Search Engine Strategies 2007 Latino Archives

The 2nd Search Engine Strategies Latino event, run by Nacho Hernandez, was a hit. The event took place in Miami, Florida over the past two days.

Thanks to three volunteering contributors, we were able to provide coverage of eleven of the seventeen session that took place at the conference. A huge thank you to Carolyn Shelby from cshel.com, Dave Rohrer and Li Evans of Search Marketing Gurus for their tireless efforts in posting live blogging coverage of the sessions. Trust me, I know how hard it is to do this and I certainly appreciate it.

Here is our coverage:

• Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
• Tapping into US Hispanic and Latin America via Search
• SES Latino 2007 Keynote with Gonzalo Alonso of Google
• Search Landscapes: US Hispanics and Latin Americans
• SEM Campaign and Project Management
• Search Term Research & Targeting
• The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans
• Converting Visitors to Buyers; Persuasion Architecture
• Targeting Spanish/Portuguese Search Ads by Demographics & Behavior
• Search Marketing with Latinos: Roundtable
• Web Analytics and Measuring Success Overview

Pretty much everything you need to know about SEO and SEM for the Latino & Hispanic market.

Want pictures? Check out the seslatino Flickr tag.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The following was liveblogged at Search Engine Strategies Latino by Dave Rohrer.

Moderator: Jessie Stricchiloa, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.

Speakers:

Todd Sarouhan, President, GoVisitCostaRica.com
Guiherme Gomide, CEO and Founder, Midia Digital
Alex Ortiz, Senior Specialist, Google Analytics

Alex

When Google decided to launch Analytics they thought they wanted to Provide content owners to see how users were using their site

Are you asking the right questions? Are visitors signing up on my site? Which marketing initiatives are the most effective? What do people do while on the site? Is the website design driving people away? Are the visitors signing up? Purchasing? Where do they abandon the free trial process? What keywords resonate with prospects and get people to convert?

What drives the best traffic? Email, Search, Banner, SEO, Affiliate programs, referrals

Where does Analytics fit?

Clicks, impressions, cost -> Analytics -> # of widgets bought, revenue
- Analytics should sit at the middle of any SEO &SEM work being done

Google Analytics
- Free hosted service
- Measure and evaluate ROI on your marketing efforts
- Evaluate visitor navigation to identify site improvements
- Track ecommerce metrics such as revenue, cost, and conversion rates
- Find and share the data to make informed decisions
o Dashboard overview and trending analyses
o Drill down into reports for greater detail
o Schedule emails of KPIs

Google analytics was originally designed for analysts and not everyone. The new version is all about helping you get to the data you need and sharing the data with coworkers.

Customizable dashboard helps you understand at a glance:
- what are my sources of traffic
- how am I doing on various search engines
- what are my top keywords for any period?

One click on the timeline and you can compare two different time periods to know if you are getting better or worse.

Getting started:
1. log into Adwords and click on Analytics tab
2. add a small JavaScript code to all the pages
3. Define your goal(s) and steps that lead to them

What are your goals?
- Ecommerce
o Visitors
o Transactions per visit
o ROI by product sales and keyword CPC
o Returning visitors
- Lead Generation
o User registrations
o Request for quote/information
o Funnel conversions, drop offs
o Case study downloads
- Brand/Product awareness
o Visitors
o Impressions
o Page views per visit
o Returning visitors

Convert more visitors to customers
1. 1st step - funnel
2. 2nd step - more funnel
3. 3rd – funnel again
4. Thank you for signing up.

Insights about all your keywords
- quickly segment your data and see performance
- you can easily get o
Take it for a spin and explore the tool on you

Todd

The problem – many pages weren’t converting
The solution – used Google Analytics to track and Web Site Optimizer to edit

The Problem
- in the month of may we had over 4300 landing page visits in the

The Solution
- we added 3 images of our featured hotels with a link to their featured listing.

Targeting Spanish/Portuguese Search Ads by Demographics & Behavior

Testing captions – tested them within
- Used Google website optimizer

Google Website Optimizer
- powerful and free
- tells you when you have
- 38% increase

Most websites have a conversion; it can be selling more products or gaining more leads

Guilherme

2 case studies to show today.

Web Analytics: Is everyone doing it right?
- very few companies measure results and even fewer take action based on web analytics
- the ones that say they measure: either have tons of data and do not analyze

Define what you want to measure
- people call it goals or KPIs
o sales
o forms completed
o navigation to a specific page

Case Study – Real estate

Problem:
- No extra budget
- SEM click volume did not grow
- Too much display advertisement, reduced SEM budget
- Client needed to increase audience

Action Plan:
- set up web analytics
- defined simple and straight forward goals
o online chats, forms completed, price visualization, apartment details visualization
- Monitored the campaign daily
- Geotargeting
- Set up bid management goals (not fully automated)

Results
- SEM campaigns had the lowest CPL
- Search engines are now responsible for 55% up from 30%
- Client achieved 140% of its goals for the year
- Reduced CPC costs by 75% and traffic up by 9 times

Case Study - Online Retailer

Problem
- no user base
- no history
- new website
- very tough competition
- no web analytics

Approach
- put Google Analytics on the site
- Defined the KPIs

Initial analysis
- high CPA
- high bounce rate
- low time spent on site per user

Data Analysis
- usability reviews/corrections – shopping cart, product detail page
- SEM campaign adjustments and fine tuning
- Changes in shipping policies

Result
- conversion rate went up 49%, average daily orders went up 700%

Take away
- you don’t need an expensive tool
- keep it simple, don’t choose too many goals or KPIs
- analyze it daily
- take real action based on your analysis
- Use the 90/10 rule – 10% of your time creating reports, 90% of your time analyzing and taking actions

Q: Is there any lag with Google Analytics?
A: Alex – it takes about 3 hours to see data. When you first start it will take 24 hours to really see worth while data.

Q: What other features of Google Analytics do you like that you didn’t mention?
A: Alex – really likes the geo location reports.

Q: Why is there a difference between Analytics and what the host say? What are the common reasons for differences between different Analytic packages.
A: Alex – thinks it’s a great question that he hears all the time. What’s most important is the trend and not the actual number. Each tool uses a range of technology and different data sets. JavaScript cant count robots, spiders and other things that log files can count. Robots and the like don’t run JavaScript so that could be part of it.

Search Marketing with Latinos: Roundtable
Landscape and Tactics Track
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 – 3:30p-4:45p

Moderator:
Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group

Panelists:
Rafael Jimenez, General Manager, Advertising and Publisher Group, Yahoo! Hispanic Americas
Andre Frugiuele, Sales Account Executive, Yahoo! Search Marketing Brazil
Bertrand Doux, Search Product Manager, Prodigy/MSN
Francisco Ceballos, General Manager Mexico, MercadoLibre
Lucas Morea, CEO, LatinEdge, Inc.
Brad Geddes, Director of Search, LocalLaunch.com
Martin Maslo, Founder and CEO, Resultics
Gustavo Ross, President and Co-Founder, Activ@Mente
Sarah Carberry, Senior Account Executive, Google, Inc.
Gonzalo Alonso, General Manager for Spanish-Speaking Latin America, Google, Inc.

(The conversation moves quickly. Each new paragraph is a different speaker.)

Where do you think this SEM industry is at in Latin America? Where is it going in the next 12 months?

Speaking as a buyer, the market is still starting. We only have 16% penetration... I guess the key point here is we’re just beginning. It’s not a mature market at all. I see a very good outlook going forward, but we’re just starting.

I think a year ago, people didn’t understand why they should be in the SM game, but now the clients are beginning to understand what SM is, and what kinds of objectives they can achieve. And probably the next three years they’re going to be spending more money to get better specific results.

It’s very difficult to define what SM is going to be in a few years, not just in the Latino market, but overall. Search marketing is being redefined all the time, so we don’t have a crystal ball and we don’t really know where it’s going to be in three years.

There’s more education needed to our webmasters, to get them to stop using flash, to help them understand how to organize their information to better make their sites crawlable so then there is more inventory for marketers to put ads on and the market will expand.

I think that SEM will have to converge with other types of IM tactics. On the other hand, we’ll have to not only think of KWs and text ads, we’ll be thinking about other types of interactive media… interactive television, etc. On the one hand, ppl will still be browsing and accepting passive content, but on the other hand there will also be more interactivity.

So when will we see AdCenter in Latin America?

We just launched in the US, and it’s still a young product. I’m sure it will be soon, but I can’t give you an exact date 

How many of you have laptops here? How many have wifi phone? (Many hands) This is where I think search is going… mobile. Look for more personalized search, more contextual based advertising. The penetration of the cell phones in the whole world is so much higher than the penetration of laptops. I think search is going to the phones.

Especially at Google, we’re making a concerted effort to make better user experiences, especially on mobile devices. How do we deliver relevant information that is exactly what the consumer is looking for. It could be not only text, esp. with universal search… imagery, video, etc.

In the spirit of debate, I think people overestimate what’s going to happen in two years and underestimate what’s going to happen in ten.

I’m sorry, one factor we have to look at is that the data plans on cell phones are used at a much higher rate than in the US. I’m really with the vision that search will be extremely strong on the cell phone. The future will be more towards voice recognition for search via cell phones.

There’s a lot of effort from the engines toward the semantic. The natural language also can be another frontier for the engines.

Some of the major obstacles to the growth of e-commerce right now are the banking issues, the lack of a dominant payment gateway in Latin America, and the delivery issues. Sometimes it takes a month for an invitation to travel via the postal service what can be driven in an hour an a half by car. Customers aren’t going to be willing to wait or risk the non-delivery of their product, and also they aren’t going to be willing to pay for an alternative means (Fedex, etc) due to expense.

Another issue is consumer confidence. In Mexico, for example, people do not buy airline tickets online. Partially because they’re less comfortable paying with credit cards, and also because they’re afraid their etickets won’t work at the airport when they get there. So they’d rather buy the tickets in person and have a paper ticket in their hand, than go for the convenience of purchasing a ticket online. Even when they do purchase a ticket online, they frequently go to a physical office location to have paper tickets printed for them so they can have them in their hands.

Ecommerce is not a roadblock to search marketing or selling online. SM is not just for ecommerce. SM should be a strategy or tactic to providing relevant content to people looking for it.

What do you think SEMPO should do in Latin America to help SM grow?

I’ve been in SEO for 10 years, and the biggest thing that drove my business with my clients was doing keyword research. So many businesses spend so much time finding new clients, when they should be letting the Internet tell the businesses why they need to be there and show them what new customers they’re missing by not being there.

So you’re saying SEMPO should be building/offering keyword research tools?

Yes.

Since I wrote the first mission statement for SEMPO… put together some sample presentation material. This is a problem all over, not just in Latin America. The one thing we don’t have is a sell job… a selling packet. Let’s figure out how to write an unbiased selling strategy. Let’s write it in Spanish. Let’s write it in Portuguese.

I think it would be great to have case studies by industry. Pharma, finance, etc. Something along those lines. Where people can access a library of information that’s applicable to their business. We need to show that search is driving people to the stores.

I think we should separate SEMPO Latino into SEMPO Latino and SEMPO Latin America. They are two separate markets with separate needs.

I have a two part question: what would you non engine people ask the engines to change? And then what about kick backs to agencies?

Fight, please!

I’d ask them for better pricing, standards and tools. We have to have two or three people with spreadsheets working on things. That’s time that could be better spent.

If I could say something to the engines, I’d say KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY CLIENTS. Don’t pitch my clients. Please remember the agencies are buyers.

Also, KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY EMPLOYEES. There is already a shortage of talent. Don’t poach my good people.

We’re going to have a serious problem in the near future with a talent shortage. SEMPO needs to help build the talent pool, or we’re going to be seriously fighting each other for a very few experienced SEMarketers in the not too distant future.

One thing that would help everyone out is a better understanding of how the data is being parsed. We need to understand the underlying raw (clean) data... the parsed data means nothing in a vacuum. We need the proper context to best use the data and reporting tools.

SEMPO needs to tap into the universities and schools.

This session at Search Engine Strategies Latino 2007 has been covered by Dave Rohrer.

Moderator: Nacho Hernandez

Speakers:

Matias Perel, Founder and CEO, Latin3
Brad Geddes, Director of Search, LocalLaunch.com
Johnathan Mendez, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, OTTO Digital
Alexanre Kavinski, CEO, Hotlist Web Marketing
Eduardo Llach, CRO, CMO and Founder, SearchRev

Brad:

Laying the basics for PPC and targeting locals

Language Barrier
- Most common forms of Spanish language targeting
o English website, wishing to target Spanish speakers who know English

Many possible configurations of keyword, ad copy, and landing page

Where do Hispanics click stud
- While traditionally Spanish-language advertising was used to reach Hispanics, new data indicate second and third generation Hispanics tend to favor English – HispanTelligence

Recent Google data suggests:
- users who consider Spanish their primary language are much more likely to search in English
- bilingual Hispanics who consider Spanish their primary language also tend (to to 1 ratio) to click on English ads.

Google Adwords options

- language settings – under campaign settings
- keyword and and copy use – no restrictions as to the language of the keywords, no restrictions as to the langue of the ads, no restrictions of mixing and matching keyword and ad languages
- restrictions – none. Be creative
- Cautions – Quality Score: when using keywords and landing pages in two different languages, your quality score can suffer.

Yahoo
- keywords – allows English or Spanish
- ad copy – allows English or Spanish ad copy

MSN
- language – does not support Spanish or Portuguese
- new options under development

Geographic Targeting - Most common location targeting options.

Country Targeting
- Google – can use one account to target multiple countries
- MSN – can use one account to target multiple countries
- Yahoo – one account per country, through 2007 – transition of international accounts into panama interface

Common Best Practice
- max of one country per campaign, allows to see stats at least the country level.

What is regional targeting?
- display your ad to only a specific geographic area

Hispanic Target Markets

Top 10 markets – LA, NY, Chicago, Miami, Houston, DFW

Reaching a Local audience – GEO targeting vs. IP targeting

Types of geographic keywords
- state
- state abbreviation
- cities
- neighborhoods
- zip codes
- area codes
- counties
- airport codes
- regional lingo

Reaching y our target audience
- location – determine your target marker’s location
- language
- inventory – choose your desired ppc campaign

Johnathan Mendez
Shows amusing slide where he searched for “Latin America”.

Relevance
- Segmentation – divide your audience
- Targeting – Source: google, yahoo. Behavior – keyword and click
- Re-Targeting – visited before

Targeting ads to user intentions

Retirement Adgroup
1. retirement savings
2. retirement account
3. retirement information – actually the user is considering
4. retirement planning – actually the user is considering

Notice the stage the user is in the buying cycle.

Segmentation
- Behavior – new/returning, click path, referrer – ppc, direct, affiliate, environment – country, ip, browser, temporal – time, day, season

Google has the host language in the URL. Hl=es is where hl is the host language.

Case study
- 30k visitors
- traffic split
- over 95% confidence level on results
- A/B test
- Musicians Friend was the site

All they did was change the top ad banner from English to Spanish.

163% more users engaged with the Spanish language then the English.
47% more users that were displayed the Spanish tile/banner
7% more revenue per visitor

Targeting works
- segment, target, validate, improve performance

Alexanre Kavinski

Traditional Marketing
Planning based on behavior and demographics.
Search Engine Marketing
Focuses on “intention marketing”

Brazilian Online User
33.3 million web users – shows map breaking out the content

Factors that can effect traffic:
Holidays and Commercial Dates
Climate

Yahoo
- doesn’t have geo targeting and is unsure when they will.

Adcenter – no adcenter in Brazil.

Rich Targeting
- improve ROI
- set an abroad marketing strategy
- learn about your customers
- information to refine your campaign

Matias Perel

Languages used by Latin Americans and US Hispanics
Behavior, Interest & Attitude
- Consumer insights -> ad texts, landing pages, keywords
- Traditional campaign management
o Do like you always have, but add more in
o Add targeting for interest, attitudes and behavior
o Improve relevance and decreased CPC
- 15 month campaign and results have continued to be great.
o CPC down 31%
o CTR up 56%
Targeting US Hispanics
- when running a campaign for US Hispanics you should consider reaching your audience keeping in mind 3 main variables
- Experiment
o 3 different concepts, 2 groups of keywords (Spanish and English), 2 Ad text samples
o Best CTR came from Spanish text and Spanish keywords
o Spanish keywords also had a lower CPC

Speak their language, its cheaper and you’ll get better results.

Eduardo Llach

Variables in Optimization -

Traditional criteria
- keywords + language
- ad copy
- The landing page – how well it converts clicks to action
- what the ad says
- the search network they are search on Google, Yahoo, etc

Creative Optimization
- each keyword and creative combination will perform differently
- create very specific ad groups, small sets of keywords

Slide shows content and search split – content ads had a CPO of $77 versus $51 for Search.

Geo Targeting
- works using the ip addy
- country mapping is very accurate
- state mapping is 50% accurate
- city mapping is 30% accurate

Nationwide vs Top 10 metro areas
- similar ctr and cpc, but much higher conversion rate (2.1 vs .05)
- CPO for metro was $9 vs $45 for nationwide

Day Parting
- it pays to test it. Depending on the day the conversion rates will be in flux. Example had high conversion on weekends and low on weekdays

Fundamentals Track
Converting Visitors to Buyers; Persuasion Architecture
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 – 1:45p-3:00p

First Speaker: Jeff Eisenberg, Future Now, Inc.

Is everybody really full? No? Good. It’s hard to pay attention when you’re really full.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, is there a sound? Who cares? If no one can hear it; who cares?

When we started our business in 1998, it was the time of the dot-bombs. At the time, everyone wanted eyeballs… as many as you could get. There was a belief that eyeballs had credit cards. Today, it’s search engines. Everyone thinks search engines and searchers have credit cards. It’s not getting the people to the site, it’s getting the people to actually buy. I’d rather have 2 visitors that buy, than 2 million who don’t.

Anemic Online Conversion Rates -- What we’re seeing now is, instead of conversion rates trending up, they’re trending down.

(Slide)
Shop.org State of Retailing Online 9.0
 3.2% in 2002
 2.4% in 2003
 2.6% in 2004
 2.4% in 2005
(/Slide)

In direct response, if you’re getting conversion rates like these, you throw a party. But you can’t compare DR to web. They’re fundamentally different, and cannot be compared apples to apples.

The Opportunity Cost Game – How much do lost opportunities cost your business per day?
(Showing slide from Overstock.com… a DVD landing page. 92% abandonment rate.)

When we think about optimizing a web site, we think about two different levels of opportunity. Persuasion (marketing) and conversion (buying). Persuasion is where the huge opportunities lay.

(Slide)
Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Optimization (Pyramid)

Persuasive
Intuitive (Does it feel natural and doesn’t make me think?)
Usable (Is it user friendly?)
Accessible (Can everyone access it?)
Functional (Does it do what I need?)
(/Slide)

How to Set Up Persuasion Architecture
(Different Audience Types)
Spontaneous: seek top sellers and new releases, impulsive
Humanistics: care about reviews, emotional
Methodicals: investigate by genre, logical
Competitives: hunt for actor, title, etc.

It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.

To Drive Persuasive Momentum
1) Who are we trying to persuade to take the action?
2) What is the action we want someone to take? (Macro vs. Micro)
3) What does that person need in order to feel confident taking that action?

Step 1- Define the conversion goals of your test
- What action do we want them to take?
- What page will we test?
- Where do we judge success (define success criteria)

Step 2 – Who are your Profiles?
- How many different types of profiles will you have that would participate in this campaign?
- How do they buy?
- Methodical, Spontaneous, etc..

Step 3 – Do the Creative
- Create the pages, PPC ads, emails or advertisements (online and off)

Landing Page Optimization
- A/B vs. Multivariate ( http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/ )
- Section Test ( Just test one small section, but tested 5 variations plus control)

7 Formulas to Online Success

1) Product Images Tell a Story – Make sure the picture tells the user all the information the user needs.
2) Test Headlines.
3) Calls to Action – Get Them to Click
4) Point of Action Assurances
5) Make It Obvious and Expected
6) Don’t Make Them Wait – Speed of site… slim down the file sizes for images to speed the load.
7) Does Your Site Stink?

Jared Spool: “… a web page can do only one of two things: either it contains the information you want, or it can get you to the information you want.”

Studying drop-off data indicates that would be customers visiting your site lose the relevant “scent” of what put them on the trail to your site; without that scent, they are unmotivated to go on.

Buyer’s Behavior and Modeling

 It’s not about what, but why
 Understand your customer’s motivation and tailor the message specifically to address those customer’s wants and needs. When you have multiple types of customer “types”, make sure that wording and imagery speaks to each type to keep them interested and pull them down the “information scent trail” right through to conversion.

Second Speaker: Eduardo Valades, President of iHispanic Marketing Group

Top Optimization Strategies for Herramientas de Produccion’s Website:
- Creative Keyword Research + Information Architecture
- Unique Titles and Meta Tags on all pages
- Content, content and more content
o HTML text, NOT text on images and NO FLASH
- HTML code design issues that have impact
- Other “off-page” considerations
- Link Analysis
- Web Analytics Software -- Tracking is everything
- Precise Conversion Strategy: Call to Action

Optimization Achievements
- Easy access to all product categories
- Clear and clean background
- No Flash
- Attractive pictures
- Numerous calls to action
- Created 400 pages of content, all of which is now indexed
- Well structured website
- Fresh content with news, events, expo information, etc.
- Improved the relevance of pages about products
- Increased online request conversion rate from 0.5% to approx. 6%

Additional recommendations by Future Now, Inc.:

PRODUCT PAGE
-- Change of text color from blue to black and hyperlinks in blue underlined text
-- Move “Solicitar cotización” button from the left to the right, more prominent, and above and below the product description
-- Button should say “Request quote and find out if its the product for you” OR “Request quote and we’ll contact you immediately”

CONTÁCTENOS PAGE:
-- Elimination of every field that is not absolutely needed
-- Informing users about how long it will take to get back and how they will get back
-- Centralization of the “Enviar” button and its graphical representation
-- Testing of buttons like “Please contact me” OR “Send now and we’ll contact you in X hours”

One of the biggest problems our clients have is that they don’t have in place the infrastructure and support systems to handle the influx of new leads/orders/customer calls. To maximize ROI, you have to make sure that there the capacity to respond to the rise in customer requests/orders/etc in a timely manner.

Questions and Answers

Q: What page elements are the most important to generate conversions?

JE: Design is something ppl have known about for a really long time. Look at heatmaps. There’s a rule of threes. Divide the page up like a tic-tac-toe board. It’s the corners and edges that people tend to notice. We’re not symmetrical, so it’s the things on the periphery that we notice the most… not always things right in front of us. Also, higher contrast and brighter colors tend to make clearer what the user is supposed to be doing. They understand the call to action better.

The following is coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference by Dave Rohrer.

The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans

Not convinced that US Hispanics and Latin Americans are a market you should be targeting through search? This session examines some of the challenges you'll need to face as well as solutions to consider. It sets up issues and solutions further explored in the Tactics session on Day 2.
Moderator:

* Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group

Speakers:

* Matt Williams, Vice President, Prominent Placement
* Emerson Calegaretti, VP of Client Development, Latin America, Acronym Media
* Lucas Morea, CEO, LatinEdge Inc.
* Alexandre Hohagen, Country Director for Brazil, Google Inc.

Lucas Morea

Going to talk about Monografias.com – Monograph: a detailed and documented treatise on a particular subject. The site was started 10 years ago to help bring Spanish content to the web.

- 1 million daily visitors
- 200k content pages
- 3.5 million subscribers
- Top 10-30 in Spanish sites worldwide

A few notes on Latin America

A Challenge
- fewer users
- most are newbies

An Opportunity
- Plenty, and growing fast
- A very captive audience

Latin America is still a few years behind. The average # of keywords per search is much lower and again, behind the USA.

Google leads in USA, but REALLY leads in Latin America. The lowest penetration in Latin America is in the 70% range.

*back to Monografias

Content brings users, when you facilitate users to bring content you get this virtual cycle. It takes some effort to get it started but once it picks up speed it gives you all sorts of great things.

The content brings member relationships, member loyalty, then word of mouth promiton and activity increases.

The Users bring marketing opportunities and supply more content for deeper content for the users to visit.

Our SEO Philosophy
- the site was built with SEO in mind from the start
- Not much was done, the site was simply built with helping search engines understand the site

Highly searched words….. *gives quick lists of some keywords*

Build a solid SEO structure
- the trick is to be methodic way of building the site
- use keywords in urls, and text links, use breadcrumbs, don’t have “click here”
- the content management system use to use “great” links but they weren’t search engine friendly and improved the internal linking with keyword urls. It had a very positive effect.
- Over time, did interlinking. Added linked keywords to relevant content.

Help your content be unique
- Allowed comments and debates to take place on the article

Accents? Google handles the accents differently.
Use unaccented keywords in places users wont read very carefully
Words that have to have the accent that don’t, are wrong. Use the accent.

Duplicate Content
- If others copy content from you:
o Don’t worry. Show you are the original source by adding more. Add comments, add more to it. If people are copying you, you should be flattered.
o Pick your fights. Someone registered a typo of the domain and copied the entire the site. Using blackhat techniques they tried to overtake the main site. Using the WIPO they took on the other site and were able to secure the domain.

Less control in the future - *shows some Universal Search examples* Images, Videos, and News are being shown along with the normal results. With all of this, don’t worry about SEO. Build it in, educate everyone so that is just becomes something that everyone does.

Ask.com – doing the same changes. Do a search for “Shakira”, its more of a portal then a search engine result page.

Tips
- build SEO into your structure, write guidelines for your team to follow
- don’t aim “to be #1”, aim to bhe the authoritative site. Own your niche.
- Heave a link strategy with YOUR USERS in mind. Make your site worth linking to.
- Define your target and stick to it, but LISTEN to your audience.
- Expand your channels and optimize all your online media.
- Learn tools and methods. Tweak and revise periodically, focus on your site.

Matt Williams

Gives background on Prominent Placement

After 3 years were able to convince a company to jump into Spanish market

First dedicated international effort for either organization
- no previous exp with developing non-English programs
- funding – was mid year and hard to get the budget
- knowledge base – very little published in English on the subject
- Familiarity with the international search landscape
- Limited access to fluent Spanish/Portuguese linguists/copywriters

Can a successful English-language program be “translated” to Spanish and Portuguese?

US/English strategies/tactics
- ppc
- site optimization
- linking
- online press release

Intent
- Drive targeted traffic
- Customer acquisition

Opportunity Assessment
- an ability to be visible in the search engines
o was hard to do, there was no competition at the time
- determine the level of performance

Knowledge of Search Landscape
- Search engine share of market, know where to focus
- People search in a form that is most individually relevant. Ex. English, Spanish, Portuguese or whatever the native language was

Things that are the same: Tactical

Site Optimization
- search term selection
- effective on and off page elements

Content Creation
- grammatically correct
- relevant
- unique and compelling

PPC
- watch your metrics
- finding/refining tail terms
- testing creative

Institute a Process
- benchmarking results
- ability to monitor/measure cause and effect
- adjust as necessary

PRWeb/ Off-site Content
- additional SERP opportunity due to optimized content
- linking – authority site, anchor text with keywords. Got the press release on a big IT authority site.
- branding opportunity
- additional reach – RSS feeds

Effective Project Management
- planning
- scheduling and logistics
- budget and resource oversight

Shortage of SEM talent
- Experienced, knowledgeable search marketers in short supply among English-speakers, even more so for those fluent in Spanish.

Level of Sophistication
- competitors – only were able to compete in paid. American competitors were just using Adwords to show up in Latin America
- Tools – have come along quite a bit. The tools had didn’t have the volume so nothing would show up.

Project Management
- additionally complexity – didn’t speak Spanish so there was additional costs and time to work with translation companies. 30% more work required due to the extra translation costs

Things that are different
- Additional credibility
o Extensive pre and post sale resources
o Tech support
o Warranties
o International expertise
 Shipping
 Customs brokerage
 Currency exchange
o One stop shop
- PPC
o Competitors
 Country specific and localized campaigns
o Language
 Campaigns were difficult, more words to say the same thing in non-English ads
 Tail terms – discovering regional, and colloquial differences
 Non-US/English words, acronyms, brands, and/or model numbers.
 Misspellings & “Spanglish”
o Creative

Seasonality and World Events
There are differences between Southern and Northern hemispheres, business cycles, elections, sporting events, festivals, holidays and etc.

Shows graph of sporting events, presidential election, and holidays effecting traffic levels.

Results

- Did no linking or article/white paper distribution
- Did do SEO, PPC, and online press releases

Slide shows how the site owns many to most of the top 10 results. In Google ES they have 7 of the 10 spots. Spanish and Portuguese speaking visitors increases +510%. $2.2 million potential new revenue in sales… with $3 million in the pipeline all for the cost of $3000.

Strategy is universal – visibility, drive targeted traffic, increase revenue

Nacho thanks for a great case study.

Emerson Calegaretti

Was the first guy for Google in Latin America. Now is with Acronym Media.

Customer Mental Dictionary – radio, newspaper, magazines, TV, direct mail, viral marketing. From these messages we create a mental dictionary based on what we need and want. What a search marketer does is tries to translate what a person has in their mind to words.

What is search marketing?
It is keyword-driven marketing. To go from wanting a “plumber” -> from demand to offer -> getting a plumber

Steps: Keywords –> Text Ads –> Landing Pages

84 million potential consumers – Comscore Media from April 2006
52% English, 27% Bilingual, 21% Native

Overall Marketing Strategy – is similar from a high level for all languages. You want to see the users interact with your brand in a constant way. The more localized you go, the more custom you have to be.

Pay attention to your translation and the several shades of gray. South California is Mexican, Florida is Cuban, New York is again different.

Phase 1
- Build a short keyword list in Spanish.
- Develop Spanish landing pages optimized with these keywords
- Run a PPC ad campaign. Both Spanish/English text ads. Track time spent and conversion and CTR. Compare with English PPC campaigns and landing pages. You will need 3 versions of Spanish Landing Pages to do it right and test them.
- Analyze traffic from organic results on the landing pages. Track where the Spanish keywords are driving users to. Use your web analytics and look into the keywords that your users are using right now.

Phase 2
- Consider professional website localization. This is very important. Know the local area you are moving into and get help to do it right.
- Organize multilingual/country SEO and PPC management
- Do your global marketing strategy with a local touch. Don’t change your logo, just adapt your message.

Cooking recipe: test then invest. What can we learn from the test?
- Which keywords are hot in Spanish? Use CTR, time spent, and conversion rate to measure this.
- The best combination of ads/pages to keywords (Spanish keywords and Spanish pages, or English keywords to Spanish pages or English keywords to English pages)
- Translate or redesign the landing pages. Depending on your results you will have to do one or the other.
- What products/services are more attractive to this audience

The following live blogging post comes from our friend Dave Rohrer.

Search Term Research & Targeting

The bedrock to success with search engines is understanding which search terms to target. Fail in that and your audience may never find you. Where do you find keyword suggestions in Spanish? This session covers ways to undertake search term research that is crucial to succeeding with your search engine marketing efforts, whether that be via free or paid listings.
Moderator:

* Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.

Speakers:

* Sylvio Lindenberg, SEM & Center of Excellence Manager, Media Contacts Brazil
* Sarah Bernier, Spanish Language Search Marketing Consultant, FindLaw - A Thomson Company
* Larry Mersman, Vice President, Trellian Software
* Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360

Larry Mersman

Example: Needmorebeer.com

German Beer – 9853 searches
Beer [from] germany – 49 searches

Looking to New Markets

Trying to add new product categories and marketing tot hat demographic can create new keyword challenges. Adding Latin brewed beers means finding keywords that will get you found in all markets.

Compiling Keywords Lists
- KeywordDiscovery.com – Shows how to use the tool and how to read the results.
* Regional options – has Spanish, Portuguese, access to Overture info as well.
Expanding your Lists

Related Search Terms

Identify alternate spellings, the most common spelling and typing mistakes.
- 9.7 million searches for “accommodation”
- 1.7 million for “acommodation”

Learning from your Competitors
- Keyword Density analyzer break down page content into a list of unique words and phrases

Tool: Competitive Intelligence
- Competitive Intelligence enables you to identify your competitor’s top performing PPC keywords

Sylvio Lindenberg
1. Research
a. Look for:
i. Client’s business
ii. Products
iii. Read the content
iv. Some keywords and synonymous
v. Site’s objective
vi. Market
vii. Target audience
viii. Region
ix. Seasonality
x. Etc.
xi. Knowledge and a first draft of search terms will come from this
2. Gathering
a. Grow your list
i. Search Engine Tools
1. Google Adwords
2. Yahoo/Overture tool
3. Miva (especially for Europe)
ii. Paid tools
1. Keyword Discovery
2. WordTracker
iii. Be creative and use alternative sources
1. Go to CJ.com or Linkshare and see what keywords advertisers allow affiliates to use
iv. Keyword variations, synonymous, plural, misspelling, geographic, etc.
v. Yahoo Answers – can be a very good source to see what people are calling things.
3. Selection
a. Use the parameters and be wise to find a balance
i. Search volume
ii. Competition (difficulty / frequency)
iii. Just use your common sense and include terms related to the client’s business (brand, industry related vocabulary)
4. Filtering
a. Less is more
i. Using the parameters and specific tools to identify real search habits
1. Focus
2. Relevancy
3. Volume
b. Can use Google Trends to assist with filtering.
c. Use your web analytics. You can use it to see how people get to your site, and what content people are NOT finding.

5. Definition
a. The last word is always the client’s word.
b. We know search but they know about their business.
c. They are the ones in contact with the final client on a daily basis…. The client is always right

This is a cyclical and continuous process – for evaluation and action

The search term selection is one of the most important phases but the structure cant be ignored in order to make the entire content crawled

This is a constantly changing environment (internally and externally) and the keywords needs to reflect these changes
- Search habits
* Two studies
-- Rankstate.com Jan 2007 Survey. 28% use 2 words, 27% use 3 keywords, 17% use 4 keywords and 13% use 1 keyword
-- Onestat.com from Feb 2007. Showing July 2004 to July 2006. Short searches are declining and the number of longer searchers are growing
- New content adding
- Competitors

Jessie brings up a Fact.

- At a conference last year John Smart gave a keynote and presented data on search queries. In 1999 the average of search words was 1.6, Google recently gave the number of 3.6, and John had said that in the next 5 years the # would double again.
- His prediction that after the 5 keyword level we will jump to 11 keywords. 11 words is the average number of words that people use to ask someone a question.
- This brings up the future of search and how eventually we will interact with search engines just like we do with humans (in terms of asking questions)

Sarah Bernier

Gives FindLaw.com background of services.

Optimization of Custom vs Translated content
- translation of existing material
* we don’t perform keyword research
-- hard to “keyword stuff” with translation
-- create meta data after the fact
* still optimized but not like customized content
-- translators don’t focus on SEO; keywords might not necessarily be those we’d choose.

Custom Content
- perform keyword research
- straight translation vs. original research of keywords
* can choose most appropriate and/or utilize synonyms
* custodia de Ninos / Menores vs. custodia de hijos
* Danos Corporales / lesions personales
- create meta data from scratch around which to build pages

Keyword research Tools
- Is the data source Us or Global?
- How rich is their data source for Spanish-language search?
- Many tools with US databases show ‘Spanglish’ and Spanish misspellings, but we do not add such terms into content
* Right now those “keywords” are showing up in our analytics
- We don’t research keywords with accents; little to no results
* Web users don’t “generally” use accents – keyboard issues
- Use keyword research tools s GUIDES only
* In English keyword research, we look at relative numbers of searches, and assume the reported number gives an idea only
* In Spanish keyword research we cannot even assume proportions are accurate.
* Experiment, then use your analytics to make final decisions.

Keywords and Special Characters
- to use or not to use accents
- majority of search engines recognize them
- use grammatically correct meta data
* “call to action” / conversion
* Shows professionalism / knowledge of language

Linking between pages of a site
- Spanish-English or only Spanish-Spanish?
* If not all relevant practice areas(topics) are written in Spanish – offer information in the other language or opt for monolingual areas of site?
* Measure weight of importance of information against loyalty to one language
* Add “disclaimer” after links to English content
- Spanish keywords / phrases are longer
* Link text and navigation tends to be longer
* Effects the user experience…. But can be difficult

Inbound links to site
- keywords in anchor text need to be specific to the site/page to which they’re pointing
- if more then one language represented, should have relevant inbound links for each

Use geographically-specific terms
- professional services
- qualified traffic vs. quantity of traffic
- doesn’t affect e-commerce as much

Lack of competition on Web
- depends on subject matter – Spanish language legal information is still scarce in US
- May show up for broader searches than those targeted

Spanish vs English Content
- newly releases sites with both English and Spanish content show searches right away for general Spanish terms.
- English results for name-only or VERY VERY specific keywords
- Spanish content unique
* Initially performs at a higher level than English counterpart
* Appears more authoritative

Liana Evans

No matter what language, keyword research is fundamental
- gives insight into your market
- understand what your competitors are doing
- understand who your competitors are
* do you have the same competitors online as you do offline?
- discover niche market opportunities

Keyword Research

- Utilize tools that give more than monthly results so that research is not biased or skewed.
- Research how many searches are done on a keyword over the past year.
- Understand your keyword
* Sandals – the resort or what you wear on your feet?
- Niche Markets
* Instead of Sandals, try Open toe sandals
- Know your audience
* Synonyms
* Jargon
* Country/area specific
* Common misspellings

Misspellings and Negatives

Example: recipes, sesame street

Negative (for PPC)
- Example: Avenue (-candy bar, -street, -road,-song)
- TriplePlay ( -baseball, -base ball)

General vs Converting
The phrases will give you where they are in the buying cycle. Are they beginning, close to buying, buying now.

Tools

Free vs Paid

Free – Yahoo Overture tool, SEO Book Took, Google, MSN
Paid – Keyword Discovery, Hitwise, Word Tracker

Seasonality
- free tools give you only one month at a time
- think globally, summer in Brazil starts in December, Summer in Canada starts in June

Brands vs. Terms
- Example: Cable internet, phone & TV providers
* Optimizing for brand limits your reach
* Optimize for terms instead such as:
-- Servicio de alta velocidad del internet
-- Servicio de la tv
... And so on

Remember!!!
- use phrases rather than just one word
- free tools and the seasonality factor
- general terms vs terms that convert
- brand blindness
- fish where the fish are

Q: Where do the paid keyword tools get the information from?
A:Wordtracker has 4 sources and Dogpile is one of them. Trellian pulls from over 180 search engines. Hitwise has deals with ISP’s to track and obtain the information that they present.

Q: For someone starting out, what is the best tool to use?
A: Sylvio gave the analogy of buying a car. If you are buying a car for the first time you don’t buy a Ferrari. You buy a more common popular car and start. As you get more advanced and comfortable you move up the chain to more complex tools.

Q: Is there any way you can see what your competitors are bidding on?
A: Liana gave spyfu.com as a source that is free and cheaper then Hitwise. Larry: goes into Trellian’s Competitive Tool as a source but states that it does not give the costs of the clicks yet. Sylvio mentions Adgooroo that does a lot of what the person is looking for.

Q: Seasonal fluctuations, how is the data “predicted”?
A: Larry – if you are looking at the past year, it starts today and goes backwards. It doesn’t have future data and doesn’t predict. Sylvio suggests Technorati and Blogpulse to track mentions of your company or keywords you are tracking.

Q: How accurate is the Spanish numbers and English numbers for search tools?
A: Sarah: I don’t look at the number, look at the proportion instead. Look if the keyword is even being searched on, and you may just have to go with your gut. Track it in your analytics and see if you are really getting a lot of traffic – she goes back to her example of how the keyword tools said one thing but in the analytics they results were way different. Jessie adds: When doing research its gut and intuition. Back 10 years ago when many people were doing the same research there weren’t tools.

SES Latino 2007: Miami
SEM Campaign and Project Management
Monday, 1:45-3:15p -- Landscape and Tactics Track

Moderator: Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group
Speakers:
Martin Gallone, Marketing Manager, MercadoLibre
Frank Watson, Head Search Marketing, FXCM
Alexi Huntley, Anthropologist/Marketing Director, Naturegate
Paul D. Saffery, Managing Director, SilverDisc Chile

Nacho Hernandez

When you're dealing with the Latin America markets, it adds a several steps to the process of managing your SEM and Online Marketing campaigns. These speakers will be sharing their experiences and best practices for handling both your US and Latin America campaigns.

First Speaker: Paul D. Saffery

Account setup challenge --

Feasibility analysis
-- Is there enough search volume? When I go to fish in a river, I want to know how many fish are in the river?
-- How much ad competition is there?

Decide which site pages to target. Make sure:
-- You don't exclude any pages from your page universe (use a site map or create one by crawling your site).
-- Targeted pages are "near" the conversion page (not too many clicks to conversion -- one or two clicks at most).
-- Targeted pages are fresh.
-- Targeted pages are usable (download fast, uncluttered, make sure the ad is in the same language as the landing page).

Create keywords and ad copy for chosen pages:
-- Maximise consistency between target page content and keywords/ads.
-- Tag conversion pages. Both you and bid tools will need to measure your success.
-- Add referrer codes to destination URLs.

Put ad groups into campaigns. Keep in mind:
-- Shared daily budget management.
-- Shared targeted networks (search/content/both)
-- Shared targeted languages.
-- Shared geo-targets
-- Channel restrictions. For exmaple, max number of allowed campaigns, groups, keywords. All for future account growth!

Establish mapping between website pages and account....

Bid Management

- Define your key performance indicators (KPIs)

- Identify which areas of your account have a high impact on your overall KPIs (Pareto Law typically holds), and prioritise management of those areas.

- If you are using a bidding tool, make sure you choose one flexible enough to allow you to set and tweak your KPIs.

- Keep advertising channel API usage costs in mind. Make sure your bid management software takes API usage costs into account.

Ongoing Account Tuning

Necessary when:
-- New pages are added to the website and we need to market them.
-- Pages currently being marketed are removed from the website.
-- Pages currently being marketed change their content (price, product availability, special offer, etc)
-- Signs of change in competition. Watch avg position, volume of impressions, click-through rates (CTR).

We need to monitor website changes. Options:
-- Wait for client to inform us.
-- Compare consecutive feeds that contain the structure and key content of the website you need to market or...
-- Crawl the site and compare the new crawl to the old crawl.

Summary: The CM Cycle

(Graph -- see slides)

Speaker Two: Martin Gallone, Marketing Manager, MercadoLibre

Paid Search

MercadoLibre's Online Makerting is defined by 6 channels: Portals, Affiliate, Paid Search, Direct, Onsite, Product.

-- Paid Search marketing strategy: Increase qualified traffic generation to boost registrations and transactional volume.

-- Keyword Generation: What are qualified users looking for?
---- Use internal data, (queries, listings, common errors)
---- Use external data (trends, news, events, new products, seasonal items, localization)
---- Validate the KWs (check against policies, remove duplicates)

After defining KWs...

-- Trafficking Process
---- Targeting: Localization Language
---- Match Type: Keyword AdGroup
---- Creativity: Price Point, KW insertion generics
---- Landing Page: Home Page, Categories, Listings, Searches, Guides, Products, Promotions
---- Bid Management: Position Target, ROI Target, CPC Target

-- Bid Management Portfolio
---- Keywords and Campaigns
------ Position Target: Branding and Strategic KWs
------ ROI Target: Marketplace 90% of KWs, ROI based on Internal Metrics
------ CPC Target: Classified categories, Increase Traffic

Third part of process is Optimization...

-- Optimization: If we can measure it, we can fix it
---- For each KW, check if objective is achieved. (Nice flow chart on slide -- cshel)
---- If objective is achieved, derive additional KWs... if not, remove from list.

Organic Search

Just make sure that your site is user friendly and crawlable.
-- Put yourself in the user's shoes... all your user's shoes
-- Be natural... don't force your content for rankings. Think of the users.

Speaker Three: Alexi Huntley

History: Nature Air starts an e-marketing strategy in 2004 with New Media.

Goals: Redesign their website and optimize their website for keywords related to Costa Rica and the airline business, after the research they found a great audience looking for Costa Rica destinations. Also, make more $$$$.

Naturegate was established in 1990. The site was designed by an agency strictly for look and feel, no seo at all. Then in May 07, we implemented a booking engine and added it to the homepage. We also added some room for banners to help monetize the site. 25% of our market is local (Costa Rica).

This is something to be aware of... when the net you're casting into the ocean, you need to make sure your targeting is dead on. The size of your net in comparison to the whole ocean is very small and you need to pull in fish every time you cast your net.

When we relaunched out site, we focused on SEO/SEM. Our campaign involved 3 different sites and began in July 06.

Our team included three participants:
-- NatureAir's inhouse staff
-- New Media (Costa Rica) a team of Internet Marketing Analysts specialized in the development of the marketing strategies and Internet solutions.
-- SEO-PR (US) 40 years of combined experience managing PR for tech companies and PR for web companies.

Our team used web conferencing to manage new content development that balanced search engine optimization needs and cultural reqs and discuss next steps.

Our team also used ranking and traffic reports to review progress.

All 3 of the strategic decisions we made required our team to focus
-- we considered paid listings, but focused on organic
-- we have a network of sites, we focused on 3 of them
-- we identified 450 potential search terms, we focused on half of them

It's okay to fail, but fail soon and fail cheap.

Our SEO campaign tripled #1 rankings and doubled top 10 rankings over the last year.

-- In my experience, you need to quickly kill the naysayers. On the SE side, we (the marketing people) need this kind of information and slides to quiet the naysayers who can kill our projects (and our spends).

Visits to NatureAir are up 147% year over year to 8,313 per month.

Business impact of SEO campaign and project management.

Working together, our team has:
-- Maintained the quality of our sites
Increased #1 rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN from 12 to 39 and increased their top 10 rankings from under 100 to over 210 in just nine months.
-- Increased traffic to the sites to record levels.
-- Maintained look and feel of our local market, while maintaining the North American marketing aspects.

Where do we go from here?
-- W/ high organic listings on the current 3, we're free to move on to the rest of our properties.

Fourth Speaker: Frank Watson

How many people are doing in house marketing? (not many)
How many are looking to build an in house team? (even fewer)
Wow. Mostly agency people then? This should go quickly then as I wanted to talk about how to build a team. :)

Many businesses believe they don't need to go outside of the American market because there's a school of thought that that is where all the money is. However, there is still a significant amount of money in those other markets and you can be very, very successful there.

How many people here look at their analytics everyday? (very few hands -- I raised my hand though)
Wow. (sad sigh).

When you're branching out into new languages, there's more to translation. Yes, you can reach out; however, you have to be able to understand the replies... what comes back.

When you're developing your team, picking the right people is as important as picking the right keywords. If you find people with the linguistics, and you're strong in the mechanics, you can train the others and you complement each other.

The Team:
-- Knowledge of Organics
-- PPC Expertise
-- Copywriting Skills
-- Solid Web Designing
-- Advanced Analytics Experience
-- Some Programming Knowledge
-- Five Senses

Knowledge of Organics:
-- On Page Elements
-- Off Page Elements

Have a basic understanding of these concepts so you can interview properly.

PPC Expertise:
-- KW Selection
-- AB Testing
-- ROI Measurement
-- Engine Rules
-- Large and Small Engines

Especially in the Latin American market, your team needs to know which engines are performing and who has what market share in your specific market/locale.

Copywriting Skills:
-- Headline Writing (journalism background good idea)
-- Press Releases
-- Website Content
-- Email Campaigns
-- Nuances of Language

Solid Web Designing:
-- Linguistic Differences
-- Eyeball Tracking
-- Cultural Colors (Look at a site from Japan.. it looks like a teenage girl's bedroom... all pinks and blues)

Advanced Analytics Knowledge:
-- Tracking
-- Conversion
-- Dynamic Changes
-- Language and Geographic Stats

Some Programming Knowledge:
-- Javascript
-- Stylesheets
-- CMS functionality
-- CRM functionality

Know enough to be able to communicate effectively with vendors and other departments.

The Five Senses:
-- Sense of Humor
-- Sense of Comraderie
-- Sense of Purpose
-- Sense of Dedication
-- Common Sense

++ The skills can be combined into a team as small as two, but as the project grows, so should the team.

++ Reward Creativity

++ Constant Training

Have fun, if you have any questions, I'll be in the bar later.

Questions and Answers

Q: What is the relationship between SEM and PR? How do you use the PR companies for SEM?

AH: Very good question. We do use PR extensively, more of a traditional model. We have our local market which represents 25% of our business, then Europe and North America. Unfortunately, we have not yet linked out press releases to our sites or the blogs and what not to our sites, and we're in the process of implementing that right now. I hope that answers your question.

Q: How do you utilize the press for SEM?

FW: Don't think of it purely in terms of traffic. There's offline branding, and there's online inbound links, awareness and some click-throughs.

Q; News indexes pretty well. Is the press release focused more for brand awareness or for indexing?

FW: It's all together. You can't isolate them. Most "real" news won't have lots of links, but there are instances where a properly optimized press release can get you some really well placed stories and generate a lot of traffic.

Q: With the lack of credit card usage in Latin America, how do you do transactions?

FW: The problem with credit cards, and that's a very valid issue not only in Latin America but also in China. The number of debit cards in South America is increasing and you can use those just like credit cards. We had the same problem in the United States, and as the number of types of "electronic money" increases, so does your potential customer base. There are prepaid debit cards and bank cards now, you can get them from the grocery store.

MG: MercadoLibre has an escrow service similar to the one EBay used to have years ago.

Q: You were mentioning consumer confidence levels. Can you tell us more about the consumer confidence in Latin America in terms of using credit cards.

MG: Most credit card purchases in Latin America are for large, special purchases. The users are becoming more sophisticated, and as they become more comfortable with the credit cards, they begin to make more and more purchases with them.

AH: For an airline that is a low cost carrier, our main sales channel is our website, and the main method of purchase is the credit card. Originally, our marketing copy was more playful... european. However, when you're in the Latin American market, playful doesn't encourage people to use their credit cards to pay for airline tickets. We had to go for more corporate, bank styled copy to instill trust with the users.

The following liveblog comes from Dave Rohrer.

Landscape & Tactics Track
Search Landscape: US Hispanics & Latin Americans
How do Latino searchers in both the U.S. and Latin America interact with search engines? Do they have a preference in language when they search, as well as the search ads if written in Spanish or English? What about Portuguese speakers from Brazil? To fully engage these audiences in the learning process, particular attention should be given to gaining and maintaining trust. Greater acceptance will occur by search marketers if they are involved in the planning, delivery, and evaluation of these marketing efforts. This session explores the latest research and provides tips and tactics for search marketers to consider.
Moderator:

* Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group

Speakers:

* Marcelo Sant'Iago, Director, Business Development, MídiaClick - Performance Marketing
* William Alvarez, Marketing Manager & Team Leader, Torrenegra Internet Solutions
* Martín Maslo, Founder & CEO, Resultics
* Gustavo Ross, Interactivist & Founder, Activ@Mente

Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group

Nacho:
This is more tactical then the last session. This is more about what you can do to take more advantage of things.

William Alvarez – Marketing Manager & Team Leader, Torrenegra Internet Solutions

Based in NY offering web solutions.

How to reach your target without wasting money while targeting the Latin market.

5 Different Segments

- Spanish only
- Spanish dominant
* % 21 of US Hispanics are in the first 2
- Bilingual
* 28% of US Hispanics fall here
- English dominant
- English only

Spanish Preferred Segment

SEO
Pros: capitalizes local markets with lack of content in Spanish
Cons: internationally competing web sites (Spain and Latin America)

PPC
Pros: possible solution if you want to market on Spanish keywords without having a translated web site
Cons: AdCenter targeting capabilities limitations (e.g. Geotargeting)

Some US portals: Univision, Yahoo, Terra, Google

Bilingual Segment

SEO
Pros: your message is guaranteed, it will always reach your target. Increases opportunities.
Cons: requires an additional budget to maintain the same content offering to the market

PPC:
Pros sounds familiar, engages the target by using a common languages
Cons: mistreats the language and it might sound not-professional depending upon the main target.
Ways to match segments

Shows micocinalatina.com ranking for “three milk cake” in English and Spanish for each of the translations.

English Preferred Segment

SEO
Pros:?
Cons: ?

PPC
Pros: Seasonality. Each Hispanic group has its own set of values and traditions and we can take advantage of this to engage them.
Cons: *took slide down*

Acculturation models - It all depends on each particular situation. Each group celebrates their own holidays and events at different times. This is a way to segment a group from others.

Stats
Advertising to Hispanics in Spanish is significantly more effective then advertising to Hispanics in English.

Shows some stats from a study in 2006 and some stats from AOL.

AOL
- 68% in 2006, 51% in 2004. Internet is best source to make final brand decision for most online Hispanics.
- More then 77% of online Hispanics use the internet to learn about brands of products. 59% in 2004

Marcelo Sant’lago, Director, Business Development, MidiaClick – Performance Marketing

Opening remarks – apologizes for Latin accent. Hopes that in the next few years the conference will be in Portuguese and Spanish and translated in English.

Shows a photo of Orkut – a Turkish engineer who works for Google

Orkut – is THE social network in Brazil. 60MM+ unique users a month, 200MM+ page views a day

About – Prime demographic distribution
Targeting – contextual, site and placement targeting. Regional/local targeting
Ad Formats – Text-base ads for contextual targeting. Display for site targeting

CGM is great – Blogger, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Orkut
Brazil is #2 in the world for internet use on You Tube, Yahoo Answers.

Photo of Chris Anderson – Long Tail

Long Tail and online advertising industry in Brazil
Fortune 500 use CPM Banners, RichMedia, and Video for the “best sellers”
SMEs use CPC/CPA banners, Paid Search, SEO for the long tail search terms

$176 million market – just over 2% of entire advertising pie.
113 million users, which is larger then many countries in Latin America
Brazil does not speak Spanish, but speaks Portuguese
Net Ratings show that 80% of Brazil users do a search everyday

Photo of John Battelle
“the database of intentions”

Think Reverse
Conversion then Budget

Budget -> Visits -> Leads -> Conversion

Leads to Conversion = CPA
Visits to Leads = CPL
Budget to Visits = Average CPC

Strategy: Keyword Matrix
Slide shows Neutral, Worst, Still need improvement, Best keywords. Shows which keywords are producing the most for you.

Personal Mantra: “Test, Learn, Evolve.”

Metrics to use: Impressions, clicks, click-through, Visits, Conversions, ROI

US is very metric based, Brazil doesn’t measure anything. Be sure to use a web analytics tool and measure. Free, expensive, just use something.

Success Case: Editora Abril

Objective: Selling magazine subscriptions
Media channels: uses CPC and display
1st sponsored links campaign to win ABEMD Award

Martin Maslo – Founder & CEO, Resultics

Nacho: Tells everyone to read his white paper. Martin put together the most important voices of Latin America.

Brings up that he would love to present in his own language, and looks forward to the day when he can.

Advertisers Spending Budgets
What can you buy with a dollar in Latin America?

Slide shows a list of flags and items that you can get for a dollar. Ex: you can feed a family in Argentina.

$1 = SEM Advertising. Shows CPC lists

Real Estate = $2.42, bienes raices = $.42
Credit card = $9.49, tarjeta de credito = $.90

Agencies can….. leverage display campaigns with search marketing using small extra budget……. Use smartly contextual networks and site targeting to reach large audiences at low costs.

Advertisers can….. be first movers can take over generic terms at low costs…. SMBs can compete head to head with large companies…… going Global with local products and services.

There are a lot of terms that small advertisers can get now, if you start now.

Few Local Players
Yahoo, Infobae.com, La Nacion, Prodigy, MSN, Terra, Es Mas, ClarinX
Not a lot of heavy traffic portals. CPM has risen, visibility has reduced. The opportunity then appears: SEM.

SEM -> vertical networks, content networks, site targeting/direct responses -> traditional CPM display ads

Instead of complementing display ads with SEM…. Complement SEM with display ads.

Communication
- email
- instant messenger – 32% of IM users use VoIP
- Blogs, 42% of users have a personal page, blog or are registered in a social network. 36% share photos.

50% of users have already purchased a service or product online.
60% of users purchase at traditional channels after doing some research on the web

Each area has a local opportunity. Different methods work better in different areas. Look for low CPC’s in one country compared to others.

Think locally specifically design your campaigns for the local market.

Dealing with our new customer: The Sales Manager instead of the Marketing Manager.
- shares passion for results
- measure the way the agency will be measured
- understands new SEM opportunity with no pre concepts
- breaks a traditional cycle
- understands that search marketing is not a glamorous way of advertisement but it is indeed a romantic approach for getting things done!!

Remember: by the end of the day, success will be measured, as in any other industry, in results.

Gustavo Ross – President & Co-Founder, Activ@Mente

Agrees about the English/Spanish translation that the other speakers have mentioned.

The Consumer(1.0) – couch potato
The Consumer(2.0) – wants when they want and actively seek it out

New brand <> consumer relationships

Past the brand communicated out, now it’s a give and take on demand when the consumer wants too. Past = communication, Present = interaction

Long Tail of Content
- Graph shows the big portals ranging down to smaller portals and verticals.
- Ranges from Massive to Niche to User Generated (smallest players)
- Shows how getting to the consumer it has gotten more difficult

Search in the Interactive Marketing Strategy
- Understand its tactical role(s)
* Tactical Roles
-- Direct response/ customer acquisition. CPC are easily measured. This is the easiest way to use search and the most primitive.
-- Brand building/awareness generation. Don’t have to have a clear call to action as you do with direct response. Example: “remodelar” search has an ad comes up that just links to an information page. The company gets 80% of its business from the web now.
-- Redirector/motivation catcher. Consumer is already motivated by other tactics. This is more for bigger brands who already are marketing. Search is the last link in the chain from the brand to the consumer. TV or radio drives a user and then does a search due to that promotion – search joins the consumer to the brand. Example: Duracell – has many channels and people are going online and searching for the promotion. The domain name is quite difficult and search helps the users find it. (Duracell and Fantastic 4 promotion). Old Spice example is similar. A non indexable site that uses Paid search to close the gap.
-- Inverse/brand response. Consumer is seeking out a brand, how do you respond to their search? Example: Duracell. Offer a Brand finder on the site. Example: Gillette. A few months ago a search for Gillette was a “boycott Gillette” that ranked #2.
- Be relevant – know your consumer and what they are asking
* Use internal search engine to see what visitors are searching for. Are you responding to what they are searching for?
-- Are you looking at which keywords your visitors used to come to your site?
-- Are you allowing them to use natural language?
-- What are they looking for? What are they finding?
-- Use the data to answer their questions.
-- Use the Funnel!!

Search in the Interactive Marketing Strategy
- Understand which role search is playing in your strategy
- Listen to your consumer
- Optimize your investment

This Search Engine Strategies Latino 2007 Keynote has been brought to us by Li Evans. Thanks, Li!

Keynote Conversation – SES Latino 2007, Monday June 18, 2007

* Gonzalo Alonso, General Manager for Spanish-Speaking Latin America, Google
* Nacho Hernandez, iHisapnic

Nacho greets and welcomes the audience. He mentions that this is the 2nd SES Latino event and the event room nearly full, people standing in the back. Nacho explains about Gonzalo's history with Google and that he started at Google in 2005, 2007 became manager for all of Google's efforts in Latin America.

Nacho then points out that its not about making more money for your campaigns, but to provide that user that service, product or information you put out there. That's what search is all about - searchers looking and you providing.

NH=Nacho Hernandez
GA: Gonzalo Alonso

NH: What do you see is the big difference between US and Latin America?
GA: First we see Latin America there is a lot of growth. Why Latin America? Growing faster
than the us, most of erope and places in Asia. Not only Spanish speaking but Portuguese. In the last 12 months, Latin America has become a #1 proioty for Google.

NH: Why put Google's Latin American base in Argentina?
GA: Meat and wine. (Audience chuckles). Data and numbers (hard bucket) and soft bucket - what we see around the Latin American community particularly in Argentins is a great talent pool, the place is very special, ecommerce is booming. Argentina is a place where everything is happening.

NH: Major markets in Latin American are Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Which others are high potential?
GA: Columbia, is starting to get a nation wide plan for technology. There's critical mass, and advertising dollars. Chile, as well.

NH: Chicken and egg factor. Lower internet penetration. What do you think could happen in Latin America to increase the internet penetration. Is it the 100 dollar computer the solution?
GA: In my opinion, 100 computers are cell phones in Latin America. But it is a very difficult ecosystem. It's more about how do you get the money from people - both advertisers, and buyers. Its all customers so we are looking into how to do this. E-commerce players are needed. Replicate what's happening in Brazil to the other countries.

Google just launched "business adwords" for Latin America. Create your own business website with us - and you can start your advertising

Governments need to find ways to close the digital gap. Google wants to help - but they need programs to help with. Participation from the whole ecosystem is needed.

NH: Is Search Marketing is going to grow much bigger when the chicken and egg situation is resolved?
GA: Absolutely. We're starting to notice airlines getting into the marketing. if we don't grow the ecosystem, e-commerce, it will be tough.

NH: What major shifts are you looking at from the big spenders in Latin America?
GA: There are 2-3 important components. More SEO in the right way will help. 2nd thing is that we are seeing a shift in companies. We are speaking more with the business guys - the ones who really need to sell. Branding side, Google is doing things with you tube, banners and display are starting to kick off. it's a tough journey.

NH: Businesses want to spend more money, but what about the content. Google just launched Universal Search, which is adding different elements of content from the vertical engines. If that's been implemented globally how does that affect Latin America, since there is a lack of content?
GA: Envision the web like an ocean, there's deep with no light, and then shallow with a lot of light. This is the way we see the web. The deep waters are really deep, just designed pages, not optimized. Why are there still a lot of content results come in English - it's not about building the web page, but building the right web page. Lots of content not optimized.

The problem on the other side, the platform are built, but content is lacking. Everyone in Search in Latin America market everyone is seeing this.

NH: Any other thoughts?
GA: Research - come to the industry if you have any cool ideas. Latin American Governments aren't doing it, so we as an industry need to partner to do this and do it really fast.

NH: Thanks you very much Gonzolas.

Liana “Li” Evans is the Search Marketing Manager for Commerce360 and oversees the search engine optimization, social media and word of mouth marketing efforts for their client’s search marketing efforts. Li also is the owner and editor of Search Marketing Gurus blog.

Landscape & Tactics Track
Tapping into US Hispanics & Latin Americans via Search
Moderator: Nacho Hernandez

First Speaker: Emerson Calegaretti, VP Client Development, Latin America, Acronym Media. Emerson is based in Brazil.

It’s amazing the audience is double what we had last year! Congratulations to Nacho for doing such a great job.

Latin America (Snapshot of Region)

• Population: 549 million
• Trade Balance 2006
-- US$ 514 billion exports
-- US$ 432 billion imports
-- US$ 82 billion balance (superavit)
• GDP: US$ 2.6 trillion (2006)
• Per capita income: US$ 9,238
• 11 million registered corporations

It’s good to have numbers like these to justify expanding into the Latin American market.

Internet Users in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico

Country/ Population/ Internet Users/ Penetration
Argentina 38 MM 10 MM 26%
Brazil 184 MM 32 MM 17%
Mexico 105 MM 19 MM 18%

Latin American Search Engine Industry

The major players are already there… Microsoft has been there for a long time, Yahoo as well and Google just started like 2 years ago. The important thing here is that they have local offices with local voices and are a presence there. This expansion is going to grow as well. More and more companies are seeing the value of the local presence and will be entering the market.

Google has 72% of the share of the searches in Latin America. Yahoo has 17% and MSN has 2%. The local search players are taking about 9% of the search. So when you’re thinking about expanding your search campaigns, make sure you remember the local players as they’re taking almost 10%of the market share right now.

Most active industries in SEM:
• Retail
• Local (Classifieds)
• Travel
• Finance
• Automotive

The YP and the classifieds for the local newspapers are really picking up in terms of catching up with the retail. Travel is booming... there are many local players who are growing a lot.

Compared to the US, the CPC in Brazil and Mexico, etc is very low.

Latin American SEM Advertisers

Advertiser base will grow almost 5xs in just 4 years.
2006 – 22,000 advertisers
2010 – 100,000 advertisers projected

Who are the advertisers in the Latin American SE Industry

Sales Channel Avg Monthly Ticket Category
Direct & Ad Agencies $10,000 Large
TeleSales $1,000 Medium
Online $200 Small
Resellers $10 Micro

The micro category contains very small, sole proprietorship type of single person businesses who are buying their online ads via resellers like the yellow pages, etc.

If you need the numbers, you can email Emerson at emerson@acronym.com

Second Speaker: Jack Flanagan, Exec VP of ComScore

What I’d like to do is talk about search as it’s related to Latin America and the Hispanic Market.

650 million searches Worldwide
Asia Pacific has highest contribution at 35%
Latin America has 7% & US Hispanic 2%

Latin America ranks #2 year over year
- 16% growth to 45.3 million unique visitors
US Hispanic growth – 5% year over year

89% of US Hispanic online population searches
Highest compared to other worldwide regions

US Hispanic market has highest search penetration. 89% of the users use the SEs.

The US Hispanics tend to skew much younger with smaller households and roughly half (49%) speak Spanish fluently.

Hispanics online are more usage intensive than the US General Market

Avg pages per usage day – 25% more pages viewed
Avg minutes per usage day – 20% more time online

US lags considerably behind all other countries in terms of engagement. France is #1, but Brazil, Argentina and Mexico are #2, 3 and 4.

Key findings

- While trailing other countries & regions in overall audience
- Latin America countries & US Hispanic audiences deliver a highly penetrated & growing audience in the area of search
- For US Hispanic, desirable & young demographics that are extremely advantageous for advertisers

Speaker Three: Sarah Carberry, Sales & Marketing Multicultural Development Manager, Google, Inc.

“Search Marketing to US Hispanics”

We’re seeing that US Hispanics are coming to Google wanting more personalization, more engagement, etc. Last year I presented a lot of heavy research, so this year I wanted to give you best practices, some search methods, and some best practices.

US Hispanics are surfing online more than watching TV. They’re using the internet more than 17 hours per week, and more than half the time on Spanish sites. More than half of Latino Adults prefer Spanish == 7.1 million.

70% of the growth in the US Hispanic market happened with the introduction/availability of broadband.

Searching in Spanish is on the Rise. The search volume is increasing over the past 3 years (see Google Trends for terms like futbol, recetas, noticias for examples).
Consumer Pathways are Non-Linear. Consumers leave footprints all over the place. They go to forums, they go to blogs, and they want first hand info from early adopters. They aren’t just going to the TV to get their information.

Search and Display work together to drive sales. When used in combination, the activations/conversions exponentially increase.

Offline exposure impacts online searching. Tying all of your offline components and offline awareness building into your online presence will help grab those qualified searchers and drive searches for your product/brand.

61% of US Hispanics own cell phones. Mobile searching, and therefore advertising, is on the rise.

Best Practices
- Keep it simple.
- Dynamic keyword insertion works well
- Experiment with language in the creative
- Develop geo-targeting campaigns
- Opt into the content network to increase your impressions and clicks.

Leverage 100% of your products and services. Make them findable.

Final Speaker: Rafael Jimenez, General Manager, Advertiser & Publisher Group, Yahoo! Hispanic Americas

I’d like to talk to you about certain things that we feel are coming in the next months and also about combining some concepts for best results.

Social search has had huge success in the region. There have been 20 million users in the region in less than a year. The good thing about social search is that you’re leveraging the knowledge of the collective, rather than relying solely on the machines. A lot of people are looking at alternative ways to find the answers they’re looking for on the web,

Mobile… approaching 250 million cell phone users in the region; 45% penetration.
- Mobile data plans are getting cheaper – driving increased usage of mobile web.
- Awareness is increasing – Mobile users are accessing the internet on their mobile devices.
- Increase in mobile content/applications – Yahoo! Go and oneSearch are good examples of mobile specific applications.
- Cellular networks are getting faster.

The New Advertising Platform
- System stability, extensibility, speed to innovation
- Timing: Code complete

New Advertising Interface
- Makes it easier to sign-up, manage and optimize your campaigns.
- Timing: Launched in US and Canada on 10/17/06; International began launching market-by-market in Q2 2007

Taking advantage of social search… Yahoo is integrating the experience of regular search with social search. We’re leveraging our user generated content within our search results to enhance the quality and value of the results. So you have the ability to tap into both of these types of searches.

While Barry and I are in our offices in New York, Dave Rohrer and Carolyn Shelby are doing SES Latino Conference reporting for us, which is happening right now in Miami, FL. Here are Dave's liveblogged notes for the first session:

Fundamentals Track
Introduction To Search Engine Marketing
Who are the major search engines? How can their editorial listings send you "natural" or "organic" traffic for free through search engine public relations or search engine optimization efforts? How can you purchase top rankings or placement through search engine advertising opportunities? This must-attend session for beginners provides an overview of key concepts.

Moderator:
* Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.

Speaker:
* Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.

Jesse does the introduction, I (daver) am the only person that was here the first year.

Jessie Stricchiloa, Founder, Alchemist Media, Inc.
Mike Grehan, VP of International Business Development for Bruce Clay starts:

Has been around since 1995 and looked to SEO for his business.

4Ps of online marketing – Positioning, Permission, Partnership and Performance.
Search is not a cure for all. It works best when in a Mix.

Positioning – using paid and organic search to drive traffic
Permission – opening a dialogue with potential new customers. Customer relation management. References Seth Godin and his books.
Partnership – Affiliate marketing, co-promotion and joint venture. Everything you do offline you can do online. Ex: coupons, charity
Performance – Measuring the success of your web site and online marketing strategies. Use of analytics.

Growth of Online Marketing
- Newer channels such as search engine marketing are changing the marketing landscape.
- CPA – Direct mail is near 10$ and search is .29$

Plotted History of Search: Brian Pinkerton – Web Crawler, Daivd and Jerry – Yahoo, Louis Monier – Alta Vista, Larry and Sergei – Google, Apostolos Gerasoulis – Ask (Teoma), Bill Gates – MSN

Two Types: Organic and Sponsored Listings

Ways to get indexed – Organic, Pay per click, Cost per click, Pay for consideration – back in 1999 Yahoo started as a directory and you had to pay i.e. pay for consideration, Pay for inclusion, Trusted feed – XML feeds that Yahoo only uses.

Taxonomy of Search

Navigational – I want to be somewhere. At Google a navigational search example is “bbc” where its hard to sell.
Informational – classic information retrieval. An example is “history of cookies”, no ads, its non commercial. 70-80% of searches are non commercial.
Transactional – beginning of the buying cycle. Search for “ipod 80 gig black” and paid results and organic results both show up. Froogle has listings at the top as well.

Whos number one? Local/Vertical/General/ Paid
Searches can show all, so which one is #1.

Google Universal

Google Base – ways to feed Google information.
Go to Google Maps and update the info and you can increase the information that Google displays about your company.

Ask.com
2 weeks ago Ask rolled out their new search. They can move faster then Google and take risks so expect more.

Marketing Analogy
Organic results are a bit like doing PR i.e. free editorial coverage in press, radio and tv.

Major Players
Google , Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com

How search engines work
Search engines look at the world as a graph. There are two sides to organic: getting indexed and then ranking.

Preparing a Campaign
- Who are we?
- What do we do?
- What are we known for?
- What’s our message?

Then list the top 10 phrases which cover the content of your website. Each phrase should be two words ore more. Talk to people OUTSIDE of the organization.

You have to think about what people are actually looking for. Why optimize for digital camera? Does the user want to buy, sell, repair, shop? Go for longer keywords.

Keyword Analyzer – interesting tool that runs on your desktop.

Its non linear. Search engines don’t start at the home page, it comes in from every direction. Don’t build your site in that way, build it thinking that search engines grab and show a page, not your entire site.

Inverted Index – words point at pages. Think of it as an index in the back of the book. In a medical book you look up Hemoglobin, and look it up in the back of the book. Each term will have a listing of all the pages that a word appears on.

The goal: write a page that the search engines like and that makes sense to a user. Write a page in a Newspaper style. Have the keyword in the title, in the headline, in the copy, in the alt tags of the image, and then text links and/or link to the sitemap.

Meta tags – came from library science but are very poor for heterogeneous corpus/collection with no standard/control.
Search engines don’t even believe your metatags or your content. Why should they? Links are what they believe. Social network analysis = link popularity. Not all links are equal. A link to your website from me, is a vote for you. It means that I think my visitors should look at your site.

The Dark Side:
Cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, keyword stuffing, fake links, over submitting and so on. See Google’s webmaster guidelines for a list of things not to do.

Paid Search:
Goto.com – started paid search.
Paid is about conversion, its not about eyeballs. Web Analytics – measure ROI, A/B Testing, Google Optimizer.

Demographic Targeting:
Google has the larger user base but not the larger subscriber base. MSN and Yahoo both have about 150 million users that login and use services.

Excellent Resource:
Bill Hunt – Search Engine Marketing, Inc
Bryan Eisenberg – Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark

Q&A

Q: Once you get #1 in Organic and in Paid, which one is worth more?
A: Mike: people tend to click on the left, they don’t know why but studies say they just tend to click on the left. Jesse: some studies do show if you are #1 in organic and paid it creates a better sense of brand.

Q: Ranking without being crawled?
A: It is possible, and Ive seen it frequently. The reason for that is it will crawl the billions and billions of links and lots are on the frontier of the crawl. Google looks at the links to a new page and you become #1. If the page is new and it’s a new term it can happen. You can tell as just the bare URL is shown.

Q: The perfect page, don’t you get banned for extensive use of a keyword?
A: You would expect to see it in the title, headline and body. There are people that user keyword density tools and set every page to a certain %. Don’t do this, search engines will figure out what you are doing.

Q: The frequency that you change your content, does it effect the frequency the visits of a Google bot and of your ranking.
A: Google and others have News Bots, Fresh Bots, and so on. Bigger sites get crawled sometimes every 5 minutes. Blogs get crawled more often as they get updated and if they have the linkage data. If your link data is normal, you could update all day long and not see a difference in the # of crawls. If you are writing lots of content and not seeing an up tick in crawling take a look at Google’s Webmaster Central. You can get a lot of data about your site.

Next month is a pretty busy month for conferences. Week after week, we have conferences to attend most of the month. The Search Engine Roundtable will have representatives at each conference, covering the sessions live for you.

The first conference is SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 4th & 5th. Both Tamar and I will be attending and covering the conference. I wrote more about this conference at Danny's First Search Marketing Expo Coming!

The second conference is SES Toronto in Canada on June 12th & 13th. This is the first time I am not personally covering SES Toronto in two years. Carolyn Shelby will be covering this conference and we may add more reporters to this event (if you are interested, let me know).

The third conference is SES Latino in Miami on June 18th & 19th. Last year I covered the kick off of Nacho's SES Latino. You can see our 2006 SES Latino coverage to get an idea on the niche this conference fulfills. Carolyn Shelby will be covering this conference and we may add more reporters to this event (if you are interested, let me know).

Carolyn Shelby (aka cshel) will be our "Conference Reporter" for as long as she loves doing it, since she has done such an excellent job at SES NY 07.

FYI - if you are going to SES Toronto from USA, you probably will need a passport. In the past you did not, but I think there is a new rule, so don't forget it.

Also, if you want to see my personal conference checklist for the upcoming events, see my personal blog.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.