Search Engine Strategies 2006 San Jose Archives

We have completed an other *somewhat* successful quadruple coverage of the SES conference. Huge thank you to Benjamin Pfeiffer of Rank Smart, Chris Boggs of Avenue A | Razorfish and Lee Odden of Top Rank Results.

We have covered a whopping 38 sessions, would have been 39, but for some reason, I lost one. I would like to personally apologize for any mistakes, omissions, grammar issues, if it is hard to read and if we insulted anyone. The coverage is meant to be extremely quick but with that comes issues. Anyway... Here is a recap of the sessions we have covered...

Monday, August 7th, 2006:
+ Social Search Overview: Yahoo!, Windows Live & Eurekster
+ Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies
+ Searcher Behavior Research Update
+ Social Search: Up Close With Yahoo!
+ Leveraging Social Media (MySpace, YouTube, & Other Social Networks)
+ Does Demographic Targeting Matter?
+ Social Search: Up Close With Google (Google Co-op)
+ Communicating With Customers
+ Searchonomics: Serious & Fun Stats
+ Search and Branding
+ SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging
+ The Search Laboratories
+ Domaining & Address Bar Driven Traffic

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006:
+ Can You Please Them All? (Google, Yahoo!, MSN & Ask.com)
+ Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues
+ Reputation Monitoring & Management
+ Search Arbitrage Issues
+ Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues
+ Blog and Feed Search SEO
+ The Bot Obedience Course - New Yahoo! Site Explorer Tool Announced
+ News Search SEO
+ Search Algorithm Research
+ Search Engines: Friend or Foe?

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006:
A Conversation With Google CEO Eric Schmidt
+ Big Site Big Brand SEM
+ Linking Strategies
+ Big Ideas For Small Sites & Small Budgets
+ When Search Engines Do Search Marketing (AOL, Business.com, Yahoo! & Local.com)
+ Link Baiting & Viral Search Success
+ Usability & SEO - Two Wins for the Price of One
+ SEM for Non-Profits & Charities
+ Pricing & Contracts For The Small SEM Shop
+ The Vice Presidents Of Search Marketing

Thursday, August 10th, 2006:
+ Search APIs (Yahoo! Developer Network, YSM API, Google AJAX API & AdWords API)
+ Vendor Chat on Measuring Success
+ Search Engine Q&A On Links (Ramez MSN Search, Kaushal Ask.com, Adam Google & Rajat Yahoo!)
+ Balancing Organic and Paid Listings
+ Organic Listing Forums (Danny Sullivan In Costume)

Yea, last minute change in coverage. Why? because, well, Danny is doing a "short presentation before we begin." He lost a bet with Thomas about a World Cup soccer deal and he had to put on, well this...

Danny then warns the folks that the search engines are listening so be careful what you say.

I am only going to cover questions that are interesting, IMO... Otherwise, I will just relax. So you know, I just found out one of the sessions I covered was not posted and it was lost. The Search Engine Bloggers sessions with Matt Cutts, Gary Price, Nile and Jeremy Z. Sorry about that, it was a pretty cool session.

Q: What is the next big component of the algorithm?
A: Dave Naylor said it will be the same, link analysis.
Mike Grehan said user behavior. Citation analysis is more like peer review these days.
Todd Friesen said overall nothing has changed, you can overload certain things and boost yourself to the top. It is still just linking and we have a lot of time left.
Bruce Clay you will see a wide spread use of complementary tools, what do you I mean I search for "java"...
Dave added, looking at the AOL data, and he saw such random searches based on the persons token ID, personalization is sooo hard, he said.

Dave says I would like Yahoo to add to Site Explorer to add a way to say, hey, I don't want that link. A way to discredit the links pointing to you.

Balancing Organic and Paid Listings

Moderated by Alex Bennert from Beyond Ink

Peter Hershberg from Reprise Media
Overview of paid and organic. Will talk about how they can be used effectively in combination with each other. Says that organic clicks represent 75% of total clicks. Organic listings are basically an impartial endorsement of the pages. This is a long term solution. Front loaded cost required for SEO. Huge impact on site traffic. Paid search takes the remaining clicks. Also has benefits. Can control messaging and placement, on demand. Broad distribution channels if syndicating results and/or using contextual opportunities. Performance pricing.

Organic + paid equals lasting impact + immediate results. Goes though some more explanation. 5 out of 6 consumers do not understand the difference between organic and paid. They have seen that paid search enhances organic listing when same site has both top listings. Gets into some examples of integration. They see benefit on the publishing side. Lifecycle of a news story: published, blogged, then searched. You can target during each part of the cycle. Paid search for published, con textual ads for blogs and news outlets, and organic for searched. Does another example regarding a news story of the California heat wave and how they did creative for cnn.com paid listings. One more example: Hezbollah news. Nice to get different types of results, such as specific info an recent crisis in paid area vs a longer history of Hezbollah in organics.

Speaks then briefly with some more examples including a branded search and some entertainment searches. They think analytics are the most important bridge between paid and organic, and they use a software that can tell the difference between them. They can optimize against top paid performers, and use organic results to refine keyword list. Suggests that everyone give a lot of consideration as to how the two tactics can work together.

Craig Hordlow from Red Bricks Media, LLC.
Fact: when searchers see a website listed both organically and paid, they are more likely to click to a site. Could give “SEM Commandments,” but this isn’t why he is here. Wants to recommend people put aside the dogma. The above fact is actually unimportant, because there is no mention of goals or cost. Goes into some biology stuff and compares “Le Chatelier Principle” to search. To compete, you have to have a superior process and technology. Recommends using “A.R.P.” Accountability, Reporting, and Process. Accountability discusses how to structure search programs players. There can be problems with accountability both with in-house and agency. For example, business units might compete against each other in an in-house scenario. Talks about how many in-house will be Jack(ass) of all trades. Recommends asking proper questions like conversion goals, responsibility for overseeing? Show an example of a kw you are pursuing in SEO since PPC goals are not being met. Goals should be clearly articulated.

Create goals at the keyword level. Use reports that show the synergies between SEO and PPC efforts. Shows a “keyword portfolio analysis,” which is a Spreadsheet with common metrics and KPI’s for both SEO and PPC. Goes though a variety of interesting scenarios with one outperforming the other. Recommends that you be wary of using multiple vendors for reporting. Goes into the importance of keyword level reporting. Need to have a “line item of action items.” Begin report with a recap of action items. Conclude with a summary of action items assigned to each individual. Conclusion is that the Internet will require you to manage your marketing with increased efficiencies.

Abu Noaman from Elliance
Paid versus Organic: Deciding which to Use and When. Tells of speaking to a couple of the presenters and finding out that even senior mangers do not rally know right off-hand how they divide budgets between SEO and Paid Search. He finds that most of their clients spend about 10% of their overall marketing budget on Internet. Senior marketers want to be able to structure “fair amounts” of budgets on and offline. How much should you be spending on paid versus SEO? Will give an overview on how they approach this.

Typical challenges faced determines the allocation of budget. Some problems include: excess inventory, timed offers, product launch, site launch, customer acquisition, brand awareness, retention. Some of the questions are more long term than short term. So these goals will help determine the budgeting between SEO and paid. Clearing inventory, for example. They go 75% PPC and 25% sponsored links. Timed offers: 25% SEO, 50% PPC, and 25% “ePR” (online buzz). Product launches: 20% SEO, 40% PPC, 20% ePR, 20% sponsored links. You need more balance in this situation. Site launch: 15%ePR, 10% links, 50% SEO, and 25% PPC. Customer acquisition: 30% SEO, 40% sponsored links, 10% each links, ePR, and PPC. Once again, need a well balanced portolio for acquisition over long term. Brand awareness is 25% each SEO, ePR, Sponsored links and PPC. Retention: looking for reassurance of purchase. 40% ePR, 10% PPC, 50% SEO.

Does a short case study…have to go now. That’s all folks! See you in Chicago for the next SES coverage.

Ramez Naam from MSN Search has two slides. Links are for three things, (1) discovery (what pages exists), (2) reputation (how important is this page) and (3) annotation (what is this page about). What are good principles of links? Offer links in your pages that are useful to your users. He said use shorter and more readable links. He said use descriptive links. He said make sure your link navigation is useful. Search engine algorithms change rapidly, so use these principles, because those will help 6 months down the road. Giving specific help now may not help tomorrow, so principles are key.

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask.com is now up. He shows the general link analysis slide with A pointing to B point to C, etc. Then he shows the community, Teoma, link analysis approach with hubs and authorities within communities. Global popularity... Clustering techniques to cluster these links.... All links are not equal... Be cautious of reciprocal links and purchasing links (it is like buying votes or reviews). Avoid link farms, cloaking, hidden links and links in images are not understood. Become an authority on your subject, focus on your business and content...

Adam Lasnik from Google (minimatt) without a presentation will keep it short. We are all interested in having webmasters make links that are useful for their users. It is not a numbers game, he said. He said the optimal number of links is 42, of course he is joking. It is not a numbers game. It is about making your links relevant. A garden site with links to mortgages, is not relevant. Do your links pass the "smell test" or the "common sense test." He then said if all the links say the same thing about you, then something is a bit sketchy.

Rajat Mukherjee from Yahoo said he will go off links become we are kind of obsessing over links. Because search engines are doing a lot more outside links to determine popularity. "7 links for highly effective people." (1) ysearchblog.com, track this blog for good info. (2) answers.yahoo.com, social search, Yahoo! sees a strong indication that users also vote in this base. Answers is a very specific case of this. (3) builder.search.yahoo.com is a different way at looking at content. People don't have a great search experience on searching on your site, so this helps. (4) myweb.yahoo.com is a very strong social search element, social bookmarks. (5) siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com shows you your inlinks in detail. (6) help.yahoo.com/search shows you all you want to know about Yahoo! Search. (7) search.yahoo.com is the main search engine.

Q & A Time:

Q: He built a site, really good site and finally sold it. Now he is building a new site. But he is building up the links slowly, even though he can get links in a second because of his past situation. It is really annoying going slow when he can do it overnight. He said he doesn't want to "irritate you," the search engines.
A: Yahoo said go organic and natural.
MSN said don't think of it as a speed issue but a relevance issue. If they are relevant, there won't be any problem.
Google said if they naturally want to link to you, then let it happen. If they want to do it on their own, and you're not twisting their arm. Don't worry about what other people are doing. Continue what you are doing.
Ask said that it should be fine. You see this in blog links. Slashdotted, digged, etc.
(Matt Cutts is in the room he (looks like he) is itching to talk, but he is holding back).

Q: Running in a very competitive industry, they have invested a lot of money creating the the site. He has seen people link to him with from very bad places. In an effort to harm his reputation.
A: Google said it is something what they have heard and they understand. But links are just one factor, there are many ways to judge the spam level of a site, the trust level of a site. Bad links by themselves in-themselves won't typically hurt you. I would not worry to much about that, Google said.
Yahoo said there are thresholds, like when tech.yahoo.com launched, it got tons of links above that threshold. If you go above a threshold, you will be manually review (did he just say that).
Ask.com said if there are bad links, they will be discounted and not counted.
MSN said as long as there are positive signals you should be ok?

Q: Do you consider non hyperlinked urls written on content, like www.yahoo.com, written out, to be a link?
A: MSN said they don't count those.
Google said, "i understand," the AP has a policy to never link, so a lot of readers may be aware of that and you may still get traffic from it. The purpose of pagerank, it won't have that "same type of weight."

Q: Bill S. asked links pointing from your pages from older more mature sites and there are some "web decay" going on with broken links. There was a search patent on issues with web decay and soft 404s. How do you deal with that?
A: Yahoo said in general they do track from an authority perspective how long a site has been around and how long those pages are there. If you are talking about repurposing a domain for a new set of content, those things do get flagged and get reviewed.
MSN said they use every possible piece of info will be used. How old is the page, when it was registered, etc. Pages with broken links are bad for users, so take care of your pages.
Ask.com repeats that, yes, it is bad for the users.

Q: If I have a page that have 404s for a year or so, will there be a discounting factor, if I put something back up?
A: Ask.com said they dont have a time discount based on that, but they have to find the URL again.
Google said you have choices, you can do nothing with it, or 301 it to a new page or continue to update the page. The last two options will be more favorable then the first option.
Yahoo! added that it may be useful for your users who have linked to you in the past.

Q: When will you start counting in RSS feeds that you index.
A: Ask.com said they look at them separately in blog and feed search compared to web search. In blog search, those links are looked at. They do circle that content on the main web search (RSS Smart Answers, I assume).
Google said they also have a blog search engine. He doesn't know how they are handled in the main search engine.

Q: Real estate question about link resources pages, should they be removed?
A: Google said there has been a lot of work to determine the relevancy and purpose of the links, if your example is not taking the users first, then...If you feel those links will give your users a benefit, because the link has more unique content.... If not, in the aggregate, then that is "kinda junk."
Yahoo! said it is also an issue on how your pages rank. If you rank well.
Danny brings up the nofollow attribute.

Danny asks the audience, how many of you are "less freaked out about who you link to?" and Matt Cutts raised his hands. Danny also said that Eric Schmidt said link buying is ok, he may be joking.

Q: Rand asks Ask.com, tell us about the growth of the blogosphere, and how it affects normal web search...
A: Ask.com said that blog and feed search... Bloggers talk about many different things. Not a real answer... on this. but what can you expect?
MSN said the question was philosophical, so he will give a philosophical answer.
Google adds, and I am pulling out a quote, although it may not be "topical, it still may be relevant."

Q: Danny asked are you looking at a link to a page and the value of the page trust or are you looking at the whole domain and trust of the domain?
A: Yahoo! said there are other algorithms that tell you the trust of a site, not just links. They also do look at a site's aggregate popularity.
Google said it depends, sometimes it may be inappropriate to share the link love of a page and aggregate that across a whole domain. It is probably clear in which times it is done.
MSN said diddo on Google. Look at Geocities, the domain as a whole doesn't make sense.
Ask.com said they do have a domain level trust but it plays into a whole bunch of things and it doesn't always come into play in rankings.

Q: I have two URLs one with my main site and one with my game portion of the main site (on a different URL). How do I merge the game site into the main site?
A: Google answered 301s, when you want to point to new pages to old pages, generally 301s are a good way to go. 301s will past PageRank, will be not be instant but it will happen.

Q: A follow up on the 301s... If you run a super site and then 301 to a new location. Will you eventually get full credit for the links coming in? And how important is it for us, or it is necessary for us to go back to the sites to change the links?
A: MSN will give you full credit with proper 301s. There is no critical need to change those links. But it is a little better for the user to get those links change.
Google said they will also pass the full value through. He diddos MSN.

Vendor Chat on Measuring Success

Moderated by Alex Bennert from Beyond Ink

John Marshall from Clicktracks.
“It’s all about persuasion” Focus on this instead of ROI. ROI only describes two points in the customer’s journey. Does nothing to help you understand all the micro-decisions made during the buying process. If you go to the end point, you miss a lot of data. There are many reasons that the ROI Data suffers. It’s such a long journey. Dispel a myth about funnel analysis. On the web, this doesn’t work. Inherited from offline sales process. An online funnel is more like a “series of tornados.” Eventually the mindset of the customer takes them to the next mental stage in progression towards purchase. To define a good funnel, divide site into stages. Think about what mental state people are in each step. Aggregate lots of distinct pages into meaningful page groups, then segment by conversion ability. Shows an example of their site stats, and how if came through search, most persuasive sections and landing pages changed from entry point to entry point. Organic was most “swayed” by “services” page. Landing page for paid that worked best was the “Click fraud” page. Yet another best one for email entrance. Closes with summary.

Akin Arikan From Unica
Shows an example of a disaster when bidding on web tracking (“hurricane tracking web site”). Recommends starting with paid keyword report and ends up with recommendation.

Brett Crosby Google Analytics
Discusses history of G Analytics. Interesting journey since launch in November as a free product. Happy to say that the wait for G A is now only about 15 minutes from signup.
Starts with a discussion recommending “analyzing & acting on the data.” G Analytics support offers free email support. No predefined support packages to “force you into a model.” Use of the product is very intuitive. They recommend that if you are “serious about analytics,” that you hire or train someone to run in-house products. Some client prefer DIY. They have “conversion university” online. Teaches best practices methodology for driving traffic, honing conversion process, etc. Has multilingual online help and FAQ. Has user supported Google Group around analytics, moderated by several people, in their division and also have a blog. Shows a cool new logo/button that looks like the “GAP” button but says “Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.” Finishes with a reminder that the best thing you can do is analyze your data and act on it.

Chris Knoch from Omniture
“Web Analytics and Bid Management” How to take customized web metrics for your goals and apply them to your keywords. They have seen that traditional conversion metrics differ per organization. Some use average pages viewed per conversion, for example. Gives an example of an online car and truck magazine and the “cost per car research page view” and “cost per truck research page view.” These are custom numbers that give the particular metric that is best for them. Then he shows a specific example of how to build a bid rule based on assigning costs. Uses “action sets.” High end: if the cost of the car research or truck research page views is 3X target, then automatically lower bid by 30% and keep doing this until you risk loosing too much traffic. You can further customize using this methodology. You not only want to set a ceiling, but also a floor. So if you are spending “not enough,” then increase bid.

Warren Raisch from WebSideStory
Will speak about HitBox. Says he agrees with John that conversion points other than the final are important to monitor. “Micro-conversions” help to measure success and failures throughout site, particularly to focus on the failures. In each area you can see” where you are losing it.” Are you not gaining trust? Is your form bad? They use a “return on action” calculator. “Let’s look at what you can do this week. They take a funnel approach initially, looking at total visitors in the “11 step process” as they go through a website. The “fallout points” are what you need to identify and study. A little information can be a dangerous thing if misinterpreted. They are using a push model,” putting the info into an easy format like a Word document or PPT slide to make it easy for people to analyze and take action. Shows some examples of their reporting outlook and some other metrics. Looks pretty cool, they are
Called “Active dashboards.”

They also look at what they call “active alerts” or “active reports.” This way they can push KPI’s directly to someone’s desk. Has “alarm” kind of system that changes the skin and launches and auto email if some thing important happens. Finishes with a brief look at the importance of navigation, and how they were able to change navigation titling and double traffic.

Barry Parshall from WebTrends
Has no PPT presentation. “Wants us to look at him.” He feels that web analytics has not done a good job of relationship marketing over the years. “What is missing is people.” Goes through a story about people making journeys through websites. It is very critical to focus on what your customers care about and when they care about it.

(added 8/16. one of the panelists sent me the follwoing, describing the last question of the Q&A:

"this question is for everyone on the panel except Brett (from Google Analytics). I am a happy Google Analytics user now, why would I ever consider using one of your products?" The other vendors sat there quietly for several moments. Then John Marshal wisely replied, "Unless everyone here wants to hear 5 sales pitches, maybe it would be best if you contacted our sales reps."

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo is up first. He explains that an API is a consistent way for a programmer to work with a third party software. The traditional way to do that in the past was to do screen scraping. With an API, there is a way you should pull the data, this is the supported and official way to get to that data. The Yahoo Developer Network has a whole suite of APIs available; search, hotjobs, finance, traffic, travel, widgets, JS code, and so on. If you are thinking about trying them out, you need to come to the Yahoo site and get an application ID (a unique id to track you), there are simple URLs (REST interface, no SOAP, simple XML results and RSS also), there are 5,000 requests/services/IP/day limits and they posted many examples of their site. He then handed it off to his colleague.

Dan Boberg of Yahoo to talk about the Search Marketing (paid side) of the APIs. They are building the API new from ground up with the new ad platform (panama). Incorporates services based on new YSM ad platform, they are using a SOAP protocol, they are also using a simple new licensing format with a usage model and there are new authorization types such as roles and agency roles. There is a YSM API Sandbox 1.0 only US based, forecasting provides sample data, etc. They have command groups such as Marketing, AdvancedTools, Research, BasicReports, CampaignOptimization, UserManagement and CustomerManagement.

Mark Lucovsky from Google, code.google.com has their APIs. Google AJAX search API is simple, it allows you to do parallel search over web, maps, video, blogs, etc. AJAX, JSON, HTML Microformats and its open and free. If you know HTML, you can use this API he said. They want search to fit in naturally on your Web site (be it maps, search, video, etc.). He skips over a case study on this, he said even a guy like Tim O'Reilly can do this. They repackaged it as an iGoogle Module on the Google homepage, so you can reuse it there. They want search everywhere, even while you are building lists. He also shows how you can add it to blogs and message boards, where he added to a phpBB forum, a video clip added to the message. He shows examples of email integration. As well as any custom application, integration.

Rohit Dhawan from Google to talk about the marketing side of Google APIs. The AdWords API overview. Users can write programs and applications to perform functions in each of these four areas; account management, campaign management, reporting and traffic estimation. The AdWords API is designed to be a do it yourself program using the developer web site, developers can find valuable resources to help them create applications. The developers guide is a guide from programmers, the key components are reference docs, WSDL's, etc. The developer forum is a Google Group message board where developers can interact with other developers and also interact with Google. He then does some case studies. Online retailer, they used to manually pull data from the AdWords web site, and they would scrub through it and look through other programs and merge them together. After a few days they made decisions based on that data. So they then integrated with the AdWords API. Now they can see on a real time basis, if the product is out of stock, then don't advertise it. Revenue has increased while reducing operational expenses. Case Study #2. Large agency did it manually, so for managing several dozen campaigns, it takes a lot of time. They integrated and they had "real time" feedback loop reduced risk leading to shorter planning cycles." Case Study #3: Small advertiser, who spends $3,000 per month. she integrated and profit doubles and conversions increased 20% with less manual work. She manage the ads manually but the bids were done automatically. Top ten tips: (1) Phased approach is best when integrating (2) understand your business drivers, (3) understand your customers' business drivers, (4) understand the adwords auction system, (5) monitor and manage your quota, (6) focus on quality keywords that drive click volume, (7) align bid strategies with goals, (8) actively participate on the developer forums, (9) read the AdWords blogs for tips and latest information and (10) continue to think of new and creative ways to leverage the API.

Please excuse grammar, readability, mistakes and omissions. This is covered in real time and posted literally minutes after the session is over.

Danny Sullivan introduces this panel, how he was amazed big companies have VPs of SEM.

Abhilash Patel from Passages Malibu is up first. Lots of people raised their hand for people who have more than a hundred employees in the company, wow. Since when does SEM/SEO get a VP? So who needs a VP for search? As "relative CPA" valuations and studies become more widely read, anyone with significant offline media budgets, which is more important, sales or leads and if you separate sales and marketing, it is time for a VP of search and if you want to quantify the market for the growth. How big should a company be that deserves a VP? Are you prepared to go after 70-80% of search traffic? The future of corp SEM. Obstacles and opportunities, if profit maximization dictates a smaller operation. What does the VP do? Progress on a daily basis with constant execution, a level of harmony with the technologist and sales/marketing, independent of growth stats and revenue channel numbers, accountability for significant levels of traffic, and for e-commerce you maintain affiliate relations, and providing invaluable consumer data back to other arms of the company for employment. Things he did? install web stats, web usability, SEM, and lots of work in click fraud, does organic SEOs (content production, site pops, link building, reputation management, affiliate management, and business development through the web) and then viral marketing and community building. The argument for in house and the relationship with vendor outsourcing: they are not mutually exclusive, many things can't be outsourced, how many times have you been burned by a vendor, and the scalability issues. Case Study; skipping...

Marshall Simmonds VP of NY Times and About.com and also a consulting firm. NY Times has high resistance to change, 11 million documents, email registration wall, paid subscription wall, it issues and so on. Working together was dealing with turf wars and getting people to work together, education was key and is key here. There was an internal approach, reach each player. There was an external approach, users, spiders, engines and the mother factor. The process is to integrate search into the workflow, small changes are big results, buy in from the bottom up, enhancing writing styles and multi-departmental communications. Everyone owns search marketing; the challenges of working with old school marketing... Selling search to NYTimes, they had to show the results of About.com, easy to follow examples, finding projects with extensive involvement, consistent communication. He shows some examples, all very good examples. Training is key, so they do lots of training over and over again. Checklists are key, he said (unique titles, annotations on all links, etc.). Putting fun graphics in fun of people. And then establish baseline metrics. External they make it more user friendly, push back registration walls, SE friendly approach. He then sums up.

Sean Smith from Citigroup made me remove this and threatened a lawsuit. So it is removed. Apparently, I misunderstood what he said. This is the first time I have ever been threatened like this.

Ken Jurina from Epiar, Inc. is up first and says to start that the information presented is their opinion and there are many ways to do things. He then goes into various industry pricing models. 1. Retainer-based – monthly fees (6-18 month contract) or the search and peak. 2. Fee-for-service model – project based, with finite scope about what is going to be done. 3. Pay per performance – skin in the game, commission structure. 4. Hourly consultation – he says this may be a tough one as when you have an hourly rate and a fixed expense. He says the services offered are more valuable than an hourly rate can compensate for. There standard SEO services, is more service based than monthly fee. There are three “branded” core service phases. They go into extensive keyword research (20,000-100,000 phrases). Keyword placement & site architecture. He says not every clients needs are the same. He talks about virgin domain vs. established site with past SEO and can be an inherent mess. There are different level of services available, which may include website audits, web analytics, monthly maintenance plans, hourly consultation.

The importance of profiling. Determining your target market and go after it. Small companies usually buy in quicker, but can’t afford the services. Larger companies can afford, but buy-in is not always possible across depts. Or there a long sales cycle. Mid-size seems to work great for them. When you can talk to the owner or c-level executive approval is easier without having to go through marketing or IT departments. Now, from a pricing and perception side of things. There can be some initial sticker shock from prices they charge. No opportunity for clients to “taste the goods”. The redid the pricing models, and starting presenting the ROI and benefit from the beginning. As for proposal must be detailed and comprehensive. But get to the point, they have them down to 5 to 6 pages. Show the transparency in the services. Ensure that logic evident, clients buy in & refer when they understand the deliverables. Proposals and contracts much be seriousness and professionalism. They define the work without being bound to a guarantee. Cover Your Arse clauses should be in the proposals and contracts as well.

Pricing based on what can bear is important. When pricing is out of the major marketing such as New York and LA. They can be a tough sell. Small town companies except big town services for small town prices. That can be tough. Don't put up with it if you can.

So why should we go with you? Common question most clients consider. You choice between being a “me too” organization and offering a unique value proposition. What are your competitive advantage, are your competitively prices, experience, etc.. In closing a little advice. Keep your focus, niche serve and product. Don’t be distracted by shiny object. Often flexible payment plans to accommodate your customers, costs can be spread of the projects. Work with thousands of dollars a month. Develop a strong home base. Well known local brands = credibility.

So what about promoting your own brand? Finding it tough to rank in the SERPS? Promote your brand, promote yourself. Be active, present, blog, doing training seminars. Become a recognized experts. Awards? Not-so obvious conferences & tradeshows. Trademarks, copyrights – register them (increases goodwill). Develop an exit strategy… do you have one?

Todd Frisen from Range Online Media opens talks about how he tried everything when he was one-man operation. Now contract issues to never compromise. 1. Indemnification – indemnification is a two way street. Make sure your contract only agrees to indemnify your client for negligent acts, errors, or missions. 2. Agreement Termination – a contract that allows either party to terminate for any reasons with 10 days written notice isn’t a good contract. Restrict a client right to terminate the contract to you committing a serious breach that cannot be remedied with 14 days time. 3. Intellectual Property Rights – never agree to relinquish you intellectual rights to anything you create or contribute to unless you’ve negotiated a separate (large) fee. An SEO should not be a “work for hire consultant. 4. Confidentiality. 5. Resolving Disputes – Key point he made here, resolution needs to happen in your jurisdiction. Never compromise on this one. It could cost you a ton of money. Make sure that any potential legal disputes are settled in the your jurisdiction. You might want to also require mediation/resolvement in your area only.

He next goes into performance based contracts. He says establish a proper baseline data. Before you can determine if a rev share deal will work, you need to be able to properly access where the potential client is at. What is the overall search activity for their space. How well do they currently rank for those terms. How many search related sales are they currently making. Always work off gross revenue as you don’t have any control over net profit. Be reasonable on the percentage you ask for. If you know you can remove a robots.txt file and triple their revenue overnight, don’t ask for a percentage that will make your 100k a month in two weeks. Make it based on what you think it would take for you to be making the same amount you would charge for upfront consulting in a reasonable amount of time (30-60) days. Set a time for the contract to expire. Provide an early exit clause for the client.

So what do you charge hourly? Good. Double It! Great information.

Jessie Stricchoila from Alchemist Media, Inc is up third. She says if your not a big dog or large SEM operation, there is a good chance you are dealing with some of the following issues in your business development. There is good reliance on Word of Mouth lead generation. Lack of top 10 rankings possibly in the engines for local terms. If there is a limited cash flow/lack of marketing budget to spend on paid advertising – on the web, or elsewhere. She next goes into client relationship management in the SEM world is unique for many reasons. We are dealing with , among other things. Expectation management with a ever fluctuating SEM industry. There is cost variation due to lack of commodization of SEM-related services (not that is a bad thing). Some of the things that make a good client relations is, clients understanding of the SEM industry. If there are prior SEM engagements, how about development resources, commitment and availably of those resources and the stability of the organization.

She next goes into companies that have prior SEM engagements. Zero to two SEM engagements is fine, but when they have been through 3 SEM companies this is a red flag. You need to investigate this. She next recommends what you need to inquire about the client’s accounting process? Is it Net 30? Net 60? Determine where you will have a direct accounting person to communicate with. Jessie recommends as well that in regards to communications, that you need to tell the client exactly what you are going to do and won’t do.

Stephen Anderson from Rock Coast Media is up first. He is going to go through PPC in the search space for non-profits. He says that search tends to work, and the challenge for non-profits is that there is not many pro bono opportunities available. Google has its grants program however there are some stipulations when you use it.

Non profits must compete in an open marketing. It can be an extremely effective medium and donations can still be driven. He gives an example of Amnesty International USA which wanted to drive donations online. They started working with their objective, looked at keywords. They developed copy and landing page copy categorized by brand, issues, current events and donation keywords. The result of the campaign was a success, it drove 76K in donations. When they looked under the hood, the brand keyword where driving the success of the campaign. A comparison between brand terms and non-brand terms, the brand terms outweighed the non-brand terms considerably.

Another one of their clients, Environmental Defense wanted to drive sign up for their online emissions petition. They did the copy and landing page work, over all the results were a bit different than Amesty. SEM recruits of high value over time. They had about a 100% subscriber retention rate. They were very active recruits which could be marketed to later on. They also asked friends to sign up as well. What the campaign was trying to do, is get Bush not to veto the stem cell bill. They did take advantage of search spikes on current events. They also addressed the emotion /intent behind the search. In summary, search works, there are high value recruits out there for non-profits.

Kevin Gottesman from DonorDigital and starts by explaining what these pictures have in common of extreme figures and says that those are keyword he buys every day. What his organization do is fundraising, list building ( to convert to donors) and contacting donors. He gives the example of Defcon, which was trying to get Pres. Bush not to veto the stem cell bill and do a lot of politicking to get politicians to support the initiates of Defcon stem cell campaign. Another example is the American Jewish World Service which wanted to form a rally to stop genocide in Darfur, Sudan. They created a campaign around keyword unique to African aid. They did postcards and online campaign; it had really great success of rallying people for support. His last case study is from the Humane Society and the pet evacuation & transportation act. They wanted to urge congress to pass a bill. They had 5.5 million impression, 60,000 clicks, and lots of new members to the humane society. He gives some stats, that 200 billion was given to charity in 2005. There has been an increase in donors giving money online. Declining direct mail efficiency however. The need is for solutions for online fundraising, ie. Search.

Rick Mitchell from World Vision is up third. This speaker came up to a bunch of people in the audience before hand to see who was in the audience. He says that donations are becoming a vertical all there own. World Vision does a lot of children in disaster areas. They are positioned globally in 100 countries to respond rapidly to disasters. They are prepared to help 24/7. Search popularity has increased in non-profit search. He talks about how his charity has done all this world with world disaster and responded to places of need. The Asia tsunami is mentioned a lot. He puts up some interesting stats about the increase in online giving. It has risen dramatically. He says that when there is a disaster people go to the internet. The term “tsunami” became a household name. He next goes into how World Vision does PPC and search.

Moderated by Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ with presentations by Matt Bailey of SiteLogic and Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs.

First up is Shari who answered questions about usability and search.

What is usability? Shows term highlighting in Google search results. Titles, snippets and web address.

Web site usability serves two purposes: Relevancy and encouraging clicks to your site.

Usability addresses all search behaviors.
- Querying (refining, expanding)
- Browsing, surfing
- Pogo-sticking (Jared Spool)
- Foraging
- Scanning
- Reading

What is web site usability? Shari believes usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use (Jakob Nielsen). Usability is task oriented. Usability meets a balance between satisfying users and business goals.

Information architecture precedes building the interface of a web site. Shares interface usability best practices. A balance between good architecture and the interface means the site has meaning whether there is search engine friendly content or not.

Interface: Areas of a website that are of benefit to users and search engines
- Navigation
- Linking

People need to understand where there are on a web site. A sense of place is what tells people where they are in a web site and also provides information to search engines.

Cross linking is important: horizontal and vertical. Vertical links are often breadcrumb links. Breadcrumb links provide "sense of place" cues, they are keyword focused and also provide a keyword optimization opportunity. They also communicate visited and unvisited pages.

Also need horizontal cross links. Types: embedded text links, related links, alternative links, alphabetic links.

Site maps should be part of the information architecture. Add a link both above and below the fold.

URL structure is part of the interface. Hyphens are better than an underscore. Also avoid problematic characters: &, ?, =, $, +, %. Short urls with keywords are usually better.

URL structure does not affect ranking, but it does affect accessibility.

Shari winds things up with a case study on Medicine.net and a reminder that usability is for both users and search engines.

Next and last up is Matt Bailey from SiteLogic with a special pen that he used to mark up example web pages.

SEO - get people to the site.
Usability - Get those visitors to do what you want them to do.

The main problem with usability is that for users, if they can't find it, it's not there - it doesn't exist. Same goes for SEO. If you're not ranked, you don't exist.

Matt explains what is important for both SEO and usability on the home page. It should be clear immediately what the site is about. It should also lead them to the information they're looking for.

Uses several sites as examples bad usability. Don't call your products, "products" and services, "services". Label content based on descriptive phrases rather than generic references. Make sure links to content are obvious and easy to read,

Taxonomy: hierarchal structure, classification, grouping. Offer alternative methods of getting to content because users search differently.

Category Pages - Use established set of categories with supporting categories. Use Keywords in the links to categories. Obvious links to products with images. Be careful of cramming categories together, as that will dilute the relevance for each.

Great example of usability: thinkgeek.com, wine.com

Product Pages. Matt's advice is to call products what they are. Give product information so users understand and to include keywords. Selling products to the logical and emotional sides of a consumer will involve the use of descriptive content and keywords. Include benefits to answer the questions consumers have and to provide keyword rich content.

Landing pages should provide exactly what the consumer is looking for.

Matt provided a variety of examples showing good and bad usability with a particularly humorous example involving something called "butt paste".

Usable Analytics - Analytics can be the key to finding usability problems. Also segment your keywords and content according to the users' needs.

Great job to Shari and Matt on this presentation. It was one of the best I've seen at this SES. Very informative, lots of examples, some humor and a great session overall.

Danny Sullivan was late to this session, tisk, tisk tisk.

Rand Fishkin, possibly the king of link baiting, as Danny introduces him. What is link bait? Web site content that is targeting link friendly audiences. Goals include high levels of traffic, numerous links and visibility/branding. Link bait combines the practices of viral marketing with popular tech trends. Step 1: Researching a sectors link worthiness; what is your market size of your industry? How many of them are active online? Do folks in your industry blog? read forums? newsgroups? What are some recent contents that got this type of attention? Step 2: Discovery of the "big" players in your field? Who are the most well read online sources? USe del.icio.us tags, google searches, technorati and referrals from colleagues. Create a list and identify the format, features and successful tactics each of the sources employ. Step 3: Targeting YDD5 (Yahoo, Del.ici.us, slashdot), can your content be tweaked to appeal to those types? Step 4: Targeting offline media also, launching press releases, hiring PR experts, reaching media through online exposure. Step 5: Selecting a content focus; brainstorm 2-3 dozen ideas from people inside your company, think of content that's completely unique and incredibly appealing?, decide based on what you feel would be most effective with your audience and industry. Step 6: Meld branding and viral elements; the piece should carry your brand without forcing it on your users, the best linkbait has elements built in that help with viral spreading including email friends, etc.. Step 7: Targeting keywords/search traffic; search hot keyword sin your sector before creating linkbait. Step 8: Look at examples of brilliant ideas, find the sites who have built amazing applications, tools and content, Digg most popular, yahoo site of the day, technorati, stumbleupon popular tags. Step 9: The value of a web 2.0 look and feel, the right look and feel with earn links others can inhibit link growth from design densitive bloggers social taggers. Step 10: Elements that encourage linking; viral features, link friendliness and social tagging links. Step 11: Pre- launch public relations; email or call relevant friends, consider hiring a PR pitch agent, confirm that everything is working 100% and ensure that your server can support the traffic. Step 12: Managing Launch Traffic; be careful not to respond negatively to criticism of your content in blog comments, you might wish to update your content with additional data or insight and quotes the source, once you've been mentioned at several big sites, be sure to continue to update your site/blog... Step 13: Continuing to get value from Linkbait; you'll often receive man emails and comments, use your new profile to launch new apps... He shows some examples...

Cameron Otthus (spelling) from ACS. Track your buzz because your reputation depends on it. Tools to track: Blog search engines, conversation tracking, message boards. Track the right terms, subscribe to the RSS feeds for those terms (company name, company URL, product names, public faces, etc.) Manage your buzz; what are people saying about you? Is this good or bad? You need to join the conversation because it keeps your buzz going. If the buzz is bad, look to turn the buzz around. He gave an example of about the bottle of aspirin Google sent a guy at Marketing Pilgrim which generated a lot of buzz. You Tube is an other example, the CEO of YouTube had a lot of bad negative buzz about privacy issues. The CEO got up and spoke out that they don't want to be bought. He created a controversy and took the focus off the negative buzz. If the buzz is good, keep the buzz going. ClaimID is a company that helps you manage your personal online reputation company. ClaimID always participates in the conversation. Naymz buzz is ClaimID's closest competitor, but ClaimID, he says, is better. He then shows the Diet Coke Mentos commercial on YouTube, it created a lot of buzz on Mentos. Mentos embrased this, but Coke responded negatively to it. Mentos spike continued to grow based on that. Always want to embrace your buzz. You also have to measure your buzz; backlinks, brand image, trends and new customers, yahoo site explorer, blog search engines, google trends, opinmin and analytics. Most important thing with linkbait is being original.

Jennifer Laycok from Search Engine Guide. She starts off by saying if she pulls off going into labor while giving this presentation will be the ultimate linkbait. Why link baiting and viral marketing? The cost is the idea, not the marketing. Any idea wont do it, you must be something worth talking about. Once you get that idea there is almost no cost to it. It created brand evangelists, gives people a reason to talk about your product, like Mentos. Link baiting is driven by passion, there is a better response that comes with that plus there is a rapid response rate to the bait. There is also a downside to link bait, i.e. the subservient chicken, did it sell chicken? It was not about selling chicken, it was about awareness. And one thing they did get was awareness. They had hundreds of millions of visits, and average time on site was seven minutes! They did make their brand cool and introduced them to a whole new generation. An other downside is that there is also a lack of brand control. Unbridled growth, make sure you can control how quickly it will grow. It is also hard to measure the impact of the campaign. Creating these ideas? ask yourself what sparks passion in your customers? Also, what hasn't been done before? How will the idea benefit your users? Will your audience risk their own reputation on it? Ideas spread because they are important to the spreader and not the originator. A good viral marketing idea is one that builds and works through relationships. Getting started; give away products or services, attract eye balls and talk by offering free things, free offer to select spark talk. Make it easy to spread the world. Scalability; make sure you can handle it. Exploit motivators, people want to be cool, give them a chance (gmail invites). Also use existing networks. Take advantage of others people's resources, use up someone else's web site space. People are talking and linking CGM... Understand the image of a good post and bad post. She talks about her 30 day lactivist project; launch a new business and promote an existing business with no money. She got people talking about it by arousing their desires, people wanted to donate services and products, learn people's names in the industry, and show respect for others. Did it work? 6 months later, the site made $2,500 in profit and $1,000 donated. NYTimes, Denver Post, more than 1,000 incoming links making up 75% of traffic, 36,000+ unique visitors.

Chris Boggs from Avenue A / Razorfish is last up. He plugs SER, SEW, and his company. He then discusses how about marrying SEO and viral marketing, and link baiting is one method. He shows off how communities and blogs within an industry drive some great buzz, he even brought up the cartoonbarry.com/link-farm.html page, also SEW forums, SEOMoz's resources section, of course the lactivist, also Cameron's blog, He shows blogrolls, forum rolls, keep the link circle going. He then brings up the Search Engine Roundtable, a post he made on how Gary Price emailed him about a post and how he linked to it and then linked to more. He then brings up the Agency.com's "Subway pitch" story, and how it generated some bad buzz. Link baiting cannot just put the bait on the hook, you have to throw it out (building), some people say the bait is enough. He believes you need to do link building for effective link baiting. You have to get it out there. How do you measure success of a link baiting campaign? Use a link analysis tool, like the WebBuildPages tool (link?). There is the good and the bad, customer service issue with comcast (comcast guy nap on couch while waiting). SaveToby.com, check it out. Gives a Folgers link bait example, Tolerate mornings. Television and Cinema are kings of viral marketing; i.e. Lost (hanso foundation), "A scanner darkly." A terrifying message from Al Gore" youtube video. "The Church of the flying spaghetti monster," too funny, google it.

Great session, Rand no links needed, and Chris - excellent!

Detlev modded up this sessions.

AOL was up first, The old was in the business of sending out CDs. AOL is giving everything away for free. They are going from being an ISP to a portal. They changed their entire business model. 2006 goals include to publish and SEO their content to everyone can discover it. The are basically taking a bottom up approach these new days. They look at the different search engines, and they drive people to their properties, then they drive people to AOL Search to drive people to other AOL properties and so on. The SEO/SEM Team becomes part of their DNA. They have two teams, SEM is more centralized (business priorities, holistic view), SEO is more cross functional. They developed SEO standards and education. The look at optimization and then track and measure. With paid search they look how do they monetize search? understanding the traffic quality and recirculation and lifetime value, ads, search revenues and commerce. They also look at internal reporting. The then back this data into CPC to meet ROI. Can AOL really make this work? AOL sees that SEO pays off, they continue to see month over month growth with the majority of the traffic coming from non-members. She shows a Google search on superbowl commercials and how they rank number two. They saw a 60% increase in traffic from organic search and 130% increase in page views from organic search. SEM, paid search, 18% increase in traffic from paid search and 39% increase in page views from paid search. AOL is serious, look at the NY Times headlines that says so. She shows how Yahoo! almost directly copied AOL's home page.

Todd Simms from Business.com. Business.com built 65,000 business categories and subscategories, prior to thinking about SEO. Their approach is to do well by users, will lead to doing well with search engines. On page SEO - category page treatment. Title before was "accounting information" and after SEO it was "accountants and accounting services." Pretty name; before it was "Customer relationship management" and then "CRM." Description before was "Resources for getting a business started" and changed to "Vendors that specialize in helping entrepreneurs start a business. Resources for how to start a small business and providers of new startup business ideas." #2 was the PageRank distribution, the internal linking, they made links to the most important sections of the site on the home page. #3 is off page SEO, with a clean link strategy, shows the business directory link on Forbes.com, "powered by Business.com."

Joe Morin is next up. They renamed the main directory categories of business.com, they did keyword research using their own directory's conversion rate and ROI, WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Yahoo and Google suggestion tools and end user paid directory listings. They move content to the root domain, less clicks to conversion and higher PageRank. Issues include; canonical issues, internal link popularity is channeled to the home page, redirects using 301s. Local.com review: Launched a year ago, it is a search engine and directory, with a challenging structure. There were robots.txt issues, canonical issues and redirect issues. Search engines are learning how to play on each other (shows the SES Party Rule #1 in 2003). He then shows some candid pictures of search engine reps. That is all.

David Roth the SEM Directory of Yahoo!. He snagged AOL back saying that I am happy AOL learned that you don't have to require people to pay to access your home page. Funny guy. He was a search guy from way back... he talks a bit about his personal history as a rock star, seriously as an SEM. He joined Yahoo! about four months ago. Yahoo! is an online company with a lot of products to sell. Why SEM?; everyone knows SEM is the best way to acquire customers, Yahoo! has extensive SEM campaigns and more. Yahoo! is engaged in SEM for a large number of properties like; personals, small business, domains, stores, shopping, travel, autos, broadband, music, etc. Within paid search they have lots of campaigns, lots of keywords, lots of marketing. With SEO they are developing a centralized program, SEO guidelines, standards, etc. Yahoo! also does affiliate stuff; he recommends you have keyword policies for your affiliates. Business models; subscription models, conversion (messenger), transactional, lead generation and CPM revenue (media). LTV optimization; what is the lifetime value of a conversion (subscription, referral, CPM/CPC), What is the net present value of that lifetime revenue stream, what is the acceptable profit margin on NPV, monthly scorecard for all business units and channels. Managing; which should be centralized versus decentralized? Business owners know their business. SEMs know SEM. Managing the tradeoffs. Adding the centralizes resources; mac efficiency and scale and maintain business knowledge. Manage against a single standard. Also allow budget mobility to incentives stakeholder between channels and business units. What should be done in-house versus outsourced? Yahoo! uses a mix between in and out house. SEM infrastructure exists within Yahoo!. Yahoo! will continue to leverage agency relationships to gain industry expertise, time to market. Yahoo! has built and will continue to build, strategic pieces of SEM infrastructure.

Q & A now, so I will be leaving...

Big Ideas For Small Sites & Small Budgets

Moderated by Anne Kennedy. I got in right as Jennifer Laycock was introduced for the first presentation. She is the Editor of the Search Engine Guide.

The Internet was supposed to be the “great equalizer.” The old saying was nobody knows you are a dog. That is not really the fact. Common sense is the great equalizer. Coming to SES means that you should learn how to use the common sense you already have, and convert that business acumen to the Internet. You are only as good as your ideas. Forget about “chasing the algorithm.” You do not have time to be the SEO experts, so you should have a philosophy of forgetting about magic formulas, and again, get back to common marketing sense.

“The Pinocchio Effect” The whole story is that P was a puppet, and wanted to be a little boy. SE’s want this same thing, wanting to be like a human instead of a mindless program. What SE’s have found, is that when you “create a magical formula,” others will reverse-engineer it. Keyword densities, etc… This is not the type of thing that can last long term (just the math). How does a computer make a judgment and how can you use your common sense to overcome any changes. Think about the past: progression of link analysis from numbers only to link text. The moved to link quality, since people learned to “play the system.” Now it’s not just what you say and how many you have, but do the others have “authority.” In the last year, we have seen Link Age becoming a bigger factor. What is the next step the search engines will use to replicate human judgment in regards to linking.

The Pinocchio effect in action now. How many have heard of Sandbox? Do you think it is affecting your site? The truth is that there is no sandbox. There would be no reason for an SE to say, if your site is brand new, you cannot rank. Let’s talk about a real life example from Columbia Ohio. If a new Chinese place opens, since there are already 50 of them, it may take a while for you to check it out. If, however, the first Ethiopian restaurant opens, it would more likely be visited first. From an SE POV, if you are one of a million sites that has “mortgages,” it will take a while. This is a “raised barrier of entry.” If, conversely, you have a brand new popular widget with not many competing sites, you will see results within a few weeks, probably.

Where is Pinocchio going in the future? Any number of things we as people use to judge the popularity/acceptability of sites. Perhaps G will start tracking click throughs, in the way that they do in the Google Quality Score for the paid search. Google is adding a feature where if you click on your back button, you may see an added box to the results which says “was this link helpful.” Very big news. If you are the number one listing and people click on it but often hit “Back,” it may need to be moved down?

Speaks briefly about Latent Semantic Indexing and how SE’s become more able to tell what a site is really about. It is all going to be about the old writing good content that people (and Pinocchio) like to read. Number one rule in organic Search: Speak the customer’s language. Let the businesses and PR/Legal department worry about including their terminologies, and add what people want to read. Next briefly touches on the search buying cycle. Depending on what you sell and how you sell it, you may want to target in any of the three cycle periods: Interest, research, and Purchase. Build yourself as a resource during the Interest area, for example. Use different keywords (longer tail” as yku move to research and purchase points. Understand the intent behind different searches and utilize that knowledge.

Number one rule of PPC…it’s not about buying clicks, it’s about buying customers! Just because it is a higher CPC does not mean it is converting better. You have to track actionable item interaction by visitors. If you do not know what converts best, you are wasting time. PPC without metrics is like launching tv, yellow pages, and direct mail on the same day without tracking them. #1 rule for small businesses when link building: It is relationship building! Must be treated like working with a local business association. Just like in person, the best referrals you will get are from people that you have built relationships with and that trust your site. A link is the same as an online referral – remember someone’s reputation is on the line. You would not walk into the business association meeting and just throw a bunch of business cards in the air and walk out. The best way to get a link si to earn it – let others do your linking for you.

You can catch more flies with honey. “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” This book by Dale Carnegie translates very well from 1936 to how Internet marketing works now. He spoke of viral marketing, talking in terms of other people’s interests, and even PR. Online reputation management applies very closely. If you are wrong, admit it quickly.

Matt McGee from One World Telecommunications
So can small businesses compete? He is a firm believer based on experience that you can. Work smarter, work harder, and be more creative in your search engine marketing. Work smarter: first question: are you going to hire and SEO/SEM or do it yourself? Work harder: Small businesses can react much more quickly to opportunities. Be more creative: “Alternative SEM” and how to get away from the main SE’s.

Work Smarter: Choosing an SEO/SEM. 4 things: Trust (are you getting actual answers or just a sales pitch? Do not hesitate to ask for references – note some will not be able to tell you all of them due to NDA’s), risk comfort level (Black hat, White hat, grey hat, etc…fact is there are different levels of aggression when you are working on SEO or SEM. What is your risk comfort level?), Measuring success (think beyond getting the top ranking – use ROI, etc, to make sure you have clearly defined measurement goals), and Cost. Recommends some areas to find businesses, includes SEMPO, SEO Consultants Directory, SEO Dex, Top SEO’s, SEOPros.org, SEMList.com. Do some investigation and figure out what the qualifications process are to be in these types of lists.

Options for do-it-yourself SEO/SEM. Use books and training seminars. Plenty of good books include SEOBook (Aaron Wall), Small Business Guide To Search Engine Marketing (by fellow panelist Jennifer), Search Engine Marketing Guide (Dan Thies), most recently: Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day. (J. Grappone G. Couzin). Seminars: SES, Search Engine College, SEO Research Labs, Search Engine Workshops (one more I missed).

How is Local search a good way to “Work Harder?” Local search targets buyers! Lists a bunch of local search options from the big Yahoo’s down to Merchant Circle, Yelp, and TrueLocal. You do not know which of these will grow into a true power. Local search is not a big source of Direct traffic, but it can be valuable traffic. Briefly describes one success story from the use of local search. Reemphasizes that this is an area for good growth. Shows some good numbers but is moving through slides too quickly for me to catch while typing what he is saying (sorry).

Use Alternative SEM. Try participation marketing in message boards, discussion groups, social networking groups, etc, where people do not mind if you are talking about your business. Make sure that you connect, not alienate. One that he likes for Small Businesses to use is Flickr. This is a lot more than just photo sharing – there are groups for many different hobbies/industries. For example, if you own a pet shop, join pet/animal-related groups. How to market on Flickr? Use your URL when you create a screen name. Upload your logo as your buddy icon. Make your business profile not “spammy.” Don’t spam, you want to “market without making it look like you are marketing.” In conclusion, remember: work smarter, work harder, and be more creative. Go connect with your customers rather than waiting for them to come to you.

John Carcutt from AppliedSEO.com
Will focus on PPC. He has found he can get past the big guys. You do not have to be Number 1, you do not need to beat Amazon. Define the goals that are profitable, and make your presence level a profitable one. You can find ways to outperform your larger competition . Use tighter product focus, you can keep in better touch wit your customers, and you have faster reaction time. All of this works organically as well as in PPC. In terms of competing in PPC, you can not let your competition pile cash on top of you and dominate the market. You have to stop this by predicting. “Become a Keyword Psychic” You need to know ahead of time what/how people are searching. Keep abreast of changes in “how people talk” (natural language keywords). Example: “Inkjet cartridge” could be a search for: HP 56, HP56 (no space), HP 56 black, remanufactured HP 56, etc…) so one inkjet cartridge has literally thousands of kw combinations.

Recommends using Yahoo’s exact match, since you can save more money this way. He describes how an exact match longer tail keyword will always outrank the broad match for that search, even if you only bid 10% of the broad match bid. (This was also explained on Monday very well in the Compare and Contrast – Ad program Strategies session by Patricia Hursh). Highly recommends Google Analytics as a free alternative to NetTracker, WebTrends, etc. Suggests Yahoo! Bid Maximizer free product that compares to Atlas Bid Maximizer.

First up in this session is Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link. She is going to go over some good tactics that you can use today to build links to your site. She talks about directories first, and says there are about 30 good ones out there, the rest aren’t worth bothering with. She recommend to avoid directories hosting excessive search engine ads (takes away from your listing). Check pages for no-follow and robots.txt. Steer clear of directories with a lot of site wides. Look for directories with RSS feeds. A couple of other tactics that work for finding information about your competitors. Look at Marketleap, PubSub, Bot A Blog, Backlink Analyzer. Other traditional sources include BBB OnLine, Chamber of Commerce and so on.

Build content she recommends, a lot of people are saying this and it really helps with gaining links. Create a corporate blog to support/complement your main website. Blogs generate links, attract press coverage, etc.. Debra also mentions that corporations are using wiki’s to promote there business. She gives the example of Ducati motorbikes and a blog they created to promote their brand. Her next tip is to find influential bloggers, taggers and media contacts. Use the term “popular” in searches on del.icio.us to people that are tagging and will possibly review your website.

Next the good stuff, she goes into getting links from MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr. Each of these sties allow clean HTML links in the profiles. Those links accrue PageRank. Flickr does allow comments and allows urls in there. She goes into an interesting example about Beer For Dogs. It was a business that they started in their garage and had no money. They eventually figured out they needed a website and needed to reach people with dogs and money. They created promotions to display on YouTube, which got some press and earned them a premier video ad on CBS worth a substantial amount of money. They have only been online four months. Debra recommends to use the basics as a baseline. Very well researched presentation.

Up second was Eric Ward, he does a great presentation about Link Reclamation and since it’s rather thorough, I will point you to his site instead – http://www.ericward.com/ses/linking_strategies.html or your can get a copy in the conference handbook. Great stuff there, I would recommend checking it out.

Greg Boser was up third from Web Guerilla, and starts to talk link building strategy. He recommends to identify competitors in your industry first, select the top 5 and then reverse engineer their links trying to find out where they are getting their links. What are their tactics? He says that web tool distribution is very popular and attracts a good number of links. Greg says that people something focus to much on anchor text links, but you can also get some help from working on the ALT text of an image link. Software distribution is very helpful, many software download sites will allow links in the software/company profile. Affiliate programs are another area that works but often overlooked. Develop or use a system that enables you to get credit for your affiliate links. Awards and contents are great for building links. Seomoz did Web 2.0 awards and reviewed a lot of sites, did extremely well. He also talks about buying links brielfly. Only purchase links from sites that have pagerank that is similar to the average sites in your space. Contact sites that sell advertising and ask if they can provide straight links. Don’t use identical anchor text across all your sites. Search for non-profit organization with sponsor pages. Great links for very little money. He also talks about blogging is the quickest way to develop links. If the blog is new, consider turning comments off. “Pre-blog” on domain of upcoming projects. Learn the art of “link baiting”. Good information from Greg.

Barbara Coll headed up moderator duties for this panel that includes familiar faces Bill Hunt of Global Strategies International and Marshall Simmonnds of the New York Times. It also includes Kara Jariwaia from Cisco.

First up is Bill Hunt.

Audience poll: How many of you are big brands? Over half.
How many of you have multiple people attending? About half

Bill mentions he's seen this as a trend.

IBM current results, 55 million pages in Google, 5,000 terms in top 5, search is 25% of all traffic, keyword research in all marketing.

Search as we know it (meta tag edits) is over. Times are changing. Multiple people are attending conferences, many brands are hiring in-house search marketers.

New product launches make search critical.

Search is being integrated into all marketing on a global level.

Search Maturity Lifecycle
1. Phase I: Search is a functional task
2. Phase II: Search has moved from functional task to tactical implementation
3. Phase III: Search is integral to the business and is a centralized solution
4. Phase IV: Search is integrated globally with support for OEM partners. Search is mission critical to the business.

5 Steps to success for big sites
1. Leverage the business case
2. Education and communication
3. Remove crawl barriers
4. Leverage page templates to fix multiple pages
5. Leverage your size for links

Opportunity matirx - estimate what opportunity there is if you engage a search campaign. Use this to sell the idea of a search campaign and to motivate managers.

Importance of understanding intent - In addition to ranking, the percent of demand depends on how well you pages match searchers intent. Paying attention to this can mean incremental increases in conversions and sales.

Semantic mapping of keywords - Segmenting and profiling of searchers based on intent and position is the "Decision to research cycle" is critical to a richer experience. Many brands use language that is not indicative of what people search on.

Update the styleguide to be search engine friendly and the effect can be site wide.

Use a "Search Health Report". Monitor on an ongoing basis to indentify possible issues.

Next up is Marshall Simmonds who works with New York Tiumes that also owns About.com, International Herald Tribune and the Boston Globe.

When About.com was acquired, one of the first steps was education about search.

5 Steps
1. Organize. Reach out to individuals as point people at each company. Engaged a team of marketing, technology, research, editorial and sales.
2. Analyze. Found out where the low hanging fruit was to show what kind of impact search can have.
Got control over the templates, cleaned up code, global search/replace, fixed redirects and Title tag naming.
3. Education. This is an ongoing process with editorial staff and content producers. With About.com the goal was that anything coming "out of the shoot", it would be optimized. The New York Times presented a host of other issues. Provide ongoing on education so the company understands search and to integrate it at the root level. Training was customized by department according to how that department's activities would affect search.
4. Execute strategy and measure results. Metrics are critical starting with baseline measurement and including projections as well as causes of variations such as seasonality.
5. Track your results. Quantify your actions. Get buy-in from IT.

Last up is Kara Jariwaia, a search marketing strategist from Cisco..
Kara talks about the challenges faced by Cisco: internal demand, word competition and leveraging partner networks. Cisco has over 80,000 web pages with 5,000 products.

Embrace internal demand: Obstacles include large product portfolio, frequent product launches, local and global audience. Solutions include prioritized goals, global implementation, SEO training, keyword research and consult with external consultants.

Managing word competition. Example, "VoIP". MarCom, Tech support, Product Team. How to figure out which group gets the SEO resources for this phrase? It depends on what the customer is expecting. Also groups keywords into tiers: tier one, tier two, etc.

Equalize your partner network. Current links showed most going to Cisco home page. Implemented an action to ask partners to link to more relevant internal pages. Focus on the most influential (in terms of page rank and authority) partners for links.

How do you motivate the partner to change the way they link? Train partners on the value of search. Helping a partner rank well, it helps take up "shelf space" in the search results.

Recommendations: Build a search strategy, centralize your search efforts, coordinate a cohesive link program.

Danny walked up to the stage with Eric. They are broadcasting this live, so the podcast will be archived also for later.

Q: He asked him about Eric saying don't bet against the Internet. Danny asked who is betting against the Internet?
A: Eric first thanked everyone for coming and asked if everyone enjoyed the party. He then answers the questions. 20 years ago people were involved in the PC client model. What is interesting is that there was a business model built by Oracle to sell this stuff. There is a new model emerging, and people do not understand how big this opportunity is. "Cloud computing" If they have the right type of access, you can get access to these applications, from any device. This is the same talk he gave in this room ten years ago about the "network computer." In the past ten years, AJAX, LAMP came out and now we have it, and we also had the development of advertising. There is a new business model to fund this work, to enabled people access to these solutions. Often lot of people are still doing this the old way. Proprietary software versus open standards.

Q: Danny brings the NY Times up about the woman who was found via token data from the AOL slip up. He said there are tons of privacy issues. What do you do to protect this? Government taking it, accidents, etc....
A: This is obviously a terrible thing. The data was not anonymized and it was a mistake. If Google were to make this mistake, it would be a terrible thing. They have lots and lots of systems to prevent this from happening at Google. They don't share everything in Google with everyone in Google. He describes a case where the government gave Google a subpoena that was over-broad, and they fought it in court. They take is so seriously that they fight it in court.

Q: Will Google destroy data they have?
A: Eric said they had this debate in Google. But they are take steps to prevent issues.

Q: He then asks about people using search engines to find details about people, public information out there. Are search engines pulling back to make this information harder to get? It is not directly a search engine issue, but....
A: He gives an example of an issue with this and that there are criminals, evil and bad people in this world. Google would be very concerned if data found on Google would hurt someone. They try to not index credit card numbers. He said Google made it easy for you to delete a phone number from the index. It is harder for things such as home addresses. The solution is that Google is an aggregator of information, and the publisher is the one publishing this information. He cites an example of an abortion hate site listing names, etc. of numbers of people who are pro.

Q: Would Google remove that site from the index?
A: They thought about it but thank god the sites dont rank well, since there arent so many crazy people in the world compared to the whole. But overall Google tries to do more good then bad.

Q: Transparency of Google, specifically Google must know the click fraud numbers but they don't publish the rate.
A: Last week they released a report to show click fraud numbers for each advertiser.

Q: Danny cites a forum thing where Google would not detail the information of the exchange rate used for AdWords.
A: Eric said he is sure they can address that specific case (good news for those advertisers).

Q: How much money is going into search versus content ads? When those figures are mixed it is hard to figure out if there are issues there.
A: Don't worry, there is no bubble with either contextual or search ads. They are both doing well. They historically did not want to give out detailed information because (1) competitive reasons and (2) they don't want to give out information that may be assumed or misconstrued.

Q: Do you think that may change with adding more channels? TV, Radio ads?
A: It could. Google is more focused from the advertisers questions versus the analysts questions. They want to give the advertiser the data they want. They are less concerned about answering analysts question (cool statement).

Q: Search ads, contextual ads, then image ads, now radio ads and soon tv?
A: Radio thing is coming and they are also moving into new areas. (1) Video ads to video content ON THE WEB (that we knew, i.e. MTV deal) and (2) with MySpace with nearly a 100M users, it is a whole new category people, it is an opportunity to advertisers to reach an audience you are not reaching today.

Q: We are looking for measurable ads. With radio and TV, the metrics are laughable.
A: Remember these are early days. Targeted measurable tv and radio ads are starting now. We are thinking about using our ad system for every form of advertising. Because it is a big opportunity to provide value to both advertisers and consumers (more targeted ads to you). One of the outcomes, if they do this right, is that you should end up with fewer but more relevant ads, in more context. Google's analysis says they have a "good shot at this."

Q: Why are search engines now working together? What changed?
A: It has always been our goal to work together. It is in all of our individual interests for SEs to talk with each other. Specifically with click fraud, standardization of ad formats, etc.

Q: AdSense is this huge boom for publishers... But there is a lot of junk out of the Web. You need to fight to keep this stuff out of organic and paid listings. Should Google be stomping down harder?
A: These are signs of success, it has been far more successful before. A lot of people who were unable to make money to do their sites, now have this money. Overall it has been a great outcome. Of course, with anything like this you have abuses. They anticipate for this and they have algorithms for it. But they can never do everything. But they continue to work towards getting it better.

Q: The way I dialog with search engines is boring. Simple, plain, etc.
A: Eric said people like that.
Q: What is the next big thing?
A: Many people are happy with the simple Google search. They also have a personalized version of Google (IGoogle), that has RSS, gadgets, etc. It is possible to take this and give yourself a uniquely more complex version of search. Second answer is that people are taking Google search and embedding it into their portals and online communities. So you will have these choices to pick from and people will choose what they like best.

Q: Google's claim to fain was link analysis. Link economy has grown out of that. But is it too late?
A: Google's fundamental goal is to drive the most relevant search result. They want the perfect result. So they would make a decision on those technical questions based on that goal. We have many new ideas, on how they can used non link based solutions. The precise formula is only known by a few people in Google.

Q: Ecosystem question..
A: Google has to be careful about launching products that may step on people's rights, also it may be costly in terms of legal costs. Most legal cases are business negotiations done in a court room, that is his personal opinion and he hates to say that. They have to respect the copyright owners. The fair use law is not as crisply defined as you might want. In Google's case, the library work they are doing, being that they do not reproduce the whole book, and just have a snippet, that is good, in Google's opinion.

Q: Google is giving us everything, just give us the Google implant and ...
A: Eric said we are working on that, do you want to be the beta user?
Q: How do you keep people from fearing you?
A: That is why Google is trying to be more transparent. These products are coming out because they want to solve the problem with data online. The test they apply is does it fundamentally effect a users online experience in a positive manner. Our primary goal is not about making money with these new products, but making their users more happy online. Google is one click away from searchers going to a new search engine. So they try to address this by solving the end user experience.

Q: Do you ever say you Google anything?
A: Cant say for legal reasons.

Q: How often do you personalize your search?
A: Thousands of times per day.

Q: When was the last time you clicked on an ad at Google?
A: All the time, he buys a lot online. He then plugged Google Checkout.

Q: What is your favorite Google product?
A: I use Google search the most but the most interesting one now is the Google certified buyer.

Q&A from audience?
Q: Will (searchers) users be able to control their click stream data?
A: He said that is a smart idea. They are already doing some of that.

Q: Someone asks about how algorithms are not good at user intent.
A: Eric talks about Google Co-op (topic links). Your question is at the root of where does algorithmic search goes. Even with search history, etc. they still dont have enough information.

Q: What is your current thought on eBay's response to Google Checkout?
A: eBay would have to comment on that. They are a good partner with Google. They told eBay that they want to integrate with PayPal. But he doesnt know the details.

Q: Rand asks, The trust people place in your queries.
A: I am not sure there is confusion with this? Google is not a truth machine. They do the best job they can. They dont think they will get the perfect answer but they keep trying.

This is a very full panel today with 7 speakers. They are Peter Hershberg, David Jakubowski, Jakob Nielsen, Dana Todd, Todd Malicoat, Jennifer Slegg, and Scott Orth. Jeffery K. Rohrs is moderating this thread. It should be a good and probably entertaining thread where the panelists will be able to voice opinions. Hopefully there will be a little calamity and vivious agreements and disagreements about this subject.

It opens up talking about an article that Jakob Nielsen wrote called “Search Engine as Leeches on the Web”. He talks about how search engines extract too much of the web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. He shows an eye tracking study, where the user is creating for information about LaGuardia in which the airport was named after. His point is that the search engine is taking the content from the website and displaying it on the search results page. The search engine didn’t create this content or pay for it, and they are displaying the content. There are too many free services being created just to drive traffic to the search engines. He says that search engines are becoming answer engines.

They next define the term “leech” and point to an article that Danny Sullivan wrote about search engines being leeches and that people are becoming to dependent on search engines for answers. Jeff next directs a question to David from MSN about his thoughts on the article. David says it was an interesting article, but at the same time there isn’t a line from webmasters saying please don’t send me traffic. He says when you think of a search engine as a consumer vehicle that a search engine can free up content and let them access it. In the early days, portals were thought to open up the web to allow people to get information from the web. He asks, “what does the user want?” They want easy access to the information they want. So the industry that has evolved around the search engines is wonderful because they help deliver the information to the people.

Jeff goes into asking about robots.txt and which consultants on the panel that have clients excluding the search engines. Dana replies its on a selective basis or to prevent them from getting mirrored content. Peter says they have 0 clients excluding the search engines from spidering them. They do have a number of advertisers, that are considering possibly excluding vertical search engines. Syndicating their content out though is good. He says that developing tools to help users shift through the content is a great thing. Jakob starts talking about farmers, how using the resources correctly is smart. Basically the websites can’t afford to exclude the search engines. He says that the interaction and branding a website has on a website is lost when it’s content is being presented in the search engines. He says you need to build you customer loyalty. Dana asks that if search engines should start paying us to include our content in there engines. Scott points out that they want the lines of text in the search engine and they wish they could have more text in the search result pages.

Jeff asks Jennifer about the bandwidth issues and how a search engine disrupts the a business. She tells the story about how yahoo publisher network bot came in high bandwidth for 83,000 times sucking up 4gigs of bandwidth. She says she blogged about the issue. Yahoo figured out the issue and stopped it. Next Jakob talks about hidden costs. He mentions the Myspace and Fox deal and how this deal actually downgrades those sites possibilities to develop other services because everywhere you go on MySpace or Fox in the future you will be blasted with search boxes. This is driving people to those search boxes and not other features or services. David from MSN next talks about keeping the search engines skewed towards more the consumers. Jeff next talks about Google Analytics and how this can expose your data to Google. He asks if the panelists would recommend this to their clients. Jennifer says this would be giving to much data. You care already giving them your Adsense data, and then you could give them your conversion data, that is a bit too much. Todd makes the point that the engines know the seasonality of certain times periods and how CPC costs rise. Giving Google this data may not be a good idea because they could control the minimum CPC’s in those categories. Dana makes the point that the toolbar already knows your upstream and downstream data with all the Google Toolbars installed. Jennifer makes the disclaimer that Google says they don’t use the data for anything “evil”. Scott says the Google free analytics tool isn’t that great to begin with.

Jeff next talks about search engines as a black box. How are things done behind the scenes? Are there any burrs under the saddle that really make your upset? Dana says that the industry is created around technology. She says there is impediment to innovation if they don’t have all the information needed to create better solutions. Rather than see innovations to create efficacy to help us manage our time, the innovation are being created just to keep up with everything. She says she wants to see an audit trail, of all the tracks along the way, and maybe where the click came from. It sort of feels like a 2.3% conversion. Good point.

David from MSN talks about the search engine perspective. There are two types of groups, one that wants the in-depth informaiton and the other that wants it simple. He talks about sophisticated marketers that require that info, but then there are less sophisticated marketers that don’t need that much info. He says the status quo of the industry is not enough. Microsoft is committed to increased audience intelligence. He says the trick is that when you talk to the different groups. The simple marketers want the data simple and easier, while the sophisticated marketers want more information and empowerment. Jakob talks about the advertising and extracting too much value. He says in any auction system the value can be bid up to high so that there is not enough profit margin. So the search engines are making all the money and the companies are all competing for the very slim profit margin. He examines that anything you can do to maximize customer loyalty becomes more valuable as the cost of that advertising goes up. Email newsletters and things like the side bar in Windows Vista to communicate. Peter also mentions that search is an integrate point to get other things, such as immediately going to a search engine when you see something interesting to find more about it.

Jeff then asks about what things in the current market you would like to change? Dana says she says that landing page relevance should not determine my price and then holding us ransom to get our clicks back. Peter says this tries to align things for everyone and create a better standard and higher conversion. Dana says that some advertisers are told not to touch their campaigns and they listen. When did we get afraid of our advertising?!? If I do touch it then somehow I might end up in penalty land if we makes any changes! And then the customer service is so bad, it just sucks all around. Dana is saying we don’t want to control the algorithm. PPC has more control available. Todd makes the point that the relationship may be abusive but its better than nothing, its an opt-in thing.

Jeff he next talks about Eddie Haskell, was the fictional character from Leave It to Beaver, where he kiss Ms. Cleaver but then punches Beaver. Funny. He is basically asking about how search engines are bypassing SEM’s. The panelists say that there is benefit in working with agencies. David says he would get on the phone with the client and recommend working with agencies. Peter talks about getting data from the engines to make better decisions and that we can crunch the numbers. He also mentions how Google wants to charge for the API, something that was originally free and how that hurts the agencies and people. He says its hypocritical for a company who recommend its employees spend 20% of its free time on innovative projects. Scott talks about what benefit is for it the engine to lower your CPC to improve your conversion if they put you 5 or 8th position. Instead the only thing that happens is the CPC keeps going up from month to month.

Jeff next talks about the last part of Jakob articles about the other things you can do to diversify your online marketing. They are: brand building, retention marketing (email, direct mail), request marketing, discussion groups & communities, affiliate programs, newsfeeds, url promotion on physical products, where possible connect your service to proprietary hardware, investigate in mobile services, and traditional marketing. Dana talks about how search engines need to differentiate themselves from each other. She gives the example how the search engine results where all the same. Jakob agrees they are mediocre today. Users are not always being led to the sites that will help them. They are popular places but that helpful all the time. He says the search engines are better than searches on website or internal website. He recommend have a good internal search to keep them there. David talks about how technology has tremendously excelled in the last several years. Search is definitely a software problem. He says that people that shape the market share are the people at this conference.

Q: A member from audience asks about if a client has 48,000 real estate listings, would it be a good idea to give those listing to Google in the Co-op.

A: That is a tough question. It tough because that real estate section on co-op is not indexable and can’t be put on other engines. Todd recommended you will need to evaluate the benefit from it and if its worth it to try.

Q: Was Google and Yahoo invited here? MSN showed up.
A: They were invited, but can’t say for one way or another if they declined or not. There were originally 9 people on this panel.

Jeff then mentions that search engines are “self interested” partners. Its not a black and white situation, there is self interest there. They need to make money. Dana talks about a publication from Bearns Sterns, called the Google Ecosystem. Things don’t stop here, there is good and bad. There is an ecosystem associated with the search engines. We all are here because of them, and can profit from them. We are all committed to making this happen, because it’s an exciting place and it gets more exciting all the time. We need to have some respect. We should incentive it for us, why should we stay around. She asks if Jakob put a no spider on his site. Take a stand she says. Go Dana Todd lead the revolution!

Dana then talks about how Google can object to a companies business model through their quality score system and evaluating the page. That is wrong. That is at the expense of the business. What if Google doesn’t like the YPN is on the landing page, they could inflate the CPC and cause them to use Adsense. Even though Google isn’t doing this, it would be pretty scary if they started. There are cases of false positives but some of the panelists agree there is some good things going on with it.

Detlev is the mod.

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz is up first. Yesterday morning Chris Sherman said the algorithms of search engines have reached their max. Rand says most would tend to agree. He said lets look at the last two years of link analysis. What is a manipulative link? What are algorithmic techniques combating this by the engines? Then he will look at some solutions. Manipulative links? She shows a link to free poker tournaments in her blog, via a comment spam link, but she didn't use the nofollow attribute. If you go to technorati, and add your blog links, is that a manipulative link? He then mentions the DP Coop links and said it doesnt work now. He then shows the W3C page that had bought links on them. He shows a little diagram showing off ways to detect spam links. The DMOZ directory clones are an other method that have been dropped. He then brings up the Google Trends page, zillow the term had a major spike, that tells Google that these searches are legitimate searches and you can expect that level of links developed. They also have Google Analytics and they can (they say the dont) use that data for ranking purposes. You also have free WiFi in San Francisco, but what will they do with that data? Google has manual link identification site identification systems. He then brings up the SandBox, "throwing out the baby with the bath water." Not all sites have to go through the SandBox, i.e. Zillow. He shows an example of the Sand Box at Google for Bill's SEO By The Search query. Sand Box is about trust, Rand says. Launching with a bang is a good way to bypass the Sand Box. Also you can link build slowly and naturally, will help. Link building practices; links via email (not automated), gaining attention, link baiting, trust sites, regional sites, press releases. Subdomain issues, non english sites do well, and also wiki, technorati, mysapce and other web 2.0 sites get around this. He then shows off some SEOMoz.org resources.

Bill Slawski from SEO By The Sea is next up (big mod Cre8asite forums). This should be pretty technical.... Stage One: one size fits all. The search engine index web, match queries, return results - that is how it was in the 90s. Stage two is understanding the users. Search engines index web, analyze queries, collect users info, match with intentions and return results. Stage 3, understanding people. Search engines index the web, analyze queries, map peoples' interest and return results based on that. He said that is what makes the MySpace Google deal interesting. He has a list of some of the stage two papers released, some by AltaVista, Excite, etc. In stage two we see user measure user behavior a lot; historical data patent application, bookmark manager patent application, web accelerator patent application and google suggest patent application. How does Google collect user data; personalized search and news, toolbar, isp data, gmail, etc... Retroactive answering of search queries; Google Alerts that looks at your search history and shows you news based on your search history (wow). On to stage 3, where Google understands people. InterestMap: Harvesting Social Network Profiles for Recommendations, "as a recommender systems become more central to people's lives, we must start modeling the person, rather than the user." "Why should recommenders be restricted to data fathered within the context of the application," i.e. partnering with other companies. InterestMap identifies interest from social profiles, maps passions, merges interests and passions with detail... Achieving results in the age of personalization; ranking reports dont help, log file analysis doesnt help as much as they did, you need to know your users better. He asks, when a customer buys from you on your e-commerce site, do you Google those people? (My comments: Who ever thinks that way, but he makes a good point). Bill adds that he spends a lot of patent application reviews and published summaries late last night on them at SEW Blog. He mentions one of outland research, about user interest and information - gender and sex ranking results based on that. (Bill, excellent job keeping this talk easy to understand).

Jon Glick from Become.com is last up. He said of all the stuff being put out there, what is being used. A patent is really a trade, they get exclusive rights to use this information for a number of years. Patents are used for: (1) red herrings (not going to be used but you know), (2) trade secrets (like Sand Box) are not in patents and (3) rumors, (4) missed it. How fast you change your content has an impact, including registration, when they first found the site, most recent crawl, and last time you changed the content on the site. They look for meaningful change (not just date changes). When a site moves IP Addresses, it is often re-evaluated, it shows a possible new ownership and change in parked status. Rate of change of links is tracked; most search engines limit how quickly a site can gain connectivity (sandbox, link aging), a sudden jump in in-links can draw scrutiny from the spam cops (joining a major link network, interlinking of lots of domains), there are exceptions for spikes sites; editorial review, lots of accompanying news/blogs posts and lots of web searches. Tagging; unlikely to be used by major SEs because it is easy to keyword stuff, anchor text offers the same benefit with better source validation and SEs experienced this with the keyword meta tags and google experimenting with a closed system (Google Coop), very useful for multimedia content (images, video, audio, etc.) and it hasn't been heavily spammed. Quality Scores; editorial quality is now part of paid listings, yahoo also will have it in their panama release, any pages you submit will go through this review, it will most likely not impact your organic rankings. Evaluation of outlinks traditionally looking for who links into you and not who you link out to, but now search engines are looking at who you link out to, they use this for spam evaluation and give you a spam score to change the trust level of your site. AdSense links do not count against you, they are through redirects also, and also the nofollow attribute may make a difference. The use of personal data is not used heavily right now but it may be used soon, information sources include user registration, search history and yahoo groups, gmail, etc. Hurdles to search "getting personal"; SEs not sure what to do with all that information, multiple users/machines, people tend to search for what they don't know, and serious concerns with both privacy and perception. Zip Codes/IP may be used to improve local results, SEs already extraction local info from web pages and AdWords and YSM support geo-targeted bidding. Unusual stuff that actually does matter include URL length (short URLs are more authoritative, and crawl depth limits), and RSS feeds (theory is if you have RSS feeds you probably have fresh content, sites with RSS feeds are crawled more frequently, especially with Yahoo and you also get an extra line in your search result). Yahoo uses over 80 factors in ranking, small changes happen with almost every new index. Content, connectivity and outside opinion all matter.

Moderated by Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media, this session included: Greg Jarboe from SEO PR, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus, and Nan Dawkins of Red Boots Consulting.

Relates a metaphor for press release optimization as a shortcut. People initially looked at news search SEO as a shortcut tactic into search results. But the search engines have devalued links within press releases. However, there are opportunities and they are not shortcuts.

Classic model of communications was Pavlovian. "Who says what in what channel to whom with what effect?"

The problem with traditional public relations is that the "middlemen" (newspapers) are losing their jobs. So if you're in PR and trying to push your message to the same old channels, you're missing an audience.

NY Times, LA Times and San Jose Mercury News have all cut jobs. So if you're promoting stories the old way, good luck.

News search engines reverse the classic model of communications. Start with what the consumer is interested in. "Who seeks what in what channel from whom with what effect?"

The public as well as the media use news search engines daily. According to Pew Research Center, the audience for online news has jumped from 2% to 31% of Americans and the audience for nightly network news slipped from 42% to 28%. 75% of journalists search the internet for previous stories on their subject.

If you don't have a news search engine strategy, you're missing out on a significant trend.

People search differently on news search engines as they do on regular search engines. How can you find queries that are specific to news? Google News suggest, Yahoo News suggest.

Yahoo News, AOL News and GOogle News in top news sites. Yahoo News is by far the biggest. As such, your press releases should be optimized for Yahoo News and Google News should be secondary.

According to Outsell, knowledge workers in businesses trust press releases more than trade press as sources of information.

The hard part of news release optimization is not the optimization, it's measurement. The ideal is to track leads from clichthrough conversions.

Case Study Southwest Airlines:
SEO PR was able to track $3m in ticket sales to press releases. Describes the issues of using language in optimization that was consistent with the corporate message that was in contrast to what consumers search on. He overcame the objection by sharing keyword research.

New York Times is starting to optimize story titles for search engines.

There is a press release SEO workshop being held by Incisive Media on Friday.

Next up is Nan Dawkins of Red Boots Consulting. Half of clients are non-profit and half are corporate.

Online news comsumption is big and growing. 50 million Americans are going online daily for news.

Technorati is tracking 50 million blogs. Bloggers are avid consumers of online news but most don't consider themselves as journalists.

Blogs act as a watchdog for mainstream media. Blogs are often sources of news for mainstream news. Example: "Dell Hell"

Journalists follow blogs. Increasingly blogs and news are grouped together.

Blogs appear in the results of some news search engines. Google News says they don't index blogs, but they do and appear next to mainstream media. The bottom line is that blogs can help you dominate news search results. Blogs get coverage in news search as well as regular search results.

Once a blog covers a source, it will often cover that same source again.

A way to get into Google News is to get covered by niche blogs. Don't assume that politically charged or low ranking blogs are not in Google News.

Topix shows blogs. AOL News does not include blogs unless they have a podcast.

Establish a blog outreach program. 50% of bloggers write about companies once per week. Only 21% report regular contact from companies they write about.

- Create a target list. Identify bloggers that match your topic. Search Technorati tag search.
- Use BlogPulse to qualify them and find what "neighborhood" they belong to.
- Develop relationships. Be familiar with the blog. Do not send unsolicited press releases.
- Be honest and transparent. Never offer to pay. Product tests and reviews can work well.

Although blogs are effective at getting into news search, they do not replace optimized releases. Do both.

Last up is Sally Falkow from Expansion Plus.

She cites an interview with Matt Cutts of Google. "There's no point in doing SEO stuff unless you have enough content and reputation in the community to be a contender."

In order to reach where your audience is, you need to go onlne.

Online Media Relations.

Old model: Company to wire service to journalists to media.
New model: Company to wire service to (simultaneously) to news, company web site and to target audience.
Or this model: Get your news on a trusted site that your target audience is already exposed to.

How?
- Research what keywords your audience is searching on
- See what web sites are appearing for those searches
- Engage in media relations with those web sites

Target other new media sites that pick up RSS feeds
- Use the social media press release
- If you send out press releases, be sure you are using a RSS feed
- Syndicate your content

Case study:
Skin lotion company that started creating an audience for the phrase "shielding lotion"

Researched online media that rank well for relevant phrases and engaged in media relations with those web sites.
- Created a news page using RSS on the client web site.
- Distributed articles

Resulted in "shielding lotion" going from non-existant search demand to becoming the most popular related phrase.

This should be an interesting session, Danny Sullivan is moderting this session. We have Jon Glick, ex-Yahooer now at Become.com, also have Bill Atchison, Dan Thies, Rajat Mukherjee of Yahoo and the new famed Vanessa Fox of Google. Brett Tabke is on my right, talking with Jon now about bad bots. Tim Converse is one row behind me on my left. Danny mentioned Brett's fight with bots and had Brett wave at the crowd.

Jon Glick up first. Robots are good at finding links and pulling that content. Bots pull the content but don't do the analysis. Bots are dumb, finicky and they cannot type. Bot friendly sites includes hypertext navigation, well ordered-hierarchical site and clear instructions in your robots.txt. Robot traps include; dynamic content, excessive parameters, and perpetual calendars. Use a robots.txt file to tell the bots what to or not do on your site. You can also used meta tags on a page by page basis, or you can also use the rel nofollow attribute. Well-behaved bots obey the robots.txt file and metatags, they identify themselves (they dont spoof), they dont crawl too aggressively, they provide FAQs, etc. When bots go bad, the most evil bots don't obey the robots.txt and metatags info. How do you detect these? look at your daily logs, do some real-time analysis. Dealing with misbehaving bots; don't hesitate to block them, sometimes just do a 24 hour block, block at the firewall level. You can also try put up a challenges, such as a text code in an image. Be careful who you block; track who gives you traffic.

Dan Thies from SEO Research Labs. Duplicate content is the same content presented on more than one URL. Most web sites do this to themselves. There is also near duplicate content also. There is a difference between filtered from the index and filtered from the search results. Duping yourself; duplicate URLs, shopping sites and near empty pages. Getting Duped; by screen scrapers, RSS feeds and proxy URLs. The impacts on traffic... 10 - 15% of traffic is organic search. After de-duping the site, 20 - 25% came from organic search. Revenue drop was "feelable." Reverse cloaking vs. scrapers: simple user agent detection, if the user agent is not a major SE spider insert; meta name="robots" content="noindex". Screen scrapers that steal an entries pages's HTML get a page that will not be indexed. Easily thwarted by someone who cares to but reduces duplication by scraping substantially. Links by proxy is an old trick. Hack someone else's site to create a link or redirect to one of your sites - either create a page or credit a URL using XSS attack... then link to it using a proxy URL. There are also public proxies that you can use. Proxy URLs as duplicates; thousands of public proxy servers, every URL on the web can be duplicated by them, proxy based duplicates when link to can affect duplicate content filtering. Public proxies pass along the user agent but proxies use their own IPs. How do you stop them? Spider validation vs. proxies; when you get a request from a search engine spider user agent, check the requesting IP address. This is dangerous so use with caution. But what if they get through? Change and rotate content; testimonials, news and headlines and use brute force. The most important page on your site is probably the home page, yet it is the least likely to get changed often (hmmm). Monitoring Dupes; set up monitoring for a signature SERP text that is unique to your pages, home page duplication is the #1 issue, use a second signature for internal pages and he then lists some tools. You can use the DMCA, digital millennium copyright act. Send the hosting provider or the search engines. I'll leave off the challenging the search engines slide.

Bill Atchison from CrawlWall.com is now up. He calls these bad bots, parasites. He said one day, a scraper took down his server. 10% of his traffic was from bad spiders, these parasites. Bad bots ignore robots.txt, spoof bot names, use multiple IPs. They want to get your data to make money. Motivations include, AdSense, YPN, affiliates. Who are these bots? Intelligence gathering bots, content scrapers, data aggregators, link checkers, privacy checkers, etc. Stealth bots vs. visible bots - visible bots are easy to block, the stealth bots are those masking as humans. How scraper bots use your content? He created the name CrawlWall to easily find pages that were unique to that keyword. He used that to locate sites that stole his content with the term CrawlWall. They took several web sites and scrambled the content together, to serve up Google AdSense. He sometimes feeds them back cookie information, so he can then track them better. He logs all this activity. Scrapers also cloak and hide your content. He shows two active proxies that hijack content, that crawled as Googlebot. How do you stop bots? Opt out bot blocking fails; robots.txt only works for the well behaved bots as the most bad bots ignore robots.txt except when trying to avoid spider traps. He went to an optin strategy. He said, only Google, Yahoo, etc. can come into my web site but that can get you intro trouble. You need to review your traffic prior to doing this. He finds Google Analytics very useful. He created a lot of rules to determine the difference between stealth bots versus a visitor. Some bots use cookies, very few bots execute JS, bots hardly every examine CSS files, rarely do bots download images, monitor speed and duration of site access, observe the quantity of page requests, and so on. He will then serve up a image access code to them. Robots.txt is spider trap because stealth crawlers reading this file expose themselves while trying to avoid spider traps. Also anyone visiting your privacy pages, it is probably not your visitor. Avoid search engine pitfalls; dont allow search engines to archive pages as search engine cache is also scraping target. People are also scraping through translation tools. Ways to rpotect your site: USe a script to dynamically display robots.txt and show proper info to allowed bots and all others see disallow. USer agent filtering and blocking with the rules structured for an OPIN allow list. Block entries IP ranges for web hosts that host or facilitate access for scraper sites. For blocking large lists of IPs, such as proxy lists, use PHP and a database like mySQL.

Rajat Mukherjee from Yahoo! is now up. Yahoo! Search Web Crawler is named Slurp. He has news about the new site explorer features. New features include; you can add your site, you then can authenticate your site (looks so much like Google Sitemaps), to authenticate, you place a file on your site and that will authenticate you. You can manage site feeds, rss feeds, etc. In addition to those standard features they added a subdomains filter, a different view of those results and a way to get those data out of the system via flat file or API.

Rajat Mukherjee from Yahoo! then moves on to bot obedience. Slurp is a very obedient bot he said. Read robotstxt.org. He showed us a photograph of slurp, a joke of course. Make sure you allow content you want Yahoo! to get and disallow content the content you dont want them to index. Yahoo! does honor a crawl delay parameter. http://help.yahoo.com/search is very well organized there, plus some new resources added there. Slurp is new and better, they announced it last week. They show the blog posts from Yahoo Search Blog and Loren Bakers blog from 7.28.2006 - where you should see up to 25% reduced load on your sites. He asks who have seen a reduction of load, and about 1.5 people raised their hands out of hundreds. Yahoo! does have multiple crawlers, but please send feedback to Yahoo about these crawlers.

Vanessa Fox from Google is last up. She put up some funny robots.txt files she found, she had no real slides. She talks about google.com/webmasters they announced last week, a tool to check your robots.txt file. She talks briefly about the www vs. the non www issue, which is now at the google.com/webmasters, that allows you to define which is the proper structure, www vs. non www. Every once and a while a host may block a googlebot IP.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson of Position Tech this panel included: Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts, Rick Klau of FeedBurner and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

First up was Amanda with yet again, a unique presentation. There is still lots of unclaimed territory.

Less than 6% of Fortune 500 companies are blogging according to SocialText. 35% of companies plan to start a blog in the next year.

RSS distributes content and drives traffic.

Build your feeds right from the start. Questions to ask:
- How many feeds are necessary
- How much content is needed to keep it fresh
- Should you publish an excerpt or the full feed
- Will the feed include other media
- How will you propagate the feeds initially and on an ongoing basis
- How to measure performance

RSS is not just for blogs
- Affiliate
- Syndicate content to other sites
- New products
- Security alerts
- Product use tips
- Customer communications - best sellers, out of stock, special offers
- Press room
- Career channel/job listings

Poll of the audience: Large part of the audience does search optimization, so how do you optimize a blog?

Optimize the blog itself
- Socialize your blog and optimize its relatioship with the rest of the blogosphere
- Submit to blog search engines
- Make it easy to subscribe to feeds

Optimize the template
- Archives - use cleaner, shorter urls
- CSS - tweak to improve usage of H1, H2, H3
- Titles - Keywords first
- Permalinks
- Other- use robots.txt and favicon
- Validate code

Use plugins to increase functionality of WordPress and Moveable Type.

Optimize the content and do what you would do with web site optimization.
- Develop a keyword list
- Don't use graphics where text will do
- Use keywords in category names
- Use keywords in other places on the page - "SEO Sites I Like"

Steps to Powerful Keyword Rich Content
1. Write your post. Focus on your message.
2. Review your keyword list for the phrases more relevant to the post you've written
3. Keywordsin headline

Harness the link power
- Free giving of links in content
- Ample use of anchor text

Amanda recommends publishing a blog as a separate site to become a link authority.

Socialize your blog for link power
- Inbound links are important
- Cross link site and blog
- Notify other bloggers about your blog via comments/email

Social bookmark tool
http://www.ekstreme.com/socializer

Ramp up traffic
- submit your feeds
- Make subscription easy
- Chicklets
- Include bookmarking sites
- Enable auto discovery
- Burn your feed with Feedburner

Optimize your RSS feed
- Use keywords in post titles
- Write description as you would for a search engine directory
- use full paths on links and urls

Measuring Results
- It will get easier over time
- Stats come from meany sources
FeedBurner
FeedCraft
SimpleFeed
Nooked
MeasureMap
SiteMeter
Technorati ratings

Next up is Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts - "Optimize for blog a feed search engines".

Shows how different search engines show blogs in search results: Yahoo, Google, Technorati, Feedster, PubSub, MSN

Optimizing your feeds:
- Use full text
- Show 20 or more items, not just 10
- Multiple feeds (by category, comments)
- Use a keyword rich title
- Use a brand name in the item title
- Use your most important keyword in the site title
- Do not use tracking urls in your feed url - it creates a duplicate url which can be a problem for search engines

Optimize your blog
- Modify your internal linking structure
- Use the ultimate tag warrior plugin
- Related posts
- Top 10 posts
- Next and previous posts

Build inbound links
- Add Technorati tags to you posts
- Get onto bloggers' blogrolls - one way to do this is to meet bloggers in person
- Trackbacks and comments wont help with link gain because they are no follow

Use Tag Clouds that show posts according to how frequently you use certain tags

IF you tag with a certain keyword phrase often, you will often rank well for that phrase.

Title Tags: PUt the name of the blog at the end of the title tag
- Tag name should go in title on a tag page
- Customize with additional keywords for display only on your home page

URLS
- Rewrite to contain keywords and use hyphens not underscores
- 301 redirect from non www to the www version of your url
- Maintain legacy urls even if you switch blog software

Anchor text
- Post titles loink to permalink
- Use "Neat-o-tool" http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o to look for opportunities to request revisions to anchor text of links coming into into your site

Sticky posts - Posts always appear at the top of a page
(Adhesive plugin for wordpress does this)

Emphasize tags within posts (bold strong)

Use one click subscribe buttons

Track subscriber behavior
- Subscribers
- Reads through web bvugs or images
- Clickthroughs through clicktracked urls

Last up is Rick Klau from FeedBurner: "Blog and Feed SEO - What's New, What's Important"

Rick offers a perspective from a service provider point of view. FeedBurner is the world's largest manager of feeds.

What's New in the past six months.
- 301 vs 302 redirects
- IE7 will affect how many people are aware of feeds, It will recognize the autodiscovery tag. That means sites with a RSS feed might have a slight visibility advantage.
- TechMeme shows a tren in mem tracking, favoring full text feeds.
- Style sheets helping feed usabiolity - no more raw code. i.e. when people click on a feed, users don't see raw XML code, but rather a visually appealing web page
- PubSub, Yutter offline

Technorati will now give users the ability to use 301 redirects, There is a SEO advantage to this but a tracking accuracy disadvantage. 302 redirects which will do a better job of tracking will still be available.

Full text matters because it includes links. Use full text links so news services like Techmeme can undestand and reward your posts. Having links within the feed post will dramatically increase your feed awareness.

Ping - FeedBurner offers PingShot or you can use Pingomatic.

When IE7 ships, then 80% of the browser market will be able to recognize feeds.

Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues

Moderated by Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink, who also has a short presentation.
“Double Trouble” What is duplicate content? Multiple domains: identical homepage, different URL’s. Different links to several URL’s from one site. The reasons not to do this: the SE’s say so. That is enough. Confusing the robot (crawler): Mirror sites (one website multiple domains). Uses an example of the site for the International Research Foundation for RDS/CRPS. They decided instead of using the (.org) Top Level Domain, they thought it would be better to be a (.edu) TDL. When they did this, it disappeared from view. This is a note to watch for IT types that think they may know how to optimize for SE’s. Another example: Lifeline Systems had 2 URL’s. Previously, all business came from health care professionals. So many links came from various health care partners and hospitals. When they decided to launch a consumer campaign, they changed URL and caused much confusion. They ended up getting banned, but it was fixed.

Dynamic URL’s: short introduction because Mikkel will be addressing, but look for pages in results without real Tile or description and the “we have removed pages that were similar” at the bottom of the results. 301 redirects are the “hero.” Highly recommends using these in the case of removing duplicate content. If you have been banned, use Google’s and Yahoo’s reinclusion requests.

Shari Thurow from Grandtastic Designs
Will talk about some elements to the duplicate content filter, and why SE’s like to filter dupe content. Understand that duplicate content is an unclear definition. It can be an exact copy, or simply the change of a date or something that is “near-duplicate” content. #1 reason is that too much dupe content interferes with the retrieval of information process. SE’s and consumers both want fast results. They learned how to cluster by limiting results from one particular site to two maximum from a website. They omit duplicate results with the note that Anne mentioned above.

When SE’s look to determine uniqueness of each document, they use a “boiler plate” approach. This is also known as “block level analysis.” They omit the navigation bars, and focus on the main content areas. They look for every single webpage to have unique in-links (linkage properties). If two URL’s have the same in-links, there is a possibility of duplicate content. In the case of articles, they can be represented in more than one site because of the unique boiler plate and the unique linkage properties. They also look for “content evolution.” “In general 65% of web content does not change on a weekly basis. 0.8% will change completely on a weekly basis, such as a news site. They are looking at the “average page mutation” of a URL and a website. If too high, and the boiler plates are too similar, they will filter out the duplicate results.

Another type of filter is the “host name resolution.” Uses BMW example. If the host name resolves to the same company or organization, that organization is probably monopolizing control of content. If content is moved to different servers too often, they will look for that too, since “search engine spammers” tend to do this. Last thing: she is an Andre Broder “groupie.” All SE’s uses his concept of “shingle comparison.” You can search for a detailed explanation, but essentially, the more shingles of word groups (word sets) that are available on multiple URLs, the higher the likelihood of dupe content. SE’s only want one page. Shari doesn’t like when SE’s pick which one to display. She suggests determining the URL’s you want displayed if you have similar descriptions, and robots.txt exclude the other ones.

Some duplicate content is considered spam. This is where clustering has come in handy. The ability for SE’s to determine dupe content has improved greatly even since NYC SES. Shows an example of a University website that has a “hallway” page which is a “sitemap” of their doorway pages. The example has a link to “marketing degree,” followed by a link to “marketing degreeS.” Some duplicate content is a copyright infringement. She recommends using CopyScpae.com to help find people “swiping your content.” Also suggests using the “Waybackmachine” at archive.org to find copies of old content that may be in there and have been copied. Keep your own records with versions of your content. You have to prove this to the SE’s because they cannot take it down just on your word.

Summary: use Robots exclusion, have a copyrighting plan, keep track of you content, register with copyright.gov. Last but not least: don’t exploit the SE’s and help everyone’s experience.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen from RedZoneGlobal
Will be covering some of the technical duplicate issues. The list is pretty long, so he could not possibly go through the entire list, so he will focus on more common tech issues: With and without “WWW” (canonical issues). Session ID’s, URL rewriting, many-to-one problems in forums, sort order parameters and breadcrumb navigation.

WWW or not WWW? Indexing issues: most engines seem to be able to deal with this. Linking issues: yes, still an issue, because you want people to link to the URL’s that the engines are prioritizing. So he recommends using 301 redirect to the most popular one. The WWW version seems to be most common.

Session ID’s can be a true nightmare. A website (smartpages.com) had 200,000 versions of its homepage indexed. Recommended solution is to dump session info into a cookie for all users, or id spiders and feed them their own content. Google recommends this – it is not “cloaking.” You are striping out info to help the engines.

Wordpress and other blog solutions. Rewrite URL’s without parameters by identifying what you want used (such as post name and /or post ID). The problem is that when you do this, you still have the re-written URL and the original URL. Even thought here are no links to this, the engines end up fin ding them. It only takes one link to the original version for it to be crawled and a dupe issue. Once again, use 301 redirects to fix. In Wordpress there is a plugin you can use to automatically 301 redirect the original to the next. Uses a tool (Schlueterica Wordpress Canonical URL plugin) for this (isaacschlueter.com/plugins/i-made/cannonical-url/).

“Many-to-one” in forums where a page can be requested in different manners, such as the URL or the URL appended with a Post ID and/or a Thread Page ID. There are some workarounds, he feels the one SEW is using could be improved. There is no linking solution. His idea is once again that you have to 301 redirect. Sort order parameters in the URL will cause duplicate indexing as well. Is yet another waste of the link popularity.

Breadcrumb navigation: you may have a problem if the navigation, you may have a problem, especially if you categorize a product in multiple ways. The first thing is that unique pages should also have one unique URL. If you want to reflect breadcrumbs, he suggests storing them in a cookie. Remember that we have infinite ways to create multiple URL’s to a different page.

QA Speakers include Tim Converse from Yahoo!, Matt Cutts from Google, and Rahul Lahiri from Ask.com

Tim: all of the info that was presented was very accurate. He wants to distinguish inadvertent duplication from “spamming.” The perfect thing for a crawler would be to have one URL for every unique page, but he knows that people don’t necessarily think about SE’s only when designing. Do not worry about getting banned for inadvertent issues. The easier you can make it for us, the better it will be. The ultimate goal for everyone is to present a diverse result for the user. If you stray into creating multiple domains with the same content or “repurposing” someone else’s content, they find this to be abusive. Ask yourself “do I own the content?”

Matt: again very good information. Of course the goal is to have good content. There is definitely abusive behavior. People often ask,” I have a .DE and a .FR of a site.” This is not a problem. If you are taking the time to translate in to multiple languages, no problem. If you have an article in four pages also rendered in one page, that is ok, but suggest blocking the spider from one. If you have “near duplicates,” with different boiler plates but identical/similar main content. When G crawls and presents search results, even to the last millisecond, they remove possible duplicates. Last point: link consistency. He would recommend that all links be to WWW. Just this past Friday, they renamed Sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools. There is a tool there that if you want to notify them that you “own” the link at DMOZ that goes to the non-www version, you can report it and they will take it into consideration.

Rahul also aggress with the other speakers and discusses a couple examples of duplicate content and how they are trying to deal with it. He discusses how the Nestle Brands of water which are branded differently in different geographical areas (Poland Springs, etc…) each have their own URL, with identical sites that only change the brand name.

Jeffrey Rohrs is moderating this session, this is the first ever of this session. This is a huge panel, hope they don't all talk too long. :) Well, that answers that, only two or so have presentations, then there will be an open discussion. On the panel are Jake Baillie, Frank Watson, Tim Daly, David Szetela, Kristopher B. Jones from Pepper Jam, and Kim Malone of Google.

Jake Baillie from True Local was up first. You have selected the most important session at this conference, he says. People have been writing about this since 2002 but no one seems to care. Who are you? PPC marketer, AdSense publisher, 2nd rate search engines, professional arbitrageur, first-rate search engine and your clueless. What is arbitrage? The practice of taking advantage of a state of imbalance between two or more markets (its an old school concept). He explains it with selling and buying "angry bananas," he shows you how it works between Yahoo PPC and Google PPC. 1998 is when he seen it started off on the affiliate space. 2000 an article was published on ClickZ on this. June 2003 Google launched AdSense. November 2003 Kevin Lee stipulates that Google won't be affiliate arbitrage friendly in the future. Jan 2005 Google becomes unfriendly to affiliate arbitrage. April 2006 click arbitrage awareness at all time high. July 2006 Google becomes unfriendly to click arbitrage. Why engage in arbitrage? Because we like to make money; bootstrapping new sites, out of stock inventory and inflating Alexa traffic rankings. Who are the arbitrageurs? Yahoo Shopping, CNet, Shopping.com, Verizon, Info.com, PriceGrabber, NextTag, eBay, etc. arbitrage isn't just for MFA sites. Real businesses are using arbitrage as part of their "real" business model. Arbitrage is not a "shhh..." word. It will continue to grow... It will make the space more competitive. Search engines will attempt to grow revenue from arbitrage. It's not set and forget when it comes to traffic quality. He hates the word/term MFAs (Made for AdSense) sites, these sites are like every other site, he explains, that they are out there to make money. He explains that those that need to make higher margins, the arbitrageurs will stamp them out who are happy to make even 5% margins. Good examples of arbitrage: A Google search for 650 Treo and shows a BizRate landing page and ad, the landing page has AdSense on the bottom of the page. He then shows Verizon Super Pages, using Yahoo PFI which costs about 9 cents per click, the landing page has ads on them. MSN search for "sweaty feet" and shows a ShopBirght ad and landing page. Arbitrage 101; source to purchase traffic (AdWords/YSM), buyer for that traffic (AdSense/YPN/3rd Tier engines), some brains, a calculator, web site, and the simple magic formula. The formula; (outgoing ppc * revshare * CTR) - source PPC = profit.

Kim Malone from Google is next up. She of course talks about Google's goal, blah. Buying low and selling high is good business, as long as the user has a good experience. Misleading the user will pollute that ecosystem, one example she gave was an ad for a carbon monoxide detector that lands to more ads - she explains they (Google) is working against this. Causing extra clicks drives users away, clicks from one ad to an other ad to and other ad and so on - the none stop ad to ad to ad to click. Ensure the useful index through advanced algorithms, and that there are human evaluations. Ensure there is a useful publisher network with automated signals and human evaluators without subjectivity. Ensure there are useful ads through ad serving technology and landing page quality. She then goes through some tips to improve quality ads, all basic stuff.

Frank Watson is asked why does arbitrage push his buttons? He said the main thing is that the constant circular rotation. With some keywords, there are hundreds of arbitrageurs on one keyword phrase. It can be a nightmare. The Google change via Google AdWords Landing page helped recently. They have to get rid of the ability of search partners to give search pages. Legitimately the whole affiliate marketing is OK. But what is destroying search is the landing at constant other search pages. All those people in the space automatically rise the price up.

Tim Daly adds that Jake took the angry banana from point A to point B. But the advertisers in AdWords who sell the ultimate product is not asking you to go from point A to point C, D, E, F and then B to get the product. So where does it cross the line. He reads a line from Yahoo!'s TOS saying advertisers do not have to pay for fraudulent clicks, i.e. people saying they are selling $29 for a product but they don't. Do advertisers have to pay for it? He then puts Jake's True Local site on the spot for motorcycle parts keyword phrase on page 4, which brings up a TrueLocal arbitrage page.

So now Jake has to defend himself. He shows that that page asks you to type in a zip code, and then it will show you local ads based on the keyword and zip code.

Tim then adds you do not sell these things and its fraud to word the ads that you sell them.

So Jake then goes to Kim from Google to ask them.

Kim adds that Google tries not to make subjective judgments. Google's goal is to get the user what they want from the first click and not the second click, wording doesn't matter.

Kristopher says he wants to draw the line in the sand between... He shows an example of Panasonic TV search on Google and a shopping.com result PPC. You see ads and not the product. It is about the value they provide.

Ok, I am out of here...

First up is Rob Key from Converseon and starts by setting the landscape of search and brand reputation. Search engine results represent the first and most visible impressions to people. Google has indeed become a front page of corporate websites. He says often the decentralization of content creation and the wide availably of affordable personal publishing technology have allowed consumers to have a substantial say in your brands reputation. 44% of internet users are content creators according to Pew. CGM content, such as blogs, continues to rapidly gaining visibility with top search engine results. Search has become the connective tissue between information seekers and users. He puts up the Pyramid of reputation conversation.

How reliable is information from consumers? Google itself is says they make no claim to the truth of the documents. The way you are being defined today is in the hands of third parties. He gives the example of Splenda, and how there is corporate information and then consumer information about how Splenda is bad. He shows the iTunes example of people not a fan get a website listing in the top 10 results. Coke has another example when you search for its name. So the implications of reputation aware. A brand is an experience that creates an impressions. So what do you do when you have bad reputations.

Let’s Sue Them!

Some companies have responded with litigation, however the resulting publicity can intensify the perception problem. He says there is a better solution to this. First they map the conversation and create a SERP visibility map. The look at the company name and then take all the misspellings to search for domains. All of that is above the water line. What is next is to go below the water line. Conversation mining technology is emerging. They conducted a sentiment analysis and they found that the top search engine listings kinda mirror the sentiment below the water line or what people are talking about. He then goes into how you can mine various parts of the conversation. Where are the incidents of bad reputation or conversation going on. What is the sentiment? Topic? Tone? Influence? Depth of understanding? What are the existing versus “new” conversations?

He says you will usually find 10% that really link you, 50% percent that don’t really care, and the result don’t like you or are in a grey area. He talks about the search shelf space and how to maximize your visibility in that shelf space. Exploit it as much as you can. Two listings per domain in Google. Will need to get creative.. He recommends about generating optimized enterprise-generated content. Also leverage positive euthusiasts, those people that love your brand or product. Bring them into the brand. Also create social media environments to help build content from your consumers. He gives an example of iPod’s faulty batteries and how consumers created blogs and movies to broadcast their experience.

He finally recommends don’t go to the dark arts. Funny. Good presentation.

Second in this session is Rob Garner. Lots of Rob’s this session. He is from icrossing and mentions how he works on paid search campaigns for Fortune 500 companies. He got interested in this discipline initially.

So what digital brand management manager need to know? Where do you look online? Look at the typical sources. The good side of reputation management. Positive online brand perceptions are positive things. On the bad side, you can have many malicious attacks take on many forms such as copyright and trademark infringement. Negative and slanderous campaigns against the company, its brands. People place trust in search engines. What an define says about your brand has editorial credibility like a newspaper. Even though the opinions of major engines are automated, whether the info is true or not, its present. He next talks about the bounty on brand terms. He says there is an incentive for third parties to capture that brand traffic. He talks about site scraping, typo cranking, and content theft. Typo cranking, where scripts will generate typos of a brand name and see thousands of pages of these obscure names. He next goes into how your get started in reputation management. Ask the right questions and understand the space. He ends to use keyword suggestion tools to help manage your domains. Find those domains in the space that are available, buy domains in the private market.

Nan Dawkins from RedBoots consulting is up third. She is going to talk about blog basics. There are 1 new blog per second. 77% of people think blogs are a good way to get information about a company or product. 33% of journalists say they use blogs to uncover breaking new or scandals. Blogs account for 26% of SE rankings on Fortune 500 company/brand names. Blogs dominate serps on “brand” + [negative keyword]” searchers. Dell Hell example, about how Dell outsourced customer service to India. A influential blogger blogged about it and it spread across the blogosphere. 6 of the top 10 blogs were either not around last year or were not in the top 100. Bloggers create CGM across multiple channels.

She talks about a user Dave and how she stalks him all over the internet. Okay not stalkes, monitors. She used a MSN sandbox tool to track posts in his usergroup. She says that she found bloggers just don’t blog, they are highly engaged in social interaction technology. The user Dave did book reviews, geneology research and other stuff.

She says that journalists use blogs. They research story ideas and uncover breaking news and scandals. So what do I need to do know. First step is to monitor and listen. Monitor what bloggers are saying to stay in front of developing problems. She goes into some monitoring techniques such as “company name” + product reviews, sucks, information, etc.. She also recommends to watch advisory groups such as terms with “Take Action”. Nan also says 50% of negative word of mouth stem from feeling of injustice. Overall good presentation from Nan, great examples and took the time to explain her presentation which is very helpful to the audience.

Andy Beal was up last and has limited time so will probably fly through this fast. I recommend checking out his blog for more information on his presentation and for a free guide to reputation management. Some highlights from his presentation. He says to create custom RSS feeds based on keyword searches. Get an RSS aggregator to read this. Track your competitors and executives. Find out what they are doing.

Good session overall, since this is a reputation session wonder how many speakers will be reviewing my coverage. :-)

Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues

Moderated by Jeff Rohrs, President of Optiem, LLC. Introduced panelists, and explains this will be a presentation with all panelists sharing one PowerPoint presentation. This will allow for interesting discussion of examples (added-sure did, this was honestly the best session I have ever attended at SES). We are joined by, in this corner, John Slade from Yahoo. Shuman Ghosemanjumder from Google, and Paul Valez from Ask. In the other corner, Jessie Stricchiola from Alchemist Media, Lori Weiman from KeywordMax and Tom Cuthbert from Click Forensics.

First off, following up from NYC Sessions, recaps some of the news headlines regarding click fraud over the past few moths. Lane’s Gift Court settled for $90M, Click Forensics reports click fraud at 14.1%, Google makes invalid click data available.

The lawsuits:
Lane’s Gift (AR) Class Action, Google settled/approved. Yahoo- ongoing. First covered by Lori (“also a recovering lawyer”- laughs) who explains the Lane’s Gift can go through appeal. Two other suits: AIT/Checkmate. Yahoo settled with Checkmate, AIT ongoing. Also covered another third one didn’t catch it yet. Going into detail: To get anything from the Lane’s Gift, you had to file by August 4th, or opt-out by June 19. Your share would be proportioned, based on ad spending between 2003 and August 2004. The value is $60M in credits, not cash, and only 50% can be used in any month.

Yahoo settlement with Checkmate is a little different. There is no limit, and you can get cash back. You have to prove there was fraud. The claim must be filed and a Special Master (Appointed Judge) will review the appeals to Yahoo’s findings. Time covered is January 1, 2004 to July 31, 2006. Tom Cuthbert adds that these suits do not do much going forward. There is still a need for accurate third party verification of clicks. Jessie has had clients that have decided to participate in the class, mostly those spending mid range dollars. The larger clients are “holding off” to possible sue in the future. Lorie agrees, same case with her clients.

Question posed to the search engines reps: Are there any changes relative to the settlements? John says that for a long time, Yahoo! Has wanted to be able to have dialogues. The settlement has enabled them to start actually communicating in public, and having these dialogues. What Yahoo is trying to do is do some of the things the industry is saying that they want. For example: how do you really measure CF accurately? The industry is coming together to get some standards about what actually counts as a click, and other such definitions. As a part of the settlement, they invited the plaintiff’s lawyers, and they have said they are generally doing a good job.

Yahoo will start bringing in panels of customers to come in and comment on methodology. Also creating a position for some internal to be a click fraud advocate for advertisers. Once again, for the entire industry, the settlement is a positive step. Shuman says they are pleased with the outcome. They found that the study supported that they are “doing their best.” The report is actually available at the Google blog, and contains “more details than we have ever been able to release previously” (about our click fraud methodology.)

Paul from Ask: has not been affected by the past lawsuits, but has been working with legal team in understanding the issue and how it relates to Ask. They were actyaully initially sued, but were able to prove that they were not in the market during the effective time frame. Yet they are happy to be watching and learning and able to join in the dialogue with the other engines to help.

Discussing stats. Lori: small sample of clients: 7% CF on the low side (the majority from 8-10%) all the way up to =20% on the high side. Tom is asked how Click Forensics gathered their data and came up with 14.1% overall average CF number? They have used data (up to 100,000 clicks for free) donated by advertisers and are collecting technical behavior (IP address, etc) and behavioral data. They have also had experts come in the verify their methodology.

Shuman is asked about his insights into the methodologies used by the third parties. Shuman states they G has always dedicated significant resources to combat invalid clicks. They are “concerned that some of the numbers by 3rd party estimates are grossly exaggerated.” They did a study of some of the studies, and found some to be very weak, without any published methodology. Discusses the “Outsell report” and how it has been misnamed as a measurement of click fraud – this was not a measurement, but an opinion survey! Analogous to asking the residents of a city what “they think the crime rate is” and taking those numbers and using them to create the published crime rate. (wow boxing gloves are off early). They frequently receive request for “fictitious clicks” (clicks that never even occurred) as well as for clicks that were not charged for (through automatic fraud prevention). They have a 17 page study about how click fraud auditing firms and how they have “consistently inflated” numbers.

Jeff asks Shuman if this seems like a methodology error on the part of the 3rd parties, or an actual attempt to fraud the engine. One big problem they have found is that additional page views are counted as invalid click. They cannot disambiguate between original and additional clicks. In addition, because those five clicks look like paid clicks, in these cases there are now “give fraudulent clicks per each misidentified one.” Second area: actual conflation of traffic from diff ad networks. They have found clicks made on Yahoo ads in reports delivered to Google. Numerous instances that have resulted in implied click fraud rates for the advertisers. In some case, there are even some that are greater than 100%. They are flawed; we do not know why “basic sanity checks” have not occurred on the part of the 3rd party auditing systems.

The advertisers on the panel and Tom seem a little shell-shocked, and Lori asks why they were not given the data (study) prior to the session. Shuman says they have made this information publicly. Lori, however, says that it is very simple to not report on repeated clicks, paid reloads, and clicks that happen in the same website. We do not track or report on those, in our system at least. The other problem with the incorrect engine being used is something that also doesn’t happen. It is interesting that you bring all this up, and the methodologies that need to be created are important. We all agree that there are no standards today – we need to conclude what the definition is. Shuman replies that they have covered some of the major ones in their research of the 3rd party tools: Ad Watcher being one of the most popular. Continued questioning of the methodology.

Tom starts with “I don’t even know what disambiguate or conflation mean – I didn’t go to MIT” (Laughs). He is really looking forward to reading the report. He draws a David and Goliath picture. Let’s agree that we will never agree on methodology and facts. What we should agree is that we can send you data, and you can look at it. They added a site this morning called “reasonable isnotenough.com.” (one note by me: Tom is obviously a very passionate man about this subject, which I think is great for the industry. I feel he was honestly slightly enraged by Shuman’s comments, per his demeanor. He “clamed down,” though, and provided excellent further comments and good answers in the QA.)

John says that the problem is also that the methodologies vary. Comparing apples to Buicks. Diff people are trying to do the right thing. He doesn’t think that advertisers and Tom don’t sit down in Texas and try to come up with fake numbers. He feels that the IAB effort is of utmost importance. Talks about how after the movie “Quiz Show” Congress actually created a body (media Ratings Council) that “audits the auditors.” They want to do things the right way…the biggest news of the whole panel is the fact that the engines are working together. This will end the methodology wars.

Shuman ads…what we have covered in the report released today does not say that the methodology is flawed, but the basic accounting is flawed. He says this is a completely diff issue than criticizing methodology.

Jessie: it is important to recognize that with regards to the infancy of the issue, none has happened without the threat of lawsuits, and that the engines didn’t wake up one day and decide to help the advertisers. “Gloves seem to be off at this point, so I have to address a couple issues.” In regards to the report, up until March of 2005, Google was counting the “doubleclick” on every single ad click. She describes people that double click instead of single clicking. She said that until March, the process of this counting double clicks was also “basic accounting” problems. She reminds us that we should keep that is context for the rest of the discussion.

Shuman “thanks her for the positive comment” (laughs). He says we are talking about click fraud, not invalid clicks. He is trying to define click fraud as being only of “bad intent.” There are certain categories of clicks such as double clicks that are detected and filtered out. He wants to ensure that they do not explain too much, so that the actual “fraudsters” do not have more data. He discusses the recent addition of the Invalid Clicks report in the AdWords report center. Jeff asks if the system tells you why the click was labeled as invalid or just numbers? Just numbers…they added this because of the greatly exaggerated numbers being disseminated though the media. Almost all invalid clicks are detected and filtered out by the system in real time. Once again, he lambastes the 3rd party reports…saying he has never identified a vulnerability in the system due to 3rd party reports.

Jessie: do you agree, Shuman, that the system needs to includes “both sides of the data?” “yes” For what percentage of the accounts do you analyze this data? “we do not publicize the data” assuming that you do not have the required full dataset with conversion data, what are you doing in order to incorporate that data? “They provide free conversion tracking tools for the advertisers to share the data” (some laughs in the audience)

Paul speaks up and says “he sees why Ask was sited at the middle of the table” (laughs- John and Shuman are on the right side from the audience and Tom, Lori, and Jessie are on the left). He provides some more insight about how Ask provides methods for its advertisers to give them as much data as they want to. They appreciate the third parties and can “learn a little something from them.” John agrees. They need to find a way to make the data interchange possible in order to make the best decisions. Tom agrees too. Shuman ads that these issues are addressable, and that they have recommended solutions to implement within the reports.

No coverage of QA…catch the continuation of this highly heated discussion in Chicago!

Detlev Johnson is moderating this new session. Can you rank well in all the search engines? Or do you need to pick and choose. This session will be a SEO session on that topic.

Aaron Wall from SEO Book is up first to do the macro comparison. He explains that most algorithms are always evolving, so things may change tomorrow. He then explains that a good algorithm is an algorithm that ranks MY site well. There is no such thing as a perfect algorithm, the results show some keys as to how the algorithm are made up, in pieces. Many webmasters see their rankings go down, and they immediately think that they have been penalized, it can just mean an algorithm update occurred. Sometimes some of the infrastructure and algorithms have side affects; i.e. Google Sandbox and Big Daddy update, sometimes things go wrong at Google. Also there are new publishing formats like the wikipedia and blogs that create new algorithmic holes.

Yahoo has been focused on being pretty literal, meaning if you search for "dog fight cats" it would look for that phrase specifically. They have changed last week to be more like Google. He still sees link exchanges and some blog spam doing well in Yahoo. Yahoo may be slightly more commercial bias then others.

MSN is new to the game, relative. Link graph was heavily spammed by the time they got in; they like new sites, bursty links. They focus a lot more on on-page factors, and the algorithm is very literal.

Google has been very focused on search, they bias towards information information resources. They are good at determining true link quality. Place more weight on domain level trust (old trusted domains do well). Google has aggressive duplicate content filters. Looks much more at linguistic patterns than the other engines and filters out some hyper focused pages.

Ask focuses on topical communities, limited market share, and not studied as closely as the other engines due to their limited distribution.

He then shows off spam in the various engines.

Dave Davies is next up to get into more SEO tips. Assumptions made here are that this is a new site in moderate competition. The site architecture and URL should have key content towards the top of the page, the code to content ratio should be smartly done, table structures (go CSS), also if you can't go with table structures that he will illustrate in a second, and search engine friendly URLs are important. He then shows the table structure slide illustrating how you can try to nudge your content towards the top even with tables. He says MSN is easiest, then Yahoo and then Google. Factors; age, content, keyword density, how the page fares in the results (he said clicks on those listings matter), and your backlinks. He explains that when you try to adjust things to rank well in other engines, you need to be concerned over all the factors. He said he rather be on page three of Google then page one on MSN (hmmm, bold statement). It is important to look at your stats to determine this, such as referrer analysis, keyword analysis including current rankings, path analysis, "most desired action" analysis. Content adjustment; ease of minor keyword density adjustments, frequency of the spidering (frequency of content changing), authority of the content, internal pages getting indexed quickly. He ran over time and decided to end his presentation early.

Michael Murray from Fathom was next up. You can please them all at once to a degree. But get real, it is not easy to pull that off. MSN is easy, Yahoo is real fickle - it sometimes slow to come around, Google is easy but takes a long time - you need to give them a dozen roses, a box of chocolates and a nice big diamond ring. He shows how he ranked a page well for "Ground Testers" in Google (#5), MSN (#4) and Yahoo (#4) relatively quickly. Be careful with the broad versus specific words (speak to different search engine users), testing (start with tough keywords and phrases) and beware of greed (same page, multiple rankings). Tools; Google 300 (inhouse tool they use), WordTracker KEI, Web analytics, Sales data, Charting performance and influence of root words. Titles should emphasis keywords, they get ranking first, don't necessarily ID section of the site and keyword repetition but without overkill. He shows some examples... Meta data; keyword location, corporate name, butchered grammar, attribute, length, keyword repetition blended. Shows an example... Content; page freeze at any point (CVS), track cache dates (select, diverse pages), breaking up isn't hard to do (if you can't win on an engine), home page is your best bet.

Rahul Lahiri from Ask.com is on the QA but no presentation.

Content here is written in real time, please excuse any typos and other grammar issues.

Monte Cohen is up first from Moniker.com and Traffic Club. Monte has been in the domain space for sometime so I imagine he will have some good things to say. He discusses about professional domain portfolios. The domain market has become very profitable he says. Domain revenue was not originally known in the beginning. Revenue = Search revenue, CPA programs, and selling domains. 850 million dollars in annual advertising and domain sales. Potential to reach 2 billion by 2010. Impressive. Companies and individuals that own more than 1000, 10,000 or more domains is on the rise. Buy domains.com owns 660,000 has investment domains. That is a substantial amount of domains.

So what makes up a good domain? He says: Natural generic brand, easy to remember (radio test), clear, concise, and descriptive (what does it say to the user), commercially oriented (search bids), visually pleasing, existing type-in traffic, back links, page rank, alexa rank, mistypes (generic vs trademark). So how do domains generate revenue. Mainly through ad revenue from CPC, CPA, and CPM. Domain sales or the sale of domain names directly or portals. Domain development such as individually or in partnership domain owners add content, diversify advertising, and build web networks. Monte puts up some article links and studies. He says that 70% of internet surfers type a name in an address bar to reach a destination, according to WebSideStory, an internet analytic firm in San Diego. Thats up from 53 percent four years ago. He gives some example of domain advertising pages. It is a one click page that is focused around the keyword in the domain. So where does this traffic come from? There is type in traffic, development, search engine referrals, and search engine organic listings.

He discusses the domain sales front. Are all the .com domain gone? Longer more descriptive domains could diamonds in the rough. 5 million domains available in the aftermarket. Domains not on market for sale? – They are for sale (private market is the largest market). Domain owner whois – and then offer market value. He says that retail vendors are the optimal domain developers. He mentions vertical dominance. He says that you need to own as many domains as you can. He says you need to also protect your brand. Try typing in brand name 100 times and see which ones you got wrong and then possibly go register them. In order to create your portfolio, you will need some moderate capital and there are many tools.

John Lisbin from Point It, Inc is up second, he says that Google makes a lot of money from domain traffic. He talks about the traffic sources and how poor domain traffic can be for advertisers. He says that cost per action is about 3-4 times higher and often 8-10 times here with domain traffic. He also says that Google and other use domain traffic in the search network even though you can’t opt out of it.

Andrew Beckman from Search Ad Network is up third. He talks about how they break down the traffic referrers to determine conversions and uses it to compare sites that are in the traffic stream. He is basically trying to show that there are so good traffic in these sources from Adsense. He recommends to track this and then go after those sites in order to capitalize on those higher conversions from those sites. He is recommending the secondary engines. Hmmm… He says they are trying to grab traffic by buying domains, good example is Marchex who has spent over 200MM on direct navigation domains.
Josh Meyers from Yahoo and says they have partners with 3 of the major domain traffic consolidators. He discusses the domain and direct navigation channel. He says the traffic from direct navigation has increased substantially and will probably continue to increase. In terms of the future he is suggesting that there is movement towards considering the domains as media. Some of these companies want to turn the domains into micro-portals and there will be a lot of blurring of lines in terms of use for these things.

Detlev Johnson to mod up the sessions, he said we have some changes to the panel.

Peter Norvig from Google, research director, up first. Most things at Google are from bottom up, they dont have some 10 year plan, he said. Desktop search was one of those ideas. Gmail was an other one of those ideas. AdSense was an other. AdSense came out of the Gmail experiment, how do I monetize gmail? With AdSense. Personalization was an other bottom up. Google Video, image processing, key frames. Extraction of facts, Google OneBox results (i.e. population of Japan query). Future at Google. Face Localization, identifying faces in images - they cannot identify people yet, but they can know if this is a male or a female. More work in fact extraction, 1 million facts - they write patterns to figure out how to extract facts, they then tried to extract facts without writing pattern based algorithms. Statistical machine translation, they are trying to make it better - he shows the problems with it (Arabic and Chinese). So expect to see more of a "conversation" between you, your query and Google - i.e. alternatives, refinements, spelling correction and so on.

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! to talk about Yahoo! Research. They are not trying to be an expert in everything but they want to focus on a few things. Specifically, community, microeconomics, information navigation and search and finally the user experience. "Better Search Through People." His presentation wasn't working like it should, so he talked us through the animations... He said imagine a Flickr slideshow. Flickr from a social perspective understood pixels. Flickr capitalized on human knowledge by adding tagging. User generated content... People + Algorithms > Algorithms. Phase I - Human editorial. Phase II - mass automation. Phase III is topological analysis. Phase IV is social search. He then goes through each phase. Query composition; 25% informational, 40% navigational and 25% transactional. Subjective queries include; "Do you know a reputable plumber in XYZ?" Democratize process of voting, move out of the purview of webmasters... ZoneTag: Use context available from mobile devices to help create, find, discover and share media. Provide least effort and most benefits. Yahoo! Remixer; allows one to take content, dump it into the tool, and enable the community to remix the content (movies). He then brings up Yahoo! Answers. I spoke about Yahoo! Answers a few times today... People answering people.

Detlev explains Ask.com's Smart Answers. Then introduces...

James Colborn from Microsoft adCenter. He will talk about adCenter Labs. He gives the adCenter marketing spiel... adLabs is a collaboration between adCenter and research center. Paid search, contextual ads, targeting, emerging markets. He shows some pre-done lab demos. He shows the search funnel that shows you the keyword phrase that is search prior and post the keyword phrase you entered in. Keyword Group Detection tool; it figures out what other keywords would search on based on keywords you enter in. Detecting Online Commercial Intention; looking at the probability of a commercial query based on the keyword phrase entered in. Now he does some live demos at adlab.microsoft.com. He shows some of the other tools, like a keyword tool like abbreviates, SUV. What about ROI? ROI has multiple meaning, region of interest, return of investment, etc.

SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging

Moderated by Chris Sherman, the Executive Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. Full (smaller) room. Chris introduces everyone, and remarks that he is surprised by the interest shown in the social search track topics so far today. He feels that social search is one of the key area where the opportunity is the greatest. SE’s are taking a cautious approach to incorporating consumer generated content into the SERPs.

Neil Patel of Advantage Consulting Services
Wikipedia and SEM. How to leverage Wikipedia results. Wikipedia is “the free encyclopedia.” They have a search function to search for articles on various topics. Can access 1.3 million articles through links, search, navigation, or categories sections. Search for term “Web 2.0” leads to a typical article page. See Wikipedia.org for more info. The neat feature is the two great options: edit this page and the history of the page and its edits The con tent is redistributable, licensed under GNU Free Document License, which allows for reprinting with proper citation/link. The history page allows for monitoring the changes to the topic.

Benefits of Wikipedia: authority links, drives traffic, great for information on current topics. Wikipedia is “more up to date” than traditional encyclopedias. Shows Wikipedia article on “Web 2.0” in #4 spot for the search at Google. He likes the traffic that it drives also. Do not: use Wikipedia for link building or to add biased information. This reduces the quality of the community. Do not SPAM! He tested the product by adding 3 links to a commercial site, and received a “Stop spamming.” Talks about “wikiality” mentioned on “the World.” The host (Stephen Colbert) suggested that people go into Wikipedia and add that “elephant population has tripled over last three months” to all elephant-related pages. Wikipedia ended up having to stop all changes from any pages about elephants in order to combat this test. Also banned “Stephen Colbert.”

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org
Brand Building Link Acquisition & Traffic Growth Via Social Tagging. Rand defines tagging as “community generated META information.” “A digital post it note.” A descriptive single word or phrases designed to contribute more information about a specific link or resource. What can be done with tags? Get attention for your content. Social communities can drive massive amounts of traffic to a site. An example is Digg and del.icio.us mention last month and the traffic jumped to 10X, and then stayed a little higher each day after the initial post. People are saying “I like this stuff,” and have stuck around.

Social tagging influences bloggers, decision makers and journalists. There is a branding benefit and positive associations that can accompany the right content mentions. Big players in tagging: Technorati – has user created tags to categorize blogs, feeds, and posts. Recommends doing a link-check at Technorati, which is far more accurate than Google. Del.icio.us: users save bookmarks publicly with tags. Suggests that marketers tag their content at del.icio.us. Popular links get thousand of hits/day. Flickr (he quietly mentions that Flickr doesn’t use nofollow tag- laughs). Stumbleupon – “a small player that drives thousands of visitors to his site.” DIGG: a social site that relies on how many times people have voted on a story. Typically when a web site gets “dug,” the average of 500 to a thousand new links appear to the site over the next short time period (he said month, I think). Bit players that matter: redit.com, furl.com, Newsvine, Yahoo! MyWeb, Shadows, Squidoo (user created lenses- also no nofollow ;) ) and a few more…

How to tag safely and effectively: do not be a spammer. These communities are monitored by people that care deeply about the content and the relevance. If you are going to spam, make it look legitimate. He is not saying don’t spam (because we are, you know, “us”-laughs), but do it in a manner that actually benefits some people in the community. “Spam for value.” (funny - people on the panel started using the term "value spam" over the rest of the session, much to Chris P's chagrin who does not like this term). Write for your audience. When seeking viral attention, content focus is critical. Look and feel of a site will effect how many people find it compelling enough to vote for. Use appropriate relevant and universal tags in order to provide ease of discovery. Look at tag clouds at the bottom of some pages (del-icio.us for example) for ideas. Use “SEO” instead of “searchengineoptimization,” for example. Tag other people’s content. Share the love and it will come back to you.

Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads
Will talk about “tagging for profit.” Not interested in the social ramifications, but how he can make money (applause). He feels that for-profit businesses have a harder challenge in getting featured in “buzz sites.” It is possible, but it takes creativity and hard work (he is not rally fond of either of those- laughs). Four points methodology. 1. create Content –content is king. Must be “bookmark-worthy.” 2. Get it in front of the right people (but don’t spam). 3. Give it a bump on del.icio.us (only once) he has found that the majority of these types of sites “sort of feed on del.icio.us. 4. Rinse and repeat. Do it again and again, and eventually your content will find links. Sometimes the content falls short, so maybe you should take a different tact. It will pay off sooner or later.

Step 1. You have a boring website, it is hawking products such as a vacuum cleaner” What kind of link bait can you build? Suggests: funny lists, encyclopedic resources, unique tools (even just basic JavaScript tools like calculators). Rule of thumb: anything “link bait-worthy” is “tagable.” Step 2: make a list of bloggers in your community who may be interested in your content. Send them an email: make it short and to-the-point and non-pressuring. Include some piece of info to let them know the email is personalized. Create relationships with bloggers that are covering your industry, so that you can email them again regularly.

Step 3, bump on del.icio.us. Tag the link once to put I ton the radar. Do not setup multiple accounts to tag it man y times. Why del.icio.us? It’s the key tagging site. If you want to experiment with any of these tactics, makes sure it’s a “site you can burn.” Step 4. Rinse and repeat. This is much underrated. He uses Rand as an example that if you keep writing articles and putting out tools, the momentum gathers. Now if he tries to link bait, it works every time.

Theoretical example: boringmortgagebroker.com wants to succeed. Real examples from del.icio.us “mortgage” tags included controversial angle such as spin saying “why banks are so afraid to foreclose.” Another: JavaScript amortization calculator – found on a few sites. So the above needs to create good link bait content. Step 2, write personal emails to a dozen or so mortgage bloggers. Ste 3: bump it on del.icio.us once. (note: if you create an “authority profile” by tagging lots of good pages, you are more likely to be respected. So what happened? It failed…don’t’ get discouraged, try again and sooner or later it will work.

Q&A Speakers for this session are Todd Malicoat from stuntdubl.com and Chris Pirillo of TagJag.com. Each provides some brief comments about the value of tagging and social book marking.

The Branding and Search session started out with Barbara Coll Moderating and the following cast of characters: Ron Belanger, Senior Director of Channel Strategy and Development Yahoo! Search Marketing, Jonathan Mendez, Partner, OTTO Digital, Chris Copeland, Partner, Managing Director Outrider Search Marketing, Mike Margolin, VP, Associate Media Director, Targeted Marketing, RPA and Jenny Howell, Interactive Marketing, American Honda Motor Co. who did not speak, but was the topic of Mark Margolin's presentation.

Just before this session started I ran into a prominent search marketer and we talked about some of the common questions related to search and branding. How do you sell clients on search marketing for branding purposes? Also, how do you best measure it? These questions and more were answered by the panel.

First up is Ron Belanger of Yahoo and his presentation, "Nurturing your brand with search marketing". Ron posed the question, "What is search and branding?" and went to the dictionary for a definition. What he found was hardly appropriate (as was intended) for defining "brand" in terms of what brand means to search marketing. So used a series of quotes from prominent individuals in the advertising world to help define brand:

Jeremy Bullmore - "Customers build an image of a brand as birds build nests. From the scraps and straws they chance upon."

It's not just the advertising message, it's every interaction that defines a brand.

David Ogilvy - "Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverence to create a brand."

Nittin Shah - "Branding is not something where the entire investment happens overnight and profits can be reaped the very next day. It's a continuous process and the returns also come in a similar fashion."

When you talk about top brands, you're talking about emotions. How we define brand is how we feel about those companies.

Ron then checked Yahoo Answers to find out about some of the top rated brands: Starbucks, Apple and Yahoo.

The value of search as a branding mechanism is not the medium. In fact, if a search marketer is doing their job, they're getting the visitor off the search results as fast as possible. The branding does not happen within the 70n characters of text in the ad, it takes place on the site.

Measurement - clicks, time spent on site.

Another quote:
David Verklin, CEO Carat Americas - "It's hard to overstate the importance that search plays in marketing and advertising campaigns. "Search will become ubiquitous. Search is becoming the behavior of choice. Our job as advertisers is to put our clients' products in the path of search behavior."

Search often leads consumers to new brands and websites. Top ranking postitions in search often convey perceptions of leadership.

Every intereaction with a brand reinforces that brand. This is not limited to search for products, it can also occur with search for support and for other post purchase search situations.

Use appropriate measurement models.

- Brand
Engagement - page views, time spent on site
Value - score desired outcomes
Brand lift
Data overlays
Yahoo Buzz/Google Trends

- Marketing Sales
Online sales
Use appropriate cookie window fhr product

- CRM
How does search affect customer support

Shows example of a multichannel strategy.
Commercial: Guy going on a beer run during a commercial.
What keywords are important, but not necessarily relevant to the product for the target audience? Online games. Next he describes an advergame related to the "beer run" concept and how search terms related to "beer run" were used to attract traffic.

Next up is Mike Margolin Targeted Marketing who brought his client, Jenny Howell from Honda and discussed branded and non-branded search.

Described a Yahoo Search Marketing Study to determine whether there was there a defined impact on search terms: branded and non-branded. They found that even impressions had value. There was also a high recall of text in search ad title and description. Overall, search brought brand exposure that might not otherwise have happened and encouraged further research. There is opportunity with non-category phrases.

Shows example of Honda Civic, not a great looking car. Ad: "It has a great personality". Next he shows an ad for Honda Element. Honda made commercials that used clever/humorous situations to communicate features of the car and then ran keyword ads to attract people looking for the commercials.

Targeted cheap keywords - a lot of them.

Created a game showing the Element interacting with the various animals in the previous commercials.

The phrases that were unrelated to the car or it's features were tracked. They identified the phrases that converted to visitors the most.

The question about going after non-related search terms, is whether they were "talking to their audience"? They used Yahoo Buzz index to identify the phrases to drop. 20-40% of all referrals were coming from paid search listings.

Branding study showed significant lifts for target audience in: Awareness, intent to purchase.

Query to the audience: Half the audience is a search marketing agency and half are brand marketers.

Next up is Jonathan Mendez of OTTO Digital, part of Offermatica and his presentation, "Optimizing your brand through search Relevance".

Search is so powerful because it's the opportune moment. THe searcher is focused on achieving a goal. How can marketers find the opportune moment and deliver contextually relevant brand messages?

Gives example of an ad via cell phone where Starbucks offers to sponsor a meeting between two friends in the same area.

Searcher behavior - people are searching on generic phrases. Need to be visible - top rankings for paid and natural phrases.

Why does the search impression have no (perception of) value? It does.
Messaging: Words can brand.

Case Study 1
Branding & Search via SEO
vitaminlab.com

Focused on optimizing for "discount vitamins"
Messaging: Title tag - brand name, keyword, brand message

The brand name in the search results makes you stand out. Brand names in title tag are in ALL CAPS.

Case Study II
Branding and Search via PPC

Segmentation - Gives example involving "Timberland" showing keyword buys and landing page creative that varies by the targeted audience.

Case Study III
Branding and Search
Secret Deodorant - National promotion.
Missed opportunity because the phrases related to the "What's your secret" are not being bid on.

Coke and Coca cola. Not showing consumer the logo according to how they searched. coke.com vs cocacola.com

There's a huge amount of data for brand intelligence available online. Who decides your brand identity? Your creative director? Why not test using search?

Brand intelligence through search analytics:
Prod interest
Impressions
Messaging that best attracts
What imagry they respond to

We are just scratching the surface. optimizeandprophesize.com (blog)

How fast can you talk about brand? Chris Copeland of Outrider tried to find out in his presentation.

Brandng for the Masses
- Setting brande expectations
- How the other half lives
- Branding between channels
- Branding for the masses

We have to get beyond situations like, "We ran a superbowl ad and bought related keywords". i.e. Most brand search marketers have "been there, done that".

Branding Expectations. The branding studies in search are limited. The studies that are being done are one-offs and being led by search engines. There needs to be consistent methodologies. Band value in search is limited by limitations on creative and control of positioning.

Dynamic Logic measures shifts in attitudes about brands. Explains the AdIndex tool that can be used to measure brand.

Outrider Research:
Online ads boost search engine searches.

How to measure brand without a study
Set objectives - not about perceptiona purchawseintent, but about engagement

Brand exposure isn't limited to just branded keywords.

Key erformance indicators
Normal DR Metrics
Conversion rate, Renvenue, ROI

Make sure you're using both orgnaic and paid search for both brand and generic messaging. Adding PPC to an organic-only campaign rasied overall conversion rate.

Barbara Coll: How do you sell this up the chain? Make people worried about the competitive risks out there can be a start. Show this via a competitive intelligence report.

Questions from the Audience:

Audience: What are some best practices for managing affiliates and your own SEM for brand?
Mike: Has worked with a few clients in this situation. In some cases, back down to affiliates. Define what affiliates can bid on?

Audience: (Nacho Hernandez) How do different languages affect how you use branding in search?
Jonathan: Be sure to test and measure.
Ron: Treat each market separately.

Audience: For Chris. Have you worked with Dynamic Logic on a search branding study?
Chris: Dynamic Logic cannot do a brand study with search because the search engines control the ad placement.

I admit I like statistics so I was glad to cover this session. The first speaker up was David Hallerman from eMarketer and tells the audience that he is a New Yorker and going to go very fast. I hope he is kidding cause fast is not necessarily fun. He says that this year alone will be a bigger year in terms of online advertising spending. No surprise here. He says that 16.7 billion will be spent, and next year it will be over 20 billion. This year 5-8% of all spending online will be on internet ads. By 2009 internet ad spending will be bigger than radio ads. Paid search spending dominates the internet ad pie with over 21% of all spending. Search is all things to all departments. US paid search ad spending will surpass 10 billion mark in 2009. However during the first 3 years of the millennia there was hyper growth in the 150-200% per year. That can be good to maintain as it will create a bubble. There has been a decline from those years starting in 2003 but it’s a good thing, as its growth that is consistent. Nielsen in June 26 said that Google had 49% of the market. Sue Decker the CFO of Yahoo even said that its not there goal to be #1. Looking at Google and Yahoo together they dominate the search space. He also says that most people have had a positive experience with Google. However not everyone is a fan of Google. 44% of internet users only use one search engine. According to Sergey Brin, the “no 1. fact that contributed to our success over the past seven years was luck”. David also mentions that the research companies have different takes on the situation. They are not all right, but not all wrong. Its difficult to count and measure search completely. According to eMarketing us local search spending is lower than last year. Local is not performing as well as had predicted. It’s a very specialized areas that need good knowledge on local markets. Advertisers and agencies have mixed attitudes about local search. He then explains where people look first for local business listings. It varies greatly. Two trends in local search. One is younger people who spend more time online. The other trends is people who have more money. Local will continue to surprise us completely over the next few years. He also mentions that conversion data about which is better SEO or paid search varies. For example he says that paid search does a better job converting in the offline area (example: car brands, dealerships). But at the same time SEO converts better in a delayed purchase cycle. 39% of US adult internet users search once a day or even more often. So what about the share of time spent online. Search has the lowest share of time. Makes sense though, if search works then its in and out and on your way. Complex searches are growing and the most recent data shows paid search is still definitive in creating conversions. He next talks about shopping. It’s a huge space. 74% of users are looking for more information about a product or service. 66% of us adults often or always research online before buying. 55% of US adults often or always research online to find the best price.

He says that 25% are not worried about click fraud, but all the rest are. 60% of US adults say: “search engines should not permanently store users search behaviors”. 51% of US adults “we’re not confident that the data search engines collect will remain private. 1/4 of US internet users would not continue to use Google if it released information about their searches to the government.

Bill Tancer from Hitwise is up next. He talks about how fascinating search term data is and the revelations you can gleam from it. Bill is a huge fan of data and loves economics he start by walking through his day. He mentions the Hitwise blog as well which has some cool information at www.ilovedata.com for search marketers. He talks a lot about prom dresses interestingly enough and I recommend checking out his blog for that information. Also be sure to check our the Mystery of the Golden Spruce.

Communicating With Customers

Moderated by ClickZ Editor Rebecca Lieb. Welcomes everyone. Will be taking a broad view from a variety of perspectives on new ways to communicate with customers. These ways transcend email, such as RSS, feeds, podcasts, syndication. Looking from perspective of an Ad Agency (Organic), a PR agency(SEO-PR), and client-side look of things (TerraPass).

Rick Corteville from Organic
They look to create empathy with target audience that leads to a customer’s delight. “Always give people more than what they expect to get” – Nelson Boswell. People often do not take this into account when communicating with customers. Some guideposts for customer communication: Be Organized, be relevant, and be flexible. Being relevant: uses tackle-box analogy: there are many types of customers (fish) need the right lure to draw them. Finding the right lure includes examining dbase and establishing a high level of relevancy.

Showcase a connection to the customer needs. Message targeting via SIC code, geography, or zip codes. Look at registrants: newspapers and portals. Look at events and target RSS feeds through particular events. Position self as a resource: social community such as 20th Century Fox’s X-Men 3 community. What they built in conjunction with myspace.com was a custom profile for fans of X-Men to visit. They can download IM skins, screensavers, etc. Obtained approximately 1.7 million friends prior to movie launch. After launch, skyrocketed to over 3 million! The largest myspace site at that point. This also relates to search. In the case of someone who is searching for product/brand name plus “broken,” the ads should be targeted to them instead of simply broad matching an ad with a description of the company as if they are a new customer.

“Bend like the reed.” Testing is the key to find out what are the types of media vehicles that are the best fit for a particular client. Start small, “you are not behind!” People feel tat they are somehow behind, when in fact there aren’t even a large amount of companies doing email marketing, for example. Do not expect results, but be happy if they come. Tells of an example where the person pitched a test to their superior and promised no returns. If you are holding something like an RSS feed to a high pedestal, you may be disappointed. All or nothing: don’t just do a blog for one-way communication, encourage responses/comments, etc and the customers will appreciate it more.

Types of things to do: frequency caps such as click to call pop-ups every fifth page. Is this a positive experience for the user? If you are utilizing video or another more engaging rich media unit, are you pushing it too far? RSS feeds within banner ads, HTML emails. Mobile: SMS for support information (like the ability to add a support Number to their address book) or ideas such as IPSH, which does mobile marketing campaigns. Social networking, desktop applications and other “widgets” to get feedback on products from the community.

Jamie O'Donnell of SEO-PR
Discussing a “panoply of offerings and options” for communicating with customers. Set’s up an example by describing how in the early 20th century countries pushed-for adoption of telephone networks. Russia, instead, pushed for loud speakers. So do people look at RSS feeds as telephones or loudspeakers? RSS technology allows you to ID content that interest you and have it delivered directly. Average Blogline user tracks about 20 feeds, one example he has seen is someone that tracks 1440 feeds! (That may be Barry?)

So they tested creating 6 RSS feeds and optimized titles and descriptions for Consumer Reports. News, ratings/reviews, cars, press releases, tips and buying advice, and health guide. He wishes that we could find out the volume of searches taking place across all the aggregators. Difficult to do this. They mapped what categories where in the top ten popular. “They added the feeds to their site and we submitted them to 80 directories.” They use press-feed.com and RSS Submit product. They then monitor to ensure content is being correctly pulled into searches. The key to the Consumer Reports RSS feeds success was “can we provide the potential reader with news that they can’t get anywhere else?” According to research in March 2005, 73% of people read blogs for this purpose (sorry missed the source).

Results: daily blog citation and LinkRank (Pubsub.com free tool, sounds cool - keeps track of your link building efforts as explained by Greg Jarboe) jumped when RSS feeds launched. By putting out really valuable content, they saw great increases in citation, and grew search rankings for the core domains. Second analogy is that there is a tendency for some organizations to want to lecture while others want to hold conversations. Provided Wharton School MBA example: testing a blog in 2005. Did potential MBA students want to hear lectures or hold conversations? Asked: who is the target? Let’s try a model for trying to create a conversation with the audience. Created “student2student” discussion board where students can blog about the experience of getting the MBA, and thereby attract others to want to do so. They actually created an “optimization guide” for the students that were participating. (great idea!) This was critical for that group in helping them to create the conversations they wanted. In order to get traffic, one recommendation is to “think about terms users would type to find your post and actually use it in your post.” One and a half years later, the blog ranks #2 for “mba admissions.” Building on this, they can further track results to data like 94% of students seeking full time employment received offers.

Adam Stein from TerraPass
Will present a case study. He feels that there are some great tools out there to help communicate with customers that are “very cheap.” TerraPass is a web retailer that sells an environmental “product,” that is, they ask for donations to help create more sources of alternative power to counteract pollution. They are a small start up, and face the same challenges as any young “pre-profitable” retailers has – they have no money. (laughs) The problem: size, no money, no technical team, no awareness, selling an intangible product to a skeptical audience. Goal is to figure out a cost-effective way to reach their audience using SEO and PR. They need to engage (trying rich content) with the potential client and develop an ongoing relationship (trying social media). Type of audience is difficult to reach in a low-cost way.

Their main marketing outreach tool is their blog: terrablog, with an RSS feed. The content is good. Also has a newsletter and uses email marketing. “Email is king” 16,258 subscribers to email, and only 233 RSS subscribers. He does note that only about one third of emails are opened. They strive in their email newsletter to have the tone of a blog. They promote reader comments from the blog into the email newsletter. Certain advantages to communicating via email: you get very granular statistics, such as links clicked-on, etc. They have incorporated Google Analytics and use them for good details on high-converting blog posts. They can see in a tangible way what effect each post has versus another in terms of converting customers. They are basically spending nothing on the whole email and newsletter package ($100/month).

Some other things they did included emailing other related blogs with an introduction to Terrablog. This led to some nice posts, including one at “Green Car Congress” which was read by an LA Times writer (Dan Neil?) who wrote an article (a flop in terms of conversions), but then led to an article which was written at Wired magazine which actually led to sales. Also, Ford contacted them from the LA Times article which led to a huge business development deal with them. All thanks to the one blog post at Green Car Congress that they had written after receiving an email about the TerraPass product. Also shows some examples of top page Google searches, thanks to G “loving blogs.” Even though the terms are obscure, they lead to some relevant traffic. For example, “TV standby mode” is actually #4 at Google, and this term is becoming more popular. Apparently, leaving TV’s in standby mode is a big waste of energy, and England is even thinking about outlawing them.

They are also very interested in myspace to reach the college market in particular. Will also look at Youtube and eBay “widg-it” and developing interactive games.

QA
Rebecca asks “what should marketers be looking to invest?” (On a larger scale.) Rick: depends on the goals and objectives of the particular company. Overall, he sees 5-15% of marketing budgets used for these types of consumer-reaching efforts. Jamie: the biggest cost is the front end design of the feed and feed landing pages. Once design, optimization, and registration is done, it can be “turned over.” We have clients that spend between 5 and 10 thousand dollars over the first few months, but then are pretty much on their own adding new content etc.

How do you see optimizing podcasts as an actual enhancement to blogs? Jamie: finds that if they are helping client leverage all emerging trends, then they will be ready when they hit the main stream. Recommends spending an extra few dollars to optimize the podcast content as well as the feeds and blogs. Adam says that they don’t podcast yet, but are planning to eventually.

Chris Sherman seems to be the moderator for all the social sessions, which turned out to be huge. People are filling the rooms to here about social search. Now it is Google's turn. But it appears there is only one person representing social search from Google. To me, that makes sense, since (1) there are some good competing sessions and (2) they are not too much into social when compared to Yahoo!, IMO.

Sashi Seth from Google, to discuss the Google Co-op. The goal is to improve search, including personalization, better algorithms, and social elements.

What is Google Co-op?
It is the algorithm of core web search plus a user base. Google Co-op is the next evolutionary step in search - extending the power of search by combining our algorithms with the context, knowledge and unique expertise of individuals. They are trying to make search more "contextual." He said, many of you may have seen this co-op results in refinements for health.

Two Products; (1) Subscribed Links and (2) Search Topics.

(1) Subscribed links: There are a number of special content and features built into Google search, such as currency conversion, movie show times, and stock quotes....

Features: Contextual information from other sources is displayed right at the top of the search results page:
- Title that leads to information on content providers site
- 3 Lines of text
-- No images or UI Control
-- 80 Characters per line
-- Mixture of characters and URLs
- Green background to differentiate from sponsored results

He shows some examples, including InStyle Magazine, Search Engine Watch and Digg, but he leaves off mine. Google Coop directory has more.

Anybody can build a subscribe link. Users subscribe to these subscribe links, they trust you. They can always unsubscribe.

Good subscribed links can be built; but what is best? Fresh, real time information is best. Target precisely, match those keyword phrases well. Make sure the content or link is "actionable," send them to the page they want right away. Try to make sure the content you control over the results are easy and pleasing to read.

(2) Search Topics: Create specialized search for your area of expertise or contribute to a Google Topic like health.

He shows a health related search that brings up the search refinements. It places several links, under categories, that enable you to refine those results. He shows the results on the page, labels, about the authors and the source are all displayed in the results.

Leveraging topics to address key needs in search include:
- Query formulation, the refinements allow users to start with simple queries and refine using labels.
- Lack of context, labels suggest ways to look for information.
- Trust, attribution provides a way for users to bring their brand associations to search

Anyone can build a search topic, a vertical search. It works similar, users can subscribe to you as an entity and will get these search refinements. You are basically able to build your own search engine with this. But a tad more complex for the generation of the engine.

If you are passionate about a topic and want to improve the search experience in that topic, you can create a search topic. They can be accessed via the co-op profiles, you have control over the labels and the refinements. Quality can be improved incrementally. You can link to your profile page from your site or blog to promote it.

This benefits you by bringing more traffic and building of brand and trust to your company or person.

This content is close to real time, please excuse any typos and other errors in this content.

Does Demographic Targeting Matter?

Moderated by Misty Locke of Range Online Media

Jed Nahum of MSN Search
Demographic Targeting and Business intelligence (BI). His team does product planning for MSN AdCenter. How do we provide BI and demographic Targeting? How accurate is the data? Does demo targeting and BI really matter?

Starts with an AdCenter overview. Discusses France and Singapore, then US launch. New release coming out over the weekend that includes Firefox support and a few other changes. So, how do we enable targeting? Pretty simple. Uses a screenshot from registration data collection methods. Windows Live ID. Collects birthdates, gender and aks some other questions. This data is used for both BI and conducting kw research, determining desired audience. Basically tells you age and gender distribution for people searching for a term. So if you know you are targeting specific demographics, you can adapt you kw list.

What percentage of searches are covered? “Not all of them, but some of them.” A sample size that achieves significance doesn’t have to be 100% of audience. “Bid Boost” product helps advertiser target their demographic more specifically. The cookie only uses age group, no specific information that marketers could get to. Because of privacy concerns, it is hard to release data to outside sources. How accurate is data? Internal assessment of data is performed using 2 different databases. Compares US data only. Identifies cases in which consumers overlap. 80% of the ages matched in the two databases. This speaks that there is a consistent match, and tended to be more accurate on the younger side, which is the demographic that is more likely to provide this information. Make of it what you will, but he feels that their internal assessment for accuracy shows pretty good results.

Information discovered falls into two different categories: one is a “duh,” of course it would be known, but other info is actually fairly surprising. For example, the searches for “diaper” are 61% male and 48% male under the age of 36. Research also led to discover that adult diapers are also being sought. Has to be careful to exclude some keywords and emphasize babies. More surprises: “Elle girl” searches 48% male (searching for Elle Macpherson, mostly). Travel: “honeymoon” splits 50/50, but “honeymoon planning” types terms 75% female. Allows you to find what Kevin calls “power segments.” “Ferrari” mostly kids, so you want to avoid catering to them in the ad copy. Process: Reaffirms what you already know. Learn new facts about your audience. Discover intelligence that changes your strategy.

Finishes off with some quotes of SEM’s giving MSN great ratings on ROAS. Also had a case study that he was going to show which shows great ROAS. Check out adlab.microsoft.com for “funky cool stuff.”

Kevin Lee from Did-It.com
Wants to reiterate some general best practices with some case studies. (Kevin is in a documentary about SEM that is being produced, so there is a camera on him.) “Better targeting brings us closer to the holy grail of advertising.” First thing to think about with demo targeting and any bid-boosting activity is “what does my regular media plan look like?” Chances are that within those plans there are some good demo target parameters. The question becomes “where did you get the data for that targeting?” You can also regress current customer information and intuit demographics based on analysis of names, for example, to help determine gender. Look at existing customers and see which ones are the best. You can also try to collect demo info during checkout process in ecommerce, for example. Start to append demo info to the user info that you are databasing. This will lead to the eventual ability to bid boost based on demographics. Find the customers that are particularly profitable to you, as Jed mentioned he calls them “power segments.”

Demo segmentation: which demographics actually lead to better conversions? If you can determine this, it will guide you ability to bid boost for them. For example, if the conversion rate of non-identified customer pales in comparison to a particular demo, target them. Does one segment order more over time than another? What is your 90-10 rule? Many questions to consider. Geographic segmentation may be the most powerful method of segmentation you have. Clicks are worth different amounts in diff areas. Clicks from diff sections of the world or country have diff preferences.

Case study #1: car buyers. Dit-it and a major car lead-gen site team use age, gender , and geography based on feedback from customers, the car dealerships. Cherry pick the good clicks with the highest potential to convert to a good customer. Regression analyses will help you understand which are most valuable. Another case: B2B marketer MSC Industrial Supply. Faces a problem many B2B’s face of having consumers “get in the eay” of business leads. They’d prefer not to sell one electric motor, but are more interested if you want to buy 400.

MSN adds increased targeting options by allowing you to raise your bids. One way to target on behavior is control you have over listings allowing you to use day parting (times of day) and days of week. Day parting in Google and Yahoo! Require use of third party system. Shows an example of data from Match.com: different predicted click value is based on times of day and week. Chart goes from very low conversion at 5:00am to very high between 8:00 and 10:30pm. Becomes more difficult for a competitor to monitor your position, since they will not notice if you are bidding higher in a particular area (i.e. the LA DMA). You are up against the two types of marketers: brilliant marketers and total lunatics (a classic line from Kevin that always gets approval). Use power segments to reduce waste, increase profits, and improve ads and performance.

Michael Sack from Inceptor
Calls himself the “doubting Thomas.” Decided to do a study to see if demo targeting really matters, or if you can use other techniques to get good results. Starts with an explanation of the concept of demo targeting. Does it matter? It depends – are you trying to drive brand, revenue? Does your product fit a particular demo? What is your budget? The dirty little secret: “half of advertising doesn’t work, we just don’t know which half.” Things to keep in mind: when targeting mass audience, the idea is that the majority meets demographic target. You must expect exposure to far more than demographic target. It is a “Push” concept (vs “Pull”)? Online demographics may differ from offline. Highly dependant upon information (cookies). Privacy issue are abound – the system is entirely dependant on people giving accurate information. He says that he uses several different “personas” when doing research, even to the level of saving cookies in a folder and using different computers. He was somewhat suspicious.

He devised a test. Using MSN AdCenter – test a group of 50 keywords as follows: 7 days with no demo targeting. 7 days with demo targeting. 7 days without, but after creative was optimized for the desired demo target. He used Bid Boost. Results: when he added demo targeting, traffic dropped significantly, and drop in cost. Avg cost per click went from 29 to 37 cents. Conversion rate went up. When he added new creative, conversion rate went up as well. As a result of improved conversions and lower cost of non-targeted optimized ads, they did better. Revenue was significantly better without demo targeting.

Conclusions: does demo targeting work? Yes. Increases conversions and ROAS, reduces cost. However you do sacrifice traffic and revenue. Is it as effective as keyword or creative optimization? Not in the results of this small test. There could be inaccuracies in testing, he admits. Should we employ demo targeting? Depends on objectives. If goal is to acquire as many customers as possible for minimal acceptable return, then “no.” You should be optimizing keywords and creatives. If you have a limited budget/niche market: “yes” demo targeting does make a lot of sense. Online demo targeting at MSN is very diff from offline targeting or Google’s product. You do miss potential audience with demo targeting that could increase revenue.

Q&A speaker is Dana Todd from Sitelab International, Inc., and along with Kevin, a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO (Dana is President).

Gary Stein is up first from Ammo Marketing and talks about his company’s mission and the work that they do. He mentions a concept of “clique-through”, using social media to spread your message deep, but not wide. Which will help generate more long term value than an immediate pop. He gives the example of a world image and how your message could spread across. He gives the example of the JibJab cartoons about Bush and Kerry. Viral or friend marketing is not really trying to make you realize the spread of some value, it’s mainly of something of interest.

So what is a clique = a small exclusive group of friends or associates. Clique through = the degree to which an exclusive group hears and accepts your ideas. Cliques are built upon norms and group culture. To be accept means to be built into that culture. He gives some data about blogging behavior. Ovewhelming that creative expression is top, document personal experience is next, and stay in touch w/ friends and family. A myspace is not a place to broadcast your ideas, but just stay in touch with family and friends. Blogging is an extension of publishing. MySpace has really 75 million groups of 4, is a better way to think about myspace.com. He gives an example of how people get suggested new products. It seems friends suggesting it or it being at a party is pretty important. Marketers need to take the product and make it a part of that exclusive group of young people. He suggests in Step 1: is to tightly define your group. He gives the example of tax and M&A attorneys. They get excited about different things. Once you identity your target group, define it even more into subgroups. Step 2: be not afraid of your features. He gives the example of a monocoque fork or unibody frame of a bike. Step 3: look for an increase in influencer ration. 1 in 10 people are influencers. Get in with them and feed them information. Step 4: Support your community. You can do this in the online space, give them software, bandwidth, calendars, etc.. He says you kinda have to buy your way into the space. He says to remember they are often times grass-roots organizations because they had to organize themselves. He talks about there are some groups where you will get to reach a lot of people and other groups that you will not. Once you get more defined there becomes less and less people. How do you do this online. He says they have had success in directories and online networks. Find that one person and then look for the clique he is connected too. He mentions about comment-vertising. He says its not comment spam, but advertising with relevant something to say. In my opinion this is still spam, the incentive is not to share opinion but to selfishly advertise. Regardless it still works I imagine, I see it quite often already online.

Scott the CEO of About.com is up to talk. He says you need to know these things. 1. Success in social media = engagement + authenticity x target audience reach. 2. Look for riches in the niches. Social media takes many forms. 3. Learn, but don’t be intimidated, into following early adopters. 4. Cede only as much control as you can stand. He next talks about About.com. He says that YouTube and Myspace create a short experience, and its still undetermined how it will pan out for the long term. He says social media is the foundation of many of out most popular sites.

..and then my laptop died, so I only got part of the session. Good session though.

Chris Sherman is up the panel moderating, he stumbles on the words "Social Search" together. DaveN is on my left drinking coffee. The Google Sitemaps team is having a lunch event after this session, I am personally not going, even-though it should be pretty cool. Tim Mayer snapped a pic of DaveN and I, so I snapped one back (will post soon). The room is pretty full.

Tim Mayer is up first. He gives a brief overview that he gave this morning. Same slides, so I may skip his intro to the beef of the session. See here for this coverage, sorry for not covering the same thing again. Cool Lamps...He then hands it over to...

Yumio Saneyoshi from Yahoo! Answers. Quantifying Human Knowledge: 7B people in the world, lets say each person know 5,000 subjects and can write 10 pages on each subject, so you get 350 Trillion pieces of knowledge. There are 40B web documents, so we only captured a fraction of that knowledge with Web search. Yahoo! Answers tries to capture this. This enables people to easily resolve everyday questions by sharing their knowledge, experience and opinions with their community. We archive and index this info into search so future visitors an quickly tap our rich knowledge repository. Yahoo! Answers complements web search, it is not a substitute. He shows the Yahoo! Shortcuts integration of Yahoo! Answers in Yahoo! Search (wow that ! key is getting a lot of use this sessions!!!!) They also show how Yahoo! Answers itself is actually indexed in Yahoo! Web search. He shows how Yahoo! isnt biasing their own content in the organic results, Google also ranks it very well. Participating in the culture of sharing: What inspires a single person to answer over 2,000 questions? It is more than just time on their hands. People are giving back to their community. It is fun to answer questions. Answers is the evolving Social Web at work. Democratization of Expertise: How do I grow my eyelashes? How can we end poverty? No question is too dumb or too obscure and the answers range.... They have seen exponential growth of Yahoo! Answers, 12x UU and 25x PageViews. Yahoo! Answers has the highest market share for a Q&A site. More than 12 million visitors last month. Monetization via category sponsorship, brand-specific channel and expert sponsor profiles,

Joshua Schachter the founder of del.iou.us and with Yahoo!. He starts off explaining what is del.icio.us. He explains how bookmarking is selfish in nature. He explains that you can share, find multiple ways. Enabling Discovery; by user and by tag, authority and reputation by user and publisher, allowing users to consume data in many ways (web, RSS and platform based). Collective Memory & Discovery; remember, organize, share and discover (circular). They work with publishers to allow easier ways to add data to the system (add to del.icio.us).

Kakul Srivastava from Flickr. Photography has historically been about event based photography. With digital photography, user behavior has changed, since it is free. People have been tracking the 'in betweens', "Ambient photography," you are tracking the stream and not just events. Focused on enabling ambient sharing; participating (making it easy, more higher volume photos being taken), metadata (tags for finding, and auto tagging with views, favorites, etc) and network (strangers commenting on photos is cool). Flickr has grown very quickly. There are Flickr fans, groups meet up to take pictures together. Flickr's vision is "Eyes of the World." She talks about the Nokia Flickr partnership. She also shows on the Yahoo home page and shows how some pictures on Flickr were highlighted on Yahoo! Also shows how the Flickr tags were shown on the Yahoo! homepage based on a weekly mining of this data. The BBC has been regularly been featuring Flickr content. Also CNN had some Flickr photos on CNN TV.

Ashish Baldua to talk about Yahoo! Trip Finder. Trip Planner is a planning tool and a publishing tool for people who want to share knowledge with the rest of the world. A user comes to Yahoo! to plan his trip, then the user shares the trip with his friends or public, then the community benefits from this shared trip. 20,000 high-quality public trips created already, since launching about two months back. He shows a map of the broad coverage Trip Planner covers. He shows the "Journal View" for an editorial like view and easy to drag and drop photos. The social features has discussion, thumbs up, comments, and more. Monetization: Sponsorships with MasterCard, travel advertisers are looking to decommoditize their businesses by creating compelling rich narratives about their products and brands, match user's trip plan to travel agents for lead generation and lead generation avenue for booking sites.

This content is close to real time, please excuse any typos and other errors in this content.

I have covered this session quite a few times since it started and it usually has some excellent information on searcher behavior studies in the search engines. This time around it looks like we have a few new people presenting. The session starts off with Greg Sterling as moderator talking about the significance of this research is that the data is pretty concrete and it can be used to influence marketers approach to advertising in the search engines.

First up is Ann Frisbie from Yahoo Search Marketing. She is going to talk about the Power of Search in reaching and engaging the empowered consumer. She talks about how Yahoo has been fortunate to conduct some in depth research studies in search marketing about empowered consumers who are using technology to help make their decisions.

The new consumer paradigm is about the evolution of the shopping process through the use of technology. They followed consumers from start of purchase to end, who were technologically on the up and up, broadband access, and all touch points along the way (tv, media, etc..). This study covers the full range of a consumer making a purchase not just on the search side. She keeps calling the landscape the “new world” as it is different place than 10-20 years ago.

Information is gathered throughout the purchase process. There is not a purchase funnel! We need to rethink whether we should be looking at a purchase funnel in the first place. Technology these days allows people to research along the full length of the purchase process. She says we should be challenged to think about whether is a funnel a good idea to think about the purchase process. Half of all consumers are still gathering information from a variety of sources right up to their point of purchase. The interest is the most utilized source of information of each stage in the purchase process.

She recommends if searchers are looking for something you offers, start a conversation. Consumers have also integrating search into their purchase process in a big way. Millions of people are researching their future purchase using search, even though the vast majority of purchases are still being made offline. Searchers are looking to be influenced. Being more engaged and investigative shoppers, searchers are the shoppers most open to discovery. At the beginning of the purchase process, they consider more brands than non-searchers. She puts up a graph that says searchers generally consider 2.5 brands when making a purchase. Searchers are knowledge seekers, not bargain hunters. Well, they are bargain shoppers, but no more so than non-searchers. Searchers truly distinguish themselves as being more engaged and active shoppers across a variety of metrics. Ann says that searchers are more engaged on your website by researching you. One of the interesting things is searchers make up their minds online and are less likely to change them offline. Building their expertise prior to purchase, searchers were less likely to change their mind about the product they wanted while shopping online. She says people that do their research online often time sometimes know more about the product than the person in the store trying to sell it to you. Searchers can be more engaged in the shopping process but at the same time quicker to change their mind.

So what’s the value of controlling the conversation? With searchers more open to influence at the start of the shipping process but less likely to change their mind once they reach the stores. So some brand new data from Yahoo about Search Brand studies. Yahoo has setup a survey capability that enables near immediate responses from active in market shoppers of your products. The capability is coupled with click stream data as well to monitor behavior.

What they found. 1. Message internalization can occur from the simple text-only ads. Statistically significant lifts in brand awareness & perception occurred in some studies from exposure alone to search ads. 2. The real power lies in search’s ability to move brand perceptions when you get the searcher to click. 3. Search advertising can change consumer behavior & increase the amount of time that they spend with your brand.

Bill Barnes from Enquiro is up next filling in for Gord Hotchkiss who is on vacation in Europe. He first starts talking about “Pre Mapping”. It is basically you imaging what a search page will look like before they conduct the search. Before they even launch the search, they already know where the relevant information is. Questions. What is the cause of high click through rates and conversions on paid branded terms? Does cannibalism occur on branded terms where paid and organic are used together. Searchers in the research phase are more likely to go directly to organic. Searchers in the purchase phase are more likely to sponsored listings.

In order to test this theory, they got 80 people and split into 2 groups. Group 1 was instructed to do research. Group 2 is instructed to purchase. He puts up a heat map next of the two groups, one is researching and one is purchasing. So some things they observed. The researcher after 2.0 seconds is still focused on the first sponsored link. Interesting. So they found, there is no real difference between purchasers and researchers in how they search on the page. This is great news for the search engines and top sponsored links. There is no real difference. In fact, researchers seemed to linger on the top sponsored. Cannibalizing is probably happening. More proof that the top sponsored is the best position provided the ROI is there.

Something else that came out of this. This is specifically to sponsored ads. Where is your highest likelihood of conversions to a lead, sales, etc.. #1 position is top, #2, and #3 are good spots. But interestingly #7 & #8 are the next best converting spots in the ad group. He thinks that people get down in the organic results and then switch back over to the sponsored results (or last ads) number 7 and 8.

Next up is David Williams from 360i and talks about some very good studies they have been doing. There are some measurement challenges. He says studies look at searches not searchers. In the their first study, they found that conversion rate nearly identical for consumers starting search process with brand or non-brand terms and finished with a brand term. Brand search ending with a brand page will end with a higher conversion to a branded purchase. They also found that consumers that click on an ad ten times are three times as likely to cover than users who lick an ad just once.

Their second study objectives where to determine the true value of paid search in assisting natural search conversions and vice versa. They only looked consumers that converted, and studied 250,000 conversions during Q2, ’06. Of all the clicks leading to a conversion there was a close breakdown between paid and natural search. Because all clicks in the study led to a conversion there was a stronger skew towards paid than in other 3rd party studies. The next thing they looked at is consumers using both natural and paid search results are most involved in the search process with an average of 3.9 clicks on average. The users that were just natural search clicked an average of 1.7, paid search, 1.6 and all users together were 1.8. Multiple clicks leading to a transaction accounted for 66% of total clicks and 37% of transactions studied. Only 46% of all users that started with a paid non-brand terms converted through a paid non-brand keyword. Over 40% of users starting with a paid non brand terms converted on a natural listing and 12% converted on a paid brand listing. Indicates that paid non brand keywords have significant influence over natural search conversions. They next look at the users that switched between natural and paid search. 12% of searchers switched.

Good take aways. Monitor customers search patterns, remove obstacles to conversion, ensure strong branding elements for non-brand keyword landing pages. Non brand keywords are potential undervalued. Measure real ROI of non brand terms (including assists) and adjust ROI metrics as necessary. Bid on breadth, range of relevant non brand related keywords; reach 7 frequency impacts awareness consumer interaction and conversion rates.

Robert Murray from iProspect talks about trends in search engine user behavior. Jupiter Research and iProspect partnered to conduct this study. Jupiter conducted the survey using their database of 2 million consumers, about 2300 returned surveys. They have 4 years of trends to discuss to today. 62% of search engine users would only click on a result on the first page. 90% of search users said they would click on the result on the first 3 pages. What they are finding is that they know what they want and they want it now. So its more important than ever to optimize your site. Only 10% of users go past the first page. Percentage is expected is continue to decline. 36% of search engine users believe companies at top of search results are top brands in their field (33% in 2002). Brand equity is being bestowed upon entities in top search results. Users ascribe industry leader to brand within top results. Reinforces the importance of being found in the top results.

Next finding is about search result abandonment. 41% of search engine users who change engines or change their search term if they don’t find what they are looking for. What this means is that marketers need to take action to ensure their copy is compelling. Finally the importance of the long tail. 82% of search engine users re-launched an unsuccessful search using the same search as they used for their initial search but add more keywords. Users are showing a preference to a favorite search engine. Re-launching a search has been significantly increased (only 68% in 2 years).

Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies

Moderated by Misty Locke of Range Online Media. Nice ballroom, good to see the “old banners” again, but surprisingly on the sides of the room instead of looming over the speakers as in smaller rooms. Room is one third to a half full at 9:00, people continuing to arrive. Misty welcomes everyone and provides an intro on the topic: ads being run through various portals. Introduces panelists

Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing
“The big 3 have significant differences.” We can gain a competitive advantage by understanding some of those nuances. Will talk about Yahoo’s upcoming Panama. Starts with review of “basic match types.” Can think of these as “how wide of a net you want to cast” based on keyword(s). Talks about Exact/Standard match, Phrase match, and Broad or Advanced match and gives brief overview. To confuse things, each engine has slightly different ways of referring to these match types. Big difference is Yahoo that only has 2 types, standard and advanced.

One thing is that advertiser is forced to choose types of match. Many that setup accounts at Google are not sure that they are broad matching terms. How can broad or advanced match simplify the number of kw’s you are managing? A client selling Internet service in LA. Just for LA, there are about 270 kw’s /phrases. If using broad match, the idea is to find the few core phrases, which in her example reduces the list to 32.

Important to remember that in broad match, every single word needs to be in the search query. She discusses another example of dropping the kw list from 12,000 to 850. Shifts to discussion about how match types can also effect ad position. In the case of Google and MSN, match type does not play a role in how ad is positioned. Yahoo is only one of big three where ad position is based solely on bid. The trick is that the match types can impact how ad is positioned. An example, if “Misty and I both sell tennis shoes online, and she has a long kw list with lots of variations, and she is bidding ten cents. I am using few kw’s with advanced matching, but bidding $10. Regardless of bid, if she has a perfect match (ie: “red tennis shoes), her 10 cent bid will outrank the $10 bid."

When Panama launches, this will change the system significantly. They are going to use a “quality index” to rank ads, which will be published an visible to advertisers. Panama will cause perfect matches to no-longer “trump” broad match. She then goes onto to discuss that it is good to use all match types for each keyword (“enter kw in 3 different ways simultaneously”). This gave them better visibility into how many people are searching for exact pages and also what types of searches were done in triggering phrase match. They use log file analysis to help with this. Recommends doing this if not already.

Disadvantages of broad match: not recommended for one word kw’s or very generic phrases. One tell-tale sign is very low click-through-rate. “Maybe you are using broad match too broadly.” Remedies: add negative keywords, tighten up focus by moving to phrase or exact (in this case you will need to manually expand your list). Reason to do this is to modify bids and ad copy more precisely. Shows a chart that shows” what’s included” re: plurals, common variations, stemming (-ed ending to –ing, etc), misspellings. Yahoo! has plurals, not variations, sometimes misspellings. Google and MSN based on match type.

Shows a nice preview of MSN’s new AdCenter labs. Find synonyms, variations, seasonal trends, etc… Summarizes: manually expand kw lists. Use more finite management of kw’s, looks for gems and focus on them first. Review your web logs.

Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media
Will be speaking about “editorial review” and “customer service. Google editorial process: official line is “ads go up instantly,” but it actually is reviewed by system very quickly. Some terms will actually go live before seen by an editorial specialist, but “sensitive” terms like maybe related to pharma may take longer. At Yahoo!, the manual review depends on two main factors: search volume and term sensitivity. Promises “fast ad activation” in upcoming Panama, but there will be more of an emphasis on the post-submission/initial approval, with them trying to review their automated decisions more rapidly and often.. MSN has both automatic and manual review. Case by case basis manual review. Everything from punctuation to grammar to ad text will be checked manually.

Trademark terms. Google: No trademark terms in ad text or headline. Some trademark terms are placed on “blocked list.” She says this list includes “companies that frighten or will sue Google.” Trademark terms are a consideration in Quality Score. This can cause problems, i.e.: “Enterprise” was flagged in one example as a trademark term.

Yahoo! Trademark policy recently changed. As of March, Yahoo no longer allows advertisers to bid on TM terms. Resellers can bid, as long as they sell the product/service. Information sites must provide substantial information about TM owner, and cannot sell or promote competitor brands. To qualify as Yahoo! Reseller, Must have distinct URL and indicate an affiliate relationship on the landing page. In many cases, this is the only difference between parent sites and affiliate sites. She shows one that is an affiliate and looks a lot like the Expedia page.

MSN: all advertisers are blocked on TM terms until they get consent from owner of TM. Once they do get this, they are placed on an “OK list.” She gives an example of an MSN search that shows some quirks in the results. In general, TM policies are still evolving, so many times advertisers are left to police themselves.

General comments about customer service. Sometimes you will end up with boiler plate answers, but sometimes will “get there.” The service is not really attributable to the SE/Portal, but actually to the individual human responsible for helping you. Is there a higher quality of service for higher –spending advertisers? Some are set in stone on amount spent, others on a case by case basis. In her opinion, these services are overrated, and that informal relationships can yield far better answers. Try to create these types of relationships when on the phone with someone who does a good job. Highlights some resources: Andrew Goodman Google AdWords Book and other Page Zero Media books.

Brad Geddes from LocalLaunch.com
Will talk about IP targeting and some options involved. What is IP targeting? Based on IP assigned by host provider. Uses technology that maps geo-location to the provider. Sometimes sues user registration data if logged into Yahoo!, MSN, Google, etc. A mix and match of all these sources of info are what IP Targeting really covers. Country and Territory based campaign differ because the target is larger.

Google: supports over 200 countries, IP targeting available in 27 count ries. Walks though some screenshots from Google as to how to setup the campaign for specific countries down to IP’s. Notes that from an execution standpoint, it is best to have one campaign per country, since it makes it easier to track. Next he talks about “DMA” targeting. We are currently in SF/Oakland DMA. He likes that Google will actually give you a fifth line if you base an add locally to show the location. Very valuable. Then talks about Radius Targeting. Based again on hosting providers, not the actual homes of people. If you do too small of an area, you may “miss” your target. G recommends 20 miles minimum if you really want a 5 mile radius., for example. Google most advanced is “Custom Targeting” which actually uses map grids.

Next talks about MSN. Currently supporting IP targeting in France and US. With MSN you only have the choice to target countries at order level. Goes through system with screenshots. They also have DMA, but this is the most specific level to be able to target to. Should use 2 different orders, one with specific regions without geographic terms, and a separate one with geo terms for nationwide searches. Y

YSM, need a separate account for each country. In Canada, you have to use French ads. There are editorial concerns. Shows a list of currently supported countries (about 2 dozen I think). They have a completely separate system Yahoo! Local. This is for Yahoo to help promote brick and mortar business, does not want a lot of ads for online properties. Y! recommends a thirty mile radius from business address. You can find these in Yahoo SERPs by looking for “Local Info.” Sometimes these ads will change the PPC rankings and even though your ad shows in the system as being #3, a local ad “gets in the way.”

Discusses Project Panama. Yahoo! Purchased “where on earth” technology. Geo settings will be at campaign level. Country targeting determined at account level. What will be the fate of yahoo Local?

Talks about some types of geographic keywords, Sate, State abbreviations, cities, neighborhoods, zip codes, area codes, counties (be careful when using these – gives example of “Orange County” in different states)… Shows a chart with comparisons of geo-targeting capabilities of each of the big three (with Yahoo local added as a fourth).

Brad Byrd from Newgate
Will talk about Ad testing across networks. Starts with Yahoo! Talks about existing model. Creative assigned on a kw basis: positive is that it is very simple. Negative is that you cannot run simultaneous ads, which kills ability to do good testing. Gives current product a “D-.” Has seen Panama screenshots. Kw’s will be bundled within Ad Groups , which means that Google has not trademarked that term. Creative is tied to groups not kw’s. URL are tied to creative or kw’s, but not both. Positive: “A-T” testing (20 ad unit per ad group! Large variety of ads). Negatives: cannot attribute click-throughs to specific keyword and creative combinations. Evidently, you cannot determine CTR or conversion rates for specific ad combinations (you cannot track which creative served the click) They are getting feedback, and the delay may allow for this to change. Best model for testing is duplicate ad group model. Take keywords and run them in two ad groups with different tracking URLs and different creatives. This seems to be the model that would need to be used in Panama. Gives it a “C” at this point, but he expects it to be modified thanks to extensive feedback from top advertisers they have shows the product to.

Google: current model…gives an overview of the new tabbed user interface where you can switch between summary, keywords, and ad variations. URLs assigned either to creative or kw’s. There is an auto-optimization feature which lets you “empower Google to self-select creatives.” Asks how many are familiar with Fasttrack (aka ValueTrack) which uses tags within URLs to learn more about your traffic. Shows some cool examples. Tags include placement (search or network) Creative (id’s which creative was used. This dynamic method is very useful for tracking these types of info. Positives: provide ability to associate creatives to keywords. Can report on the intersection of creatives and click-through-rates. Negatives: nothing major stands out. Gives it an “A.” If you are familiar with all features you can get a lot out of this system.

MSN. Creatives tied to the orders. Has an “Ad Tab” similar to Ad Variation tab in google. The expansion of the dynamic keyword insertion features, Dynamic text provides the ability to put specific info about specific keywords at the point of ad serve, which allows for templated creatives. Parameters allow for customized testing of kw’s that are not available in any of the other products. The templating is the revolutionary part of this product. Each kw can have 3 different parameters. URL, discount information (parameter recommended by MSN) and third might be “delivery information.” Positives: parameters. Negatives: need API to get good reporting. The current reporting is a bit confusing through the system without API. Doesn’t have ability to evaluate conversions on a per creative basis. For testing, best off using a third party tool.Finishes with a chart showing smiley faces for each product: Yahoo gets one, Google 3, and MSN 2.

Misty asks the panelists to briefly overview the budget setup differences between the systems. Brad gives a good short overview, including discussing the Google Budget Optimizer. Patricia cautions that budget optimizer can very dangerous. “All clicks are not created equal” so you cannot assume Google understands that Click A is more valuable than Click B.

QA: Do you see any difference in the quality of leads from different engines. Patricia, “yes, but frustrating part is that one industry does better in one engine and another does better in a different one. Testing allows determination of these trends.

Is there such a thing as “negative geo-targeting? I.e. you do not want ads shown in a particular area. Brad G says no such system exists, but you can use a geo term as a negative keyword.

Chris Sherman is moderating this session, the room isn't crazy full but its substantial for the first ever one of these. Chris says Social Search is Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgement. Informed can mean many things - including egregiously uniformed. No good industry standard definition yet. Chris explains that we have always had some sort of social search. If you look at Tim Berners-Lee page, you will see a form of it. Also the Yahoo directory. Meta tags were created in 1996 to help content owners influence search engines (mass failure). Algorithmic search is fundamentally social by human biases. Also search engines observe human behavior - click paths, popular urls, and use this to modify algorithms. New personalization efforts are also used to refine search for everyone. So why is there so much buzz about social search these days. Chris said algorithmic search, in his opinion, has plateaued. Humans are still better at some things than computers. A major factor, - many if not most of the players in social search are leveraging the work of volunteers. Types of social search; shared bookmarks & web pages = del.icio.us, shadows, myweb, furl, diigo. Tag engines (blog & rss); technorati, bloglines. Collaborative directories; ODP, prefound, zimbio, and wikipedia. Personalized verticals; eurekster, rollyo. Collaborative harvesters; digg, netscape, reddit (popurls.com). Social Q&A sites; Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, AnswerBag. What are the issues with social search? Scale & Scope will be an issue. People simply cannot keep up with the explosive growth of the Web, so it is hard to scale. Tagging issues; ambiguity of language, lack of controlled vocabulary, human laziness, and we are not the brightest all the time; and finally we have spammers who take advantage of it. What will ultimately work with social search? A combo of both algorithms and people mediated search, you will see "trust networks, " you will see an increased level of personalization and user control over results filtering and social search will probably work best for non text content (photos, music, videos, etc.).

Great intro Chris,

Next up is Grant Ryan from Eurekster is up first. Personal publishing is king (books = web sites, newspaper = blogs, radio = podcasts, TV = YouTube, encyclopedia = wikipedia, and then the search engine). All media get fragmented over time. More and more people are defining what is relevant to them. Swiciki owners have control over (siwki?); where results come from, single source or many, how are they filtered, how are they modified and how can make changes, how they look, how users are drawn in and how they make money from their search result (swicki). He shows an example of one swicki, a personalized search engine created by you. He shows off a sleeping search engine and shows the tag cloud (buzz cloud) on the right. He then shows how you can monetize. You can use visual ads, you can have text ads, you can have affiliates, you can have free, you can have banners, etc. He describes how he built a solution to automatically gather the list of the most referred sites you search engines send people to and then send an email to them for them to place ads on your search engines. Swickinomics; property rights are key to motivate people in the long term for any economic system, anyone can create a valuable asset building on their knowledge expertise and existing property, existing communities and brand scan extend into web search to create valuable services and revenue, everyone in the world can help organize the internet and earn an income at the same time.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! is up now. He announced Search Builder, a Eurekster like product. He throws up some blah slides on why Yahoo is into social search. Basically because it is core to search and they hired a pretty big name for social search - see the SEW blog from last week. He then shows the historical perspective of social search, much like Chris Sherman did earlier. Yahoo! believes in tagging and the next breakthrough in search. Tags and Answers. He then throws up the Yahoo mission line; find, use share and expand all human knowledge. Yahoo!'s social search strategies; obtain critical mass of high quality user generated content, and leverage knowledge and metadata... He puts up the pyramid, early adopters (delicious, myweb), web sites and human knowledge... He first shows off MyWeb; Yahoo!'s extensive bookmarking application (it looks much better then it did on day one). He then puts up a search result by Yahoo and Google, the query is "cool lamps." With normal web search, you really wont know what "cool" lamps are. But with MyWeb, you can see who said what lamps are cool, since a person tagged them. He then shows Yahoo! Answers, ask answer and discover. He shows the vertical integration of Yahoo! Answers in Yahoo! Search Results via Yahoo! Shortcut.

Nils Pohlmann from Windows Live Search, Microsoft. He defines social search as enabling a social network to refine and create additional search results. Windows Live Spaces big new feature is social networking. Why are we doing this now? Community content used to be chat and forums and newsgroups. Now there are much richer ways to create content. He demos a few services; Windows Live QnA in private beta which is similar to Yahoo! Answers, Windows Live QnA is different because you can see networks, its more social, he says. QnA has tags, Windows Live suggests tags for you. By clicking on a contributor, you can view the person's reputation, QnA score. To find out more about the contributor, you can click on through to that person's Windows Live Space. Friends are pulled from MSN Messenger. He then shows Windows Live Messenger, on that you can see a little "gleam" to let people know they have new content. He then shows off Windows Live Local, the cool maps, and it has "collections." You can share your maps with your space, friends. He then shows Windows Live Expo and shows in the search results that there are indicators for your contacts, or in your "group," you will be more likely to trust them. http://ideas.live.com is how to try out betas.

I am sorry if this coverage is a bit hard to read, I just feel so tired... This is real time typing, no grammar checking, etc.

There are two types of people who read our coverage.

(1) Those who can not make it to the conferences.
(2) Those who can not wake up for the sessions but spend most of their time at the parties

Joe Morin is the later, but he is known as the official party manager of SES events. He has posted the *OFFICIAL* SES San Jose 2006 Party & Events Schedule and plans on updating the thread as we get closer to the SES event.

Here is what we got so far:
Sunday Night: Be in the bars
Monday Night: Two private parties
Tuesday Night: The Google Dance (i'll be bringing my wife)
Wednesday Night: SEMPO's In-House Search Marketer Mixer & Webmaster Radio's SEARCHBASH 3
Thursday Night: Nodda

More details at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I just posted our coverage schedule for the San Jose conference here. As you can see, we have the same crew working on this coverage for you. We got Ben from RankSmart.com, Chris from Avenue A RazorFish and Lee Odden from Top Rank. If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to post them.

I just wanted to let everyone know that Chris Boggs will be in the SEMPO booth during the 12:30-2:00pm time frame on August 9. Ben, Lee and I should be rooming the halls and in the sessions at the times posted above. Of course, a big thanks to Danny and his crew for allowing us to provide the coverage. And a thanks to you for reading it.

The San Jose conference is coming up shortly. Yes, we will be doing some quadruple coverage, maybe more. The event schedule is live at the Search Engine Strategies site. I will be posting our coverage schedule probably within a week or two. But for now, you should check out the threads on the conference. They offer advice on finding a good hotel, since the two main hotels are now sold out and flight ideas.

Forum threads include:

• The OFFICIAL SES San Jose 2006 Thread - SEW Forums
  
• Getting to SES San Jose 2006 - SEW Forums
  
• SES San Jose - Golfers Sought - SEW Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• High Rankings Forums