Search Engine Strategies 2007 New York Archives

Big thank you to Kim Krause Berg, Debra Mastaler, Chris Boggs, Greg Meyers, Ben Pfeiffer, Lisa Barone, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Carolyn Shelby, Tamar Weinberg for helping me out with this awesome coverage. Here are the sessions we covered, somewhat in order.

Here are the fifty-plus sessions we covered at SES NY 2007.

1. In House: Big SEO
2. Video Search Optimization
3. Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies
4. Podcast and Audio Search Optimization
5. Benchmarking an SEM Campaign
6. Online Video Advertising
7. Advertising in Social Media
8. Mobile Search Optimization
9. Where Are Your Spending Your Client’s Money?
10. Advanced Paid Search Techniques
11. Ads In A Quality Score World
12. In House Big PPC
13. Keynote Conversation with Steve Berkowitz
14. Sitemaps & URL Submission
15. Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic
16. Link Building Basics
17. Introduction to Search Marketing
18. Web Analytics & Measuring Success
19. Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
20. Converting Visitors Into Buyers
21. Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads
22. Writing for Search Engines
23. Meet the Search Ad Networks
24. SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
25. Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix
26. Earning Money From Contextual Ads
27. Fun with Dynamic Websites
28. Landing Page Testing & Tuning
29. Search and Branding
30. Robots.txt Summit
31. Successful Site Architecture
32. B2B Tactics
33. Social Search Overview
34. Creating Compelling Ads
35. SMO - Social Media Optimization
36. Images and Search Engines
37. Search Behavior Research Update
38. Social Bookmark Strategies
39. Shopping Search Tactics
40. Organic Listings Forum
41. Microsoft adCenter: Today and Tomorrow
42. Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues
43. Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan
44. Local Search Marketing Tactics
45. Search & Regulated Industries
46. Wikipedia & SEO
47. Linking Strategies
48. Usability and SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One
49. Link Baiting and Viral Success
50. SEM For Non-Profits and Charities
51. SEM Agencies: Working With Ad Agencies
52. CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines

Moderated by Sara Holoubek, a “Free Agent Consultant,” as well as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO.

First speaker is Janet Driscol Miller, from searchmojo, in Charlottesville, VA. They have had a great experience in partnering with Ad Agencies. There are natural synergies between SEMs and agencies. Agencies are seeing requests for SEM/SEO, and many do not have in-house expertise, and this can be difficult to build. SEM firms offer full-service marketing through partnership. This means low-cost lead generation, and allows the SEM firm to focus on SEM and leave the sakes to someone else. Also, working with agencies leads to an increased possibility for acquisition.

There are major challenges, though: you have to find the right partners. Each needs to pick the right SEM/Agency for them. There can be operational issues such as billing (SEMs often have a different type of billing structure that agencies). Some recommendations: relative to your assize. Track records of success. Boutique agencies are less likely to have an SEM person of staff. Do your homework: remember the brand is now associated with the agencies. Don’t be afraid to cold call/network with agencies. She heard another panel where an agency person said “one of the happiest days of my life was when an SEM firm came through the door,” which made her very happy to hear.

Solving operational issues: create an integrated process flow. Use flow charts and project plans and insert SEM process into it. One problem that is common is that an agency will redesign and client site without informing the SEM, which can lead to major issues. She emphasized regular updates in training. Can the agency sell your service? It is important as an SEM to enable that. Train them regularly in the basics, and then they can always call you in on a sales call. One way they have achieved this is through handbooks. They created handbooks to all partners, specific to their needs and processes.

They also recommend dedicated account managers. The SEM will assign an account manager to each partner, to facilitate easy and rapid communications, Use co-branded marketing activities to promote the partnership. For example, use an email announcing the partnership to the agency list. So, should you lower prices to allow for agency markup? Not always needed, and this depends on the fees. She never lowers the fees for any body. She finds that SEM firms are in high demand, particularly by agencies, so she doesn’t feel the need. However, she does find ways to make the partnership mutually beneficial. You can work with the agency if needed to find creative ways to compensate, such as perhaps using a PPC setup fee instead of adding to the management percentage of ad spend fee. They are always open to testing models.

Contractual issues can exist. Try to be transparent versus white label in the approach. You can keep the brand presence, and maybe represent the firm as a trusted partner. Otherwise what may happen is someone meets with her and then Googles her name and finds out she doesn’t even work for the agency. Thus, you should always be transparent if possible.. Mutual NDAs are recommended – otherwise there may be situations when the SEM ends up training the agency to do their job. Make it easy: use a blanket services agreement, and append service agreement with a statement of work, instead of starting from scratch.

In summation, try to make it easy to work with agencies. Do not limit to only ad agencies: there are interactive agencies, marketing services, PR agencies, customers. Remember to evaluate the relationships on a regular basis.

Peter Hershberg from Reprise Media next. He will present: Working with Ad Agencies: “Transparency versus Opacity.” Just in case, he defines Transparency as “Full client visibility.” Opacity is “white label partner.” Pros and cons of each: transparency first. Pros: the client relationship is open. Can help influenced decisions over marketing and budget. Also, there is more credit for work. The downside: Two clients, agency and the client/brand. This leads to the need to establish credibility twice. It can be challenging for the agency partner to articulate the value proposition.

Opacity has pros and cons as well. Pros: There is a less intensive service relationship. This can be an incremental sales channel without being involved in the Business Development. At the same time, you will not be getting credit for the work, and there is less influence of strategy. Search may not be automatically integrated into the broad campaigns. Also, the issue of having project work versus ongoing, and this may not have an extended shelf life.

What are some of the major reasons agencies prefer an opaque relationship? Many agencies fear change. The client demands search, it is outperforming everything else…so what if the clients knew? This makes the years of experience with the client obsolete. He showed an example of an agency that actually had to hide the effectiveness in SEM so that they wouldn’t lose the other media. There are downsides for SEMs as well: Retail business, through an agency, case study: they got a ten-to-one return on 100K product, and were never able to cite it as work/success.

He shows a mini case study for a major electronics retailer. They felt strongly about SEM being integrated and actually brought them into the meeting with the agency. The results were excellent, thanks to the total integration. He cannot share specific results, but they are “killing it.” In the end, he feels transparency is in everyone’s best interest. Everyone is able to work towards their strengths. It allows for joint proposals and pitches. It can be very powerful when a specialist goes in with the ad agency to a cline to pitch the new business. Also, the coordinated execution helps the rest of the project.

Scott Orth from GTS Services in Portland, Oregon. Shows a Reebok TV commercial on slide titled, “why cant we all get along?” It is the Terry Tate commercial (office linebacker). Very funny… the idea is that if you are an SEM working with a traditional marketer, you may have issues with conflict. But aren’t we the same anyway? He shows traditional marketing and their online equivalents: PR = SEO. Media Buy = PPC. Creative/storefront design = Website. In the example he showed, he felt that the emphasis on driving traffic to the site to see more Terry Tate videos was not strong enough (they had a brief image of the reebok.com domain at the end of the ad under other verbiage). People tend to search for ideas within the media piece and search around that.

He does a short case study about work with a Corporate HVAC company. The environment included three players: SEM, Web Development firm, and traditional agency. The problems: working independently, ad and brand messages were not integrated, the site design was based on web and technical details, and the primary SEM goal was the increase of traffic.

So, after the creation, problems were: Directories, Titles and META descriptions were not reflective of the global message. Imagery and content did not match. Solutions: traditional agency lead the initiatives and shared media plans. The SEM realigned organic SEO and PPC campaigns to match up with offline campaigns, and they had a three way partnership to do a full site redesign, focused on SEO and usability. Results: Streamlined branding and messaging. Traffic from search jump 53%, which was incredibly successful because it was global brand that already receive millions of visitors. The interactive tools they designed were also an instant success. Lastly, targeted conversion increase 59%.

The secret to success: knowing who to blame for mistakes. Learn to point fingers, trash-talk traditional marketing. Finally, communication, how will the client know their traditional agency suck without you telling them (laughs from everyone – he says obviously he is kidding with these). So how to make it work? We’re on the same team, sharing different skills – remember that. Share plans, brainstorm together! Give regular presentations. Assist in sales pitches…doesn’t only mean that you have to go to the pitch, but at least work with them in the creation of the pitch. Remember, it’s all about success – use test campaigns. He also feels you can “get in the door” with PPC, show some success, and then move towards organic once they are convinced of the value of search. He feels that PPC best aligns with traditional media so it works well at the onset.

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines, Friday April 13, 2007 12:30 pm
Organic Track

Moderator: Danny Sullivan

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, GrantasitcDesigns.com
Jim McFadyen, CriticalMass
Dan Crow, Google
Amit Kumar, Yahoo! Search
Ryan Johnston - Critical Mass

This is the final session for me today and one of the last for the conference. Again, it is being held in a ballroom sized room and it's cold in here (but better than being in some of the hot rooms.) I didn't have info in advance on who would be moderating, but Danny Sullivan just appeared and it will be he who moderates this session. Two minutes to go and the room is starting to buzz and fill up.

Danny is at the podium and cracking jokes. Last session of the last day. This will be the "best session" he jokes. The web has evolved as more people are making use of css, ajax. Issues for SEO? Shari leads off.

Shari:

I think everybody who attends the last session deserves a reward. CSS - html addition that allows webmasters to control design, font, link appearance, etc. It’s a text file. SE's can read it. Decreases download time of page. Easier to control elements on a page. Communicates visited and unvisited links. Ability to control look of a site. SE's monitor hidden links. Disadvantages - end users have to have the fonts you call in stylesheet. users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers; they often prefer odd typefaces found in print. Css hyperlinks clutter a page. Sometimes there is unusual text wrapping when a stylesheet is changed, like changing font sizes. CSS can be used to hide text on a page. SE's don't use alt text to determine relevancy. Some people use h1 tags as workaround and they make a lot of content h1 tags in CSS. CSS layer coordinates are something SE's can detect. Some SEO's try to hide content in negative coordinates. CSS makes it easy to put layers on top of each other, making it easier to use CSS to hide text. They myth is that you can use CSS to hide things from SE's. Drop down menus are not considered spam because text is meant to be read by humans and so are the links.

Put all css into separate directory. Make a different design for mobile, she recommends. Not just changing the css. Should you robots exclude css? No. SE's don't want you to hide CSS or JavaScript with robots.txt. She highly recommends css. Increases page load times. Make sure your websites display properly on browsers. Not all elements need to be css. Some images are fine rather than doing it by css.

Ryan and Jim co-present:

We use tools like AJAX all the time. Used for some high end clients. Tech has been around for 7 years. Asynchronous JavaScript XHTML. X is for data formatting. AJAX is not a programming lang. Nothing to install or download. All browsers are enabled. AJAX not supported by SE's.

Full/ partial /none are 3 groups of support. SE's and AJAX don't mix because of the use of JavaScript. Makes it hard to locate or index content. If AJAX delivers your content, this is the problem. Every pg needs to be an html, php, aspx page. SE's must find and index them. Every page must have content that exists on the page. All links must be in html. Test by turning off JavaScript. If pages are there, SE's will find them.

AJAX enhances the user experience. Engineers come in and change anchors on the page to change function to AJAX calls. Ensure your baseline app supports non-AJ users, including spiders. AJ can help a site be more interesting for users. make it run faster. offer assistance, like Google suggest.

Ex - Rolex.com

copy in nav
wanted nav accessible from every page

They didn't want all content indexed by SE's. Solution was AJAX.

AJAX breaks the normal browser refresh. This means content does not always correspond to the URL. No history, no back button. Major usability issue. They use JavaScript to update urls, won't refresh the page and fake an entry into browsers history. Advises not to cloak. Our research suggest duplicate content should not be an issue as spiders don't index past the # sign.

[This is a very techy presentation. He is having trouble showing his examples from a live site due to FLASH. It's hard to take notes on this session because he is showing AJAX solutions in use.]

AJAX is used to accommodate url updates and handle deep linking. Looks at gucci.com. It's a pretty site. Easy to move around. If you remove the JavaScript, there is nothing on the pages. No content. It breaks every rule for SEO. All images, all JavaScript driving it.

Amazon is viewed next. Shows how AJAX handles interface and menus. Amazon Diamond search. Site works without JavaScript.

Panel input:

Dan Crow - Google
Says Google is moving towards indexing css FLASH, AJAX, JavaScript. They say there is no change in the present state, but expect a major shift in the future. They're interested in this technology. If you think everything is hidden behind JavaScript, someday that will longer be true. Be cautious about your assumptions about how you build your websites because they are making changes.

Amit -
It's our fault we can't index programming. We don't want to stop you from designing for your users. He states that what is built for accessibility is also built for search engines. CSS and JavaScript would like it not be hidden by robots.txt. If you have a problem with this, let Yahoo know. If technology you use requires clicks to use a form, makes it hard for SE's. They look at content and references from other sites. AJAX that doesn't allow urls to change is a problem for SE's and bookmarking because descriptions are in those urls. SE's don't know exactly which url is the actual inbound link that is making the referral.

[Note: This session was about conflicts, or not, with CSS and AJAX with search engines. It was a little hard to follow if you don't know about AJAX and what it is used for. It was interesting to hear what the search engine reps had to say. I think as AJAX solutions become more popular, we'll be hearing more about this and getting more details on actual applications for use.]

Provided by Cshel!

Vertical Track | 10:45a-12p

Moderator, Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Speakers:
Ettore Rossetti, Senior Manager, Internet Marketing, Save the Children
Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Kevin Gottesman, Founder, Gott Advertising

Audience is fairly light. Anne encourages the audience to move closer.

First Speaker: Ettore Rossetti

1. Apply Pareto’s Principle to SEM. (20% of the searches result in 80% of
the clicks)
2. Find Your Search Niche, being small and finding your narrow niche is
better than being big and broad and general. Try to be #1 for a very
narrow category than fight to be #1 in a broader category that might
already have a leader.
3. The Brad Pitt Effect. Informally named after the “butterfly effect” in
chaos theory. Unanticipated effects from non-intuitive actions or causes.
4. Actionable Advertising. Discover what times of year/day/whatever your
visitors are more likely to convert. Be aware of these peaks and valleys
in traffic. Know when your browsers buy.
5. Searcher Intent = Expectation. When searcher intent and results
delivery connect, the result is a win-win outcome. Make sure your call to
action perfectly matches the result after the user clicks.
6. A click is not a Customer. You cannot communicate back to a click.
Therefore, a click is not a customer, nor is it a lead. It’s an anonymous
suspect with the potential to become a prospect. Be aware of your
conversion rates and what you’re actually paying for. Make sure you
qualify your customers before you communicate/convert them?
7. Measuring holistic results. Search marketing is part of a greater whole
of integrated activity and needs to be tracked and measured holistically.
Make sure you’re getting a “panoramic” view of your online marketing
efforts. If you focus in too narrowly on a single aspect, you might miss
more important details or trends.

Second Speaker: Kevin Gottesman

Non-profit is not a dirty word. People have real money, they spend real
money and they’re using real budgets and buying advertising and developing
strategies, etc. A few years ago, non-profits seemed to be (or at least
have the reputation to be) all about getting free pub and just praying for
some conversions.

Client Goals and Types of Campaigns:

1. Fundraising:
a. Get peoplel to renew or join,
b. Get EOY (end of year) donations, etc
c. Appeals for specific assistance or types of donations.
2. List building
a. Breaking News – Have a baseline campaign running constantly so that
when a breaking news event happens, you can just add in a few new keywords
to take advantage of the search spike in the 2 or 3 days after the story
hits.
b. Core Issues
c. Seasonal – Take advantage of seasonal events and tweak keywords
accordingly.
d. Petitions – If the primary goal of a campaign is to get people to
sign/send petitions to congress, whatever, then once you’ve successfully
completed the petition action, send them to a page inviting them to join
your organization. Piggy back an additional action on the campaign and
take advantage of the traffic.
e. Land based events – Rallies, petition drives, food drives… non-online
events.

Google offers “Google Grants” for non-religious, non-political
not-for-profits to run free keyword campaigns. Many groups who are taking
advantage of this make the mistake of driving all the traffic to their
homepages, rather than to a specific call-to-action page, rather than
hoping they dive deeper past the homepage and choose to act.

Potential members and donors are online searching, donating and joining
daily.
Look for them where they are searching for your information, mission,
cause or event.
$200 billion donated by individuals in 2005
SEM and SEO are long term, necessary investments for all non-profits and
charities.

Third Speaker -- Nan Dawkins

“Missed Opportunities”

#1 PPC
• Overly broad keywords and terms
• Mismatched keywords
• Failure to fully utilize Google Grants

#2 Failure to be seen – Multi-channel visibility
• PPC isn’t the only way to be seen on the SEs. The cost of PPC is going
up, and will continue to do so. A multi-channel strategy helps you appear
more time on the search results page; the more likely you are to get a
click. The more clicks, the more conversions. Plus, the more times you
appear, the better your brand exposure is as well.
• ROI is higher with multi-channel strategies

#3 Social Media Strategy

What does social media have to do with search?
• Brand recognition, improves CTRs dramatically.
• SERP shelf space and reputation management.
• Social media can boost the number of quality links which boots your
organic rankings… in other words, better search visibility.

Social Media Examples:
• Wikipedia, blogs (your own, your supporters),
• MySpace/Facebook (local organizing),
• Vertical social networks (Change.org, Hot Soup, 43 Things),
• Ning,
• Flickr (photo sharing from events),
• Second Life,
• Video

Don’t start a social media campaign or effort without a sound strategy,
because a misstep or poorly executed effort could inadvertently alienate a
large group of very vocal people.

#4 Testing and Tracking

Make sure you have analytics and use them. Make sure you’re looking at
your log files and regularly audit your traffic, clicks, see what search
terms your users are clicking on to get to your site, etc.

Moderated by Jeff Rohrs
Presented by Rand Fishkin, Cameron Olthius, Jennifer Laycock, and Chris Boggs

Rand Fishkin is up first. He gives a background of linkbait evolution (18 months). He presents a quote from Matt Cutts about linkbait as a powerful tool.

Linkbait, above all other tactics, in marketing, has the greatest chance for high impact.

How do you leverage this? Linkbait is about getting content on the web that is worthy of being shared.

Rand shows us the linkerati - web researchers, journalists, and bloggers. Linkerati dominate the linking on the web. Browsers and customers do nothing compared to the linkerati. They are very important and you therefore should target them. They mean rankings, branding, mind share, and getting the word out about your product.

How does linkbait help you rank if you provide content that does not relate to your site? A page that has many links will help the global authority of your site. The 2,000+ links spread the link love throughout your site. Doing this consistently will help your entire site rank better. Example: Wikipedia. They rank for every arbitrary term but that's because there's a great amount of links to other pages.

Sample of successful linkbait: Worst College Mascots on drivl.com. It ranks very well for college mascots. Celebrity Nudity Awards on Drivl.com - it ranks #5 for nudity. These pages have several hundreds of thousands of page views, several thousand links, etc.

But if you're not in this industry and you need something practical, think about this - Rand discusses linkbait about a drug rehab firm - a drug identification chart - ranks #1 for illegal drugs. It was launched via Digg and got over 100,000 views and many links, etc.

Some content strategies: lists (best of, worst of), list of tips, howtos, problems, benefits, resources, teaching resources, humor/irony, controversy, interviews, breaking news, product reviews, poll results/data results, aesthetic beauty, tools, comprehensive reviews, great insight, and many more.

If you are looking for what these people are looking for, look through the linkbait portals (a lot of people a day look at content on those sites). Digg.com is an example (2mil+ visitors daily, tech/web centric but has news/photos/offbeat pieces, 50-100 votes required for homepage, 10-30k visits on average after the homepage, somewhat over 1000+ links after a few weeks). Reddit.com is another example (500k visits, broader in scope, 20-40 votes required for main page, 4-10k visits average, and 600+ links after a few weeks). Netscape.com is more of a news centric site (250k visits daily, 20-40 votes required for main page, 4-8k visits average, 300+ links per article). Del.icio.us popular (1mil+ visits daily, developer centric, 20-30 for main page). StumbleUpon (3mil+ users, all subjects, 70% thumbs up, 50-5,000 visits that are continuous, 25-250 links).

Other portals: popular blogs and sites
- Michael Arrington of Techcrunch
- Boingboing.net suggestion page
- Engadget
- Lifehacker
- Slashdot
- Techmeme
- Scobleizer
- Daily Kos
- The Huffington Post

Rules for Linkbaiting Safely: keep in mind about IP tracking, geography of users, groups, profile identification, and spam submissions. Digg is pretty savvy about acknowledging ways to game the service.

Cameron Olthius speaks next. How does viral search success impact traditional search?

1. Improving your rankings: there are three types of linkbait - content pieces (flash games, written content), widgets (e.g. MyBlogLog), and mashups (content from more than one source to make an integrated experience).

2. Reputation Management. There are two ways to use social media for reputation management. Control the top results through social media profiles. You can also contain the negative buzz before it goes viral. An example is Comcast Customer Service - search Google - #1 result is comcast.com, #3 result is a blogger's rant, and #5 result is a YouTube video of a Comcast guy sleeping on his couch.

Where do you monitor? Social media sites, blog search engines, and comment trackers.
What do you monitor? URLs, company name, product name, public facing figures, relevant keywords, and competitors

Participate to keep the good buzz going or to turn negative to positive. This can lead to more links.

3. Rank social media pages (like on MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia). Create profiles and control small linkbait here - the sites here have such high authority so it will be easy to rank.

Our third speaker is Jennifer Laycock, who says she will cover viral side. Linkbaiting in its purest form is about getting links, and it's not about branding. It's great about a new site launch. Viral marketing is all about marketing. It gets you the links but it's more about building your brand, driving conversions. It's getting past the traffic.

Why would you do viral marketing? (1) The cost is in the idea - there is no placement cost (no PPC, banner ads, etc.) This is word of mouth marketing. (2) A good viral campaign creates brand evangelists and increases your credibility. (3) It also has a rapid response rate (between blogs, discussion forums, and email).

How do you create these viral idea? Find out what sparks passion within your customers. Find out what hasn't been done before. Come up with something new that nobody has tried. Ask yourself how the idea will benefit your users. Find out if your audience will risk their reputation on it.

Ideas spread because they are important to the spreader, not because they are important to the originator.

You have to think of a viral project from the very start - formulate your marketing campaign out of that.

Viral marketing works through relationships. Social media speeds this up. Find ways to work through these relationships to get these to spread.

How does it spread? You launch via opinion leaders. Find out who the thought leaders are who would be most interested in this linkbait. Once you reach them, it goes down the line.

A few techniques: "send a friend" links on your website; one-click access for social bookmarking; integrating the ad (e.g. like signatures in Hotmail). Another one is exploit motivators - "cool factor" Gmail accounts. Use existing networks - people are already talking, so find them and get your services talked about. Take advantage of other people's resources.

Be ready to act: Jennifer has a personal site called thelactivist.com. She mentions her personal battle with her CafePress shirt that said "The Other White Milk" which was apparently a conflict with another trademark. She was battled with the National Board of Pork who issued a cease and desist letter to stop selling this shirt. She took advantage of this in viral marketing, which she calls "a match made in social media heaven." Something will fall into your lap and you can jump on it. She prepared a blog post with a PDF. She had a buzzworthy hook (she played upon how the Pork Board said that she's ruining pork's good reputation). She posted the blog as a call to action. People came in and read her blog. She had links to the bottom of her blog for social media sites. She planted the seeds (emailed mommy bloggers and others in the search engine world - that was enough for the publicity) and motivated linking (by adding a section that listed who covered the story). The result was that the traffic spiked 400% in about a week, there was a branding spike (people looking for her blog name), there was a topical blog spike (pork board, Jennifer Laycock, thelactivist.com, etc.), she had a sales spike (700% increase), and she had a community spike of people who are now visiting her blog. Eventually, she got a sincere apology (especially after they said "how do I make the calls and emails stop?" - the audience laughs.) They revoked the cease and desist and donations were made to the milk bank.

Jeff adds how quickly the National Pork Board reversed their decision after this increased buzz.

The last speaker is our very own Chris Boggs. (Hi Chris!) He talks about leveraging the community. In searchenginewatch.com, there is a "forum roll" on the forum homepage - you don't have to feel competitive. Find a community where a lot of people within your industry belong and that's a way to pass links along. He shows us Barry's own Link Farm.

In other community love, Chris shows us SEOmoz's recommended list of competitors.

Chris then tells us about the My Super Proposal site where this one anonymous individual wanted to propose to his girlfriend on the SuperBowl. It ranks pretty well for a superbowl proposal, but not for "will you" yet (#1 result for "will you" is "how will you die?" - the audience laughs).

Purists think that link baiting should not include link building efforts.

You should research your backlinks - Yahoo! Site Explorer. Logfiles are also a great way to understand information. Check Technorati to see what people are saying. Look for anchor text and locations of new in-links (webuildpages.com and seobook.com).

Chris then presents an example from Neil Patel - "My 50 Favorite Blogging Resources" - Posted 11/13, and by the 19th, 1292 referrers sent traffic to that post; 4358 Diggs, 1762 Del.icio.us, 2851 Stumbles, Yahoo MyWeb 641 links, and 521 links on Furl.net. Traffic incrases over weeks also.

There is Good and the Bad - for example, as mentioned earlier, Comcast Customer Service.

He shows us savetoby.com - a guy said he would kill a rabbit if he didn't get $50,000 in a given amount of time. The more you can spend on being creative, the better chance you get.

Another example is Norelco's ShaveAnywhere.com (with title Philips Bodygroom), which was a viral initiative and got 750,000 uniques.

Viral can blow traditional marketing away if done properly.

Remember: there are risks when you want to consider, like on Norelco. If you search for Norelco now, #2 is Philips Bodygroom, which could cause people to consider other options and not want to work with Norelco.

Usability and SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One, Friday, April 13, 2007 10:45am
Organic Track

Moderator: Dana Todd, SEMPO and SiteLab

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, GrantasticDesigns.com
Matt Bailey, Site Logic Marketing

Was just interviewed by Mike McDonald of Webpronews again. I thought I'd be more relaxed, the second time around (1st interview was in Chicago), but I was still afraid my words would come tumbling out too fast and I wouldn't make any sense. He and videographer, Richard Easterling are professional, comfortable with what they're doing and do their best to put interviewees at ease. We discussed usability a little and how it relates to seo, which leads me into the next session I covered, presented below. This session is in a ballroom size room and it is full.

Dana Todd arrives. She is the moderator. She's surprised to see so many people show up on the last day...cold room. Every visitor is important to convert. You need to think about making your website perform. Introduces for Shari Thurow. She's a lively moderator. My favorite so far!

Shari is first. Dana and I have been with the conferences since the beginning. She calls it "search usability." Website usability vs. search usability. She loves Jakob Nielsen's view that usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces or web pages are to use.
Are you giving users enough info when they arrive? SEO and usability are not that different. Focus groups measure opinions. There is a herd mentality, the one who disagrees will likely go along with the majority. Usability. Measures whether person finishes a task. Did they click a button? Did they add to cart? Not a matter of being a cool site. Are they completing a desired task and if not, why not? Balance between user and business goals? The customer is not always right. We have to balance what the majority expects. Usability. Addresses search behaviors. Queries, browsing, surfing, pogo-sticking foraging, scanning, reading, berry picking. Search is not a linear process. If people are jumping back and forth between search results pages, that's negative search behavior. They're not finding what they’re looking for. Scent of info, sense of place, user confidence, info arch vs. site nav, interface - key concepts in search usability.

Scent of info = term highlighting in search engines is one ex. Google uses it in titles, ad copy, html title tags, term highlighting in snippets, some urls can provide scent of info. Too much highlighting bugs people because it seems like keyword stuffing. Primary and secondary text serves SERPS. Html tags, copy, meta tag desc.... Whenever a page provides scent of info and sense of place, not irritating to users. Show people a page for 8 seconds, and remove it. Ask them if they remember what the page was about. If they can't recall, not enough keywords to give sense of place. Good places to put keywords are top left. Recommends H1 tag. Breadcrumb trails are good for keywords. Main body.

What do you want people to do? Put that in the middle in the page and or above the page fold. Embedded text links are good for keywords. Navigation links. This is providing a sense of place for people and it also ranks well. She's showing an example of how pages can be optimized for SEO and are people oriented at the same time. Her illustrations show placement of copy, labels, content and links that illustrate this balance. Do your keyword research first, and then do you IA based on that. Site nav is part of the interface. Categorization is the IA, and how you do nav is the interface. She shows primary, secondary, and lower level navigation. Asks users in tests, What level are you viewing? If the IA and interface are keyword focused, people recall data easier, and where they are on a site. This is not keyword stuffing. It's logical placement of keywords to support the people who are visiting the site. She shows how this also ranks pages at the same time.

Nav schemes - text yes, FLASH now. User what your users prefer and put supplemental text links at the bottom as alt. Graphic nav, make sure you have relevant cross linking. Number 1 design mistake is cross linking. Cross linking is internal. There are vertical - breadcrumb, cat/sub/product and are a "you are here" directive. Breadcrumbs help form a mental model of the site. Don't make the homepage the main emphasis. Embedded texts are great because you look at a page of content and it is boring but links are keyword focused and provide scent of info. Alphabetical nav links can be helpful for some search scenarios. The key she points out is to provide alternative nav for different types of users and needs. Alternative links for products are good for things like related products, for ex. Sitemaps are huge positive. It's a map of sites global nav. If you have to submit your sitemap to engines, then your IA is poor. Keywords in urls count. Characters in URls are stop signs to SE's. Hyphens in urls are not the end of the world. What urls will your users remember better? Dynamic urls are hard to recall. Directors or subs? Both are fine for people and engines. Sub domain or main domain? Both are fine with SE's and people. Whenever possible your urls should reflect your sites arch.

She's over her time limit. She's going to talk about MedicineNet.com. She got the project of making the site of making it user friendly rather than seo friendly. She shows examples of on page optimization for human goals. Then they tracked and it shows skyrocketed conversions, ROI with no zero PPC investment. Shari is a detailed speaker. This is my third time covering this session. Her strength is in the fine details and illustrating to the audience on-page placement of elements, which I can't do justice for in this post. Her screenshots are a better way of communicating her ideas. She shares a great deal of info.

Matt Bailey is next.

Once you get involved with usability you fall in love with it. The reason you are here is because you want people to do what you want at your website. Get people to your site. Why spend money on seo when you neglect to measure where they're going and what they can't find? If they can't find it, its not there. It doesn't exist. Same as seo. If not in engines, it doesn't exist.

Homepage should have clear directions. SEO links out to the rest of the site and keyword focused navigation. What you sell must be very evident. Exit and bounce rates, when they search and they land on a page that has no info on what they just searched for, they will leave. They need a reason to stay and go somewhere from there. There must be a goal for your visitors. He shows Hall of Shame sites.

You can shop now or enter the site, which one should I do? Funny ex. of a site for cars. Users have a sense of fear in their choice. "I made a wrong decision at the very beginning” They want to shop but also want to go into the site. Pet site example - he has the audience cracking up. Is there anything on the homepage that shows it’s a store? It says product not products. Nav needs to be more desc. of what people will find. Shows a wine site. Ads from Google on a homepage are illogical because it takes people off your site. The color contrasts were terrible. Black links. Dark colors on dark colors. You need high contrast colors.

Taxonomy= good organization. User research comes in handy. What do people call your products and how do THEY group it? Not you or your company. New customers? Existing customers? Address your users’ needs immediately, right from the homepage. Understand what your visitors are looking for. Bring it forward. You can divide up by categories, as one suggestion. Groupings by how people do tasks. By price? Ratings? Popular? He shows a wine site that constantly changes their homepage based on research on how visitors conduct tasks on the site. This analysis explains what they want to do and the site nav and content, and keywords back it up and support this.

You need an established hierarchy of categories. For seo, multiple links with keywords. Customer based nav groupings. Don't hide links. Make them look like links. Buttons that don't look clickable are a no-no. Don't make people think about what they need to do. Use keywords in product links, Alt text, captions and labels. When you group in product pages, don't put so many categories on one page forcing a long scroll down. Don't clump all products on one page. Don't be afraid to add new pages. Shows an example of missing sub-navigation and faulty nav. Shows example of sub-navigation that is redundant. Stop selling so much. Far into a site, people want to focus on just the product, not all the other stuff you throw into the top and side spaces. Shows a good ex of ThinkGeek site and how they do sub-nav well. Other ex. is nav by type, price, etc. Call products by what they are. Be product specific about product content. For seo, call products what they are. The want benefits, value prop., how it connects to your users vs. just product stats. Sales decisions are emotional decision. You need to sell to the logical and emotional sides How will product make my life better? Problem solve keywords. Make your nav solve problems.

Shows a toilet aquarium site and everyone laughs. Site homepage is one big graphic, and everyone boos. Landing pages, does this page meet my needs and expectations? Shows his now famous Butt Paste web page. It's on a baby site. Has everyone in stitches. It was featured on Oprah. Search is for diaper rash ointment. That keyword is on the page in one place. But product is "Butt paste", a product name which is not what people search for.

Shows example of third party shopping cart on another site. New UI to deal with. Shows a sushi site. Has a buy button but no price. What happens if someone clicks a buy button. Shows a science site...rubber band powered racers. The page had 3 different product names on one page reinforced with content and big visible buy now button. Shows a real website warning that failure to review company's policy may be damaging financially to the user. Funny. He shows a product page with content that clearly describes product benefit to the user if they use it. Asks for review or upload you using the product. High rank because of extra content. Where do people enter and exit your site. Hilarious screenshot of with people using search engines and he represents Yahoo and Google with MSN sneaking onto the page. Avoid using slang. Words that are lost in translation. International users - not everyone have 5 digit zip codes. Not everyone lives in a state. Show shipping before they buy. Make pages easy to navigation, easy to find.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson
Presented by Justilien Gaspard, Greg Boser, and Jim Boykin

Detlev introduces the session and says that link building is core to developing a presence in the search engines. Good links can build good traffic in their own right.

He introduces Justilien Gaspard (justilien.com) who has a link building business and is a contributing author to SEMPO Institute and an author of SearchEngineWatch.

He says that for linking, some methods work better than others. You should find one that fits you best.

One of the ways to do this is through directories that are made for people and that people use. People found things through directories before search. There are low-quality directories around now but you should look for older ones that have been trusted by users and search engines. Trusted neighborhoods are important.

Niche and vertical directories are also neighborhoods that are trusted and often overlooked. He only uses directories that rank well in Google. (e.g. search Google for "travel directory" if you are working in the travel industry and submit to the top results.) The one time fee is worth it for many of these.

Other good directories are local directories, organizational directories, and chamber of commerce directories.

When you're looking for them, look at whether human edited, what they are listing (sites you want to be associated with or spammy ones?). How many links? (Less is better), age, and high-quality backlinks. PageRank is a litmus test - don't focus so much on it. The backlink is most important. Avoid directories with nofollows, selling sitewide links to mortgages/pharm, or few pages indexed.

Some tipes: follow their guidelines and appear natural (use good anchor text that are not keyword stuffing or look like you're using an automated program). Have non-spammy sites.

Another thing that is important is content + research which will yield links. Find out from your customer service what people want and focus on content for that. Do keyword research and find out what is attracting links in your industry. Don't reinvent the wheel. Look at the top 20 results in your keywords and see what tools and resources that your competitors create that attract links. Don't copy them but do something similar.

You can use blogs, wikis, and forums as well. Blogs help and establish you as an industry expert. Blogs also attract attention from the press - you can get contacted for interviews, etc.

You need to be proactive. Promote. Don't sit and wait for links to come.

A good way for promotion is to find influential media - reporters, newspapers, televisions, radio stations, and bloggers. Some media directories are Gebbie Press (gebbieinc.com) and Burrelles Luce (burrelleseluce.com).

Take advantage of social media for promotion - Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, etc.

Another way to link is press releases. Press releases and social media - progressive media relations.

You want to build a solid foundation, create useful content, promote it, and use social media for promotion.

The next person who speaks is Jim Boykin, CEO of WeBuildPages.

He says that links can be looked at as currency. If you get a link from a good trusted website, that's like getting quarters or dollars. The quality of backlinks is important - how you're linking.

Submitting to search engines is long dead. They find you.

Meta tags and on page optimization without backlinks is dead.

Don't use the Google toolbar to look at your backlinks. The best way to do this is on Yahoo linkdomain:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com

Don't link a bunch of your sites together. The IP addresses of the sites are important. Google is a domain registrar now. They know who owns what, even if you use Domains By Proxy.

Link trading is dead. Here's why - if you link out to 500 places and they all link back, this is not beneficial for you because the results get filtered out.

Buying PR8 and PR9 is semi-dead. Some of these might not count in Google.

Getting new sites ranked quickly for competitive factors is dead.

4 Trust Factor categories: unique content, who do you link to (and their neighborhoods), who links to you, and is your link found within the content?

On Google, the "similar pages" link gives you a neighborhood of pages in your linking network. Similar pages share common backlinks.

Google is getting better at seeing link maps - who links to who. What is the neighborhood, what is the trust? www.touchgraph.com shows you this neighborhood.

Solutions: produce good quality content, link out to other related/trusted sites, get good quality places to link to you, and get your links within the content of a webpage. Block level analysis - if the header is the same and navbar is the same, the things that the search engine will analyze is - what is that middle area (that differs?) You want your links in a different area - the middle area - within the content. Add lots of text to your homepage, make sure your existing pages have content, add new pages (resources, FAQ, testimonials, manuals, guides, tips, linkbait, etc.)

Who do you want to link to: trusted sites, edus, govs, non competing resources

Natural backlinks are best. Think: do backlinks look natural or "SEO'd?"

The better links you have, the better you rank.

Greg Boser from WebGuerilla speaks. He focuses a lot on competitive analysis - analyzing what others are doing to build our own strategy. A lot of people don't understand the trustrank issue. What are good links for you and what are good links for your competitor are two totally separate things. Older sites have more leeway with regards to what's accepted algorithmically. Newer domains have more trouble.

Linkbaiting strategies can help the whole domain. The problem is that sometimes there are links from sites that are not contextually relevant. Forbes.com hosts pages that are not about finance that still rank well - that's becoming a problem. Ultimately, Google will have to find a way to make domain trust contextually related.

When you are linking, think ahead - find out where people are headed. Google is going down that road to focus on contextually related domains.

Danny Sullivan is moderating the session. He ask about who has heard of wikipedia?
Many people raise their hand. This is a pretty packed session. My laptop had a case of senioritis so I missed the first few mintues. Sorry Neil.

Neil Patel is up first, and starts explaining about wikipedia and what it does. He talks about the Colbert report and his campaign to make sure the elephant population was well represented. He explains how wikipedia is beneficial and what not to do on wikipedia.
How to do you add links to wikipedia? Only add reliable links from authorities sources. Neil next discusses how to add images. He gives an example of a bottle company and putting an image of a bottle that improved the brand of the company. Wikis are everywhere.

Jonathan Hochman is up second. He says wikipeida gets more pageviews than myspace and other areas. He says we have a lot of bright SEO’s here, but wikipedia ranks first for the term search engine optimization. SEO have enough reputation problems already, so try to remember wikipeida isn’t a linkfarm. The wikimedia Blacklist means “no links for you”. He says there are people that like to hunt for spammers. The blacklist is a bad thing, because you will not get a link from wikipedia or all the other 2000 wikis out there. Search engines could eventually look at this public list and take it in account. Yet that is doubtful. Wikipedia links actually deliver traffic. To reduce spam wikipedia adds no follows. Ha, he mentions the attempt of some SEO’s to create entries for themselves in wikipedia. These are the non-notable people. He explains that Matt Cutts was non-notable because the majority of people don’t know who he is. You need to state your cause. I wonder if Jon is an editor? He says that articles that fail to assert notability, supported by reliable sources, are nominated for deletion. Writing an article about yourself or a client is a conflict of interest. He says not to get involved about an article about yourself or your competitors. He says read the conflict of interest guidelines. Barry Schwartz posted an article on wikipedia about himself. Wikipedians jumped on this article to delete it. There was a few editors that changed their minds about Barry’s article and decided to keep it. Barry is notable they decided. COI doesn’t prevent you from participating. Learn the policies and customs and work with other editors to get your points into the article. If you have an article you have no control to edit that article or influence it in any way. He puts up an example of the Criticism of Wal-Mart page. On this page Wal-Mart can not do anything about this page. Ideally, the page needs to have a pros and cons section of the article. With an article about yourself, you can delete spam, remove slander, revert vandalism, and state your view on the article talk page. He also gives an example for Green Zap, and how the companies reputation was ruined because they did some bad things and it found its way into the search engines. Oh my! Wikipedia is a bit stick for generic search terms. Even if your own site can’t outrank the competition, Wikipedia probably can.

Don Steele from Comedy Central is up next. He is here to talk about how wikipedia works with Comedy Central. Comedycentral.com is the online arm of Comedy Central Cable Channel. They use a lot of methods to market their content in a diverse manner we can create momentum, capitalize on buss and are constantly driving traffic to Comedy Central. He puts up a video of Steven Colbert about changing a wikipedia entry and that enough people believe it, then it becomes true. So why do we care about wikipedia? Traffic volume and soccues in SEO made wikipedia a vital channel for us to understand. Our content is highly reference and referred on Wikipedia. Make sure information is accurate and up to date. Make sure our site has the information being referenced. Wikipedia has become a relevant traffic driver to comedycentral.com. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report is an example that sends traffic. He says that they had 90,000 visits come from wikipedia in one month. It’s a top 5 traffic driver. He says they are saving $20K a month by using wikipedia and the traffic is coming to comedycentral.com. 9AM Wednesday morning they announce a new south park show. He shows an example of the wikipedai article. The episode plays on TV and then their appeared 900 entries on the southpark page about the episode and it becomes a little community about that episode. The Da Vinci code was really the Hair Club for Men and so on from the Southpark story. Don talks about the benefits of wikipedia. They identify relevant content and post references on discussion pages. Wikipedia editors become decision makers. All of our discussions have been added as they are relevant and do meet the standards. If you are marketing content, make sure what is appearing in wikipedia. Monitor traffic from wikipedia. Good presentation.

Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink is modding up this panel. The room is suspected to be fairly roomy this morning, due to it being the last day. And it seems pretty empty as they start the session.

Heather Frahm, co-founder, Catalyst online is up first. SEM in the pharma industry.

She explains how competitive this category is.

80% of american users searches for health information online. 66% begin at search engines and 27% go to health vertical search engines.

Those who use search engines are 2x more likely to view third party health sites and 3x more likely to view pharma sites.

Regulatory benefits is the control they have over paid search. Pfizer purchased "high cholesterol" and showed a Google ad for it. She shows more examples of these types of searches.

Best Practices Process:
- Educate and involve regulatory team
- Present and approve corporate policy via regulatory
- Expedite regulatory review

Paid Search Best Practices:
- Safety information on every web site page
- Condition and brand in text/URL: one click away from safety info. Compliant and minimize destination disappointment
- Do not bid on a competitor;s brand name or trademark terms

She then showed more examples. Use negative keyword phrases, this is standard ppc stuff.

Organic Search Marketing & Regulatory Issues:
Best Practices:
- Don't include competitors drug names in your tags
- Visible and non visible content should be approved by marketing and regulatory teams
- Present key-phrase research to your regulatory team
- Guidelines dictating content is close to sixth grade reading level
- Misspellings (spelling multiple sclerosis)
- Popular keyphrases but incorrect circumstances (high blood pressure symptoms)

She then shows Botox's home page, and showed how they are cloaking it for Google. Showing one page to the user and one page to the search bot.

Authoritativeness - Linking Practices:
- Text links approved by regulatory team
- Links from US based sites for us approved drugs
- Careful of making claims ("cures")
- Stay away from bad neighborhoods
- Integrate your PR efforts
- Optimize your press releases
- Link back to the branded site (but some don't like to do that)

Martin Murray, Chief Executive, Interactive Return is next up.

SEM for the drink industry....

There is a wide diversity of cultural acceptance of drinking world wide. Different countries and cultures accept no minimum drinking age. He shows the various laws across the world.

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

Guidelines:
- Not have the alcoholic strength of the drink
- Encourage immoderate consumption
- Incorporate images of people under 25 years old
- Suggest any association with anti-social behavior, illicit drugs, sexual success, social success, enhanced mental or physical capabilities

Google's Content Policy:
Google won't allow ads for beer or hard alcohol (yes wine) as of Q4 2006. Now that has changed a bit, depending on the countries.

He shows examples of beer sponsored listings in the Google UK engine. In Google.com, he showed wine sponsored results.

Yahoo permits alcohol sponsored ads.

There are other concerns, for example if you go to a page on drinks, you need to enter your age in an age verification page, plus what country you are in. This can stop a bot from entering your site.

I have to step out for a bit, sorry....

Li, let me know if you want me to post your slides. Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360

This session is a question and answer with Danny Sullivan.

Question: Where is search going to be in three to five years?
Danny: I wouldn't be surprised if search is very similar to the way it is now with a box and results. If you type in New York Hotels, instead of getting 10 links, you will get a big map and listings will come out of a local guide with a thing that says "Or do you want to search the entire web?" For "Madonna videos," you'll see a list of videos. Search engines will get smarter to present the vertical results rather than jumping through hoops. You'll still see Google as king of the heap, and Yahoo will be there. I think that Microsoft will be there but they might be splitting up a share with Ask - Ask.com is just hanging in there. I tend to think that we'll see more human intervention in the search results. In the future, it may be possible for people to vote on the results and influence the rankings. Maybe there will be new exciting new verticals. Google and Yahoo will likely acquire a lot of these verticals.

Question: What technologies are you excited about in that 3-5 year timeframe?
Danny: So far, I haven't seen anything that has made me jump up and down. I was pleased with Hakia and its internal language search. "Madonna nude" doesn't need a lot of natural language interpretation. What I thought was interesting about what they were doing was tapping into other data sources and building out nice content pages to answer this information. I don't know if that will revolutionize things. I do look at social media sites like Digg and find it fascinating but don't know if it will translate into improved search results. These sites are so undemocratic though - maybe we can be the top Googlers from this. I don't see a lot. A lot of new properties are overhyped and overpromising and will be gobbled up by the major search engines.

Question: When will the "incentivizing" of search engine spamming through AdSense break?
Danny: Didn't it break already? Google tried to make it very expensive. On the other hand, it doesn't cost a lot of money to put a scraper site on blogspot. It is still an issue if you get bad conversions. I think they will get a handle on it but they will have to drag their feet to do it. I think the web search people hate it. Danny then asks: Why does Wordpress have so little spam compared to blogspot? It seemed to be because Wordpress is running their Akismet trackback spam checkers. Blogspot doesn't have such a spam checker, however. There is more that they can do.

Question: We are serving products to baby boomers. They are grandparents and are not computer savvy. How do we target them?
Danny: That's not a search thing. There are sites that are designed for people who are older. Crusty? (Someone says "Cranky." Danny says "Oh.")

Question: I currently use WebPositionPro for visibility reports. I run monthly reports and a colleague told me that I could be banned. Is that true?
Danny: You are running analytics, right? That's more important than reranking reports. Secondly, the issue with web position and ranking tool is that they put a burden on Google. If Google sees a specific IP doing this, it will ban it. If you are on a shared IP address, it will affect hundreds of sites. I'd relax if you do it once a month or so, but if you do it all the time, be careful.

Question: Can we get your $0.02 on the impact of personalized search on SEO?
Danny: When you go to personalized search, person A might see my ranking, but someone else might not and the incentive to rank will be a lot less. It will be harder for me to blatantly spam. It doesn't make SEO go away, though. If I still have the key ranking criteria, I have a best shot. He then provides an overview of personalized search and explains how people need to just be signed into Google to get personalized results. For the SEO side, the results are definitely different. The results are not that dramatically different, however. One or two things change.

Question: Couldn't, as a resolution to the personalized issue, Google implement a toggle button?
Danny: Yes, but they don't want you to do it.

Question: Does Google want more personalized data to charge the advertiser?
Danny: Microsoft is the only major service that does heavy demographic targeting.

Question: As long as we are talking about Google and how you are using your influence to change things, I hope I'm not the only one who has problems with parked domains that have Google ads.
Danny: You can. When these people opt out of the content network, they opt out of any links on those sites that are hard coded. Those links that are hardcoded are part of the content network. Someone at that site did a search at that site and they got your result (which you are paying for) from the search network. You can't opt out of the search network. Lobby your Google representatives.

Question: Who is going to win the local space?
Danny: Who knows? Does anyone from the local search space want to self-declare that you've won? I went out to lunch with someone and noted that local search had too many features and I don't know what features I need. This guy told me "we are the best local search!!!" (He's kidding.) The difficulty I have is that I live in a small town in England and I know what people do. Local search doesn't help me. I suspect that the winner will be one of the major players. The major search engines are often the major search utility companies. If you are a smaller search, you tend to go to the major utility company.

Question: How will do you use Craigslist for local search?
Danny: Craigslist has great listings. Anyone who has local service will get that data in there. Google is crawling this data but not in a structured way. Google Base is taking listings and making structured data. I don't think that Craigslist is going into the Google Base system. I think it's just a regular web search. Someone says, however, that Craigslist is going into Google Base.

Question: How many people here are from small to medium sized manufacturers who want to promote their own search?
Danny: You realize that this audience doesn't answer, right?

Question: Can you tell us stories about your SES experience? What were your biggest disasters?
Danny: In San Jose, I lost a bet about the World Cup so I had to wear Thomas Bindl lederhosen. At the end, they ran out of food at the Google dance. Tim Myer from Yahoo is there with Paul Garney, head of Ask with a Google web guy. They were mocking each other jokingly and Paul got onto the chair and said "Look at me, I'm Yahoo! I'm the tallest of them all." At one conference, a guy ran off the stage and said "I can't do this" (he returned the next day). Back at a conference, Sergey once spoke and it was hard to get Yahoo to attend. Back then, Yahoo controlled the web. I was afraid that they were going to get attacked -- physically attacked -- after they started asking questions. However, someone came up and said "I want to thank you for coming out for us today." There were tears and hugs and it was a really sweet moment.

Question: I want to go back to personalized search. Can you find out who searches? Will people stop searching?
Danny: There was an incident with AOL search when they released user data and the NY Times found a woman. But people were still using the search engines.
Question followup: But the search engines will now target my habits.
Danny: Why would it register to you that they are targeting you? You're going to Google and getting specific results based on what you are searching for. People might be more concerned about it in the future and lawmakers might make it an issue in the future, but it doesn't seem to be problematic now. Right now, we can't operate without search engines. Even if you turn off personalized search, potentially, your IP address can get traced back to you.

Question: I'm with an SEO agency and we have small businesses. Is the supplemental index going to make it difficult for small businesses to get better rankings?
Danny: Supplemental results means that "your page is not important enough for our really important index." It doesn't mean that it won't rank. Google just decided not to revisit it again. It's rare that I see them ranking. I'd be a little concerned but I wouldn't freak out about it.

Question: I have an audience poll. I don't know how many of you went to the mobile search session. I went to it and came out of it and didn't think I learned much. Does anyone else feel the same way? (I actually read up a lot on it.)
Danny: There were 2 mobile search sessions actually.
Question followup: I didn't go to the other one.
Danny: Oh. I see. It's really difficult to cover in a general conference a topic like that in depth. That's why there are vertical conferences. We could run an entire track on it but then we'd get in trouble for not focusing on video search or other types of search.
[The lights dim. Danny asks, "Do I have to go?"]
I understand. I'm sorry. The other problem with mobile search is that - do you know how hard it is to do mobile search?
Question followup: They're doing it in Asia.
Danny: How many people here market in Asia on mobile phones? (Laughter.)

Note: Sorry for the typos, especially with regards to names of people.

Provided by Cshel!

11a-12:15p | Vertical & Retail Track

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Speakers:
Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing
Justin Sanger, President, LocalLaunch!
Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placement, Inc.

Talked a little shop a bit with Phil Maher from LocalLaunch! and Dale Petruzzi from Batteries.com. Saw Thomas Bindl. Room at about 80% capacity by one minute til.

Greg Sterling starts us off. How many ppl have ever been to this session at a prior SES? 3 hands go up. So it’s a fresh audience. Greg says even if you’ve heard this before it’s good to stay fresh and up-to-date.

Marketplace overview:

What is local search? Comscore defines local search as geo modifiers or using a local search engine of an Internet yellow pages site. Sterling’s definition is “Local search is a process where users seek information online, the ultimate intention of which is an offline transaction at a service or business level…”

This market is fragmented, invisible and hard to track. New local search destinations launch every week. All these new sites fragment the traffic and confuse users. Local searches are also frequently invisible to the search engines because they’re lacking geo-modifiers. This also contributes to user confusion. 109 million users of local search engines and online yps. 400+ billion dollars influenced by Internet. Of total US retail spending, e-commerce represents 3 percent.

Forecasts show local spending online is like 2.5 mil. Ad spending online. Marketers give local search advertising gets mixed reviews as per Marketing Sherpa. Ppl still optimistic and excited about Local Search. Traffic fragmentation is still a huge concern.

Emerging LS segments: Word of Mouth/Social (Yelp, Lilaguide, MySpace), Verticals (theknot.com, citysearch.com, zillow.com), Mobile (WAP-based local search, text, voice search/free DA). All make the world much more complicated, but are emerging technologies in local search.

First speaker, Stacy Williams

Reiterates immense fragmentation in local space. Breaks down various players in the segment. She’s going to go over how to get free listings and other strategies for leveraging local search.

Big SEs: Data from Bill Tancer’s blog… less than 1% of the search results in the big ses comes from a special local search db. The best bet is to get into the main search results. Use best practices for SEO, and use keywords including geo-descriptors. Use physical address in footer (text, natch) and that helps the SEs determine you are a brick and mortar business and they can place you accordingly. Submit business profile directly to major SEs. Many sites buy their data from data warehouses, so if you’re not providing your own business info to these sites, they might be using 10 year old info. When writing your business profile, write it
long (1000 words) and then create pared down versions of it at various lengths (500, 250, 150, 100). Other things you need to know: year established, years in business, operating hours, languages spoken, products/services, prof. associations, special deals, geographic areas served, etc. Some sites just publish what’s sent to them, though most have some means of verifying you are authorized to submit changes/new info. Agencies should remember to share the passwords for their clients accounts with the client. Always track everything you do. Even if your profile is mostly correct, find something to tweak anyway because once you begin the changes can help you add a lot more data that you normally wouldn’t know was even an option at the free level. (She puts up URLs for the big search engines business listings).

Local Online Search Engines: Local.com (free or $40/mo). TrueLocal (will tell you how many clicks you get/can expect in your zipcode), superpages, YellowPages.com, SwitchBoard (can’t submit directly), Dex, YellowBook.com.

Business Data Providers: daplus.us. She doesn’t like the interface there. If you have to change your listing, you have to print it out first and then re-enter the WHOLE thing (ew). Acxiom, Localeze (supplies listing to MSN).

Review Sites: Insider Pages, CitySearch, Judy’s Book, Yelp.

Why Bother? Be found by local prospects. Ensure online data is accurate, complete, etc. Build back links. Dominate the SERPs. (Take up as much real estate in the SERPs as you can and leave less for your competitors to fight over).

(Ppl have been filtering in, room is pretty full. Ppl standing along the walls)

Second Speaker, Patricia Hursh:

Local Search Advertising, Why? Ppl are increasingly searching locally. Marketers are increasing their local search ad budgets. Local search ads are effective. Local search is part of the overall customer experience. Patricia shares her recent local searches… find a sbux near the hotels she stays at for conference, other search was she needed directions to an AMC theater in a different town.

6 Tips for Local Search Advertising: 1. Integrate multiple PPC targeting methods. 2. Focus on the customers’ decision criteria. 3. Capitalize on the “local speak” advantage. 4. Drive in-store visits and phone calls. 5. Research available ad positions. 6. Local search isn’t only for local companies.
1. When you’re running a ppc campaign, use geo-targeted /ip targeted campaigns. Figures out where the user physically is to better target the ads displayed. Google and Yahoo reward local relevance if the search is clearly local. In some verticals, you’re trying to reach ppl who aren’t already in your local area, like in Real Estate. So use local keywords. Combine using local keywords AND geo-targeting for best results.

2. Focus on Customer’s Decision Criteria. Consider what the user is searching for, extrapolate what is the most important consideration for the customer, and tailor your ad copy accordingly. (See slide… good examples).

3. Capitalize on “Local Speak”. Write culturally relevant ads. Use local lingo. Focus on the local aspects of your business. Differentiate yourself from the big national players.

4. Drive In-Store Visits or Phone Calls. If primary goal is to drive foot traffic or calls, focus on local search ad products that provide maps, phone numbers, addresses, online printable coupons, etc.

5. Research available ad positions. Google Local Business Ads are displayed on Google Maps results pages. Yahoo Local Listings are displayed on Yahoo Local results. However, there is a tremendous amount of cross-over with main search results. (See slides)

6. Local Search for Big Brands. Most popular types of local searches involve real estate, new and used cars, mortgage brokers, restaurants and hotels, etc. Many of these types of businesses are big national brands, not local. There will be a “big awakening” soon when the big guys will realize they need to be leveraging local search more.

(Wow, LOT more ppl squeezing in and craning necks to see over the standing ppl)

Third Speaker, Justin Sanger.

Big businesses are turning to the yellow pages type companies that they’ve been working with for eons to help with the big brand’s local search efforts.

We are Witnessing a Consumer Revolution: The birth of a new savvy local consumer.

Local consumption isn’t new and local search in actuality is a reflection of our everyday life. 80% of all purchasing activity takes place w/in a 5 miles radius of our homes.

What’s new now is the Internet and its ability to augment our traditional local activities. Kelsey Group says 70% of local consumers are using the Internet to find products and services locally.

Local search innovators are continuously making the “next big announcement”. Each innovation, through its unique displays and ad serving conditions, yields the possibility of new and valuable local advertising inventory. Problem is, all these new innovations with their new beneficiaries aren’t actually benefiting proportionately to the hype.

Local Search Fragmentation: It’s only going to get worse for advertisers. Better for users, as consumers drive the LS marketplace and the demands of these new users are significant.

Constructs of Local Search Behavior (Fragmentation of User Behavior)
• Social Networking
• Special Events
• Life Events
• Health
• Shopping and business look-up
• Travel and Transportation
• Work Life

All aspects of local search. All reasons users are turning to the Internet. Local search has been around forever and has multiple constructs. In order to move forward, the industry needs to understand the fundamental constructs and then fill/serve one (or some) of the specific constructs.

What is missing? Local connotes geography and search is merely an action. So is the revolution we describe really just about a geography search? No. What’s missing is the definition of the behavior construct. Right now, there’s a proliferation of “horizontal” search sites (everything to everyone).

Further segmentation of the already segmented local search utilities. Google and Yahoo understood that the local searchers’ needs and display req’s are different from the “regular” search user, and they wisely segmented the local search out from the main search. They knew they needed maps and directions, etc. To gain usage/critical maps, they’ve both also reincorporated the local search results into the main results page (like what Stacy was saying) to increase exposure for the new segment.

Horizontal local search engines must transform themselves into deep, vertical local search/info aggregators. There will be a convergence of vertical and local. Vertical players currently lead from segmented and niche content perspectives, but they lack critical mass. Horizontal players have or are approaching critical mass, but lack rich, structured, segmented content. Both groups need to address their shortcomings.

Structured Business Content Imperative. Vertical and LS require structured content. Where does the LS data and content come from? Offline-derived local content. Internet-indexed local content. Syndicated-authority content. User-generated local content. Advertising products.

(You’ll need to download the slides; Justin talks *fast* and the slides have tons of info)

• Think beyond your website
• Think atomization
• Study the SERPs
o Authoritative algos point you in the right direction, ride the coattails
• Find vertical authorities beyond the norm including trade orgs and
directories
• Run searches on Google Maps and look for reference sites
• Back-link check your competitors.

Question to Justin: Ppl who have a service based business but have either no physical location or an undesirable location, and you come to the consumer rather than the other way around. How do you still use Google Local/Maps?

Justin: Find the vertical sites where they cater to your business needs.

Question: Any other platforms that allow you to advertise a local address?

Patricia: It’s a difficult issue that our clients are struggling with right now.

Question: Strategies for tracking online influenced transactions.

Greg: Loyalty cards, phone call tracking services, coupons (must be redeemed physically), etc. Some new stuff in wireless.

Stacy: Phone calls are probably the easiest to track. Clickpath serves up dynamically generated phone numbers which gives even greater granularity to your tracking.

Greg: Sometimes just flat out asking the user “Where did you hear about us?”

Question: We just acquired a national pizza chain, and we’re running ppc local campaigns for the national change. Any advice?

Patricia: Make sure all the individual locations are registered in the SEs with their local addresses, include local keywords in the campaigns, etc.

Question: Does getting into all of these directories require manual submission or is there a way to outsource it or something?

Greg: Justin runs a company that offers those types of services.

Carolyn Shelby is the webmaster several sites, including a national plumbing manufacturer, and the city guide for Greater Lafayette, Indiana.

Moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs from Optium. The panel has changed slightly since past versions, with each speaker actually presenting their own PPT. He says there have been some great changes in the past year.

First speaker will be John Marshall, the CEO of ClickTracks. They have a natural bias towards what happens when people click on an ad, since that is the world in which they live. Distinguishing a badly designed ad from click fraud is difficult…they look familiar.

They did a case study and noticed they suddenly got lots of traffic from one particular ad. It looked suspicious, but was it click fraud? An alternative explanation was that is was an ad that appeared on a new affiliate site. The affiliate generated low quality clicks. They went through the thought experiment. The clicks were not converting into sales. Lots of clicks from India. Does this mean it was obviously CF? However, it is entirely possible that the ad was picked up by a publication hosting AdSense that is particularly targeted towards India. The ad sounded interesting to the readers, but when they find out you are in the UK and don’t ship to India, they go away.

Back to case study…came from many diff IPs. Mostly (89%) from the US. They had various user agents, loaded images, activated JavaScript and did the things that real browsers would normally do. However, the majority was going to one page, and the referrer just kind of “looked wrong.” In the end, they submitted it as questionable and got a refund. The moral is that detecting CF from actual traffic can be difficult. They don’t see the type of stuff like repeated clicks from one IP address. Encourages attendees to move away from a model where you think some sort of automated system can tell you if CF exists. This potential problem requires human judgment. It requires a knowledge of your specific website and visitor demographics. For example, if you have an average time on site that suddenly looks low.

An effective approach uses computer-assisted detection for the obvious stuff like repeated visits from an IP. If using a “lack of ROI” to tell you something is wrong, this wont work. For many keywords, there literally is no ROI. Look at campaigns which are different in some sort of definable way. There can be false positives, like airport metal detectors. You should fix poorly-performing ads just as quickly as you would “fix” click fraud. The techniques described, by giving false positives, still provides a value since the overall campaign will benefit from the changes suggested. Like the airport metal detector, you want to tune the system or mental protest to create more false positives than not. The reason being, like with an airport metal detector, you’d rather have that than false negatives.

Next up is Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google. He is excited to be able to present slides this time around. Asks some questions. Where does CF come from? Main incentives would be to attack advertisers and inflating affiliates. Numerous methods are used: Manual clicking, click farms, pay-to-click sites, click bots, and botnets. Shows a screenshot of a botnet console…in some cases these are very sophisticated.

Important to distinguish between CF and “invalid clicks.” CF is difficult to ID, since there is a question of intent. From a theoretical perspective, if they could read people’s minds, they could create a set that included click fraudsters. Like John said, you want to make sure that if you are sensitive enough you will actually catch the activity. There will be some examples where they don’t catch it. They throw the net widely enough so that they have a statistically confident feeling they will get them right. There are a significant number of clicks marked as invalid. The advertiser then doesn’t pay for a real click, so that is good. They are thus providing an enhanced ROI, in a way.

The actual systems that they use is complex and involves numerous algos, etc. There are three principle stages: 2 proactive and one reactive. The proactive methods are filters and offline analysis. The reactive is investigations, which are relatively rare. All advertiser inquiries are investigated by the quality team. CF estimates vary widely. 2004 50-70% (?). 2005 30% of clicks (marketing Experiments). 2006 15% (outsell) 12% (Click Forensics). The reality at Google is that there are a significant (<10%) number of clicks detected as invalid. This wide net ensures nearly all invalid clicks are detected proactively. Reactively detected invalid clicks are negligible proportion (<0.02%).

Google wants to see more over-reporting versus underreporting. By checking each of the advertiser complaints, they can continue to fine tune their reactive technique. So where do fictitious clicks come from. Clicks that actually never happened would be reported by an advertiser. For example, one person reported 20 CF suspects during a time period when only 5 clicks occurred during that time. They found this was a basic problem of ignoring a basic fact of web analytics. Most versions of Firefox and IE will technically reload a page that looks like the original click on the listing. The way to resolve this is to use redirects, or AdWords auto-tagging. ClickFacts and ClickForensics both ask that all their advertisers use auto-tagging.

There are many features unique to Google. They have the only industry actual reports of clicks not counted. Averages are meaningless from the POV of an individual advertiser, they must look at their own data. Google is trying to become more transparent over time, but the challenge is that they do not want to educate the fraudsters. He compares the problem that crime forensics teams now have due to a wiser public able to hide crime more efficiently thanks to shows like CSI.

Next up is Tom Cuthbert from Click Forensics. He wants to talk about progress that is being made on the CF front. He is hearing things are improving. They have been building their team with even more talented individuals to help detect the problem. Search providers have made great progress, with Google’s plans for IP exclusion functionality to Yahoo naming a VP to oversee the issue (who will speak next. However, none of this eliminates the need for a third party monitoring. Other industry progress includes an awareness of CF at an all time high. IAB Click Measurement working group. Click Quality Council meeting monthly. And the “Enhanced Click Fraud Network” launches (from Click Forensics). They give free reports up to 100,000 clicks each month.

The numbers: Overall threat level by quarter. In Q3 and Q4 2006, the numbers increased to close to 14% overall, with 19% in the content network the overall average. Terms that cost over $2 have a click fraud rate of over 20%!

What is next? They have been constantly enhancing their products and services. They like the site exclusion process. They also like the ad scheduling feature of their tool, as well as the country of origin functionality. They recently were named the best tool to fight click fraud, by Inc. magazine. In the next few months they will also comment on things beyond CF, that are also areas that advertisers need to monitor that make up different pieces of the “bad click” family.

Last is Reggie Davis, who has been working for 2 months at Yahoo! as their new VP of marketplace Quality. He spent the last several years managing litigation at Yahoo, including the big CF case (?forgot the name). Their goal at Yahoo! is to create the world’s highest quality search and display advertising network. It is clear they need better disclosures, the executive commitment, and build industry leading technologies and teams. They want to move from the paradigm of front-end filtering and back end refunding based on submitted reports. They want greater visibility and control for advertisers, and more dialogue.

Numbers never disclosed before: between 12 and 15% of overall average clicks coming through have been tagged and discarded. They feel that a percentage of it is CF, but also some lower quality traffic. He shows a graph which displays how the filters work based on rulesets. Thousands of filters are used to assess all attributes of each and every click. Other initiatives: improved publisher assessment. They take actions if they feel that partners are violating terms. Partners using popups, etc have been terminated. They also are seeing an increased advertiser adoption of conversion tracking tools, which helps. They are also making improvements to the matching technologies. They have seen a significant reduction in the number of claims made by advertisers.

Shows some quotes from various advertisers that are happy with panama. He announces today for the first time the new Yahoo! “Marketplace Quality Center.” This is a one-stop location for advertisers come in (password protected) and do research around this subject. They decided to setup the privacy center to be very simple and also thorough. Some pages allow for the advertisers to submit a click inquiry. They will then do the analysis. The area also includes “how-tos” for installing conversion trackers, detecting suspicious activity, etc

Initiatives for 2007: quality-based pricing. Domain blocking will be released in 2007, allowing for the advertisers to help shape the overall quality of their campaigns. Continuing detail in their investigations. When refunds are provided, there will be better clarity and analysis of the reasons why. They also will strongly support the IAB efforts. Next steps are industry definitions and standards, audit against those standards, and let’s keep talking!

I got here a bit late, but most of the beginning stuff is just promo stuff as expected. Quality, inventory, yada yada. I will only chime in when I hear something new.

The showed stuff from adCenter beta...

Molly is now up...
She is talking about customer service. Here sides are pretty hard to read, due to the background.

Then talks about the adCenter community team. Talks about how they help people in forums, blogs, etc.

NEW: They are launching adCenter Accreditation with official tutorials, verification and logos.

Unlimited negative keywords on the campaign level coming this Summer.

Now there are Q&A

This is a question and answer forum about blackhat and whitehat techniques from some of the experts of the industry in both arenas.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson
Speakers: Bruce Clay, Todd Freisen, Dave Naylor, Jill Whalen

Question: We had a blogger account for the past few years, and we moved to Wordpress and we have scrapers. How do we establish authority on the new site so that people don't rank higher for our original content?
Jill: You need time to get that authority. You can't really fake authority.
Todd: After you use the blogger.com platform, once you move, it's gone. You need to move that content over.
Bruce: It's best to start a blog on your own site, but you can get it with time.
Dave: Get someone to email your reader community.

Question: Will you be in trouble for doing click arbitrage?
Dave: You'll be in trouble.

Question: We work in Canada and we are a bilingual country. Is there a way to spot the Googlebot and differentiate between what type of bot is coming to your site?
Todd: The bots don't differentiate between language.
Dave: If you want to go technical, host the DNS in France. Do the same for the US - put a proxy in the US.

Question: What triggered you to get out of the Viagra thing?
Todd: It was a professional decision - I wanted to get into the agency world, managing people. It wasn't really a reason of competition.
Dave: I moved away from that industry. It is very aggressive. You have to dig deeper. The black hat got much more illegal and it will be a matter of time until people get caught.
Detlev: Black hat isn't always a fix for marketing.
Dave: When BMW got kicked out of the rankings in Germany, that was blackhat spam. Most corporate clients should be kept on the straight and narrow - they need to think search and not user. It's more about educating the larger sites about doing things the whitehat way.
Bruce: I've been playing on the whitehat side all the way through (Dave says - "yeah" and the crowd laughs.) A lot of big accounts didn't let you touch their site. You had to do things external to some of these sites to get them traffic and rankings. As of late, billions of dollars are being given to spammers. There's about 6 weeks from the time a new technology is discovered between being caught. Is that valuable - to be caught immediately thereafter? You have to think about that.
Bruce: If we were to play the game telephone and said "whatever you do, do it right, don't spam" to everyone in this room, it will take one blackhat to put white text on a white background. (Crowd laughs.) In the early days, we couldn't tell what was clean. It's easier to tell what's not clean - people want to come to conferences and do it right. In a few years, it will be 10 times harder to do things blackhat.
Dave: I disagree with that. People will always take advantage of blackhat techniques.

Question: I'm using the scrolling marquee tag and I am afraid it will hurt me. I add corresponding text as well.
Jill: Is the content relevant? (Yes.) You need to be careful if they start looking at that stuff. Make a site or pages for the search engines without flash and things like that.
Todd: We just redesigned a site that had Flash from top to bottom. We cloak to search engines and offer the same exact content to users in Flash. This is a perfectly valid solution.
Dave: Blackhat wants to get as close as humanly possible to do whitehat solution. Blackhats put divs off the screen and you wouldn't notice. How would crawlers notice?

Question: Regarding looking at the first page of results and seeing so much blackhats, how do you compete with that? Are there ever results in the top 10 that you can't explain about?
Dave: There's always a reason. In the Viagra industry, you look at Pfizer, they are bending the rules ever so slightly to compete with generic Viagra. That's more for reputation management. We once ranked for flowers and it ranked on top and it just redirected somewhere else - that's blackhat. You really have a six week lifecycle - every week a blackhat is popping out thousands of websites. Every six weeks, when that batch dies, new sites come up. Whitehats tend to make it safer for themselves. The .edu stuff will fade away.
Detlev: Pfizer is not doing what they need to do whitehat to get there. They listen to a little white hat and a little blackhat, but they don't have any hope of getting up there.
Dave: If you're going to go for a little blackhat, you're going to fail miserably. You need to be either blackhat fully or whitehat fully. Don't cloak partially - just cloak fully.

Dave asks - how many people think that cloaking is a bad thing? How many people think that Google Website optimizer is a good thing? How many people think that it's the same? There's a show of hands for everything, but not so many. Google seems to have made cloaking a-okay to do.
Dave: The word cloaking is such a bad word, but Google has cloaked for years.
Detlev: And people who cloak are not taken out.
Dave: BBC Kids does that - they have a Flash website.
Detlev: Let's do our duty. Does that mean that people should all cloak then? (Crowd laughs.)
Todd: Not all sites are created equal. If you're not one of those websites and you get caught, you can be gone for good.
Jill: Dave, when you say the top 10 are using blackhat techniques, you're talking about very competitive terms.
Dave: Yes. Just the markets where there's real money. (Laughter.)
Bruce: If you are cloaking in a deceptive way, like if you are offering baby blankets to the search engines and then the person clicking goes to an adult website, you're gone. But if you see identical content on the engines and as the user, then it's not evil. It depends on what you're trying to do with it.
Detlev: It's more difficult to draw the line then when you're doing it. You might keyword stuff in cloaked content which might show up in the listing in your search result. When you cloak, you're divorced from the knowledge of where to draw the line. You can get banned in that case as well.

Question: What's your take on the future of social media sites and how they're being treated by the algorithms? Now that blackhat SEOs are really spamming social media sites, how do you think algorithms are going to adjust to this?
Dave: The Squidoo lens has gone onto the blackhat scene. We've known about that for 9 months. When we did blackhats, what worried me was that blackhats were too aggressive. It's like Wikipedia. I would work for free with Encyclopedia Britannica to release that content. Why? Because I don't like that dominance of Wikipedia. It's human edited content - it's not always correct.
Jill: Black hatters ruin things for everyone else. People create spam articles, automated crap, whatever. I do think that these social media sites might not be good in the end.
Detlev: I think that paying Diggers to rank that content higher will have a negative impact.
Dave: Matt Cutts talked about Digg once - don't play in high traffic areas without reading the warning signs. Digg traffic might take your site down. I hate being Dugg. It costs me bandwidth and there are low conversion rates.
Bruce: I think it's worth mentioning that social media is not going to go away necessarily. A lot of us probably grew up and we paid attention to brands that appeared in TV or traditional media. Many people today don't watch TV or follow traditional media. If you have a brand, you should have a presence in that space because otherwise those potential consumers (social media users) may not know who you are. My larger clients are considering projects in the social media space.
Detlev: Those projects are very effective. You can certainly drive traffic. You can use social media for link building and social media in itself is a traffic driver. You don't have to be blackhat at all. Whitehats can do so but they should play in the same way with the right attitude. You don't want to piss these users off - it's a hornet's nest.
Todd: You have to be very careful in this space. Consmerist.com is a site that will highlight your screwups. It's second to Digg traffic. If you do something right, on the other hand, then consumerist.com can be your best friend.
Dave: One of my clients just made an island in SecondLife. It's expensive to play it but you need to measure that traffic. It can help you.

Question: How do you successfully get out of cloaking when you're hooked on it like heroin?
Todd: Why would you? Are you doing the evil bad cloaking and are afraid to get caught?
Audience member: Well, I'm concerned about other sites -- my competitors -- that have gotten caught and banned.
Detlev: Is it that much difficult to provide the same content to your user?
Audience member: Probably not.
Detlev: You can take those steps into rehab. (Laughter.) If the material is almost the same, how much of that information is used in your rankings and how much is inbound linking? Inbound linking is not cloaking.
Audience member: But the problem is that regular pages are not ranking at all.
Detlev: I don't think you wouldn't have that much trouble at all. With "miserable failure," the whitehouse.gov page didn't mention that phrase at all on the site.
Dave: As a safeguard, download Google Website Optimizer and check your site.
Todd: The risk is that you could lose rankings.
Audience member: I happen to be ranking now because of cloaking.
Dave: Then just do it.
Jill: Start a new site the whitehat way so that you have a backup in case something happens to your cloaked sites.
Todd: Right now you're ranking. You're saying if you take it down, you won't be making money.
Detlev: If your rankings go away and you're not banned, it's better than being banned. You're now in line to be banned.
Todd: I'm going to guess that there's shady work in your industry.
Dave: If you put a sword out and people have guns, you're in trouble.
Bruce: There is no one answer. It really depends.

Question: I have a site that has a bunch of different tools and I want to move one of them that ranks well to a different domain. Can you talk about the best way to redirect?
Dave: The best way to pass authority is a 301.
Audience member: Does it have to stay there forever?
Dave: There is a risk that if you take it away, you will flip flop back again, so I would say yes. When is the right time to take it down? I don't know. That's the million dollar Question.
Bruce: I think it's at least 6 months. The Question is - why would you take it down?
Todd: As long as you control it, leave it up.
Dave: Google Webmaster Central is a great tool to see backlinks. Check your site after you have that 301 redirect and tell those people that you moved the site to avoid looking stupid.
Detlev: I advocate telling these people. It will pay off in the long run. You want one site, not two. This also goes for the cloaking member. You do better when you have more links pointing to one domain.
Jill: You will lose some rankings if you go on a new domain. You'll get caught in the aging delay even with a 301 redirect.
Audience member: It seems that there is more attention on my site to break up the sites because I offer tools and they get attention on their own.
Dave: 9 times out of 10 you lose rankings because when you move from site A to B, you have changed the site navigation. Make sure these move over to the new site as well.

Question: I wonder if you can help us about analyzing backlinks. Is Yahoo still the best way to analyze backlinks?
Todd: I don't think anything shows you the order of importance anymore. The best way would be Google Webmaster Central.
Detlev: Yahoo is more comprehensive in its listing. Google only started this a month or two ago. You'll see a different list in MSN. Look at them all and assume that there are even other backlinks that search engines haven't found. I don't think there is any search engine that would be more important than the other for this. If you have a huge list of 10,000 backlinks, you'll probably find the more important ones in the first pages.
Bruce: If you have 3 search engines and you have a list from all engines, those lists are not identical. Look at all of them and aggregate them. You may very well see 10,000 on one, but there really are 15,000. Assume that they are disjoint sets.

Question: Someone mentioned that you can see something in your backlinks even if there is no juice spilled over. How do I know this? Why should I pay for links that don't give me much juice?
Detlev: You're going to be in the dark for that one. Example: Washington Post. You can pay for their directory. Is it worth it for you? Chances are, it's not going to pass rank - like for a site of Viagra, not many people are going to be using it. With regards to search engines, some of the things you buy, you might not get any rankings.

Question: I need to point the traffic of one domain to another because of a trademark issue. How do I do so efficiently?
Todd: Set up a 301.
Audience member: You're going to lose rankings.
Todd: Not if you do it right. Get a wildcard 301 for every page. If it's the exact same website with the exact same URL structure, and you're not on a Microsoft server, then it will be easier to do.
Dave: Don't leave both sites live at the same time. 9 times out of 10, the newer domain will be penalized.

Question: I wanted to know if you have seen anything that shows that search engines count clicks to emphasize popularity in the results.
Todd: For awhile back, you could view the search results on Google and you could see click tracking going on. I haven't noticed anything that is attributed to that but Google has done a lot of things.
Bruce: The problem is, it's self-fulfilling. If you're #1, you'll get more clicks. I'd put faith in the fact that Google can find out if people bookmark you as a way of emphasizing your value.
Dave: AdWords can work - once you are in the top spot, you don't have to focus so much on your side rankings. MSN is awesome - they use MSN messenger to profile you. They are great with personalized search.

Question: Do search engines prefer friendly URLs versus other URLs?
Dave: Yes.

Question: About personalized search, how do we optimize for this?
Dave. This is the best thing for an SEO. How many people go to their own site? Personalization shows you that your personal site is most important to you - your client will go to his site all the time, and he will be so happy when he ranks for those keywords. (This is all sarcastic and everyone laughs.)
Todd: Don't ever log off your Google account.
Jill: It differs via geographical, personalization, and it's a good reason why people shouldn't be looking at rankings but more about analytics.
Todd: At the end of the day, it's about measuring metrics. A lot of people focus more about ranking reports, but it boils down to making money.
Bruce: Once of the things this fringes upon is behavioral search. If people search for Java and want programming, and you search for Java and need coffee, pretty soon search engines will know that you meant coffee or you meant programming. From an organic point of view, you need to just know your audience. You need to make your site the best way you can be so everyone wants your site.
Todd: Behavioral could be a good thing for search.
Dave: Unless the search engines screw it up.
Bruce: We're going to see a lot of behavioral stuff going up.

Question: There's a theory about backlinks in our company. Is it true that if you buy PPC links, you'll get more backlinks?
Todd: Those links don't count as backlinks.

Question: What about a content management system site that has a unique timestamp in the URL?
Todd: You want to stop that quickly.
Dave: We have a client like this. We need to send the spiders to a caching server that lacks the timestamps in the URL.

Question: Do caching server solutions work for sessionIDs?
Dave: Yeah. Search engines should see the content in the same place. They just need a cached copy of the content without the dynamic content. It's not easy to achieve; it's not a quick fix. From a search engine point of view, the hard copy of the content is really important. That is legitimate cloaking.

Question: I'm not as tech savvy. We push different content to users than the search engines. Is that the same thing that he's talking about?
Dave: Yes, pretty much. A specific IP address gets a static page and other IP addresses get other pages.
Audience: Is it a negative nightmare for the search engine?
Dave: Give them the content in a way that they can handle it. Don't make the content totally bloody differnet. If you do, you're going to get banned.
Audience: What we're doing is legitimate.
Todd: IP Delivery (ip-delivery.com). You should look into that - it will provide spider lists and other tools to get you going.

Question: Can you link-build too aggressively (can this sabotage your competitors?), and how important is varying your anchor text?
Dave: They removed the Google bomb for George Bush's website. How many people noticed that he put the word "failure" in his page a few days ago? He's ranking for failure again! You don't need thousands of links. It's the quality of the link and the trust of that domain. My domain is trusted. God only knows why. They should know better. I made a post about "buy viagra" and Danny Sullivan linked to me. I was #5 in the UK for that for at least 6 months. Google changed the terms and conditions and says that nobody can do Google bombing anymore.
Audience member: Are we talking about a couple of thousands of links, or a hundred of thousands of links?
Dave: If high profile sites are already linking to you, that is going to push you up.
Jill: Authoritative site links will boost your rankings.
Todd: Not all sites are created equal. You can throw any piece of crap link on a trusted site and it is going to help it.

Question: I have an established domain and I'm going to release a huge amount of data on a subdomain, and for advertising reasons I need to protect the traffic. Are there any guidelines that I need to know about spidering per month - is there a percentage amount?
Todd: It is hugely dependent on the website. I would get signed up with Webmaster Central, Sitemaps, Site Explorer, etc. You're looking at 4-6 weeks to get your site crawled a lot.
Dave: Are you concerned about the spidering of it?
Audience: No, just the advertising of it.
Dave: I got 2.2 million pages indexed in Google in 3 weeks. I managed to get 2 PR9 links.
Detlev: The key to push it over the top is your inbound linking. There is no amount. The amount of links determine how deep they will crawl.

Question: How much time should you be spending on AdWords or organic or on building your website?
Todd: I'd be serious to say that it should be what's making you the most money.
Dave: One of our clients is spending 80% of their time doing multivariate testing - how to convert the users. He has 25% conversion rate. I never thought that would be possible. Someone who is a conversion expert brought a site that had a 2% conversion rate to 88% rate. It has taken 2.5 years. It's commitment - they test everything - logo size, slogans, etc. Example - "discounted product" changed to "cheap" - raised conversion rates. "Discounted" in the UK doesn't work. "Cheap" does.
Todd: There are many places that do multivariate testing for you. I resell for one of them. Come talk to me.

Shopping Search Tactics Thursday April 12, 2007 2pm
Vertical and Retail Track

Moderator:
Alan Dick, Vintage Tub and Bath

Speakers:

Brian Smith, ComparisonEngines.com
Scott Greenberg, Marchex
Brian Mark, Toolbarn.com

Can't believe I got to this session with time to spare. Had to depart the SEO Women's luncheon early, after gulping down soup and drying off after arriving there drenched from the pouring rain. Nice turnout, despite the weather. Tamar is not far behind, also running back to catch her session. I ducked out with Jill Whalen, who had to speak at 2pm, replacing Mike Grehan. The room was packed by the time they started.

Alan starts off. Shows a product from his company and will give them away to 4 questioners at the end, shower thingy. Another presenter has drill bits to give away. Another has water bottle and money. Silly stuff, incentives from the shopping sites.

Brian Smith - Learn to love your feed. Who uses shopping engines? Do you use more than 3? More than 8? More than 10? Show of hands as he asks. Will discuss basics of shopping search engines. He's from comparisonEngines.com and SEWatch. Blogs for Loveyourfeed.com. DFO = Data feed optimization, a new term. No one thinks it’s easy to work with shopping search engines. It's hard to get images and products up and running. Add as much info as possible with your feed. Read directions carefully. Automated XXL solutions aren't optimal. Track your stats. Submit to Google Base. It's free. They cleaned it up. DFO. Will get into later.

Lots of choices. Big/small, datafeeds/crawlers, free/paid/cpa/vertical lists them. Shopzilla, Froogle, Builders Square, USA Today, MySimon, Buy.com, TheFind, vdeep, Healthpricer, Become, Smart, Cnet Shopper, Pricewatch..I grabbed what I could. There are adult toy comparison engines out there. Some search sites will appear from merchant sites, even if competitors. Consumers - know the question the shopper is asking. Merchant - Delivers a highly target market. Use automated feeds. Fill out all fields. Choose categories. Track. Do it manually is fine.

Scott Greenberg - Start with high margin areas. You will have room for error. Learn about the engines. Actively manage CPCs across cat, prod and campaign. Know the "true" ROI. Returns, charge backs, incentives understand pricing, price changes, bidding. What it means for your products. Fill out all required fields in your feeds. Add price, product availability, tax, shipping, more. Take advantage of merchant ratings, testimonials, non-standard opps. Logos, displays.

Ex. of binoculars search. Shows lots of reviews. Shows logos. Another search site shows ratings and takes advantage of that. They handed out a shopping feed matrix. Has feed positioning factors. They're all different.

Brian Mark - Oneboxer.com is his blog, to learn more. Probs are raising cpc. Poor tracking tools. Analytics don't often get it right. Too many ind. feeds. ROI is hard to calculate correctly. More competitors. Rules constantly evolve. Nowadays there could be hundreds of the same tool listed for example. At first they listed everything but have cut back. Track data. Develop technology to target exact products to send in the feed. They use Froogle/Google Base, Bizrate/shopzilla...and a few more. No need to be on every shopping search. The key is knowing your clicks and sales associated with them. Must decide how much weight each multiple clicks gets. First one, last one sold? Irregularities are several clicks at a time before making a purchase, what if it is a bot, seasons, each engine handles clicks differently. When to discount a click?

They look for most clicks vs. sales. Hidden costs are things like boxes, order processing, merchant acct fees, drop ship, call center staff, and more. GP - (CPC*Clicks), calculate the cost of each sale vs. net profit. Take a look at problem items. Watch new competitors. Set goal for ROI numbers. Drop poorly producing products. Work on conversion rates. Yank a product if it doesn't meet your goals. Smart feeds show a profit. Shows stats on cpc. Watch engines that charge an extra 10 cents per click. Try to get really good ratings. Use your seals, logos, pricing and ratings to stand out. Some engines will charge more for things like logos in the feed. Direct shopping is easiest to track. Someone clicks on a product and buys on the same visit. Indirect shopping engine sales for a number of reasons. Ask how they found the product. Set a cookie on the email to friend inbound link. When your merchant ratings are low, people tend to call to order.

Using shopping engines meant increase in sales. A redesign killed traffic for awhile but shopping engines kept things going until Google found them again. Shopping engines can lead to new customers. about 20%. Adwords - 4% MSN 6, Yahoo 9. 22% repeat shoppers come back via shopping search engines. They like being able to compare prices. Track as much as you can. The more you know the better to track ROI. Set goals and stick to them, even if it means dropping your fave product.

Brian Smith is up again. Uses singlefeed.com to show example of how to do a feed. Everyone wants to get to the top of GoogleBase. Shows an Excel spreadsheet. Quantitative aspect and qualitative aspect. Data feed can be optimized. You can change copy. Add keywords. Don't ignore them. You can do PPC and SEO work through your data feed. Figure out where the title fields are the same. Look for long tail terms. If not using attributes on shopping search engines you're missing out. All engines have different headings. Part numbers are unique identifiers. Remember yours because others who sell forget your product may forget to add it. Don't forget product name. Some sites draw from the product title, so it has to be there. Be specific with titles. You can add color later. Suggest if a great holiday present. Show users you understand what they're looking for. A month before Mothers day, put "Great Mothers Day present" in desc. Be careful to not send JavaScript 9or other code in fields. Sometimes will get a rejection for having a dollar sign. Read directions. Track product urls, so you can track better. Image urls don't like muli9ple image urls because they can't understand the url. All engines ask for unique ID. Be consistent. Don't confuse the engines. If there is no relevant content in your feed, you're in trouble. List payment type. Some engines will strip away data they don't accept. He has issues with Google checkout. Not many people in the aud use it. He provided the audience with an optimization checklist. Make sure your products have unique urls. Don't list the same title 20 different times. No html allowed in feeds. The checklist is on the screen and is very long and detailed. Experiment with using your logo and removing it. Test results.

Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink is modding up this panel.

Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing is up first.

Browser Bookmarks:
- Save for future reference
- Difficult to manage
- Navigation issues
- Single location access

Web Based Bookmarks:
- One click saving
- Tagging
- Sharing
- Wisdom of crowds
- RSS
- Portal

Social Media consists of social news and social bookmarks.

Social News:
- Digg
- Netscape
- Reddit

Social Bookmarks:
- Del.icio.us
- Furl
- Google Bookmarks

Major Players:
- Del.ici.us (high traffic, high syndication, social network, toolbar and firefox plugins, tags, folders and over a hundred hacks). He shows how del.icio.us works, etc.
- FURL (medium traffic, med-low syndication, caches content, toolbar feature, searchable notes and export bookmarks)
- Blinklist (medium traffic, med to high syndication, JavaScript features)
- Magnolia (medium traffic, low syndication, rate bookmarks, grouped oriented)
- Google Bookmarks (med to low traffic, medium syndication, affects personalized results, multiple ways to add, access bookmarks via IE toolbar)

He recommends 301url.com/social-bookmarks is a great resources.

Ways to show bookmarks:
- Text
- Icon
- Combination
- Drop downs
- Fold downs
- Fold out
- Pop up

Tools:
- Alex King plugin for WordPress named Share This
- AddThis.com

Tips:
- Become a user first
- Pick a tool
- Place buttons prominently
- Dont overkill it
- Match bookmarks with audience
- Monitor traffic
- Not limited to just blogs

Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl to talk more about Del.icio.us.

Why Del.ico.us?
- It is all about the links for Todd
- Being in front of a large audience, a large audience
- The anchor text rocks on these sites
- They are real bookmarks so you get repeat traffic and loyal visitors
- This is real traffic
- This helps build your search traffic by getting you more links and more impressions
- These are smart, savvy, successful people who use delicious

Delicious Tips:
- Coordinate the launch (you need help from others, 30 - 50 friends within a 24 hour period)
- Ask friends via IM, etc...
- Put the links on your site, use call to actions
- Tagometer
- Delicious Firefox Plugin
- FeedBurners FeedFlare

Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service is last up.

How to use bookmarking sites to boost your stuff.

Research for Social Media:
- Find out what working
- Find out whats not working
- Discover trends
- Discover key players
- Identify any competitors
- Find out whos saying good or bad things about you

RSS is a great tool
- Its Big
- Fast
- Easy
- Orange :)

Research on Digg:
- Look to see what stories for that subject in a keyword search has been buried (if you need to know how to do this, comment)
- Use Yahoo to Search on Netscape since netscape doesn't have an internal search feature
- Some stories have carryover onto multiple social bookmarking sites, so watch for patterns

Research on StumbleUpon:
- He explains how it works
- You can see a person's profile and see what they submit

Research Using Delicious
- You can see who bookmarked things
- You can see what tags they used, when they did it, etc.
- Delicious has networking features

Track Your Company Name and your Competitors
- Rep management
- Google Alerts, Google News, Yahoo NEws
- Track URLs, etc.

Search Behavior Research Update, Thursday April 12, 2007 11 am
Stats and Research Track

Moderator:
Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro

Speakers:
Anne Frisbie, Yahoo!
Rob Murray, iProspect
P Lee - Microsoft (Was too far away to see name, I'm sorry.)

Room is filling up fast. It's a smaller one, and very warm. I always sit somewhere near the screens, so I can back up what I'm hearing with what they may have on their PowerPoint presentation. And, I plan my early escape route out, by a door, because it's always embarrassing to duck out during Q/A sessions, or have to walk over people with my BIG RustyBrick bag (which is enormously comfortable btw.). It's been said before but I'll repeat it because I need to type...Gordon looks like Indiana Jones. Room has become standing room only.

Gordon says we'll each have a car at the end of the session donated by Oprah. Gord is also presenting. They did a B2B survey, where they did an update of a 2004 survey. Went out to 1086 participants between 3/19-23, 2007. Think about past purchase and one they are currently participating in. Divided by roll and phase. Report release is 4/30. Where was your involvement in buying process? Did you search? Sign check? Still early but he's showing top level findings. They had economic buyers, tech buyers, (influencers), user buyers (need help with a prob), coach buyer (gets solution to the right person who needs it). Parts and components, business servs, equip, IT, other categories. Primary online destinations are SE's. No surprise there. Alot of people search. Short list candidates phase need high level info, this is the hot spot for b2b. This is where deeper verticals help. Primary is always the vendor site. (Was interrupted here...)

Google was number one SE. Yahoo and MSN way down. 17% for Yahoo and 7% for MSN. Google has stranglehold on market (b2b). If not going to se first, how did you get to b2b site? Are you using a se to get there? 1 out of 4 use se to get to a primary site by typing in url directly. People think they are going directly to site. He thinks results are skewed due to toolbars. This was not a user watched survey. Vertical engines - business.com, number one. Influencing factors? Online and offline were measured. #1 is main website of the vendor. #2 was se's. #3 distributor websites, not a vendor but site that offered broader vertical presentation. Top offline, word of mouth? Peer #1, #2 friends, #3 trade word of mouth are influencers. Vendors and industry sites out rated word of mouth for influencers. We are trusting the web more and more. Trade shows are high on offline influencers.

What are they look for? Set pricing references for people when they get to your site. #1 thing people use to qualify. Features and products are next. Installed toolbars, google #1, yahoo #2, MSN #3. Keep an eye on toolbar installation. Google offers search suggestions. Causes you to search differently. Take this into consideration. Online out influences offline.

Rob Murray - iProspect is next.
Presenting study of social behavior and marketing. Methodology - Jan 2007, conducted by Jupiter, 2200 responses, represent US pop of 18 and over. Goals how US participates with social networking sites or social search engines. Site allows for user generated content was used, or site that searches user generated content sites; Amazon was included, digg, and others.

How freq have you visited these sites? Lists SE's and social sites, inc. village, myspace, facebook, trip advisor, to name a few. Social networking visited by 1-4 at least monthly. About 41 million people. Engines visited daily Yahoo was the leading engine. Myspace 12%.Recommends identifying social networking sites where communities match your target profile. Assess value of those sites. Continue paid and natural optimization and marketing.

What was the reason for your search? Research, entertain, purchase...intent varies. Facebook 49% to network. YouTube 72% Amazon 46% to purchase. Intent plays a part in where people go. Map your product to user intent. Seek out well indexed sites that mention your brand. What influenced your decision to purchase or not? 1 in 3 has been influenced by social sites. They base purchase decisions on these sites. People trust people like themselves. Research and purchasing intent on the part of a sites users leads to greater influence on purchase. Research unique culture and code of acceptable marketing practices of each site. Backlash is significant. Be open and honest and transparent. Become part of the community. Not once a month. Really become part of the community. If you are not part of the community, they'll tune you out.

Most visitors don't post comments on sites. 54-90% never have, depending on the site. Participate in dialogue with your users. Embrace negative comments. Recommend other products you think provide a benefit to your users. How to reach sites? Direct nav and bookmarking is #1. Be indexed by major SE's. Make content worthy of bookmarking and linking. Direct prospects to user generated content. 25% on online pop visit social search. Have unique communities. They have own code of acceptable behavior. Social marketing influences 34% of online pop.

Anne Frisbie - Yahoo
Did a lot of research in 2006. Brand advocates. Buying habits of brand advocates. Who are they? Why? What are their plans and habits? How can use them to reach and engage uses? Chose specific verticals for the study. Who are they? Natural leaders. Slightly more educated. They tend to be one of the first to try new things. Feel a good brand is worth talking about. Will recommend. Consider themselves social and well connected. Will talk about products that interest them. They are a minority group- 40% of all buyers, 25% of general online pop. They're impact on purchasing is majority because they convince others. They are heavy researchers. They need to know what they're talking about. They're identifies are tied to their favorite brands. They are loyal customers. They create awareness.

Advocates plan on spending more this year than last year. They will have twice the planning for high ticket items. Home appliance will tell twice as many people about their purchases. 33% they convinced someone to buy. In home decor, 2-1 ratio. 75% recommended products. Basically, advocates could persuade at least twice as many as non-advocates to make purchases. They're a powerful group. 87% search multiple times a week. 75% use social media. 2 in 3 are social media participants. They leverage search to learn about new brands. Willing to be reintroduced to products. You can keep trying to attract them. They use trademark searches more often. They read blogs, post on blogs, make comments on purchases.

Advocates like consumer reviews. Use them to your advantage. Those who came via reviews browsed the site more actively. Special K used Yahoo to get to women losing weight. They created landing pages with communities aimed at support. Thousands of people are participating in the communities. Lots of customer reviews that come up in search. Newsletters can engage users and be tracked as they go into your site. Leverage search side and user passion. Understand motivations your brand advocates. Get involved in enthusiast sites or communities. Include user reviews. Understand tools and website advocates.

(Needed to cut out early due to threateningly low battery. Am off to SEO Women's Lunch and a 2pm session directly afterwards.)

This is the second session of the day, Chris Sherman will be moderating. He says images are interesting that with experiments trying to understand images via pixels, size, etc.. have been promising, but on the web filename, alt text, and so on matter to the search engine. How do you get images well ranked in the search engines?

First up is Shari Thurow and is going to discuss a brief basic review. There is primary vs. secondary text, including alternative text. Web pages should contain the words and phrases that your target audience types into search queries. Information architecture and interface is important to give search engine spiders easy access to keyword rich content. Link development including number and quality of objective, 3rd party links pointing to the url. She discuss the difference between primary and secondary text. Primary text is what the search engines definitely read. Secondary text is the things that some search engines may look at. She gives an example of Art Institute of Chicago and how the page only contains images with alt text that says Art Institute of Chicago. The links pointing to this page is what makes it rank in Google she says.

If your brand is extremely popular OR if your main keyword phrases are truly unique, acceptable to have a graphics intensive web site and or page. She gives an example of the Nissan group and how badly optimized the page is and how Yahoo outranks the Nissan site because it uses a combination of html text and graphic text.

Graphic image search is extremely popular. Term highlighting in the url is popular. Search engines do not see graphic images like they do images. Graphics images are made up of bits instead of text, search engines currently are not able to directly compare query words with the actual content of a graphic image. Search engines can tell now between a woman’s and mans face, they can also see colors in images. She next shows example of why a certain image ranks for a specific keyword, because the text is above and below the images One thing search engines looks for is jpg and gif. Gif’s only have 256 colors while jpgs have millions of colors. Search engines think that jpgs are most likely photographs. File names are important for graphic image optimization than text file optimization. Search engines are looking for context, use keyword rich labels or captions is important for graphic image optimization. Name your graphic images in a way that makes sense to your target audience. Do not let software generate file names. Always provide contextual cues to image search engine when appropriate.

Li Evans from Commerce360 is up second and going to give some opportunities for retailers, rep management people, etc. Image is one the fastest growing search verticals. Shoppers are visual. They want to see it before they buy it. Print them out and take it to the store with them. Search engine incorporate images into contextual searches. Its another avenue of search marketing with out having to pay for the traffic. The opportunities out there are hot products, niche markets, comparison shopping, contextual search, and reputation management. Li gives an example of a hot toy for 2006 which was the roboreptile. Niche markets provide opportunity to gain traffic. It is easier to optimize images and creates better conversion rates. She gives an example of flameless candles and how small business are doing a better job than big retailers in optimizing their images. Use images in your shopping search feed. 3 of the 4 major search engines integrate images into some contextual search results. Searchers can form an impression of a brand, product or service by the images they view. What does an image search say about you? She gives an example of an RIAA search and how there are images that the company probably would not want to have. She gives another example of Neil Princess Patel. Hot products in retail offer opportunities in image search. Niche marketing are great for smaller retailers in image search. Use images in comparison shopping feeds.

Chris Silver Smith from Net Concepts is up and he is going to talk about how to optimize images through image sharing sites. He believes you can get good inbound links from photo sharing sites. The design of Flickr is advantageous for SEO. It offers titles, H1 tag, captions, tagging, cross grouping, comments, sharing, alt text, and optimal linking hierarchies, Date taken & page views. Users can add more text. Steps for optimizing images, have good quality pictures to use. Pictures with good contrast tend to work better. Be broad in experimenting with subject matter for pictures intended to drive traffic and conversions. Factories might show setps in product manufacture. B&B might show furniture & decorative art. Some steps to optimize images. Add unique title, appropriate to the image. Add a description for the photo or even write an article to go with the image. Always tag your image with keywords. Be specific. If the photo is location specific, geotag the picture. If taking many location specific, pix, consider using a camera that has built in GPS, allowing photos to be automatically geotagged with the EXIF data. Create thematic sets for your photos and add each pic to the set appropriate for it. There is a penalty in the interestingness algorithm of Flickr that if you require people to link back to you when you create a group, then it will demote your image somewhat. Also, link over to each of your Flickr photo pages from your website. Try experimenting reuploading images in order to help it rank better. He is not sure how successful this is.

With Google make sure to enable Enhance Image Search feature in Webmaster Central. Some recent research was published and they took image tagged images and associated parts of the image that are tagged and use those blocks to determine what is contained in other images. True image could be affecting the results pretty soon. MSN Live search says they might be doing some of the more advanced true image search by looking at blocks from the images to determine the subject of other photos. Very interesting. Good presentation.

Rand Fishkin is on the podium, got here a bit late because I was talking with Apostolos Gerasoulis of Ask.com, the inventor of Teoma. Social communities don't like SEOs. Because they perceive an SEO role as a type of spam. In many cases they are right. But SEO helps these social communities grow. Trick, act like you are not an SEO. Control your brand before other people do. He showed off a Wikipedia entry that went totally against that individual policies.

Social media helps build awesome link popularity. He said, look for photos and Flickr and comment at the popular ones - hint, they don't use the nofollow tag.

He then showed search results for randfish, and shows how he rules the SERPs.

To create a successful profile you must be consistent. Build out a robut profile, comment, contribute and share. He showcases HD at Flickr.

Site to Target include a ton of places like Yahoo 360, LinkedIn, NEwsite, etc, they have an article at SEOmoz on it.

Neil Patel from ACS is next up to talk about Digg and StubleUpon. The audience at Digg is babish, and explains - not that it is bad. He then gives examples of an article about taxes but how to use your tax refund to build geeky stuff. Important factors include; number of votes in times, by specific voters, who the submitter matters and who your friends are. You get up to 200 friends, so he only adds friends who friend him and then sends it to all his friends with the send to friend feature in. Do not use self-promotion in these submissions. Do not add biased information. Do not pay for votes. Do not break community rules. Do not spam.

He decided to break all the rules. He submitted his own site, create 30 accounts on same IP, used the same domain and he paid for votes. It didn't work and he was banned.

What to do?
- Add friends
- Participate in community
- Use great titles and descriptions
- Become a top user
- Submit during the right time

Andy Hagans from AndyHagans.com

He is a professional baiter. He approaches it differently than others. He uses social media to get links. Here is a case study...

Network Security Journal....

Their strength is a tech oriented subject. The weakness is a dry topic most people aren't into. He said the most important aspect is the title of your submission. Rule of thumb, can you imagine it on a magazine cover? For this client they came up with "The Fight Against Phising: 44 Ways to Protect Yourself."

Then they write the content based on the title. The title is a promise to the reader, so the content needs to deliver on that promise. Make sure it is focused. Make sure its "Lifehacker good." Make sure it is pretty and link out generously in your article. He talks about articles that get buried and it is a horrible feeling, he said it happened to him several dozen times.

The hit list:
- Digg, Netscape, StubmleUpon, Reddit, Delicious
- The second tier is Yahoo! MyWeb and Furl
- Top sites in the industry such as Slashdot and Lifehacker

Old fashion link begging
- Make a spreadsheet with first name and other details
- Personalize every email

Going Live
- Submit to bookmarking sites via a trusted account
- Cram all promotional efforts into a few hour window
- Links lead to links, traffic leads to traffic

Results:
- 40,000 visitors
- 3,244 backlinks according to Yahoo
- Trusted links from industry sites such as OReilly.com, LinuxSecurity.com and Lifehacker

In this session, both speakers discussed the best practices for creating, testing and writing Ads/Creatives for paid search engines. The commonalities from this session were testing ads without affecting the quality score of the campaigns; create multiple Ads and have them simultaneously against each other and let the consumers decide based on CTR% and Conversion Rate. Below are some more interesting details from the session

Vic Drabicky Range online media
Vic Drabicky started off the session with a presentation discussing that in reality, there is only (1) one Ad/creative can be applied to all engines and he entitled it “GoogleHOSN”. Vic also addresses that the goal is not to not get every click, but to get every profitable click. He also emphasizes on his Five (5) Ad/creative rules to live by:

1. Include the keyword in title and description of the Ad.
2. Write tailored, clear factual Ads (not everyone can have best deal in the world)
3. Avoid symbols, exclamation point, numbers and “cutesiness”
4. Avoid non-specific calls to action (book now, save now, etc…)
5. Don’t be salesy. Use the rod roddy rule (monotone, general tone of the offer and this technique tends to be more successful)

Step 1 of 3 - Titles:

• Use DKI


• keywords in title


• use param2 & alt text to further customize


• be grammatically correct


• differentiate yourself from the competition where possible

Step 2 - Descriptions

• Descriptions are most important and customize Ads for every relevant group of keywords is key.


• Setup adgroups by Ads/creative and not by keyword.


• It’s important to tell your story in the Ad


• Also important to include your brand name in the Ad


• Clearly indicate your unique value proposition (price, selection, etc..)

Step 3 – Display Urls
Slight changes in display URL can drastically change your CTR display with in domain has higher ctr%

• Search Engines can automatically optimize creative for you.


• Having 3-4 Ads/creatives running together is best alternative


• Make sure each ad/creative has a very different message


• Track the performance of the Ad/ Creative (CTR% & conversion)


• Search Engines punishes users who make a lot of changes to the Ads/creatives (Quality score)


• Try to keep at least 1 Ad/creative unchanged.

Rule #1 - Use alt text & Param2 for MSN and Yahoo.
Rule #2 - Test often, but limit the testing for quality score problems.
Rule #3 - Get a 2nd opinion, then 3rd, then implement.

Theory #1 - Goal is to not et every click, but get every profitable click
Theory #2 - Searchers may think differently than you, so keep writing new Ads/creatives
Theory #3 - Don’t chase competitors. Have your unique creative message

Darren Kuhn, Group Account Director, ResolutionMedia
Next up to the podium was Darren Kuhn, and he discussed the test and analysis phase in writing effective Ads/creatives as well as going into detail into how MSN & Yahoo handle Ads.

• Best practice to have a testing methodology


• Research categories and industries with historical strong ROI% & CTR%


• Make sure keywords are related to one another


• Keywords and ads should link to the same url/landing page


• Minimum: Each ad/creative should get at least 25,000 impressions or 250 clicks during the test period


• Duration of tests depend on the amount of time it takes each creative to attain the min number of impressions or clicks


• High volume sites test period should be at least 2 weeks

Test phase

• Create 4-6 ad/creativess with different message types (official site, capitalization, price points, free shipping, etc…)


• Place unique tracking on each creative so both conversion and CTR can be tracked


• Disable auto optimizers.


• Continue test for at least 2 weeks.

Analysis phase

• Decide on winner and let winner run


• No clear winners, re-write new themes and messages and test again

Yahoo Panama specific:

• Difference between old Yahoo vs. new Yahoo Panama (quality index where cost savings enabled)


• Ad rank is determined by it’s bid & expected performance


• Yahoo looks at CTR% where it’s optimal for the keyword to relate to the ad (better the relationship, the higher the quality index.)

MSN Specific:

• MSN Allows low performing Ads to continue run and be displayed in results


• Best practice to constantly rewrite ads


• *Important Note: If you rewrite the Ad and don’t rename the Ad ID, the ad will keep its previous performance regardless of the change.

Study 1: Title & description testing:
The DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) option historically works well in terms of CTR%, but not always has the best conversion rates. Best to track Ads with analytics software that handles this.

Study 2 – Display Urls
Noting the performance differences between different variation of Display urls (subdomains, www, etc..) Best tactic is to test all of them.

Study 3 - Content match testing
Track the Content Network very closely, because it historically low converting.

Study 4 – Automated Testing Tool (example: BetterPPC)
Auto generate 54 different creatives and explained the benefits of betterppc. Issue with tool, did not track conversions, but quickly tested to find the highest CTR%. Used these top 6 ads to then test for conversion rates

Article by Greg Meyers Sr. Search Manager at Commerce360

Social Search Overview Thursday April 12. 2007 9am
Social Search Track

Moderator:
Chris Sherman, SearchEngineWatch
Speakers:
Grant Ryan, Eurekster - Did not show
Tomi Poutanen, Yahoo! Social Search

Apostolos Gerasoulis. - added speaker
Seth Godin - added speaker

Rough night with little sleep but made it to this session on time. Early even. About 5 people here at first, with most of them security people. Lisa Barone is blogging nearby. She's extremely dedicated to reporting sessions for Bruce Clay's company. It's gray and rainy. Chris Sherman is here now, setting up for the session. They must have expected a lot of people for this topic because we got part of a ballroom for it, but the session starts in five minutes and the room is only slightly 1/4 full. Looks like they added a third speaker. Apostolos Gerasoulis. (Thank you to the kind gentleman who helped me read the name sign on the table. Even at the front row, I have a hard time seeing due to my poor eyesight.) It's after 9am...looks like Chris is getting the panel ready.

Chris introduces himself. Talks about the opt to win a Mini Cooper during the break after this session, sponsored by AOL. What is social search? There’s no good definition. He defines it as Internet way finding tools informed by human judgment. Informed can mean many things including egregiously uninformed. No good industry standard definition. You can have people influencing social search who really don't know what they talking about. We’ve always had social search. Yahoo was originally created by a team of human editors. Meta tags created in 1996 to help content owners influence search engines and were a massive failure. They were the first "true" social search. They're returning to their roots. They were effective for about 6 weeks or so, until spammers got a hold of them. We now have tagging which are meta tags in a different incarnation.

Algorithm search itself is social. Fundamentally search engines reflect human bias (programmer choices). They observe human behavior, click paths, popular urls and use this to modify algos. New personalization efforts are also used to refine search for everyone. Yahoo stores 12-14 terabytes of data per day. We have privacy concerns. Personalization will be a huge threat to optimizers. Every search will bring different results. Why is SS so popular now? Algos have plateau. Innovation is much harder then it used to be. Humans are still better at some things than computers. Most players in social search are leveraging the work of "millions" of free volunteers. Image search. Flicker. SE's see a pixel not what we see. Images are found based on surrounding text and tags. We can see it but SE's don't see images the way we do.

Types of social search:del.icio.us, shadows, myweb, furl diigo are for bookmarking, tagging. Tag engines are blogs and RSS, like Technorati, bloglines. Collaborative directories like Wiki, ODP, Prefound, Zimbio. Personalized verticals like Google custom search, eurekster, rollyo, trexy. Collaborative harvesters like digg, netscape, reddit, popurls.com aggregates these. Harvesters focus on news. You can vote up or down. Up, stories rise to the top. They tend to be dominated by "power". If they don't like what you write about, they can blacklist you. Social Q & A sites are Google answers (gone now), yahoo answers answerbag. People have questions and other people offer answers. How do you do quality control? Over time, Yahoo really got good at this. They ask, did this person’s answer match our algo on this? Yahoo is experimenting.

Scale and scope issues. There are Tagging issues due to language, lack of controlled vocab, human laziness and "idiots, spammers trying to game the system. What will work? combo of algo and people mediated search. trust networks. increased personalization and user control over result filtering. SS will work best for non-text content (photos, music, video, etc.) You decide what sources you want for your information. SE's can't understand video. How would an SE understand humor? We'll still need people describing media.

Seth Godin is presented next.

"Search is broken." If I go to Google, and type in espresso machine, I find 8 million matches. Impossible a few years ago. Today, humans built content. You all responded. Martha Stewart has a huge site. Someone types in "martha cookies":. The third match is Squidoo. What it shows recipes, images, books, tons of content. A human being compiled the info and built the page. The only purpose of the page is to get you to leave. He saw the need for human beings to build a post search solution. A search for laptop bags. You may have 50,000 pages. Too much competition for first page in SERPs. The first result is a human written page by squidoo on laptop bags and comes up first. She changes the content frequently. She’s doing Yahoo's job. If you like what she does, and follow her other links to other sites built by other people. Accidentally clicks on an image with men standing in underwear and everyone laughs. He's posted more than 2000 times in his blog. He doesn't want you to first meet him there. If you go to the page he built in squidoo, it's more about him, by him with links and books and essays and other stuff that helps you get to know him. The wrong thing to do is try and send in traffic you haven't earned. Have your biggest fans build those pages. If you can get 100 or 1000 of them to build out content because they care about you ,they like you, each giving a thoughtful explanation about what they like. SE's want you to do this. Its important data being put in front of SE's and hence, you.

AP - From ASK.com

Strongly feels ss is the future of search. Direct Hit was first social search. Was bought by Ask.com. (He corrects Chris.) Algo search has plateau. How can you rank in the future with the new technology? SS is a knowledge that is used to guide you into a region of what you want. You want to find the exact info, text will take to the info but not take you to the region where it is located. "Rangers" will mean different things to different people, countries, states, etc. You can guide and give what the users want. Kids looking for college search by college name. They create a path. Creating a path to ivy league schools. Wouldn’t it be nice if I understood who you are when you do a search like this? Teoma is taking the web and splitting it into communities (still working in the background of Ask.) It wants to find the right community for you. Some of this has been a closely held secret until now, due to competition. He came from Madison, NJ and sees traffic. He used his social knowledge and traffic starts early, Lincoln tunnel will be blocked. He makes a quick decision to take the train, so he could make it here. Next generation of search will integrate social search and communities. This is an important future area that we need to support. We must look for innovative solutions to deliver what the user wants.

Tony P - Yahoo Social Search

Thanks for showing up day 4 of conference. Starts with a quote by Peter Drucker, The Educated Person, about the contrast of knowledge and information. Knowledge is embodied in a person. The shift to a knowledge society puts the person in the center. (Paraphrasing here). Yahoo believes in human to human communication. 3 services: Flicker images. Runs a search on golden retrievers. (I started looking for my dog! Got sidetracked). He's showing a power point pres. of dog pics. Flicker geo codes, for maps, can be used to find your morning coffee. Another search is del.icio.us. Social bookmarking product. You can share pages of interest with your network. He searched for the Hilton in SE's, get paid and bland responses. In de.licio.us, you get humanly described content about the Hilton search. Different ways of rank. Yahoo answers. Enables you to ask a question and the community as a whole answers the question. No economic incentives. People helping people. You can ask for suggestions for products or services and get people-driven responses. Chris questions the expertise of information (sources of people), the wisdom of crowds is being built in. Bono asked about world poverty for example. Yahoo is including results from Yahoo answers in its overall SERPs. They are committed to social search. Have been investing in it for the past 2 years or more.

From the Q&A session. The discussion was interesting, so I stayed to listen.

Books are not always the authoritative source. Misconception there, that print is better than the Internet for best. So far everything is free. Google Answers was paid and died. Yahoo is free and thrives. A person from the audience wanted to know how long this free, "hippie phase" of free stuff would last. There are problems with being paid and Yahoo debates this all the time. They like the idea of rewarding top contributors but changes incentive for contributing. Seth says money changes everything. Bloggers work for free. If there's money on the table, you know who the people are. You can fool around for free. Not if you are being paid. Money destroyed the quality of the search engines, Apostolos says. Seth says Dell made a mistake by ignoring blogs. Tony says everyone has to make a choice. If a company wants to serve its customers it can't ignore Web 2.0. Big companies want to get involved but are "shy" because of published "dangers" and bad press on some social sites. There's a "ton" of pent up demand for social driven content.

This session, entitled B2B Tactics, focuses on targeting business-to-business users. The session is presented by:

Brad Bauer, Senior Director of Business Development at ClearGauge
Paul Slack, CEO of WebDex
Patricia Hursh, President of SmartSearch Marketing
Moderated by Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief of The ClickZ Network
Sponsored by SLI Systems

Brad Bauer is up first. He explains that B2B is different because it is a considered purchase. Some of the key challenges faced is mostly keyword selection. The challenge is who you are messaging to.

One of the biggest challenges is that you have a smaller audience. Testing is more challenging. Landing page testing should be limited to a smaller number of variables than you typically would if you were focusing on business-to-consumer markets. It is still very valid, however. He shows that the testing results show that there is not enough volume to make good decisions.

How do you reduce waste? Get vertical. Use vertical search channels to produce a set of audience participants. Business.com is a fantastic source - drove 60% more conversions at 1/5 of the cost and generated 14% more page views per visit over Google. You can also qualify your leads through messaging. (e.g. Make an ad that says "offer financing for $10M and up." This targets the desired audience.)

Measuring the entire buy cycle - one of the biggest challenges is developing a thought process around what's really valuable on the site (e.g. giving a phone number, answering a survey, asking a question, requesting a sample, downloading a demo, etc.) Once you think this way, setting up measurement is key. Measurement also requires analytics.

Once you've defined the highly valued activities and begun to have a solid campaign, measuring qualification levels is the next step. Understand where prospect revenue comes from, how they're behaving when they are actually moving through the process with you, etc. He shows an illustration where a form is tagged to see whether people abandon a particular process on a website.

Once the analytics are in place, go to your direct sales force and find out the quality of the lead/sale and take it back to a keyword you purchased on Yahoo, Google, or Business.com.

He shows an illustration of a valuation model - creating proxies for highly valued activities and tracking them back to ad groups, aggregating them to point values, and becoming more cognizant of the value pipeline of your website. He shows other illustrations about trends (graphs) and says that they are fantastic for portability and providing value to your business - what actionable behaviors can come out of looking at these numbers?

Enterprise Search Strategy: key relationships, local search, determining how to create an organizational framework for success - who owns keywords where, etc., and what your customers want and need is delivered from your organization.

Local search is highly untapped. People need to connect with dealers in local areas and can do so in a specific locale.

The next person speaking is Paul Slack. He says that the interesting thing about B2B search is finding the right keywords. He is going to focus on driving qualified traffic to your website.

He will show us the B2B sales cycle, who to target, how they search, and developing an Internet Marketing strategy.

The B2B sales cycle is that you're not focusing on the consumers - sales by committee, large purchases, long cycle. For example, new equipment in a factory, or refresh their IT department. The need is uncovered on the client side and they research possible solutions. They are then looking for companies to solve the problem. From there, they find a qualified company - they go through a bid process and ultimately come to a decision.

A few years ago, there was a study where they went to B2B buyers - where do you engage search in the B2B buying cycle? Usually, more people focused on it in the consideration or research or decision phase - not so much in the awareness phase.

If we're doing a sales by committee scenarios, there are two individuals in the process - influencers and decision makers. Your website should be geared toward the influencer. It should not be designed to the decision maker. The influencers often begin a sales cycle.

You should target your keywords for the long tail (4 or more keywords) as well for these specific concerns. There's a high probability that you will get a lead. There is greater likelihood to respond to a "call to action" with the appropriate keywords - if you center your call to action around to making the job easier. Your website may not necessarily have to focus on selling your services, but instead - focus on the leads. Communicate that by taking the next step, you'll make their job easier and this will give you a higher opportunity for getting a conversion.

He shows an example of optimizing a whitepaper for a specific search term that ranked well organically. This was a long tail search and 539 visitors with 93 leads - 17% conversion rate.

The decision maker is important too. No decision maker wants to make a bad decision. They are late cycle searchers. You want to focus on high level searches - 2 or 3 words. He doesn't know if not finding the results organically would be a deal-breaker, but in his example, he didn't rank organically, so he had a PPC campaign for visibility.

Your website isn't about you. They fulfill a specific purpose to satisfy a specific consumer need. Make sure you have defined goals, etc. He focuses on imperative analysis - using results of offline marketing as a benchmark for online marketing to set the baseline for success. Once you have this baseline, you can take a dollar figure that gives you real goals. You focus on the budget and realize that to profit, you will need to generate a specific number of leads to be as good as traditional marketing. Search is the lowest cost per lead than any other marketing method.

In summary, begin with an end in mind. Understand who you are targeting, how they are searching, what you want them to do, how you will measure success - then focus on what makes best sense for them.

Patricia Hursh is the final speaker. She tells us that she will cover B2B marketing trends (Forrester research), thinking beyond the "click," and four ways to improve results.

Trends - Forrester research asked B2B marketers asked - what are the tactics you use today? In position #11 was search marketing, but in the top - trade shows, PR, direct mail, and print advertising. B2B customers are slow to embrace search marketing. With regards to focusing on spending, they acknowledged that emerging online tactics and search marketing are the two highest growth categories. Forrester asked how marketers fund this increase in search marketing - they will spend less on sponsorships, print ads, direct mail, and trade shows.

Patricia then overviews the process: find prospects online (put a compelling message online), drive them to the website, let them do actions and convert them to leads, and measure to improve ROI. This can be tricky for B2B companies: multiple buyers, a sale may occur offline, etc.

Finding prospects and driving them to the site = pre-click marketing
Converting these prospects and measuring = post-click marketing

The big lever is conversion, a competitive advantage. Campaign optimization has its limits Conversion has the largest potential impact on marketing ROI. An improved conversion rate allows you to pay more for each click and beat the competition. Integrate pre-click (campaign) efforts with post-click (website) solutions to maximize your return.

Four ways to improve post-click conversion:
1. Mapping visitor needs to solutions. Identify the types of visitors, assess their needs and pain points across the entire buying cycle, associate their needs with your assets, information, experience, and solutions, and turn your assets into actionable, online conversions.
2. Offering options for conversion. For example: download a trial, free web seminar, self-guided product tour, etc. Many websites have one conversion and that can be a little short-sighted. Her example shows a company that has a desire for one conversion - to download that trial. When the free web seminar and self-guided product tour were added, there were many more (720) inquiries.
3. Testing different registration forms. She shows us a form for downloading a whitepaper. It's very long (3 pages) - and she noticed that the minute you ask for a phone number, you'll get a huge dropoff of prospects. There's a real disconnect between the customer's perceived value of what's being asked and the time they have to put into filling out the form (privacy, etc.) With her customer, she tested several different forms. Conversion rate is radically different when there are fewer required fields. Often, you'll ask - how useful is an email address? The client followed up with these individuals via email to get more information from them.
4. Continuously improving landing pages. Registration forms are one element of a landing page. Rapid iterative testing process of landing pages. She shows us how an original landing page was transferred into two test pages with the following focus: general look and feel, page layout, images, messages, action triggers, name and descriptions for downloadable assets, and registration forms. Don't underestimate the huge variances between what you are calling them and the reason that your users will click. Different landing pages showed different conversion rates (first one 5% conversion, others 10-12% conversion rates).

There are certainly challenges with B2B but it is different than traditional marketing. As more verticals get into this, it will accelerate the process.

Successful Site Architecture Wed. April 11, 2007 Session 4:45pm
Fundamentals Track

Moderator: Alex Bennert

Speakers:
Matt Bailey, SiteLogic Marketing
Derrick Wheeler, Acxiom Digital

Walked into a busy room. The speakers from the talk beforehand are still here, meeting audience members and answering their questions. Quick visit with Matt Bailey, speaker. Says he has new stuff for this presentation. Alex Bennert came up to say hello. Waved to Anne Kennedy. A Cre8asiteforums member recognized me, walked up and introduced herself. That was fun. Another female SEO. It's so fun to have a face to go with a forums avatar or name. The room is again, absolutely packed. Chris Winfield and his new wife, Danielle, are here somewhere. Saw them come in and did the wave thing. The room is warm and alive with chatter.

Derrick leads off with what is successful site architecture? First, he talks about se spiders. A search engine spider requests pages from websites. It must be able to follow links to your pages. It takes them back and indexes them into an index, somebody searches for it and they come and buy something. Funny diagram. SE spiders discover URLs and adds to a Que. Collects content elements to use. A search engine Index is a scaled down database. They boil down your page to the smallest amount of info that is relevant. They use off page factors. Algorithm asks which page should I show from my index? There are different versions of indexes, depending on where you are and time of day. Always updating.

SE crawls entire site. Indexes entire site. Users perform targeted queries, se ranks appropriate pages. Users click on the ranked listings. Users take action or interact with the website. Any change will impact one of those things. These are the 6 steps to success. Balance between users and search engines. He asks how many have new site, or redesign or tweak existing.

Mastering the basics - figure out where you are today and measure over time to know impact. Keep a list of domains and sub domains you own and what they're doing. If you have other domains that are dupes, your SEO needs to know this. Monitor your log files. Not just analytics. Log files show what is making the request. You want to know what pages the SE's are requesting. You need to know if something is blocking you website from se's.

Track your rankings for business critical keywords at major SE's. Collect data from different sources, like Yahoo! Google, MSN. Use tools like Omniture, Wordtracker, etc. Webposition shows rankings. Keep monthly reports for your websites to spot problems earlier.

Internal cross linking - most sites have a global top nav and go down to other levels. Breadcrumbs are how you link back up. Go top down and bottom up. Side to side too. Make sure you have all these links. URL structure. Make them text links. Why? Its easy for se's to read URLS of text links. SE's don't execute JavaScript. Some JavaScript has the url in it and the SE may be able to see it. Don't trust it. If a section of your site is not being indexed, it could be the URL structure. Alt attributes don't get much weight for SE's. They are used behind images. SE's can't fill out forms. Forms are great for users, provide another path for SE's.

Footer links - recommends using them. Link to the most important pages on your site. Not all partner sites or links pages. Keep it short and simple. Less links equals more weight for each one on the page. Short URLs are less complex and easier to follow. Many levels down is interpreted as not being important on your site. The higher up the link, the most "important" you feel the page is.

Http request/response cycle - referring url user agent name, ip address, cookies for domain, more. http response is 3 digit status code (200, 301, 302, 404), html code, location of redirect, cookies or more. Every request is met with a response. Some URLS have moved, for example. There are cookie communications to and from.

200 ok code - all is well and here is your html. Don't put a custom error page with 200 ok code.

301 - permanent moving of page; redirect to appropriate page
]
302 - temp move

404 - custom error page

The circle of death - do not block entire site using robots.txt file. Don't permit a "Disallow://". Don't require anyone to require a cookie to access the site. SE's don't accept cookies. Don't force cookies to see a particular country. Can cause huge problems. Every URL should have unique content.

Breadcrumbs show paths. Related products and navigating them cause problems due to breadcrumb setup. Two products may end up on the same page but the URL is different. He's talking about spider traps. Shows T-mobile site. Clicks on View All results. Shows how clicking on two links extends the page URL with dis=true code. Session ids are another cause for accidental duplicate pages. Link and session ids have different urls linking to it. Duplicate pages can happen with http and https absolute urls. SE's will think its two different sites. Use relative links to be safe.

Alex introduces Matt Bailey.

Architecture. Thanks everyone for hanging in there. Wants to make it simple. Shows a picture of Prince, We're gonna party like its 1999. Looks at site architecture from an accessibility standpoint. Describes Target lawsuit. The site had no alt attributes. Made a lot of use of image maps that you had to see visually. Forced to use a mouse. This excludes keyboard and voice only users. SE's want to index your websites. Offer a sitemap. Use text links. Create a useful information style rich site. Google has suggestions for how to be ranked, but Target didn't want to follow those guidelines. If you make the site accessible, it is crawl able. SE's are handicapped. They can't see, or click, eat cookies. If site is accessible to special needs, SE's will get it too.

Alt attributes - Shows Target website without images. Empty pages. No content was visible. Screen readers can't use it. Selecting a country first? You have to hit a continue button, but SE's can't do that. Flash prevents SE's. Cluttered URLS are too long, force line breaks, rewrite it to make sense to the user. A recent test showed rewriting urls to make shorter increased se visits. It removes all the wild cards. People want to know location, directory and where they are. Favicons put your branding on someone's browser. When you redesign, carefully rewrite and redirect your pages and links. You have to redirect your traffic. Who is linking to your deep pages? You need to take time move and redirect to not lose traffic and links. Study your popular pages. Match keyword traffic that is unique or the primary url. Describes 301 redirect old directory to new directory. Does not recommend meta redirects. MSN will describe how to setup 301s.

CSS and standards. Can validated code rank better or do sites using CSS rank higher? CSS separates content from markup. It keeps it external. Reduces page clutter. CSS vs. tables. Shows an example. Shows how engine looks top to bottom. It stacks the page for easier reading. Stacks tables. Navigation always on top and content to the right. Tables aren't "bad". SE's see the code differently. CSS eliminates this stacking of tables. The focus is on the content. Validation can uncover coding errors. Assures spiders can index content. It's not about rank. It's about making pages accessible to SE's.

Mobile phones are another factor. You want the pages to gracefully degrade (graceful degradation). Sometimes there are different style sheets for different browsers. Progressive enhancement starts at the lowest common denominator. Anyone on any device can access the content. At the base, can be accessed at basic level. Additional functionality is adding in layers for increased experience and technologies. Use Webmaster Central by Google for "great reports" It's free. If you have accidentally disallowed your site, it will tell you. How many pages have been crawled? How often, what sections, what time? See external links to your site. Sitemaps.org accepted by MSN, Yahoo and Google.

This session allows the search teams at Ask, Live, Google, and Yahoo to provide input about various robots.txt files and asks the audience about how to improve upon the robots.txt standard. It is very discussion-based and representatives from the Big 4 ask for input in a variety of different areas related to robots.txt (and sitemaps).

Presented by:
Keith Hogan, Ask.com
Eytan Seidman, Live.com
Dan Crow from Google
Sean Suchter from Yahoo!

Moderated by Danny Sullivan

Keith Hogan first presents the Ask.com company profile. Less than 35% of servers have a robots.txt files. The majority of robots.tx files are compied from one found online that is very generic (2.5M hosts have this file). The robots.txt files vary in length to 1 character to over 256,000 characters.

He shows a histogram of the sizes - the peak is at 23 characters. 11% has this amount:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Robots format is not well understood. He shows a screenshot that has a funny comment saying "Please use during off-peak hours."

Recent addition to robots.txt where you can add a sitemap directive:
SITEMAP: http://www..xml

Both robots and sitemaps are kind of linked together. The accomplish similar goals. Sitemaps allow webmaster page level control to identify pages, etc.

Possible changes/additions to robots: is it time to change the format to XML? It would improve accuracy control, perhaps: crawler allow groups/disallow groups, allow paths, disallow paths.

Another possibility is to have peaks during daytimes, valleys at nighttimes, etc. Should webmasters be able to stop/slow crawling of the site during differnet times?

Perhaps it is better to specify a start crawl time and end time.

Some sites have hosts/IPs that are dedicated to crawlers and tell them to visit certain sites.

HTML provides meta directives - noindex, nofollow, nocache, noarchive. Should this be added to robots?

Another thing is spider traps or duplicate content for crawlers even though there are plenty of heuristics to identify these problems - session IDs, affiliate IDs. Should robots add hints for this so that sites don't end up with duplicate pages and smaller link credits?

You can find the Ask crawler information from the About page.

Question for audience: If you had your own machine and website, what is your interaction with your hosting company and how can you control crawling your site?

Eytan Seidman from Live.com presents next. He asks how many people use robots.txt. He shows us the hilton.com robots.txt file that says "Do not crawl the site during the day!"

A big part about websites to search engines is communication. Search engines have no good way of communicating with websits through robots.txt. There should be a protocol to facilitate this communication in robots.txt.

Robots.txt's protocol is very complex. Engines don't support a common set of control. There is some commonality but it's not as good as it could be.

Dan Crow from Google speaks next.

He speaks about the robots.txt exclusion protocol - robots.txt and robots meta tags. Tells search engines what not to index. The exclusion protocol started in 1994 and is the de facto standard in the industry. There are still significant changes between search engines

Standardization: Should we revive the standardization effort? Common core features as they exist/defined extension mechanism.

Long-term goal - consistent syntax and semantics/improved common feature set.

Sean Suchter, director of search technology at Yahoo speaks next. He says that the Yahoo spider is Yahoo Slurp which supports all standard robots.txt commands. There are custom extensions, such as crawl-delay, sitemap, wildcards. There are custom meta extensions, such as NOODP and NOYDIR. He adds that different Yahoo search properties use different user agents, so if you are trying to affect one robot, please only address that robot. You want to be careful - depending on how you use your robots.txt, you will have different effects on different robots and can lose out on traffic from some type of search.

One question that he has for us is regarding the crawl-delay. How should this be rate limited? A crawl delay actually seen "in the wild" of 40 seconds means that Yahoo can never crawl a large news site. Is it about bandwidth reduction? In what manner is this used?

Another one that is floating around - robots-noindex and robots-index - this goes in your HTML page that mark pages that you don't want the robots to use for purposes of retrieval. For example, templates or ad-text that would cause irrelevant traffic.

The last question he has is about complex HTML and CSS, iframes, etc., there's a lot more than the page that is useful - how would users want to emphasize or exclude this?

Questions - Danny asks: Is it better to have robots.txt in an XML format?
Some guy from the audience says that it should be part of the sitemaps standard if this is a requirement.
Another guy says that he likes the XML idea for the nature of his business. He mentions that XML could underline parts of his site that have duplicate content issues. He says that he wants to know if there are any tools that display any pages that have duplicate content.

The first guy who responds adds that he is concerned about people being able to authenticate through robots.txt to only allow spiders that people trust.
Danny says that there is the ability to do reverse DNS lookups, but he acknowledges that this is a pain. How can the robots.txt be improved to allow for authenticated spiders?

Danny asks about timezone control. Not many people seem overly concerned about timezone control.

A woman says that she wants the META exclusion to be available within the HTML "absolutely." She says that she actually has clients who cannot add robots.txt files to their root directory for whatever reason.

A man asks if robots.txt is optional. Dan responds to say "yes, there are." But some search engines may ignore it though. Dan says that content will be crawled unless you tell the spiders not to crawl the content.

A developer says that he wants to be able to ignore dynamic content completely.

Danny asks about the crawl-delay and asks if all of the Big 4 have an exact definition across the board. They all look at each other quizzically and don't know. Sean says that it's probably not used the same across the board. Some webmasters don't use it correctly; it hurts their site. Crawl-delay should be defined as page loads per second or queries per second, megabytes per day, megabytes per month - but there is still no definite answer. When suggesting megabytes per day or MB per month, the audience gets all muttery and Danny responds, "We don't like that!"

Keith says that there is anecdotal evidence that shows that some sites have different robots.txt files that are served at different times of the day. Sean adds that "if you do this, we have to crawl it every minute, and how many people would like that?" Since some people actually need a time-of-day restriction, this is very bad to swap robots.txt files. "We'll note that, but please don't swap the robots.txt files."

An audience member says that the day of week is more important for him.

Danny asks how many people were hit by a scraper site, and a few people raise their hands.

An audience member says that spiders should adjust their crawling based on server response times, and Dan says that Google does this.

Another audience member chimes in about the XML standard and says that doing an XML based format will be more easily messed up. Dan says that this is one of the main reasons why they are against doing this XML format.

Dan says that some of the robots.txt files he sees (75,000) contain a jpg.

An audience member asks about legal jargon on his financial site with over 40,000 pages. He wants people to ignore parts of a site with the legal jargon.

Dan asks if standardization would be useful and people raise their hands and say that it would be.

An audience member says that she likes the crawl rate but she wants a robots.txt option for a crawl rate that can be slow, medium, or fast.

Another audience member has privacy concerns about robots.txt. She says that because "robots are not indexing the page, but you're still indexing the URL, we have PPC links that are easily accessible in Google and that's a click-frauders dream. Do you have comments on a separate standard where we won't even index these URLs?" Also, she asks if there's a way to have a Webmaster Central way of defining your robots.txt so that you don't have to have a public file.

Eytan says that Microsoft is looking at that. It's not a great user experience to show a URL and description so they do want to know how to optimize it.

Sean says that on Yahoo, you can delete URLs or paths in SiteExplorer and that will affect any indexing. Dan says that Google has the equivalent as well. Vanessa Fox from Google (who is in the audience taking notes) says that you can do this on the page itself so that it cannot be indexed at all.

Danny asks about who should be the priority - is the siteowner always right (unless it's the homepage)? There is mixed reaction in the crowd.

Someone in the audience says that there should be more meta commands - don't crawl me but list my URL, for example. A few people actually want a lot more options, but Danny says that there are problems that can result from these options.

Dan says that people have complained to Google that their pages weren't being crawled but it was really the fault of their robots.txt files that excluded the spiders. Sean finds this hilarious: he says "check the robots.txt file!"

Someone in the audience talks about the sitemaps.org standard and asks what would happen if you didn't include everything to be allowed in the sitemap but don't necessarily exclude it on robots.txt? The speakers agree that this information will not be excluded. Keith reiterates and says that if it excluded in robots.txt, it will be blocked, but if it's not in the sitemap, it will still be crawled.

Feature request: ability to tell people about dynamic session parameters and that search engines should not crawl them. Sean says that you should redirect content with for Yahoo's robot to another page without the session ID. It is not the best solution, but if you see Yahoo slurp coming, you could redirect to the right page without tracking codes or session IDs.

Sean reiterates part of his presentation and asks how robots should be used to focus on CSS, iframes, etc. Nobody has said anything thus far so he wanted some input. Dan says that Google looks at CSS, but a lot of people actually do block css files through robots.txt. Dan says that the CSS should not blocked because it is occasionally used by Google to find out if people are using spammy content (white text on white text, for example).

Sean asks why people in the audience are blocking off CSS files. Nobody really has an answer but one guy says that he puts all the non-search-engine-essential content in a folder (CSS, Javascript, etc.) and robots.txt tells the entines not to crawl that folder.

Note: Please excuse typos, this coverage is provided live from a complete discussion with much audience interaction.

Moderated by Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro and the Chairman of the SEMPO Board of Directors.

First panelist is Kevin Heisler from JupiterResearch. He states that they got over 1100 respondents to the survey of agencies and marketers. His first slide is titled Agencies Should employ advanced creative tactics to replace standard Display and Pop. He finds that richer advertising techniques will start to replace traditional display ads. Recommends the building out of micro-sites, rich media, etc. They know that this will be a major aspect of Google’s YouTube strategy over time. They will slowly roll this out once people are more sued to other in-stream ads.

In the future, when building a campaign, it won’t be limited to the 30/60 second spots. He actually cites a very creative ad they saw recently from Avenue A | razorfish, using some rich media in a campaign for Coors. Advertisers expect campaigns to benefit from improved measurement tools in the n ear term. 38% of the online advertisers using an agency indicated an increased sophistication of planning and measurement tools (31% of those not using an agency). Following was increased availability of new creative formats.

They strongly believe that agencies need to improve their deep ROI metrics. They need to actually specify metrics and belonging to brands. They need to define branding success metrics. Across the board of different sized companies are all interested in using online e to increase brand awareness. They also agree on increasing the intent to purchase. He showed a slide where he was trying to show the closing of the gap between goals and measurement. This is a huge gap for all different sizes of companies. Thanks the audience.

Dan Sundgren from Efficient Frontier. His presentation is titled “Branding with Platform Marketing.” He feels that platform marketing will evolve into Google, Yahoo! etc. Step One: protect your brand. His “poster boy” is Nordstrom, which actually is zealous about protecting their brand. Also uses the Nike example. In Nike, they actually let affiliates bid on their term. Shows next the example of a search for Morgan Stanley. No top listing by MS, but the top Paid Search listing is a quite negative result indicating Morgan Stanley misconduct. The ad uses Morgan Stanley in the title and description, which shows him that they have not bothered to fill out the paperwork with the engines.

After the “blocking and tackling” suggestions above, he goes onto the planning. Uses an example of Pepsi, which is promoting a design a can contest. They did not match up the Paid Search by buying related terms like “Pepsi can design.” He shows the Google trends tool which indicated a spike in “Pepsi can” searches around the same time.

Shows two case studies that he did while employed with Google prior to EF. First was with Intel ViiV that showed trends history. He likes this type of research because the benchmark is zero since ViiV is a new product. They worked with an agency to setup tactics that matched search marketing to offline branding tactics. Google Trends also shows major news events that occurred, which correlates nicely with the spikes in traffic. The Intel ViiV PR resulted in 15,000% more Google searches (yes this is deja vue, because another speaker mentioned this same case study in a session I covered yesterday). He says the key is to do both pre and post-studies. Remember to engage your user.

Second case study is on whitepages.com. they wanted to test three DMAs (designated marketing area – Nielsen metric) with a different media mix. Each had very different blends. You can run radio and measure the lift on the DMA. Found that CPA’s varied by over 50%, depending on DMA. Brand lift was anywhere from 9-18%. One thing they noticed was that outdoor was very effective. This type of research gives you the ability to go “back to your boss” and show specific variations between community areas. He is eating his own soup…he paid for the term “ses new york” just before the conference. He got 63 clicks for $7.18 which is his blog and the creative is inviting people to this session.

Fionn Downhill, founder of Elixir Systems (and SEMPO BOD Member). She says that her story starts in 1912 at a Dale Carnegie Training session. He started writing his own materials. One of his trainees was from a small little know publisher called Simon-Shuster (sp?)…this led in short to the “How to win friends and Influence People” being voted as a top 4 most successful business books of all time. She actually said that the book was the first one she ever read, “when she was a girl years ago.”

Background of case study she will present, DCT had traditionally generated leads through print and offline media. (The statistics that were orginially presented herein were removed at the request of the speaker)

In short, DCT feels that this is the most successful lead generation campaign they have ever done (quoting Piera Palazollo, the Senior VP of Marketing at Dale Carnegie Training).

Gord adds that now brand building is a participatory experience, compared to years ago. “We are sharing the brand building experience with a number of additional people.”

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by n the interest of speed.

Tim Ash at Site Tuner.com is up first and explains that this is going to go by real fast due to time constraints. What is conversion tuning and why should you care? There is three online marketing activities such as acquisition, conversion, retention. He says the problem at this conference is about getting people to your website. He asks how many spend for on site conversion and testing. He says he wants to help us fix the weak link. The economics of the business is to get cost down on the website. Who should design your website? The real answer is none of the above, it should be designed by the visitor of the website. So what can you tune? You can tune mission critical parts of the website. Landing pages leading to track able actions. You can tune the price of your product or service. What can you tune on your page? What can’t you tune. He recommends don’t go to your competitors website and copy what they are doing. What works for them might not work for you. There are several ways to tune, A-B testing, multivariable testing. With A-B testing you can test one variable at a time. Send equal traffic to all at once. The typical test size is 10-100 recipes. The testing tries to predict best setting for each variable. He explains there testing engine. It uses proprietary math for internet marketing.

What mistakes should I avoid? Ignoring your baseline. He shows some examples of baselines on sites. The conversions improved but the baseline got worse. Always devote some bandwidth to your current version (the baseline). Measure relative to the baseline, not an absolute number. He asks another a question, 90 conversions or 100 conversions. The answer is that we don’t have enough data. Mistake number two is not collecting enough testing. Do not make decisions based on too little data. Pick a confidence level. He nexts puts up some example of pictures of Ferrari and then a Ferrari that had crashed. He explains Volvos are safe! Its not the picture, not the headline it’s the context which you see them in. Interactions are very important. The best setting for variable depends on its content. Mistake number three is ignoring variable interactions. There are major testing themes. Less is more, grab their attention, test the offer, reinforce your key messages, and personalize it. Radical simplification can improve your bottom line.

Next up is Tom Leung from Google. He is going to talk about some common pitfall and various testing concerns. He asks what about if I place the javascript on my pages will it penalize me? There are hundreds of factors search engine consider. Don’t treat search engine bots differently. The variations that you are testing should be consistant. He said don’t be evil with your testing. Javascript tags will not hurt you in the search engines. Testing is still part art and part science so you need to put your thinking cap on or retain a consultant. The Google optimizer works by testing different types of pages. The conversions are recorded and they are telling you what is the best situation and the best conversion.

Fun with Dynamic Websites is a session presented by Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Laura Thieme, and Jake Baillie.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen (demib.com) presents and says that search engines like to index as much valuable content as they can possibly find. If search engines don't index you, it's not because they don't like you. Dynamic websites can be difficult to be indexed.

It comes down to IRTA:
Indexing - getting your pages indexed
Ranking - ranking for relevant keywords
Traffic - get people to click on your website
Actions - get users to do desired actions

Indexing is where the problems are. Typically, there are a bunch of problems being crawled.
Ranking: options - dynamic websites can potentially outrank static websites
Traffic - the game is the same - static or dyamic
Actions - technology only plays a limited role as long as it works.

Dynamic architecture - a user requests a page and the webserver might query a database, server side includes, or other variables. The problem with this picture is that the complexity of what goes on at the backend level is usually just returned directly to the users and the spiders - that is not always good. If your engineer comes back and offers Javascript, requires parameters, or needs cookies, this can cause some problems. How do you improve this issue? You can simplify technology. If this is not possible (buying off-the-shelf CMS systems and untweakable systems), you might want to think of a virtual layer between the back architecture and the front architecture, like a bridge. One of the most common ways to do this is requiring a URL rewrite engine. The complexity of the URLs can be in the backend but the users/spiders don't have to see it. Another option is to use a static replication of the content.

What is not a problem? It is not a problem to store content in the database. Search engines need a safe way to navigate to the content. Search engines won't fill out forms or query the database. Also, a ? mark is not a problem. It's just an easy way to identify a template-based dynamic web page. It shows that there's one file that serves different content depending on parameters passed to it. SSIs (server-side includes) are also not a problem. The thing that is important is what is returned to the users/spiders.

Extension names are also not a problem. Use .asp, .jsp, .cfm, .html, whatever you want.

Search engines don't care what processes run on your web server as long as what is returned is valid JHTML architecture.

What are some indexing barriers?
One of the most common issues is long and ugly URLs. This URL will not be indexed in any engine.
Another common issue is duplicate content: session IDs, click IDs, time-stamped URLs. The engines do not want to index the same content on different URLs. You don't want many-to-one problems. He shows an example of over 200,000 visits on Yahoo and says that sooner or later, this will hurt you.
Server downtime and slow response times can be issues. If you don't know how fast that Google can spider your site, sign up to Google Webmaster Tools.
Spider traps - infinite loops of dynamically created links and pages

Other indirectly related issues (You can find these issues on static sites as well) include: required support of cookies, Javascript, Flash, etc.; geotargeting and personalization, form (post method) based navigation

Issues not related at all: robots.txt and META-robots exclusion, frames/password protected sites.

Solutions that work:
There are many solutions available. There's always more than one way to solve a problem. Don't just pick the first and best. Get an overview of the ways to deal with a dynamic website and pick the one that works for you. Work from the bottom up.
- Fix your system - or:
- Add a "bridge layer" or:
- Replicate your content

Favorite fix: the one-parameter website.
Change something from index.php?id=12&cart=23&sort_order=44 and store this in a database to one parameter to call something like this: index.php?R=35

Identify spiders on a global level. Don't serve session IDs to spiders. This has nothing to do with cloaking so don't be afraid to use this techniques.
Static pages may not be as bad. Use dynamic objects on hard-coded static pages (examples are banner scripts, timestamps from server, rotating news flash, RSS feeds, etc.)
Create a sitemap: guide search engines to the most important part of your site, etc.

You can also pay to play: pay for inclusion - directories, Yahoo! search, etc.

A dynamic website can be more optimized than static site!

Next up is Laura Thieme (bizresearch.com). She mentions that she's been in the business for 10 years and focuses on key topics: are you indexed? The crucial pages should be indexed. Other important things include optimization tactics - how long does it take? etc. Extenrnal factors (CMS, etc), and ensuring that you don't lose rankings.

The first thing is to begin your research project. Look at the URL structure. How many variables are in your URLs? Look at the search engine indices (doable for Google/Yahoo, but what about MSN whose site:xxx.com is broken?), curren ranking, spider activity (NetTracker, ClickTracks Pro, Log Analyzer), determining target terms. Once you are here, however, you have to overcome technology, resources, and/or political challenges. Index, optimize, and monitor improvements.

With dynamic versus static pages: in most cases, you do not have to keyword embed, you do not have to create static only pages. Be prepared that by doing these changes, you can lose rankings.

Home page titles can really matter. Example: Pier1.com - we had a few select phrases that we wanted to focus on.
Target term: Dining Room Tables on pier1.com. Google said it did not want this URL but MSN took it. Even though it was relevant, it was not indexed. Therefore, it was in the homepage title. Ironically, within 6 months, the title "Dining Room Tables" showed up in the Google SERPs as #3. Category page titles matter too. There are other optimization opportunities, because you can add target terms to the title. Interestingly, people search for "candle holders" instead of "candleholders." Make sure that your tools can overwrite the subcategory titles. Titles, headings, navigational text, metadata, anchor text, links - incoming and outgoing.

Example: champion.com. The page was indexed but wasn't optimized. Sure enough, they are ranked in the top 10 with a title update for Women's Fitted Tees.

Example: Pear's Gourmet. Revised page title bought better rankings.

Example: Levenger ballpoint pens. Each product title added "Ballpoint Pens" to the product and that increased its ranking.

Example: Gabriel Logan - replaced images with text, optimized page title.

External factors: so what if you've done this optimization? If you can't get the search engines to read your URLs and your CMS (content management system) is keeping you from getting indexed, what can you do? Watch out for these vendors that prevent spidering, fail to properly redirect, and lack administrative tools for you to focus on optimization. Try talking to a CMS customer service rep. Research before you buy.

Search engines may choke on some dynamic URLs generated by your site search engine. You may just need to upgrade your CMS.

You might see that MSN might be picking you up faster than Google. Select keyword phrase improvements in Google, but takes longer to achieve top positions. Consider optimizing a Yahoo data feed.

Which one wins? Dynamic or static?
There are many times that we work with clients who work with agencies that are determined to create static sites. On a scalable model, static pages are harder to keep up to date. Other technology challengeS: site search engine, check the version and way it's getting indexed; check your robots.txt; canonical issues, 404s

Keyword embedding URLs work - but don't forget to put 301s in place, but be willing to temporarily lose rank. If you redesign your pages, focus on 301s.

In summary: get indexed, optimize based on the way people search, submit a data feed, monitor improvement, be persistent/patient. If you see that you're still not ranked, you might have a duplicate content penalty or over-optimization.

The final speaker is Jake Baillie, managing director of STN labs.

He focuses on duplicate content - why it happens on websites and how you can control it.

Dr. Phil's duplicate content primer: "To take control of your problems, you have to understand why they happen." The biggest cause of duplicate content on dynamic websites is circular navigation. Brand/category/item, category/brand/item, etc. When you build, for example, e-commerce sites, you have multiple ways to get to the same result. You need to be consistent on how to access certain content. If you have a page on red widgets, make sure the URL to that is always the same.

Print-friendly pages, by definition, are duplicate pieces of content. Use CSS to style and JavaScript to flip between them. In a pinch, block the other content from search engines.

Designers have this mental block - to slash or not to slash, that is the question. Pick a directory index format, and be consistent. This causes 60% of duplicate content issues.

Looks don't count - you need content on your pages. Lack of content causes stoppage of indexing. Stoppage of indexing causes lack of rankings. E-commerce sites are a problem.

You might have issues with your registrar's DNS redirection service - 301 redirects are the best way to do it. Different URLs - same page. DOn't use cloaking scripts you don't understand.

Contnet : URL - always one-to-one relationship. The golden rule to avoid duplicate content issues.

Enjoyable image service - if you are selling a product and someone links to the picture on eBay, you can use mod_rewrite to serve them a different image. You can also do a price swap RegEx example. What Jake is trying to say is that with modern webservers and dynamic sites, if you can think of a condition to test for, you can act upon this condition: competitors, time of day, type of browser, length of visit, number of visitors, your mood, etc. If someone requests 200 pages in 30 seconds, it's probably not the kind of visitor you want - but you would want exceptions to be made for spiders.

A few years ago, Jake focused on shortening URLs for search engines, but there are a lot more ways to focus on mod_rewrite to be creative with your results.

Other ideas for harassing your competitors: 403 - access forbidden, 404 page not found, different pages, sounds/lights/pictures/movies, annoying JavaScript, their own website, track. This is good for testing too.

Dana Todd starts off by doing a few surveys to gage audience knowledge and then passes the podium on to Jennifer Slegg. Jen's top tips for AdSense publishers include using your page titles effectively and implementing/optimising meta tags. Think twice about disabling image ads as well, they can often earn you a lot more money. It's worth testing the new CPA solution on Google once it comes out of Beta. Video ads work quite well and a lot of the advertisers have viral adverts that people click on them. Test between using borders and not, different sites find different results so don't assume that one is better than the other. Don't forget about Yahoo Partner Network, a lot of people who have moved across from Google are making significantly more money (it's currently in Beta although the people at the Yahoo! stand have the power to get you in). Try to prevent banner blindness - use ad rotation software to mix up colour schemes and borders. AdSense is affected by the inbound links to your site and the keywords used in their link text - just like in organic search. Making AdSense titles the same colour as your normal site links can highly increase CTR. Think twice about using more than one ad unit. Although Google recommends using several placements, it can force users into clicking on the lower units, which means less money. Forums are tricky to monetise on forums, use a colour scheme rotator in order avoid people ignoring your ads. Using image ads on forums also works well as forums tend to be quite text heavy already. Targeting ads on sites using a lot of flash or images can be hard, make sure that you use meta tags and alt tags on images effectively. Use caution when using ads on a site selling products and services, it will make alarm bells sound in your visitors heads (why are they advertising their competitors and not converting me as a new customer?). If your AdSense account gets suspended, make corrections and make yourself compliant as soon as possible. Google usually send a warning first unless something such as click fraud is occurring. You should keep your account in good standing, don't pay for cheap traffic, don’t encourage clicks and don’t click on your own ads. Analyse your logs when you get a suspension notice including IPs and referral URLs. Be polite and professional in all correspondents with Google, as angry/threatening publishers probably won’t get unsuspended.

Jeremy Schoemaker describes how he got into contextual ads, creating a website to convert file formats and then found AdSense as a way to monetise it. You should make a usable and useful website before getting into AdSense - think about your users and not the money. You should usually wait until you get 1000 unique visitors a day before putting ads onto your pages. Getting into the AdSense programme is very quick and simple, just apply for an account and stick the JavaScript code on your website. Be careful about what adverts are shown on your site, you can exclude certain sites although it's very hard to keep on top of it. Remember that when people click on your ads they are leaving your site; they may also see the adverts as recommendations, which can be damaging to your own reputation. You can test the boundaries with what you do with AdSense, but always be completely open and communicate with Google. Preventing your site from getting banned is all about communication, make sure that you comply and keep AdSense support reps informed. YPN was launched in August 2005 and was unstable and unreliable at the start. The targeting is still really bad and is mainly focussed on the advertisers rather than publishers. A lot of false alarms also occur with compliance issues, which can be quite stressful. Google Analytics is excellent for tracking your progress; heat maps are also a very effective way of deciding where to place your ads (such as Crazy Egg). Jeremy's top tips include testing all the time, use analytics, take advantage of user heatmaps and keeping communication flowing between your contextual ad providers.

Note: Please excuse typos, this coverage is provided live and without much editing, due to the timeliness of the coverage...

Moderated by Gord Hotchkiss, President of Enquiro as well as Chairman of the SEMPO Board of Directors. He lets everyone know that one presenter is missing (?not sure which one).

First up is Curtis Dueck from Epiar (one of the sponsors of last night’s dinner thrown by Allan Dick – on word: wow). Will discuss Search Informed marketing (SIM) – Use of search data and intelligence. Marketing 101 recap…as any seasoned marketer will tell you, in order to connect with those that have a demand for you, they must see you clearly. Once upon a time, the “TV/Industrial complex” made for a circular motion in supply/demand. In today’s environment, how do we connect supply with demand, and how has demand changed?

Two forms of research are necessary: focus groups, surveys and polls. Now they are joined by search research. Billions sample size, “pulled” data sources, and low human hours required to effectively collect data. In the others, the sample size is much smaller, require high human hours, and need to be “pushed” to provide info.

Prerequisites to success with SIM. Willingness to embrace change, to genuinely provide what the market demands, Willingness to change your vocabulary to match what people are asking for. In order to do this, you need comprehensive research and insight. Remember that competitors are dealing with these same \questions. There is an alternative to adopting SIM, but the results could be bad (shows a pic of a dinosaur).

Search frequency research: looking for trends, patterns, ratios, relationships, oddities, and ultimately meaning within the data. He shows a series of search frequency research charts by product segmentation, television demand. He finds that people are looking for plasma twice as often as rear-screen projections. Looking at what market is entering into search engines allows the “finger on their pulse.” Another chart: Brand Equity. Phillips approx 500 times a day searched with one L, another 500 with two L’s. How would that feel to find out?

Another chart: product ideas. With searches related to wholesale candles show an example of product ideas…since “soy” candles are near the top of consumer demand, this could drive the idea to sell them. Next chart: Consumer feedback. Auto brand used in searches surrounding EGR and PCV valves.: Ford #1, but this is bad since these searches are indicating a problem with these types of valves. Chevy and Honda were 2 and 3, respectively. They can then look within a specific manufacturer.

Next chart: Competitive intelligence. Looking for terms surrounding “Microsoft downloads.” If you were looking at doing your own software development, simply knowing what people are searching around MS terms could help guide strategy. Next chart: Foreign affairs. In searches around “Iraq,” he found the Iraqi dinar, which was interesting to currency speculators he knew. Next chart: Public Issues: healthcare. If working in government, or in a pharmaceutical company, you may be able to gain insight into what searches occur around “spasms.” The different spasm being entered into the SE’s provides unprecedented insight into aggregate human condition..

Next chart: Celebrity brand searches. Surrounding “Tiger Woods” was a huge list starting with “wife” (laughs). The last place was Nike….this could be an issue. He showed a couple case studies. #1 client was an online retailer, and they suggested some redirects to various product pages, which worked great. #2 also experienced explosive growth due to the SIM strategy. Anyone is able to apply this information: online/offline, for or non-profit. Anyone who is in the business of demand can benefit.

Next speaker is Bill Mungovan the Director of Search for Carat Fusion. He will present about how you can take the type of data that Curtis presented and build a great campaign out of it. He talks about the fact that he works in a company that still considers search just a department. He points out that although $10B will be spent on search out of $20B online this year, still $150B being spent on other media. This puts things into perspective. He feels that agencies are organizing around preparing for further shifts towards online spend. He feels that they are not currently very well integrated and becoming one agency, but that he feels that is the direction they are going.

Search is a function of demand. Sots between online/offline media and buzz. They need to be told by something somewhere to search for something. Search inventory fluctuates with demand influencers. He will cover a case study of some work done for their client, Hyundai. Goals: maintain 100% share of voice on brand terms, also support online and offline events. Starts with a media plan that includes other efforts such as TV flights. They actually build an area for display and search into the overall media plan, which he was happy about.

They found that display and search interacted: 36% increase in Yahoo! click volume in the (day?) after a Yahoo! homepage takeover. Then shows a chart that search reacts to all advertising. They used scheduled TV spots and an additional homepage takeover (AOL) along with a TV spot to keep sustained click volume. They saw a drop when all print spots were completed. Then they ran another Yahoo! homepage takeover and the volume was brought back up again.

There is a 0% opportunity cost. If you don’t plan ahead and have a huge search budget, the TV spot will not lead to the additional volume. Without having a search program and without using budget for search while running TV ads, you are potentially losing tons of traffic. Allocate enough budget to capture this increased volume that is created online. Connect with offline media plan before client approval. Map keyword bundles to overall goals, not just lower funnel acquisition efforts. Lastly, remember search is still cheap! Very few large marketers are getting it and thinking in the full circle.

Last was Misty Locke, co-Founder and President of Range Online Media. She starts with a short case study looking at brand leads can stay ahead of non-brand spend. Unfortunately, I could not really understand the chart she was working with, but I will try to get a recap from her. The next thing they did was challenged measurements. It is sometimes not the media and the placements, but how we are measuring and tracking it. Realize that the ROI is not the most important factor at all times, but how you grow overall revenue. Currently only 15% of advertisers have consolidated all online and offline consumer data/. 39% actually don’t even measure online.

So they make a group decision between 7 diff agencies involved in one project and worked together with them, in a case study she presented. She showed examples of shared creative with online and offline. The online media can try all three ads they made. This was for Reliant Energy. They has a 13% increase in search conversions the week after the direct mail launch. Q19% decrease in cost per acquisition. Shows some other great results stats, and says they will obviously try this again.

Shows another case study in order to capitalize on Oprah Winfrey show. They placed/monitored ads around her name and products. Results: 100% increase in brand demand during the first week. 34% of total online sales came from search te first week. 60% increase in overall CTR. 5.8 ROI. And a “keyword shoutout” when the guy first featured on the show went from 0-200 searches with the week. I think I remember Misty from a past coverage because she talks so fast! :) This is great stuff but I can’t get it all…

3rd case study focused on a Pier One “Instant Win Game” campaign. Almost 74K players opted to receive offers from Pier One Imports. Resulted in over 343 actual in-store transactions (up 79% over previous years). She thanks everyone.

Gord has been making some good comments between and after speakers. He tells a story about the Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” bands. He went on a show, and was not prepared for the following traffic. He had a Yahoo! Store Website, and it in fact shut down the entire Yahoo! store system for a day due to the traffic generated but the offline exposure.

Looks like Andrew Goodman has a new pair of glasses. Greg Jarboe is sitting on the panel looking very calm. Spencer and Falkow are also on board. Finally, Rick Klau from FeedBurner is up on the panel, curious what info he has to add. People are sitting on the floor, this room is packed. I guess blogs and SEO make for a popular topic. Here we go...

Andrew asked who has a blog, 99% of the audience raised their hands. Wow. And I used to be shy about having a blog.

Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC.

Optimizing your feeds:
- Full text feeds are the way to go
- 20 or more items (not just 10, posts, comments, categories, etc.)
- Description field should be unique in your feed

Optimizing your blog:
- Rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure (tag clouds, related posts, top 10 posts, next and previous posts)
- Title tags (decouple the title from your blog post, talks about joining multiple tags together to make unique pages)
- URLs
- Anchor text (influence that)
- Heading tags
- "Sticky" posts, posts always appear at the top and they help with intro copy.
- Author profile pages and author links

He explains it is easy, even his daughter can do it.

Rick Klau from FeedBurner is next up.
- Manage over 600,00 feeds
- yada yada
- 301 vs 302 redirects
- Search engines incresignly consuming feeds
-- auto-discovery
-- noindex
-- ping full content are critical
- Style sheets helping feed usability
-- Raw code is going away
-- IE7, FF2, ignore stylesheets, FeedBurner is now capable of overriding
- Yahoo! Pipes makes RSS more customizable

Click Through Tracking
- They sometimes use click through URLs to track this but those URLs go through redirects.
- Default redirect is a 302 and not a 301 redirect, but you can opt for 301
- They recommend using a 302, because you don't necessarily want to tell the search engines you permanently moved them from your site to them but your call.
- Feeds are not just blogs, they are podcasts, they are videos, they are retailers, yahoo pipes, web services, etc.

Full Text vs. Summary Feeds
- The publisher needs to decide
- But there are a number of publishers adding value to the feed, like Techmeme. Techmeme looks at the feeds and looks at the links and the relevancy of that content.

- Use autodiscover
- Make sure to ping when you add new content
- Know which services that are crawling feed content
- Adding meta data into your feed helps with rich media feeds
- Use show notes in your podcast downloads
- Give people more of a reason to click through from your feed to your site, (i.e feedflare)

Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus Inc.

She is giving a case study. She has client who uses RSS for news items. So she said, Google thinks it is a blog. It seems like a hosted news page, that allows you to easy add content, that is RSS enabled. She showed rankings for Google Blog search, related blogs. More examples of how the links work, nothing major here. She shows results in stats, rankings and links. Full case study and more case studies, if you want them, give her your card.

Greg Jarboe from SEO PR is last up.

Greg drops me a live note... He then asks some Qs about how quickly it takes to get indexed. He will share a case study on getting blogs indexed.

StubHub case study. FYI, they don't sell tickets. Someone else sells them, but not StubHub. They wanted to create 15 blogs around the issues for fans, on ticket sales. There may be small audiences in your corporate blog, but there are lot more people interested in your news in your industry. Greg set up "news objectives" for each blog. What can they do that is unique? News, perspective, etc? By focusing on the content, you begin to build an interesting relationship with your readers.

They did a stock market analysis on the value of tickets for sale for concerts and events over time, up until that event. This is useful info, that is unique. So they did a ton of keyword research on what people were interested in. They researched what is important to the friend.

They tried new tools like who are the top bloggers, but who do they link to, who link to them. This helped them figure out who the influencers are.

He then showed the growth in rankings and traffic over 1, 2, 3 and 6 months. They saw the links increase. They got some really good links. And then eBay bought StubHub for $307 million - of course he said he cannot take credit for it, nor did he get some of the money from that - people laughed. The average price of the concert ticket sold decreased $20 per ticket year over year, due to the information out there.

Coverage provided by Lisa Barone for Bruce Clay.

Rebecca Lieb is moderating this afternoon’s Meet the Search Ad Networks session featuring Doug Stotland (Microsoft adCenter), Stewart Easterby (Yahoo), John Kannapell (AOL), James Speer (Ask.com) and Brian Schmidt (Google). Now that representatives from all the engines present and I have a tummy full of falafel (thanks for lunch, Tamar!), I say let’s go!

Up first is Stewart Easterby. Everyone say hi to Stewart.

Stewart gives us a quick Yahoo update and says that Panama was the worst kept code name in the entire world. Heh.

He notes that the buzz around Panama started about a year ago and assures the audience that Yahoo is on pace to successfully move all of its advertisers over to the new platform. Early feedback is very positive, with users really enjoying the geo-targeting features, shares of clicks forecasting (can see potential bids and positions), and the signup process.

Stewart talks about some recent brand advocate research. A brand advocate is a customer who really loves a specific brand, but I’m sure you could probably figure that out yourself. Anyway, Yahoo conducted a survey and found that 87 percent of brand advocates search several times a week or more, 75 percent regularly use social media, and 2 in 3 social media users are brand advocates and highly engaged. I’m not sure what that has to do with paid search, but okay! Stats are delicious.

Stewart leaves his stat talk to remind us that Reggie Davis was recently appointed to VP of Marketplace Quality. He says that Yahoo is 100 percent dedicated to ensuring quality across all of their listings. And for the first time Yahoo is revealing how many clicks they remove on a regular basis before advertisers are charged. The discount rate is 12-15 percent and that’s across the entire Yahoo network.

Up next for Yahoo are quality-based pricing, domain blocking capabilities in 2007 and building on their new deal with Viacom which will help them deliver search and contextual advertising on Viacom’s 33 broadband sites. Cool.

Up next is Doug Stotland to give us our adCenter update.

Doug makes a very important and impressive announcement: Yesterday, Microsoft adCenter finished first in a head to head competition with Google and Yahoo…in a Rock 'Em Sock ‘Em death match. (I can confirm the validity of this statement; I’m proud to say I was there.) Doug hopes this will give advertisers some confidence in Microsoft. I think I love him.

We’re also reminded that since the last SES, adCenter has been live for 11 months. They’ve launched in the US, UK, and Canada and done over 5 releases. The feedback has been consistent:

• Clicks are very good clicks -- The clicks people get from adCenter tend to convert higher in 4 of 5 categories, according to a recent study.
• Not delivering enough clicks to advertisers – Microsoft is now running a Pilot Program to open up ads on the Microsoft Network.
• Haven’t made it easy enough for advertisers to manage campaigns – If you want to play with new, not-yet-released adCenter features, you can visit http:/beta.adcenter.microsoft.com and toy around. Features include full text search, the ability to manage campaigns Costco-style, campaign import, favorites, and improved navigation and UI.

James Speer is next to talk about Ask Sponsored Listings.

The IAC Advertising Solutions was recently created to integrate all of their media and advertising solutions. It offers a one-stop-shop for media and search advertising throughout all of IAC’s properties.

James moves on to ASL and says its best feature is the standardization of its traffic. All of Ask’s publisher partners are actively monitored to ensure CPCs, conversion rates, and CPAs.

To ensure ASL advertisers get even distribution through the day, Ask calculates pacing factors which can be adjusted at the request of an advertiser. New campaigns are conservatively defaulted to a pacing factor of 50 percent. The lower the budget to spend ratio, the higher the pacing factor. The objective is to slowly move pacing up/down depending on search levels.

In Q2, 2007 Ask is introducing referrer blocking to the ASL console so that advertisers can decide where their ads are displayed. How does it work, you ask?

• Advertisers review their click logs to determine whit sites are driving down campaign CPA metrics
• Important data points include: date, keyword, clicks, conversions, and referrer
• Log into your ASL account and add the refers to be blocked

Brian Schmidt is up next and he’s here to talk about vision. Sweet.

Google believes they’re in the connection business. They connect consumers with what they’re looking for and connect advertisers with the customers they’re looking for. They do this through the three-tiered Google platform:

• Search Solutions
• Content Network
• Web Utilities & Other Programs

Google is working to give advertisers more control over their ad campaigns by launching tools like Google Web site Optimizer, pay per action ads (PPA) and CPC Site-Targeting.

Other things Google is working on:

• Google Audio Ads: bringing efficiency, relevancy and accountability to radio advertising. Audio ads will be at scale, targeted, efficient, inclusive and measurable

• Google Print Ads: Web-enabled marketplace for buyers and sellers of newspaper ads covering the top DMAs.
  

Next up is John Kannapell from AOL who says AOL’s Advertising Network is thriving.

AOL Search keeps users engaged, brings them back and enables high quality ad opportunities. (No, don’t laugh; he said that with a straight face). Their goal is to be accurate, more complete and more convenient.

AOL Search Marketplace allows advertisers to really focus their message to AOL users and give them more control. It also helps to increase ROI. What this does for AOL is bring an end to end solution. Users get:

• AOL-branded version of relevant components of the Google AdWords system
• Sponsored Links specifically on select AOL properties to select advertisers
• AOL’s new system offers advertisers the best of breed functionality, features and reporting that is used in Google’s AdWords system for text-based ads.

AOL Search Trademark Layer is the most prominent placement on the AOL search page. It appears above both the sponsored links and Web search results. There are four clickable elements.

Next came Q&A with was by far the most amusing part of the sessions thanks to some quirky mics and Brian’s (Google) inability to hear anyone in the audience. Heh, good times, good times.

The best question was posed by Rebecca Lieb, who dared the networks to answer one important question: Why should we spend with your network? The engines went round-robin to answer.

• Microsoft adCenter: Two reasons: These are the highest quality converting clicks and there are things you can learn and do on adCenter in terms of understanding your audience that you can take to apply to all your campaigns.
• Yahoo: The reach of the network, the quality of traffic, ease of use of our interface and the quality of support.
• AOL: Sends consistent message. Building a comprehensive solution to build your brand.
• Ask: We can deliver incremental conversions for the same CPAs. It’s an incremental buy. We have lower spend points established. Take the heavy lifting off your plate.
• Google: Reach, innovation and options, support and usability.

One advertiser asked the engines’ representatives how they can incorporate search ads in video.

Brian of Google responded that there are existing opportunities to use or leverage Google’s video marketplace. Obviously, Google believes that online video is a growing market, but they’re not sure about the right way to do it right now. They’ve been careful to put the user first and have been cautious not to damage the brand of YouTube.

I can’t help but think Googler’s answer questions far better than any other search engine rep. Maybe because they admit that they don’t know everything and that they’re okay with that. Googler’s are awesome.

And that’s it. Consider yourself updated on all the search marketing networks.

This session covers search engine writing and keyword usage in the copy, presented by Heather Lloyd Martin and Jill Whalen.

Heather Lloyd Martin speaks first. She discusses her overview. First, she will use a case study about how SEO copywriting boosted profits of a company. Then, she discusses best practices, and finally, she will discuss how to overcome challenges.

Case study: AmsterdamEscape.com.
She noticed: "Everytime I look for something in Amsterdam, you have something ranked!" How do you do that? It's a highly competitive marketplace.

At first, a "bad" SEO created duplicate content but were banned from Google. They then spent $4,000 on AdWords to keep visibility. This was a considerable amount of money for them.

They hired a short-term consultant who discovered the duplicate content. The consultant developer/SEO made great content and then filed for reinclusion.

They added value-added content pages. AmsterdamEscape is about apartments in Amsterdam, but they created other pages about what people like in Amsterdam - nightlife in Amsterdam, Amsterdam do's and don'ts. This keeps visitors at the site for a long time. They started ranking for Amsterdam nightlife, Amsterdam shopping, Amsterdam red light district, Amsterdam apartments, etc. Furthermore, there were other rankings for long-tail keywords too. This is success from a content perspective.

The result = the company cancelled AdWords and saved $48,000 a year. (Not every company should do this -- but for this company, this represented a huge amount of savings.) If you are spending on PPC and you have organic listings, this can definitely boost your visits.

Best practice rundown: Don't do the easy bake method for copywriting where you stick in key phrases and then hope that it is done. Every word you write is highly important to the tone and feel and conversion metric. So you don't want to sound spammy -- visitors who come to this site will see it as keyphrase stuffing. It is not content creation.

There are certain things to avoid or look for when writing content:

#5 - lack of keyphrase focus. You need to look at your page and see if your keyphrase is there in text, not graphics. If you're not positioning in the SERPs, make sure those key phrases exist on the page!

#4 - short, stubby copy. People who write for catalogs write in a certain way. But writing online content is different. You can control everything you say with content. Increase your usability with around 250 words per page (which is a sweet spot). There are ways to structure pages so that they are not scary. Example: 220 words with white space might be good - not hard to read. You can put a complete explanation of what you have to offer on several pages - longer copy is not a bad thing. Palm.com is a good example of a site that breaks it down into several pages.

You should have 2-3 keyphrases throughout your copy. The first paragraph is important for marketing to draw your users into the content.

How to structure the page? Main body text copy, tp to bottom. Headlines and subheadlines - benefit statement next to a keyphrase. Call to action links (hyperlinks) - especially important in internal linking structure. SEO copywriting makes your writing more specific. It does not destroy it.

#3 - content doesn't convert. People are hitting pages and leaving them. Should you edit this phrase for keyphrases? Probably not. At this point, if your page doesn't convert, rewrite it. You can't take something that isn't doing so well to dress it up.

#2 - you want clickable descriptions on the SERP. The cruel thing is that Google and other engines don't display our carefully written meta description. SERPs display a snippet of text around search query. There is a workaround - hint - putting benefit statements near your main keyphrases, especially your first instance. Your description will boost your benefits. The first opportunity for conversion is on the SERPs, so you should have a good description.

#1 - untantalizing titles. Titles, from a marketing prospective, are nothing but headlines. The better the title, the better you can boost your rankings. Titles can be really important. She says that she had a client whose title was revised alone and that ranked a previously unranked site to the top 10.

Example: Radar detector sale - save up to 60% -- that's exactly what the user wants, and it's on sale!

Titles should be unique to every page. Make it read like a compelling headline. Include keyphrases. DOn't necessarily target company name unless you are a big brand (because you already have trust). Each title should be 50-75 with spaces.

In SEO copywriting, it's okay to take baby steps in your organization.
* For fast success, try editing pages that are not crucial for conversions and tweak the title to reflect keyphrase focus. Another tip is to try adding headlines and subheadlines to text (this can add keyphrases and hyperlinks). Adding a hyperlink to another related page can boost that page's ranking.
* See if the web developer department can dynamically generate titles that can be tweaked later.
* Hand-create titles as much as you possibly can on your most important conversion pages. This can be a gradual process.
* Unless you are a big brand with a lot of links, chances are your copy will not position. Therefore, you should look for creating new content for your product to differentiate the content. This makes you more competitive.
* Rewrite your main conversion pages first and figure out a gradual strategy, and then tweak the title accordingly for maximum power.
* Don't be afraid to provide lots of information - and you shouldn't feel afraid of splitting this into different pages. The cool thing is: the more content, the more opportunities your site has to position for different keyphrases.

What content can you write? You can write article pages, FAQ pages, how-to pages, blogs. The richer that your site is, then you really do become an authority hub. Even e-commerce sites can be hybrid sites - you sell a product but you also have a lot of information in your site that is geared toward the target audience. People may not find you for the digital camera you are selling, but they will find you for the article that says "how to buy a digital camera."

Smart SEO copywriting closes the loop between the engines and your offer - the right approach is critical. You can do this for your own site and you can babystep it. Do a couple pages a month; the rankings will slowly build.

Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com speaks next. She will provide editing strategies and opportunities.

Remember that keywords are the key. Focus on what people are searching for. That is "guinea pig" SEO. Do keyword research. Optimize for real words that people are searching for.

Your homepage can have general phrases - what your business is about. On your inner pages, you should be specific. Every page should be written well because they are gateways to other pages on your site.

Keyword-rich content is crucial: 1/3 of SEO. Don't forget title tags, links, crawler-friendly design, etc. If you have been around for a long time and have built up links, this may help you and will stick. Newer content will just require you to focus on linking again.

Example: Cosmetic Dentistry page. It looks fine, but Google's cache shows nothing. You can view the text cache of the site to see what text Google sees.

Placing keyword phrases into copy: No text graphics, user comes first, descriptive, location is important in geotargeting, keyword phrases (not just keywords), and plurals, tenses, suffixes, etc.

Search Engines don't read graphics (as in the cosmetic dentistry page). You can use ALT tags. You should watch out when you use a WYSIWYG editor because sometimes the copy may not show in the final page. Flash is not readable by the engines. Comment tags are not helpful - they aren't hurtful but they do nothing for you. PDFs are indexable and are technically like graphics; search engines do convert them to HTML text. You can optimize PDFs.

Turn text images into real text and watch out for graphic headlines. Do stuff with CSS and other tactics that can be read by engines.

Users come first. Write content that makes sense to people. Don't sprinkle keyword phrases - temporarily this might help you but your users will wonder what "crazy drugs you're on" (the crowd laughs).

Add keyword phrases that make sense. E.g. replace "Frequently Asked Questions" with "Frequently Asked Questions about Gastric Bypass Surgery, Stomach Stapling, etc." This technique is "thinking like a reporter." Ask who? what? where? Ask questions as you're writing them and be descriptive.

The simplest trick is to be descriptive. Don't use terms like "Our team" or "Our service." Use something like "Our search marketing team" or "Our event planning service." Try, instead of "if you'd like to contact us, fill out this brief form online" -> "if you'd like to contact us for help with your next meeting planning, fill out our special event planning request form." Put two different phrases in one sentence - be creative and descriptive. Another example: "this small resort offers tone of the finest views in St. Lucia" can be turned into "this small Caribbean resort hotel offers ..." And another "with the industry changing and print providers offering..." to "with the print on-demand industry changing..."

Single words don't count. Turn them into phrases. Often times, a single words can be turned into longer keyword phrases. A quick trick is to go back to your one-word terms that are part of a longer phrase - turn these into longer phrase or phrases. You can optimize your page for more than 2-3 phrases. Sometimes 5-6 phrases is enough to help you rank for them too.

Keyword: Invest. Do keyword research - small cap investing, real estate investing, online investing, invest in stock. See where these longer phrases make sense to substitute into pages.

Keyword: Marketing. Do keyword research and see what fits better: Internet marketing strategy, marketing your business, opt-in email marketing, marketing program.

Keyword: Balloons. Keyword research: inflatable advertising balloons, outdoor advertising balloons, promotional balloons, promotional helium balloons.

Don't push these words in. Make sure they sound right in your copy. If it doesn't make sense to turn this word into a larger phrase, don't.

If you're local (e.g. doctor, dentist, lawyer), you want people to find you in the same geographical area. You need to make sure your website is clear about your location for lots of reasons. Search engines can categorize you based on your local phrases. Instead of "our office," say "Our NYC office," "New York City barber," "cosmetic dentist in Manhattan."

Before - fully customized packages. Discounts and coupons to more than 100 shops and attractions.
After - fully customized New York City Travel packages. Discount and coupons to more than 100 shops and attractions in the Manhattan area.

You don't have to use the same phrase again and again. Use plural, past tenses, suffixes. Don't rely on search engines for "stemming." Search engines understand the plural but you should do it yourself. It avoids repetition.

People should see "art lesson" and "art lessons" - example - 1) take each art lession when you have time. 2) Personal critiques of your art lessons.

Words with multiple spellings.
- Forklift or fork lift
- work place safety vs. workplace safety
- colocation vs. co-location vs. collocation
- webcam vs. webcam
Advice: Use all these forms to get all the traffic, but focus on these other spellings on different pages. It looks like a typo if it's "misspelled" in multiple spots on one page.

Bonus phrases: not as targeted but are descriptive, still relevant, and might be searched upon.

Example: "New York's finest dining establishments" changed to "New York City restaurants" - maybe these people are not looking to rank for NYC restaurants but they can add ads for NYC restaurants on their page!

She shows us a page called the epitome of no copy. Someone who looks at the website and won't know what it is. People who write for websites might think along the lines of a brochure, but this is not the case when people find a site from a search engine.

Good web writing matters! It can help bring extremely targeted visitors, and then converts them into customers. It's worth paying copywriters what they're asking.

Andrew Goodman kicks of the session by mentioning that the audience is most likely knowledgeable about paid search already and looking for more a source of more quality traffic. He passes onto Chris Bowler who starts by surveying the room to get an idea of the existing contextual knowledge in the room.

What is Contextual Targeting? Displaying advertising on a third-party website which is used by your target consumer market. Google offers content targeting across hundreds of top partners such as About.com, as well as many thousands of AdSense publishers. They offer several different forms of content targeting including a new Cost Per Action initiative, which is currently in Beta testing. Advertisers are demanding performance-based deals to make campaigns more cost effective and reducing risk. Yahoo also has a partner network for contextual ads, although it’s much smaller than Google's. Their options include contextual, keyword and behavioural content matching - as well as Run of Network. MSN has a contextual network pilot program, although there's little data about its status or release date yet. While search traffic has matured and stabilised, content networks continue to grow and also offer cheaper CPCs. Content targeting can differ a lot between different verticals - finance seems to perform poorly whilst retail advertising works very well. Networks are starting to offer formats other than just text now, with some of them trialling video and graphical ads.

Anton from Acronym Media specialises in keyword driven marketing. Keywords tell you a lot about a potential customer, so you must look at the keywords they're using and make sure that you're targeting them correctly. The CPC model offers a lower risk way of experimenting with campaigns. Contextual advertising is perfect for brand awareness as it's instant and has broad coverage. It extends an online marketing campaign beyond the search box and gets around the issue of a lack of search inventory. It should be managed and monitored separately from a search campaign due to their differences. Utilise keyword data from search and other online advertising information in order to get the best possible results. Remember to use negative matching in order to avoid damaging your brand by advertising next to questionable content. It can be used for damage control as well though, when people blog or write about something negative regarding your company you may be able to advertise your response next to these pages. Check your referral logs to avoid poor quality sites and try to track this back to conversion rates per publisher. Using fewer keywords in each ad group can allow for more granular tracking and monitoring. Publishers can use multiple ad spaces on their site, so make sure that your site is positioned well. Top position is important for contextual advertising as well. CTR is not taken into account on contextual networks - you can bid as low as you like and your keywords will not get disabled like with PPC quality scores. Click fraud happens and is more likely with contextual ads so it's important to look closely at your traffic and record information such as IP addresses in order to catch abusers and report them. Choosing the right channels is crucial, so investigate your options.

Don Steele from Comedy Central uses contextual advertising to promote comedycentral.com, which promotes their TV shows as well as generating traffic for their own advertising inventory. You need to read and understand what people are saying when they mention your brands so that you can understand the words and terms that they use. Contextual banner ads offer a great alternative to buying display inventory, reaching a much wider group of sites that may not be known or accessible otherwise. Be flexible and fluid with your campaign; get ready to catch traffic from new interests e.g. an upcoming guest on The Daily Show.

Note: Please excuse typos, this coverage is provided live and without much editing, due to the timeliness of the coverage...

Converting Visitors into Buyers

Wed. April 11, 2007, 1:30pm
Moderator: Alan Dick (AD), Gen. Mgr Vintage Tub and Bath

Speakers:
Bryan Eisenberg (BE), Future Now
Michael Sack (MS), Idearc Media Corp

AD:
Introduces BE

BE:
Fiddles with mike. Asks how many have read Call to Action. 7 tips to boost conversation rates.
Overstock.com was doing 1/2 billion a year. One page was costing them 7000 a day. 91.8% abandonment page, number visited page. Changed image and overnight, increased 5% sales. Must understand why and what you test. Once you do SEO, then what? Then you move them through funnel. Ave 2.4% conversation rates. No change, despite changes in procedures.

Is it functional.
Is it accessible?
Is it user friendly?
Is it intuitive? Does it feel natural? Doesn't make me think?
Do people really want and understand what they are buying? Persuasion.

How many of you would love a high performance site? How many of you work for companies that are overstaffed? There's a difference between what we want and what we have. It's never about what but why. A computer can never tell you how much you could have sold. It tells you how the last dime you made.

Who are we trying to persuade to take action?
What action, what page to test, knows your profiles, and how does they buy, understand their motivations: methodical, spontaneous, humanistic, and competitive. Create pages ppc ads emails and ads that drive prospects to your pages. Do A/B split testing. Before and after.

Test using a link or a button. Test your top 5 high bounce rate, Top five high exit rate. Products tell a story. Shows examples of imges that tell a story. Downloads - shows examples of how many ways show it and test which converts.

Shows pics of beans. Ordered beans converts best for methodical people. Scattered beans no. Test headlines. Test fractions. Test asking questions. Test "We: language. Try the WeWe calculator at FutureNow. (audience laughs) Test call to action buttons. Get them to click. Shows examples of different ways of doing buttons. Don't copy from others without testing your versions. Learn more changed to Help me is an example of better convert label. Little things have a huge impact. Let them know you value privacy. Shopping cart? Show privacy policy when they add to add. Sometimes increasing the font size of a phone number can increase convert.

How many of you like "Submit"? (aud laughs) Be careful of the words you use. Don't waste people's time. Create low bandwidth images for fast load time. Does your site stink? Are you providing relevant scent? They need a "smell" to know they are coming to the right place. Jared Spool studied effectiveness of trigger words. Move forward until found rule. Most traffic drops off by page 3 of a website. Did they find what they were looking for? They are losing scent.

4 types of people. People have different motivations. You can't market to them the same way. Shows an example of someone looking for product, finds it but it is not within any context to base a buying decision on. It takes a long time to find product that finally has information about the product to help her buy. Lesson is don't just present the product.

Test outside your environment. Not in-house or developers. Find users or get outside help. When planning a test, test on page and off page factors.

What is the action we want someone to take?
What does that person need to feel confident?

MS:

Gives history of company. Two sides of lifting conversations. We can always do a better job. We should be looking at 8-10 % conversion rates but we are not. Two sides: first side is outside-in. You can’t convert them if they don't come. Keywords, site side optimization, other marketing vehicles. Inside - in is homepage on in. What do you now that they are here? Conversions enhancements. Targeted delivery. Prepare your site target, traffic ,track and learn fix your cart. Do not force 19 steps to purchase.

Prepare your site. Go out and look at best sites in industry. Emulate practices. Identify conversion points but make sure you measure ALL conversions. What makes their site convert? Find benchmarks.

Get your customers to see your site content. Control the experience. Why is milk always in the back of the supermarket? Retail industry has 37% conversion rate. (offline world). Can we apply offline to online? Milk is always far away. Why? Because consultants tell us to put it there. Based on studies and behaviors. Your experience is being controlled. Why is perfume the first thing you find in some stores? There's a lot of testing. They are trying to enhance the buyer’s experience. We all have different intent, so marketing is lowest common denominator.

Homepages can be overkill. Too many links. Shows a page with 50 links - too many. Confusing navigation. This design is not good for users. It's a good directory structure. Shows K-mart site. Amazing number of links to click on. 100 plus links on the homepage, some of them redundant. Users need a fast path to what they want.

Marketers Dream. If you know Mike is walking in the store and you know milk is aisle six then you put it into aisle six. But you don't know who Mike is. How can you move the milk to where he wants it? The web is dynamic. As soon as you know who user is, you deliver what and where they want it. You need to know what door they walk in. He creates "virtual doorways" by testing landing pages. It's like testing where you put the milk. He describes behaviors in groups and how we make decisions based on this. Think about how they start at search and where they land.

Good layout, clear purpose, limited options, self id, good search -elements of good homepage. Content optimized for spiders. Make a site fit searches.

Virtual Doorways are more specific search phrases. More specific key phrases mean higher conversions and better ROI. The keywords that are more important to you may not mean as important to users. Pay attention to the behavior of your keywords during different points of the day. Calls this the "Bidding Zone". If you can plot this and understand you can improve conversions by driving traffic in at those times of days. You can decrease bidding and increase bidding at different times of the day. You can plot it. Use heat maps. Create graphs.

Target landing uniquely. Direct traffic to specific destinations. Implement test-analyze-adjust cycles. Determine best click paths. Connect search phrases to conversions. Drive people to best paths to search. He calls "Scent", "intent". You can control the intent. Use different terms like model number, compare products, and just product name. Different variations - test them. Test A/B/C. Showed a product page with 3 versions. The one with more images of product was tested to convert best.

Some landing pages can increase conversions by 200%. Keep testing and track results. Google Analytics is a free tool to try. Must be able to track keywords. Be able to see click-thru from search to conversion. Be able to track direct and deferred conversions. Associate cost per click with transaction. Track offline sales. Search stack and attribution is the converting search stack and how it converts. Sometimes there several searches needed to narrow down.

Elements of a good cart
Speed. Make the cart fast.
Few steps. Privacy. Make sure people know where they are in the process.

Inventory and shipping - accurate inventory, and shipping avail, tell people where they are going to get it, no hidden charges, let them safe carts. Make cart a gift for other people. Capture email address prevents - can we save the cart for you, how to get them back? Be nice. Handle errors gracefully. NO RED. No surprises.

Bought a headset for $12.99 plus 9.00 ship plus 5.95 handling fee. Cause for abandonment because fees were more than the price of the product.

This room is PACKED, I feel like I am a rock concert there are so many people in here. It is an obvious testament to the interest in duplicate content issues.

Shari Thurow is first up to talk about the issues and says that they all agree with each other and here to share various outlooks on the same topic. She put ups a slide and says she will show 5 ways search engine detect duplicate content. What is duplicate content, the definition is unclear. A duplicate can be a replica of exact syntactic terms and sequence of terms, with or without formatting differences. The problem is a single formmating change such as CSS. Search engine don’t like redundant content in their indexes because it slows the information retrieval process and it degrades the search results. Searches rarely wish to see duplicate content in the search results. Search engine use clustering to limit each represented web site to one to two results. She shows an example of clustering. The other search engines do is that they also filter out duplicate content in news section. She gives the example of BMW getting banned from Google News.

Shari says that search engines look at content properties such as boilerplate stripping/removal. A boilerplate is a section of HTML code that is common to many different documents. She says they look for a unqiue fingerprint and heavy html density. Collection and filtering happens first. Indexing is one thing and adding to te index is another thing. Another item that search engine looks at is linkage properties. If the linkage properties are too similar. Press releases are a concern she says. Extermal third party links going to PRWEB and the National Cancer site. They are different and not the same. She loves Yahoo site explorer, a big groupie apparently. The other thing search engines are looking for is content evolution. In general is 65% of web content will not change on a weekly basis. 0.8% of web content will change completely every one to two weeks. Search engine are also looking at host name resolution. Many host names will resolve to the same web servers. Search engines are seeing geninue redundant content and that which is not. The last is a shingle comparison, every web document has a unique signature or fingerprint example.

She gives the example of a shingle comparison and gives an example of a word set. She gives three examples with the same site but slightly diffent product descriptions. The content is similar but varies in placement. She recommends finding the page with the highest converting rate lets Google spider it, and nofollow or robots.txt pages with similar content. Robots meta-tags is a good way to manage this. Some duplicate content is consistent spam and some is not. She puts up a university page (Norwich). This is a good site she says but indeed it is spam. Its stumped Danny Sullivan. She found a hallway page or a page with links to many other doorway pages. Universities do spam. Some duplicate content is copyright infringement. These are things such as scraper sites and link farms. You can also use DMCA reporting. Shari also recommends to register your copyright. Its gives you the keys to the courthouse so to say.

Mikkel deMib Svenden is up second. He says there is a million ways you can create duplicate content problems but he is going to highlight the popular ways. Some sites resolve both to www and non-www. Most engines have a problem with this, but they are getting smart to the fact they are the same site. There may not be an issue with indexing, but are you leveraging the value of linking the best way. He recommends using picking one way to use www or non-www. Session ids are also a problem, he puts up an example of a site that had the same page spidered 200,000 versions of that page. This is a resource problems for the engines. Dump all session information in a cookie for all users or identify spiders and strip the session ID for them only. IN any case: deal with it. He mentions using Wordpress and using permalinks. He says don’t leave the engines to decide which url is supposed to be used. The solution is to 301 the non official version of the url to the official url. For example http://www.domain.com/sessionid?=33 to http://www.domain.com/this-url.

He says you can user server header check to look at the various responses you get to diagnose any problems. The header check should show a 301 redirect if you did it properly for the non-official url to the official url. He next gives an example of Many-to-one in forums. He puts up a search engine watch.com issue. Its not a problem for the site right now because you have to register and login in. But when somebody links to this url it can create a problem and a way in for the search engine spider. The solution for the forum example is to detect for bots and redirect them to the official urls.

Breadcrumb navigation can also be an issue. The problem is a when you use breadcrumbs that reflect the url structure of the site. He recommends having a product or article in on physical location. Don’t put multiple types of urls in the breadcrumbs. He last pearl of wisdom don’t ever leave the search engines to make decisions for you. There are a couple ways they can approach the website and usually it’s the wrong way.

Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink. Why is duplicate content a problem? Because they said so. They are clear on what you should and should not do. What happens when you have a site in two different languages? Internationally generally is OK – Google identifies user by IP. But US is a single region and Google aims to return only on result for a set of content. You need one canonical domain and link all internal pages on the site to it. Exclude landing pages for tracking from search engines using robots.txt. Use 302 redirects ONLY for content that is going to change and only for temporary content.

Allan Dick, Vintage Tub and Bath - Moderator

Speakers:
Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placements, Inc.
Laura Thieme President of Biz Research

Q&A
Akin Arikan, Unica
John Marshall, Click Tracks
Chris Knoch, Omniture
Brett Crosby, Google Analytics
Barry Parshall, WebTrends

Laura Thieme
Search Marketing Without Web Analytics – Its all about proving value
Conversation become more interesting web analytics

Is Search Delivering -- Leads, Sales (At loss or at profits?)

Strong analytics – can you track to the product and keyword data?
Is the data accurate

Key Performance Indicators -- Impressions, CTR, Average CPC

Advanced KPI’s
Dissecting ROI & ROAS
Average Cost Per Order
Cost Per Action
Gross Profit
True Customer Acquisition Cost

Tracking Organic vs. Paid
Without tracking strings that are updated and accurate this report in your analysis

Web Analytics – ROAS Analytics
Provide more information than visibility report
Provide more than just traffic reports

“Managing Customers as Investments”
What is your acceptable customer acquisition cost?
You need to know this to truly understand your costs acoss all channels

How can you track?
Visibility, Spider Activity, etc.
Recommend Web Position Gold to help track rankings

Why Ranking Reports Matter?
Typically an issue when you‘re getting ready to redesigning , keyword embed, or otherwise changing URLs in anyway.
Make sure 301s are in place

When to run reports – 1 and 15th of the month

Tracking Spider/Robot Activity – make sure that you understand how long it takes the spiders to go through your site

Launching a new site?
Her experience was that MSN first to index, Google first to visit. Took weeks for Google to have her “live”

NetTracker – very easy to understand
Path analysis is great
Better is the funnel analysis

Click Tracks Pro – shows the power of certain pages and content over others

Blogs can change your traffic demographic entirely
May increase your visibility in other ways
Blogs can generate leads

Cross Segment Performance
Make sure you select 50 or more keywords

Web Analytics is extremely time consuming
Should be broken out, different than SEO, SEM

Products: Omniture, CoreMetrics, WebTrends, Hibox, Nettracker, Click Tracks, Google Analytics

This influences what customers think
Latency tools are very important

No tracking tool will do with everything, you might need to use 2 or 3
SEM/SEO people do not make the best analytics people

Stacy Williams – Prominent Placement Corporation
Basic Concepts – those need to be understood before your proceed
Why should you measure – SEM is strategy and planning
Web analytics is like the backend to your online marketing plan
What should you measure?
B2C vs B2B
Big Brand vs. the Boutique
Business Goals
It’s all relative to you
You should ask yourself these questions
What do you really want to know?
What will we do with the information?
Have a clear understanding of your company or project goals
Don’t let the data hold you down, don’t get stuck inside of the really minute stuff
Don’t get tied up in what your competitors are doing
Where do I start?
Start small – do little and learn from it
Set a time to look at your data reports
Avoid analysis paralysis
Maintain a diary – to help you track metrics over time to see seasonality
Create a checklist
Atlanta Childern’s Shelter
Online visibility was non-existing
Goals: build awareness, acquisition of quality prospects who would donate money, goods a nd time to the shelter
Market Leap’s free tool to help see market saturation page was use
Showed that holidays were big time for them with volunteers and donations

Minimize the “spazz factor”
Bounce Rate –
you can be high because you “accidentally” rank for something you shouldn’t
Using it as a rolodex (contact information)
You cannot make your site invisible for words you don’t not want to come up with in organic
Outside Factors
There are thing you can control
There are things you can’t control (seasonality)
If you are doing marketing internationally be aware of the culture and their holidays
In lieu of reporting – seek discovery – tell a story
Don’t waste time on measures that don’t tell you much

Liana “Li” Evans is the Search Marketing Manager that is responsible for all SEO, Social Media, and WoMM at Commerce360. Li also is the owner, editor and chief writer of SearchMarketingGurus.com.

Danny opens the session with welcomes, ask for a hand survey on a number of “who uses this and that” type things and then announces his kids are here with him and in the room. I came in right as things were to start (with Dan Thies) and so we had to sit in the back of the room.

There are many ways to be listed in the search engines. Everyone would like to be #1 but we know that isn’t going to be the case. Google has free listings, or what we refer to as organic and editorial/paid listings. The paid listings are on the right side of the screen. Local listings has maps, directions and telephone numbers.

News and local search results are taking the number one and two spots in some searches lately, even if you don’t want to see them they popup. Says google is trying to showcase their local engine by putting the results in the organic serp space since people apparantely aren’t clicking those links off their main search page.

Why do they call it vertical search? Because the info is narrowed down to one slice of information. Free listings come from the search engines crawling the Web.

Don’t depend on free listings. It’s best to mix things up and have free and paid searchc listings (meaning – work the organic side and pay for ads). When you do, write a clear and concise call to action, know your message.

Use the top 10 phrases for your site and don’t use single keywords, use at least two words. If you don’t have the time or money to do the research for your terms, go with your gut. You know your business.

Where can you go to do research for your keywords?

Danny stops and does joke about his kids who now head out of the room. They’ve had enough of dad.

So – the research tools…. Use Wordtracker, Yahoo keyword tools etc. You can’t guess at everything people are searching for but you should have good content on different topics using html text. That means if you can cut and paste it, the engines can read it.

Ideally have a page or section with real content on it for each key term you’re going after. Hits for less important or long tail terms add up.

Danny explains process behind the long tail. Sometimes the less popular terms end up bringing in far more targeted traffic and end up equaling more searches than popular terms. He puts up a chart that shows the hits for primary keyword terms, and then the sum of all the long tail searches and surprisingly, the long tail terms produce more traffice.

The reality is, people searching for something specific don’t enter your site through the main dot com but through an interior page. The more people you catch with long tail terms the more people will come into the site.

How crawlers work.

They follow link and read age found
Text of pages are stored in an index and when you search they are retrieved for matching text. Page content is crucial, Title is important, Design issues have an impact
Link analysis plays an important role.

Other off the page criteria may be considered such as the age of the site, clickthrough and the neighborhood a site is associated with. Crawler should find some pages naturally and they especially like to get pages with many or important links pointing at them.
Submitting may speed the listing process and may increase representation.

Danny lists free add your url list for Google, google sitemaps, yahoo msn and ask

What to submit

Submit home page and key section pages, turnaround for this could be a couple days to 2 months.

Should you deep submit? Use google sitemaps and submit a file with URLS to Yahoo.

Yahoo Slurp crawler.

Like google, yahoo has a crawler that may list your pages for free
Like all crawler it may not find and include everything so yahoo also has paid inclusion program. Danny makes joke about bots having cute names.

What is paid inclusion?
A submission program that guarantees your pages will be mixed into the free listings and revisited on a regular basis. Only Yahoo does this.

Why should you do paid inclusuion? Because you want to have pages added right away, you have dynamic pages or not all were picked up. Paid inclusion is definitely something you want to do if you have a product database.

Ground floor content.

Article was written by Debra Mastaler at Alliance Link

Continue reading "Introduction to Search Marketing"

This session is Link Building: The Basics, and is presented by Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link and Detlev Johnson, who will be assisting Debra because Eric Ward's wife is giving birth this morning! (Congratulations Eric!) Mike Grehan, who was supposed to attend, is also not here because of a loss in his immediate family. You can send condolences through his website at mikegrehan.com.

This session covers: why links are valuable (definitions and concepts), link spam and what to avoid, and link tools and tactics.

As visitors, we need links to go from one page to another. Links are used for traffic and organic results. All of the search engines have the same function - you type in a term and you get a relevant query. The algorithm that returns the results uses a variety of components. Link popularity is one of the largest factors in determining rank. Link popularity = measure of quantity and quality of links. All the major search engines use link popularity in some format. It's considered an off-page factor because the value is determined by another page. If the link sits on your page, it's content.

Link popularity: quantity of links, quality/authority, relevance of linking sites, and anchor text.

What is quantity factor? It's not necessarily about quantity anymore. It's more about quality. You need a lot of links from quality sites to rank well. What is an authority site? It is a site that ranks well. They are linked to by other quality sites, they are well-known in their circle, etc. This happens for a reason - co-citation process that exists on the web. They typically have higher PageRank scores. (Disclaimer: This isn't definitively the way it has to be. It changes all the time.)

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm written by Larry Page as a way to get Google to improve the rankings. When it was created initially in 98, it was based on the quantity of links. The PR algorithm has changed significantly since it was written. Pages that ranked well also had higher PR scores back in the day, but this is no longer the case. Higher PR pages don't rank well necessarily. PR is not used as strongly as it has been in the past.

The relevance factor behind link popularity - search engines read words around anchor text and throughout the page looking for on-topic and subject relevance. They want sites relevant to the query and thematically related.

Anchor text indicates the subject page that the link is pointing to. A link that says "Click Here" does not help as much as "Click here for Snow Tires." People and search engines read the words in the link.

Tip: I have found that I rank higher when anchor text links that are used on other sites linked to my sites that use the same text as titles or file names.

PageRank is dead, Long Live Anchor Text

Does Google still use PageRank? Yes. It's still a part of the algorithm but is not as heavily emphasized. Should I use PR as a linking criteria? Pages with higher PR scores are crawled more frequently. The info in the PR toolbar is probably 6-8 months old. I would not use this as the only indicator.

Link popularity measures quality and quantity. You need links from authority sites. Anchor text should highlighy on page keyword phrases. PR has little effect on rank. Look for links from contextually relevant sites.

Are there links that you should avoid? Yes. If you're looking to build for rank, avoid the following:
- links that use rel="nofollow" (use Firefox SearchStatus tool to point out pink links = quirk.biz/searchstatus)
- other links that don't count: links in Javascript code, image links, redirected links through 3rd party sites - affiliate links and tracking codes. However, if you're an affiliate marketer, you can still pass link popularity through tools - search for Naked Links.
- It's not a good idea to be involved in a link farm. These are sites that are set up and have been developed to purposely manipulate rank.

Some of the most valuable links don't appear on websites. They appear in email-based communication (emails with over 100k subscribers). You won't get link popularity but you will get the residual effect. Don't overlook these opportunities.

Outbound links - should you link out? The only thing you lose if you don't link out is opportunity. Link out to people who mentioned you. Link back to similar industries and established sites.

TouchGraph offers a tool where you can pop in a keyword and find out who has been linking to you by term. It points out topically relevant websites.

Link out to press releases, directories, award sites, affiliation listings, associations, articles. Regarding directories - if your directory is topically relevant, link to yourself in the directory.

Linking Tools and Tactics

If you are getting links, make sure that these pages have been indexed by the search engines.

Link building takes a ton of time. Make sure you have your tactics prioritized and budget for them. Then have your resources organized.

Some of my favorite tools are:
www.marketleapcom/publinkpop - down, dirty, and quick comparison tool
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - brings back all links. The links that come back are typically brought back in the order of importance as seen by Yahoo. Yahoo has Trust Rank (whereas Google has PageRank). Bottom line is to understand that Yahoo acknowledges that there is a seed set of authority sites out there.
www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php - brings back anchor text, unique domains. You can save the results to Excel spreadsheet and it's free.
www.linktree.info - takes multiple sites and looks for recurring backlinks. It's another free site that allows you to export the results to Excel.
www.urltrends.com - both paid and free options. It brings back all the information about a site - Alexa, how many links, pages in archive.org, and what category in DMOZ the page is listed. Use it to see where your competitors are listed.

There are some paid tools:
SEOElite ($170)
Caphyon Advance Link Manager ($149) - www.advancedlinkmanager.com/download.html - 30 day free trial.
They do a lot of compare and contrast, they do rank checks for you, etc.

You can set traps with RSS - use Google News, Yahoo News, and type in keywords. The point of this is that if you have a competitor that is in a news publication, you could always go to the news source and perhaps get the same coverage.

Tactics - Basic, tried, and true linking tactics that produce consistent and solid results: trust links, directory links, reclaimed links, reciprocal links, credibility links, just ask links, elbow grease links (time consuming that nets very solid links), article writing, press release.

Consider your tactics. Press releases don't always have lasting effects. Do foundation linking on the right sites.

People don't have a page that asks for links - "Just Ask." Debra mentions that she created a page for a client that asks for links. So far, in four years, there are 365 links. You could also offer an incentive (freebies). Requesting that people link using code specified helps too. (Tip: Give out free T-Shirts.)

Credibility Links - you can secure links from industry credible sources, such as the [virtual] chamber of commerce or associations (www.ipl.org/div/aon: The Internet Public Library links clubs, military organizations, etc.). You can join these offline and online.

Elbow Grease Links - soloseo.com/tools/linksearch.html?keyword=your+keyword+here

Directories - general and niche, RSS, article, podcast, blogs, wikis.
www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories/General_Directories
www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php - breaks down the general directories

Debra says that she has been asked whether the Yahoo! Directory is worth the link but says that it is completely credible. It is $300/year. It is a good link especially if you're relatively new to this.

Is DMOZ worth the trouble? Yes. They are an AOL search partner, Google gets its directory results. You can get a lot of different relevant page links using DMOZ.

Other notes about directories -
Avoid directories hosting excessive search engine ads.
Check robots.txt and nofollow links.

Reclaiming links - there's a thought process that links that have been around for quite some time could be revised wordwise. It can work better for you to reword some of these anchor text links after a good amount of time.

Finding authority sites -
www.langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html
Using a specific term, you can see the top links on Google and Yahoo and how they are ranking. If there is commonality between the two, you will want to have the link from it.

Reciprocal links - do search engines devalue this tactic? Yes and no. If you only use reciprocal linking (exclusively) in link building, you may not be successful. Avoid excessive reciprocal links. Swapping links is great because you control what the link says. Not all sites have the opportunity to swap links.

Press Release Submission Services -
www.prnewswire.com
www.i-newswire.com/submit.php
home.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?front_door=true
www.ereleases.com/submit.html
prweb.com
These are sites that take a press release that you have written and send these to other publication online. They are all paid services (which can help - there is tracking capability in some of these press releases).

Media contacts in your niche - traditional venues: Gebbie Press and Burrelles Luce. You can also go to topix.net, which breaks down sources into category and geographic location. It pulls up all of the sites that have press information in them. Another one is cyberjournalist.net and Yahoo news.

Article Writing - become an authority. Everyone is looking for content. This is why this is a very popular tactic. If you are a specialist in a specific area, people will come after you for information. There is a list of article directories at www.arcanweb.com/resources/article-directories.html. Other tips include: creating a lens on Squidoo and link out to the article resource center on your site.

Buying Links - there are two ways to buy links. You can go through brokers or do it yourself. Make sure that your link stands out. Try to stay out of paid links where "paid links" is obvious. Search for blogs (which can be less expensive for you). AddThis.com - use social site icons and add these to your articles.

Ask anyone of the panelists and they will tell you domains are hot right now. There is a lot of interest in this sector for many obvious reasons. At one point you will probably need a domain to establish a presence online or if you dare squat on someone else’s presence. So it makes sense that at search conference highlighting some of the issues in this market is a good idea. This particular session is new for New York and one I have covered before last year. It is an information packed session dealing with all things domains and more specifically how to monetize them, type in traffic, buying and selling, and the current state of the domain private market.

Chris Sherman is moderating this session.

Monte Cahn the CEO from Moniker.com is up first to present. He stats by asking how many domains people have, 10, 100, 10,000? There are a quite a few hands still raised when he asked about who has 10,000 domains. He talks about the basics of domaining. ICANN regulates the domain industry. The original revenue sources for monetizing domains were not developed early on and it is something that has evolved tremendously. There is a 850 million in annual revenue and domains sales. Its predicted to reach $2 billion by 2010. He talks about several companies that own quite a few domain names. These large scale owners have been rising. Since last year, domains have growth 30%. A record 112 million domain names are now registered, a 30% increase in the past year. 9.4 million new domains were registered during Q3 of 2006, the third highest number of registrations ever in a single quarter. At least 100 domain sold twice between 2004 and 2006 for double their value.

So what maybe a good domain. Natural generic brands, there is a lot of search volume. They need to be easy to remember, clear concise and descriptive. Sometimes they can be commercially oriented. It also matters what industry segment is hot or cold at the moment. Are the domains visually pleasing? Is there any existing type in traffic, or backlinks. Mistypes are all popular.

So how do domains generate revenue? Domain traffic (direct navigation) is ad revenue from CPC, CPA, CPM, selling traffic directly to companies or advertisers. Domain development individually or in partnership domain owners add content, diversify advertising and build networks. You can also vertical dominance to monopolize groups of domain names in category verticals. Domainance means more power and revenue. Domains for the first time are not leveraged value for financing/loans, charitable donations/tax deductions. He next goes into a lot of stats. He says that 70 percent of internet surfers use direct navigation, up 53% from four years ago. The rest use search engines. Direct navigation is a $1 billion business by 2007, on track to surpass 1.2 billion.

He next puts up a landing page from Fabulous.com and describes the type of landing page for one click landing. He also shows an example of 2 click landing pages. He says there is a correlation between search volume and type in traffic. He says that a lot of people are typing domain names into search engines with the extension. This is a reverse of a direct type in. Monte goes into examples what people are paying for domains.

There are many ways to get a domain portfolio started. The barrier of entry is low. It does take moderate capital, intelligence, patience and time. There are a lot of aftermarket websites, whois, search databases, and trademark exclusion tools. He says it’s a little late in the game but definitely not dead.

Jon Lisbin from PointIt, Inc is up second. They are a search engine marketing company and wants to give a different perspective about domain parking. He asks if there is anyone that doesn’t have parking sites. Hey says that traffic from many parking is bad. There is a problem with cheats who arrange for people to click on there ads. There is also cypersquatters and domain kiting. Registers abuse the ICANN 5 day holding period to test domains. He explains that traffic from sources like Sedoparking the CPA is really high. He mentions that you can not opt out of Sedoparking and Oingo sites in Google Adwords search network. This is different in the content network which you can opt out, but not in the search network. The domain parking traffic is bundled together with the search network.

He next gives an example of how a parking page that has no real content buy sending a lot of traffic to his clients site. Jon gives an example of the parking page and says there is no reason anyone would want to go to this site. There was 0 conversions from these sites. His examples are pretty funny because they are clearly obvious the traffic is bad. He says that Yahoo is doing work to clean up their network. When will that happen completely, who knows. He asks why Yahoo doesn’t go after they guys who cheat the system.

Andrew Beckman is up from SearchAdnetwork and going to give a positive look at domain driven traffic. He says that you need a web analytics and or bid management system to track the traffic. He puts up an example of kids.com and what they parking page looks like. He says you can use the Google site exclusion tool to prevent your site from getting traffic from those sources. He says parked domains need to be developed a lot more such as a search box and keyword drill down need to be fine tuned. There should be content developed around these domain names.

I walk into the room, 7 minutes before air time and Vanessa Fox of Google Webmaster Central is handing out donuts. Yum! On the panel are representatives from all the major engines plus Todd Oilman Friesen and Eric from Performics. Danny Sullivan is modding up this panel. All the search engines have a big announcement, specifically Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery from Danny at Search Engine Land.

Todd Friesen walks in a minute after the official start time, but he made it. They did not start yet. Don't think we didn't notice Todd! This panel is packed. Looking forward to getting something to eat...

I guess Todd was not late. We are now scheduled to start at 10:30 not 10:15. Danny decides to hand out the remaining donuts, imported from Canada, to the audience. I could have charged my laptop another 15 minutes. Anyway, he is trying hard to sell those donuts. I learned Yahoo Canada has actually brought them with them here. Then Danny mocks that I am blogging about the donuts, but he is not mocking that I am covering that he is mocking me. So who gets the last laugh now?

Priyank Garg, Product Manager, Yahoo! Search is up first.
- Sitemaps are an XML schema to publish your site's URLs to search crawlers
- Google initiated it and Yahoo and Microsoft are joint sponsors.
- He showed a sample file, he then showed examples of the fields.
- Sitemaps rules include; the path must contain the sitemaps file, sitemaps are expected to be valid XML, all URLs must be entity escaped, all meta data are hints for crawlers and used to improve crawl.
- You can put several Sitemaps in a Sitemap index file and point in this file to all your sitemaps.

- How do you submit your sitemap to a search engine?
- Publish your sitemap and then submit to a search engine so they decided to make it better.
- Autodiscovery now is there, today (see link above)
- So now all you do is publish your sitemap, put a ointer to the sitemap and the search engine will find it.
- Ask.com has also joined in to support this standard
- Sitemaps are independent of useragent
- Provide full URL of sitemap
- There are international languages also available at sitemaps.org

Danny again mocks me! Tim Mayer comes in; so then Danny gives him attention, so the spotlight is now on him. No Matt Cutts, so attack Tim from Yahoo!

Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer, Google is next up.
The benefits of sitemaps is that it maximizes your site to search engines. A sitemap list URLs as a txt file, rss feed or XML protocol. She then gives examples of all the protocols. The benefit to search engines is that it aids the crawler to build a greater index. Sitemaps improve index freshness by helping awareness of new or frequently modified content. Sitemaps increase efficiency by helping to identify unchanged pages to prevent unnecessary crawling. So now you can get indexed through web crawl or through sitemaps submission. She quickly shows other methods into Google's vertical engines. She shares some sitemaps guidelines, similar to Yahoo's discussion. She then goes through the different files accepted, Ill skip these slides. There are sitemaps generators at code.google.com. She then shares URLs to help at Webmaster Central. She then goes through the steps to setting up a Google Webmaster Central account, she goes into this in detail, so I will take a break.

Priyank Garg, Product Manager, Yahoo! Search is back with more on Site Explorer tools that recently came out. It is now out of beta. He shows how it works, I covered this so many times in the past, so again, Ill skip. He explains you get more info when you log in and authenticate. They now accept mobile feeds in Site Explorer as of yesterday. He shows the delete URL feature and shows last crawl dates that are available to authenticated users. If you delete it by accident, you can recover. They added a "report spam" link. If you find an inlink that seems spammy, you can just click a button and all you have to do is click send. This won't hurt the inlink that you reported, directly. So you won't be associated with the link farm.

Vivek Pathak, Infrastructure Product Manager, Ask.com is now up. They are excited to be part of this. Ask.com will be looking for your files. He just explains why this is good.... He is looking forward to comments...

Nathan Buggia, Senior Product Manager, Live Search is now up also, without a presentation. He asked a few Qs. Of those people using sitemaps, how many are using txt based sitemaps"? Not so many. Atom sitemaps? not so many. XML sitemaps? Most people raised their hands. He said he is also excited by this announcement. Microsoft doesnt have a webmaster section now, they hope to roll out support over the year. Keep your eyes pealed on their blog, to see when it comes out (yea, whatever, they said that a long long time ago).

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, Performics is now up. So now you have this info, how can you use it?

- Sitemaps usually picked up within 1-2 days
- Entire sitemap is normally crawled within 3 - 14 days, average 7 days
- Small sites with low PageRank will take longer
- Also have an optimized native sitemap
- Focus the crawer on the right content by excluding redundant content, disembodied content and spammy stuff
- Use the preferred domain tool
- Include separate sitemaps for news, video and mobile content
- They either see number of indexed pages go up or go down depending on the redundancy of those pages. In both cases, there are successes.
- He then shows off some crawl errors
- He then shows the link reports

Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online Media to not talk about sitemaps but rather about paid feeds from Yahoo. Search submit pro. It is a hybrid model of both natural search with paid links within those results. A flat CPC model, it is not an auction model. You control this and it has nothing to do with your page. It is easy to set up. Your feed is crawled on a daily basis, so all changes are picked up and refreshed within 48 hours. Two kinds of submissions, TLP submission (top level domain) and the best part of the TLP submission is the "quick links" under the results - you define them and they convert very well. The next level is the feeds part, where you submit categories and products.

They like to use feeds on the forefront of their SEO campaigns. You get some nice reports by using these programs. Updates are within 48 hours, so you don't have to wait too long. The CPC prices run about 25% on average of the top CPC price in the sponsored results.

He then has a case study... I may post these details later...

Note: Please excuse typos, this coverage is provided live and without much editing, due to the timeliness of the coverage...

The first two rows here are dominated by bloggers. A girl name Sam is on my left, she is a loyal reader of the Search Engine Roundtable. On my right is Tamar, the sidekick, followed by Li Evans. Just behind Li is Kim Krause Berg and husband, Eric. Yes, and Lisa Barone is sitting right behind Tamar, with these pointing sharp objects - what they are for, I don't know.

Steve Berkowitz is ready to get up on the stage, but they wait for the audience to pile in. Now Danny and Steve walk up on the stage, take their seats, with their very manly headset microphones. Danny welcomes everyone and introduces the Senior VP of Microsoft Online. Before he was CEO as Ask.com, and jumped into a larger ship to Microsoft.

Danny: Danny brings up the NY Times interview where he describes the change from a row boat to a cruise ship. How do you handle it Steve?
Steve: The first 6 months was walking around and finding his way around the ship. He said this is an amazing place. Tons of technical and marketing talent. They are really trying to focus on search as navigation and then the advertiser. Then he talks about that ecosystem thing that everyone talks about (yada yada). Last you need operational excellence.

Danny: Brings up the unified search platform that will be headed up soon, as a new initiative. I.e. Shasha...
Steve: First he praises Shasha... A single delivery platform is important to bring this across.

Danny: How do you deliver the produtcs?
Steve: He said that he has product management. It is not one person who has all the ideas. It is bringing all this customer research together and bringing products based on that. It is pretty flexible.

Danny: Windows Live came along, we had MSN. You have Office. How will they all come into place with search?
Steve: For Microsoft, they look at Windows Live, how do they extend the Windows presence? You can take your Live ID and take it anywhere. Take your identity and who you are, and bring your history, wherever you go. You will see Windows Live as that extension. For Microsoft it is about getting the products right. They moving their portals into more social, user generated areas, with using one profile. From hotmail to Word, making them more social. It is not a one size fits all solution.

Danny: How does Microsoft do this big win search? Microsoft says you keep saying it is early in the game. Will there be a big pop? Are you happy with let's say being #1?
Steve: Search will continue to evolve. They won't be happy with just #2, in a sense. There are different types of search - destination search, convenient search (integrated search in mail, msn, etc.), Steve said he believes it is where you find search. So it is about where you are, when you are searching. It is the ability to integrate search into where you are. Know how your friends searched. In the context of semi-structured data. It is about; let's get the basics right and then innovate. The things they have in labs, will blow people's minds.

Danny: Do you see yourself having to do deals with Lenova, HP, etc.?
Steve: Those are the deals of the day today... But in the future, those won't be as important. He said it starts with the operating system, then the OEM and then the ISP. There is real no benefit to owning an OS today, outside of being a good business. Today, Dell has a great deal... The OEM is in the best place. Then the ISP is there. He said, let's earn it with the customer and if someone wants to change the default - then that is their choice. You need to earn it.

Danny: Do you think we will get to the point where you let the person choose the default from the start?
Steve: Well, money is money. And people are out there that don't think about it. They just use it. The most important part is the experience they build with Lenova and Alienware is better than other places. It is not just about buying it, you need to do it right.

Danny: There is renewed discussion on Yahoo and Microsoft joining forces.

Out breaks Ms,. Dewey, which is funny. She pull sup a chair between Danny and Steve. Very funny.

He then asks about launching an experimental search engine, Ms. Dewey. And what is the future of Ms. Dewey... More jokes...

Steve: It is more about the UI. Ms. Dewey is about a way to deliver information in different ways.

More jokes from Ms. Dewey, and she leaves... She walks away, "What a bunch of geeks" as a joke.

Danny: I won't let you off the hook.
Steve: He cannot comment on Yahoo or other things like that. He can only comment on what he controls today. He explains he is amazed at what they have, but they have not been bold enough to bring these technologies out there. They are not cool enough, he said, yet.

Danny: Will there be more integration between things?
Steve: I am not talking about Windows from a tech perspective. They need to build on top of the Microsoft APIs like anyone else. The challenge is that they sometimes forget they need to use the APIs. Whatever benefit they get from the brand of Windows is different from integrating into Windows. They take for granted how things work for them, sometimes - they need to extend the paradigm of windows to the Web.

Danny: What puts you ahead of Google, Yahoo, Ask.com?
Steve: It is not about who is ahead. He said they do better at engagement. The way they build out integration of search into the MSN experience, Windows experience, etc. The advantage Microsoft has is reach. There are very few companies that can do it from the data center perspective from the storage perspective. The need to invest in infrastructure and ability to compete on the technology side requires research and you need to think 10 years ahead. Microsoft also has the advantage of experience, plus great resources, plus ad business and diversification.

Danny: When you were at Ask.com, you were searching at Ask.com. When you moved to Microsoft, did you switch to Live.com? Did you require others to switch?
Steve: You cant force people to switch. He uses Live.com 90% + of the time, and uses the other engines mostly for comparison purposes. He was not a messenger user before, so now he uses it. They are more than search... It is more about integrated the search experience into all of those things.

Danny: You tried to get people to take notice to Live.com. Search and Win strategy? Does that work?
Steve: To be in search, you have to have the basic for everyone. You then need to segment. There are lot of people who use coupons, people who like to win, lots of new UIs, etc. Making search more graphical versus text based. There will be so much revolution around the UI.

Danny: Favorite features of the product:
Steve: He downloaded the local app on his phone. He got live traffic as he was driving up here last night. He found a restaurant... It is that type of stuff that they do, but don't do a good job marketing of.

Q &A Now:

Contextual ads? Basics first Steve said.

Elyse Thibault, Hearst Magazines
In this session, Elyse’s opening comment was her best. She stated “Bidding Wars get all of the glamour, and that keyword research and campaign organization are most important”. This statement was a great lead way into her presentation. She then continued to identify the problems of competition within the internal divisions of larger companies and corporations. She mentions that the common issues such as generation gaps, sibling rivalries, new kid syndromes and the world cup where companies are competing regionally as well as internationally. She also mentions the difficulties of Affiliate marketing and resellers/partners who are also driving up the costs of paid search campaigns.

Elyse identified the main challenge areas such as Messaging, Tracking/Reporting, Keyword management, bidding wars as well as how we need to differentiate between metrics such as downloads, form submissions, sales, etc… She also talked about how the lack of coordination leads to irrational bidding. There was much emphasis on creating benchmarks and having a more centralized structure are ways to overcome the challenges of multi-divisional SEM campaigns.

Olivier Lemaignen, Intiut Global Search Marketing
Next up to the podium was Olivier, and he discussed the “real-life” issues with having a multi-divisional SEM team at Intuit. He mentioned the complexities of handling paid search for all of Intuit’s products such as online editions, Mac vs. PC editions, QuickBooks, TurboTax, etc... He went into details such as redundancy and the overwriting of the display urls which confuses the engines, hence making it a nightmare to track performance as well as driving up the costs.
Another area of focus, just like in Elyse’s presentation is the importance of SEM Team organization and how to best manage the teams as well as harness the best practices and processes. He went though how the company had a more “Holistic approach” where one (1) person had oversight over all teams, and that having an aligned keyword development and an SEM strategy process reinforces faster sharing of best practices, consistent communication and methodologies. In closing, his vision for the future of search is a more holistic SEO/SEM relationship.

Matthew Greitzer, Dir. of Search AvenueA/Razorfish
The last presenter Matthew Greitzer, pinpointed on the four (4) rules for managing internal competition which are building an organization & service structure to support collaboration, having accurate unified tracking, strong keyword allocation and brand protection. He acknowledged that most of all big companies or corporations have “intra-company problems” with regard to paid search. He also discussed the importance of a well organized “Centralized Vision”, as well as developing master keyword lists and trying to avoid competitive bidding conflicts.

Matt then focused on Trademark protection especially with affiliates and reseller partners. He noted that even though all of the engines address Trademark policies, they are all different. His best suggestion to get a handle of this is to simply restrict affiliates and partners from bidding on that company’s trademark terms. A strategy that worked well for him was to convince the client to run a test without affiliate bidding and the results very very encouraging. The client saw lower CPC (quality score & less competition), higher conversion rates, better ROAS% and more qualified traffic volume.

Due to internet problems yesterday, this session is being posted a day late.

This article written by Greg Meyers from Commerce360, Inc.

Next on today’s agenda is the super-packed Ads in A Quality Score World session. The panel is being moderated by Gord Hotchkiss with speakers Joshua Stylman (Reprise), Andrew Goodman (Page Zero Media), and Jonathan Mendez (OTTO Digital)

This morning’s session was pretty important because it reflects the change in search marketing we’ve been seeing over the past few years. As the speakers pointed out, your rankings in paid search are being less about how much you page and more about your ad’s perceived relevance. This morning’s panel was all about understanding the factors that go into the engines’ quality score algorithm in order to increase your ad’s perceive relevance and getting those high-positioned bids.

Up first is Joshua Stylman to explain this whole quality score thing and help the audience put it in context. (I must note, I apparently missed the “get here 30 minutes early” memo so I’m so far back I can’t even see Joshua. In fact, I’m not even in the same room as the one he’s speaking in. However, I’ve been assured he really is standing there so let’s hope this isn’t a really elaborate set up.)

Back to the session, Quality Score is a way for search engines to rank their ads based on a variety of factors. Google, MSN and Yahoo are all now using a quality score system instead of the bid-based system that was used when pay per click was just a baby.

When Google released its AdRank model circa 2005, it confused advertisers because Google didn’t tell them what the exact variables that went into the ranking system were. Thankfully, now that time has passed and we have a little more information.

Google uses historical data to determine whether or not a keyword is relevant to an ad, which in turn determines what you’ll have to pay to rank for that keyword. The up-side to this is that it produces a better user experience, more qualified leads and more revenue for the engines. The down-side is artificial CPC inflation, that the engines are able to define ad quality (which Google’s Nick Fox disagrees with) and that any change advertiser’s make can affect and reset their quality score (i.e. testing is penalized).

Joshua also argues whether abiding by Google’s quality laws really increases the relevancy of your ads. His argument is that perceived relevancy is very often different than what your customers would value as relevant. Joshua found that by molding his ads to fit Google’s perceived relevancy scale, it actually made his conversion rates decrease. What good is a lower CPC rate if you’re losing out on conversions?

None.

Search marketers need to continue to study landing pages to find out what works best for them. As Joshua says, it’s what puts the ‘M’ in search engine marketing. Rock on, Josh!

Another interesting tidbit noted by Joshua is that under Yahoo's Panama, branded terms have seen a 25 percent increase in CPC. He found that branded terms dropped 58 percent, while un-owned brands CPC increased 42 percent. It makes sense…almost. Naturally, if Guess is going after the term “Guess”, their cost will be less because the term is seen as very relevant to their ad/brand. However, that also means Macy’s will have to pay more because they’re “less relevant” than Guess. This seems almost like a penalty. If you’re looking for Guess jeans (by the way, the early 90’s called and they want their style back), is a Guess store more relevant to your needs than Macy’s? Not necessarily. It may even be more relevant if you’re on a budget.

Next up is Andrew Goodman

Andrew starts by outlining the three generations of paid search advertising.

1. GoTo.com/Overture: pure bid for placement model.
2. AdWords 2.0: Max Bid X CTR
3. AdWords 2.5: Quality Based bidding

Obviously, right now we’re living in the world of quality based bidding and Andrew goes on to explain the two different types of quality sores – one affects your minimum bid and the other affects your rank.

The latter is most relevant for new accounts. When you have a history CTR things will become more stable. In the beginning, the engines are trying to determine what your potential CTR will be, as well as your relevancy for the keywords as they related to the ad and your landing page.

However, if you’re evil, there is no sanctuary (muahaha!). If you’re participating in privacy intruding data collection without disclosure, creating nasty multiple accounts or doing other bad things that would make your mother smack you upside the head, your ads aren’t going to be positioned well, if they show up at all.

Jonathan Mendez is up next, and says contrary to what we just heard there are three quality scores. The two Andrew listed above, as well as a content quality score which takes landing page relevance into high consideration.

Why are the engines creating multiple quality scores? Because it improves the quality of the ads being produced (according to the engines).

Jonathan warns audience members about being too concerned with their score. Personally, I like Jonathan’s approach. If you concentrate your efforts on delivering relevancy through your keywords and your ad, your quality will improve and so will your results. It’s the same thing with search engine optimization. Instead of going crazy trying to identify every little factor the engines are looking for (that’s our job) concentrate on making your site a subject matter expert for users. The other stuff will follow.

Relevancy is about how well you fill the needs/intent/goal of the user. Understanding the way users are going about their goals is the first step in being relevant.

Paid search is built for relevance. It is a segmentation engine that uses channels, campaigns, AdGroups and keywords. Ads are the bridge or relevance between the query and the landing page. You want to create ads to get attention, generate interest, set expectations and persuade the user in some manner.

Make sure that your ad copy is relevant to your keywords, and that the keywords you’re using are targeting the same kind of user. Don’t mix buying and research keywords in the same ad.

To determine the relevancy of your ad you have to look at your conversion rate, not necessarily at your click through rate. Interesting to note, your ad description has a higher influence of conversion rate, not the title. If you can create an ad that stands out, you can create something that is valuable and relevant to users.

To create effect ads, advertisers must:

• Understand user intent with query
• Segment keywords based on intent
• Target ad based on segments
• Optimize CTR and CR
• Reinforce relevance on landing pages
• Message to needs of users (not your needs)
• And always be testing and optimizing!

Nick Fox (Google), Brian Boland (Microsoft) and Gulshan Verma (Yahoo) are here to represent the search engines and participate in Q&A and had some great things to say.

Nick states that contrary to popular belief quality score is not a black box. Today’s presentations captured the essence of what Google is trying to do with their quality algorithms. Don’t worry about quality score, just focus on relevance and everything else will follow.

Also, don’t be afraid to experiment. Though we’ve heard this can be dangerous, Nick says Google encourages advertisers to experiment and improve their keywords, copy, landing page copy, etc, especially if you feel like you’re being penalized by a lower quality score. If you experiment and find the results are bad, you can always revert back to the original and you won’t be penalized. There is nothing to lose.

Clearing up another myth, Nick assures readers that it’s the users who are defining quality. Click through rate is a great metric to see if users are demonstrating interest. Google is trying to capture the essence of what users are telling them about relevance and then incorporate that into the algorithm.

Microsoft’s Brian Boland announced that Microsoft is going to release a quality based ranking component in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

This article was written by Lisa Barone from Bruce Clay, Inc

Moderated by Jessie Stricchiola

Eduardo Llach from SearchRev. He will focus on the kinds of techniques to use with “early terms,” and john and Sharon will focus on tail terms and some pitfalls. Traditional criteria used for targeting: keywords, ad copy, landing page, and the search network. How to split up traffic based on additional criteria such as location, time of day, etc.

He discusses “multivariable targeting.” How to use these techniques to improve the performance of the campaigns. For example, “online dating.” How to split it up geographically and by demographic, as well as time of day and day of week. Also, they want to optimize the creative. What works better in NYC verus Denver or San Francisco?

Geo/metro targeting. This works using the IP address of the searcher. AOL does pose a problem for this since all seem to be in VA. Country mapping is very accurate, state mapping is now accurate to 50%, citty mapping is accurate to 30%. He shows a spreadsheet detailing some home security system targeting conducted in about 20 cities. They found that it worked to aggregate metro areas by, for example, top 10 metro areas at Google. When they study this, they can find information and determine similar CPC but much higher conversion rates, for example. In these cases, they can use the data to recommend an increase in bids in a certain area.

They also adjust the exposure by sometimes using the search engine only, or adding it’s “search network” to increase visibility. With syndication, they can then compare conversion rates across each of the sites. If not taking the time to do syndication targeting, he would recommend running branded terms across all networks, in the example he shows. Remember that better conversion rates do not automatically mean more orders. Even though Google may have a higher conversion rate, there may be more raw conversions on another engine, for example.

Conversion rates do vary across industry. For example, although normally abysmal results in the content network, they found that a non-branded search in the automotive vertical had a very high conversion rate in contextual placements. He recommends structuring a campaign that works by optimizing beyond the keyword level. This multivariable optimization allows for additional tweaks based on geo and other factors mentioned above.

Time of day and day of week. Focus on conversion rate here…when it is traditionally up, bid up, and when down, bid down. Showed an example of one campaign with much higher conversions on the weekends. This can be 78% more effective if you bid up and down each day. They have noticed widely variant numbers based on the industry. For time of day, they focus on morning versus afternoon. The idea is to measure against the overall conversion rate. They found that some mornings were better than others, and some afternoon on different days were better also. You can use Google and other engines to set rules based on increasing/decreasing bid based on this type of data analysis.

Creative optimization. Each kw and creative will perform differently. Showed one example with a wide variance in conversion rates based on the creatives.

John Kelly from Sure Hits. He will focus on managing tail phrases. They mostly manage clients in the financial services area. So what is a tail phrase? They describe it as any keyword which doesn’t get a lot of volume. Why care about these? Large aggregate volume. Clear intention = better conversion rates. Less competition = lower bids. (Editor note: in some cases, this may not be true, especially with the page relevancy algorithm which sometimes may jack up a minimum bid even if there are no others bidders)

When we analyze the potential target, we need to find out what they want. Then 1 Calculate the click value. 2. Reward word choices, and 3. Watch our for tail dangers. So, how to calculate the click value? [Probability of conversion X Value of conversion] Is small volume a big problem? What if one click every six months? How to estimate the quality and value of the conversion?

Shows an example of a search for “Columbus Ohio car insurance quote.” This includes two great clues: Geographic data and product information. How to deal with this information? A bad way would be to use buckets: States, cities, city and state, car insurance, quotes. The problem is when someone types in quotes, they are twice as likely to convert, so bucketing causes the loss of this type of information. The right way to do it, he feels, is to “tag” tail phrases. You should tag each phrases for the different identifiers, and then use the information to estimate what the probability of conversion is based on the number of tags it has and each of their own historic performance.

How to bring this all together? [probability X value = click value] So in some cases the longer tail will have a much larger value. So what about rewarding the choices made by the searcher? Respond to them with creatives in ad copy as well as on landing page. He found many pages in the PPC listings that did not present the proper information to reward the visitor for choosing their listing.

A couple quick dangers: brand phrases. Many brands are built around cities, for example, “Tampa Bay Mortgage” is a brand. If someone is looking for a Tampa Bay mortgage, are they seeking any mortgage provider or the branded one? Watch out also for “fake” tail phrases, such as “Washington auto insurance quote online.” Too many searches per day on a term like this may indicate that it is being used as a title of a paid link somewhere. Last danger is homonyms, such as “Mobile home loans.” Is this for Mobile, Alabama or for a mobile home?

Last speaker is Sharon Crost from Red Bricks Media. She will speak about avoiding the pitfalls of PPC, or “How to get more ROI by Dragging your tail.” She introduced a couple of examples, but unfortunately I have to leave for a meeting so I will not be able to cover the rest of her presentation.

This session is a one of the newer sessions from the ClickZ track that is going to get opinions from some top media buyers on what they expect to see this year, what they are buying, and where the trends going.

First up with Tessa Wegert from Enlighten. She says she will discuss the four major areas that are experiencing growth and changes such as Television, radio, and newspaper. Looking at media spending growth, in 2006 spending is on the rise. A lot of advertisers are looking at spending in local media because a lot of the effect translates down to local advertisers. The local community content fosters site user loyalty. Relevant regional content eliminates need for geo and contextual targeting. There is a lot of untapped inventory out there. Less competition for location site inventory means competitive rate. Local sites are more willing to create more inventory opportunities. On the local media search sites such as Google Maps, Google Coupons, etc.. you can create local business listing, local business ads. Great way to set your business apart from others. Google local business ads is basically Adwords but it appears in Google Maps.

When search and display used in tandem an advertiser's site pageviews up 68 percent. There are a lot of benefits doing a integrated campaign. You can expand audience reach, increase interaction, and increase sales. This nets a wider audience online, drive search traffic. She puts up an example of a integrated campaign. They are doing advertising on national sites like Better Homes and Gardens and the other part is Google paid search advertising.

She next talks about online video. One third of the US population over age 3 watch online video monthly. With video you can create a lot of cross media consistency. It helps with branding. She mentions a study, that fewer video ads needed to create brand awareness than other means. There are a longer banner recall as well from video ads. There are different types of video ads, such as PointRoll an ad type that accompanies the video player, clickable video which cites immediate action but may require unique video content, and long form video which is random ad placement reduces avoidance).

Tessa next goes into custom made media opportunities. She talks about Pandora an online radio station who has experimented with custom ads such as using custom variance, customer text ticker, and combined proven ad unit and custom art. Some of the more traditional publishers are even coming up with custom made media on there sites.

Second up is Robin Neifield and she starts immediately explaining the question better. She says she wants to know where they are spending the money on a wide variety of areas. Is the budget allocation across media predicted on specific goals and current media penetration. She says they look at the spending on a media model in a three tier system of potential customer, window shoppers, and active buyers. She is expecting spending to shift a little bit towards new types of media and testing. They want to expert with community sites, etc.. There are new networks out there that can present some good opportunities. People are spending more money online. Robin says they allocate some of their clients money for testing. She explains that the pressure to monetize increased media budgets, better analytic tools, and a stronger understanding of how to use the data will lead to: more conversion testing, better analytics, etc..

Behavioral targeting is now widely utilized. Mobile is finally moving forward. Search retargeting is a great new area to get into to. There are new targeting options (including video), and new networks. She next goes into mobile advertising. According to eMarketer, mobile ad spending in the US will reach nearly 4.8 million by 2011. From 2006-2007, mobile marketing spending is expected to double. The largest area of growth in 2007 will be through the development of WAP (the mobile internet) pages and supporting campaigns. WAP is the second highest mobile content used sources for mobile browsing. SMS can be difficult because you have such limited space to tell you story.

Click through rates can be substantially higher when combined with an integrated marketing campaign. Extension or complement to TV viewing is a practiced method. Repurposing TV spots for the space is an option, but creating web only video is a better option. Social media is another area. They find that the engaged audience is less likely to click off and complete an action. Blog advertising is not as good. Users are interested in a conversation and ads are harder to deliver effectively. In the end its about getting a story told in search, banners, e-mail, and affiliates.

Third is David Rittenhouse from neo@ogilvy and talks that they works with a lot of different companies but specialize in technology companies. He says that advertising media investment choices are driven by consumer and business priorities. There is a complex environment in which spend allocations are made by advertiser, region, country, campaign, message, medium, tactic, and media company. Challenge is digital media present mass of ever-changing ever emerging, ever under measured options. The next part to this, is that consumer media usage is flux and media \$ want to follow closely. Out of every $100 now it is ordinary to have 1/3 to ½ spent online. Overall media budgets are not growing at the same pace but at the expensed of traditional media like print and broadcast. Some clients are flipping models and putting digital media first. Interesting but understandable.

He feels that growth in digital does not always equal more of the same. On small scale tests over the past several years have yielded learning that are starting to drive scaling up and out. There is a lot going on in online video, microsites, podcasting, mobile, social media & blogs, content syndication, and video games. He says there is a real focus on asking ‘what else can I do?” He gives an example of streaming golf for specific holes for people who loved golf but only wanted to know what was happening at certain holes on the course.

One of the challenges he sees is the availability vs. recommend-ability. The challenge is planning and prioritizing in a systematic way that is based on consumers and advertisers needs. It’s a question of usage, quality, and relevance. One of the challenge is buying acrss a number of different currencies. He means impressions, click, circulation, streams, and all the other “C” words. The second challenging in this is the execution of being efficient when everything is always new. There is no surprise that Rich Media and Search leading the way. Ecosystem is most ready to deliver these with scale and there are few barriers.

David finally goes into search and how is matters in the media business. Search is the fastest growing part of the media business and of Neo’s operations. Increasingly the “way” in to many clients and most logical first dollar spent of digital budget. Search as a marketing application, beyond PPC is starting to realize potential with clients. There is a diagnostic services, natural search and analytics. Though there is some drag that should be dealt with expeditiously. He also mentions that specialization can also lead to isolation. He says he observed that some marketers only do search or this or that and they isolate themselves, when in reality we are all marketers and should work together on that.

Harry Gold is up last and talks about working with B2B companies specifically and how they like to track and measure. Traditional advertisers continue to migrate online. Richard media replaced search as the fastest growing form of online media driven by traditional advertisers. From a recent study 62% of respondents said it was where most of their growth was going into rich media. He says prices are going up! He says that rich accommodates a level of branding and rich media formats that search does not. How efficient are you when you are dealing with new mediums. He says they help clients experience with new forms of media. Ranking of ROI from types of media, search is down near the bottom. Good news about the internet is you can track everything, but the bad news about the internet is you can track everything. Lot of data and everything may not always work.

He is pessimistic and optimistic about search. Traditional advertisers are increasingly looking at online media and search as branding mediums and love multi platform deals. But they still love the metrics and the concepts of optimization and cancellation clauses. Performance and lead gen advertisers continue to buy farther down the conversion chain. Where did those quality leads come from? Look at lead sources and lead quality. What is the most they can afford to spend on a lead? What do those people paying $13 dollars a click know that you don’t They know the quality of the leads they are getting is very good. Its worth it. He explains that they are strong advocates for search so it is expected that it would grow for our clients.

He says this might be a strong statement but rented email is out. Email is always the lowest performing thing on the list. There are spam filters, open rates, click rates, conversion rates, the CPA is way to high. Newsletter sponsorships are great though.

On the performance lead based side. Advertisers are extremely focused on metrics. There is continued growth in search. Low CPM and PPC network buys. Premium buys combined with alternative placements and value ads. There is an increased usage of CPA buys, especially in education. What is happening is that is driving down the cost of the lead. There are overall budget increases. He ends that online is the biggest real time focus group there is. Offline has been in a way driving online. Optimization needs to be integrated and online will be driving offline.

Chris Sherman starts the session off by introducing Mobile Search as an ever-increasing build-up of new ideas that will soon catch up with earlier expectations of consumers. You can't optimise for mobile in the same way as you do for the web, although as few people have currently adopted it - you can get ahead of your competition.

Cindy Krum recommends optimising your existing site, rather than a new .mobi site. You need to make sure in mobile search that your pages are device independent, in order to broaden your user base. The industry is in its infancy with some niche mobile search engines still requiring manual submission. Search results for mobiles use a different dataset to web search, with its own crawlers and slightly different algorithm. Code Best Practices should be strictly adhered to; mobile browsers are less forgiving than traditional browsers, so sites should be W3C compliant (preferably XHTML). External CSS style sheets are a good idea as they limit the amount of code that needs to be downloaded and helps when scaling for different resolutions and screen sizes. CSS allows you to have a separate stylesheet for handheld devices as well as your original stylesheet. Cindy suggests showing different pages based on which mobile browsers are being used, although this is more likely for hiding features rather than your web copy. People won't learn your website's format so organise buttons consistently and logically. Text links should be used rather than images, which may not download and will increase page loading times. People prefer navigation below the content of a page, as they don't want to keep scrolling down on each page to find your information. This can be done via CSS styling (I try to do this anyway for websites as it pushes content to the top of the page and helps prevent duplicate content flagging). Anchors (links to sections within the same page) are no longer confined to the 90's; it means that people don’t have to keep scrolling on their device. Do not use frames or flash on your pages, as most mobile browsers don't support them and they just slow things down. Keep file names short so that URLs can be easily viewed and managed on small screens. Do not use pop-ups and use heading tags correctly. You can get mobile device emulators to check to see what your site looks like, such as Mobi Ready. Make sure that if you go to the trouble of optimising your site for mobile that you advertise your site as mobile compatible. Get links from mobile sites and directories; it helps with SEO and for people seeking mobile sites. Make phone numbers clickable, you can send a number directly to the mobile device by prefixing tel: to a phone number in a link (like when using mailto: for clickable email addresses).

Greg Markel from Infuse Media starts by mentioning Google's Voice Local Search service (currently in BETA lab for the US), which is easier and more convenient than searching using a stylus. There's no cost to get into these search results, your business simply needs to be in the main Google Local index. Mobile adoption is slower in the US than anticipated, with only 19% people using mobile search. Most of those people end up using mobile portals, often operated by their phone carrier. A good place to find industry data about Mobile Search is M:Metrics. Unlike the more precise search queries being used in web search, terms on mobile search are usually quite generic e.g. "movies". This is most likely a result of the time it takes to type queries on mobile devices. Brand terms are also very popular, as users don't want to have to type in the full URL. A majority of users don't scroll through results, putting a lot of pressure to rank positions 1-3 for your target terms. Google has recently released a new version of mobile search, which offers similar functionality as found in web search after signing into your Google account. Google Mobile has a good help section that explains a lot about mobile search and is a very good resource.

Rachel from iCrossing has spoken to her clients a lot about mobile search recently, 1.3 billion people around the world use a mobile device and is a market that should not be ignored. Mobile devices can't currently duplicate the same user experience as found when using a browser on your computer. This shouldn't be an issue as people using a mobile device are looking for different things such as contact details and snippets of content. A lot of people are still using WAP rather than mobile browsers, especially for news and sport results. People are starting to understand what’s available to them on the wireless web though, and many are migrating across. The average salary of mobile searchers is higher than the national average and age groups are starting to level out. Most mobile users are not just surfing aimlessly; they are actively looking for something, such as movie reviews, DVDs or services. Google now allows you to submit a separate XML sitemap for mobile. When visiting Google, users are not automatically sent to the mobile optimised result set, although this is expected to change soon. Many companies have also failed to acknowledge the need for mobile search optimisation - a search for McDonalds on Google Mobile for instance has a mobile-friendly BBC news page as the number one result.

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by in the interest of speed.

Advertising in Social Media
Rebecca Leib – Moderator

Speakers
Bill Flitter – VP Marketing Pheedo, Inc
Marc Shiller, CEO & Founder, Electric Artists, Inc.
Nicole Bogas Gossip Blog Team Lead, Blog Ads
Chad Stoller – VP of Emergining Networks of Organic

Rebecca welcomes everyone to the ClickZ Track, Click Z is 10 years old
Explains about the Click Z track

Bill Flitter from Pheedo
Speaking about Ads in feeds. Pheedo does adverstising in feeds.
The old way of advertising - Broadcast Advertising – “We tell You” (publisher/broadcaster) – newspapers, TV, etc.
Now – there is social media
“We tell each other” Brands and people are participating in the marketing, but also still have passive readers
Meet all the people that see your ads (Types: “Not Interested”, “Needs More Information”, “Existing Happy Customer”, “Too Busy”, “Clicks Through”)
But most ads are only targeted towards the “Clicks Through” and avoid the “not interested”
But don’t the others have value – absolutely – immediate value, although the not interested has “longer value”

“Needs more Info” – suppose she could subscribe to the info, instantly read review, speak to a peer
“Too Busy” – forward the follow-up, bookmark
Happy Customer – become the customer evangelist, write a review, tag your ad for the world to see

Engaging all them, learn from one and each other.

Advertising for today’s audience - But does it work (Adverstising in RSS Feeds)?
Ford Case study – ford auto show web site
.4% CTR on content
20% conversion rate on subscriptions
.2% Email rate
133 interactions in 7 days (comments, tags, etc)
Overall 1.1% interaction rate

The “not interested guy” – came back read a product review by your happy customer, and came across a bookmark by the Too Busy, and bought your product.

Nicole Bogus from Blog Ads
First sold Sept. 2002, over 1300 leading indie blogs
All site accept flagship unit the Blogad
22 blog specialists and programmers
Target delivery into 40+ hives, gossip, politics, parenting, music, gay/lesbian, humor, pets, marketing, ports, religion, fashion, etc.

PerezHilton, Go Fug Yourself, PowerLine, 101 cookbooks, hot air, crazy aunt pearl – some of the top blogs

Before blogosphere communities – one to many
After the blogosphere – “swarms” – lots of link, information gets out quickly and more efficiently

Perez Hilton – tops E Online, US Magazine
DailyKos – tops the New Yorker and New Republic

What ads work –
Smart Ads: have multiple links, strong image, faux video, hand made feel, puzzle invites click
Bad Ads: no links, dull, text-heavy image Tell rather than show, feels designed, full story negates the reason to click

Engaging the blog reader
Rich Media is expensive, so the blog ads it’s a good alternative
Click in to watch a video
Click to add to netflix queue
Click to purchase song
Encourage of participation
Encourage conversation
Add reviews of movies
Banners designed around the Blog’s atmosphere
Content rather than hard-sell = more clicks

Mark Shiller
Talking about advertising in 2nd Life
Bringing brands into Social Media – hard to tell the difference between PR, Advertising and Marketing

Focus should be on experiences
People are more interested in being shown how something is made or created than they are in seeing the final results
To succeed in a “Connected world” good will must be in the DNA of everything you create
From sitting back to leaning forward – web 2.0 communications is less about watching and more about producing

2nd Life is great for
Creative prototype experimentation, brand re-invention, opportunity to foster more collaborative learning methods, PR Awareness, relevancy: allows a brand to sty in touch, e- commerce opportunities, new channel of customer interaction

Obstacles – no direct ROI, budgeting is tricky, maintenance and management of brand in 2nd life, slow to create interesting in world experiences, resolution and functionally to technology, time

Starwood Hotels – becomes the first company in history to launch a new hotel brand inside of a virtual world. Prior to opening to the public in 2008, Aloft Hotels offered in a sneak preview of the brand in world.

Starwood Hotels opening in 2nd life allowed Starwood to test-market the hotel’s design

They will be the first brand to leave 2nd life as well – the hotel will go out and land donated

iVillage Girls Night Out.
In December iVillage launched a series of new events inside 2nd life called Girls Night Out. This extended what iVillage already knows how to do “bring women together”. They held a fashion show with incredible results, had people waiting a few hors to it to start.

Student Travel Network
College area is now exploding in 2nd life. Works with the universities to help them understand 2nd life.

Pick a niche and go after it.

Social Networks – has become a legitimate web community and resource, however social networks can polarize people.

This covedrage was graciously provided by Liana “Li” Evans, who is the Search Marketing Manager at Commerce360 that oversees Natural Search, Social Media and WoMM. Li also is the owner, editor and writer of SearchMarketingGurus.com.

Note this is coverage provided by Lisa Barone of Bruce Clay, Inc. Thanks Lisa!

Zachary Rodgers (ClickZ Network) is moderating this morning’s Online Video

Advertising panel with speakers Ian Schafer (Deep Focus), Chad Stoller (Organic), Lars Bastholm (AKQA), and Steve Rosenblat (Dennis Digital)

You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but today’s ad campaigns have evolved past your traditional static online banner ad. I know, I miss them too, but they’re gone. With video penetration almost saturating the market, advertisers are looking to interactive video to grab a hold of customers and make the most impact. Utilizing video has become a cost-effective tool for marketers, but only when they’re up-to-speed on all the various formats, strategies, creatives and other considerations.

Zachary comments that two years ago online video was nothing more than a two minute clip with a 30 second ad attached to it. That was all consumers could get and all advertisers could buy. Boring.

Today we have Hillary Clinton videoblogging on MySpace, paid ads on YouTube with comments, online video being embedded on blogs, and magazine Web sites also using video advertising. The choices provide a lot of opportunities for marketers to do new things, but it can also create confusion. Media buyers don’t know if they are better off sticking to the traditional video spots on sites like MSNBC that have been tested or if they’re better off experimenting with the new types of online ad formats.

With all the confusion, the easiest thing for marketers to do is to roll their own content and build their own experiences.

First up is Chad Stoller. (Side note: Chad must be from the East Cost. He talks faster than my mother and almost as fast as Michael Gray. I can’t help but stare.)

Chad’s presentation focuses on an ad campaign Organic ran for Jeep.
Jeep has been an early adopter of Internet technology since 1995. Much like the Jeep brand, Jeep.com continues to innovate with interactive technologies. On March 15, 2007, they launched the Way Beyond Trail in conjunction with the launch of the new Jeep Patriot. (Warning: If you go to that site, you’re going to be humming the theme song all day, but I guess that’s the point.)

The Way Beyond Trail is a complete interactive experience for users with over an hour of video. Users are part of a 360 degree holistic, integrated and seamless marketing program. There are 44 different scenes incorporating personalized elements with only one correct ending. While navigating through the game (Is it a game? I guess it’s a game), users will find surprise, delight, zany character, and will see the Jeep vehicle presented in a non-traditional way. Chad has found in order to be effective the consumer’s experience must be completely transparent. Don’t preach about your product, demonstrate the “why buys” through the video. Have a lot of cargo room? Don’t say it; show how many sheep will fit inside that jeep.

Once your video is out, advertisers must study everything – time spent, bailouts, social and sharing, forums and conversation, pass along, personalization counts, hand raisers, exit surveys, etc.

A great presentation by Chad.

Next up is Ian Schafer focusing on the importance of creative and placement. Ian uses a few of his company’s past projects to show that the purpose of video is to reach people wherever they may be, not just at a brand-specific Web site. Sage words by Ian right there.

Ian’s first example focuses on the launch of the new season of Best of Show. It was decided that video would be used to fill a plot hole for the TV show.

In the video, the character played by Jeremy Piven is interviewing new staff members. [Ed. note: Jeremy Piven is actually in Entourage.] Once users enter the site, they are able to fill out a job application (also a great way for the company to get leads, user’s email addresses, demographic info, etc) and sit in for an interview with Piven’s character. The entire process is interactive and Piven will respond based on what users’ type into the answer box. The whole thing lasts about 10 minutes and at the end of the interview users will find out if they “got the job” or not. (Wait, you mean they don’t have to wait and stress for two weeks like I did? Unfair!)

Ian reports that the average user spent more than 8 minutes interacting with Jeremy. He also notes that if you want your video to be effective, keep your video on the short side. You never know how long a user will interact with your video and you want to make sure you’re able to get your message across.

To have the most impact, marketers should look to create advertising opportunities on the most popular sites on the Web before they become well known for their advertising opportunities.

Ian then wins my heart by bringing up Ze Frank (Huzzah! I hope every session has a Ze mention.) aka the most popular videoblogger on the Web (his words!). He brings up Ze to make that point that using video doesn’t always mean you have to create content; it’s also about establishing your brand through existing content. In the case with Ze, Ian’s company sponsored the last week of the show and the archives and in return got a verbal plug from everyone’s favorite videoblogger. Totally cool.

Ian’s company Deep Focus is currently developing a hybrid online/on-air interactive video production, as well as dynamically, contextually targeted Flash overlay video advertising. The latter may be the thing that ends the pre-roll.

Lessons learned from Ian:

• Don’t be intrusive with online ads
• Keep it short
• Keep it portable
• Make it good
• Make it relevant

And work with the content creators, dammit.

Up next is Steve Rosenblat.

Your first step in utilizing video is to know what the user is expecting to see, how they’re currently interacting with video and who you’re trying to reach.

4 Ways to use video:

• Original content
• Product placement
• Video integration
• Custom video

From here, Steve outlines a few of the campaign his company has been working on:

Icehouse Miller campaign: Steve’s company created an original video about a new robot Brewtron. And it must have worked. I, a female and not part of Icehouse’s demographic was not amused. However, panelist Chad, who is a young (hunky) male, was giggling through the entire video.

Mission accomplished for Icehouse.

To distribute the video Steve used viral sharing sites, community and social networking. You want to create a brand content piece and put it in the right place where users will pick it up and pass it on.

Old Spice: Create an association between Old Spice and the theme “experience”. To do this they created Lessons to Live By and took slips from movies like Talladega Nights (Steve shows a clip. Once again I am left looking around wondering if I missed the joke while Chad is giggling). At the end of the videos, a Maxim model went out and interviewed a bunch of men and asked them about their favorite badass. (Mine is Mikkel.) The video concluded with a “brought to you by Old Spice” message.

Moderated by Allan Dick, who will be throwing his awesome dinner tonight.

Cam Balzer from Performics will lead off. He says they have a new discipline called “benchmarketing.” Since search is such a public arena, you have to pay attention to what competitors are doing. How are others responding to the dynamics of the marketplace, thus the mix between search and benchmarking. Goes over the search funnel and benchmarking. First ask “how visible am I in search results?” How effectively am I reaching searchers, and lastly what is the cost/ROI.

You can first “benchmarket” against yourself. In above stages use the following metrics: impressions, clicks and CTR, leads and $$, in order to derive CPC, total cost, and ROI. Since search is so fundamentally competitive, but also benchmarket against competitors using the following metrics: Coverage, share of voice, share of wallet and overall cost and ROI. Will now walk through several benchmarketing examples for Performics clients.

One benchmark example he showed: Looking for paid visibility of select advertisers on a sample of 38 insurance terms. They use AdGooroo to load up keywords they want to track. They (AdGooroo) go to all engines in multiple countries and perform searches repeatedly in order to gain insight on visibility. Shows a chart with Avg reach on horizontal axis and coverage % on vertical access. Looking at a bucket this size gives a good overview of this vertical, and allows for analysis and predictions. Some questions that can be answered include: how visible am I? What kws are showing up? What are my competitors’ bid strategies? What level of coverage should I maintain on high volume/high cost keywords.

Then shows another visibility benchmark from Hitwise. He used the visibility benchmark of “share of visits.” Showed the top 15 sites that received traffic from the search for “iPod.” Apple accounted for 54% of total visits, but this isn’t as much as they maybe should be getting, since the Apple sites to well both in Paid and Organic rankings. So what more could they be trying to increase reach? Question to ask is what portion of visits are generated by particular keywords.

Next benchmark is the traffic benchmark. They use Hitwise again here that follows click data to determine the monthly percentage of traffic from search to selected home improvement sites. Questions here include how much traffic is coming from search versus my competitors. Bear in mind that this is both paid and Natural search blended together, and they cannot separate the two datasets. They like to combine this data with the market share data in order to gain more insight. Even though some seem to be found well in search, they may not get the level of visits that some competitors. Looking at this allows one to decide if they could be more aggressive in their SEM.

Natural versus paid traffic. According to ComScore qSearch data, the total traffic from paid and organic varies from 5% paid/95% Organic all the way up to 50/50 and more tilted towards paid. The average across all categories is about 89% of search traffic is organic. Car rental actually gets 54% of its traffic from paid search. This is very useful data on an aggregate/category level. Considerations include weighing the proportion of natural versus paid against the absolute volume.

They “take their thought leadership role in the industry very seriously.” In January of 2004 they started tracking an index of 50 of their clients. He then discusses the performance benchmark of cost. The chart he shows varies dramatically on an avg CPC level, and also indicates a strong seasonal relationship to the cost. Looks at other metrics as well. He notes that the Performics 50 can be found at Doubleclick.com.

Next is Mike Moran with IBM. One thing that they found with search marketing campaign benchmarking is that is was difficult to benchmark the competition since they have so many different products and competitors. They found that no matter how important IBM was, in 2001, Google didn’t really feel they were that big of a deal. Less than 1% of visitors came from SE’s. So they needed to really focus on their own benchmarking, which is what he will focus on today.

Conversion rate is a nice tool, but they do not want to optimize on that, instead you want to increase your traffic. The nicest thing is if you can do both. Many people don’t want to talk about what they are actually selling, instead focusing on their rankings. Each site must be trying to get someone to do something. At IBM, they want people to download the whitepaper. They have found that 2% of these will end up buying a 50K consulting package.

The first step in organic SEO is to be in the index. Which search engines are critical? This can vary by country. How many pages are in the index versus how many pages should be there. The hard part for some companies is figuring out how many pages they actually have. In a lot of cases, the exact number doesn’t matter, but that the trend shows increased traffic. The second step is to choose the right keywords. Ask what percentage of the traffic should be yours. Third step is to examine what the landing pages have on them. Want to look at conversions, since they will help you find out what needs to be done. If you have good rankings but no conversions, there are a couple of possible reasons. Your web site might not be the strongest, or maybe you are not focusing on the right people. This needs to be done week by week, month by month, keyword by keyword, landing page by landing page. Focus on constantly trying changes and experimentation to get you where you need to be.

There are some good tools to help with rankings, as well as some that perform Content audits. Focus on the analytics packages. The fourth step is figure out how to find links to the site. For any competitive keywords, this can be the difference. Use tools to find, “score” links. Tools can also manage link campaigns. Use the competitors backlink data to gain insight. Suppose you do not have time for all these tools? All-in-one tools that he likes for small businesses include soloseo (hosted) and WebCEO (software). It s nice to have one dashboard instead of having to reenter metrics into every different tool.

“I can’t look at each page individually.” Build tools. They built their own tool to analyze for missing or duplicate titles, for example, as well as other factors. They also broke it down per division, and used “management by embarrassment” to color-code the particular site areas that needed more help. Even though many managers didn’t really understand what was wrong, they wanted to move from a red code to a yellow and eventually to a nice green. These metrics can be updated and should be to include the current factors that matter most, and omit issues that have been handled already.

“None of this works for personalized search.” He has been looking at a tool recently called SEMlogic, which looks at the underlying factors across competitors, Analyzes which ones matter for your keywords, and allows for decision making. Now, IBM has 2M pages indexed in Google versus 10K. In 2001, 95% of pages had titles, now up to 99%. 2001: no top 10 rankings, now over 3000. Briefly promotes his and Bill Hunt’s book, “Search Engine Marketing.”

Martin Laetsch, SEMDirector. Will talk about what he has learned about benchmarking “with a small little company like Intel.” When he talked to marketers, they often came up with “fluffy” marketing terms like reach and frequency. This is not enough. With Intel, one problem was that it was a very siloed organizational structure, which made things difficult. When they started with Intel, 19% of keywords were duplicated in at least 2 campaigns. Pentium alone was in multiple SEM campaigns, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasteful spent.

Typical management challenges with information included: missing information, too much information, numerous sources, not valuable, difficult to get from other areas of the company. Yet competitor information is difficult to get. The use of reporting analytics for benchmarking is important. In order to get actionable information, comprehensive reports are required. The reporting and housing of this information needs to be scalable to other software. You should have consistent reporting, and know the audience for specific reports.

When dealing with thousands and tens of thousands of keywords, so many things to consider. Even as deep as the delicate balancing act between PR teams and sales. So: used a centralized organizational structure for all search program management. They set up best practices, then moved on to tactical SEO and SEM execution, followed by establishing the reporting and analytics software framework. Also, then line up search with other marketing efforts… The Intel Viiv press release resulted in 15,000% more Google searches! He ends up with two quotes: Andrew Lang “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts – for support rather than illuminations.” Sherlock Holmes: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data…”

What does this mean? Marketing is changing, and online is going to con tin ue to be a larger percentage of the overall mix. Measurement becomes that much more important. Must use solid data to make sensible decisions.

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by n the interest of speed.

Moderated by Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land, as well as one of the conference organizers.

OK this is a monster post so bear with me.

Leading off with Amanda Wattlington of Searching For Profit. Provides five major reasons to Podcast. (thanks Amanda for giving me your slides prior to your presentation :) ) :
First, it creates direct communication channel with prospects and customers. Secondly, it extends reach through emotional connection with target market. Thirdly, it adds new media outlets to extend reach. Podcasts offer marketers audiences unavailable via regulated broadcast radio. Use short sponsorships to integrate advertising for broad-based content. Fourthly, it facilitates marketing communications with target audiences. Extend awareness of knowledge, expertise and approach. Forges relationships. Finally, it humanizes relations with the public. Provide the public with a more approachable means to relate to your organization.

Benefits: Engage consumers by creating a dialogue. Easily indexed by search engines.
Augments site content. Little-No Cost Media – Easily distributed (RSS). Humanizes organization. Extends reach of message. Choose topics selectively.

Challenges: Requires level of transparency. Measurability can be limited. Content is less formal with shorter turnaround than traditional communications. Less control and ownership. Requires on-going commitment and content development. Set editorial guidelines for content. Loss of control of distribution and use. Company vs. public information. She provides a list of things that are “podcast-worthy.” Includes educational content, news, oral history, commentary, tours, music, ads, and literature.

Before You Get Started: Decide if you are doing a one-off standalone podcast or a podshow. Don’t finalize the name of your show until you make sure the show name is not already in use. Podshow names are not as easy to check as domain names. Changing the name is difficult once you have an audience. Decide on Showname and episode name – Each will need its own Title and Description. Carefully write your Titles and Description for your show and episode. Develop a keyword list for the show and determine how you will brand it – by the host, the show name or (else). Write the audio tag information carefully in advance. Get album art ready – even for non-musical shows. Review iTunes categories to look for the right fit. Be prepared to edit the audio tags yourself for each episode – download a tag editor. Build your infrastructure in advance of creating the audio so that you can rapidly mount your show.

Describes podcasting as a four-step process: 1. Optimize ID3 Tags. 2. Create Web page. 3. create and validate feeds. 4. Submit and regularly monitor distribution. Step 1 is optimizing the sound (ID3 tags: ID3 = Metadata for MP3, 4,WMA, AAC or Ogg Vorbis audio files. ID3v1 = Appended to the end of the audio file. ID3v2 = Appended to the start of the audio file, highly flexible format. Maximum tag size is 256 megabytes and maximum frame size is 16 megabytes. 39 pre-defined frames including – copyright, content type, dates, and content information, and space for files such as pictures. Can also carry lyrics and complete transcriptions of text. Look up tables for locating information in the file. Comment frame is user-defined. ID3v2 editors abound – originally designed to assist users in cataloging and organizing music collections. All of the data in the ID3 tag is able to be parsed.

In addition, use: Title – Name of the show and date (mm/dd/yy) or an episode name. Album – Name of your podcast. Artist – Your name or the host. Year – The year podcast is released. Track – Episode number. Genre – Podcast or Other. Comments – URL, a transcript or abstract and who or how to contact for more information.

Optimize the File Name: Make sure that you use a unique name. Use a shortened name + date or episode number. For example: pdmktg032707.mp3 could be the name for a show called Podcast Marketing, first released on March 27, 2007. Or, pdmktg03.mp3 could be the file name for the third episode of the show. This is important for users and for directories.

Optimize Your Landing Pages: Use a separate landing page for audio content to limit possibility of broken links. Have a page for the podshow with links to it for the episodes. Provide information on the show’s schedule to attract subscribers and how to subscribe. Create a separate pages for each episode. Optimize the landing page for the show. Provide subscription information on every landing page. Include a player for those who want to listen online. Include with the player the length and size of each audio file. Include an abstract or a transcription of each episode. Use multiple feeds if you provide multiple formats. Optimize – SEO “scrub and rub” every page.

Amanda then suggest some services to create and validate feeds, including Webmaster Podcaster, Feed For All, Jitbit, Podifier, and FeedBurner. The list some places to submit, including FeedBurner, Podfeed.net, Singing Fish, iPoderX, podnova, Podcast Alley, and Yahoo! Podcasts and others.

5 Tactics to Promote Online Audio Beyond Search Engines: Use the power of the content – interviews and topical subjects draw listeners. Use PR and word-of-mouth techniques. Embed links to audio in online press releases distributed by newswires. Use marketing communications to drive listeners. Make URL/name memorable and easy to spell. Feature links on your website to boost awareness of your podcast. Blog about your content and link to audio.

Amanda then speaks briefly to monetizing, and gives examples of enablers such as FeedBurner, Podomatic, Podbridge, Podcastpickle.com, Podzinger and some others. Lastly, she gives 5 Secrets for SEO Success for Your Podcasts: Optimize the audio file. Build landing pages for your show AND Each episode. Build accurate, effective RSS files. Submit and promote broadly, and watch for changes.

Next: Daron Babin from WebmasterRadio.FM. Will talk about “Is it worth it?” Factors like production time, cost of production, equipment, encoding (can be a pain), analytics (who has come close?) and bandwidth. When listeners come, they want it to be nice and “clean,” otherwise they may not come back.

Speaks at length about the importance of minding bandwidth. “One rogue blogger” can send traffic off the charts. Users want to be entertained and engaged…don’t write about your dog being neutered (to the wrong audience). Keep the person’s attention is an even greater job. They are listening if you are compelling. They want to be both educated and entertained. Prepare for the growth. He recommends securing a sound or content delivery network. They currently use Akamai. Live streaming is an issue with them, but for delivering volume they are great. Latency doesn’t become an issue with these networks, people don‘t email saying its taking forever to download. Be prepared to pay a premium for these services…it is not cheap. Establish up front what it is going to cost. It will cost an ungodly sum of money if not properly negotiated at onset.

Also determine what kind of analytics will be provided. You can use some to “marry with log files” and get a very accurate picture what is going. This is very important because when you look to monetize podcasts, people are going to want to know this.

Transcribe everything! In optimizing audio files with spoken word, you can get great traction. In terms of optimizing ID3 files, like Amanda said can be a problem, he challenges you to “do it dynamically!” Remember that originality + passion = downloads. Be passionate and don’t pull punches. People want to hear the passion, this is what engages people and leads to downloads. Goes into some methodologies for optimizing. He urges that you look at how to write and employ text for media files. (he gets a laugh when he describes a “dark side” technique of employing content is particular fonts…)

If summaries are not thorough and you are not transcribing, you are doing yourself a disservice. Take the time, and the results will follow. He suggest checking with Amazon that has a product which helps with this. He isn’t sure of the name but it is fairly affordable ($10 for every 20 minutes or so) and it is a quick turnaround. Look at geo-targeting to deliver ads for the podcasts. There are whole new avenues of monetization coming in the realm of dynamic podcast delivery options.

Rick Klau, from FeedBurner. He is not here to pitch services, since most of their stuff is free. He will look at some stats into what is working and what isn’t.. Things to remember: not everyone uses iTunes. This fundamentally changes in how you look at your audience if you remember this. Metadata is essential for discovery. The subscription process sucks. Some people don’t even care about this. His wife refuses to do the RSS feed because she just “goes to the web site.” Laughs when he explains that this is funny because of his job and he can’t even get his wife to use the feeds to properly subscribe. (Funny I have the same problem – I can’t get my wife to blog about her passion for Children’s Ministries, so I can monetize that). Get your feeds out there. “Ping, ping, ping…”

In Q1 2007, over 100K podcast feeds managed. In aggregate, they are tracking more than 5M subscribers, up from 50K in Q1 2005. When he says this, the actual audience is likely to be over 10M, but this cannot be determined. The stats are important to understand. If larger audience is goal, then optimize for that. If targeting is goal then optimize for that.

He describes one particular feature called “uncommon uses.” The common ones are Tunes, etc. Increasingly, however, they are seeing access from domains that are only requesting one particular feed. This leads to the need to further analyze why this is happening, in order to gain greater insight into the needs of the audience. You have to understand the scope. This is almost secondary SEO, because you have to optimize to make sure that those audience have easy visibility.

Consumption is happening everywhere. He picked on podcast and listed literally 100’s of applications that are consuming the podcasts. For example Tevo just one place to make sure that you podcast is easily subscribable for the listeners. Directories are a very important driver of pod cast consumption as well. Many are in themselves “SEO honeypots.” They are static archives which are frequently updated. If not in directories, you are losing the potential visibility within the major search engines. They are likely to rank higher for your show name or category than you are, so make sure content is properly formatted and rich in description in order to be prominently listed.

Republishing is also critical (to the freshness factor, I am assuming). Making the content consumable in the way the audience wants is again critical. Just seeing a link to iTunes isn’t necessarily enough. He explained to (his son I think he said) about how you can actually engage iTunes for something other than 99 cent songs. He was amazed. Many people have never bothered to even find out what a podcast is. Do not assume that people understand what the podcast is. Do not assume that a link to iTunes will automatically translate to the visitor as being a way to download or subscribe to the podcast.

Step 1: create the feed. Format the page in something understandable. Talks about how different current browsers assuming they know how to present content better than the way it is archived. Suggests using Yahoo! Media RSS which provides the ability to present additional metadata. Using show notes: make the files look interesting! A small part of him dies every time he sees ugly show notes. Remember this gets indexed by search engines. Describes a friend who had a problem with “John Elway Dodge” and now owns that term with a six part podcast. (Chris Sherman mentioned after that John Elway had changed the name of his dealership, and this may have been why).

Remember to submit and “ping.” Submit to all services and directories available. Enable “PingShot” to ensure timely content updates. Remember this is a good way to use popularity. “Cool kids get cooler.” Directories love popularity contests.. Ensure “Auto Discovery” is enabled. This ensures that bots know where the feed lives. There is no limit to how many feeds you can advertise. He designs his to include all relevant feeds. By doing this, just like user agent subscriber-focused servers, you are enabling applications to no be in the position to consume the feeds.

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by n the interest of speed.

Brad Geddes Dir. Of Search Locallaunch.com
In this session, the presentation were a combination online examples how all the paid search engines offer different tactical options in Geographic targeting, SEM Campaign best practices and the importance of Editorial Reviews and Trademark policies. The most interesting key points were that Bidding on Trademark terms in Google does affect the Quality Score as well as Yahoo Panama’s matchdriver which takes misspellings, singular/plural combinations and other variations and directs them to a primary term. Now, that we have a brief overview, I will now go the key talking points.

The session started off with Brad Geddes Dir. Of Search Locallaunch.com. He spent a lot of time focusing on the many different options on Geographic targeting in Google, Yahoo and MSN. He also walked the audience through the Google adwords target audience settings, as well as the details of Google offering Geo targeted campaigns in 200 different countries with Local targeting is 27 countries. He also went through some examples of Geo targeted ads, Radius Targeting, Multi-map options, Location Targeting Options where users can targets customers in an area whose shape you define. Ad Diagnostic tool. Ads show in different results based on where you live.

Brad then continued to talk about the geo targeting options that MSN and Yahoo offer where MSN supports 200 countries, Local targeting is 4 countries (US, Canada France & UK) and Yahoo Panama supports 23 countries, DMA and State Targeting. He also talked about blocked continents, map or text regions, zip code search, and the one of the most interesting points that each country has different editorial guidelines.

Kevin Lee, Exec. Chairman, Did-it.com
Next up to the podium was Kevin Lee and really nailed it on the head when he said Paid search is targeting humans, not clicks or impressions. He focused on that driving qualified search to interesting prospects is what matters. He walked the audience through the interfaces that the engines offer. Going though the different Matchtypes available on the engines and mentioning the importance of Yahoo’s extended broad match and MatchDriver which tries is figure out what the searcher is looking for. He also talked about
that MSN is experimenting with stemming and that MSN as well as Google prefer that you add plurals to the campaign separately.

Kevin also went into detail about why we need to use match types to determine search intent and to use exact match to maximize quality score. He mentioned best practices such as to mix and match the different match types to maximize SERP coverage; Encouraged users to utilize analytics to look for seasonal, weekly and daily trends track everything such as the time of day, day of the week, geographic, etc… He closed his presentation highlighting on that scale & efficiency of SEM campaigns equals a good strategy.

Mona Elesseily Internet Marketing Strategist, Page Zero Media
Next up to the podium was Mona Elesseily and she focused mainly on search engine editorial review process, as well as Trademark policies. Mona highlighted on the that even though Google MSN and Yahoo have automation in place to speed up the review process, Ads to do not just automatically go live on the engines without some sort of review She also focused on Yahoo in particular still continues to random sweep all accounts to catch editorial infringements and is still performing “case by case” manual reviews.
Mona then discussed the Trademark issue, She mentioned that grammatical errors, superlatives and use of the trademark name do trigger problems. In Google, a user can bid on trademark terms, however not in ads/Creatives and that some trademarks are placed on a “block list” for immediate notification. One of the most interesting points in the presentation what that even though users can bid on trademark terms, it is very likely that it will affect your quality score. In my opinion, this is welcome news for companies who are in bidding wars with their own affiliates, competitors and partners because it makes it has the potential to free up the real estate for the trademark search terms which are generally the most profitable for them.

Session Coverage Provided By: Greg Meyers from Commerce360, Inc.

The SERoundtable team (minus Barry and Tamar) is covering many of the sessions at SES today. Barry and Tamar will be here tomorrow. I wanted to point out if there is any particular session that the reader want covered, leave the suggestion in the comments here. We have quite a few people today covering sessions such as myself Ben Pfeiffer, Chris Boggs, Debra Mastaler, Greg Meyers, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, and Kim Krause Berg. If you happen to see anyone of us, be sure to say hello.

So far the conference is PACKED again this year. Many of the sessions are standing room only. I noticing a lot more big business and companies with new SEO positions represented this year. Additionally have already meet a lot of people from Europe visiting this conference. This has been an ongoing trend over the years as one would expect for more and more businesses to create positions and send those people to learn more about SEO. What a testament to what is going on in this industry. Despite the changes over the last year, the basics are still important as ever it seems in the SEO process. The press room is also quite packed. The internet is fast and consistent (thank goodness) so a thank you to Incisive for making sure we are setup here. If you have followed us for a several years now, you know that we have covered the accessibility to internet for press at these conferences.

Some Recommended SES Sessions Today:

11:00-12:30pm Podcast & Audio Optimization

11:00-12:30pm Ads in A Quality Score World

2:00-3:30pm In House: Building The Team

2:00-3:30pm In House: Advertising In Social Media

4:00-5:30pm Where Are Your Spending Your Clients Money?

4:00-5:30pm Advanced Paid Search Tactics

Welcome to SES NYC 2007! Chris Sherman moderating.

Got in a little late…Sherwood Stranieri from Catalyst was speaking. Came to a slide titled “Video and viral are drinking buddies.” I wish I understood that analogy. ;) Anyway, Sherwood was stressing the point that linking works very well to help with SEO. He feels that video is driven by viral marketing, not search engine marketing. Now he will go into video strategies for different industries and applications.

Spread of video throughout the web is happening very fast…6-7 figure traffic per month. So: people have the idea of using video as a content provider. Everybody that produces content on this level has a stake in the game or could benefit from it. Right now…viral marketing is the primary mechanism, so how to leverage that for lasting value? There are bloggers to television networks. They decided to work with a “feeder strategy.” Made two groups of videos, one geared towards YouTube and others towards video SE’s. The goal is to get them back to the website, so that they can view the ads. If you post videos, it is not enough to just be famous on YouTube. This can be used as a foundation for other updated content, which turns into a cycle that keeps feeding users.

Caution: all-in-one video players can cause problems for search engines. Be mindful of how the video is implemented. Sometimes it is made “almost too sophisticated.” Avoid taking that road too quickly without considering possible after-effects. Pages that mix html content with the actual video players will function best. He shows a couple examples of pages with both html and video. The he goes into top ranking videos in standard search results. “Video search is reaching out to the so-called ‘real world’ of search engine marketing.” “Beyonce has a video from YouTube on page 2 of the regular results. CSI Miami on #1.

Video for pharmaceutical companies. Here we have a very different approach. Very regulated, conservative space. Has two approaches: one for onsite/brand portals. Offsite/off-brand veers towards curiosity and entertainment sites. These are dry topics, but video can add depth or dimension to the topics. It ads color/details/life to products. Things like patient interviews on a website, brings life. So far they have not achieved the strongest natural rankings in regular engines for this, but are getting some lift. He shows another example of a medical animation showing the creation of a cell or something, and how it garnered traffic because it was interesting.

Video for ecommerce: make it newsworthy. Showcase anticipated uses of products you sell. For example, if you sell power tools, use them to build a deck. Sell clothing? Use a runway show. Prepare for unanticipated uses of products. These can be very big. One person made an MP3 player out of an Altoids tin. This can be leveraged. Use teaser strategy and bring people to a branded page. Imagine the commercial value of having footage that no one else has, and making it work for your marketing. Brings up the Mentos/Diet Cole example. This was leveraged after by producing additional videos. Shows other videos that show up high. The rap video for Pepto Bismal, etc.

To wrap it up: video pages can be strong contenders in regular search results. Most of today’s videos search success stories are happy accidents. Product demos, testimonials, entertaining commercials – use anything that adds dimension to the products. But don’t fake it (or suffer from massive quantities of negative commentary). Execute your strategy with the right mix of video and text content.

Next is Eric Papczun from Performics. Will dive right into stats. 123 M Americans now consume video online. 7B videos served/month. 72% watch news videos online, 27% once a week. 76% of users are sharing videos. Driving the viral chain. Video consumption is moving from TV sites to video sites and eventually to search. So, will video kill the radio star? Seeing more and more people searching for video than things like music.. The top destinations. He shows share of traffic versus share of video streams. 43% YouTube traffic, but only 9% of video streams. MySpace leads the share of video streams at 20%, followed by Yahoo sites at 11% then YouTube.

The relative share of traffic: 68% Google Video, 21% Yahoo, 8% AOL. Traffic relative to Google.com: 2.20% Google video, 0.69% Yahoo! video. The reality is that most people are using traditional search engines to find videos, or going to a trusted provider like YouTube where they have relationship and a community there. (Last year, Blinkx was garnering lots of press, but they have less than 1% share of traffic.)

The roadblocks: Lack of simple and consistent taxonomy for producers to use. Search is too dependant on text from video’s corresponding we page. Flash video players. Ugly URL’s with lots of parameters. So he says that you should think like the Video searcher. Shows the example of searches for Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld), and how there is a short opportunity to get videos indexed. Shows the top video results at Google for Michael Richards, which are not good. (#1 is titled “the Death of Michael Richards’ career.” People are also searching for Kramer. Those sites that were smart and also optimized for that did a good job of gaining multiple share.

He also advocates surrounding video with html. Recommends keeping videos “off of the root.” Use a separate directory. Also suggests using video site maps, one sitemap linking off of regular sitemap. He advocates using the word video over and over again. The more times you can get it into META data and content, the more success you will have with regular searches. Not a lot has changed in terms of relation to traditional SEO. Link and anchor text are very important. But now file tagging and commenting Are becoming more important. (this makes sense since it is SE-legible content that surrounds the video). There is a whole collection of folks that “sit there and really do the work for you.” Now instead of watching the whole state of the union address, you can watch only the parts that pertain to you.

Shows some common video distribution tools like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Blinkx. Best practices: train editors to think like searchers. Encode for the right keywords – use them in filename. One video per URL (avoid Flash and pop up players). Suggest using tools to remove metadata that is just “noise” getting in the way. Add tagging./ Keep video files in same directory. Surround video w/relevant text. Crosslink to videos using keywords in anchor text. Create an optimized video sitemap. Upload videos to SEs. Add in-format metadata.

He feels there is a good opportunity to brand yourself in video. Grab real estate around the term video. Really wants you to focus on the keyword video. If you have a good potion in video, you will do well down the road. Paid search helps to capture current stories (like Kramer video” search. Shows and example of top paid listing titled “Kramer’s Racist Rant.” He feels that in Google, video search can be gamed by suing links and anchor text. He shows a chart with correlation between linking and rankings. Not perfectly scientific, but the evidence definitely points to the Goggle video ranking algo using these.

Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative. Talks about the fact that it is exiting to see all these people interested in video search (the large room is pretty full). Why is video search so important? Well, it is free, that helps. There is no cost per action or cost per click. More guys search for video than girls…that’s a surprise. Laughs. He will skip through some redundant content to leave more time for QA. You cannot rely on the big players for the highest view numbers. They often see numbers surprisingly high on the second tier engines.

AOL video search skews entertainment-based searches. They find that focusing only on YouTube is sometimes causing the miss of big surprises when it comes to traffic. More people search for video that news, love, and religion. Video is influencing regular search results. A search for Corvette Video” on Google.com does not return a single manufacturer site. Again, this is free. Many of the video search engines have great integrated viral/community tools. One ting that is hot with VSEO is similar to the commercial blogging enterprises. Tagging teams can help follow regular SEO and help to create artificial interest that leads to additional viral bang.

The list of video SE’s is growing exponentially, weekly. New engine every other day it seems. He shows a list with lots of them, and states that there are still tons left off of it. Goes into basic approaches to optimization and submission types. The uses the word “sexy” for the second time in his presentation which as usual makes me cringe. Shows some examples of encoders that can be programmed to be SEO-friendly. There are three main ways to get content into a video search engine (VSE). The first are crawler-based VSE’s. Another submission type is the upload-based like YouTube. A degree of keyword prominence seems to come into play with these. Keep usability in mind also…use the keywords but include a call to action in creative. The second are the ones where you upload a video. With many of the upload types, you will see requests for specific information: use them!

Third type of submission that is possible after crawl and upload is RSS. Yahoo! Is one of them. They would require and HTML RSS feed, pretty basic. Optimization tips for this include title, description and keyword, as usual. Include this within the RSS structure. If yopu are posting video on a website, make sure you link it from relevant html pages with associated keywords. Goes into some examples of how the process is still manual and somewhat labor intensive. At Infuse, they create a tool to semi-automate the process. This also tracks views. He announces that they will be creating a commercially available version of this tool sometime in the third or fourth quarter.

He does not see the landscape changing soon. Shows some case studies. A Non-profit sex education site for teens. Video and sex education types of keywords – figure this out, it is extremely competitive. They received over 250K video views in the course of two months with only optimization cost. When they talk to companies now, the first thing they ask is what are your video assets. Another case study shows over 1000 video views (brand impressions) per week as a result of their efforts. He echoes that secondary VSE’s can be important especially in some niches. He lists essentially the same best practices as the other speakers.

Before you upload videos, take advantage of the medium. Watermark the lower right hand corner in order to create brand reinforcement like CBSA does for example. Include a brand reinforcement in the first frame of the video. In last frame of video, include an audio or text based call to action. These are simple things that can add to overall marketing benefit. If you really want to be geeky, make sure that you are also optimizing your spoken word. Although voice-recognition is still growing, it is changing rapidly. Additionally, the ability to recognize characters is also improving, so include keywords in the video subtitles, if available. He gives one example of around the Superbowl, many people would use the word “commercial” in their searches. So they actually tagged their commercial with the word commercial, which worked great. Finishes with a list of helpful resources. Blinkx created a wiki for VSEO…can be very timely information.

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by n the interest of speed.

What matters when doing big SEO for big brands or big sites with thousands of products? This session will discuss the problems and solutions that marketers run into when faced with such large issues and the best way to