Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose Archives

Four days of SEO, PPC, SMO, Link Baiting, Landing Pages, Google Dancing, and SearchBashing has now come to a close. I am extremely proud to announce we have covered 64 of the 74 sessions offered at the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference.

How did we cover so many sessions? All the credit goes to the contributors including Chris Boggs of Brulant, Li Evans from Search Marketing Gurus, Kim Krause-Berg from Cre8PC, Steve Krull from The Krull Group, David Wallace from SearchRank, Carolyn Shelby aka cshel, Rob Kerry sir EvilGreenMonkey, Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and Tamar Weinberg of RustyBrick. This coverage, along with coverage from aimClear Blog, Ask.com Blog, Lisa Barone at BruceClay.com Blog, Justin Davy, David Dalka, Lee Odden, Search Engine Journal, Unofficial SEO Blog, WebProNews and others, is a true testament to the SEM communities values and good will in helping others.

Now for the wrap up, in alphabetical order, the sessions we covered:

1. Ad Exchanges are Changing Everything
2. Ad Testing: Research and Findings
3. Ads in a Quality Score World
4. Advanced Paid Search Techniques
5. Advertising Track: Search Ad Buyers Forum
6. Are Paid Links Evil?
7. B2B Tactics
8. Benchmarking An SEM Campaign
9. Buzz Monitoring
10. Content is King
11. Contextual Ads & AdSense Clinic
12. Converting Visitors Into Buyers
13. Copyright & Trademarks: What SEMs Should Know
14. Creating Compelling Ads
15. CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Search Engines
16. Domaining and Address Bar-Driven Traffic
17. Earning Money From Contextual Ads
18. Fun with Dynamic Web Sites
19. Getting Traffic from Contextual Ads
20. Images & Search Engines
21. In House: Big PPC
22. In House: Big SEO
23. In House: In, Out, or in Between?
24. Introduction To Search Engine Marketing
25. Keynote Conversation with Jim Lanzone of Ask.com
26. Keynote Conversation With Marissa Mayer
27. Landing Page Testing
28. Link Baiting
29. Link Building Basics
30. Local Search Marketing Tactics
31. Meet The Crawlers
32. Meet the Video Search Engines
33. One Billion Searchers
34. Organic Listings Forum
35. Personalization, User Data
36. Podcast and Audio Search Optimization
37. Post Search Ads
38. Public Relations Train Wrecks in the Interactive Biz: Disaster Can Be Avoided!
39. Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix
40. Search Advertising 101
41. Search APIs
42. Search Engine Friendly Design
43. Search Engine QA on Links
44. Search Engines On Click Fraud
45. Search Marketers On Click Fraud
46. Search Term Research and Targeting
47. Searcher Behavior Research Update
48. SEM Pricing Models
49. SEO Q&A On Links
50. SEO Through Blogs and Feeds
51. Shopping Search Tactics
52. SMO: Social Media Optimization
53. So You Want To Be A Search Marketer!
54. Successful Site Architecture
55. The Search Landscape
56. The SEO Reputation Problem
57. Universal & Blended Vertical Search
58. Usability
59. User Generated Content
60. Video Search Optimization
61. Web Analytics and Measuring Success
62. What is a Brand Vehicle? Integrated Marketing Together Forever
63. Wikipedia & SEO
64. Writing for Search Engines

Panelists

Jeannette Cezanne eWay Direct
Benjamin Lloyd Amplify Interactive
David DeVries Microsoft Small Business

Moderator
Jennifer Laycock

Jeannette is up first. Content is the future of search and design. The expression has always been content should never be an afterthought. Content is usually created without much thought or without SEO thought. Her take away is content, design and SEO should all go hand in hand. It’s easier said than done but you must focus to get the job done.

Important part of SEO is linking, but what makes a site want to link to you? Do you have quality relevant content? You must give them something of value. When content is keyword rich and focuses then people will link to it. Become a resource.

Jeannette says a great example of site with good content is Progressive Car Insurance. They are a resource, have become trusted so both spiders and humans go back to.

Look at each page and ask yourself the question “so what?” If you can answer that – good. Look at each page from the point of the end user. If I was the end user what would be useful for me to read, see or hear? Tell your visitor how to do everything on the site. Make it easy to find things.

Pretty pictures don’t bring people to a site it’s the content that engages people with a site.
What’s the path to go through the site? Make it easy for people to find all elements on your site. There is a reason the site exists, explain it.

What is the site trying to do? Is it an information site? It’s it entertaining? Determine what the site is and then design each page of the site around it. Here’s the theme of the page – if it’s not clear then you’ve not optimized the content properly. Good information should be at the top of the page.

Think about the end user, this is the person you want to communicate to about the content.

Quick exercise to use on your site: make a list of all site pages then ask yourself:

Does each page have a theme?
Is there a call to action on each page?

Best SEO specialist is you. Here’s a handful of useful tools to analyze content and help you work: Cleverstat - Shareup Snapfiles

Know your audience what is the content your visitor wants to see there? Find someone who is part of your target audience to go through site with you.

Be creative in your user keywords, broader keywords are less competitive

People and spiders like new content, be sure it’s relevant to your site.

You need to be careful with misspelling, people are turned off with them, and they might not use you for lack of trust. Check for grammatical errors and misspelled words.

Make what you want your customers to do – the easiest thing they can do.

If you give her a card/email she’ll send you a cheat sheet for content providers.

David DeVries – Microsoft

At the end of the day it’s the results that matter to a business owner.

Showed Microsoft small business pages when bCentral which was very content heavy versus now (showed site) it has video, call to action, ask the experts, etc – exposing content in different ways. They’re taking a more multimedia approach.

Here are there 5 steps to great content:

1. Identify your audience and their needs – ask what their needs are, what problems can the content solve? How does your audience search?

2. Choose new keywords. What’s the target market searching for?

1. Take stock of your existing content – look for gaps in resources, don’t have the same information everyone else does. Inventory the properties/assets on your site

2. Build content within zones of opportunity. Be sure you can place it in a way that it makes sense and is easy for customers to consume it. Look to build wikis, blogs, podcasts, forums, training, user generated content, etc – how can you add all these elements so the end user can easily use and understand?

3. Once content is in place, promote the content on the site. Promote through RSS, newsgroups, develop a personal dashboard, blogs etc. Promote the content off site as well, share video with YouTube and Google video, increases traffic and real estate in Google universal.

Great results come from great content strategy. A planned journey is key, continually re-evaluate your site.

Benjamin Lloyd

Going to show case studies and practical advice to help with your content strategy.

First case study – Tripwire. Unfortunately, Benjamin used a laser pointer on the screen opposite where I was sitting to point out elements while he spoke so I couldn’t see what he was talking about!

Focus on solution content development, architecture improvement and optimization. Leverage content rich white papers and web casts content for search traffic and lead generation. Develop niche specific links to deep content.

Don’t put your white papers behind a registration process, search engines can’t find it. Include an overview of what the paper is about. Bold headlines, include forms for people to fill out and ask for more information. When content changes were made search results and conversions went up.

For B2B clients – need to think about what you need to solve. Boost content and increase effectiveness.

TheFertileSoil.com was the second site for the case study. Site is about acupuncture.

The owner wanted to generate qualified prospects and registrations for a retreat she offered. To drive more registrations, they used PPC but needed more long term strategy. Through research they found out women searched for problems not solutions so content was written to talk about women’s problems. Search traffic went up as a result.

Universal search results mean more of your content is content for search engines. But text is still critical. Wrap video and audio results into page. Timely content is found faster, allow your users to generate content for your site and blogs.

Debra Mastaler - Alliance-Link / TheLinkSpiel Blog

If you build a user friendly site, chances are you've also built a search engine friendly site. This session teaches how good usability can help your human visitors while bringing in search traffic.

Moderator: Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro Search Solutions

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, Omni Marketing Interactive
Matt Bailey, Site Logic Marketing

Finally, it is about 12:30 pm Thursday and this is the last session of the day. Today is a half-day, with tomorrow devoted to training. People are still trickling in. I've covering this session for the third or fourth time...am losing count. Ice cream cones are being passed around. Gord throws one to someone in the audience. It gets thrown around until it finally lands in the back to someone in the audience. The speakers and Gord are eating them too. He kills time by asking how the parties were last night. Room is about full. Gord introduces Shari by using her old company. She teases him about that. Gordon remarks they get less formal as the days wear on. By the time the session was ending, the room was packed.

Shari:

She will discuss search usability vs web site usability. A lot of SEO's don't understand web site usability. People type in keyword phrase. Ave. is 2.3 words. Get a search result. They go to the page they desire. SE's do term hightlighting of that word. This provides "scent of information" (see Jared Spool). They want to see their same keywords on the page they click into. IF you design for the user only you won't make a lot of money.You need to meet business goals too. People don't always create using user personas or base design on user behaviors. Browsing? Pogo sticking (jumping between pages), foraging, scanning, reading, berrypicking. Querying. These are search behaviors to take into consideration. Scent of info, sense of place, user confidence, info arch vs site nav, interface are key concepts in search usability.

Scent of info is make of text and graphical cues that people use to decide a path to chooose. Term highlighted in engines helps with scent of information by offering clues. Usability serves relevancy via HTML title tags, body copy. Secondary text is meta tag desc and url structure. Provide a sense of place and scent of information. This encourages clicks to the your pages. There is the 8 second (or 5 second) test. Show people your page for 5-8 seconds. Ask where are you? What are you viewing? What is the topic? Is the info you want there? This helps you understand if the keywords are there or not or the content provides enough scent of information clues. She gives a demonstration of a page constructed and describes the content elements, how screen real estate is used, where people's eyes go first, how search engines react to the page, etc. Recommends not removing the underline for clickable links. Because blue is associated with being a click, using blue for non clickable words is confusing to people. Her demo page also shows a litle bit about how to redundant info to help visitors understand the page.

Info arch is the organization of site content into groups. Determine info arch first, then design. She has a demo page that shows navigation, groupings of info. Asked people what are you viewing? They got it 100% right because page was keyword focused and navigation supports it via keyword oriented labels and specific placement of info. Keywords help your visitors find what they want while also aiding search engines. Site nav, cross linking,page layout, allocation of page real estate and url structure is where you add keywords to content to be spider friendly. Shows a demo of breadcrumb navigaiton and how you can put words in reverse

order in the breadcrumb trail, for keyword searches in reverse order. Cross link vertically as well as horizontally. Use embedded text links. If you have a glossary, you should have some form of alphabetical navigation (A, B, C, D etc.) Every site should have a sitemap. Don't make sea of blue. Annotate the links. She says if you have to create a sitemap so your users can use the site, it means your site isn't built right. There are those who disagree with this few as well. Simple URLS are the ones users will remember the most. (The ones minus the extra parameters.) One sub directory or two? Both are fine and both are search engine friendly. Sub directory or sub domain are fine. Sub domains are recommended for very large sites. URLS can and should communicate the site arch and it doesn't hurt rank She shows a case study...says a swear word and asks me not to blog it. (That was funny.) The case studies show how different organization of elements on a page, with exact same content, compare with each
other. You have to consider the end user. The performance of tasks was tested. Search usability helps web pages be found and helps visitors use the site once its found.

Matt:

Last speaker, last session, last day...he jokes. Usability is always last. Says he's on a sugar high from the ice cream. Search and usability are hand in hand. SEO is a child of usability and site arch. When you make usability changes on your site you will see changes in search results too. Number one goal of search is to get people to your site. Increase qualified traffic. USability is what happens when they get there.

Where do you want them go and what do you want them to. IF they can't find it, it's not there. It's your problem if users can't find what they want.

Matt launches his traditional funny screenshots of bad sites. Seeing is believing and this session is always hysterical.

If you try to force people where to go. Shows a site where you can shop now or enter the site. You can't do both? Avoid user fear. Should I have clicked that other button? They second guess themselves. Shows a page with product info with images that make it look like they have one product to sell. Shows a ecommerce site with ads that take users off-site as soon as they get there. Shows a page with navigation you can't see, including contact us. Color and placement matter. Taxonony- hierarchal stucture, classication, grouping. You need to determine how people classify things. People don't do it the same way. When you develop

keyword groups, how do your users group the words? This information goes into your navigation labels and information arch. How do you shop for wine? Region? Red, wine, pink? Blends? Wine.com takes this into account for their groups of links. You can provide different ways to look for products so people can find them. Make links clear and visible. This allows SE's to see those pages. You can also interlink your own web pages.

Break out products into categories. Show related links on the page. Don't force anyone to go back out to main navigation or homepage to start a new search on your site. Shows a page with several navigation schemes that confuse the task at hand. Know when to stop selling and when to allow them to get what they want. Shows a redundant navigation structure that works. There is a left side nav and inside content version but the content one has descriptive content that further describes the link. Avoid using "more" and "click here". Allow your users to explore. Give them the ability to find related items. Make it easy for someone who knows specifically that they want and wants to get in and get out. You also want to enable browsers to find info, be sold on what they're looking for.

Be product specific with terms. Call your product what your customers will call it. Users are searching for specific products rather than brands. Sales decisions are emotional decisions. Shows a Fish n Flush product. Not something people would be normally looking for. People have to know it exists before they can search for it. Landing pages, people want to know if this is the right page they should be on. Avoid dropping them on homepage. Put them on product pages instead. They want to immediatey get what they want.

He gets to the Butt Paste page (he's used this before. Always gets the most laughs.) It's really diaper rash ointment. Why don't you call it that? Branding vs what people call it. People don't search for butt paste.

Shows a product page where you can recommend it to a friend but you can't buy it. Shows a funny sushi disk page with all kinds of illogical elements on it...have to see it to understand. Shows a page with repeated keywords to the extreme. Shows a page where you hit "Start shopping" but you're presented with 3 PDFs to read first. You have to read to the policies first or "you will lose financially". (A real site did this.) Shows a cup warmer page with a ton of content on a silly product.

People look for different things. Digital camera info has to be different than MP3 player shoppers. You can't sell it the same way. International, content may be lost in translation, avoid slang, use clear instructions.

Don't assume that something is usable here, it is usable globally.

What are people saying about your company or clients? What are the hot trends that turn into keywords you should be mining? Discover tips and techniques for monitoring buzz in this session.
Moderator:

* Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:

* Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
* Andy Beal, Consultant, Editor, Author, MarketingPilgrim.com
* Jonathan Ashton, Director of SEO, Agency.com

Chris introduces the session and says that if you have negative publicity, you need to reduce the effects of it.

By the way, I have better hearing than Lisa. I can hear Chris just fine. But he does seem to be a little shy.

First up is Rob Key.

What is buzz? Consumers want to talk to consumers. They don't trust marketers; they trust each other. MySpace gets more traffic than Google.

Social media is linkable. You can't have a search strategy without a social media strategy. You cannot have a social media strategy without a search strategy.

You no longer own your brand. Your brand is a conversation.

There are different parts of the conversation - enterprise, mainstream media, and consumer generated content. Unless you're monitoring the buzz, you won't know what's there.

What is the conversation below the waterline? Buzz monitoring is conversation mining. You can scour the discussion areas to capture, understand, and report the products, issues, and opinions that consumers share between and among themselves. This includes newsgroups, blogs, podcasts, and social media sites.

The value of conversation mining is that you can spot trends and find out what customers really think of them. They can come up with ideas and concepts and companies can now listen in and engage.

Conversation mining helps marketers promote and protect their brands through the measurement of analysis of online word of mouth.
- Where is it being appearing?
- What is being discussed?
- What should I be wary of?
- Who is talking? Is it customers or employee?
- Is my market engaging with consumers?

What are the core business uses?
The failure of conversation mining is that when you won't take advantage of these issues, you may have issues with reputation management. It's an extension of customer service.
- Reputation Management
- New Product Launch
- Market Effectiveness
- Customer Service
- Brand Management
- Sales & Acquisition

Key mining dimensions: what do you want to mine for?
- What's the source?
- How do they feel? Positive, negative, netural?
- What's the topic? Product quality, service?
- Tone - enthusiastic, angry, etc?
- How influential is the venue?
- How deeply do they understand the product? Do I need to educate them further?
- Existing versus new voices.

Conversation leads:
- Influence: who are the most frequent and visible voices in the brand? What are they talking about and what is their sentiment?

Trending - category conversation mining. Trending over time provides great insights, allows you to find out if the sentiment is changing, and learn about the new topics. How are the perceptions of new voices?

Above the waterline: what's the source, what's the tone? You can see the stuff below the waterline and before it moves p.

Social media mining:
What's your reputation for the most popular terms?
Who can you influence?

Making it actionable: buzz monitoring allows you to create a social media strategy and we define social media strategy to proactively and ethically engage in proliferating consumer-generated media universe to inform the community.

Social media has detractors - reasonable detractors who you should kill off and determinate detractors who hate you and will be hard to work with.

Social media can enable you to take your site to the top.

Next up is Andy Beal who talks about buzz monitoring and wants to tell us how to take advantage of it for free.

Why should you track? There are a number of reasons:
- Get product ideas
- Get keywords (keyword research)
- Be prepared for scandals
- Product recalls
- Industry trends
- Client opportunities
- Customer reactions
- Competition

What should you track?
- Company name
- Executives
- Customers
- Patents
- Press releases
- Competitors
- Stocks
- Services
- News

Industry: you can subscribe to RSS feeds that are broken down by industry. If you want to track the most recent news, you can get an idea of what's happening by going into Google News which tracks mainstream media and second and third-tier news sites. You can subscribe to that RSS feeds as well.

News Buzz: you can search for items on Digg. (Now I'm happy I chose my Digg shirt to wear today.) If you're a voyeur, you can use products like Digg Spy.

Blog posts are good to track. Technorati has a great amount of information for industries. This is probably the best RSS feed to subscribe to if you choose to limit your subscriptions.

Google blog search also works rather well. It picks up on things within a matter of minutes.

Blog comments: the conversation may have a deeper impact than the post itself. Make sure you see that too. Someone could have written a very positive post but the tone may change in the comments if your detractors are there. You can subscribe to comments.

Blog conversations - viral blogging - you blog, someone else blogs, etc. Blogpulse.com/conversation

Blog trends: you can check blog trends and see how often a topic has been blogged about. A service that does this is blogpulse.

Bookmarks: we're very lucky that people bookmark sites publicly rather than locally. Delicious is a good site. Subscribe to that RSS feed. Now when people bookmark things you can track it and see what's being said.

Photos/videos: You might want to keep track of anyone who has been uploading photos of your product. You want to make sure you can track Google Video, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

Tags: Everybody is tagging things these days. Check the brand name and see what people have tagged with a particular word. Then you can browse through Technorati, delicious, etc.

Forum posts: These are hard to track but we have BoardTracker that keeps track of conversations.

Changing information: Wikipedia.org. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all the changes made to that page.

Job Listings: Oodle.com. You can use this to aggregate classifieds. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for that.

SEC filings: For example, google.brand.edgar-online.com lets you find out about these publicly traded companies.

Patents: google.com/patents. Look for ideas or keep track of your competitors.

Conference calls: You can subscribe to transcripts of conference calls.

Events: upcoming.yahoo.com. You might want to know what conferences are being held, etc.

New Products; amazom.com/tag/productname - you can see what other tags are being applied to products as well.

Search queries: Google Trends. This can be narrowed down to city.

Keyword referrals: searchanalytics.compete.com. If you type in the phrase iPhone, you can see which sites get the most traffic for that phrase. Compete can also tell you what search terms your competitors are ranking for.

Email Updates: google.com/alerts

The untrackable: copernic.com tracks a page for you and tells you as soon as it's changed. It's great for monitoring a BBB report or a PR page of your competitors.

Lastly, Yahoo! Pipes can be set up to track many different products. You can track conversations that happen in real time.

The last speaker of the conference is Jonathan Ashton.

He is focused on talking about minimizing the impact of complaints.

How much do you have invested in your brand? It's very important to do online because search engines can magnify that space. Brand owners can no longer control your message. The community sites facilitate the word of mouth communication. That branding you've invested can be killed completely by one single complaint.

He illustrates some brands that don't exist anymore because of the impact of negative word of mouth marketing. Complaints can have a life of their own.

Buzz management is now brand management. Push marketing from corporate sources is less impactful. In this era of social computing, word of mouth, customer reviews, and tagging that carries more weight than the billions of dollars you've invested.

You need to abandon the top-down perspective on brand management. Actively seek out the communities that respond and engage them.

Terminix and Orkin are brands under siege:
- 99% of customer satisfaction means that there are tens of thousands of less than satisfied customers.
- Complaints and bad buzz of all kinds show up in the SERPs when these brands are searched.

Some sites that do this are:
- BBB
- Ripoff Report
- My3cents.com
- Complaints.com
- consumeraffairs.com
- TheSqueakyWheel.com
But do your teams actually play defense?

The blog is really the soapbox of the new millennium. Today, it carries worldwide. Search Terminix and look at the third SERP.

Problems, complaints, and other problems show up in the results as well. You can find out about lawsuits and settlements. Even though they were from the past, they live in the presnet.

Co-opetition (book published in 1997). Finding ways to work with competitors and positively influence the environment in which you live so that you can separate the brand from the complaint.

Simple solutions:
- When you search for Orkin, right above the fold is a complaint. Bid up some sites that are based on your brand. It may push the results below the fold.
- Maximize your site to run interference. Give yourself over knowing that your customers are complaining about you. If your site is "Orkin Customer Service," change it to "Orkin compliments and complaints" so you'd rank higher. (Their Customer Service page has a high PageRank so it has high authority.) Modify your property to deal with this.
- Help your corporate siblings to do better as well. Many local branch websites should also be linked to the results to push bad pages down.
- Get your HR involved. Get a brand landing page on Monster and CareerBuilder so that it will be optimized for keywords related to your brand.
- Maximize your PR. Use sites like newsreleasewire.com, marketwire.com, etc.
- Wikipedia. Orkin has a Wikipedia article and Terminix does not.
- Help accidental tourists: You can pass link popularity to people who have the same name. Jeff Orkin is not related at all to the company but you should pass juice to him so you can push down that bad buzz.
You can't put the genie in the bottle but you can reducethe negative buzz with creative thinking and co-opetition.

Representatives from major crawler-based search engines cover how to submit and feed them content, with plenty of Q&A time to cover issues related to ranking well and being indexed. Danny Sullivan the conference Co-Chair is moderating with Peter Linsley of Ask.com, Evan Roseman of Google,  from Eytan Seidman Microsoft and Sean Suchter of Yahoo! Search are panelists.

Eytan is up first for a short presentation. He talks about their Live Webmaster Portal which includes features on how Microsoft will crawl your site. They support site map submissions and you can also see statistics specific to your web site.

They have multiple crawlers that will always begin with "MSNBot" -

- web search
- news
- academic
- multimedia
- user agent

Next he points out that they support "NOCACHE" and NOODP" tags.

Sean is up next for a short presentation on some updates with the Yahoo! crawler. One is dynamic URL rewriting via Site Explorer. Another thing is the "Robots-nocontent" tag which allows you to block access to certain portions of a web page. They have implemented crawler load improvements (reduction and targeting). New crawler has lower volume with better targeting.

Evan is up next and to start things off, he highlights Webmaster Central and explains some of its features. He suggests that you take advantage of it to submit a site map so that Google can index all your content. He also points out the Google Help Center in which they feature answers to some of the most common questions.

Finally, Peter is up. He talks about catering to the search engine robot as many times in catering to the actual human visitor, the robot is forgotten. Some problems include requiring cookies. He points out that Ask does accept site map submissions but points out that they'd rather be able to crawl naturally.

Peter uses the Adobe site to demonstrate some issues that they may have with multiple domains and duplicate content. He then uses the Mormon.org site and shows that they are disallowing crawlers to index the root page. This creates problems with crawling.

Now begins the Q&A portion of the session.

Q: First question if for Google rep. Wants to know whether they will allow users to see supplemental results within Webmaster Central now that they are no longer tagging them in search results.

A: Evan stated that being in supplemental is not a penalty but did not provide a definite answer as to whether they would allow users to discover if or not results are supplemental.

Danny interjects that all engines have a two-tier system and Eytan, Sean and Peter confirmed that. So... they all have supplemental indices but people only seem to be concerned with Google's, most likely because they used to identify them as such in the regular search results.


Q: What can a competitor actually do if anything to hurt your site?

A: Evan says that there is a possibility where a competitor could hurt your site but did say it is extremely difficult. Hacking, domain hi-jacking are some of the things that can occur.


Q: Question relates to scenario when you re-publish content to places such as eBay but the sites you re-publish to rank better than original. How can a webmaster identify original source of information?

A: Peter answers that one could try to get places they republish content to use robots.txt to block spidering of content. Another thing to do is have link back to original site. However on a site such as eBay, that is not always possible. The response to that is to create unique content for these sites that this person is re-publishing content on.


Q: Robert Carlton asks if all engines are moving towards having things like Webmaster Centrals. Also asks how they treat 404s and 410s.

A: As for 404s and 410s, Ask, Google and Yahoo! treat them the same. Robert points out that they should treat them differently as a 410 indicates the file is gone whereas 404 is an error.


Q: Question regarding getting content crawled more frequently.

A: Evan suggest to use the Site Map feature in Webmaster Central and keep it up to date. He also suggest promoting it by placing a link to it on the home page of their site.


Q: How can one use site maps more effective for very larges site that have information changing on a regular basis? Also inquired how to get more pages indexed when only a portion are being indexed.

A: Submitting a site map with Google is not going to cause other URLs to not be crawled. Evan also points that they are not going to be able to crawl and include ALL the pages that are out there. Again suggests that webmaster promote them such as listing them on home page. However when dealing with hundreds of thousands of pages, that is not always feasible.


Q: How do engines interpret things like AJAX, JavaScript, etc.?

A: Eytan answered that if webmaster wants things interpreted, they are going to have to represent those in a format the engine can understand, AJAX and JavaScript currently not being one of them.


Q: Question regarding rankings in Yahoo! disappearing for three weeks but then they get back in. Is his due to an update?

A: Sean answers that it certainly could be and suggests using Site Explorer to see if there is some kind of issue.


Q: How many links will engines actually crawl per page? How much is too much?

A: Peter says there is no hard and fast rule but keep the end user in mind. Evan echoes the same feeling.


Q: Do the engine use meta descriptions?

A: All engines use them and may use them if the algorithm feels they are relevant.


Q: For sites that are designed completely in Flash, can you use content in a "noscript" tag or would that be considered as some type of cloaking?

A: Sean said IP delivery is a no-no but if the content is the same as Flash, he'd rather see content in noscript than traditional cloaking. Evan suggests avoiding sites in complete Flash but rather use Flash components.


Q: Is meta keywords tag still relevant?

A: Microsoft - no, Yahoo! - not really, Google - not really, and Ask - not really. All read it but it is has so little bearing. For a really obscure keyword where it only appears in the keyword tag and no where else on the web, Yahoo! and Ask are the only ones that will show a search result based on it.


Q: How do engines view automated submission/ranking software?

A: Evan - don't use them.


I asked a Peter Linsley a question after the session regarding whether Ask is working to make their index fresher. In other words, are they working to re-index content as fast as the other engines do as typically it takes 6 months or more to get changes made to pages in the Ask index.

He said they are working on it but cannot give me any definite timeframe as to when that might be rolled out.

I also asked if they prioritize sites such as a CNN or Amazon in that changes to those sites are updated in the index more frequently than a mom and pop brochure type of a site and he confirmed that was true.


David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank

The growth of Wikipedia and its almost ubiquitous presence on search results pages means that search marketers can't ignore this important guide. This session looks at appropriate ways to interact with the service. It also examines if there's more that can be done to make Wikipedia editors more accepting of marketers and to make marketers more understanding of the Wikipedia community goals.
Moderator:

* Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies

Speakers:

* Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
* Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
* Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates LLC
* Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

First up is Neil Patel. Neil is pretty cool. He's going to introduce Wikipedia. He talks very fast. I'm really sorry if this is incoherent.

It's good for authority links, branding, and information (especially for copying essays). Wikipedia also gets a ton of traffic especially since it's so high up in the Google SERPs.

What you shouldn't do:
- Do not use Wikipedia as a link building resource.
- Do not add biased information. They hate that.
- You don't want to break rules.
- Don't want to delete accurate information. (If you put in inaccurate information, Neil's term papers will get him a bad grade. He doesn't want that.)
- You don't want to SPAM.

Once, Neil totally broke the rules and added a link to his website, but they found out and he got in trouble.
Rule of thumb: Don't be a dick.

How to add links:
- Develop a reputation as an editor.
- Add information first, links second.
- Follow the Notability rule.

Adding images is good for branding. You will succeed and you will do well.

Wikis are everywhere. You don't need to leverage Wikipedia only. There are real estate Wikis, etc., and those are easier to manipulate.

Jonathan Hochman is a Wikipedia editor. He focuses a lot on SEO on Wikipedia and he wants to resolve the issue of the SEO reputation problem (which I covered yesterday!) Wikipedia ranks really well for SEO in Google. Competing for that spot is hard in SEO.

Wikipedia can rank for almost any generic search phrase. Even if you can't outrank the competition, Wikipedia probably can
What's better at the top fo the search results? A neutral Wikipedia rticle or propganda from your competitor?
How to optimize a Wikipedia page:
- Introduce links from other articles
- Add proper categories

Digg is great but Wikipedia gets better traffic. If you look at Social media, Wikipedia is better than Digg. (By the way, I am in the front row wearing a Digg shirt. I'm getting a bit sad.)

There is a thing called a spam blacklist and sites will be added to the blacklist. Search engines know about this blacklist as well. I wouldn't recommend that you join that blacklist.

Articles have to exist in Wikipedia as long as the subject is notable. There was an article about Matt Cutts that had no notability and it was nominated for deletion. That wasn't a bad thing to do, because most people don't know who he is. So you need to find notable sources to validate these entries. Also, it's not good form to start an article about yourself (like Barry did). :)

WikiScanner allows you to see IP edits from many sources. If you have a big brand, avoid getting yourself embarrassed. Make policies. Tell your people that editing Wikipedia at work is not anonymous and they need to follow site rules and avoid conflict of inflicts. I recommend a liaison take appropriate action for Wikipedia issues.

Example: zango - Check the Wikipedia page. It's perceived by many as a spyware application and thus people are writing bad things about them. But Zango is not happy with this so they're communicating with the users through the Talk page. You can use the Talk page to get attention. You can also go to the Conflict of Interest notice board to notify someone about inaccuracies.

Last thought is Tom Sawyer: you get all your friends to paint the fence. Get people to write about you and write important things about you. Think about that in those terms and you can promote great value.

Next up is Don Steele of Comedy Central. He shows a clip of Stephen Colbert editing Wikipedia. "If enough people agree with it, it becomes true." Comedy Central is a division of Viacom.

Wikipedia is one of the tenets of their online strategy. They're using social networking, email marketing, search, videos, etc. But their content is viewed as products and they are trying to find people's content that they can trust and discover.

Why do they care about Wikipedia? In the SEO world, it's huge. They want to channel it and make it better. The content is highly referenced on Wikipedia. If there are links back to Comedy Central, they need to be up-to-date and not 404 pages. They need to focus on a good user experience. Comedy Central needs to use discussion pages to get their company's word across.

Wikipedia brings a ton of traffic to them.

How did they sell the idea internally? There are 50 million users a month on Wikipedia. For branding, that's huge to understand the reference of your brand. Getting all this traffic through Wikipedia is free instead of doing it through an SEM agency.

What we don't do: Google/YouTube vs. Viacom's lawsuit is known. They won't edit that out because they are not changing the brand perception. They work with discussion pages and editors and let them know about relevant content to promote it.

Sean Penn was once on the Colbert Report with a guy named Robert Pinski. This was put on Wikipedia. That ended up driving traffic to Comedy Central through Wikipedia. Cool.

Beforehand, Comedy Central was able to edit the pages, but now they can't due to IP tracking. So they post references in discussion pages. Wikipedia editors are decision makers. They don't troll for outbound links. They want to encourage conversations within Wikipedia.

South Park is not known to the staff of Comedy Central at 5pm. But at 8am, they get a press release about the episode. Someone who received this press release unrelated to Comedy Central put it on Wikipedia. The following morning, there were 3 pages on Wikipedia about this episode created by editors. Wikipedia has a rabid audience. But Comedy Central does want to make sure that the information conveyed on these pages are accurate.

Summary:
- You must understand how your brand is conveyed on Wikipedia.
- You should monitor Wikipedia.
- You must follow the rules.

Last up is Stephan Spencer.

You need history and street cred to get your edits to stick. It helps to have an altruistic profile. But if you don't, your entries will be deleted. A virtuous profile has a lot of age to it and has great history of altruistic edits, has won awards (Barnstar).

You should deelop a user page and a talk page. It helps to work your way up to Adminship status.

When you make an edit, you don't just want to add links. A harder edit to revert is one that you edit juicy content at the same time as that link. Add links to the references section and not to the external links section.

Communicate with the main editor of that article before adding an external link and negotiate with them. Ask them what they think.

References must substantiate claims made in the article copy. Reference links that require registration or login to access the information may be construed as spam.

When you create new entries:
- Really important to clear the notability hurdle. Criteria: having something that's notable enough to be mentioned in a mainstream encyclopedia. Be written up in the mainstream media that are mainly about you (not just a passing reference). Get your PR firm to work on this stuff.
- Have more solid contribution history for a new article to stick. You're guilty until proven innocent.
- Make sure there is no connection with you and the article subject.
- How do you make sure that the entries are perceived as real value and are neutral? If you're going to be editing/adding content to a page, do so by participating through the Talk page. It's a great venue for communication.
- Watch the page after it's added because it can get shot down at any time. You don't want it to get Speedy Deleted or AfD (Articles for Deletion). If you get AfD, jump in and get your $0.02 to stack the deck and get the rubber stamp on your argument and the article.

Once you added a page, protect your investment - watch and make sure it stays. Use a tool that emails you when a web page changes (TrackEngine, ChangeNotes, ChangeDetect are some services that do this).

Wikipedia is a social network. It requires friends and you're going to need them.

Maintain activity of your profile. Keep altruistic edits going. If you make self serving edits, have a nice balance of that and other edits. Be selfless and there will be dividends. This is a bizarre community kind of like Digg. (Remember, I'm still wearing that shirt.) There's a lot of politics. The fact that Jimmy Wales is a cofounder of Wikipedia and also owned a soft porn website gets into Wikipedia but he tries to get them removed. The information is on wikitruth.info.

Everything you do is going to leave a trail. Anybody can get nailed into the future because every single edit is kept. You need the tools to mine that and make sense of that.

In the book Freakonomics, there's the story of teachers changing the test answers of their students. It took some time for that to be picked up but they got fired eventually. That can happen on Wikipedia. Don't think you're anonymous.

Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief, The ClickZ Network

Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

Lee starts off saying, "in the spirit of the session, we thought we have some of the people in the audience to come up and give the presentation for us." I enjoyed that joke.

1) Users spend a lot of time in UGC (user generated content)
2) Consumers expect to be able to make their own content
3) Consumers trust user generated content
4) Product reviews increase sales
5) Increases conversions
6) It is a great way to generate SEO generated content

UGC is various kinds of media content that are produced by end users.

He then showed examples of sites using UGC.

Types of UGC:
- Information Resources
-- Wikipedia
-- Linked In
-- Yahoo Answers
-- Etc.

Platforms:
- Reviews
- Blogs
- Etc...

Pros:
- UGC is trusted
- Contributors are loyal
- More content for search engines
- More information sources for users

Cons:
- Oversight and moderation
- Spam
- False and outdated info
- Who owns the content
- Structure can be challenging
- Negative information about your brand

Tips on Optimizing UGC:
- Crawlable URLs
- No session IDs
- Less than 3 parameters
- Links crawlable
- Site Architecture
-- Pre define keyword rich categories, topics and tags
-- Logical structure and cross linking, bread crumb navigation
- Template optimization
-- Focus dynamic content as the majority of the on page text
-- Dynamic insert title tags, meta descriptions, image al text and anchor text

- Create incentives for content creation
-- Contests
-- Add functionalities to make it easy

- Crowdsourcing, create a task community with generating ideas, content for a particular goal/purpose
- Reward super users with more access and benefits, status

Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex

Case for User Reviews:

- Good For Marketing
-- Users add content, often using key search terms
-- You gain unique content on boilerplate product pages or...
-- Create new pages targeting "review" searches for that product
-- May capture more "long tail" queries

- Good For Business
-- Reviews educate customers
-- Fewer product returns
-- Reviews educate the retailers also
-- Reviews lead to more sales

Overcoming Fear of Users

- Fear of Negative Reviews
-- 85% of reviews are positive on Yelp
-- According to Bazaarvoice says 80% of all reviews are either four or five stars
-- Negative reviews can be helpful
-- Negative reviews create trust
-- Reality, no product/service is perfect for everyone

- What if they are not my customer
-- Fake reviews
--- Not a huge issue
--- Track IPs of reviewers
--- Require registered accounts, manual processing of submitting reviews via email and "was this review helpful" feature

Implementing Reviews
- Add policy
- Make sure reviews can be crawlable
- Allow shoppers to sort products by rating
- Create a top rated products category
- Promote the UGC part

Where to get reviews:
- Do it yourself
- Bazaarvoice
- PowerReviews
- Amazon
- Inods
- Expotv

Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media

To give case study on his site named HomeStudy

- UGC 1.0 + $$$ + Crowdsourcing savvy = UGC 2.0

First examples:
- Open Directory Project
-- Army of editors
-- Supposedly overcomes the scalability issue
-- Directories then fell out of favor
-- Issues with quality control

- TripAdvisor
-- Users help each other to avoid bad travel experiences, find good ones, etc.

Lessons learned
- You can make money from this so now everyone is doing it
-- YouTube
-- etc.

Unique Advantages of UGC
- Search Engine Strategy
-- It dovetails with search
-- Doesnt compete with search engines
- Search Engine Tactics
-- Smart tacticians will architect site properly
-- Content is popular, topical
- Solves long tail weaknesses of editorial driven media
- Fills a human need for community and content

UGC Checklist
- Got search engine strategy
-- Is it risky (he says like Squidoo)
- Using Search Tactics
-- Architecture
-- On-page and off page
- Do you compete with Google (i.e. Mahalo)
- Do users have any incentive to contribute en masses
- Any major drawbacks that will sink you?
-- Legal
-- User interest is fleeting
-- Credibility and truthfulness
-- Space just too competitive
- Can you become a destination or platform, so 1,2,3 no longer matter

He said TripAdvisor had all of this in place, so they did well

PlentyOfFish.com is a great example, turned a dating site into an open network. It grew like wild fire.

Yelp had good search engine strategies, the incentives were offline promotions,

NowPublic.com doesnt have a search strategy

Squidoo's top 100 is pretty much all about handbags, seems like that screen shot was spammed.

Mahalo's problem is that they do have crowdsouricng but they compete with Google. They cant win unless they become a destination.

HomeStars "the zillow for after you own the home"
- Search strategy like Yelp
- Sheer user interest

Questions:
- How dependent is your site on user generated content?

Pose questions to our panel of experts about free "organic" listing issues, plus participate in this session that allows the audience to share tips, tools and techniques. There's no set agenda, so this is an ideal session to discuss any major recent changes with organic listings.
Moderator:

* Danny Sullivan, Conference Co-Chair, Search Engine Strategies San Jose

Speakers:

* Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* David Naylor, SEO, Bronco
* Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online Media
* Jill Whalen, Owner, High Rankings
* Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC

It is 9am. David Naylor and Greg Boser are wearing sunglasses in an already dim room. Danny is talking about sumo wrestlers. Todd Friesen's nametag is printed backwards. That gives you an idea of what happened last night.

Mike Grehan says that he's the only sober person on the panel. I actually believe him.

Greg Boser says that scheduling this panel at 9am is a sick joke. Danny mumbles, "Oh, but I'm here too."

Today will be an interesting day.

Q: I was just curious about proximity of content and the source code being weighted heavier based on perceived importance. Do you think it really matters anymore? Do you think the engines can determine where the content is from the source codes?
Bruce: I've run experiments on my own site and moved code up and moved code down. I haven't seen it impact rankings at all. But if you repeat the same stuff on the top of the page, we recommend that you take it off or reposition it. The table trick is something you can implement it (search for it on Google).
Followup: Can you expand upon externalizing scripts and its ability to
Greg: If your content is not towards the top, you've probably built a crappy website.
Dave: If you keep it really simple, keep in mind that spiders are stupid things. Don't put a gazillion links there.

Q: I have a text driven site and I have dynamic pages that I need to optimize to get into the top 10 in most of them. I was wondering if there's significant advantage of CSS over tables and if I should take that fight to my IT department.
Greg: Yes, you should, only because that's how the web progressive and that's how we roll these days. I don't think there's an SEO benefit but I think it's important to follow and maintain some of those standards. If your website is using the font tag, that's bad becasue it's deprecated. Can you make an argument that you can rank way better? Not really. I wish that search engines did reward valid code but they don't.
Dave: Way back, if you had a lot of elements inside of your table, the page wouldn't render until everything loaded. It's about user experience too.
Jill: The bottom line is that it's not going to affect your SEO. If it's a big deal to revamp your site, don't do it.
Bruce: When I redid my site, I switched from tables entirely to CSS. I also made it W3C compliant. That may be something that emerges. I was moderating a panel at adTech and Google said that the cleaner the code, chances are the search engines will get a better idea of what your site is about. From that point of view, go to CSS because it's simpler.

Q: I work for a medical publisher and we're trying to make as much money as we can off our content. We put scientific articles up and try to sell them. We want to get indexed. I'm facing a problem with duplicate content because we cater to different environments (hospitals, education, etc.) and want that audience to see it in the results. How do you convince the indexers that they want to get it more than one time?
Todd: That's going to be problematic.
Greg: Here's the thing: it won't work. I want things like that too. In the big picture, the engines are really good at duplicate detection. An example is the AP publishes the same story on hundreds of websites verbatim. When you do a search, only one of those websites show up in the results. That's based on trust. If you see the same article over and over, it's poor user experience. The question is: can you leverage the experience in other ways? We do something called conditional redirection (robots.txt file on steroids). We can redirect pages to one central location and you get the benefit of all random links to pages that won't rank anyway.
Dave: If I just take your content and put it on my higher ranking website, whose website are they going to choose?
Followup: All my stuff is copyrighted.
Todd: That doesn't mean anything! (Sad truth.) Having multiple copies and rank one version for one market and one for another market won't work.
Followup: Can you tell my boss that?
(At this point I'm thinking - I just did. I hope you're reading Search Engine Roundtable.)
Dave: They are all about most relevant.
Bruce: How many here syndicate content? This is the exact problem syndicators have. Some people get their content ripped off by affiliates. Your content is going to be indexed on the page that is most relevant to the query. The site that ranks highest is the one that has the highest authority. I had a client (Edmunds.com, the car guys) who would write their content and AOL would copy it. AOL would rank and not Edmunds. This took a lot of effort to straighten out.
Jill: The simple rule is one URL for any piece of content. That's your best bet.

Q: We have an e-commerce site in the states and we want to launch in Europe. We want to host the sites in the US. Is there an issue with that?
Todd: The domain extension will do well for you. If it was sitting on a .com, then you need to start playing around with IPs.
Mike: You do have to have TLDs for a particular country but I've found that being hosted there helps as well.
Greg: The difference is also duplicate content in the US, UK, South Africa, and Australia. Be careful. Also, Google Local favors mobile content more than in the past. If at all possible, use the TLD or the IP that tracks to that country.
Mike: We've had a number of issues where it's not possible for the client to host in their countries. But the best advice is to host in the other countries. Sometimes this isn't feasible financially. I've said to Matt in the past that it would be a great idea to add a tool into Webmaster Central to put in an option where you can specify which country you're targeting.
Greg: You should set up a reverse proxy. You can also do multiview DNS which is cloaking from a DNS level: you give a different IP based on who is trying to resolve the DNS. That can make the engine believe you're in a different country that you're not in.

Q: I am doing a good job at getting ranked on Google, MSN, and Yahoo, but I can't figure out why I don't rank on Ask.
Dave: Ask is a bit weird. Ask looks at communities and themes and areas, so you need to make sure that the authoritive sites in your industry are linking to you.
Todd: In the paid link panel, the big argument was that paid links are all bad because they cannot determine their relevancy. So people bought thousands of links on blog networks. It didn't make sense. Ask really understands this; they really understand the relationship of different communities. I wouldn't worry about it though. Let's wait for them to come out with a new algorithm.
Mike: The original algorithm is subject specific and creating communities. There's an algorithm based on PageRank that is keyword independent. There's a keyword dependent algorithm as well. But I tend to find that the subject matter is really important.
Greg: Their search doesn't scale. Several years ago, someone asked us - "How do you spam our engine?" And I said to them, "I'll tell you as soon as you bring traffic."
Jill: They don't bring traffic, so don't worry.
Danny: Ask's big thing was "when you do a search with us, we're going to take a collection of documents that match the query you look for and we're going to look at keyword relevance and look at the linkings within the documents to get relevance." To me, Ask gets funky because of the way their ranking algorithm.
Dave: Ask prioritizes the way that they spider - if you don't have a robots.txt file, you go to the bottom of the list. Even if it's empty, you're at the bottom of the list.

Q: Our website is teardown.com and we disassemble electronics and we write competitive intelligence reports. We rank well for teardown, assembly, etc., but when we come out with a new report, we don't rank highly that quickly after we publish a report.
Greg: The biggest threat to SEO is the CEO. I suggest you log into his account early in the morning and personalize the results so that he sees the rankings very highly. (Everyone, this is obviously a joke.)
Followup: I can't do that because he stays up all night.
Greg: You should implement an RSS feed because it will attract Google's bot for blogs and that has a lot to do with news search. It helps get you spidered a lot quicker.
Dave: Just put a blog up there with a blog footprint. It will rank you much quicker: an hour, within a day. If your CEO wants to see a new report and ranks immediately, ranks will help.
Mike: I read a whitepaper a few weeks ago about how search engines are able to rank news results faster from looking at RSS feeds. I think that generally speaking, if you have newsworthy content, you need an RSS feed.
Todd: You should also consider press releases.
Jill: How do you link to it when you put it out there? Is it easily accessible from your main navigation?
Followup: We put it on our main page and then put it on the content page.
Jill: That should help.
Bruce: We blog the conference and we actually do it in a pretty much live mode. Every one of our blog posts are spiderable within 15 minutes of being posted. (Hi Lisa!)

Q: I wanted to find out if DMOZ is a player anymore.
Jill: Submit and forget.
Followup: How do you get your listings out of there?
Greg: Just ignore it.
Jill: You can use your noodp tag to get your description out of it.
Followup: Why is Google still using it?
Danny: Google is using their directory but nobody goes to it. They aren't dropping it because if they did, there'd be anger about how Google is dropping open source. So they have it. But the noodp metatag lets you stop using the title in your Google results.
Mike: The main reason why they use those directories is because it's a directory with a human element. But nobody outside the SEO community knows what DMOZ is.
Bruce: Don't worry too much about directories. Last year, I had a half a million unique visitors and last year only one visited me from the Yahoo directory.

Q: I have a client who has tens of thousands of pages on their website and they publish fresh content every day and they didn't do a good job with sitemaps or 301s. The problem is that Google is removing some of these old listings, but Yahoo doesn't flush out this old content. Do you have any tips for removing the old content?
Todd: Within SiteExplorer, they have a facility where you can instantly pull URLs out of the index.
Greg: Buy Tim Mayer something and ask him to fix your stuff.

Q: I'm a jewelry seller. I have very unique content and the site is optimized fairly well. I can't figure out why I'm not ranked. I think that I'm being buried now because sites like Amazon are duplicating my content. What do I do?
Greg: That's it. When you syndicate stuff, that's a risk you're taking. Amazon will always win over your site because it's more trusted. They're the only e-commerce site left in the world that ranks. That's the downside of syndication.
Todd: If you're going to syndicate content on that level, syndicate a different version of your content.

Q: We're trying to protect our copyrighted material and we're trying to put information in our PDF that says we're the authoritivate owner of the site. Does the search engine care?
Todd: No, that's just a link.
Greg: Googlebot is very stupid. They take the content and throw it in a pile with the rest of the data on the Internet. They don't rely on any input on you, the webmaster, becasue we all lie, cheat, and steal. They try to use as little signals as possible provided by you so they focus on authority, PageRank, etc.
Dave: When you think about it, Google doesn't know that you're lying or not.
Bruce: There's an actual tag in HTML called the quote tag. It's supposed to specify the authority of the source for a specific quote. We've been ramping sources in quote tags to point to the original content. Even though there's no proof that anyone pays attention to that HTML, but as part as an overall project, that seems to have helped me. The only assumption here is that the people who duplicate your content actually points to you and uses that tag.
Danny: Your pain is well understood and shared by many people. It's frustrating. We've waited many years for this but they're focused on video copyright theft right now. All those issues on YouTube now are applicable to webpages. Aaron Wall had a good rant where he poked at Google and said they don't care about copyright. The good news is that a lot more people are being vocal about duplicate content, so maybe we'll get better tools in the future to verify the original source of the information.

Q: Bruce, you talked earlier about experimenting on your site with techniques, and I think that most of us do this. But do you recommend setting up a really clean test environment? If so, are there any tips?
Dave: There's no such thing as a really clean test environment. If you're going to do it, put it on a domain that isn't worth keeping. Don't do it on a quality domain ever.
Jill: If you're not trying to push the envelope, use any blog and test how many keywords are indexed in meta descriptions, etc. You won't get in trouble for that and you can learn a lot. That's what I do.
Mike: You can reduce the risk by dealing with an affiliate (webmarketingnow.com)
Greg: The hardest thing is replicating the factors. When you do research and development, you can't replicate authority and trust. You have to test specific theories. In the old days, we can rip government sites and do numerical find and replaces for common words (we'd replace the word census with 19427) and then we can find numeric combinations to find keyword density, etc. because there were no competing pages. We looked at thousands of factors. But you can't draw conclusions from what you see anymore.
Todd: We run SEO for about 28 different brands and we get to look across 28-29 different types of websites in different verticals, but it's very hard to do tests.
Bruce: We did simple tests. I own a lot of URLs. Nobody links to many of these and I have to put in content and then test it, and then I have to take the site down and wait for the data to be deindexed so I can test again. You don't want the first test to bias the second test or the third test.
Dave: In different industries, there are different quality signals in these industries. Consider the pharmaceutical industry. One test may work well for one industry but not for another.

Q: I'm looking for a tool to understand the optimization of my site. Do you have any tools that you'd like to share with us?
Todd: WebmasterCentral helps. You can use tools to find broken links.
Bruce: If you search for "free SEO tools," you can get 132 free tools. I think most of us have proprietary tools that we've written.

Q: I have worries about pages being scraped over the years to the point where snippets of your page are all over the web.
Greg: I apologize for that.
Followup: We always beat somebody who scrapes the whole page. But I'm beginning to see that it's almost as though we're being treated occasionally badly. Have you seen that?
Greg: Some industries are powered almost 100% by scrapers. Most of them will leave your links intact. You can build backlinks from this.
Followup: Most of these people are not taking everything. They're taking snippets. Using a tool like Copyscape helps us find them, but they're not in Google.
Greg: Google is doing a pretty good job. They'll let you put AdSense on it though (laughter).
Dave: That's actually changed. (Yay!) Google has gotten really clever about scraping data.

Q: We're considering using a content management system and I'm worried about using iframes. Is that a problem?
Todd: There are many CMSes: you want to have good URL structure and no iframes.
Dave: Most SEOs use Wordpress for their blogs. Check how to optimize Wordpress.
Jill: You want to be able to customize your title tags and meta descriptions as well.
Dave: Does it use session variables? Those should be crossed off the list.
Todd: Look at people who use these CMSes and see how they're being crawled to see if they are good. We have a client who pays about $500k a year to license the CMS and it propagates the same title over the entire site, so price isn't a good indicator.

Q: We're finding that we're getting a lot of referrals from Google but Yahoo and MSN are not close. Do you find that there are issues with those engines?
Greg; There are demographic differences in the engines. It's not always about volume. Benchmark if it's a ranking issue or if it's just because nobody uses it. The Yahoo index indexes everything really well but doesn't rank it very well.
Bruce: It's very specific to industry on Yahoo. Equally optimized sites may rank differently in different engines. There's no real way of getting a site to rank everywhere without putting in a fair amount of effort.
Todd: MSN does have deep crawl issues. They admit to that.
Dave: I see that all the time. With Google, the amount of backlinks will determine how deep they let you index it. But in Microsoft, there's no indicator to determine how deep they should go. Yahoo is a weird one because they can go crazy and end up with 10x the amount of pages in Google. I don't know.

Community-built web sites, Wikipedia and new sites allowing content being shared through "tagging" can be a great way to tap into links and search driven traffic. This session looks at SMO services and strategies to tap into them appropriately.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, Position Technologies

Speakers:

Neil Patel, ACS
Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz
Todd Malicoat, Consultant (aka "Stuntdubl")

It's the last day for sessions and, sigh, the night after the WebmasterRadio Search Bash, where everyone who was there sounds like a frog this morning. That includes me. The room fills up. This is a fun session because Todd, Rand and Neil give good presentations with humor, funny pictures and lots of resources.

Detlev starts. Asks for show of hands to see how many are here for the first time and want to do it again. Half the room responded. Asks how many people use Linkedin. It's been around for years and is just now starting to become really hot.

Todd:

Do something that people feel. Gives a quote by Kid Rock. You must have a human voice to market with social media. The Cluestrain Manifesto ...read the 95 thesis. It was social media before Linkedin, before the second or third generation of SM. You'll understand link baiting and marketing better if you read it.

Hooks:

attack
humor
contraian (contrary opinion)
news
resource
ego
picture/movie

These are ways to write to attract readers. Links come with something resourceful and a human voice.

Top Titles

Think of your title second
Copy blogger
over promise and deliver
action words
alliteration
social proof
cliched titles work for a reason

Come up with 10 titles based on the type of hook. At least one keyword for good anchor text. Make sure content is focused, make it pretty (bullet points, short paragraphs), make it "magazine good," link out generously. Link out to a variety of areas. Be prepared for failure. Some linkbait will bomb. Ex: The cheating spouse guide - what every guy should know. It was funny. Did well with exposure. Cheating was the anchor text that helped. Stretch relevancy. A new twist onan old topic is the only to get an old topic to new eyeballs. Ex. 8 diseaes that give you super human power - an example of an extreme angle and it did really well as link bait.

Prepare launch date for your piece that you want to market. Use a trusted account. Digg is a 24 hour period. Cram all promo efforts into a short window. Don't always submit to the same sites. Digg, Netscape, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc. as examples

You can ask people for links to your SM article. This is one area where emailing friends for links does work. Cache your content, host images on alt host, search diggslashdot effect. You can get 30-40,000 "nearly worthless" visits, lots of scrapers, tons of backlinks What you really want is trusted links from high profile industry sites. You may only 10 of them out of the thousands of junk links. Track your links. You won't sell to social media. It's not adSense. You want to establish your "flagship" content. Global links. Increased link pop and trust. RSS subscribers.

Rand:

How many of you had heard of SEOMoz. Show of hands. Never did any advertising or marketing. They just did social media marketing.

What is SMM? Social media marketing. Creating web 2.0 profiles on web 2.0 sites. Why? Goal is to build friends and relationsips in the blogosphere and online social sites. Not same demographic as customers.

You can't sell to social media like you do to customers. You can control your market by participation in conversations. What do you people think of your business? You can go and partipate and correct information if you wish to. Some people don't expect the response. Reputation management and link building is done via SM. You can control your brand better in Google and Yahoo better. You get mindshare and branding.

People will see your brand on the social media sites they use. You need to be playing in those spaces.

Where to conduct SMM?

YouTube, Stumbleupon is the 2nd driver of traffic for SEOMoz. They don't have to submit to it or thumbs up there anymore. It's a discovery engine. People want to see something new and different. Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers. Has 3.5 million users now. Broad population there. Digg, Yelp -for local business reviews. Reddit is good for linkbaiting. It's more "Serious" than Digg, Linkedin for business networking. Flicker can expose image content if you brand it well. Netscape, same as Digg and Reddit. Del.icio.us is a bookmarking site. People share their links there. Facebook and MySpace. Craigslist has forums and "best of" Craiglist is popular. Amazon, is where you can leave comments and if you provide content like a book they have a blog in Amazon. Technorati is for if you have a blog. Get people to "favorite you". Newsvine is serious, newsy, you can submit stores, top of the vine, Sphinn (screenshot shows Cre8asiteforums 5th birthday, thank you Rand!~),City Search is another site to submit to. Helium has good editorial quality. Wikihow for some good quality content. SecondLife is at the bottom of the list for a reason. It's a game. But the fad is ending. Twitter can be useful to help communicate that you have something they can link to.

Neil:

Leveraging Digg and Stumbleupon. You need to know the user base. The audience is young. 4525 diggs for "Pictures of the craziest urinals from around the world". Digg users are "retards like me". (audience laughs) Massaging your content. Ex. The angle was an article targeted to those who hate to pay taxes but a popular piece was how to spend the money if you do pay them.

Number of votes, time, voters, submitter, friends - these are important factors. Power submitters do better than random submitter. You can be banned for having too many friends. Stick to a few thousand.

Do not self promote. Add biased. Pay for votes. Break community rules. SPAM. This stuff can ruin your reputation and you will banned for good. If you get caught paying for votes, can be banned. He experimented with submitting with his own site, created 30 accounts on the same IP and he paid for votes. It got pulled and banned.

Do:
Add tons of friends
Participate in communities - same interests; before submitting you want to help the community grow before leveraging it for yourself
Use great titles and descriptions
Become a top user - Do this by submitting to quality stories
Submit during the right time - submit when people are on the web and not sleeping

Q - Someone wanted examples of using the SM sites and how it relates to business.
Rand gave a lot of detailed examples, using different sites and methods. The possibilities are endless. The method has to fit your business. Every situation needs its own plan.

Q - What are tags?
Tagging is used to identify content or images. There are no guidelines for using spaces or dashes. Everybody does tagging and entering the differently. You can tag your own stuff. Readers who post your content can tag it when they submit it. Todd suggests mixing broad and specific tags. Detlev says user generated tags can be helpful and instructive. Be aware that words have different meanings.

Q - How does SM effect search results/behavior (ie. Universal Search)?
High ranked video and podcasts are getting more click thrus than text results.

Chris Pierry from Yahoo
Video usage is widespread. From News to movies, everyone on the internet has watched videos on the internet.

Content Analysis – Extraction of semantic information form unstructured data types. Page analysis, what is the page about
Analysis of the video itself – Flesh tone detection to detect adult content
Audio match form a sound track
Logo detection object detection
Text to Speech

Submit data feeds to Search Engines
Enter accurate data descriptions – titles, keywords, abstracts, summaries, close captions
Embrace the social web!

Biggest challenges – safe search for adult content and copyright violations

User experience – in-place media consumption, hyperlink – jumping to the appropriate scene. Tags, bookmarks, sharing, commenting. Yahoo can play in page, both video and songs/mp3s

Stephen Baker –from EveryZing (formerly PodZinger)
-Core technology of everyzing is speech to text
-Problem with video and multimedia content. – crawlers can only see meta data.
-If you can view the transcript of the video, it helps the crawlers.
-Text Transcript increase Audience Reach, they can help you optimize the page better – tags, content, etc.
-Text transcripts can increase Content Access, can help to create better snippets, etc. -Text transcript from Podzinger also help you navigate through a video via keyword mentions or time mentions
-Text transcripts can be used for monetizing, by issuing calls for ads relevant to the video

Onil Gunawardana VP of Advertising at Blinkx
Indexing –
Automated spiders that literally understand audio/video content
Agnostic approach – ability to use metadata and closed captioning where it exists.
Search and discovery
Autonomy-powered conceptual search that acts on phonetic, as well as textual data in parallel
CQF – Cluster Query Focus delivers relevance and accuracy In non-linked data world
Video Search Engine Types
-First generation – metadata, display-oriented spidering (AOL Video, Altavista, Yahoo)
-Second generation – speech recognition, visual analysis, video optical character recognition (podzinger, blinkx)
-Blinkx SEO Whitepaper – blinkx.com/video-technology#Video%20SEO

Peter Tuttle – Turveo (AOL company)
First wave of improvement for video was in 2004, 2005
2nd wave – iTunes announces you can buy full length videos, the opened the flood gates for content producers
3rd wave – YouTube in 2006
4th wave – Google acquired YouTube, copyright lawsuits ensued, videos taken down and users go to video search engines to find videos

Truveo.com – one stop shop to search all video on video sharing sites, but you can search all the videos on all the sites that have videos.

Truveo offers API’s to enable their users to search and browse through millions of online videos – http://developer.truveo.com -- submit feeds to them too

Li Evans is the owner and editor of Search Marketing Gurus and is also the Search Marketing Manager for Commerce360.

Session Overview:
Forget consumers. You want only the business-to-business audience! This session explores options and issues in targeting B2B.

Moderator:
* Gordon Hotchkiss, President & CEO, Enquiro Search Solutions Inc.

Speakers:
* Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing
* Paul Slack, CEO, WebDex
* Karen Breen Vogel, President and CEO, ClearGauge

Karen
Karen is planning to cover some things that will give us the insights that support complex selling cycles, dealers and distributors.

Agenda
- What's different from B2C
- Making the case for SEO in B2B
- Key Challenges and Solutions
-- Who is the searcher
-- Low sample sizes for testing
-- Avoiding waste
-- Qualifying visitors
-- Measuring the value of a visit or a conversion
B2B goals is more about starting or continuing a relationship. You are not closing the deal.
If you are successful, it is likely you are not only using the major search engines - look at Business.com and specific verticals.
Users will use different keywords depending where they are in the buying cycle.
Given the long buying cycle, you cannot give just one offer in B2B.
- Highlight one offer but provide other opportunities
Track ROI through the pipeline - put a financial value to it.

The Case for SEO
- 64% of users are searching related to business search.
-- Odds are good if you are only doing PPC you are leaving money on the table.
-- PPC costs are going up
- Organic CTR is much higher
- Can get a wider buying cycle through organic versus paid.
- SEO cost is upfront and you don't pay over and over.
- Need to know the value of the form completion on the site.
-- If you don't know the math, you might be spending too much money.
- Cons
-- Algorithm shift
-- Competition
-- Lack of immediate results
- Conclusion - Get it started.
B2B Challenges
- To whom is the messaging directed? You often don't know who the searcher is.
-- Do you want the user to go through a Pain Point link, a Buy Cycle Link or Functional link?
- Low Sample Sizes
-- Perform A/B testing as it will get the job done.
-- Multivariate testing is ok, but you need to limit your variables because of the lack of traffic.
-- Vertster.com is good resource to check out your A/B testing or multivariable results.
- Get Vertical
-- Investigate the verticals - narrows the scope for your users. Google is more like a needle in a haystack.
-- Must test and measure the vertical engines - sometimes the backfire.
- Qualifying the leads through the cycle
-- Specifically tailor the message to weed out users you do not want.
-- Tag your form fields and use that data to optimize keywords.
- Measure the entire buy cycle
-- Don't just measure the final activity.
-- Measure all of the smaller activities as they occur along the way.
-- Award points for each step of the way.
-- Tie it all back to a keyword or a form and award points to keep score.
-- Map out the cost per point which keyword buy makes the most sense.
-- Look at the entire funnel and assign appropriate credit.
- The best thing you can do is to turn the points into dollars.
- Calculate your threshold or breakeven CPA's

Paul Slack
B2B Sales Cycle
- Uncover the need on the client side - whatever the need they start by doing research and looking to solve the business problem.
-- Research solution
--- List of vendors
--- Bid
-- Make the decision
Search Engine Buying Funnel
- Awareness
- Consideration or Research
- Decision
- Purchase
When there is a long sales cycle group the users into buckets - Influencers and decision makers.
If you intention is to generate leads, the web site needs to be an influencer/catcher.
Influencers are not as inclined to follow a PPC trail because they are in the research mode.

Targeting the Decision Makers
- Late cycle and are using the web find the right company.
- Influencer recommends the finalists and the decision maker goes out to look. They may not even click, they just want to see.
- Don't be fooled into thinking that the site needs to be tailored to the decision maker
- (Speaking too fast…tough to keep up)

To target the Decision Maker use bulleted text and a strong call to action but the key is still the influencer.

It's about the user/influencer and how you can satisfy their need for knowledge. It's important to define the goals and measure against them to make improvements.

For each client compare and measure all of the clients marketing efforts and determine what the lead cost is. At that point, move on to determine the cost per acquisition. If you want this spreadsheet send him an email.

Run the breakeven analysis and see how many leads you need to generate. It creates a solid benchmark that it realistic to meet or exceed with SEO/SEM.

- Begin with the end in mind.
- What do you want them to do?
- How do you measure success?
- Make sure they can find your content on either paid or organic.

Patricia Hursh
Agenda
1. B2B Marketing Trends
2. Think beyond the click - post click marketing
3. Four ways to improve your results

B2B marketers are slow to embrace search
- Search marketing was in 11th place among marketing practices
- Good news is that in 2006 online tactics and search marketing were poised for growth.
- Where does the money come from?
-- These programs are being funded by taking money from traditional channels.
-- Money shifting as results are promising
Think beyond the click
- Find
- Drive
- Convert
- Measure

4 Tips
1. Map Visitors Needs to Solutions - Not every visitor is the same.
2. Offer Action Options - Offer options to different users. Not everyone wants a call or to fill out a form.
3. Simplify Registration Forms - Test your forms. Simplify.
4. Continuously Improve Landing Pages - Test and improve the landing pages.

Map Visitors Needs to Solutions
- Needs are different by user and place in the buying cycle.
- Turn their pain points into actions on the web site.
Offer Action Options
- Provide options - downloads, tours, webinars, etc.
- Think in terms of primary and secondary conversion.
Simplify Registration Forms
- Long forms don't convert.
- Don't make the form a wish list for the sales team - make it about the user.
- Test the forms and use the data to make better business decisions.
- Simplify the form and create a robust follow up process to get the additional data you need. Send follow up emails, engage the prospect.
Continuously Improve Landing Pages
- Test the look and feel, layout, images, messages, action triggers, names and descriptions of downloadable assets, registration forms.
Summary
- Search is a potential killer app (Forrester) for B2B customer acquisition
- Marketers will follow their customers online
- Missed this one
- This trend will continue.

Verticals are becoming more and more important over time. The verticals are maturing and providing better results and information.

Think of information in terms of random access - quick information available for download. They want to assemble the information, process it, and move it through their organizations.

Q and A
Q - How do I convince the decision makers that we need to reduce the form?
A - Karen - Get them to do a test. Usually the data speaks for itself. Also, would ask what they are going to do with the information? Question the purpose of the data. Think of it as volleyball - just touch the ball back over to the prospect.
A - Paul - Yes, please test. When we encounter that issue, we toss it back to sales. “If we don't need an address to deliver a white paper, why do we ask for it?” Test, test, test!
A - Patricia - softly suggest a test. Be honest about what you're getting when the customer downloads a white paper - is it really a lead or is it an inquiry?

Q - Can you share link building strategies and link-baiting you will share?
A - Karen - When we work on link building. Find the credible sites, but its research. Associations and academics are a great place to look.
A - Patricia - It comes down to content. What is unique and valuable? Sometimes B2B companies miss the obvious - links from partners, suppliers and others.
A - Paul - Block and tackling works well. Get a press release and article strategy in place.
A - Gord - Anything you do with link building has to consider your end user.

Q - Is there any 3rd party tool to use with SalesForce to track the full circle?
A - Karen - Integrate the leads into SalesForce then it comes down to commitment. Get the sales people to manage the data. If you do this, you should be able to follow it all the way through and report it back to the campaigns.

Provided by Steve Krull