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

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

• 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

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

• 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

Thursday, December 7, 2006

• 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�