corresponding to URL
- No addition to the browser history
- No history, no back button

Fix this by Add Unique page IDs to each Page:
- Use JavaScript to update the URL using #
- Use JavaScript to fake an entry into the browser history
- But is that a duplicate content issue? But typically # signs do not count as duplicate content, they ignore that.
- Make sure not to cloak, it is very easy to cloak in this case, dont do it

Bad AJAX:
- Gucci.com
- Looks nice
- Most content is served through AJAX
- AJAX navigation
- He then turned off JavaScript and the page was blank
- Bad

Good AJAX:
- Amazon Diamond Search (www.amazon.com/gp/gsl/search/finder?ie-UTF8&productGroupID-loose_diamonds
- He shows off the diamond search feature with sliders
- When he turns off JavaScript it shows a simpler version of the AJAX version

Scott Orth from Selytics to talk about Web 2.0
He explains web 2.0 is hard to define, he gives his conceptual explanation of it... How you interact with customers...

Case Study on Carrier North America Home Comfort:
- Problem was the site was very static, not much in terms of being interactive, slow, conversions bad
- They did the paper prototyping and focus groups to plan the new navigation
- Interactive tools to enhance the user experience (polls, sliders, cost savers, forms, etc.)
- New site was mainly built in CSS
-- Makes it easier to update
-- Loads faster
-- Reduces Code size
-- Allows you to do a lot more with the site
-- Tables caused errors, they got rid of it
-- They used H1s and H2s and standard content

2005 vs. 2006
Size 260KB 204KB
HTML 760 250
Line 1 484 91

Results:
- 97% increase in top ten organic rankings
- Traffic jumped from search 53%
- Organic performance accounted for 73% of all search referrals
- Targeted conversions increased by 59%

Yahoo wants to make some general points:
- There is a reason why Yahoo wants it to work for a general user that doesnt have JavaScript, they want to look at the site from a "baseline."
- Yahoo will understand this stuff, they will get there, so dont assume stuff right now
- Open up your CSS so Yahoo can peak into it
- He also brought up Sitemaps as a way to also submit content (Site Explorer)
- Search engines arent built to interact with the site, like users

Google said they will also be indexing JavaScript and AJAX and CSS, so don't use it to hack. Google will walk you through it with Webmaster Console. Google's ultimate goal is for you not to worry about engines, and it is Google's job to figure it out.

Yahoo added again, again. simple user...Build it for the simple user and not the search engine.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session is moderated by Danny Sullivan, who runs Calafia Consulting and Search Engine Land.

Danny kicks off by welcoming everyone to the session which covers the process and ethics behind buying and selling links for SEO and/or traffic reasons. He asks the audience whether anyone in the audience has bought links, a nervous crowd hesitates before putting up their hands.

Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads is up first, starting off with mentioning the Link Mix - Natural Links, Directories, Link Buying, Reciprocal Linking and Link Bait. The first thing to look at when thinking of buying links from a site, is it's theme. You want to purchase for links on a site which has the same or complimentary theme. You can use Google PageRank to gage the real link value and worth of a site, although a new popular blog could have no backlinks although is very important. Patrick recommends avoiding the really high PageRank sites, as it can stand out amongst your lower PR links. Relevancy and mid-PR sites are the best properties to buy linkage from. Alexa is another general guide to whether there is any traffic going to the site. If a site is not on Alexa or has a 2,000,000+ rank, its probably not worth buying links from. The location of where a link is placed on the site is also important for not only the engines but also for direct traffic. You can use the Google SERP heat maps to see where people look when they visit the site. A good link could be located on the top right of a page, and using a varied selection of link text on each site purchased from. You should also check that the link that you've purchased is actually hardcoded and not javascript, plus also does not use a "nofollow" Meta Tag, robots.txt or href attribute. It's important to also look at what direct traffic you gain from each link via your Web Analytics package, possibly dividing the link cost by the number of unique visitors clicking through. Think Natural - make sure that links look as natural as possible, use different link text, from sites on different IPs/networks. To help increase the rank and worth of your individual product pages, use the paid links to point over to these (where it's harder to gain natural links).

Eric Ward is up next and explains that he's not against buying links, although he buys text link ads for traffic and not SEO. Paid links don't have to be just traditional style websites, look at other alternatives such as blogs. BlogAds.com offers an advertising platform purely based on blogs with niche and targeted audiences. E-zines (email/web magazines and newsletters) may not help your PageRank although could target the perfect demographic for you or your clients. Another format worth looking at is PDF documents published online, the search engines still count the links and index the pages - so why not get a link in these documents. Content networks such as Yahoo's Top Sites and Forbes Best of the Web list top websites which can't pay for placement, although a PR company could lobby for your website to be included. Eric then mentions that he now has his own newsletter with advice on links and PR, and thanks Danny for his contributions to the industry.

Thomas Bindl then takes the stand to discuss how to detect bad paid links and making sure that you get value for money from your links. He starts off by showing a Fake PR9 website and why its not always trustworthy. The example German domain is using cloaking to fool the engines into think that it's the same site as Disney. Going into some links which would not parse PageRank, Thomas first mentions JavaScript links which appear to genuine text links although actually use JS which search engines don't follow. Redirects are also use by many sites (mostly for tracking and conversion monitoring) and search engines rarely follow them. Even a real static link could be worthless, as it may contain a "nofollow" attribute. Before buying a link, visit their robots.txt file (found in the root folder) as it may be disallowing a section of the site where your link exists. Some sites use comment tags () around links so that automated link checkers see the links although the search engines or users don't see them. Take a look at the Google Cache of the page which you're looking to get a link from, to make sure that the meta tags or links don't change when viewed by the engines. You can also use the WayBackMachine on archive.org to check the history of the site and how long links tend to stay on the site. Check other paid links on the site and see if their PageRank has increased or benefited, see how long their links existed and whether there's a big rotation of sponsored links. What can happen to me if I buy links? - Your site can get kicked off the Search Engines; Your ranking is 30 positions worse (a relatively new Google penalty); You don't parse PageRank to sites which you link to.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session was contributed by Amy Edelstein of Ascent Copywriting.

It’s 8:50 am, just before what’s meant to be Danny Sullivan’s first moderated session this morning on Advanced Linking. But frankly, all the buzz over double espresso and avocado tofu vegetable breakfast wrap is…well…you all know…Danny’s big Third Door Media news release yesterday, and the mark of a landmark juncture in the Search Engine industry road. I imagine he’s going to be a little busy this morning.

What’s the buzz? People are shocked. People are stunned. People are happy. People are incredulous at Incisive Media’s seeming lack of advance knowledge. People are sentimental and genuinely appreciative of Danny’s friendship, humanity, and unquenchable passion for this rough and ready cowboy (and cowgirl) industry.

So, it’s with that caveat that I snap my laptop shut and head downstairs for the Link Building session to see just what this morning might bring.

I pass Danny in the hall, heading the opposite direction from the session he’s meant to moderate. Big smile, long stride, heading towards who know what, and still a warm connection in the midst of the bustle. That’s Danny. And that’s what we all love about this industry.

The other aspect of this industry is that search marketing always marches on. Or accelerates exponentially, morphing, innovating, evolving with the changing times.

Somehow, appropriately for this fast-paced industry, the session starts, sans Danny, with the inimitable and sardonic Mike Grehan, giving a Biblical history of links, link value, and all good things connecting, starting from the beginning of time, way back in our dim and ancient past. Circa 1994.

Grehan educates and entertains, talking about linking strategies and the deeper implications and knowledge that can be derived from linking data. From Brian Pinkerton tinkering in U of Washington’s dorm room, to Jon Kleinberg development of hubs and authorities. Then the next chapter, heading out of Genesis into the book of Search Exodus with the almighty revelation of PageRank, before which Larry Page and Sergey Brinn decreed, “we can never be spammed.” But verily, they were wrong.

As he builds a picture of the foundation of linking, Grehan than teaches us bleary-eyed seo’s about heuristics, about social network theory and its connection to connectivity properties, and an appreciation for how for example, relevancy can be built through citation analysis at the end of white papers, where who’s who can determine the quality of your link, and therefore rank.

Now just before you relegate Grehan to an anthropologist of search, he moves into some of the technical underpinnings, discussing the algorithmic bases for analysis of linked anchor text: PageRank and HITs. Before getting lost in the myriad mathematical complexities, Grehan keeps it simple. Real simple.

The buzzword is signal. What is the quality of the information coming though? How is it related to everything around it. For practical application, the take away is:

If you can get the query term to match the title text to match the anchor test than you’ve made it.

Eric Ward, the maestro of linking, took the podium. Now for anyone who doesn’t know Eric by now, you must be brand spanking new to linking. Eric, in his free-access, throw back to the love and happiness, share and share alike mindset of the 60s, makes all his hard won knowledge available on his site. Anything you missed or want to follow step-by-step, log in, it’s there.

As a little background for what you’re in store for, Eric started building links in 1993, when seo was but a twinkle in its developer’s eye. Eric made his break linking for Amazon and the rest is history.

This morning’s Ward Wisdom focused on link reclamation and holistic linking. So, what is Link Reclamation? And when do we need it?

There are times in the course of a developer’s life, when it becomes necessary for…. Ok, perhaps not as dramatic as a declaration of independence, but when current online wisdom calls for significant strategic changes, great and dramatic breaks from the past, including moving from .asp to cold fusion, changing domain names, etc. it’s important to reclaim your link equity.

In case we didn’t quite appreciate the perils of not Eric candidly took us through a rea-client example with the massive Discovery Health site, and what he encountered when Discovery changed their site structure. Lo and behold. Can’t get better link equity, then…the pain as we watch a link on a first rate recommended site, with great views, great page rank, and the thud, a click and instead of the Discovery’s health resource, a cold, dead 404 redirect.

Now, everyone knows, 301 redirect is the way to go. Don’t lose your visitors, don’t lose your link rank with the engines. And everyone lives happily ever after.

Ward Wisdom II -- Holistic Link Building:

Remember, deep and wide linking is better. Why? Simple. Engines rank sites higher that have links throughout the entire site—both home page links and deep links. Can anyone get them? Sure. Holistic links are waiting to happen, for those who are a little creative. Play around in blog directories. Subject specific blogs. Podcast directories. Audio and video directories. Believe it or not, great links from Google itself. They’re looking for great A/V content, so they’re happy to freely take and link to your video content.

Big announcement of the morning – Eric starting a free e-newsletter, with tips and tricks for all happy linkers. Sign up everyone, it’s sure to be good content.

Last but not least, Justilien Gaspard, up-and-coming link building specialist, runs through the basics for link building success.

The list is clear, complete, and comprehensible. Not earthshaking. Not rocket science. Good solid web knowledge combined with common sense, public relations 101, and long term relationship building savvy.

Here’s the low down:
Use Directories- They’re the foundation for stable links and stable visibility. Of course, older directories give better results. It’s a trust thing.

Capitalize on Vertical and Niche Directories. Go for both industry and local specific. Don’t panic with low cost membership fees. Good directories have strong link credibility, with backlinks from .gov and .edu. A little credibility can go a long way, and believe it or not, can give you a leg up especially in competitive industries like travel ore real estate. A tip: rely on backlink makeup as your primary quality indicator.

A little leg up-- vary the wording of your directory descriptions and the keywords in your anchor text. Show a little human touch.

And don’t forget blogs, wikis, forums, and influential media. There’s loads of link potential. Takes a little work. Creates a long standing impression. Make yourself an industry leader, set trends, let your voice be heard, and let what’s heard create links. Link with reporters, media directories, radio stations, and other bloggers.

There are ways and means of doing business with people that creates relationships. Don’t be shy, co-promote. Do business with other people who will link back to you. Find reviewers or critics in the industry, get them to review or test your product. When you do, presto, a real link, with content, and a relationship.

Finally, think viral. Viral and social situations used to carry all kind of noir connotations. No more. With social media, viral infections lead to more fun, more content, more link, more rank.

We finished with a little wrap up in the Q&A. We sang the swan song of the sad decline of Dmoz. A beloved monolith, covered in cobwebs and dust. For those who still hold out a link from the great, after this morning, you can put your aspirations and dreams to rest. With few category editors, and even Eric, a category editor himself unable to use his log in to edit his category for days, we’re looking at a behemoth in the industry. BUT, you can still rely on Dmoz to point you to quality businesses and approach them for backlinks. If they’re listed here, they’re reputable and have been around online for a good long span of time.

Mike admonishes, When you’re looking for links, take a brutally honest look at your own site. Make a list, check it twice. If you can’t list 10 good reasons someone would want to link to you, then ask who you built the site for and why. ☺

Todd Freisen, our stand in session moderator, ever the pragmatist, pipes in, “You can always go out there and buy some links, and that works just as well if you do it right.”

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Posted by Amy Edelstein, Ascent Copywriting.

Jeffrey K. Rohrs is moderating this panel, a new panel for SES.

Anton Konikoff from Acronym Media is up first.
He starts off explaining that he is a fan of affiliate marketing. They have a brand new affiliate program, they offer 15% commission. He then lists a ton of terms you cannont bid on, you cant bid more than $0.25 and you much praise the client and no bidding on client names, this is of course a joke on affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing obviously has its challenges. Affiliates can drive up bid prices, affiliates can effectively block your ads from showing up in Google AdWords, they can cause a lower volume of traffic, higher cost per acquisition. The bad thing is that clients are not able or unwilling to control their affiliates use of paid search. He shows an example for one of his clients get bidded up, 7 out of 10 links are from affiliates. Google favors affiliates in some cases, he says, because amount of historical data, higher CTR and better quality score matters. Google is making a little easier for search marketers by requiring things like unique domain names and a landing page quality factor. A case study with Sirius radio, with Google's changes, increased volume by 15% and drove higher CTRs and lower bid prices, since Google's changes went into affect. As an affiliate, you can always be harsh and say no bidding on brand terms, limit the search engines and channels, unique offers only for affiliates, no brand name in copy and don't let affiliates bid higher than the search vendors. He advocates against such tight restrictions, the 7 deadly sins of affiliate marketing book, he came up with his own. 7 Brilliant Ideas on dealing with affiliates intelligently:
(1) Ground Rules, fight the "reflex to restrict", revise inventory estimates with affiliates in the equation, create a search revenue model for affiliates and show the shortest path to the long tail.
(2) Learning from Affiliates ; closely examine affiliates that appear to be performing better than you and why are they beating you out (landing page, ad copy, larger sample, etc.)
(3) Reconnaissance Mission; monitor top affiliates keywords, landing pages and ad copy for brand compliance. SEMs: offer affiliate monitoring as a standalone service. Automated tools can help harvest the data for analysis.
(4) Are you good at sharing? Build loyalty, in exchange ask affiliates for search intelligence, ID two or three key affiliates and use them to complement your efforts and develop metrics to report on affiliates search contributions.
(5) Battle for Search Domination: use affiliate intelligently to own more SERP real estate, design search programs to boost awareness and trial, quantify benefits using branding metrics and do not offer exclusive affiliates.
(6) A Taste of Organic; run ranking reports on affiliates, educate affiliates on SEO best practices and potential pitfalls. Use them as a workaround. Train them
(7) Advocating your SEM Work: success will require solid relationships between SEM and the client and other agencies and affiliates, create a what if scenario for the client and be vocal to your client.

Mark J Rosenberg from Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross P.C.

Key Intellectual Property Issues with Affiliates:
- Trademarks
- Copyright
- Infringement
- Third Party Liability

Trademarks and Affiliates:
- Keyword issues (when you can buy trademarks, how you can, intent, etc.)
- Domain Names (cyber squatting, intent is important)
- Meta Tags (playboy examples)
- Search Results
- Affiliate Web Pages

Take Control:
- Know your Affiliates
- Set Guidelines and Standards (they need to be contractual)
- Police Your Affiliates
- Terminate The Problem Affiliates

Kristopher B. Jones from Pepperjam is now up.
They are super affiliates and leading outsourced affiliate marketing management company.To run an good affiliate campaign is about two things; communication and transparency.

Affiliate Friend or Foe:
- Affiliates are your friends if you work with them strategically.
- 95% of your sales are generated by 5% of your affiliates (super affiliates)
- SEM affiliates are generally most sophisticated than you are.
- SEM agencies can be expensive or cost prohibitive
- Believe it or not, you can control what your affiliates do, he says.

"Affiliates" Potential Strategic Partners
- Affiliates are your partners, not a cowboy or something like that, they consist of
- SEM Professions
- SEM Agencies
- Niche Web site owners
- Coupon web sites
- Comparison Engines
- Maybe Amazon
- Maybe eBay

It's a Land Grab
- Search results represent available real estate
- Google offers users 10 organic spots and 10 paid listings (max)
- The more land you own, on average, the more sales/leads you will generate
- Work strategically with a few professional SEM affiliates and control more land
- You can't be selfish if you don't own the real estate

Working Strategically with Key SEM Affiliates
- It's your choice, your competitors or your affiliates
- Identify potential partners
- Carefully select your SEM affiliate partners
- Define a list of keywords from the head and long tail
- Broker the deal; agree to provide internal conversation data and metrics

The Rules:
- Use the basic affiliate contract or add an amendment to control the relationship
- You must share information, require an NDA
- Set a min and max bidding rule
- Restrict or include certain keywords
- Allow affiliates to bid on trademarks

Examples of Good and Bad policies were not given at the end due to time..

Chris Henger from Performics is last up.
4 or 5 years ago, affiliates totally dominated the search results, it was very much the wild wild west but now that has changed a bit. Understand the business market of the affiliate, each market is very different and you need to know that. Biggest thing to think about is what is your business model as an advertiser? Each business model will alter the search landscape and types of affiliates you want and attract. He shows examples of merchants that use two different affiliate partners (CJ and Perfomics). He shows a bunch of examples, stuff hard to type. The key thing to note about affiliates, is that they can be very opportunistic on your behalf, be selective with your affiliates, they are willing to take risk, they are willing to spend money and they can be top performers.

What is the affiliate wish list?
- Authorization and guidelines to bid on trademarks and brand names
- Ability to direct link to an advertiser's site
- Ability to send traffic to domain that contains advertisers brands
- For lead generation programs, the capability to host the form on your own domain
- Authorization letter to search engines providing permission to use advertiser's brand in ad title and copy
- Ability to build links quickly and flexibility (offline BYOL, and data feeds).

Lessons Learned:
- There is a balance between advertisers interests and the affiliate's need to drive traffic
- Affiliate publishers are often at focusing on conversion than advertisers
- Set guidelines, communicate and monitor for compliance
- Maintain feedback loop
- Provide tips and best practices to your affiliates
- Measure the impact across channels

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session was going to be moderated by Jeffrey K. Rohrs, although due to a delayed flight, Tim Daly filled in for him.

Tim from Sendtec gives a brief description of Search Arbitrage, where PPC advertising is purchased for the purpose of getting the user to click on more expensive ads on your own site (making money from the price difference). Search Arbitrage was linked to Click Fraud by BusinessWeek who performed an in-depth investigation into the issue. A 23 year old Hungarian millionaire Roland Kiss rakes in $70,000 ad revenue per month through a "Paid to Read" membership base. He then explains that Google's introduction of PPC Landing Page Scores was partly because of the problem of arbitrage and not offering any value. An example search for Cypress Trees shows a PPC advert on Google which enters a disguised arbitrage site and all the links click through to yet another Made For AdSense site, making an infinite loop. What's Google doing about this problem? - They introduced landing page quality into the PPC position algorithm; Keep on updating the algorithm to weed out people trying to beat the system. What's MSN doing? - Have been slow to react, although not as significant as Google's needs; MSN was clean and friendly when launched, but Arbitragers found it as a new home in August; MSN began its first efforts to combat arbitrage by only allowing one advertiser to use a specific URL. What's Yahoo doing about the problem? - Yahoo refused to comment on the BusinessWeek article and did not want to provide information to the session panel about what they do to combat fraud and arbitrage. How do we solve this problem? - Search engines need to develop specific requirements and have strict enforcement in the terms used of the amount of content required to show paid ad listings; Engines should work together and also have a joint blacklist of suspected fraudsters; there should be a manual daily review of each partner site that delivered traffic to see whether they are in violation.

On opening the panel up for comments regarding the presentation by Tim, Jake Baillie from TrueLocal jumps in to say that he doesn't think that Click Fraud should be directly linked to Arbitrage. Although the Cypress Tree example is a bad thing for the users and he doesn't like it, he does support the need for arbitrage when done correctly and honestly. He's worried that search engines may try to regulate advertisers too much and remove creativity which is so important in PPC.Kris Jones from pepperjamSearch then steps up to take a very strong view of what he calls "Garbitrage" for Made For AdSense arbitrage, although thinks that affiliate arbitrage is perfectly legitimate (Buying PPC and sending traffic to affiliate links to earn a percentage of the end sale/conversion). Kris then goes on to hammer the search engines for not attending the panel, and goes on to promote his company's own arbitrage-style shopping site. David from Clix Marketing which purely works in PPC introduces himself, and makes a controversial joke which I'll exclude from this transcript. He agrees that search engines are partly responsible for managing arbitrage, because is effects the user experience. Frank Watson of FXCM asks the audience, who came to the session to actually learn how to do search arbitrage - no one puts their hand up - although most people probably were.

Only one presentation was made on this session, it seems that this session was mostly aimed as a debate. You'll have to come to the conferences to learn what questions people asked and some of the more extreme opinions voiced.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Images & Search Engines

Regular search engines can't understand text trapped within images, and this session looks at strategies to combat this problem for the image-intensive site. It also examines how to generate traffic using your images via image-specific search engines.

Speakers:
Shari Thurow,Webmaster/Marketing Director, GrantasticDesigns.com
Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.
Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google, Inc.
Chris Smith, Head, Technology & Advanced Development, Verizon Information Services

ST = Shari Thurow
KS = Kakul Srivastava - Did not appear
LE = Liana Evans
VF = Vanessa Fox - Was present but was "not permitted" to make a presentation (I'm assuming by Google). Danny invited her to add comments and answer questions if she wished to. She said the new Google Image Label tool (application?) in BETA is popular.
CS = Chris Smith

Note: This will be a brief recap of what was a very informative, interesting session with great speakers. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties with my laptop, I couldn't take notes. I did, however, record the entire session and Liana had previously sent me her presentation, so I will be able to compile an article at a later point. With Barry's permission, I can refer you to a fellow blogger, Lisa Barone, who is reporting for the Bruce Clay blog and was sitting next to me. I have no doubt she will provide a nice recap in their blog and we respectfully point you there, and to those others who are reporting SES, who may have sat in on this session.

Quick notes and observations from my head...Firstly, Danny Sullivan arrived as the "Emergency Moderator". Incredibly, he looked awake and ready to tackle Day 3. He warmly addressed the attendees and then presented a quick overview of the purpose of the session. It is about discovering the ways search engines find images. The first speaker was Shari Thurow.

Shari gave an overview of the nuts and bolts of optimizing web pages that contain images or are image intensive. If you have images on a page, there are specific ways in which you can still attract SE's, such as alt attributes (she refers to them as "alt text"). She showed an example of a web page that was image intensive and contained no alt attributes behind any of the images. It was essentially a blank page. This is what both SE's and those relying on screen readers will see. Shari was good at discussing and providing examples for where to place content on pages around and near images. She talked a bit about the information architecture (which is your navigation and organizational presentation), and the page layout and where you place keywords and natural descriptive text. This would include breadcrumb text navigation, anchor links, image captions, headings (heading tags), and title tag.

Liana Evans spoke on the value images are for retails sites and she was quite good at finding clear examples of where online retailers are not properly utilizing image searches. All of the major SE's now provide image search capabilties, but each has its own algorithm and way of presenting them to users. I saw good tie-in for basic conversions usability in the example she showed of a search for a product on a comparison search engine, that showed where some ecommerce sites didn't provide a thumbnail of a product vs. those who did. Obviously, the site that shows images is going to get the click. She showed how each SE displays images in their image search results to show differences. Do not block spiders from your images folder, else they won't find images to add to search. Li made a great point that people are visual and love to print out pictures of things they want to buy.

Chris made his debut talk. What stood out were the details he provided on how to optimize, using Flicker as the example, photo share apps. Photo enhancement is the way to go. There are lot of ways to add keywords in photo apps, such as comments, captions, links, groupings of images, file names, etc I'm not doing him justice here. He gave a highly actionable presentation with many, many good suggestions you can apply now, and easily. I hope someone posts more on his presentation.

Chris Sherman is the moderator of this panel, the room is very empty. Why? Maybe because it is the first session of the morning or maybe because people assume it isn't a big deal, when it is.

Chris puts up a slide that defines what social search is. He said social search are "wayfinding tools informed by human judgment." It can also mean uninformed, where people give wrong information to the social community. Chris explains that the very first web page was a directory and Yahoo! is a directory, all these are forms of social search. We also had meta tags in 1996 to help content owners influence search engines, they failed. Fundamentally, algorithmic search is social because search engines are programmed by people who have biases of their own. The search engines also observe our behavior to change algorithmic search. And there are new personalization efforts to refine search for everyone.

So why is there so much buzz right now? Chris said, possibly because algorithmic search has plateaued to some extent, also humans are still better than computers at many things and there are thousands of volunteers to help in social search.

Types of social search:
- Shared bookmarks and web pages; del.icio.us, shadows, myweb, furl, diggo;
- Tag engines such as technorati and bloglines;
- Collaborative directories such as ODP, Prefound, Zimbio and Wikipedia (an encyclopedia but lots of links to other resources);
- Personalized verticals such as eurekster, Google COOP and rollyo;
- Collaborative harvesters such as digg, netscape and reddit;
- Social Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers and Answerbag.

Problems with Social Search:
- Scale and scope issues
- Tagging issues )ambiguity, lack of controlled vocabulary, human laziness, and "idiots".
- Spammers

What will make Social Search Work?:
- A combination of algorithmic and "people-mediated search"
- Trust networks (like shared bookmark services and friends)
- Increased personalization and user control over result filtering
- Social search will probably work best for non-text content (photos, music, video, etc.)

Tomi Poutanen, Directory of Yahoo Social Search Networks (i.e. Answers, Flickr, del.icio.us, MyWeb, etc.).
Yahoo! Answer's Birthday this week, they acquired del.icio.us last year, and Flickr March 2005, and they all have grown tremendously, be design, he said. He shows examples of how the different services work... Nothing really I can type here, just check out those services, they are sweet. Typical web search is about three words, typical questions are eleven words. They want to build the largest knowledgeable out there.

Shashi Seth of Google Custom Search Engine (Coop)
He does not have a presentation, he will just chat a bit. Before the Internet came about, people obviously had questions and information seeking needs. So they asked people their questions. That phenomenon is translating into web search as well. It is migrating from specific properties and being found on web search (one place). That is Google's philosophy, everything starts with Google.com. They do not believe in people going to multiple properties, it is one location, Google.com. Social search is about sharing, discovery, collaboration, trust, recommendations. Google has Google Coop, Custom Search Engine, Google Topics in the form of refinements. Google is focusing on efforts to improve collaboration within many of their products.

Pathak from Ask.com
They extend the "expert rank" to the social search area. There are fundamental areas that we need to resolve in the social search area, and he lists them out. He believes they can provide significant value to the end user...

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Fundamentals Track

Successful Site Architecture

Learn to successfully architect your site for search engines and how specific page elements and design technologies may impact your ability to gain good organic listings. Covers topics such as directory and file structure, server-side includes (SSIs), 404 error trapping, JavaScript, robots.txt use, frames, secure area usage, and much more. Toward the end of the session, volunteers from the audience will have their sites examined to see how changes could be made to their site architecture and design to increase search engine traffic, as time allows It's highly recommended for those new to search engine marketing to have previously attended the "Search Engine Friendly Design" session on Day 1.

Moderator:
Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.

Speakers:
Matthew Bailey, President, Site Logic Marketing
Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.
Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Strategist, Acxiom Digital

MB = Matt Bailey
BC = Barbara Coll
DW = Derrick Wheeler

BC launches into the session. Most web design doesn't have SEO in mind.
If goal is to produce sales, is to achieve high rankings for the keywords that convert. Your site has to get into search engines, however. Think about SEO throughout the design cycle. Look for opt opportunties. Look for web devs and designers who have seo experience or partners. There is more education coming. Check references on who you hire. Arcitecture inc directory structure, file systems, domains, error handling, redirects urls. Technology is CMS, tracking, dev applications.

How to get the team on board to get an optimized site. Educate the team. Convince the team. Show them stats on landing pages and conversions, for ex. Bribe the team, ha ha. Search engines want your content. Your content not being in there is your fault. How many people use Google sitemaps? Make sure engines can navigate your site. Use their tools. Check what pages are being indexed. Are they following links to my site use www.se.spider.com. www.rexswain.com use as a http viewer. Tell SEs which pages are valid on your site. SE's never forget your site.Visit google webmaster pages for info on how to submit. You must own the site or have access to the site. Google sitemaps tracks history of a site. Will show you content/external link reporting. Yahoo Site Explorer is not as informational but has its pros. You can look at one page's external links.

DW:

Step 1. Master the Basics.Offers a diagram of how a SE works and "sees" your web page. It must find your homepage. Then it must the links to all the other pages. It must grab the content and put that into an index. Shows funny drawing of the process.
1. se crawls site
2. se indexes entire site
3. users perform targeted queires
4. se ranks appropriate pages
5. users click on ranked listings
6. users take action and or interact with the site

Where are you now? What are your domains and subdomains? Identify them. Track your 301,302 pages. Measure the number of pages from your site that are indexed at each engine. Identify sections of pages of your website not indexed. Track your rankings. This tells you need to focus on keywords. Study your traffic. How you link from page to page is vital. It's easy for se's to follow text links. There is a url and a page with keyword file name. That's easy. Navigation in JavaScript is not. There is no path to a URL then. There is mumbo jumbo code like ":mouseover". Prepare a sitemap so SE's can find links. Pop ups links are difficult to follow too. If no alt attribute, for images, engine can't tell what the image is about. Use CSS for text links and dress them up to look like images instead. SE's can handle CSS. SE's can't fill out forms. You have to offer an alternative way of navigating, like a sitemap. He showed an example of a travel form and a page on the travel site that listed the same stuff, only you could find it without a form. IT was with text links.

Footer links are nice in 2 rows of text lnks. You can put nofollow on privacy, copyright, terms, in bottom row. In top row, link to pages you really engines to find. Keep your urls short. Limit the number of parameters. Limit the number of directory levels. Limit total length. In general. Use HTTP status codes, or server response codes to help SE's. Like 200 okay, 301 for a permanent move, 302 temp move file, 404 error is invalid or mistyped urls. SE's will treat 302 like 301's. If in doubt, use 301. SE's will remove the old url and add the new url.as the value/occurrance of each goes up, chances of success go down. Don't stuff long urls with keywords.

The circle of death. Use robots.txt file to prohibit se's. Robots Meta tag for noindex.nofollow. Don't accidently block your site. SE's do not accept cookies. This is an indexing prevention. Homepage redirects. Use breadcrumbs that never change. If they are dynamically generated, se's don't have a direct path. Related products presents complicated paths for users and engines.He showed some good examples. (Hard to describe.) Use robots.txt to prevent spider traps from very long urls. Tracking IDs look like duplicate content to SE's. Use absolute links for https, not relative. Use short, easy to remember names for your domains. No dashes. Page content must have clean code. www.marketleap.com/ses for slides. (I suggest going there for the secton on spider traps. It was complicated and the visuals tell the story better than I could by typing what he said.)

MB:

Takes a different view on SA. He focuses on blindness issues and disabled users. Which just so happen to be like search engines. If you do accessbility, you will likely do well for engines. He talks about the Target lawsuit. Since the web is an extension of the physical store, the blind want the web version to be accessible. They want alt attributres, image maps that have alternative, etc. and Target refuses to do so. The only way you can use the Target form is to push a button with your mouse. If you can't see it, you can't use it. Sometimes you require someone to select an language or country before getting into your site. SE's can't pick languages. FLASH pages offer no information for SE's. A retailer refuses to include alt attributes?

It's image based web based. If you remove the images, nothing is there. All the sale info, calls to action, free shipping, etc. were in images. If you can't see the image, how can you know whats for sale? Engines won't see this either. Do not stuff alt attributes keywords. Alt attributes are meant to describe the image if it can't be seen. Why would you not want to do this for users and engines?

Matt says that people don't read Google and W3C guidelines. If you pass the accessibility checklist, it will pass the SE checklist. They are very similar. Cluttered URLS. These are the dynamically generated ones that are a mile long. You can't find actual products on the Target site because the urls are too busy. Favicons are a great way to brand. It's an icon file. It's free advertising. Re-write cluttered urls. Redirect from old links to new ones. Link. Look for pages that go to old links and 301 or 302 back. Maximize with se friendly urls. Identify top entry pages to the site by url. Those are the pages that are ranking well. Redirects. MSN has instructions on how to handle your redirects for their search engine.

CMS, (Content Management Systems) look for language, flexibility, query strings (rewrite available), unique page titles, meta desc's, server redirects. CSS and standards. Can validated code help you rank higher? No. Using CSS is a benefit, not be the main difference. CSS strips away all the code and lets content be the primary focus of the page. Moves the gook to an external page. This is good for engines. CSS vs tables. Engines try to stack the table. Look at a site in a mobile device to see what stacking looks like. Se's go from top to bottom, next row, then top to bottom. Screen readers do the same thing. Validation assures that spiders index content.

(Sorry for spelling errors...)

Mobile Search Engines

Moderated by Danny Sullivan. I cam in a little late because Danny lied at the end of the last session and said we had a half hour break. His fault. :)

Anyway, Paul Yiu from Yahoo! was speaking, and I missed the first part. He is talking about operators and how mobile search is tailored to them. They are working with partners on this: Helio, Orange, “3,” among others. He is looking for high quality results. Uses an example of a search for Ludacris. He shows a couple examples of the Helio results, including how the local search box asking for a zip code comes up if someone searches “Starbucks.” He syas they use reviews and ratings on the Yahoo! network to help prioritize rankings. He said there are over 6 billion reviews and ratings found within their network.

Shows a search for “Helia Duff,” and how they default to it probably being an image search. Suggests seeing if your own name shows up as an image search, which means you must be famous. They have agreements with Nokia, Motorola, and Rim, and the way they can package the same type of content for them. How do content publishers participate? To be included in the results, he recommends: improve your visibility. Use short concise titles. Adhere to Mobile standards found at W3C. Also, your site being validated through validator.w3.org. Suggests connecting to popular sites by linking. Use robots.txt and make sure you do not disallow mobile crawlers.

For advertisers, with mobile sponsored search, you set the price you are willing to pay per click. The top two bids appear. Mobile sponsored search Beta launched in the US in September 2006. Yahoo has relationships with over 80 companies in over 40 countries. Use the relationship between advertisers, users, operators, device manufacturers, and publishers.

Next is Sumit Agarwal from Google. Stars with three quotes: Billy Joel: “this is the time, the time is here now.” Although people have been talking about this for years, it really only came this year. Kevin Costner says “ Build it and they will come.” Will talk about tailoring content for Google Mobile. Lastly, Ringo Starr says “shout.” Make sure people know about your site.

Mobile e-commerce sites that are making a lot of money: rakuten.com very popular in Japan, average transaction value on regular site is $80. Mobile average transaction is only $8, but this is still good. People are overcoming the limitations of mobile devices and transacting. To build great mobile websites: mobilizer.volantis.net. use tools such as this to convert content to mobile version. You can also author sites in a way that represents them well on screens as well as mobile. Pages.google.com allows you to author websites. Winksite.com is a place to author in a variety of mobile formats. You can build mobile specific pages that are standards compliant. If you want to go the extra mile, follow some guidelines. They will be available in Google Webmaster Help pages.

Use simple URL’s. Link from PC website “the big brother” to the little brother mobile versions. Have downward links. If you have taken the time and trouble to build a mobile page, use the mobile media tag (this may have been copied wrong from slide-so double check at G) Tell Google about the mobile site through Google Sitemaps.

Matt Tengler from JumpTap. They have built their product using talent from both the mobile side and the search side. They currently work with 7 Mobile operators with 88 million customers. The biggest differentiator between them and the Googles of the world are that they take a white label approach. They deliver the three pillars of search: the UI, the SE, and a Mobile advertising platform. What makes mobile search different? The content, which is dominated by what he calls the mobile consumables. There are great mobile websites surrounded by seas of basically useless sites. The form factor is also big…you have to be more concise in the search results. You have to actually get the correct answers and get to the top 2 spots to really succeed. The opportunities include a more personal device that is always on. Capabilities specific to the mobile medium: LBS, audio/video input, etc. 215 million subscribers in the US, millions more worldwide.

Barriers: UIs need to mature, carrier data plans can be confusing and expensive. There is a walled garden approach by many nowadays. You have to make search simple, and put it in front of the user. There is a lack of content in key verticals. Improvements in the above areas is already driving more usage. Ultimately, content and applications that leverage the mobile medium are required to drive mass market adoption of mobile search. The Internet on the phone is interesting, but the internet on the phone combined with LBS services, enhanced inputs and applications that leverage them is very interesting. JumpTap does have a mobile search index, which is a collection of mobile friendly content. They also have a PPC product.

Types of queries? Words: 1 = 50% of queries. 2 = 33.9%, 3 = 10.5%, and 4 3.7%. Also shows that shorter query character lengths seem to be the norms. Navigation: 16% of queries. Music Ringtones: 10%, entertainment: 8%, sports 6%, reference 5%, local 4%. They look at 6 weeks of query data and how it jumped after the launch of the off portal search solution (Mobile index). This develops the long tail. There is a pent up demand for off-portal content. Uses an example for Alltel portal search as well.

How to increased mobile traffic? Deliver markup that is relevant to mobile device, VML, XHTML, etc. Traditional SEO works well…deliver relevant content that is optimized for the mobile user. Jumptap.com/guidelines.aspx.

Last up is Mikio Matsuo from Nokia. He wants to let people know that Nokia is taking mobile search very seriously. Nokia ships 265 million devices in 2005 – this is not to brag but to show that there is volume. They feel that the growth in mobile browsers is huge, but fully capable browsers will start to catch up by 2010. Also goes over some predictions for the global growth of mobile subscriptions. So what is the business model behind mobile search? He feels that mobile is the ultimate advertising platform. Personal, always on, always with you, and billing and payment options available. Pay per call is a tremendous opportunity for mobile. Mobile users love maps. Pay per action is also a good idea, with mobile coupons. The problem is the data access costs. It costs too much. Also low quality networks can be an issue, input and output discrepancies, platform fragmentation. Also not all users even know they can search on their mobile. They believe that by verticalizing search opportunities, it will be easier for users to reach content.

He shows some results from the Nokia, which seem nice and clean. There is also a click to action button then to launch the website once you have chosen the detailed description. Moving to local search, he shows the one click dial option found under results for a “Pizza Vancouver” search. He then shows a very funny search for Brittany Spears and Madonna kissing, and shows the image results and how you can zoom in and even save as your wallpaper (lots of laughs). They also have a Over The Air (OTA) updates feature as well as Media Roaming capabilities from country to country. For example if someone goes to Germany, they have a different set of results databases to render for the visitor.

They also offer the mapping feature. Full panning and zooming capabilities. They recently acquired a company that will enable to let them do GPS navigation and direction on some of their devices. They need to make sure that once users find the content and information that they can quickly connect and consume. They concentrate on ease of one click action to use other features. So far since they have launched the devise, they are in use in over 140 countries and in 460 operator networks. They have a constant groeth, 25% monthly growth in search volume. Have noticed that image and local search are a lot stickier than “regular search.” He cant share any more stats than this, but hopes that as they grow more into the Internet space that they will soon be willing to share more numbers than these types of device manufacturers usually do. Eventually, your ads will be able to be shown on Nokia devices, so make sure that your business or your clients’ businesses are in the databases, and that important information such as phone numbers and addresses are readily available.

Detlev is modding up this session.

I may leave this session early, to prep for the Search Pulse podcast at 7pm (EST) at WebmasterRadio.FM.

Bill Hanekamp from Microsite.com is up first. He said he is a fan of micro sites and they absolutely work. He defines a microsite and pulls it from the wikipedia. He shows off Philips site for the USA. When Philips wanted to sell a shaver, they made a microsite named shaveeverywhere.com. Microsites work, because anything a corporate site does, a microsite can do better. Google is smarter than we are. Google makes a lot of money by providing the best search results. Thus, Our goal is to make microsites that are relevant to visitors. Harvard Law School case study for a negotiation microsite, again I hate covering case studies...sorry. also, need to do SearchCap now while in this session. Sorry for skipping it...

Abhilash Patel from Passages Malibu is up now, he says he doesnt build many microsites. Some pitfalls to avoid is running mini site networks succeed only to dilute their resources and traffic.
Benefits of launching a microsite:
- Duplicate content
- More sites = more traffic and sales, sometimes
- Test new marketing strategies
- Experiment with aggressive SEO
Difficulties of multisite:
- Duplicate content
- More sites = more work
- More linking needed
- Original content and creativity is hard to scale
Questions to As Prior to Launch
- How competitive is that vertical?
- Budget and human resources needed?
- Quantify the traffic opportunity
Reasons The Network Could Fail
- Original content
- Don't divide and conquer your own resources
- Obvious linking between all your microsites
- Brothers & Sisters effect
- Same server, same class C ip address
Is Your Network Transparent?
- Registration info
- Matt Cutts at PubCon on Webmaster Profiles
- Competitive Webmastering by Graywolf and Andy Hagans
- Use reverse IP Lookups for competitive analysis
What Else Is On Your IP? Your Other Sites?
- How much do the search engines use this IP stuff in their algorithms
- If your goal is rankings, keep the sites separate
- If your goal is branding and identity, your OK
Ways To Build Your Network
- Use copyrighters
- Contact your own link neighborhoods
- Acquire a site
- Whois everything
- Expire domains

Sally Falkow from Expansion Plus. She is giving case studies... errr...Ill skip this one also, sorry folks.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session is moderated by Detlev Johnson, who is the Director of Consulting for Position Technologies.

Detlev starts off by explaining that the session will cover how to help the search robots index your site and also keep out the bots which you do not want using up you bandwidth.

Jon Glick from Become.com starts by explaining that bots don't analyse or rank a site, they simply go out and grab content. Using forms or pure flash will halt the bots straight away, so use text links to get around such features. Robot traps are page features which cause infinite loops and duplicate content issues, such as calendars with text links which robots can keep clicking on month-by-month to infinity. You can get around these issues by removing session id's, using forms/javascript for links you don't want followed and using robots.txt. Robot.txt allows you to tell spiders where to go and where not to go, including specifying each robot based on their name (e.g. Googlebot). Meta Tags can also be used instead of (or in conjunction with) robots.txt to tell a spider what to do on a specific page; such as not to follow links or not to index the page.

Well-behaved bots obey robots.txt and meta tag commands, identify themselves with a unique name (they don't pretend to be someone else) and respect the Interlectual Property of content on your site. Bad bots ignore robots.txt and meta tags and can sometimes hammer a server with page requests or scrape content from your site. You can block bots by banning an IP address that is abusing your site by blocking them for 24 hours, if they continue to abuse the system you should block them at firewall level permanently. A image verification challenge can also be used if you suspect a bad bot, although this could annoy false-positive visitors and should be made usable for the colour blind or the disabled. Be careful who you block though, as bots sometimes change their names (such as when Yahoo changed across from Google's index to their own backend). You should also be aware of less known bot UserAgents such as the Yahoo Shopping spider and Google's variety of bots (details of which can be found on their websites). The benefits of controlling bots include better indexing and makes duplicate content less likely.

Dan Thies is next up to the stand. Starting on duplicate content, some of the issues include using www.domain.com and not redirecting domain.com, pages which are almost the same, near empty pages etc. To find out whether a spider is genuine, you can reverse lookup the IP address of the incoming spider and check to see what domain name it's using e.g. bot1234.google.com. Dan uses the ARIN.net WHOIS service at his company as an alternative method, which check who the IP address is owned by. On dynamic websites, you could automatically insert a "nofollow, noindex" Meta Tag on the entry page, although be careful that this does not block good bots. You can check duplicate content via Google Alerts and Copyscape. You can kill duplicate content by sending DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices to web hosts, site owners and the search engines. Why are any URLs from known proxies and scrapers still indexed by the major engines?

The next speaker is Bill Atchison of CrawlWall. His website was under constant bot attacks and scraping accounted for 10% of his page impressions, not counting Google, Yahoo and MSN. Copyrighted material was scraped, stolen and used on spam websites. He therefore decided to build a system to stop them. Bad bots want to make money out of your content, they are effectively hackers. Some of the bots are used to check for copyright infringement, intelligent gathering and some of the data is even sold to the US Government. Bill keeps bots under control by using opt-in rather then opt-out in robots.txt. Allow Googlebot, Slurp, MSNBot and Teoma, then block everything else (unless you know of niche engines which you'd like to be included in. Using a customised firewall, you can also only allow through IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera although block other unknown browsers. He uses image verification on some bots to check if they really are humans. Don't allow search engines to cache your content (using the noarchive meta tag) as spammers do scrape the search engine cache to gain content. He then goes on to list the various checks and tests which the software "CrawlWall" uses to test and analyse robots.

Tim Converse from Yahoo steps up to talk about the robot Slurp. Although it's not a bad bot, sometimes Slurp gets a little excited so they do support a new protocol in robots.txt which controls the indexing speed. He noted that although he agrees with the opt-in principle, users should make sure that all major engines which you'd like to get indexed by are included in the policy file. Yahoo supports wildcards and pattern based commands in robots.txt which can exclude session IDs etc, information is available on their website. Slurp uses yahoo.com, inktomisearch.com and alibaba.com for its spider domains, so if checking the hostname of an IP address - make sure you allow all of these and not just yahoo.com. Further information is available at http://help.yahoo.com.

Vanessa is next up and does not have a presentation, although plans to show how Googlebot (the Google spider works). Google uses a variety of spider names although you can disallow one and allow another. Although the spiders have access to a shared cache of pages, if you disallow Googlebot it will not use the cache. Webmaster Tools is then mentioned which has tools for features which are not possible via the robots.txt.

The internet connection then went down which cut the presentation a little short.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Mobile Search Optimization

Moderated by Danny Sullivan

Jason Prescott from Red Door Interactive. Talks about some stats related to mobile. By 2010, over 300 million will be using mobile phones and PDA’s. The five big verticals of mobile: Consumer Package Goods, Fast Food, Entertainment, Travel, and Financial. Two industries we do not want to forget about however are gaming and adult. Says these are going to be “rather explosive.” Talks about a couple examples of using cell phones to search.

Mobile search engines: the short list: G, Ask, AOL, Technorati. How users optimize their URL’s. At G you can enter a URL to optimize any site for mobile viewing using …site.com/gwt/n. He also showed a couple other examples but is going through slides quickly… Mike Davidson goes over four aspects for Mobile Compliance. First is to create a mobile subdomain….and more at Mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/7/make-your-site-mobile-friendly . W3C has a good mobile compliance section at w3.org/tr/mobile-bp/. This is a “meaty file,” but an excellent source of good information. Mobile optimization is all KISS. Regular SEO tactics do apply. You should limit your content.

Talks about getting indexed. Says Google and Yahoo are the main engines to focus on to start with. G provides a mobile sitemaps system through its Webmaster Tools area, and Yahoo has yahoo Mobile Submit. Search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.

Cindy Krum from Blue Moon Works. “Making the most of Mobile.” How to optimize existing site for Mobile. Many aspects of mobile optimization follow traditional seo wisdom. We need to speak about device independence also…recommends a device independent (see w3c.org/2001/di/). An optimal mobile experience -= more traffic = better search results.

What is different about mobile? It is an industry in its infancy. A lot like the Internet when it was first growing, you have to pay attention. :Less traffic = traffic is more important. There is a great opportunity to get into top rankings early. There are different bots/crawlers than traditional search. They will evaluate site as if being rendered on hand held technology. Also, there are different browsers…a multitude of browsers are used in mobile.

Code best practices: it is vital to code site in XHTML. Traditional browsers are forgiving and Mobile not. XHTML has rigid accessibility standards that make it ideal for mobile. You should avoid unnecessary code because handheld has slower download time. Separate content from design with CSS. External CSS is ideal for mobile for multiple reasons. It separates content from design for easy updates. Minimizes the code required to render pages. Decreases download time (external versus embedded). Ensures correct display on different screen resolutions. Allows you to specify rendering based on the device.

Have two style sheets: handheld and screen. Put traditional one first. Used the display: none” to hide elements in either rendering. For examples a lot of people want to hide advertising. Use the element to attach style sheets –some handhelds will not recognize otherwise. Use appropriate headers combo of http user-agent, http accept, and UAProf. Use appropriate Mime type as well

Navigation best practices: organize buttons logically. People will not learn your site, so make it easy on them. Name buttons clearly and try to use same navigation on each page. Use good calls to action. Include text links for the main navigation on the page. Have a sitemap (and submit to G Mobile Sitemaps), and make sure everything is no more than 3 clicks from the homepage. Make navigation appear below main content. On mobile platform, nav could be rendered in it’s entirety. Change the order of the source code to place the nav at the bottom and use the CSS to render where you want on a screen. The mobile browsers will usually place them below. This keeps the more optimized content at the top. Easier to see you have reached a new page.

Use optimized “jump links,” (aka bookmarks that use the pound sign) in lieu of main nav at the top of the page. Hide these on traditional site with CSS. Use optimized links in this format with keywords in it. Shows an example of the good and bad, with header, jump links, content, then navigation being the desired rendering order.

Basic best practices: follow all seo best practices. SEO is super relevant for mobile, and more strict adherence will lead to better success in mobile. Interchangeable elements = more bonus phrases = more chance to rank for shorter keyword searches. Submit to mobile SE’s. Send confirmations. TEST with mobile devices and device simulators such as Opera, Skweezer and Google. Validate site with mobile code checkers such as W3C. Begin a traditional link building campaign. Offer an RSS feed for mobile readers. Purchase text links. Consider mobile PPC with Google. Offer social tagging and book marking icons. Mention mobile in press releases. Embrace the flexibility of mobile sites – provide information to people that are mobile. Make phone numbers clickable…which allows for the phone to make the call if clicked on. Offer “send this page” links. Shows a good versus bad example.

Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative. He will speed through his presentation since a lot has already been adequately covered. 34.6 mobile web users as of June 2006. 81% are using XHTML browsers. Shows a study from wapreview.com that shows the top 10 Mobile SE’s right now, with Google out front. There are not only differences in browsers, but also handsets. The usual are the most limited browsers in terms of capability. The #1 is openwave. Nokia was second, and Blackberry and Treo were down at 6 and 7. Shows more stats…

The big find of his research for this talk is a study: esprockets.com/papers/kamvar-baluja.chi06.pdf. He feels that finding user experience that goes wrong will help to better the overall user experience. Avg number of words in queries on cell phones 2.3 or 14.5 characters. Avg # of words per query on PDA is 2.7 of 17.5 characters. 17% of queries are URLs. Users average 29-36 seconds scouring search results page. Number of clinks per query average is only 1.7. If a user did not find a result the first time, they often stopped and went elsewhere, assumably to search.

More stats from the Google Mobile Search Study (search for it :p). The PDA based query statistics are different from device to device, which makes things “even more interesting” in terms of who you are trying to reach. Key conclusions: PDA/Cell Phone/browser user behavior and technical capability completely different from each other. Google.com/xhtml. G Mobile search will automatically render websites to be a better mobile experience. If you haven’t done this yourself, G will do it for you. There is incentive thus to create mobile versions of the site. You can use the additional visibility and presence on various directories to increase linking benefit for overall site. There is an early mover advantage within G mobile search, since they do feature mobile sites at the top. Also, G offers the ability to see only mobile sites.

Again, site needs to be XHTML and compliant to be accepted into G Mobile index. It does seem that the same SEO rules apply, however you have a lot less to apply them to., The ideal user experience for mobile to be almost unbelievably minimalist. It is really a text based world. Fast page load and other factors will mean for best user experience. In mobile environment, very few people scroll down search results. Macro media does make a mobile version of Flash, but most handhelds do not support it. He recommends that most compelling message largely appears above the fold. Remember that most people are only typing in 2-4 word phrases. Remember that bad user experience can “do you in very quickly.” Scholar.google.com/mobile.faq.html..

Last is Paul Smith from mPulse Media. They started in Mobile and then incorporated search marketing aspects. They saw an opportunity to develop important communities and the role they can play in creating the content that search crawlers like. Create content for communities = search results increase. Will go through a couple case studies. The first site is WapTags (their’s) and then a client’s. Most important question: “What is the key thing that the site offers to a mobile audience?” Talks about WapTags user demographics. Predominantly male in their 20s. 30% in India, 20% USA, 20% South Africa, 5% UK,5% EU, and 20% other. When they launched, they didn’t have anyone in the community.

To build community, they used AdMob, which he feels is a fabulous portal for PPC traffic. AdMob puts a link to your mobile sites on other sites. The goal was to get people to talk about popular topics. They got a spike in traffic, after G Mobile found them, to close to 10K a day. Why did they come through? One of the things they have is a “bunch of links.” It is a user generated directory of mobile sites. People are more likely to simply click on a link instead of actually typing things into the mobile browser. Thus put up a list of what others have found useful. Do the work for the user. This also does the work for the spider or crawler.

They also provide classifieds, another example of things to click on. They found that by creating the community, the community-generated content played a huge role in getting the attention of SE’s and brining a larger audience in. So next they made a mobile device plugin that allows for the community aspect to be brought in to another mobile site. Again, the secret value in this is the increase in content to draw SE’s.

Quickly went over Zoo Vision. Their goal was to drive up page views by having visitors entice each other top send longer on the site. Trying to entice users to comment and chat on a topic, and then the SE’s pick up those comments and feel that it may be a good place for further information about the topic. People have an insatiable desire to socialize with each other, as well as to sort of “voyeuristically browse” others’ profiles as well. The results were more page views. Final thoughts: users and spiders click everything and type nothing. Social, social, social, and adult content. Don’t be surprised by dramatic fluctuation in visitor levels. Offer other services…this is a young ecosystem with some infrastructure. Offer CPM and CPC advertising, and create/offer plugins for the benefit of the community.

Rebecca Lieb is modding up this panel.

Jennifer Slegg, JenSense.com, Jenstar, etc. is up first.
- Use titles effectively, a basic SEO principle, applies here
- Use meta tags, there is evidence that they influence your contextual ads (both keywords and description)
- Enable image ads on AdSense ads, use a secondary unit as an image only ad and you will get a lot of CPM ads, which is nice.
- Ensure the ad unit that has the highest CTR appears first in the HTML
- Sometimes borders on your ads are best, it depends, so try it out, test it.
- Give YPN a test
- Sometimes labeling ads as ads on the site help, sometimes not
- Enable AdSense for search, they add up
- Mix it up to prevent banner blindness (use ad rotation to use different styles and colors, use custom channels to test this stuff)
- Craft your inbound links carefully, the anchor text can influence the ads that show on your site (both external and internal links)
- Remove the page clutter, use external JavaScript and CSS calls, make cleaner html using CSS
- Monetize 404 and error pages
- Optimize your ad title colors
- Use your filter list with caution
- One ad unit on a page may earn you more
- Watch out for your syndicated content (PSA issues symbolize that, might trip sensitive content filters)
- To increase your CTR on forums, take advantage of color schemes rotation, change position and sizes and enable image ads.
- For blogs, use Yahoo's RSS ads
- For Blogs, avoid usage of common blog terms as (comments, trackbacks, etc.)
- For blogs, the front page of blog will often be mistargeted due to dynamic content (dont bother putting ads on those pages)
- Image and Flash sites don't have content for the ads to work off of, add on page text to help and use alt-tags for images and enable image ads for CPM payouts
- Business and Corporate sites, should they have contextual ads? It depends, approach it with caution, Jen said. Competitor ads will appear, these ads do not open in a new window, you will lose sales and clients.
- If you account is suspended... You might get warned first, and if you do, you have about three days to fix the issue. They may stop serving ads on the site. If you do not comply, they will take action. Difference offenses have different punishments. If you keep tallying up warnings, it might get you banned. Avoid bad traffic sources, do not tell people to click on your ads, do not write content that is against the TOS. Avoid talking about your CTR, impressions, etc. Keep your contact info up to date. Never ever ever click on your own ads.
- Yahoo Publisher Network Compliancy Manager shows you the issues you have with your site, shows you warnings, etc and tells you all the details. Google doesn't do this, so this is nice.
- If you get a suspension notice, check your logs and look for something out of the ordinary. Make sure the violation is on your site, do not get banned for third party sites. Any competitor issues? Keep copies of your raw logs.
- Formally appeal a suspension; make sure to come clean always. Always be polite.

Jeremy Schomaker is up first with his crew, ShoeMoney.com. Shoe starting March 2003 with AdSense, at about $4 a day. He said if you design a site with contextual ads in mind, your kinda doomed to fail right away. When do you stop using AdSense? When you get to a certain point, you will have people waiting in line to give you direct ads. When to stop takes care of itself. After you complete the functionality of the site, that is when he starts adding ads, and about 1,000 unique visitors per day is a good point. Positives contextual ads, it is super easy to implement, they take out all the hassles of finding advertisers, dealing with them, etc. Negatives are that there is a "one click and gone effect." Only way to get paid is for them to leave. The user experience is not controlled by you, you do not directly control the ads that come up on those sites.

The Gray Area of Contextual Ads:
There is good (white), there is bad (black) and there is a huge middle ground, with a lot of people making a lot of money (gray). He is one of those people in the middle ground. He feels those people are innovating the area. The innovative might be also named the "about to be banned" ATTB. Images near contextual ads is a really gray area. He said they are always updating their terms of service, so communication is really clear. He brings up a poll on the DP forums; will you use stop using image ads? The poll showed that there was a mix view on this. Some people are risk takers and some are not.

Contextual Arbitrage:
What is it? If you buy from Microsoft to sell to YPN, that profit is the arbitrage.
Why is it so profitable? Because the stats are right there for you, you know what your profit is right away. He shows examples of these type of pages.

He brings up the Bear Share, and when you install the Bear Share program. It asks you if you want to set your home page to Google Bear Share. You really dont have a choice, you kinda need to install it. Google.bearshare.com was a Google AdSense for Search site. There was no way to stop them for getting this off your home page on your site. 86% of the traffic on bearshare.com is either Google.bearshare and search.bearshare.com. He emailed Google about doing this on his site. Google said you can't do it due to TOS. So he thought to himself that he ruined bearshare.com's day. But bearshare.com is now using a different engine, Ask.com's PPC engine, which really pulls from Google's network.

Are people getting banned? Yes, tons of people, just check forums.

Who gets banned? It depends on who you are and how much your making. Etc. His dad got banned.

Tools for Contextual Ads:
- Analytics is awesome (new vs. recurring visitors is a big stat)
- CrazyEgg.com has a cool to see where people click on your site

Make sure you know your CPC, the cost per click. YPN shows your CPC, AdSense you need to do the math your self. He said always go for the higher CPC, not matter of bottom in earnings.

Tips for Success:
- Test
- Don't sell out
- Analytics
- Heatmaps
- Communication
- Rotate ads, test them

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Mobile & Vertical Track

Local Search Marketing Tactics

This session looks at ways search marketers are tapping into an audience using local search engines, online yellow pages and other local search methods.

Moderator:
Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence
Speakers:
Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placement, Inc.
Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing
Justin Sanger, President, LocalLaunch!

GS = Greg Sterling
SW = Stacy Williams
PH = Patricia Hursh
JS = Justin Sanger
GS starts.

High expectations and mixed reviews so far on local search. Very hyped. Important, complicated fo rmany reasons. SEMPO data. Largest group found it okay, varying degrees of interest. some unimpressed. Marketing Sherpa did study and have similar data. Some found it successful. Some say it works for some and not for others. Not enough traffic volume. Highest interest is local search by marketing agencies, above social search. comScore data shows market share shows Google is tops, Yahoo next, the others fill it out.

Nielsen-WebVisible consumer survey from 8/2006 on local search, attitudes. yellow pages search. 51% used a general service term to search, 49 percent used gen and regional term, 23 perc. use biz name and 19 perc. specific term to search with. These are how people use local searah to find things.

SW:

Local search space is highly fragmented. Yellow pages, big search engines, review site, local only yellow pages, business data providers. Some are editorial free and others are ad paid supportive. If you are new, start with free ones. Big engines. Google, for ex. there are main results and local results. Less than 1 percent use main search engines for local searches. Optimize site using geo-targted search terms (like "Atlanta message school") Add physcial address in the footer, in text. (hint - great for usability too!) Submit business profile directly to search engines. There are many fields, so compile it in advance.

Gather this stuff: Basic biz info, desc. of varying lengths like 100 words up to 1000 words. include search terms but don't overdue it. Have ideas for different categories, you won't know options until you see their form. Choose up to 5 in advance. Year established, operating hours, payment methods accepted, (see her website for the full list). Super Pages by Yellow Pages you need a billing address that matches. This is a security measure. Most of these sites have a human review. Review times vary. Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, MSN through localeze.

Local engines - Local.com and TrueLocal. Two best ones. Free and fee paid. Internet Yellow Pages. SuperPages is the "Granddaddy" because they are partnered with everybody. Dex. is another one. www.daplus.us for bus data search. (Directory assistance plus). They can be complicated. You can change your listing, etc. acxiom.com is another one. Localeze is MSN's. Review sites inc. InsiderPages. (She listed a lot of sites. I'll need to follow up with an article. I'm recording this session.)

Pros of local search: Be found by local prospects. Ensure online data is accurate and complete, Build links to your site. Dominate SERPS. Directory listings help you dominate search. Nov27 - Dec 1 at SearchEngineGuide is a series of articles she wrote that also covers this topic.

PH:

Local Search Advertising. Options inc. campaigns w/local keywords, geo-targeted camp's, local search engines and ads on maps results. Geo-targeted uses IP for search.

Local keywords. Include location in search query. Match between keyword in account and keyword query in google. You can use many combos, like abbreviations. Keyphrases inc. desc. of location. Works on any PPC ad network. Ads served regardless of searchers location. Effective way to reach movers, travelers, visitors, and anyone coming to your area.

Geotargeted ads - such as "marketing agency". Google will identify your IP and send results from your area. Ad serving relies on tech that detects ip and membership and registration info. If engine can't map IP location is a drawback like a lot of AOL users because they all look they come from one place.

You're competing against national ads, Google views local ads as highly relevant. If running a local search campaign, keep that in mind. You can select regions in Google AdSense. Yahoo Local lets you choose country, state, DMA and zip radius. Local search engines must enter what and where you are searching. Most inc. mapped results. People are looking for driving directions, address, maps, phone numbers, contact info, local search providers, hours of operation, consumer reviews. Local search really helps.

Yahoo! is phasing out local sponsored search. Its based on B&M address. It's for physical stores. Now use Geo-targeted sponsored search accounts. Yahoo local listings have 3 options - basic, enhanced, featured. Free, fee and very much fee. Yahoo will give you fixed price for getting into the local directory. You can control the cost this way. Googlemaps is the local search product. There are coupons you can print and quick to call. Go to google local. Go to local business center and setup an account, via call or mail to setup. Use your adwords account. You can ppc campaign from here.

You can run national with branded keywords, nation w/;ocal and local with IP targeted. Keywords vary on which one you choose. Local Campaign with geo-targeted has second highest conversion rate in the test she showed. Take away is use more than one approach. Local search drive foot traffic and phone calls.

JS:

Says Greg is the leader in local search. It's here. Local search is upon us. They've done 12 of these panels. Local search will dominate search in the coming years. We need to move beyond PPC. We're going through radical changes. We need to understand local search behavnior and consumption. What did we get used to? Yellow pages, newspaper classified, word of mouth. Local search has birthed the savvy local consumer. We use LS to compare and contrast. Its changing our consumption patterns. Approx 30% of all queries are LS. 90% of Internet conversions take place offline. 70 % local consumers use the Internet to find products online. The implications are far reaching. Search online to buy offline, locally. Internet mimics our normal behavior. We try to make life easier this way. Marketing dollars follow eyeballs.

The irony is that the targeted beneficiary of new local ad inventory, local advertisers, aren't benefitting proportionally to the hype. How do you do something different? Tactical fragmetnation, online classified, yellow pages, local media sites like news slite, judysbook, social networking, local and vertical search, craigslist, Yelp, Insider Pages, 2006 is the year of social marketing. Each of these is significant. They lead to confusion though. Need to think beyond traditional seo like landing pages. 'There is no single landing page for a business anymore. It's not about a website. It's about business information online. It's a different way of thinking. We must cleanse, enrich and optimize content. Think: Atomization - separate and spread. Managing and dispersing biz info is the local search markeitng tactic of our time. The new local search landscape requires new thinking.

Choose structured business content. Its the common element. 35 percent of net users have created and posted content online. Rich structured content serves users, businesses and search engines. Business profiles assist in comparitive local buyng decisions. Cleanse and distribute optimized business data. Core business dats is what everyone knows about you. Your phone, address. Lets make sure they're right. Cleanse it through Amacai, Acxiom, and InfoUSA. Enhanced business data is user submitted, so be careful about what people say about you. There are user generated content, pro and con, ratings, votes. Google local crawls consolidates it and displays. Social marketing gathers it too and that searched. This has nothing to do with your website.It has everything to do with controlling and enhancing the existing and new data put out about your or your clients business. The keywords people put in your reviews show up in algorithms. Tell five of your friends and customers to give you ratings. You can take advantage of the local search opportuntiy. Study your SERPS. You can use the information to help determine link strategies.

SEO for local is about making sure the information is there and correct. Look at your yellow phone book. Dex.com is a play within region. "You should be in that". Switchboard provides effective SERP distributions.

(He ran over his time. Had tons more to go. His goal was to get us thinking beyond traditional SEO thinking. Organic is still strong, esp.for mobile search.)

Getting Traffic from Contextual Networks

Moderated by Detlev Johnson from Position Technologies. Unfortunately there are only about 30 people in the room…must be another session that is drawing lots of folks. Detlev introduces the concept of contextual advertising, and advises that we may be missing some good traffic without using it.

Chris Bowler from Agency.com speaks first. He welcomes us to his city, Chicago. Starts with an introduction to contextual targeting, which is outside of search and based on relevancy between the content of the page and a set of advertisements. Shows an examples of dog-related ads served at nameadog.com. Whether your ad appears will be determined by relevancy, bid, and with Google, the quality score (that marketers have grown to know and love). Yahoo’s Publisher Network, known as Content Match, also works in a similar manner, with less relevancy score and more keyword bid price and ad. This will be changing with Panama.

Google will not reveal exact number, but it appears they have approximately 250,000 publisher sites. Yahoo has quoted to him about 5000 only. The difference is that the Yahoo content ads are largely syndicated within the Yahoo content network. MSN has a pilot program in BETA by invite only that started in October. Expected to launch in 2007. Other contextual players include Industry Brains, Quigo, Kanoodle, Vibrant Media (which uses the “intelitext” ads sometimes found in content).

A couple charts showing the growth of content targeting over the past few years. For one client, content accounted for 12% of traffic, now up to 36% in 2006. Same clients with actual numbers shows search numbers at around 47k vs content 6554 in 2004 and search 48765 and content 27704 in 2006. Search CPC is .75 versus content CPC at .55 on average. They want to draw down the search spending to pick up a better rate, if traffic is the number one method. In the case where traffic is the goal, they see 25-64% of overall traffic com ing from Content. On the other hand, clients running for more conversions or leads only show 5-15% of totals are content targeted clicks.

3 key trends, the “3 C’s.” Control, Customization and Creative. Control: he feels it is the interest of both G and Y top provide more control to the advertiser in order to reach desired goals. Yahoo Panama upgrade will allow for a much greater ability to manage content versus search. This will allow for separate copy for content ads. Customization: the ability to not just take the whole network as it is, but to customize which categories you want to be on. Yahoo can do this, but you need to contact their representatives to get to category level targeting. Also, Yahoo is willing to build custom networks. They want to roll this out in a self service basis eventually.

Google is also seeking greater customization and ease of use in 2007, but did not detail what they were going to do. Creative: We are largely looking at a text based network, with more graphic oriented advertisement flexibly starting, including banners, flash, and video. Yahoo Graphical Text – repurposed copy to be “more intrusive” than just the standard sponsored text link you would see. 3 takeaways: contextual ad programs drive incremental volume. It is separate from search network, and needs to be managed separately. Contextual targeting enhancements will be a focus by both Google and Yahoo in 2007.

Next up is Anton Konikoff from Acronym Media. He wishes he could start with a story about puppies (laughs). He has a different story. As with any tale, there is a protagonist: Acronym. There are no evil forces. Then Anton walked in one day to a big client
‘s office to pitch contextual, because it increases reach, gets around the search inventory interface, and can be operated by same management system. The client asked a lot of questions. First, what is different about it? Banners always targeted content. The big difference is that is can be bought on a CPC model (yes you can buy banners that way as well, but the algorithmic relevance allows for a higher degree of confidence in targeting the customer.)

Text ads next to text content! This is good because we as human read text content and sometimes don’t even notice it is an ad. We are conditioned to read text, especially if it is relevant. Talks about Google site targeting, which is an excellent opportunity to engage with sites that are specific to your audience. This is ROS and CPM buy. He has however yet to hear a success story from Site Targeting. The latest from Moutnain View is Vertical/Demographic targeting. Less targeted than content or site targeting but being tested.

Next question: how am I sure that my ad will not appear in less than favorable context? The answer is yes it may, and that you hope the CEO will not notice. He talks about how Four Seasons Resorts wanted to think about it. They have a problem that they only target households with a greater income than $600,000/year. This is a harder target to hit. You can add negative matches. You can also use contextual for quick response and damage control. He feels this product is great for effective broad distribution in a Public Relations sense.

How is campaign management different? Yes you have to separate them. What they have found is that unlike search, ad hoc campaigns don’t work as well. They recommend “evergreen campaigns” when using content targeting. You need to predict spikes in searches, and “surf on that coverage” as well. Positioning is important, and there is less real estate available. It is critical to be in the top three for maximum exposure. What to do different about creative? The consumer may not be as far along in the purchase cycle, for example, and you may want to use more educational project differentiation copy. You can customize ads based on narrowly defined contextual categories that are more relevant. He admits there is no answer set in stone as to how to best do creative.

He goes over a short case study of a client targeting teen audiences. They bought content advertising for ring tone related terms. They also did a campaign for Scholastic last year, and they targeted kids. How do you know what kids are going to type into search versus parents? Much more difficult…however you do know where they tend to congregate, and can target effectively that way. They used a Clifford the Big Red Dog site and it worked well. Also, the worked with sports sites through Kanoodle and Quigo to target some sports related ads.

Lastly, clients asked: how to get started? Of course, you should start with keywords that work in search. Start in a very precise fashion, using exact match and as many negatives as possible, then carefully phase in other keywords. If you start with what works best and carefully broaden, you will be less likely to fail. How to optimize? Be careful with broad match. Test, test, test. Roll out to category and targeted networks like Quigo, Industry brains, and Context Web after testing initially on G and Yahoo. How to measure success? Same goals and CPA objectives. CTR is irrelevant. You need above the fold impressions, and multiple touch points. Recommends an in depth analysis of latent conversions and lifetime value. Don’t’ assume that behaviors will match up to observed searcher behaviors. Bottom line: he loves it, and fully expects to switch 50% of clients’ budgets to contextual.

Don Steele from Comedy Central. He is happy that the other speakers said what they did, since he can build on it but make it funnier since he is from Comedy Central (laughs). Talks about the comedycentral.com objectives. They gets about 6 million + unique users. For the most part their strategy is “we build it and they will come.” It is a content depository. It is funny stuff, but not necessarily about kicking people in the ntus but that is funny in another way.

They use the content for #1: Branding opportunity. They also use this for pre-broadcast opportunities. Great way for them to reach the audiences they desire by prepping a show. Secondly, they use it for traffic arbitrage. They use contextual for more eyeballs to the site, and to support their ad sales objectives. Also, they use search and contextual to support ancillary businesses, mobile, online store, and record business. They strive to support and own their brand in search. Talks about how their content is all over other places like YouTube, MySpace, etc. they are not against these sites hosting the content, they just want it done with “proper credit.” They try to use contextual search to bring visitors to their own version of the content.

They are not such bad guys. Shows an example of “bad press” about brand at arstechnica.com (from 12/1/06 an article about Comedy Central going after YouTube). They actually host an ad on the side of the page driving people to the “official site of the Colbert report. The relevancy factor. The key for them is to be sure they are creating highly targeted and relevant ads to support their content. He ads that Viral is great for them…about once a month sometimes happens in the viral vein which drives millions of visits. They do not use RSS feeds to create content. For example, if someone is talking about 9/11, they do not want to advertise about Comedy central there. You cannot simply walk away from this after setting it up.

Goes over some more examples. Talks about the Colbert report, and how he sometimes sues his “Colbert nation” to get people to vote for online things. His favorite team is the “Saginaw Spirit,” and they were having a contest to name the new mascot. They actually hosted an add on a fan site of theirs which led to a bunch of good traffic. Shows another example of an ad in a Columbus GA newspaper (online) giving them traffic in the same vein. (Yes I have used the word vein twice so far…must be something about that word today). They also used banners and keywords to try and capitalize on the elections. It was a traffic opportunity as well as a branding opportunity. It was interesting to see what they were paying on a CPC basis versus what they may have been paying on a CPM basis. The ads appeared, maybe not as high as the ad agency ads, but the cost was drastically less. Showed an interesting chart that revealed not much of traffic was coming from search, and much more (78%) came from content match over the period of the election. Site Targeting made up 18%, and search only 4%.

Summary: our efforts in contextual search have helped to extend brand online and driven a lot of traffic. When possible, the 1 to 1 relationship between keywords and context will secure low priced and string performing ads. They must be fluid…as soon as their content is up, it needs to be bid upon.

Jon Glick from Become.com to present Beyond Ink's presentation. Duplicate content can be multiple homepages on different URLs. Different links to several different URLs and dynamic URLs. Search engines want one copy of your content, not duplicate pages. You can confuse the robots through dynamic URLs, be careful with that. Mirror sites are two domains with the same exact content on two different domains are duplicate content. Two different domains that represent the same exact content is also dup content. Google and other engines will choose the best domain only for you. You choose one canonical domain and link all internal pages on the site to it. Exclude landing pages for tracking from search engines using robots.txt. Use 301 redirects to point all your domains to a single domain. Use server side redirects, 302 redirects are temporary, use only for content that is going to change, such as event schedule. He shows that you can contact Google. Yahoo has a similar form, and they actually tell you if you are banned. (Um so does Google).

Shari Thurow from Grantastic Designs is up next. What is duplicate content? Is it 65%? It is not a percentage, it is a resemblance, Shari said. Search engines do not want it in their search engines because it slows down info retrieval process, and searchers do not want to get the same content and results over and over again. She explains clustering as a way Google and other engines group results together. Types of dup content filters;
- Content properties, they strip boiler plate of the page (nav, footer, etc.)
- Linkage properties both inbound and outbound
- Content Evolution (65% of web content will not change on a weekly basis, 0.8% of web content will change completely on a weekly basis, average page mutation)
- Host name resolution
- Shingle comparison (web pages have a unique signature or fingerprint, break down content into sets of word patterns, order doesnt matter)

Use the robots.txt file to exclude duplicate pages. Some duplicate content is considered spam and some is not. She shows some examples. If people are stealing your content, higher an attorney to sue them. Copyscape is a good tool, archive.org, also copyright your material. Use DMCA reporting at Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen from deMib.com. He is going to talk mostly about "identical issues." Common issues include; www or non www, session ids, url rewriting, many to one problems in forums, sort order parameters and bread crumb navigation but the list of dup issues are almost infinite.

- WWW vs. Non WWW used to be an issue, now it is not an issue. If some are linking to your non www, and some to your www, that is not so good, so use a 301 redirect.
- Session IDs can be a nightmare. One site had 200,000 versions of the same exact page in Yahoo Search. The solution is to dump the session info into a cookie and not put it in the URL.
- Customize Permalink Structure for your blog software. Some times old URLs work, so now you have two URLs that work exactly the same way. It is a huge issue with many open source sites but (I personally think) Google handles this well. Make sure to block or 301 those URLs. Wordpress has a plugin that does it for you, it is a WordPress Canonical URL plugin.
- Many to one problems, specifically with forums. Get to the same page in a forum via a different URL.
- Sort Order Parameters is a common issue, for this identify spiders and 301 them to the default URL.
- Breadcrumb navigation can be an issue also. Most of the time you replicate the breadscrumb in the URL structure, and you may have other ways to get to the same page - so you have several URLs but same content. You can make sure your product URLs have one URL, store breadcrumb info in the cookie instead.

Adam Lasnik from Google and Tim Converse from Yahoo are also on the panel for Q&A.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session is moderated by Andrew Goodman, who is the founder of Page Zero Media.

Andrew starts off the session and mentions that it doesn't appear to have pulled in a large audience compared to the other sessions, although it's still a very important subject. He introduces Monte from Moniker.com.

Monte introduces himself as founder and CEO of Moniker.com and mentions some of the big domain sales which they've escrowed and their status as an ICANN registrar. Domain Marketing is a $1 Billion market and contributes to 15% of Google Search revenue via domain advertising. 112 million domain names have now been registered, a 30% increase in the past year.

What makes a good domain name?
- Natural Generic Brand
- Easy to Remember
- Clear, Concise and Descriptive
- Commercially Oriented
- Visually Pleasing
- Existing Type-In Traffic
- Backlinks, PageRank, Alexa Rank etc
- Mistypes (generic vs brand)

Domains generate revenue through direct traffic to a relevant supplier, affiliate revenue, selling domain names and adding value to a domain name by building a site with content around it. According to WebSideStory, 70 percent of internet surfers guess a domain name of a brand (brand + .com) or a supplier (service/product + .com). Verisign indicates that approximately 10 percent (30,000 a week) of its new domain registrations will be used for PPC as either a parking page or part of a content site aimed at adding domain value. Domain Auction websites are becoming increasingly popular, Moniker's Live Domain Auction (TRAFFIC) topped $5.4 million in sales last year. You can acquire valuable domain names from expired/drop lists through services such as SnapNames, registering new generic terms before anyone else, buying from other people and adding value, or via domain auctions. Use trademark search before buying a domain name, consider having a valuation done, use a domain escrow service, financing is available on domain names (it counts as an asset), use a stealth acquisition service if you think that the current domain name owner may inflate the asking price because of who you are.

Jon Lisbin from PointIt Inc. is next to the stand. PointIt is a SEM agency and does not directly use domain parking. According to the Washington Post, 15% of web traffic is "Type In" traffic. Looking at a client of PointIt, domain parking traffic can be just as good on CPA as Google Search PPC, although some have proved 7 times worse then Google Search PPC traffic. Google no longer allows AdWords users to opt-out of Sedo Parking when using their partner network**. Reasons for poor CPA from domain parking includes Click Fraud, Cyber or Typo Squatters (Dotster is named in a Cybersquatting lawsuit by Neiman Marcus), Domain Kiting (abusing the 5 day refund period given by ICANN to keep domains off the market - only 8% of domains registered in May 2006 were paid for).

Andrew Beckman is up next from Search Ad Network, who plans to talk about how to analyse and increase performance when domain parking. For a Children's Education Portal, Google's AdSense partners are outperforming Google Search PPC with 14 percent conversion rates compared to 12 percent. Future of domain parking - the ability to find more relevant results through search/drill-down on the parked domain and adding content to the domain names. 2nd Tier search engines are buying domain names themselves to try and get traffic volume and quality traffic to compete with 1st tier providers (e.g. MIVA). Big brands are also acquiring domains, such as Barnes and Noble who bought Books.com (the keyword "books" got 2,458,019 searches in October).

Josh Meyers from Yahoo starts off by saying why the domain traffic industry exists and what Yahoo Publisher Network does in the vertical. Yahoo uses its partners such as eBay, HP and CNN to increase volume and the real estate which its advertisers can promote on. The old domain parking of the past was not keyword targeted and had poor conversion rates. Now these sites have keyword specific results, images related to the domain, tabbed navigation and a layout which makes it appear like a genuine information site to the user. One partner site "digitalcamerasdigest.com" uses Yahoo Shopping feeds to offer content which can gain traffic through means other than type-in. Yellow Pages has registered thousands of US ZIP Codes as .com domain names in order to gain visitors who type the ZIP into the address bar (Internet Explorer will look to see if the .com, .net and then .org are registered of a word and direct users to the site, if typed into the address bar without a real domain suffix). Yahoo Partner Network has seen a significant growth in Long Tail traffic from parking and micro-sites.

Hal from Google does not have a Powerpoint presentation. Google supports the use of domain parking as a way of harnessing type-in traffic, as it's still a way of users finding the information or product which they're looking for. The vertical no longer sees the more risky websites such as "Drive By Downloads" as there's more money in legitimate Made For AdSense style websites. Google takes Click Fraud very seriously and will take down any parking site which is proven to be using Click Fraud. **Hal says that there should not be a problem with excluding Sedo Parking (or any other site) from a PPC campaign as the AdWords interface allows advertisers to exclude any and every partner website. Google is working to further improve the quality of traffic sent to its advertisers (including from parked domains) but also help the legitimate domain parking providers.

Sorry that this coverage is quite short, the session had a lot of time at the end for Questions and Answers.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

We seem to be starting a bit late... Some technical difficulties with Google's presentation. I offered my VGA to HDMI cable for Amanda's Mac to connect to the projector. Now they can begin. I seriously wonder where the world would be without me, just kidding..

Danny explains the bulk submit 1.0 was where you submitted URLs in the add URL forms. They then added site inclusion programs, but those also went away. Now we have 2.0 with Google Sitemaps, Site Explorer. Danny then said it was announced at PubCon so Brett would be happy, a standard sitemaps protocol for all the engines.

Amanda Camp from Google is first up, with her Mac. She works as a software engineer at Google, works with Sitemaps. She is only going to talk about Sitemaps and not add URL form or other forms. Sitemaps is the current way to tell Google about your pages via submission. It helps them find new urls faster and helps them be smarter about the way they crawl. Of course, what you give Google is just hints and they wont rely on it 100%. Sitemaps is 4 different formats; (1) Text File, (2) RSS/Atom feed, (3) Sitemap protocol and (4) OAI-PMH (open archives initiative protocol for metadata harvesting). A simple HTML sitemap is not a Google Sitemap. Sitemap rules: always submit full URL and remove unnecessary parameters from the URLs. Sitemaps should be placed in the highest directory of the URLs you are submitting. You have to make sure the path is an exact match, i.e. http vs https, www vs non www, and subdomains. You can name the sitemaps anything you want. URLs must use HTF-8 encoding. All URLs must be encoded for readability by the web server. They can accept max of 50,000 URLs or 10MB, and up to 1,000 sitemaps in one index file. Please use gzip to compress your sitemaps. The text file format is one URL per line, the URLS cannot contain embedded new lines. Each time file can contain a max of 50k URLs. The text file should contain no info other than the list of URLs. The Atom or RSS feed accept 2.0 and .3 atom. If your feed includes only recent URLS, Google can still use that info. She then shows the XML format for a official sitemaps file; urlset, url, loc (path), lastmod (last time page was changed, optional), changefreq (always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never, and this is optional), priority (between 0.0 and 1.0, this tells Google which of your pages are most important, internal to your site). There is an official Google Sitemaps Generator at google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ etc.. Once you make your sitemap, you add your site to Google Webmaster Tools. She shows screen shots of a pending verification status, and then will change to OK or a red error link. She then talks a bit about Sitemaps.org, supported by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Amit Kumar from Yahoo is next up. He explains that the have Site Explorer and explains they are the only major engine that offers reports that shows inlinks. It also allows you to submit sitemaps. It is especially useful dynamic sites, etc. It is important to authenticate your site, and you can use the YDN API to ping Yahoo. Check out the publisher network at publisher.yahoo.com, lots of tools you can use as publisher and webmasters. He shows the main Yahoo Site Explorer interface (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com). You can then manage your feeds for those sites (lots of different formats supported). He recommends you use the feedback link, they do their best to respond, but try to also use the forum in the tool. He shows a submit sitemaps page. He then shows how you can authenticate your site in Site Explorer. He shows the inlink reports and the "explore your site" feature, all old stuff. You can download your data but there are limits. He is missing a slide... Then he puts up a new slide on ysearchblog.com, read some interesting things there.

Eric Papczun from Performics is next up with a case study for Google Sitemaps. He explains these tools are great and exciting for him, for large sites. When building a sitemaps you need to get a complete and accurate list of URLs. Then you convert that file to an XML protocol. Pick your verification method, either meta tag or a file you upload. Sitemaps usually get picked up in a couple days, the entire sitemap is crawled within 3 to 14 days. The average time is about one week. Smaller sites with low PageRank take longer, so refresh your content regularly and add external links. Make sure to have an HTML, native, sitemap for your end users. Focus the crawler on the right content by excluding redundant content, disembodied content (like flash) and spammy stuff. Use preferred domain tool to tell Google if you want www or non www to appear in search results. Include a separate sitemap for news and mobile content. You either see the number of pages increase or decrease after you submit a sitemaps to Google. It depends on how many URLs lead to the same page. Both instances are successes. Google sitemaps is just a tool, use it to help you accomplish your objectives. Use the priority XML tag to tell Google which of your pages are most important (home page, category pages). They use this tag to spotlight frequently updated pages and new pages. They found that Google is responsive to the crawl priority tags. He then shows some Google crawl errors; such as not found errors, etc. A lot of the time are 404 errors, this is like a "poor man link checker." He then shows URLs restricted by the robots.txt, review that carefully. There is also an unreachable URL report. He then shows the Crawl Rate report, very interesting stuff he says. There is also an advanced image search option, he explains, it relates to Google Image Labeler.

Todd Friesen from Range is now up. He explains there are two types of feeds. Back in the day, it was all about the bulk submit, submitting to infoseek and altavista via dumptruck. Now, there are many reasons why our sites are hard to crawl. There is also paid inclusion; shopping, etc. He will talk about Yahoo Shopping, MSN Shopping and Google Base. Yahoo is probably the most active paid inclusion Range uses. He explains that your natural URL will show in the listing, the feed URL may show and you may also show up in the PPC area, so three URLs on that one page is possible. The data used to rank you and display in the SERPs is from the feed and not your page itself. A case study shows that feeds really work, with Yahoo paid inclusion. He then moved over to comparison shopping engines. Normally this stuff is automated, just spit out the data from your database and then put a drop of little human elements into it and it works out very well. MSN shopping he said converts best, Yahoo is OK but not as great as MSN, and Google isnt that great. Highs and Lows of Google Base: It is free and it converts, ranks by relevance over price, limited user support, lots of competition, beta means no guarantees, and no third party tracking allowed. MSN Shopping: reaosnable CPC costs, best grouping algo, on average the volume is lower than base and lackluster on promo. Yahoo Shopping, the highest volume and most expensive, high CPC, conversions are good, customer reviews a bit outdated, they send most traffic. They had one client use Google Base; they built a sitemap on the current site, then built a new sitemap on a new site, 301ed the old urls to the new ones. They submitted the old sitemap, and the crawlers picked up the old urls 301ed to the new ones and they picked up on it and it worked well. They got an order within 24 hours from Google Base, daily traffic grew by 250 visitors and daily sales average about $1,000 per day from Google Base. He then talks about SEO in a more theoretical and philosophical way - deep man, deep.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

As we were elevated up towards the keynote ballroom, the presence of a higher force was there. (ok, scratch that). But there were tons of people waiting for the ballroom's doors to open to let us in to the keynote. They finally opened the door, so I elbowed Vanessa Fox, Lisa from BruceClay.com, Kim Krause Berg, Loren Baker out of the way, and decided to trip Todd Oilman and David Naylor DaveN to get to the front row. Nah, scratch that also. We are now three minutes late and I am eager to begin typing here, so let's go already Danny. Still waiting...

Danny is starting Jason is actually is video tapping his own show, and it is live on WebmasterRadio.FM. He shares Jason's bio, which is pulled from the Wikipedia.

He explained that he loves starting new companies. He was able to leave any time at his current company. They fired the CEO, and that what was encouraged him to move on from Weblogs and Netscape. He has accepted his position at Sequia (spelling) Capital. So now he needs to figure out what to build, he needs the right idea.

Danny brought up the idea of a new iPod, etc...
Jason said how many of you blog, lots raised their hand. He wrote a post in the middle of the night that was titled, things I might do next. He just wrote things as if. So the whole thing spiraled out of control since then, out of a joke. One of the ideas was to become a professional poker player. He explains that being an A list blogger isnt a big deal, just read top stories at techmeme and right about those stories. All it was, was a stupid post.

Side note: I think the Incisive people (one named Tim Walsh) are sitting on my left talking about Danny's announcement about starting a new conference at SearchEngineLand.com. Yup, they are reading on their phones about Third Door Media site.

Danny asked about Netcape, first it was a browser, then a search engine, then a portal, then .... Now its a digg.com.
Jason said you have this portal and its average, and they asked him what they should do with it. The number one suggestion was to redirect it to AOL.com. They decided to go with a social bookmarking solution. They said, people who say we copied Digg, those people are 12 year olds on Digg. But Digg got their idea from del.licio.us. etc. There was a big problem with Digg, where it did not have any editorial protection. They added professional editors to this idea.

Danny went into SEO, and the whole thing about his views on SEOs and search.
Jason said, he thought SEO is bulls$#@ and he still does. He said just build out your pages well and the search engines will like them. There are those who cross the line. If everyone would just chill out and write good content and let Google do their job, we would all be in a better situation. He finds SEO contracts shady, he said, they lock you in at 10k per month, he said its shady. He said, all these link farms are so much work, why not just make a better site. (Kinda laughing inside right now).

You have those users who adopt early to these great products, i.e. emails, blogs, search, etc. And then people come in an pollute them. It includes the social news sites. Some people are very upset they have an editorial process in Netscape.

Jason just called payperpost evil and as being part of the force of good, he feels he needs to say something. He just used the F word in the keynote. If someone throws trash on the floor, you yell at them to clean it up. He is really passionate about pure blog posts.

Danny asks; Is forces of good and evil clearly black and white? Do you see it that way?
Jason said there are a ton of borderline stuff. You need to look at the expectation of the user and the intent of the author. Danny asks about ReviewMe, disclosing that you are getting paid for the review. He explained ReviewMe is more about the link. But he explains ReviewMe is disclosing it. It is an interesting model, if the blog posters disclose in the first post how much they are getting paid for the post. He said it adds a level of complication that is unnecessary.

Danny said, what about the concept of taking the top Diggers to come over and get paid.
Jason said it was his idea, and it is a crazy concept to get paid for the work you do. They wanted to pay them $1,000 per month to submit hundred something stories, any story they want, but they cant get paid per story by the advertiser, just by Netscape. Getting paid might be a sign that you are better at it then others. You can get paid to right at the NY Times without being corrupt, he said. He said this whole thing was a PR war, and he felt he lost the war.

Side Note: Incisive people just walked out to talk more.

Danny brought up that Digg thing where someone digg one of our articles and they complained about not linking directly to the story and linking to my post.
Jason explains this is the issue, it is "breaking the middle man rule." At netscape, they encourage people to do a "viral link," found on X site, and then link to the main article.

Danny asks why can't people submit their own stories?
Jason said that they encourage it. Digg, said it is not a rule. But some Digg members don't like it.

Word Association Round:
Digg - brilliant
Google - brilliant...unstoppable and good
AOL - he thinks a bit, transition
Techcrunch - brilliant, opinionated, more right than wrong
Spam - evil, die die
Netscape - the future
SEO - Keep it simple
Podcasting - Addictive
AdSense - I love you
Valleywag - liar, evil, idiot, stupid
Jason Calacanis - striving, trying to interesting things, likes to work

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Video Search Optimization

Yesterday, I missed the coverage of the first panel of the week, due to various reasons. However last night at the SEMPO meeting, I saw my good friend David Carberry from Advertising.com, and he said he could give me his notes from the session. I bolded some points for emphasis. These are obviously in a pure notes-style, but I think there is some good information in there. I think you will also agree with me that based on an overview of Dave’s notes, not many things have changed in Video Search since the topic was discussed in Chicago last year. (See coverage of the 2005 video search panel.) Thanks Dave!

Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch >>> Search Engine Land, as well as his company Searchwise was moderating, and Jon Leicht from Intuit spoke first.

We see the Naming of the file – Video_3low bandwidth – this is a typical error

Meta Tool kit page content is crucial and video is the final and provide the engine with meta information in coding – if the video is encoded from one format to another mpeg to another the meta data is wiped – reinsert it

Media Meta Information copywriter keyword artist and title
-
Singing fish example – Title description and copyright in the content.

All media files – high bandwidth to make it convertible

Bandwidth is less of concerned - Audience specific compression versus multiple versions

File format less of an issue with uploading to Google and You Tube

Discreet Cleaner – media Cleaner MAC

Singing Fish – put the info in the same directory – make sure you have an RSS feed for Video – all the sites have easy to use forms

Video Dashboard and reporting available you can update any time and content – they also have reporting tabs

Plays Video via Flash so uploading the format is not important

You Tube allows for basic info along with the video

Blinx allows for indexing of podcasts audio – speech recognition

Indexing Files based on the RSS feeds – making sure you have the best content and weed out the garbage

Video Site Map is crucial

Content drives demand – people not searching for quality yet – everyone is experimenting and what is the best way to search and serve – Googtube Category specific search engine

Ease of Upload will continue to dilute quality content

Eric PaPczun – Performics

Share of Video Streams – Myspace – 20% - Yahoo 11% Youtube 9%

54% of online users are consuming video
72% News clients

Video Consumption is moving from TV to Video Search

Now is the Time to optimize your Video Assets

Flash Video players have issues with seeing the content

Use keywords in the file name

CNN launched new news site and optimized it properly – get the video in the video directory to submit it in bulk and makes it easies

VIDEO SITE MAP – Call it the VSM

Sire map and Video site map in footer – cross link to other videos and keyword copy and multiple links Copywriters need to think about the engines and sometimes it is difficult teaching an old dog new tricks

Video Search is there for the taking.

Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative

Majority of the TV orgs have not partnered with the Engines -
Titles and descriptions need to be heavily visible – RSS feeds/media different ways to submit and it is the nature of the best – provides lots of competitive advantages

Meta Data is important some Engines use multiple format types – multiple file types - Encode multiple file types

Go to You Tube and type in movie – and then type review of the content – watermark your video. Conclude it with incentive

Tracking and reporting is a nightmare – engines need better API

MySpace large number of views – Create multiple variations of video clips is it spam not really at this point – perform Video Searches for the Engines and the competition.

PPC arbitrage – it’s coming with Video – optimize from a paid title and description is important

In fuse created a submissions tool for the engines with the news companies

Teensource.org submitted a video to many engines- half of the traffic came from Vsocial.com find out what delivers the most traffic

This session is moderated by Rebecca Lieb, who is the Executive Editor of The ClickZ Network.

Rebecca Lieb starts off the session with a brief introduction on how social media has come from a "geeky medium" into the mainstream. Today's session will look at advertising in blogs, RSS and games.

Gary Stein is first up: Why are advertisers interested in Social Media?
Three wrong reasons, two rights ones - plus a bonus concept.

Wrong Reasons -
That's where the people are - minority of consumers read blogs, use podcasts, have a Second Life avatar etc.
Consumers in Control - There's nothing new about consumer control and media owners have rights to their property and enforcing their rights.
The Mainstream Media is kaput - The best blog rarely reaches the same audience as large sites such as the Chicago Bulls (big frequency, low reach).

Real Reasons -
The usual channels are unfair - private labels prominent and "big box stores" dictate rules.
Manufacturers set the ad agenda - Manufacturers drive brand over sales.

The more manufacturers are reaching out to social communities as a way to meet consumers as equals. When consumers feel that they can use their power with the brand, they are less likely to act against them.

Bonus Concept -
Brands Want Media and Agencies Want Brands - More brands want to own channels, built upon Web 2.0 principles, e.g. Nintendo Wii branded social network on Yahoo.

Henry Copeland starts a presentation on blog advertising. He gives an introduction about BlogAds.com which started in September 2002 and offers an advertising network across nearly 1300 blogs. The old world of advertising was fully controlled by the brands, although it's a lot harder now to get consumers interested, looking at the brand and clicking. The best ad fits into a blogs' news content and vibrant conversations. The ads are designed to loook like advertising sections and are relevant to what the blogs' targeted audience wants. Ads are content too - try different sizes, looks and layouts for ads - see what works best for you. If you don't get clicks, make subtle tweaks to test results. An example is given of a blog ad for an NBC show and how different creative, headlines and photos can make a big difference to CTR. Don't do the hardsell, consumers are blind to it. Changing the sales pitch to an eye catching photo and natural speech content, massively increased clicks for one of their advertisers. Creating good adverts on popular blogs can be great PR and could get inbound links to help the site even more.

Bill Flitter is next to the stand, works for Pheedo. Media is changing, going from Interactive Media (MSN, Email etc) to Social Media, which takes things a step further - where consumers can blog and discuss about what companies are saying.

As a media company, how can this help me?
Case Study with Citrix GoToMeeting - They spend a lot of money online although they wanted to do something a little bit different. They wanted to get their product into the consumers hands. Pheedo worked with Lockergnome (Chris Pirillo) which offers a podcast which can last around 3 hours long. Chris talks about products on his show, although Pheedo wanted to put the product on the listeners desktops. Chris used the GoToMeeting (Online Conference and Desktop Viewer) to show over 200 users various software products which he was talking about, although as GoToMeeting was used, people got to use the software and hopefully review/talk/buy it. Users encouraged to continue chatting and using the software by offering a competition with the full version of GoToMeeting given as a prize. The partnership with Lockergnome helped GoToMeeting (the Lockergnome landing page) boost up the natural search listings fast as so many people were blogging about how to use the software in conjunction with Chris' show. Also helped generate links from Digg and other bookmarking software. Social Media tends to have a longer lifecycle then Traditional Media with a more gradual taper off at the end - "The Campaign Long tail". The campaign for Citrix reduced the CPA by 50%.

Marc Schiller is to talk about advertising in games, specifically Second Life. Second Life is an extension of the concept that social networking is becoming more common. 1 in 8 couples married last year met online.It is a virtual world where thousands of communities work together in creativity;"it's about sharing ideas and creating a better world". It is NOT in-game advertising, it is primarily a social platform. 1.6 million residents live in the virtual world and the median age is 33, 50/50 male/female and women use it more often then men. Every piece of content is created by the makers users, Linden Labs only provide the platform and servers. Users maintain ownership of Intellectual Property, not the software provider, Linden Labs make money by selling space and land.

Why would brands want to join the world?
You get to build a virtual connection with your real audience that makes sense and you're able to experiment with prototypes and new ideas. There's no direct ROI (at least traceable), although it opens up a new channel of communication and deeper connections to the brand audience. "The Loft" is a virtual Starwood Hotel and is a way to test design, user reactions and offer a virtual client base that can convert into a real world client base. Scion is to create the first car manufacturer in Second Life, selling theirs cars to other users. Don't just do it because your competitors are; don't do a hit-and-run; re-invent your brand - don't just copy it.

Back to Rebecca - Is social media strictly a form of advertising or is it just brand advertising?
Bill notes that in his circumstance, everything is trackable and advertisers can tell that tweaking campaigns directly effects CPA/CTR.
Marc - CPM is not possible, although that's refreshing - don't just do it for PR though.
Henry - Social Media is going to be the biggest medium around in 10 years, it's important to make consumers participants rather than an audience.
Gary - Is embarrassed after thinking he bought a bike on Second Life and actually bought a bike shop. Re-iterates that it's all about getting consumer participation.
Rebecca - The reason why the IAB created fixed advertising standards is so that everyone knows what sizes to create and publish ads in; Gary jumps in - the IAB piggy-backed onto a standard which was already forming although we know that getting away from the standards brings results. Henry follows up - the standards are based on image banners which are not necessary where effective marketing is happening.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Ad Testing: Research and Findings

Moderated by Andrew Goodman

Came in a couple minutes late during Anton Konikoff from Acronym Media’s presentation. He is speaking about advanced topics with testing. Covering the fundamentals of ad testing: where can you test? Google and MSN both allow for multiple ad creative testing, where Yahoo has not in the past. However Yahoo! Panama will alow for this. He said that they would have to run ads over a certain period of time and then change them. He discussed key metrics: Click-Through-Rate (CTR) allows you to know how attractive the ad or offering is, and which messaging is more effective at driving traffic. Conversion rate is a more desirable metric, and should be tracked by keyword.

How many ads is enough to test? Rules of thumb: small budget try 3-4 ads, larger budgets 5+ ads. Need to allow enough time and spend. Title lines are very easy to test, you can use keyword insertion, or a multitude of titles. When testing descriptions, keep the title consistent. Use a themed approach to create a variety of description lines, such as price points, “official site,” time sensitive offers, promotional offers, and even language variations. He says that using the keyword in the title doesn’t always work, even though most people say that is a “best practice.” He went over a short case study fro Klutz Toys. They tested multiple themes from Award Winning to “How-to,” to “Unique.” They found that “award winning” performed best.

More granular ad testing strategies include punctuation use, capitalization, proper case versus sentence case, accent usage versus non, keyword insertion versus non. Another short case study for Sirius. They tested two offers: $30 instant rebate and “free trial.” The $30 off offer was higher, which surprised the client. Misconceptions and myths: start with the most straight forward test, not with difficult multivariate testing. Don’t use this to come up with good ad copy. Try a simply A/B test in early stages. He suggests trying radical hypotheses…subtle changes will yield subtle results. Keep up a testing regimen, then test, test, test! The best testing is continuous…don’t just come up with a conclusion from a test then stop. You should set aside a specific budget for testing – many clients don’t like this because they want results from every single dollar spent.

Jonathan Mendez from OTTO Digital. Discussed how they set up search ad MTV (multivariable testing). 4 elements to ad: title, description line 1, description line 2, and URL. They try to use three variations: one for control and two new copies versus control. They call this a 4 by 3 MVT. They use Taguchi methodology. In Google, they added parameters to click through URL. They are not making any changes to the pages themselves, they want to know if the ads are impacting conversions.

First case study: “major product aggregator” (some would refer to them as a vertical search engine). They wanted to increase user registration. He went over their MTV test array with the variations. They found that one ad greatly outperformed the rest, with a 36% lift over the control. Lots of numbers and I could not get them all… looked at the influence of the keyword in the title…conversion was not as good, but they had the highest CTR. Quality score does not make this easy to solve, since CTR is very important for that score. Case study #2, same client, looked at Titles with impression levels. Case study 3 was with a major services brand. Interesting test because landing page had more than one option…they were able to segment the groups and see how their behavior might be different based on the ads. They looked at them separately and then combined. Brand and services combo title had highest CTR, but lowest revenue per visitor. Summing up, titles matter more for CTR than for conversions. Description lines do matter, and the URL matters as well.

Hugh Bernham from Rare Method Capital Corporation. Will go over a case study with some CPC ads they did for a client (OnAir.ca). He is pretty funny, telling people to “get jiggy with it” about testing, if “he can be so fly to say jiggy.” (laughs) They audited an existing CPC campaign, and found it was basically solid but being used with broad match. The impressions were huge but the quality of visits were low. This caused for their ad cost to shoot up. They found the gems in the keyword list and then built on them using plurals and variations. Don’t reinvent the wheel. There is a good chance that you know more about Paid Search than the ad agency that may be working with them. Is the client giving enough credence to the value of Paid Search? Wonders about the clients that feel fine spending $15K for a half page print ad, but wouldn’t dedicate that to a year of Paid Search.

They went into the strategy based on the audit. They wanted to switch all broad match to exact phrases. Raised the daily budget, created a more diverse approach to ad copy, created ad groups for general terms as well as industry specific terms. They shut off the campaigns on weekends to save money and expanded the keyword list as described above with plurals and like terms. Results were outstanding: impressions up 233% increased visits to the site 358%, average ad position went form 4.3 to 2.1 (solely on improved CTR), and all this was done on just 16 hours of billable time! As a result of the success of this campaign, his company is now doing SEO for the client and have had some early success with that as well.

“And now a man who needs no introduction,” (Andrew says he has always wanted to say this) Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro as well as being the Chairman of SEMPO. He laughs about being from Canada and enjoying coming down south for the warm weather…says there will a lake swim in the morning. He introduces his thoughts by saying that people need to find five basic things out: what is the right message, the right place, the right time, the right person, and the right experience. It is tough to figure out how to make these 5 work together, but if you do enough research you will gain important understandings.

They have done a fair amount of research into how people scan web pages. He discusses how they have found that people scan from the top top and look fro relevance clues before making a click decision . So how does customer intent impact their searching behavior? Let’s say you want to stay at Bellagio. He shows a MSN Live SERP for “bellagio las vegas.” There are two types of intent instructed to the test participants: either they already know they want to book a room, or they are still researching if they want to stay there or not. If the intent is to book a room, there is probably a fairly high chance of people clicking on the Paid listings. In the case of research, however, people are m ore likely to skip down to the organic results.

Intent should impact scanning behavior, they hypothesized. But you should never simply ask people how they search, because often how they think they search does not match with how they actually do. So you have to actually observe them. Discusses Enquiro’s famous eye tracking studies and the golden triangle results. They found that people scan from top down and then laterally. He also found more lateral searches in top listing and decreasing as they go further down. Some interesting results: the searchers looking to actually book a room spent three times longer on the SERP than the ones looking for research information . They also spent a longer time in the sponsored listings area than the research-focused searchers. They found that on the purchase group, it was about 50/50 between Paid and organic click-throughs. However, in the case of the researchers 100% clicked on Organic results.

Multimedia Track

Podcast & Audio Search Optimization

Chris Sherman, Moderator

More and more people are "podcasting," on-demand radio-like shows people can listen to on MP3 players or their computers. This session looks at various search engines specifically for podcasts and how to best get your audio content found through them.

Speakers:
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Daron Babin, CEO, Webmaster Radio

AW = Amanda Watlington
RK = Rick Klau
DB = Daron Babin

AW:

Podcasting is not new. Audio has been around for years. On demand audio cultural intrepretation. We see it as educational content, news, oral historie, tours, literature, books on the web and tape, ads, music, commentary ar enow seen in podcasting. Used in recruiting . Promo for video, games, comic books. Nature walks, tourguide material. Optimize for search how to. Don't finalize your name of your show and get artwork is done and make sure it is not already in use. Podshow names are not as easy to check as domain names. Changing the name is difficult onece you find an audience. The show name is the Title you will use for your feed. Develop your keyword list. How do you want it branded? By entity offering the show. Write tag info ready in advance. Review cats for you fit. Audio is not usually optimized. Optimize ID3 Tags, optimize web page. See www.id3.org for how to optimize sound by optimizing ID3 tags. Editing is done by any audio software. Audacity is an ex. and is free. Optimize landing pages. Limit number of broken links. Have a page for the podsow with links to it for episodes. Show each episode and how to subscribe. Include a player for those want to listen online. Include player lenght and size of audio file. Inc. abstract or a transcription. Create feeds. Feedburner is recommended feeds. Submit your feeds. Like old time SEO. Lots of players. Podcastdirectory.com. ODEO. Podfeeder. AllPodcasts. To name a few. Submit to podcast directories and track and monitor them. You may need to enter different things for each one. Keep good records of the data you want to track, like dates and where you submitted. Next in the future is measuring and monetizing podcasts.

Optimize the audio file. Build landing pages for your show and each episode. Build accurate, effective RSS files. Submit broadly. Watch for changes. Like a remapping by iTunes. Fast changing.

DB:

Congrats on launch of Askcity. New launch. Is anyone really listening? Is it worth it? Production time. Cost of production (human resources), equipment (recording, compression), encoding is a pain in the...analytics to see who's come close and bandwidth. Do you plan this to grow? Hobby? Business? Expect there will be growth behind if you put a marketing effort behind it. "They are downloading by the thousands, daily." Look at audio engineer websites. Explore skype. People call in. Live podcast has its own headaches. Invest in equipment wisely. If you have mission critical files, you have an obligation to keep streams up and live. Talk to a carrier who can bear a load. You need a network who can support your growth. Analytics ...do you want VC funding, do you want advertisers? You need to know the analytics which translates to bandwidth. True bandwidth measurement doesn't come from anything other than tools designed to measure that. Many of the tools we're familiar for tracking data don't do this.

They are listening...show your passion. Listeners do not want to know your dietary strengths or weaknesses. They don't want to know about your dog being neutured. Be compelling. Secoure a sound host or content delivery network and work a deal. Consider you will users around the world. He raved about Akami. Everybody wants to know...whats the analytics? Become a pioneer. Transcribe everything. Every word is text equity. Originialtiy with passion = downloads. Leave no word unspoken. Look at howyou write anddeploy your text in your media files. Ensure proper on the page criteria and certainly no engine can complain about finding new orig and relevant content. For investors and ad dollars, make every effort to make sure your analytics is correct. Make the data make sense. Experiment with files with and w/o ads.

RK:

Podcast feed optimization and measurement. Not everyone uses iTunes. Other means are avail, browser, search engines, links. Metadata is essential for discovery. Content must be embedded with meta data. The subscription process blows. (Poor usability..he illustrates it has too many steps.) Don't assume that people will subscribe. Providers don't make subscription easy. Ping.

Feedburner manages huge number of podcast/video feeds. Graph shows steady upward rise. 6 million feeds, 1 million to podcasts. IE7 has support for RSS built-in. Podcast is a feed that points to video or audio content. Syndication is embedded everywhere. Points of consumpion growing very fast. Of a huge list he showed, only 2 were iTunes. Not device driven. People listen on phones. Nokia for ex. Your listeners are all over the place. Directories are great source of traffic but don't always send subscribers to you. They may listen at the directory, not your site. Cheyenne Kimball is a musican site using feeds well. Create a feed. Use Blogger, Typepad, and link to your hosted audio file. Burn your feed at Feedburner (redirect existing feed). Use "browser friendly" offering to increase subscription conversion. There are usability issues for some people who click on feeds.

Make sure you add meta data. iTunes has their own way of doing it. Choose categories, keywords, desc., etc. Add show notes. The most underused piece of podcasting is the show notes (text). People look for text. "Episode 372" means nothing. Put in descriptive title and show notes. 60% found site through search (one person's findings) to prove value of transcription. Be findable. Use Ping. Submit to directories. Enable Feedburners Awareness API. Ensure auto-discovery is enabled. Create one feed only. Change-auto discovery links. Redirect properly. Ping. Insert meta data.

Q & A

Tools for encoding and compressing? Audacity. free. for PC and Mac (audio). Windows Movie maker for video. Quality software makes a better product. Some tools not intuitive. For live production, a bit different.

iTunes most popular. Who else? MyYahoo. Newsgater and Feeddemon. Bloglines. Google Reader. Web-based are popular with consumers.

Do we be concerned with feeds that don't take the user to our site...they read on the feed site? SEO issues? You can use sub-domains, aliasing. feed url is your own anduse redirect 302 to Feedburner. Clickthru tracking can use 301 or 302 redirects, there is a choice offered by Feedburner.

Future? Transcribe all content. There are companies who are trying to automate that but still new. Look for automation of this. Daron is going back and transcribing 2 years worth of files to be searchable. Some phones will have a "mobile newsroom" capability (watch Nokia). People will have more ways of creating content at the point of activity. Delivery mechanisms are expanding. Create anytime you want and find anywhere you want. A whole new world for contexual advertising. Big ad networks see opportunity but not sure how to tap into it yet. Be ready for them.

Challenges for podcasting industry? Shift to increasingly professonal podcasts. Used to be fun and experimenting. Now the bar was raised. Lots of opp for SEO's in it. Professional presents barriers to others who don't have the skill, equipment, etc. Maudio has podcast factory. Throw the mike away. Spend money on a condenser mike. No tile floors. Deaden the room. Get a popscreen. Lots of letters sound bad in audio. Encode to control audio. Get it where it needs to be. Very important. No barrier to easy stuff for feeds. Work on the audio and quality. Test low bandwidth feeds.

Where to compress. Format depends on audio or video. If you have music behind words, no problem for search engines but a pain for transcribers. Consider what users like and don't add things they don't care about. Enhanced podcasts are great for education like how-to.

Podcasts can be done over telephone and transcribed into text. Consider storage as another expense. Like your pictures, data, etc. It adds up. Still tons of room for pioneers, esp. in develpment of these new technologes. This is new territory. Castmetrixs.com, "check them out".

(This is the first session I've ever been to where the audience applauded every speaker. Every speaker was exceptional in their knowledge and passion for their topic. There were a few technical terms I was unfamiliar with and recommend following up with any of these speakers for more information.)

Note: Okay. Technically, I was here on time, to post this within my few seconds after racing from the session, as per SERoundtable fashion. Got to the press room. Did my thing. Rebecca from SEOMoz comes in. I ask her to join me at the table. And then my Internet connection times out. I can't post. I see my boss, Barry, across the way. I leave Rebecca to seek help from my boss. He can't get in either. The message kept saying the max number of users was hit. After playing with it, I decide to use my connection up in the hotel room. I go to apologize to Rebecca for abandoning her. She's gone. I feel terrible about that. Will post this while my luck holds out.

Working with Ad Agencies

Moderated by Danny Sullivan. The idea behind this session is to try and cover ways for specialized marketers to communicate with Ad Agencies.

Janet Driscol Miller, from searchmojo. She gives an overview of how they have grown in a year, primarily due to partnerships with ad genies. There are natural synergies between search and ad agencies. Many traditional marketing agencies are looking for a more holistic solution for search. SEM firms may specialize in Paid Search, and need to partner with SEO specialists. The benefit for both is an exchange of services. Challenges: how to find the right partners; operational issues including project coordination and sales team knowledge of SEM; pricing and contractual issues.

How to choose the right agency partner. Should be relative to your size, agencies you can grow with. They should have a track record of success. Boutique agencies are less likely to have SEM experts on staff. Do your homework – remember that your brand will be associated with this company. Don’t be afraid to cold call when trying to find partners…networking works very well. Networking will be where you find your best partners.

Solving operational issues: create an integrated process flow, use regular updates and planning; dedicate a representative to work with them. She likes to get a process plan template and work her own process into it in order to set proper expectations. Pricing issues: should you lower your prices to allow the agency to markup? She never does. Try and work with the agency to find other ways for them to make their “cut.” Contractual issues: try to keep your brand present. Present your firm as a “trusted partner. Reference client work. Use mutual non-disclosure agreements – try not to limit yourself if possible, but absolutely use these. You do not want a partner to build an in-house group off of what they learn from you. Go for a blanket services agreement with the agency, and append the agreement with a statement of work.

Always use the KISS method. Don’t limit your agency scope to just ad agencies…use interactive agencies, marketing services agencies, PR agencies, etc…evaluate your relationships on a regular basis. She found that she got 21% of her business over the last year from agencies.

Peter Hershberg from Reprise Media. Working with Agencies: Transparency versus Opacity. Transparency gives them full client visibility, where opaque options use “White Label Partner.” Both have pros and cons. In transparency, there is a direct client relationship. There is influence over decisions and budgets. This also gives more “credit where credit is due.” Negative issues include that you have 2 different clients, the agency and the client. Also, you have to establish credibility twice, and sometimes resell your services to the client if they do not “take the agencies word for it.”

Opacity pros and cons: Pros are that it is a less intensive service relationship, and an incremental sales channel. Downside is that there is less credit for work, as well as less influence over strategy. Also it is project work versus ongoing work, without an opportunity to discuss results with client and establish a more long term relationship. Many agencies fear change. Clients are however demanding search, and many agencies lack SEM services. Then what often happens is that the search performance outshines other marketing, and that the years of experience the agency has with them becomes obsolete. So in some cases they actually suppress the SEM success data. Mechanics of a positive relationship include everyone working to their strengths, without for example the ad agency picking keywords. Joint pitches and proposals go a long way in terms of highlighting capabilities. Goes hand in hand with coordinated execution.

Scott Orth from Selytics. Will go over some case studies. They created Selytics with the goal in mind of partnering with agencies. A corporate HVAC company: problem – online had no connection with online. Their directory listings, page titles and META Description did not reflects corp. marketing message, and the traditional ad agency felt they should manage ALL marketing. They realigned organic campaign to follow offline plans, and matched up a new online campaign with other initiatives. The result showed that they streamlined the branding and marketing message; traffic from search jumped 15%, and they actually had to pause marketing due to unprecedented product demand.

Next one was a home building product company. The problem was that the traditional agency tried a paid search plan as a part of their overall media management. No organic focus on the website, and thus disappointing search results, and the leads to the site were largely unqualified. They solved this thanks to the marketing agency letting them take full control of the online element. Again, they aligned online with offline focus. Great results: Increased organic search positions by 63%, corresponding traffic by 21%, and increased PPC visits by 350% without additional funding. The goal is to make the traditional agency look good too. There is a benefit to TV and radio, etc, so they wouldn’t try to take from that budget. Tie the online piece to online to make everything cohesive.

How to make working with agencies work: realize and set expectations that offline and online marketing differ. You have to be straightforward – it is hard to market to marketers. Don’t compete: work together. The client gets better results and then everyone wins. It is all about success, and you have to be able to show the client that online and offline can work well together.

Sara Holoubek, “Free Agent” and also a member of the SEMPO BOD. “How to play nicely in the sandbox, (or not).” Goes over her view of the Ecosystem. Staring with SEM agencies, there are those that just want to be business partners, and those that are uncomfortable but play nicely, and those that are threatened by agencies. Agencies, on the other hand, go from those that don’t even want to know about search, to those that do, but don’t know how, and those that offer only PPC, and those that are threatened by SEO.

Being a business partner: deal structures include referrals, preferred outsource partner, or even white label relationship. Work best when “ownership” of SEM project is agreed upon, information on goals and budget are freely shared, partnership might lead to purchase of SEM, and there is full transparency. Be aware of repeated requests for search 101 sessions, agency politics, and clients that “play both sides.” She gave an anecdote of working with an agency that offered PPC, and how she got repeated requests for SEO 101. She got to the session and found 25 people in the meeting from the agency including the CTO – they were obviously trying to get their own thing going.

If the agency feels threatened, deal structures are different: it is often a forced situation, the advertiser has insisted on SEM, and there can be political preference. Works best when each party has a formal contract, each party has direct contact with the client, and the client is aware of the dynamics and mages all agencies. Be aware of agency politics and competitive blocking.

Tips for success: Understand the annual budget planning process – agencies and partners can get a seat at the table. You can encourage folding in search early, and you should work with partners by providing annual proposals early. Secondly, pay attention to politics within the agency and between the agency and the advertiser. Look out for large conglomerates having potential internal friction, or for career ambitions as well as the typical client/agency friction. Last “ learn to speak CMO,” remember than many CTO/CMO’s didn’t necessarily start with a marketing background.

Todd Malicoat from Stuntdubl.com and David Wallace of SearchRank on panel also, for QA only. Todd gave a short introduction, saying that he is here to learn as well, as he feels he has probably “broken all the rules” that the other panelists gave. David recommends placing content on your website that informs visitors if you are an SEM that is looking for partnership relationships.

Andrew Goodman is moderating this session, he gives a nice intro - and says we are currently missing one of the speakers.

Kelly Graziadei of Yahoo is up first. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money in research. They recently released a study on the long and windy round, that examined how consumers went through the buying process in different verticals. Search is part of the shopping process. Searchers are much more likely to read online reviews and write online reviews. They had a reach and release study in the apparel industry recently. Searchers were 47% likely to email a friend of an online buy. They used customer service chat 39% and much more juicy stats. Brand perception increases among those exposed to paid search listings vs. those unexposed. Brand perception increases among those that clicked through to the landing page. Yahoo and comscore released a study this AM, that shows for people who are exposed to both search and graphical ads lift 244% in online purchases and 89% in offline purchases. She talked about an old case study of a Miller Lite ad. GM and Chevy tagged their TV ads with a go to Yahoo! campaign.

Curtis Dueck from Epiar is now up. He showed some funny search queries. Why are people searching on these? The question is, how can we use this data? Search Frequency Research; people entering phrases into search engines, gathering search info around a selected topic, analyzing large volumes of phrases and their search frequencies, and looking for the meaning. Business market research, social trends and issue-bases research and just for fun reasons to do this type of research. Business Research: Suppose you run a music store, what products should I carry in my store? He posted a slide that shows a guitar topic, top phrases with searches for that keyword topic, first is guitar tabs, acoustic guitars and electric guitars is way down the list. He then shows brand searched for guitars, fender, gibson and martin are the top three. He then shows the topic of TVs, satellite, plasma, tv show, direct tv, lcd, etc. So plasma is top type of TV. Top brands are samsung, lg, Panasonic. You can also learn new product ideas; organic baby products is hot. Organic cotton, clothing, food, products, bedding, etc. Same with Jewelry; silver, fashion, costume, sterling, body, and gold, and diamonds at the end. You can also get consumer feedback; your auto needs EGR and PCV valves; ford, chevy, honda, dodge, toyota, etc. You can also learn about geo-specific insights with this data... We can learn about social trends, such as with downloads, people want free downloads, they want music downloads, and games and solitaires downloads. Then you can narrow it down to Microsoft Downloads and see windows, xp, internet explorer, etc. You can also see political affairs, such as the topic in Iraq, it is war, baghdad, news, jobs, video, map, soldiers, dinar, us, military, causalities, rape, etc. What about President George W. Bush; include, Iraq, his wife, foreign policy, education reform, tax cuts, education reform, etc. Healthcare topics; breast cancer, etc. Zoom into health care, and look at spasms; muscle, back, bladder, pain, etc. Education Resource; definition of software, blog definition, money market, etc... Pop Culture; Tiger Woods examples: wife, golf, pga, girlfriend in that order. An other example is NFL; football, schedule, jerseys, betting info, etc. Example NHL Hockey Player names; wayne Gretzky is number one. How and who can make use to this? Anyone who wants comprehensive information. Ended with some examples of private searches...

Massimo Burgio from Global Search Interactive and Xister. He plugs SEMPO... His company integrated search, they do not take away from the budget. It is designing effective strategies, it is about putting search in the mind of the clients or agencies.

Case One: Academia Barilla
He explained what they do, I am not sure, something with food. They wanted to reposition the brand in the US. They set up a a consumer generated media organization, a promotional campaign to learn the perception of the food in the US. They came out with a poll advertising campaign. They came out with a long tail of keywords for each target of consumers. It was via PR, blogs, other means and search. The long tail of keywords will help with the content for the new web site. He talked about personas... They decided to use a ton of blog marketing methods, about 7 blogs to be launched. He then explained how the poll is used for search. He explained how everything is tied together.

Case Two: rifonazione comunista
I think Ill leave this one for those only at SES. Sorry, some case studies, by nature, are hard to cover...

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Ads in a Quality Score World

Moderated by Danny Sullivan. “It used to be so easy with the ads…pay the most money and you get the most clicks. Now it’s like there are black boxes everywhere, controlling things. How do you succeed? We will be defining success.

Josh Stylman from Reprise Media. How is industry defining “quality score?” Method was originally defined by Google. Shows some historical context explaining how PPC started with GoTo. Started with the simple rule that “whoever pays most is #1.” There were analogies to the financial services market since you knew what your competitor pays. “Thank Google” for introducing idea of CPC X CTR, which made advertisers become more aware of the copy they produced, as well as forced bid management. Why did G change the auction? Control over #1 position, minimized less relevant ads, and of course maximized G’s revenue. In 2005, very quietly, G launched Q score, “the introduction of the black box.” Added other variables, some well known, some that G is less forthcoming about. “We will not tell you exactly” what this model is (in typical Google fashion). They found that CTR did not equal relevance…made for less relevant landing pages. People were maximizing for CTR, and brining people to m ore inks. Arbitrage will be covered in another session. Again, he feels that engines want m ore control over the market and thus profits.

He shared an example of a search for “Google” at Google in 2005, which had a bunch of ads on the side which had “snuck in.” In 2006, these ads no longer appear, which means the system has learned to filter out irrelevant ads. Goes over a case study for “Feedcast,” and then “credit monitoring” client. Showed how Q score had an impact in as little as one day, and how the position cost $11 at the beginning of the day, just to gain entry, but once q score had taken effect, it only cost $4. There are unintended consequences as well, such as artificial CPC inflation. Also, the engines define what “quality” is, which makes it difficult to identify from an agency perspective. Changes to a campaign can also affect quality score. Every time you change a variable, your q score gets reset. This can make advertisers worried about making changes. All this leads to “putting the M back in SEM” People had grown used to bid management process running things, but now advertisers must focus on end-to-end management.

Andrew Goodman from Page Zero Media. He introduces this session as being a very important topic. He will talk about the three generations of paid search ad ranking. First was GoTo/Overture model, pure bid-for-placement. Variation was AdWords 1.0, CPM-based, fixed. Then Variation2 was Overture folding in “click index.” Then came AdWords 2.0 introducing Max Bid + CTR, which led to various CTR “cutoffs” and other factors. Then what he calls “AdWordss 2.5, and then where we are now in AdWords 2.6..

It is normal to have high quality score across the board, he showed an example where only 9 of 428 keywords were deactivated…in fact they were only deactivated because of low bids instead of q score. Google just told him there are actually two quality scores. One affects minimum bid, and one effects ad rank. In the old days, there were rules which have transferred to being scores. Keyword status is based on either predictive or historical CTR. “Other relevancy factors” move in, including tightness of relationship between keyword, ad, and landing page. Landing page and site quality are now also a factor. Some types of keywords can lead to a “shorter leash,” basically. Shows a list of keywords that have a very high minimum bid because of the lack of quality of the page. He says this was an example where he lumped all keywords together and only used the home page as a landing page. The problem is when he goes to fix it, he isn’t 100% clear as to if it worked or if G even noticed. He showed how he changed the landing page for 1-800-got-junk, and how it took some time to see what happened. Suggest backing up changes with some sort of contact with Google to try and force change.

How it works? See Google’s guidelines, they are valuable. There are human coders used to “train the algorithm.” We do not know the exact variables in the algorithm. The principles for ad q score rates are derived from user feedback on a large scale. This is scaled down to the algo. Arbitrage does make up a large portion of the user complaints they receive. The AdsBot crawls landing pages looking for “markers” that will indicate low quality pages. CTRs are still key…they still determine where you show up in the auction. It is really unclear how the other relevance factors weigh into the algo. He showed an example of a search for “jelly beans,” and how a Yahoo ad may have been affected by low CTR. CTR is normalized for ad position, so if you are in second place, they will take that into account from not being in first place, for example.

Is G really targeting arbitrage or not? He doesn’t want to get into it, but shows that some of their organic results aren’t much better than arbitrage landing pages, using “jelly beans” as an example again. Shows a couple of case studies where in one case, AdsBot thought the landing page was a “spammy” site, which actually wasn’t. Another case was an example where some client upped his bid to $100, and then had a popup which told people “next time you visit this site, please don’t use an SE, because each click coats us money (laughs).. Finishes with “arbitrage versus garbitrage…” why doesn’t g target some sites that seem worse than others? Also gives a quote that even though G operates paid and organic separately, do not think they are siloed."

Jonathan Mendez will talk about delivering contextual relevance. Goes through an example of a neat segmenting the audience tactic used by Starbucks in the mobile environment. We are lucky as SEM’s because nothing is better than delivering contextual content than search. We are able to segment, target, and control the engagement through the landing page experience. The holy grail is the right message to the right audience. So what is q score? Ads need to be relevant to keyword as well as landing page. The ad is the “bridge to relevance.” It is important both in a pre-click and post-click stage. If you are lucky enough for the searcher to click on the ad, you have to meet or exceed their level of expectation once they see the page. This is a holistic view of providing relevance.

How to set up campaigns? Use root and stem relevance. He showed an example grouping in one case “retirement” as the “root” and other factors as the stemming, such as “savings, planning, etc.” Showed an example of a multivariate test with some keywords that will be further covered in a later session. Says the best measure of relevance is the conversion rate for ads. Showed how a simple change in an ad title caused for a jump in conversion for around 5% avg to as high as 11%. They found that the description line had a much greater effect on conversion that the title. Evangelizes that busing the right message will ensure relevance. Discovering relevance begins with understanding your audience. You must understand their goals: primary goal, secondary goal, and latent goals. Primary could be “find a jacket,” secondary could be “find a down jacket,” and the latent goals are harder to find. So maybe the mention of an extra pocket or the goose down could be what turns them into clients.

You have to understand what the customer needs…you have to segment in order to drill down. Again, search is wonderful for this because you have their keyword phrase, so you can sometimes find the latent goal. Shows a couple examples, including a search for “Pope Benedict,” and how one is bad and one is relevant. Geo-targeting is key to ad effectiveness, helping people find more “geo-relevant” options. It is important to emphasize relevance from ad to landing page. If you can even imbed some relevance to a form, for example pre-filling the geo area, the visitor will feel better about the experience. Talked about keyword source reinforcement, where using the keyword more prominently on the landing page lifted the conversion rate. You have to understand the way your users think about content. He did some user observation about searchers for “telescopes,” and how the user navigated a site to find the most relevant page. Went through some other good examples of creating a relevant experience. He knocks NY Times for “clickjunk” and some other issues with helping people understand the relevance of the page they are on.

Brian Boland from MSN will be a QA speaker and gives a nice introduction to how they treat relevance as being very important.

QA follows, but we do not cover that so you have to make it out to SES!

Note: sorry I did not cover Video Search Optimization this morning, was still settling in.

SEM Firm Track

Session: Business Issues For The Big SEM Shop

Desc: Should you do rev share? Bill on percentage of ad spend? How do you deal with existing ad agencies? Should you expand to cover more than search, if there's client demand? How do you keep good employees from leaving? This session explore these and other issues facing the medium-to-large SEM firm.

Moderator:
Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.

Speakers:
Alan Rimm-Kaufman, President, Rimm-Kaufman Group Llc
David Williams, Chief Strategist and Co-Founder, 360i
Peter Hershberg, Managing Partner, Reprise Media

ARK = Alan Rimm-Kaufman
DW = David Williams
PH = Peter Hershberg

Jessie begins. Building from the small biz.

ARK:

Fee structure for ppc. Why structure the fee to use? It matters. Incentives drive behavior. Model rev share, ad expense, flat model, hourly model. Rev share pro is pay for performance. Brand name generates sales. Measure clicks. Sales. A search for brand name is like a white page, not a yellow page. Talks about real cost and effort put in. Low hanging fruit is easy to get. Disputes rise over who gets what of revenue. Recommends program audits. Twice a year do order audit. Evaluate other channels like direct mail in-house mail portal ads ebay auction affiliate infomerical. Ad markup con is work incentive, overspend. 15 day out clause in contract. Up to 30 days. Put a cap on top and bottom of ad spend, When holiday sales go through the roof, you need to determine a cap. Need a monthly minium. Caps protect client at the top. Protect agency at bottom. Disuadde clients wheich are too small. Muliple site discounts. Ala carte add on services: feeds, consulting, custom programming. Be fair on caps. Offer easy outs. (This presentation had graphs that did a better job of supporting his talk.)

DW:

Staffing Discussion. Major issue for everyone. How many are involved in hiring process? Two pieces - planning and retention. SEM has sig turnover, rapid pay increases, lack of skilled and senior employees, fast moving and stress env., changing tech, need sophisticated skills, no recognized industry training, SEMPO in launching an institute. Will be announced tonight. Do you plan and budget hiring in advance? Are you hiring just to replace or growth? Do you have a strong hiring process? Strict hiring process? Staff and mgt trained in interviewing? How is your company different from others? This is a important. Hiring is competitive.

What to consider when hiring. Size and sophistication of clients. Industry focus. Agency or inhouse. Reputation of your company? Leave room for pay increases. What do Yahoo! and Google think about your agency? Are you a leader? Your hires will be interested in what you offer them. Expecation of performance based benefits, important for senior level. Upward mobility? Are you structure for growth? Make opportunities for employees. Don't train the competition. Look for other skills like project mgt.

Big clients needed account director, media services, director of data analytics, director of natural seo. Having these people helped his company get big accounts. Staff must have 8-10 years experience. These people help grow good client relationships. Compensate your staff and stress they have a stake in success of company.

Grow from within. Monster. Craiglist. Local uni. Local job search firms. SES shows. Staff referrals. Conferences. Internal candidates, move them up. These are where to find new hires. Edu inc. ecom, stats, marketing, business, good schools, previous experience, computer science. Turnover is high and has a neg. effect on key client relationships. 1st step should be to take care of existing employees. Thirsty Thursdays drink, skills, training, strong mgt., strong processes, company events, knowledgable about company, excellent work benefits, working env like office space, location, etc. All of these contribute to lowering turnover. This is good for junior and senior staff.

Hiring the right people. What are your goals? Bad hiring decisions take a long time to correct and have a negative effect on morale. Hire for future, not just todayt, esp.for rapidly evolving industry. Don't be afraid to let go of bad performers. Referrals from employees and industry hires.

Company Benefits inc.stock incentives, profit share. Reduce turnover, have strong benefits, budget and plan in advance, have a good process, hire for future, look for strong sklls and well rounded people. look for mentors and those who want to mentor. Compensation is important. Referrals are key.

PH:

Biz issues for Big SEMs Differentiation/Marketing. Big firms are faced with high growth in the industry. People want to get into this business. SEM firms are well represented. Analycis companies, consultants, interactive agencies, rich media...these are companies who are entering this industry. Are they any good at SEM? It's getting harder to tell. Work doesn't stand on its own. Can't always tell how good based on ads out there. Full service, intregrated servicces, leading, solution, are terms that mean the same thing. This is a challenge that needs to be dealt with. Many terms doing the same thing. How can you differentiate?

What to do? Vertical focus. Market segment, such as going after local search market. Partnersip and Acquistions. Geography which are focused on your own area. Less competition. Finding a focus and niche. How to stay ahead of the curve? USe emerging formats. Video, audio print and mobile, radio, tv. These are formats to focus on. Quality based bidding. Strategy becoming more important than managing the auction. Google has driven this. Follow their terms of use. Google has a "All or nothing" support. Technology: build or buy? What to consider? Build right tech if you know the problem you are tryng to solve. Build technology if you the time and resources correctly. Sometimes there's a moving target, hard to build for. A lot of technology out there. Can you improve on an existing solution?

Where is market heading? There is more consolidation in the industry. Build and scale what they already offer or they're builidng new. Fragmentation is another. Companies focus on landing pages, creative opt. keywords, focus on segments of the industry.

Q & A:

Setup fees? So much work is front end loaded. Start billing before ads go live. Some can charge a fee or not.
Verticals - How to serve multiples when you are changing hats? Will you serving competitors and is this trouble? Competing for keywords an issue? You may need to decide whats fair to existing client. Does it make business sense to manage two competing campaigns? Conversions are the comparison factor. Some clients don't want you working for a competitor and thats in a contract. Be cautious about giving contracts with competitors

Pros to hourly, use for mechanics, marketing advice, writing pages. Retainer, hourly or percentage offer different options depending on client need and budget. Some clents don't have a long term need. There are opps for custom services based on their need.

What to do with small clients who can't afford you? Do you send to partner, other company? Okay to make recommendations. Many that went away eventually return. Be honest with them. Find agencies who handle smaller clients. They may send you the larger biz they can't handle. There is a lot of "search business", there's room for everybody. Decide if you want to help them a little, send away or do some and take a certain percentage for your time.

One huge Googler panel, seriously. With Jessica Ewing, Venessa Fox, Shashi Seth, Adam Lasnik, Paul Botto and Amanda. Hope it is not boring... ;-)

The Googlers joke around about starting late. Vanessa offered to dance on the table. Adam recommended pizza and joked about more things. Adam is the mod of this panel, I assume.

Vanessa Fox from Webmaster Central is up first. She said she will talk for a few minutes, because they have a whole lunch about Webmaster Central. Amanda is the assistant, she is doing the demo. The show off the help section, and a Google Group, and a blog. They then log into sitemaps... She explains the main page, error pages and stats pages.

Paul Botto to talk about Google Analytics from Urchin. He is going to give a 30 min presentation in 10 minutes. Its a free hosted web analytics service, 80+ reports. It is for all types of sites, e-commerce, lead generation and brand awareness. Its more than a technical to now a web marketing tool. You can track all marketing efforts, not just Google stuff. You can also identify problem areas on your site. Funnel visualization reports and product merchandising. You can also analyze the results across two data ranges, to see if you improved or not. Analytics is integrated with AdWords, automatically. You can compare organic versus paid keywords. He continues to go over all the features, but he obviously doesnt have enough time to capture all those features in this 10 minute presentation. He talks about the Website Optimizer BETA that allows multivariate testing. They are hiring account execs and analysts.

Shashi Seth for Google Custom Search (i.e. COOP). He shows off what it is, all explained at Google.com/Coop/. You pick a "slice of the index," you define the sites you want or the patterns you want to include in your custom search engine. A requirement is that the pages need to be first in Google's index, if not, then go to Google Sitemaps. He then talks about creating "refinements" those Google labels at the top of Google search results for medical related searches. You also have the ability to change the rankings of various URLs, you define it in general but not on a url by url or query or query basis.

Jessica Ewing from Google Gadgets is last up. Google Gadgets uses RSS Feeds, and you'l want a gadget she said. Gadget is a box that lives on the web, and you can put anything you want inside of it. It is basically an iframe. No rules about what goes in a gadget, do whatever you want. RSS feeds are used for content owners to get content out, the limitations are that RSS are read only, there are formatting rules, and it is not completely customizable by the end user, but a gadget has preferences the user can control. Create gadgets to get new users, more traffic, and they are really easy to create. Currently there are 2,390 gadgets out there.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

SEM Firm Track

Session: Business Issues For the small SEM Shop

Desc: It started out small and slow, but now your business is ramping up fast. An email agreement for work no longer seems safe. Is it time for formal contracts? If so, what do you put in them? And does billing hourly still make sense as you better understand the long-term value of your service? What do you do when a client wants in house training? In this session, advice from those who've dealt with these and similar questions and come through to success.

Moderator:
Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Speakers:
Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink
Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online Media
Ken Jurina, President and CEO, Epiar Inc.
Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.
Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC

AK = Anne Kennedy - unable to attend conference
TF = Todd Friesen
KJ = Ken Jurina
JS = Jessie Stricchiola
GB = Greg Boser - unable to attend

(Starting late...missing a speaker. Room was very hot when we first arrived but thankfully they turned down the temp. Not a packed room. About half way full. Spoke with an attendee from NYC advertising and media firm. She explained Second Life and described it in more detail. You can create your own avatar and conduct business "for real". Virtual world with real money and real businesses. Greg Boser is not here.)

Anne Kennedy not coming due to death in the family. Jessie is moderating. Asks how many people are independent, sole prop. First speaker is KJ.

KJ:

Asked how many people are new to SES. Welcomes everyone to SES. Owns a small firm. Growing. 4 Typical pricing models. Monthly fees, retainer based. Monthly maint. Pay for performance. You take commission of that. Fee for service, project based. Hourly consult, quick approach and SEO suggestions.

Funny scribbled papers displayed about "Our extensive planning": Start small and build. The reality is your not charging enough. 85% is fee for service, spec. deliverables, 10% ppf, 5% customized services. Analyze keyphrases, keyword placement, inboud link campaigns and reporting, online PR. Stick to your "profitable" business model. If necessary offer customerized services. You're the expert. Don't let customer dicate to you. Customer ser vices. web site audits (yay!), Show whats going well and going wrong and "inherit the mess". Reviewing sites, looking for problems, don't fix problems for free. Web analytics, before and after. Monthly maintenance and marketing plans. Hourly consult.
Hourly is 3rd party copywriters, agencies web dev companies. Plan for it, estimate the time it takes to educate client. Allow time working with internal personnel.

Cusomter Profiling. Determine your target market and go after it.Get the decision maker into the presentation. If marketing person makes decision, find out how much moneyand authority they have and get to the person who has more. Pricing and perception - initial was fixed at i.e. $25K. Clients understand the process if educated and given opportunity to tast the goods. Phone and email contact vital with client. Detail what you will do. Don't confuse them. They may not understand what you are doing. Establish trust. Be clear. Outline price, deliverables, time frame, price - all in the front, first page of proposal. References in back, info on your website. Be clear. Invoicing cycle be clear on when. Outline client and your responsibiles. Show professionalism.

Location. Different pricing depend on where your business is located. Pricing points depend on where the client is. Some companies expect higher pricing. Small town companies expect large companypricing. Be competitively priced. Focus on organized strenghts. Proprietary software applications. Focus on preferred biz model, find niche. Small companies provide product and services. Find out where you make your profit and capitalize on that. Find local great brands, for referrals. Right customers help you prospect new ones. Be active in industry events, blog, training seminars, SEMPO, associations, exhibits, sometimes you may the only one there (no competition!) and focus is on you. Exit strategy...do you have one? Value in your intellectual property (software r & d costs).

TF:

Pricing and Contracts for the Small SEM shop. He started out as the 1-man shop. Did everything. Now works for a larger agency, about 53 people. Never compromise on these. Walk away from client who won't accept them. Protect yourself. Indemificaton is a two way street. Identify yur client for negligent acts or ommissions. You want to be protected. Agreement Termination is give your client a way out. Restrict a a clients right to terminate the contract to you submitting a serious breath that cannot be remedied within 14 days time. Be fair. If client screws up, try to fix it first before walking away.

Intellectural property rights - you own that. Never agree to relinquish your intellectual rights to anything you create or contribute to unless you've negotiated a separate (large) fee.

Confientiality. Do not give away client information. Works both ways. You don;t want to lose business because someone found your secret methods and are using it. Resolving disputes. You don't want the expense of being sued. If something goes wrong, you want your own lawyer. Google changed that, not me (example.) Performance based contracts. Growing in popularity. A lot of fun. Spinoff of affiliate marketing. If Idon't drive you biz, you don't have to pay me anything. Pitch a huge cost, scary. Pitch performance, and charge more for it. Esb proper baseline data. Be accurate. Always workoff of gross revenue. You get "x" percent of money. Don't gouge them for something that was easy for you to do. Be reasonable. Bring real value. Give them an out. Let them go when you are obviously not offering them any value anymore. More work is done is up front. Provide an early exit clause for the client. Don't force them to stay with you. Service - if you charge hourly, triple it! Don't be afraid to charge more money. Lower money brings in crappy clients who are more needy. They expect the moon for less. More value associated with higher fees. You must know what you're doing. Larger companies understand the higher paid consultant. You will be left alone to do your thing. It will change your client base. www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes download old episodes. www.seorockstars.com is his other site to come and visit.

JS:

Survival of the smallest in SEM Consulting. She also talks about underselling our services. She tells a story of someone who tripled fees and he increased his business. You can learn from "big dogs". Small biz don't have many resources. You rely on word of mouth lead generation. Lack of top 10 rankings for sem related terms. If you are new or small, your biz is not ranked as high as big dogs. Focus on local client base. Limited cash flow. Client issues are dealing with tech/design teams, external agencies, prior sem engagement/expecations, ego. You are dealing with your clients issues. Create sucessful client relationships, even before you start the work. Expectation managment. Prescreen your client, for better sucess rate. Client selection is the biggest factor. Do they understand SEO, have they hired others, committment, financial stability. Did they go through many SEM's before you? Find out how many? Why hasn't it worked for them? You want to be the savior but hold back from that. Why after two or three did they not work out? This is a red flag. Problem is likely on their side. Proceed with caution. Important to discover is their resources. Don't let them delete your work! Do they have access to your work and can mess with it? They may be dealing with their 3rd party providers, which is another hurdle for you. If they are limited, so are you.

Is your client available. Do they have resources available to you if you need them. Who is responsible for managing your campaign? Find out their Net payment date. Net 15, Net 60, Net 90 (no!). Determine whether you will have a direct accounting contact for payment and if you are okay with the arrangment. Get a contact. Person who signed the deal is not the person who signing the check in many cases. Communication is vital. Don't keep secrets. Doesn't fly. They need to know what your doing. Explain what you will do and not do and how. Describe your methods. Establish trust so they can handle risks or bad news better. They will feel informed. What are your expectations of their team throughout the project. Are their risks involved with the SEO process and if so, explain it to them.

Choose clients wisely. A lot of business going around. Make sure internal unity. Everyone is on the same page. Do they have good communication skills. Cultural fit. No ego factors. They shouldn't choose the top keywords. You do. Time zones are an issue. Some clients are casual, some are suit and tie. Pre-screen clients. Don't settle. Develop the long term potential clients rather than short term ones. Don't rush for cash flow reasons.

QA:

Tools - What kind of tools can a small shop use? Firefox extensions, web analytics, download
www.epier.com/ses. Web deveoper extension, search status search status, quirkco. web developer toolbar firefox, aaron wall seo book seoforfirefox extension. Trellian.com has good tools.

Pricing cross country issues. Pricing on first page will scare off new client? Demonstrate what you will do first. Give verbal overview and then make a presentation. Webex presentation.

Detlev Johnson is modding up this session. He introduces the show to this audience. And then explains the session at hand.

Brad Geddes (aka eWhisper) is up first, from LocalLaunch, asks people to turn off their cell phones.
Google AdWords supports over 200 countries, with 27 regional targeting options. He shows a screen shot of the countries screen in AdWords. All countries and territories is the default option, so be careful with that. He said you should use one country per campaign, and he will explain that more later. He then showed the regions and cities targeting features, down to Los Angeles, CA, San Jose, etc. But you can then choose the cities option. He said one of the advantages is that you may get a 5th line of ad text in the Google search page (it shows the geo specific data to the searcher, sometimes). Google also allows for radius targeting, type in a zip code and say you want to target within X miles of that zip code. Google also allows you to enter multiple points, intergrated with Google maps, you can click on the map, highlight and outline the region and that is where you will target. Google also allows you to preview your ads, as if you are in a specific geo location, so you can see what your advertisers will see, as if you were them (this tool is found in the ads diagnostic tool).
Microsoft adCenter supports 200 countries but only shows ads in 4 countries but they will role out more as time goes on. Geographic targeting is determined at the order level (ad group level). He then shows screen shots, all customers (all of the world) or you can select countries or regions.
Yahoo Search Marketing "Panama" is only available in the US now. 23 countries available, DMA targeting (US only), one account per country. Each country may have different editorial considerations. He then shows screen shots from the US based advertisers. You can select entire market versus regions (entire market is a country). You can drill down to state, region, etc and it shows you a highlighted map with your selection. They do have a zip code search, but it is not radius, it just shows you regions that are in or close to that zip code.
How does this work? They use user registration data, passport accounts, previous searches. They also use geographic queries (searching for chicago hotel). IP targeting, the most common technology used, he shows typically how it works (i.e. the ISPs host location, so it may not be 100% accurate if a customer uses them but is not in the same location as the ISP). So you should create two campaigns, one for geographic based campaigns and two for country based campaigns - so you can control each one. TYpes of geographic keywords, state, state abbreviations, cities, neighborhoods, zip codes, area codes, counties, airport codes and regional lingo.
Measuring Geo Campaigns: Measure statistics and create offers at the smallest, logical, geographic level possible. Different geographies respond to different offers. If targeting internationally, use one country per campaign.

Kevin Lee from Did It is next up, to give a match type review. Broad match is the default in Google and adCenter, so understand that. Phrase "quotes" in Google, Microsoft lets you check out. Exact is in brackets in Google. Make sure to use negative keywords to refine your audience. Advanced (Yahoo's combination of phrase and broad matches) and is Yahoo's default for Panama. Extended broad match and matchdriver. Google and Microsoft prefer that you add the plurals to the campaign separately. Yahoo uses MatchDriver. But Microsoft is currently experimenting with stemming. Google may use extended broad match on a plural or other stemming issue. Kevin always recommends doing more work and create longer, more specific keyword list. You improve relevance as you get better at managing your campaigns. You are trying to understand the searchers intent. That may change how you structure your campaigns and your landing pages. Use your match type to maximize your quality score. Mix match types to gain breadth of SERP coverage. And make sure to track everything. Make sure you understand that you can also control the "network mix." That is of contextual options and extended network (i.e. AOL and others from Google). Clicks from different segments of an engines network may need different bids. Leverage Google's FastTrack to track contextual and bid separately. Yahoo's Panama has URL tracking, that gives you more detail on your clicks. Your dealing with more than keyword lists, and there lots of ways to segment. Segmentation includes; plurals, day par,t, network control and demographic control. He then shows Microsoft adCenter, and shows you how you can bid boost against the refinements you make, those segments. Yahoo Panama allows you to select options at the campaign level. Google has bid boosting as well by day parting. He shows how day parting can make a huge difference in conversions. Because of segmentation, there are hundreds of ways to mine the tail. Then you can bid higher and increase conversions and get more orders. He reminds the audience about the SEMPO survey taking place now at SEMPO.org.

Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media is next up to talk about search engine relationships and agencies. Google's editorial process is that ads go up instantly, which is not 10% true. The automated system speeds up editorial review, it blocks trademark terms, grammar issues, etc. Yahoo's editorial process is mostly manually reviewed, it depends on search volume and search sensitivity such as "snow blowers" are automatically reviewed). With Panama, Yahoo's review process changes to Fast Ad Activation, they go up relatively quickly, but not all ads go up within 5 minutes. Yahoo places an emphasis on post submission reviews. They will continue to randomly sweep accounts to catch editorial infringements. Manual reviews have human error, so appeal them. Microsoft is sent through automatic filter, anything that fails, they go through manual review. It can take ten days to clear in MSN. Google Trademarked Terms, you can bid on trademarked keywords but not use them in the ad text in the US. Some trademarked terms placed on a block list. Trademarked terms are considered in quality score. There are issues and weirdness with it, of course. Yahoo! Search Marketing trademark Policy; Yahoo originally allowed people to bid on trademarked terms, but as of march 2006, they no longer allow it. However, resellers and info sites can bid on those terms but there are explicit conditions. MSN Trademark Policy; they don't allow ads in keywords or ad copy that are TMs. But TM holders need to file this with Microsoft. There are exceptions like with the others. She brings up the Rescuecom vs. Google in September 2006 and the buying for the home versus humble adobe in October 2006. She then goes into explaining how MSN's ads are getting more relevant. She compares Google in August 06 to now and all is good. Customer service; the search engines are helpful and the help might be better from specific customer reps. You should try to find good people. And there are higher service tiers at the search engines but does that translate to better service? Yes and No - it depends on the representative you get.

Brad Byrd from NewGate is last up who gives the company pitch first, and then said they were just acquired by icrossing.com (congrats!). Management Interface: He shows off the Google AdWords interface. He then shows off the new Yahoo Panama interface. Most of this was shown in previous presentations. Followed by the MSN interface, he said they took dynamic keyword insertion deeper than other ppc engines have done so far. Ad Delivery Optimization; Google auto optimizes creatives delivery, but this is not 100%, since its automated. Google provides two options, (1) optimize and (2) rotate, and rotate evenly delivers each creative evenly, to each ad unit but optimize will slant the delivery to the ad creative that generates a higher CTR. Yahoo also offers an ad delivery option, in the ad group setting (which differs from Google). Google's model focuses on click through rate in a campaign, Yahoo looks at each individual ad group with each keyword and creative. MSN has no option to turn on or off ad optimization, so one would assume the creatives are rotated evenly. Brad then gets into tracking tools. Yahoo was the first to introduce additional URL data. There is a tracking URL option in the admin console, and you can term them on or off, campaign wide. They will tell you match type, keyword, and the search query. There is currently no way to identify which creative was served for that specific click. Google uses a FastTrack or ValueTrack, it is an advertiser intimated tracking URL, you define your own URL and you can drop in your own features and values to get data from data. You can get search versus content, placement identifier and creative identifier can come from Google. MSN provides similar features, matchtype, order item id, ad id, and query string. Major Innovations in PPC ad networks. The Yahoo Watch List, a shortcut for tracking keywords or ad groups that are top of mind for you. MSN allows for creative templates, which provides additional customization on a per keyword level while still working in a template.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Today begins the first day of SES Chicago 2006. I arrived yesterday and we are all excited for the event. Again, our live coverage schedule is posted and so are the details of those contributing towards the coverage. So expect some long, detailed, a bit messy, posts going live within the next few hours and throughout the next 4 days.

Are you here? Do you want to be?

A forum thread is taking place at Search Engine Watch Forums with a virtual party, of itself.

I just posted our coverage schedule for the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference here. As you can see, we have two new names to add to the crew working on this coverage for you. As usual, we have Chris Boggs from Avenue A RazorFish. Our new additions include Kim Krause from the esteemed Cre8asite Forums and Rob Kerry a SEW moderator also known as evilgreenmonkey. More details about these contributors at the authors section. If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to post them.

Please be aware, that our coverage is is almost in real time. The conference coverage is basically note taking. The grammar and spelling will not be 100%, we aim for speed, comprehensiveness and timelines.

If you see any of us, please free to stop us. Maybe you will get a Free YoYo.