Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose Archives

August 23, 2007

SES San Jose Coverage Wrap Up

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:

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 5:04 PM Comments (5)

August 23, 2007

Content is King

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

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 4:47 PM Comments (2)

August 23, 2007

Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price of One

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.

posted cre8pc in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 4:42 PM Comments (0)

August 23, 2007

Buzz Monitoring

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.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 4:26 PM Comments (4)

August 23, 2007

Meet The Crawlers

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

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 3:16 PM Comments (2)

August 23, 2007

Wikipedia & SEO

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.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 2:30 PM Comments (0)

August 23, 2007

User Generated Content & Search

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?

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 2:30 PM Comments (2)

August 23, 2007

Organic Listings Forum

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.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 1:13 PM Comments (0)

August 23, 2007

SMO: Social Media Optimization

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.

posted cre8pc in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 1:00 PM Comments (4)

August 23, 2007

Meet the Video Search Engines

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.

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 23, 2007 8:41 AM Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

B2B Tactics

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

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 9:10 PM Comments (1)

August 22, 2007

Search Engine QA on Links

Moderator: Danny Sullivan

Speakers:
Peter Linsley, Ask.com
Shashi Thakur, Google
Sean Suchter, Yahoo!

Have questions about links? Search engine reps provide answers to the audience.
Danny is telling everyone to run. The room is starting to fill up...but not standing room only. Last session of the day today.

Shashi:

He goes first. It's his first time speaking at SES. Danny jokes "no pressure". Shashidar Thakur, Tech staff at Google. In the old days people created lists of favorite sites Google figured this was a good way to figure reputation. PageRank was born. Links got messy. A link is a personal reference. Says a lot about you. Poor linking effects credibility. Link on topic. Be relevant to your page/site. Be useful to vistors. Be visible. Designed for users not engines. Make good anchor text with descriptive text rather than "click here". Bad linking attempts to manipulate SE's. Low value to users. Bad linking is like wearing a ball and chain on your legs. They try to catch bad linking. Shows example of spam linking page. It was a meds site. Another example of spamming forms. Hidden links are bad links. The whole point of links is someone is supposed to click on them, so don't hide them. Shows a page with hidden links, exposed. Bad neighborhoods is another example of spam links. Unrelated to your business. It says something about you when do this.

Sean:

Runs engineering for Yahoo web search, for about 10 years. Attract organic links. Stable urls attract cut and paste behavior. They're attractive to linkers. Avoid dynanic URLS, session IDs, don't require cookies. USe https only when necessary. No popus. (No address bar). Users can't copy the url and link to it. Use 301 to redirect on the same site if moving URLS. Submit sitemaps to SE's stay up to date. Link farms, no. Users may link to the different domains diluting your organic links. Better to be concentrated. Muliple countries sites can link but be careful about same exact content. Don't dilute links. Nofollow - don't use it for ranking algorithms. Doesn't mean non-inlcusion. They follow both absolute and relative links. Don't break the links. Yahoo site has a help page for SEOs.

Peter:

Create good conent with good links rather than bad pages with lots of "bad" links. Linking is about the quality of links. Links from on topic count more. Shows an example of web page and shows source with spammy links. Tons of hidden links showed up on another otherwise normal looking page with decent content.

Microsoft: (Did not catch his name. Wasn't on screen or print info. If someone can leave his name in comments, I can fix this.)

Announcing beta for webmaster tools. More details on our blog. Live Search New Webmaster Portal...official blog for the Live Search team.

QA:

1. I hear bad links work well. How to tell if bad links?
A - They rely on algorithms. Recommend not buying bad links. Matters not whether bought or not. What matters is the value of the link itself. Is it relevant to users. What causes user disatisfaction? It is often bad links.

2. If "blackhats" spam your site and the spam is not your fault, but rather "their fault"?
A - You can report the bad inlinks in Yahoo Help. Ask says to write and alert them to the problem.

Danny asks if audience would like a tool to be report spam links.

3. Using Google Alerts discovered a porn site that is using text on their site that includes a lot domains and are linking to them, alphabetically. They show up as inbound link but its a porn site.
A - You can report this to all SE's.

4. New name, new domain. But new site.
A - Use 301 redirects and use sitemaps to educate SE's. Keep old site? For users, yes. Want the crawlers to learn redirects. How long to keep up? As long as possible. Microsoft says keep old site up as long as you can. Keep the old domain.

5. Is linking to a vanity URL that real one that redirects to destination URL?
A - See Yahoo Help for their advice. Microsoft will pass it through. Be careful with 2 different identifies. Messy for users and brands.They go to vanity URL vs the destination one.

6. How to handle bad publicity via blogs, etc. that you can't control. Afraid of people who use submission tool to send bad links to you.
A - Danny asks how many people link to you that you don't want linking? Not a lot of response. Should you worry? Danny really thinks a tool to help us control bad incoming links would be great.

7. What if you have a blog like Blogger.com domain to new domain?
A - Put a note on old blog with the new domain and URL. Redirects don't work for Wordpress or Typepad.

8. How is purchasing a highly relevant link "evil".
A- The vast majority of paid links are not relevant. They see it used for spam more than legitimate linking. They don't care if it is paid for. They care about whether its relevant. Danny talks about the debate on this. There are no real clear rules issued by SE's. It shouldn't matter how the link comes in to you, whether via good content or paid or submitted to social media site like Digg.

posted cre8pc in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 9:06 PM Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

The SEO Reputation Problem

SEO is a four-letter word to some people that stands for snake-oil salesmen and blog spammers. Yet SEOs are also highly in demand and plenty help website generate traffic that converts. This session looks at SEO's reputation problem and explores possible solutions.
Moderator:

* Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

* Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
* Kristopher B. Jones, President & CEO, Pepperjam
* Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
* Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
* Kathleen Fealy, Education Chairman, SEMPO

Jeff Rohrs introduces the session. Everyone then introduces themselves. Kris Jones says that he's ~~Jason Calacanis~~ ~~Dave Pasternack~~ himself.

Shari talks about reputation management. A few years ago, she was a MSN search champ and someone was convinced that she was a spammer. This woman wouldn't let her post on her blog to rebut. So how do you handle a situation where people won't let you rebut on their blog? She used other avenues, like blogs, to communicate this.

How do you tell the academic community that you don't have the plague? There's a huge need of education. We have to teach people how to search and discern the good from the bad.

Kris says that the crux of this discussion lies in question and answers but he wants to emphasize that this is an incredibly important issue. The portion of people's profession seems to define the rest. Those fundamental attribution errors and illogical conclusions that are made put business professionals in a difficult position. That's quite unfortunate. One of the foundations of online marketing is your placement organically in the search results. He recommends that you be careful of the small percetage of SEOs who will attempt to sell you guarantees. That's his biggest pet peeve. Stay away from them. He does a search for "guaranteed search engine placement." There are a lot of results. A lot of companies have failed at successfully finding themselves in these organic listings and have desperately tried to get in the results. But the important thing is to convey the proper expectations. Otherwise, the client will have unreasonable expectations. Many of these "guarantee" websites do try to cater to these people but these people are not doing due diligence.

You can't take shortcuts. The approach is long term. You need to follow the policies and work to integrate SEO to your paid search and your other strategies.

Jonathan Hochman is next. He shows that there are reputation issues at stake for sure. Some people sell Wikipedia page placement on eBay (as he illustrates). This is fraud. It kills the reputation. Another one is from a prominent SEO blogger who wrote that. Another link is on Wikipedia itself which links to a web design firm. People are spamming Wikipedia and it causes frustration.

Some people, therefore, think that SEO is spammy. That's because they've been burned. Wikipedia responded with nofollow. nofollow was implemented because of an SEO contest, which isn't very known. A lot of people were upset about this. Andy Beal was very sad about it. He blogged about it and Jonathan showed a screenshot. But Jonathan says that Wikipedia is not vindictive; they had a reason for it. A long time ago, back in the 80s, there was a thing called netiquette - net etiquette: you need to remember that the internet is a shared resources. Even nonprofits need to do policing. Let's tell the public what the slimy process are and how to avoid them.

SEMPO people should email eBay and tell them that it's fraud. You should get involved with these communities to fix the reputation problem and become more profitable as well as remove the perception.

Kathy Fealy is up next. A lot of businesses are asking for SEO services for under $5k. Here are some comments:
- I've been taking before. I don't want to be taken again.
- Why should I bother with SEO because the results can change?
- I thought my web designer did this for us?
- Our IT dept thinks it's unnecessary.
- Click fraud.
- I thought PPC is better because you can see ROI.

How do you know if you're hiring someone who is qualified?
- People don't know if the people they hire are up to date.
- They may not get what they're promised.
- They aren't "certified."

We have to work with people and find out what they need and what their objectives are. Are they planning on bringing more products, increase conversions, or reputation? But they get conflicting ideas in their proposals. Everyone has different prices. There's a lot of jargon.

Some people are victims of scams. "If it's too good to be true, it probably is." "There is no such thing as a free lunch."

A little knowledge can be dangerous -
- Web designers don't know how to design.
- Traditional PR firms put up graphics instead of text.
- Marketing professionals think it's an extension of current work.
- Many clients use small business templates that build sites for them. Then when a real professional says that they have to redo their website, the person goes back to the business template provider who say that the SEO is wrong and that they can fix it.

The perceptions is the reality.

Every true SEO professional needs to become evangelists. An SEO needs to explain what needs to be done and why.
- Write articles, speak to organizations, join professional organizations (SEMPO), continue learning (SEMPO institute, conferences, major Search Engine publications, books, podcasts), and advise clients of the risks of search engine strategies - ethics.

Last but not least is Jennifer Laycock. She is talking about social media. People can connect with people who share their passions from all over the world.

Some people think that social media marketing is a one-stop shop. You need to engage your customer and join the community. However, not all people like this and assume it's a marketing stunt especially if they have proof that you're a marketer (which occurred in Jennifer's case). It didn't matter what the truth was, the perception was reality and everyone believed it. From a regular business, you have issues with reputation management.

You don't have to have a hard sales pitch. We need to think about making this as a tool to build the reputation of yourself to your customers.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 8:31 PM Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

Shopping Search Tactics

Session Overview
Learn how content from your ecommerce or merchant site can -- and should! -- be included in shopping search engines.

Moderator:
* Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers:
* Brian Smith, Analyst, ComparisonEngines.com
* Bob Reeves, Director of Sales & Account Management, Marchex
* Brian Mark, CTO, Toolbarn.com

Brian Smith will teach us to learn to love our data feeds

Small shoe store in Tampa was able to drive significant traffic and increased sales and conversions. Overall a 10x lift in sales volume online

Shopping engines come in all shapes and sizes. Some are free, some are paid and charge monthly fees, revenue share or other.

Little guy list;
- PriceTool, Calibex, Become and more.
- Beauty of little shopping engines is that sometimes you can get better conversion rates.
- Pronto
Verticals
- Vdeep
- Healthpricer
- Builders Square
Syndicated Listings
- Shopping.com will get you listed on Buy.com
"You have to test everything out"

How do you get on the engines?
Some basic concepts
- Adwords is easy - Yahoo Search Marketing is easy - Shopping engines = Yucky!
- Track something - know your metrics
- Automated XML solutions are not optimal (in e-commerce platforms)
-- Take your time and optimize.
Basic date feed is name, product price, category and much much more.

Google Base now has custom fields - like battery voltage or other different product options that are unique to your products.

How to create a feed
- Use a management firm
-- If you do this, manage it closely.
- Do it yourself
- Track everything
- Test out different engines - find 5 or 10 and test them

Bob Reeves
Keys to Success (some may sound simple - hope they’re not insulting, but these are often neglected)
- Start in high margin areas - so if the returns and conversions are off you have some wiggle.
- Create bid & placement rules - do not re-purpose you search rules.
- Tailor Submission to each engine - look at the competition and see how they look on the engines
- Monitory each engines ROAS - recommend daily review.
- Retest product that has failed previously - sometime
- Feed completeness
- Make use of all required and recommended fields.
- Optimize the titles and descriptions of your products - make sure they show up in search results
- Shipping/Price Availability
-
Loves shopping engines for their ability to merchandise

Merchandising Keys to Success
- Use ratings to measure success
- Testimonials
- Focus on pricing and placement
- Pay attention to other opportunities - placements and category

Internal case study found that for one retailer that client got more sales with fewer merchants. ROAS began to slow.

Another retailer showed that as long as they were within 10% of the lowest price the ROAS was strong.

If price >$1000 users tended to click on merchants they knew

Feed Positioning Factors
- Use of all required fields awards rank and relevance.

Brian Mark
Shopping Search Difficulties
- Rising CPC
- Poor tracking tools are "included"
- Analytics vendors don’t "get it right"
-- Tell you where the last click was.
- Too many individualized feeds
- ROI is hard to calculate correctly
-- So many variables that have nothing to do with clicks and products - internal costs and phone calls.
- Rules constantly evolve
Four Step Program
1. List everything
2. Scale back
3. Track it
4. Built the technology needed to manage
The key is to build a strong foundation
- Know your clicks and the sales
-- They use a redirect on their site to track
-- Set a cookie
-- IP / UserAgent info is gathered and logged
- Trying to get as many data points in order to track it back
Weight of multiple clicks
- If user clicks on multiple engines - how do you weight the click?
Fixing Irregularities
- Multiple clicks
- Bot clicks - some engines forget bots exist.
- Seasonality - potentially huge factor.
- Each engine handles it differently
At the end of the day they wanted to know how many clicks, how many sales and what the profit was.

Hidden costs
- Boxes, Order processing, phone calls, customer service and more

Gross Profit - (CPC * Clicks) - (other expenses)
Custom tailor each feed for products that work well on each one.
Don’t just say "it’s not selling" but look at factors affecting sales.
Set some ROI goals and stick to them.
If a competitor is doing something "dumb" for a while - back off and wait or drop out.
Optimize your conversion rates.

Smart Feeds Show Profit - 1800-3500% ROAS

Seals and logos have not shown significant conversions but stresses that you should test. Smilies and ribbons have done better.

Tracking indirect sales
- Set a cookie on the "Email a friend"
- Unique toll free numbers
- Ask where they found the product
- When merchant ratings are low, people tend to call.
Overall effect on sales
- Started in 2004 with a redesign and the site tanked in the SERPs. If the shopping engines had not been there, layoffs would have happened.
- 18% of new customers come from shopping engines
- 22% repeat customers come through shopping engines.

Conclusions
- Track as much as you can
- Know as much about each order as you can
- Set your goals and stick to them

Back to Brian Smith
My Two Theories (disagree if you like)
1. Garbage in - Garbage out
2. Google Base really really really does matter - submitting as structured data - your Google base listings may become more relevant than your organic results.
Google will list relevant products in organic listings

Data Feed Optimization (DFO)
- Think about it and think about tracking it
- DFO
-- Engine setup
-- Qualitative
-- Quantitative
- Engine Setup - are your products running and is it running with the right information.
-- Are the field lengths correct, are the fields there - watch and review.
-- Beware database dumps that have HTML - could cause problems.
-- Watch engine specifics
-- Be patient
- Tip - test taking down your logo and pay that .10 for the click to move up.
- Qualitative
-- Tracking and more tracking
-- Similarities between SEO/PPC & DFO
--- Look at the DF in a structured manner
-- Product titles and descriptions - write them wisely. Use the carryover from your SEO/PPC to re-write long verbose names
-- Use all of the fields available.
-- All of the shopping engines are still search engines - give them as much information as you can.
-- Categorization - If you fail to categorize your product, it will get stuck in miscellaneous.
- Things to avoid in your feed
-- Duplicate content
-- Duplicate URLs
-- Not following the rules - required fields
-- Not following the unwritten rules
-- HTML
-- Incomplete data
- Do tests against titles and descriptions
- Quantitative
-- Tracking
-- Quantitative
--- Make metrics based decisions
--- Spent X, made Y, margin of Z - decide if you should be there.
--- Channel
--- Engine
--- Look at profit by engine.
--- Category
--- Find the categories and products that are not profitable and remove them.
--- Product/SKU
--- Start using the pixel trackers or building redirects to track.
--- SKU level reporting is near impossible using them engines themselves
- Click fraud can be just as hard to track here as it is on the search engines.
Start with good data and work toward the quantitative
There are many factors to test
- Test different titles, descriptions, banners ,logos, bidding strategies
Be proactive and manage this as you would any other channel.

Q and A
Q - Do you think the shopping engines are a valid avenue if I cannot compete on price but instead on trust and brand?
A - Brian Mark - Use the logo program to support the brand. Use some products the other retailers do not carry and test those.

Q - Is there any talk about a common shopping feed format?
A - Brian - They tried and it didn’t happen, but think it should happen. It will happen eventually after some pushing and pulling.

Q - If you had to optimize and submit to one site which would it be for children’s birthday party supplies?
A - Brian Smith - Why are you submitting to just one?
A - Allan -If resources are limited, what would it be?
A - Brian Mark - Use shopping.com or shopzilla.com and one of the smaller ones like Pronto.com

Q - What percentage of your product sells online?
A - Brian Mark - It’s different between engines - it runs from 30-60%

Q - Should the landing pages for my top 10 products be without "also considers?"
A - Brian Smith - No, it’s ok to have this so long as each item also has its own landing page.

Q- Should I just take my top 10 products and upload only those to all the engines?
A - All - Make time to add products even if it’s two a day or just to pick one engine at a time. Another option is to add everything and then pare it down. Make sure the overall plan is manageable. You have to be able to go through the feeds and make them right.

Q - Can you talk about CPC paths and CPA paths? Why do some retailers put more emphasis on CPC vs. CPA?
A - Allan - You really have to ask each retailer. They deal

Q - How does setting a cookie work as far as tracking a click and how do they charge?
A - Brian Mark - It’s not a charge. The email sets a cookie as a continuation from the original user.

Q - Do Pronto & ask overlap?
A - Brian Smith - Most engines syndicate their content. Ask.com search results may show product search results from Pronto.

Q - How do you know which shopping engines work with which search engines?
A - Brian Smith - If it were syndicated from Pronto to Ask, then Pronto will charge you for the click. Shopping.com syndicates to 300-500 different sites and you cannot opt out and you cannot tell where the product was actually clicked. There is no transparency into the sources of those syndicated clicks

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 8:08 PM Comments (2)

August 22, 2007

In House: In, Out, or in Between?

Moderated by Jeffrey K. Rohrs. He asks speakers to briefly introduce themselves and give their backgrounds both in house and agency-side if applicable.

First speaker is Marshall Simmonds from the New York Times. He describes that his team at NYT is completely responsible for their search strategy , and is directly involved with all aspects of it. “Imbedded Strategist” role is imbedded into many different levels. They run SEO point, and work with company thought leaders. You have to alter SEO strategy to mirror company’s voice. If you do not understand the business model, you will fail. In the “Consulting” model, this is typically a validation. The consultants are there to validate the model that is in place, working with the existing team.

What can big brands do today? Organize. Hire an in house search specialist or SEO project manager, who should be a strong communicator along with a strong understanding of SEO. Establish an internal team, and include at least one person from technology, marketing, editorial/content production, product development, strategic planning, and sales. Then analyze the data and the roles,- the goal is to not become beholden to SEO consultants. Lastly, “educate,” and make sure to follow up and stay current.

When to seek outside help? For a core competency outside your department. If you do not have the time and resources, a “buy in from the top,” it is not worth the time to bring in a consultant or imbedded. There has to be a strong commitment from leadership to perform.

Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International and the SEMPO BOD is up next. He announces that he thinks his presentation sucks. (laughs) He describes that there are 3 options that should be considered to be the best model for the company. Either “all outsourced” (what most people do), “Hybrid,” and “all in house.” Remember that there is no one other than those in your team that has the passion for success. However, he says that “if their skin is in the game,” they may be more likely to perform better.

He advocates full integration for optimal results. Need to tie in all the major constituencies into the search planning. How do they get Search into the workflow of the other teams? Ask “what are we trying to get from search?” Most people can’t answer this question well, he has found. In many cases, there are not enough resources within an organization so they have to end up outsourcing.

People have started to think along the lines of “I can build a great team for the $2 million that I am spending on PPC management.” This is a growing problem for agencies that need to provide value. Another question to consider: “is the current model working?” For program management, ask if more control is needed, and if there is an advantage to having more control. What is the culture? Will vendors fit in, and how are they managed? For the execution, ask “what is the labor resource required? What are customized tools…do we “need something custom?” They have created lots of customized tools and it has been very valuable. And are there internal barriers that hamstring agencies? He relates that iProspect did a study that showed that very few recommendations ever made it to being implemented.

For cost efficiency, What is the total cost of each program? What are the barriers to implementation and what will the costs be to overcome them? In measuring/predicting time and success,, he feels that in the end some form of hybrid marketing will rule.
He recommends going through all the above questions and answering them to be able to make sound decision

Jessica Bowman from Business.com is up next, and polls the audience to find out what they feel they will do, based on what they have learned so far this week. The majority of those that raised hands felt they would use a “hybrid” type model. She asks, do you think you can do it yourself? Goes through a scenario where a consultant would bill 15-20 hours a week. Can you do as much in that amount of time? She cautions that people will likely not be able to accomplish work as efficiently as someone who is experienced with working with lots of different types of sites.

You can do well completely in house, especially for the low-hanging fruit , like header tags, directory submissions, ALT text, unique page titles. Then there are more advanced things that may require help such as architectural issues and more advanced coding problems. So, if you are going with completely in house: spend time at conferences, understand you market share. What are you getting versus what your competitors are getting. She says Hitwise is a great tool for that. Recognize that in the beginning, the results are likely to be lower. You probably want to only be in house for two years before essentially losing interest and a “fresh perspective.”

Completely outsourced? It is nice to have someone to assign the work to, but you still need to remain educated, in order to not go in the wrong directions. Remember that you will also have to guide the consultant, especially for keyword selection and copywriting, as well as link building.

In between: you can manage the overall project. She feels the in between route is th best of both worlds. Remember that no matter which option you choose, there will always be in house work. There will be disagreements, and approval processes. Still need to work with IT to launch the changes. Remember to keep the projects in scope, and that reporting will likely require in house input for revenue numbers, for example. She provides a few links of what she likes to read. 80 20 rule of the in-houser: 80% of time is spent selling search marketing to the rest of the team, 20% actually doing SEM.. The larger the company the more complex the politics, usually.

Matt Greitzer, from Avenue A | Razorfish (my old company) starts with the slide titled “This is the slide where the agency guy tells you to use an agency.” The benefits of using an agency is the thought leadership that exists within it. It is hard to hire someone that alone has the same resources and experiences as the 2000 people coming up with ideas on a regular basis at A|R. The tactical leadership experience is obviously valuable as well. He has found that SEMs consistently drive better results than in house, based on campaigns that they have taken over. The other big reason to use an agency: track record of results.

What are the questions to figure out before hiring someone? “What is the staff t- client ratio?” “What is the employee turnover rate?” he feels that 20% in the agency environment is average. If anyone is vague about the answer, it may be a red flag. “What is the level of customization?” He says that A|R will pick up your dry cleaning if needed (laughs). What is the standard deliverable, and what will cost extra? How does process, training, and onboarding work? Lastly: Meet your team. At the end of the day it is about the people who are working with your business.

How to get more from your agency? Share data. It may take longer to become comfortable with sharing sensitive data, but when you can, it will improve performance. Invest in learning, and plan for long term gains. Reward success – structure something in the contract to give agency extra based on performance. Push for innovation and exceptional results.

Paul Elliott of eMergent Marketing \ Brulant, Inc. (my new company) starts with a comparative experiences list. He used to work with Things Remembered as in house, and now is the principle eMergent, which he sold to Brulant last year. At, Things Remembered, he was a 1 person SEO / SEM / affiliate marketing / email marketing / and partnership marketing “team” as part of the eCommerce department, and now with Brulant he is part of a team of 40+ SEM professionals. TR: Gained extensive insight into products and competitive landscape, but at eMergent worked diligently to gain product and industry insight for our customers, but rely on clients to leverage their expertise. Most importantly, he became bored with working on only one site, and now he never has a dull day 80-100 hour work weeks are the norm.

As a part of the team, he gets to leverage the learnings of the others on his team. He missed that on the in-house side. He loves to be able to bounce strategies off others internally, even while continuing to gain insight on clients’ industries. His personal job now is the project or relationship champion with the client. This avoids those natural roadblocks with getting stuff implemented, because the communication channels with the clients are better.

He gives a summary of the pros and cons of being in-house: Pros: Strong connection to the product / service offering and in depth understanding of the industry and top competitors. Concentrated focus on servicing just one client instead of balancing the needs of multiple clients. It may be less expensive to maintain internal resources, depending on the size and experience of the team. Timely and complete access to forecasts, sales data, inventory, etc. Better integration and coordination with other internal departments, including: marketing, merchandising, IT, and finance.

Cons to being in house: Many of the best SEO / SEMs are extremely competitive individuals, yet internal positions do not usually foster this competitive spirit. There is often a sense of boredom and eventual lack of motivation that comes with continually working on the same site as opposed to new challenges and opportunities. As part of a small internal team there is often a lack of informal learning opportunities which inhibits professional growth and the ability to deliver in a rapidly changing environment. With a single in house resource, you will be constrained to a single set of strategies, as opposed to best of breed solutions that result from an integrated team approach. SEM professionals are rarely equally trained or experienced in both organic optimization and paid search marketing (except me, of course :p). Therefore, you may be sacrificing by relying on one resource or investing in a larger team. It is often difficult to drive organizational change from within. Often times, external resources are needed to justify priorities, directional change, and budgets.

Decision factors that he would suggest: How competitive/dynamic is the industry? Will campaigns require constant adjustments and testing? How aggressive are the goals for the search marketing efforts? Have you allocated the appropriate budget to support your marketing costs plus the fees of a qualified internal team or external partner? How likely are you to be able to attract, recruit, and retain top search engine marketing talent within your company? How complex is your product or service offering? Is this something that only an internal resource can truly understand? Can you provide the appropriate level of data and insight to properly support an external partner?

He provides a chart which shows the different members both in house and on the agency side that will be important to the hybrid team. The two major players that he calls out on the in house team are the “Client Executive Sponsor,” and the “Client Marketing Liaison.” Paul recommends the use of an external partner, in order to: Introduce diverse skill sets and creative strategies; Avoid the need to attract, recruit, and maintain hard to find and expensive resources; Leverage best of breed tools and processes; Maintain focus on other aspects of the business; Potentially minimize cost risk by developing a performance-based partnership.

Usually do not cover QA, leaving that for those who attend the conference, but there was a nice “discussion” about the merits of an agency when it comes to keyword list development. Bill Hunt mentioned that he would want that to happen in house, and Matt and Paul both disagreed, saying that doing it in an iterative fashion with an outside POV works better. Bill wanted seemingly to hold back, but decided instead to raise the BS flag (in his opinion – btw he is a former Marine so I am not surprised he let his feelings be known). He said that he has seen mostly inadequate lists from agencies when he has taken over an account or consulted. He got the last word in, but it would be interesting to see if that particular subject gets more detailed at SES Chicago, should this panel still be on the list.

(This is live coverage of SES San Jose 2007, and some typos or grammatical errors may exist. If you were a panelist and you would like something clarified, please post in the comments or contact me through the system)

posted chrisboggs in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 7:58 PM Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

SEO Q&A On Links

No presentations -- just plenty of time to put questions to search engine optimization and link building experts who are in the trenches about issues relating to linking.
Moderator:

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

Speakers:

* Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* Debra O'Neil-Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link
* Jim Boykin, CEO, We Build Pages Internet Marketing
* Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC

This is a question and answer session.

Q: I was curious about run-of-site links and their implications and their problems.
Greg: Purchased links or..?
Followup: What if they aren't purchased?
Greg: It depends on why they're there. There was a time when Google treated external links the same way as internal links, so you could get a link buy on a 50k page site and life was good. It doesn't work that way anymore. I don't see that benefit. It creates huge backlinks that your competitors can see and it's not good.
Jim: If your link is a sitewide link like in the footer, I don't think it carries as much weight as in the body.

Q: I understand that Google is penalizing for paid links. Is that true? What's the consequence?
Mike: 3 months in jail. (Everyone laughs. This obviously is not true.)
Jim: The rule is that Google will try not to pass the PageRank on those links. But from Google's history, you have to be really bad to get banned like this.
Greg: That can change. My suggestion could be to stay away from brokerages in the future because you're going to see "seek and destroy" where these people will be penalized. It's better to do work to get links even if that means to buy them. A lot of these brokerage firms have open inventories that are obvious.
Debra: Most links are paid links in some fashion, but you might want to stay away from Sponsored Links.
Danny: Unless it's AdSense.
Mike: Buy buying them, it might take a sweat to get the great link, but it's harder to discover if it's paid or not.

Q: What about links on chambers of commerces where you pay minimum fees or local marketing?
Greg: That's a slipperly slope. Look at Microsoft as a charitable foundation - their link equity comes from them as a sponsor in many cases.
Debra: Their issue is that they are afraid of buying links to manipulate.
Greg: If you help the Boys & Girls Club, that's okay.

Q: How do you think universal search will impact linking?
Debra: I think that's wonderful. Link builders have always focused on a content issue or a quality issue. But now these are going to show up in your search results - it's an incentive to get that quality content on your site.
Mike: I think that you shouldn't think that you're Steven Spielberg. A lot of what comes out in universal results comes from end user data. They're only going to be put in there if they're popular with the end user.
Greg: Google talks about universal search as the greatest thing since sliced bread. In the big picture, I don't see it even popping up a lot for day to day queries. But for high profile terms, you may see it.
Mike: On a tangent, the end user data will need to be aggregated over time to be displayed on the search results. They need to keep out questionable data like pornographic data, so it will take time. Take notes now and think for the future.
Jim: For most of the searches our clients are targeting, video is often going to be ignored by many people anyway.
Danny: Universal search is the future, and you really need to get your content out there, regardless of it being image or video. Those are new opportunities.

Q: What do you believe is the value of unpaid PR0 and PR1 links, if any, and if they're relevant?
Greg: You need to separate the idea of PageRank and anchor text. You can definitely get a lot of links from low-PR sites. I wouldn't worry. But over time, if it's a low PR site, then you might want to reconsider.
Jim: Check the page and find out if the page is in the supplemental index.
Danny: Why do you care about the PageRank?
Followup: We've been asking for links in return for supporting some of our partners.
Danny: It's not an issue of the PageRank. It's a question about the network of sites that are linking to you. The idea is even if you have some dodgy links, you'll still have some natural links that point at you, and those links will balance each other out.
Jim: The most natural way to ask for links is to ask them to link to you without telling them how. That means the anchor text is varied. It looks natural.
Greg: It looks a lot less spammy. You can write a script that changes the alt text for buttons that give some variation on the text links.
Debra: It takes a lot of work but do some keyword analysis and determine what your competitors are doing.
Jim has a post about why a site with 50 backlinks is better than a site with 1000 backlinks. He explains that if you have a relevant neighborhood, it may be more valuable than having links from unrelated places.
Debra talks about TouchGraph, which is a cool site that lets you see your link environment.

Q: I have a question about internal linking. When Google acquired YouTube, they added nofollow to many links on their site. What do you think about this? Can you pass around authority with this tactic?
Greg: You can use it to control the flow of juice. You may not want the "About Us" page to rank, so you can nofollow it. Thus, it's a strategy worth exploring.
Debra: From my understanding, Google views a page nofollowed as one not to be trusted and they don't follow through with it. If you don't care about the page being indexed, it doesn't matter. But you never get a straight answer about it from them.
Mike: Bruce Clay is a firm believer of using nofollow in internal linking and he creates silos where he tries to pass link juice down a specific vertical.

Danny explains that nofollow, for those who don't know, is like a link condom; you touch the site you link to without actually touching the site. Nice analogy. (Rhea made me blog this.)

Q: I try to keep external link ratio to internal ratio about 40/60. Do you have a magic number?
Greg: I've never broken it down on a percentage basis.

Q: What's your opinion on linking to nonrelevant sites?
Greg: I once worked for a client in that space that got penalized. This is where the engines are at - if you get a large group of people who collectively conspire to conspire the engines on a grand scale (like a real estate site where they all link to each other on many directories that have misleading anchor text) - some of these places have thousands and thousands of sites. You can get banned for this because it's clear manipulation. There's no reason why a real estate agent from California should be linking to one in Maine. It happened to more than one particular company in my experience. That whole industry needs to rethink how they develop links. It's a dying model.

Q: There are many ways to get links, but what's the best way to get links?
Debra: It's hard to say one thing because every site is different and some are more competitive than others. Link building overall is hard.
Greg: It depends on what your goal is. Blogging can develop links but they may not help you rank for the products that you sell.
Jim: Finding good resources yourself (not through networks) and writing to these people proving that you're human may yield better results.
Mike: I agree with Debra. There's no one-size-fits-all solution. Look at certain niches: some B2B places might benefit from PR tactics, etc. But you need to think about the content and understand what the content means. Is it compelling copy or is it a great tool? Some services may benefit from having a mortgage calculator. Others may benefit from other products.
Debra: You may want to want to set up incentives to ask for links. You can go through a lot of networks and obtain information.
Mike: Find niche newsletters and focus on them. There's a likelihood that people link to it.
Jim: There's a problem with linkbait. People link to the bait but it's not selling the product. If you link to the wrong page with the wrong text, it may not be good. Getting links is good, but you may want to write to people and request that they place the link a certain way.
Debra: Bait is great for exposure but one-on-one linking can be achieved by asking.

Q: Is it ethical to have people who write content and link to "grey" areas?
Jim: If someone writes an article and submits it to lots of places, you may be penalized for duplicate content. But if it's on one page, then don't worries.
Debra: There are so many places that have guest writers. You know that they can put links in there.
Jim: If someone said "this guy paid me money to put this page there," you might trip a filter. Be careful about that.

Q: We have a site that ranks real well. The content is high-quality and relevant. A few years ago we ranked in Sponsored Links. Should we nuke those? I don't want to trip any filters. But I don't want to change it because it could affect our great rankings.
Greg: Odds are it's not passing any juice. But if you turn it off and you do slip, can you get it back?
Followup: If Google knows, who will be penalized? The advertiser or the publisher?
Greg: It's not really a question for this session. (You should check out coverage of Search Engine Q&A on Links where representatives from search engines will answer these more authoritatively.)
Jim: If your site ranks well now, I wouldn't change anything. But if you hear eventually that you'll get penalized, remove it and put your competitor's site there. (Yes, he was kidding.)
Danny: With Yahoo, you can report inlinks as Spam. Maybe that will help you. But that's a good question to ask the search engines.

Q: In your experience, have you seen the behavior with linking differ across search engines?
Greg: Microsoft has no clue. The fundamentals are the same. Google is a little farther along in their ability to filter and tweak the leverage of links. But the core concept is the more links wins. MSN: you really can't tell.
Mike: Google has been using this type of ranking mechanism from early on. There's a lot of historical data that they have but Yahoo and MSN have relatively new data. But the mechanisms are all based on the same characteristics.
Jim: Yahoo is in the same place that Google was in 2003. As Greg said, Google has a history of doing this a little longer. That's an advantage. As Yahoo gets smarter, it will look more like Google. Most of the stuff you do for Google is still good with Yahoo.
Mike: Links are a powerful signal. You're going to have different patents of end user data and toolbar data that causes fluctuation.

Q: I have 2 websites that are SEO friendly and generate a good size of revenue. I have to shut down one of them. Can I use the external links into that website and direct them to the other website?
Greg: Yes by using 301 redirection on the site you're shutting down. Hopefully the one you get to keep is the better one in terms of links.

Q: Why is it when the keywords appear on blogs, they seem to propel up a result faster than others? If they're consitently posting on the same blog even though they're varying the keywords, why will that push them up?
Mike: Legitimate blogs?
Followup: No, spam blogs. There is duplicate content - everything is verbatim. They are propagating in the Google results, not Google Blog Search.
Danny: Talk to Matt Cutts offline.
Followup: Why does the blog propel up the ranks?
(I'm thinking to myself that it probably has something to do with fresher content from recent blogs. But nobody says that.)
Greg: Much of what you see in that aggressive space shows a weakness in the algorithm. You may want to apply it in a more traditional whitehat way when you stop getting angry.

Q: What's to stop people from having the same links from the same sources?
Greg gives out a strategy - when trying to get links, he gets some backlinks for all terms on his competitors and sorts by PageRank.
Debra: There's nothing wrong with contacting the same source.

Q: If people link to each other reciprocally and it may not be relevant, what do you think?
Jim: The issue is if it makes sense. I'm guessing that there are some filters. If you have 500 natural backlinks and there are 10 people that you're trading with but it still makes sense, then there's no problem.
Mike: When you have a look at your website, you need to be brutal and ask 10 reasons why you should link to this website.
Danny: You're going to get in trouble if it's not natural. If you're a mortgage website and a realtor site, link together, but otherwise, don't.
Debra: Don't utilize this tactic solely.

Q: We're looking to implement a glossary on our site. What are the risks of doing this aggressively by linking internally even if it's valid and good content? Is there any value of this? We're putting a lot of effort into it.
Mike: What's the use of it to the end user? Is it beneficial to them?
Followup: Yes.
Greg: Is it niche specific?
Followup. Yes, it is. Is there a risk of quick implementation though?
Greg: The thing is with glossaries is that if you create everything on your own page and everything is short, those thin pages all end up being worthless. My suggestion is that you shouldn't scrape content from Wikipedia. If your content is in-depth, that's a great thing to do.
Followup: Would you recommend a structure?
Greg: If you turn it more than just a definition of the word, like history/application/etc, then it makes sense to do word by word. It's more valuable to the search engines.

Q: Rhea! asks a question. Google is in a philosophical pickle regarding paid linking. They have a lot of confidence and if they did they wouldn't have implemented a snitch report. My question is - do you think this is something they're going to focus on aggressively or are they going to change the algorithm?
Jim: I think they're going to try to scare people to stop buying links. FUD!
Greg: It's absurd.
Jim: It's good. They're doing their job well.
Greg: 95% of their algorithm is based on fear. Results are good because people behave because they are afraid of getting kicked out. They are going to exaggerate what they can catch algorithmically. Realistically, that's not how it works. There will still be paid links. I think they're far away from implementing an efficient solution but they might penalize people so that it reinforces that fear. I know they're working on it though. Brokers who do this mainstream will drive this more and more underground which will affect the user.
Mike: It makes you be more cautious to get editorial links. Great editorial links are better than paid links.
Jim: Just stay under the radar.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 7:37 PM Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Search Engines

SES San Jose
Organic Track: CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Search Engines

Speakers:
(Moderator) Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink
Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
Vanessa Fox, Zillow.com
Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com
Amit Kumar, Yahoo!
(Q&A) Amanda Camp, Software Engineer, Google

Shari Thurow: CSS

Advantages CSS
- HTML addition that allows webmasters to control design parameters such as margins, font/typeface appearance.
- Ability to change the "look" of a site quickly and easily.
- Can significantly decrease the download time fo a page.
-- Usability pros say 8-12 secs.
-- Yahoo rep says 30 secs or less

Disadvantages
- End users must have fonts installed on their computers or the page will not display as designers intended.
-- Logo or corporate identify
-- Banners (ads or self-promotional)
-- Condensed font used for screen real estate
- Usability testing (task oriented) and focus groups (user opinions) might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers.
-- Print materials
-- A/B and multivariate testing
- CSS-formatted hyperlinks can dominate the content of a web page making the content appear unfocused.
- CSS can be used to hide text on a webpage

Surrounding a graphic with an H1 tag does not make the alt text does not make the SEs believe the text is more important.

CSS can be used to layer objects. SEs can detect negative coords. Negative coords are used to cloak content. The SEs know about this and it doesn't work. Another form of CSS manipulation that doesn't work is layering an object under another object so the user cannot see both objects but the SEs can. Search engines detect CSS positioning. Drop down menus are one form of acceptable invisible layers.

Should you robots exclude your style directory? No.

Definitely use stylesheets. Only determine use graphic nav versus css nav after testing with your users. Make sure your pages display appropriately on multiple browsers. Hidden elements (layers, text) are acceptable to SEs as long as those elements are meant to be seen and used by site visitors. Do not use CSS to exploit SEs.

Wow. We're at standing room only now. Big crowd.

Mikkel deMib: Web 2.0

What is (important about) Web 2.0? Most people still don't know what it is. Basically, web 2.0 is a new type of application. Not so much new technology, but it's a new use of the same technologies. One of the most popular new use of technology is AJAX.

Web 2.0 is also a deeper interaction with users. Turning visitors into active participants and "community" members. The paradox of Web 2.0 is that it embraces the true web and the power of user generated content, but it also isolates itself from existing web interaction.

AJAX is Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX puts a new javascript layer onto the client and handles a lot of the interaction that used to be handled on the server side, which dramatically increases the response times for the application.

AJAX is cool, right? WRONG. Remember frames? Useful yes, but they still suck. AJAX breaks the standards. AJAX shares the same problem with frames and flash... you can only link to the application, not a specific page. So it doesn't make sense for the SEs to crawl an AJAX application.

Tips from Mikkel:
-- Should you use AJAX at all? Yes, but not as much as some people will tell you to.
-- Ask yourself why you want to use AJAX? If you only want to because it's kewl, then don't. However, if you feel it will improve your business or make you more money, then do it.
-- Let AJAX be an option -- not the default. Don't turn away users who don't support it.
-- Set up proper (301) redirection of "wrong" linking to the AJAX application.
-- Let the pros do the work! Do not let happy script kiddies and HTML-amateurs destroy the user experience and jeopardize security with poor AJAX applications. AJAX is HIGHLY insecure. Use TRUSTWORTHY vendors and consultants.

The Social Web 2.0

User generated content is great for SEO
-- Original content is expensive -- loyal users write it for free
-- You don't have to do keyword research -- users write (just as bad) as they search
-- Miss-spellings are acceptable in user contributed content -- even in headlines and titles
-- User generated content improve your freshness factor on your site and help rank non-community pages too!

Would you like to have 20,000 SEOs? Use your users to actively promote your site. train your users to help themselves to help you. Though you have to watch out how you train them. If one percent of your users turn out to be spammers, you suddenly have 200 spammers.

The "One page -- one link" strategy. It is not that hard to get one link to one good piece of information. Teach users where and how to get that one link -- and make it the goal to get that one link for every contribution. With just 1000 contribution a day, that's 30k new links a month!

Vanessa Fox: SEO in a Web 2.0 Startup World

The life of a startup... we don't need a lot of money (truemors.com). We have cool data (zillow.com). We don't need advertising, we have link bait! We have snazzy new technologies.

Oh, the woes of cutting edge technology... Does your site work with javascript turned off?
If you can only do one thing, build in the ability to do more things later.

The biggest SEO mistakes
- Blocking links
- Blocking content (AJAX does that a lot)
- Not providing content

Real World examples -- 95% of Zillow's search traffic comes from people searching for "Zillow". Which is very, very sad. So how can Zillow get traffic for other terms?

"But everyone has Flash!" Say your content is only available through Flash, but you think that's okay because all of your users have Flash installed. Yes, but SEs still can't read that content. "But Flash is so snazzy!" Eh, not always.

Keyword research in a web 2.0 world...as a searcher looking to find out about home appraisals, real estate estimates, etc. Make sure you use REAL words/names for terms, and not just your cool proprietary product names (like zestimate instead of estimate).

Remember that AJAX prevents SEs from seeing (as well as users with JavaScript turned off) lots of content.

User generated content is awesome! More indexable information, more freshness, etc. However, make sure you HAVE information... empty discussion boards look like ghost towns. Ensure you've got a place to get some content from.

Amit Kumar: From a SE point of view

The four things I wanted to talk about are the guiding principles, technologies, techniques, and resources.

Guiding Principles
- Build for your users: Yahoo! will adapt.
- Think "Accessibility"
- Users vote by attribution -- the way we determine what people are looking at and people like is by how many links a site has. It's important to remember in the context of AJAX. Make sure users can link to you.
- We accept hints! Use sitemaps.

Technologies
- CSS
--- Issue: understanding your pages
--- Core to the web, like HTML
- Flash and JavaScript
--- Issue: reading your pages
--- Need to consume carefully.
- AJAX
--- Issue: Finding all your content
--- Think "form filling"
- Badges
--- Issue: Where is the content from?
--- Attribution

Techniques
- Graceful Degradation
--- Turn off js/css in your browser, make sure everything still works.
- Alternate Nav
- SItemaps
- Site Explorer
- Robots.txt

Amanda Camp, Google:

I'm on the WMX team (WMX == Webmaster Ecstacy). Our goal is to make Webmasters happy. See www.google.com/webmasters

We have a ton of content off of Webmaster Central that deals with AJAX, CSS and web 2.0 things. We just did a post, in fact, about Flash. How Google handles Flash, making sure your site does okay, etc. Hopefully you've seen it, if not, go read it.

We also have the webmaster guidelines. Really, you should go read them if you haven't already. It talks about things like content and javascript and all of that stuff. What to do if you have javascript, etc. Really, just make sure it degrades gracefully.

So, we have lots of information, please go check it out!

Interesting Concepts and Tips...

Search engines don't use the title attribute to determine relevancy. (Not the title TAG, the title attribute)

Sitemaps are not meant to substitute for poor site organization.

posted cshel in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 7:27 PM Comments (1)

August 22, 2007

SEM Pricing Models

Moderator:
Misty Locke, President & Co-Founder, Range Online Media

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz.org

SEO Services:
- Standard SEO for keyword rankings
- Site Auditing
- Standard Consulting
- Keyword Research
- Content Creation & Copywriting
- Link Building
- Strategic Planning Design/Reports
- Viral Content Creation and Promotion
- Social Media Marketing
- Reputation Management Control
- Brand Tracking and Reporting
- Web Development & Design
- Training & Workshops

Pricing Models
- Hourly Consulting ($100 to $400 per hour)
- Monthly Retainers
- By the Project Pricing
- Pay for Performance
- Profit Sharing
- Hybrid Models

Example:

Travel Industry Web Site
Needs: keyword, strategy, link building, measurements, roi
Method: consulting, phone emal
Cost: $24,000 - 8k first month and 4k for remaining X months

Large Media Web Property
Needs: SEO training, consulting
Method: on site meeting/training, ongoing consultation phone and email
Cost: $25,000: 10k down, 10k upon training, and 5k following month

Classifieds Web Site
Needs: SEO audit, recommendations
Method: Remote consultation and report construction
Cost: $16k: 8k down and 8k second review

Personal Reputation Management
Needs: Two listings pushed to page 3+ of results
Method: Remote link building and optimization
Cost: $20k, 5k down 10k on page two and 5k when on page three

Technology Web Site
Needs: link bait
Method: remove creation of link bait
Cost: 30k, 6k start, 6k for 5 months

The Consulting Business Model:
- Scalability issues (more clients, more hours, more people)
- SEO Products vs. SEO Services

Lance Loveday, President, Closed Loop Marketing

He shows extremes of profitable and non profitable clients.

Pricing Goals:
- Minimize risk
- Maximize upside
- Rationalized/justifiable
- Competitive
- In line with client expectations
- What works best for the client

Pricing Models:
- Flat Fee
- Hourly (doesnt use it anymore
- Cost Plus (doesnt use it anymore)
- CPA (doesnt use it anymore)
- % of spend
- Retainer (rare)

Set Up Fees:
- Fixed Cost (+7k)
-- Discovery
-- Keyword Themes
-- Strategy
-- Campaign Structure
-- Write Ads
-- Keyword Research
-- Tracking
-- Campaign Setup
- Determine Fee based on
-- Scale
-- New vs. Existing
-- International
-- Geo targeting
-- PITA factor (hard clients)
-- Size of client
-- Estimated time

Management Fees:
- % of spend
- Monthly
- All inclusive (mostly)
- Absolute floor ($3k)
- Tiered - % decreases as spend goes up

Our Guidelines:
- Set up fee average 2-3x monthly management fees
- Number of keywords less important than the number of campaigns / ad groups
- Additional one-time fees for major campaigns expansions/reworking
- Ad hoc consulting on landing pages, analytics and other online marketing best practices is included (design and configuration is extra)

Ken Jurina, President and CEO, Epiar Inc.

The Big Question:
Q: How should you charge for your SEM work?
A: The way that is going to make you the most of profit and deliver the highest value of your ideal client

4 Typical Pricing Models:
- Retainer based (2k to 50k month)
- Pay for Performance
- Fee for service model
- Hourly consultations

Get Niched
- What are your strengths?
- PPC or Organic?
- Established SEM (then price the market, but if your new, then price to live)
- Know your competition and market

Importance of Customer Profiling:
- Find the right client

What They Do?
- 90% fee for service
- 7% pay for performance
- 3% customized services
- Three branded core SEO service phases
-- Extensive keyword research
-- Keyword placement
-- Link building

Stick with your profitable business model

Customize Services and Pricing
- New domain
- Past SEO
- etc.

Different level of services are variables
- web site audits
- web analytics
- monthly maintenance plans
- hourly consulting

Pricing & Perception
- Our initial pricing model was fixed
- Pricing models changed over time
-- Phase and variable pricing
-- Clients comprehend costs/phase and accept price
-- Final cost came out to be the same

Location, Location, Location
- Pricing based n what market can bear, geographically
- Outside major markets (NY, LA)

Proposals and Contracts
- Proposals must be detailed and comprehensive but to the point, shows transparency, terms, conditions and legal stuff - and make sure they sign it

Mike Murray, Vice President, Fathom SEO

He gave someone $10.

Bizarre Price Factors
- 20 placement 8 engines
- Refund admin fee
- 800 directories no spam
- 10 top 10 rankings

Hourly Pricing is good but you may run out of resources

Custom Fit Pricing they shy away from but you can tailor to client needs, but it gets expensive and doesnt fit in a process

Performance based model, they dont do it, but they almost came close. You get what you pay for but you need to trust them.

Retainer/Annual Contract
- They want clients in for minimum a year
- You can continue to improve with long term program
- But it is expensive for a client
- And quality issues

Models:
- Easy access for small and mid sized business
- Time tested
- Comprehensive
- Easier to train consistently
- Accommodates teams with diverse skills
- Simple, short, easy
- Scalable

SEO Models
- Annual with monthly payments
- Based on number of keywords
- Can add extra keywords pages
- We post updated to move program along
- Follow strict process
- Long term fits ongoing optimization
- $800 to $1,800 monthly plus options

Online PR/Links:
- Annual but with monthly payments
- Hourly focus provides campaign directions
- Vast offerings
- Campaigns crafted quarterly
- Follow strict process
- Long term reflects sound plan
- $800 to $1,800 per month

PPC Model:
- Three month arrangement, monthly payments
- MAnagement fee and 5% of media spend, reflects efficiencies limits investment
- Adhere to prices
- Analytics and conversion
- Custom reporting
- $800 to $1,800 per month

Conditions
- Money back guarantee
-- It doesn't drive more sales from serious prospects
-- Risky

Right to Cancel model
- Cant demonstrate full program merits
- Creates a premature focus on rankings

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 7:12 PM Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

In House: Big SEO

SES San Jose 2007
Issues Track: In House: Big SEO

Speakers:
(Moderator) Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget
Bill Macaitis, VP of Online Marketing & SEO/SEM, Fox Interactive Media
Marshall D. Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, New York Times /About.com
Melanie Mitchell, Vice President of SEO/SEM, AOL
Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Strategies International
Kara Jariwala, Search Strategist, Cisco

Marshall Simmonds

We've broken up the topics into 5 categories, I'm going to be discussing hiring and retaining talent.

Challenges
- New Employees/Turnover
- 11M documents (and more all the time)
- URL integrity - maintaining standards
- Paid subscription wall - TimesSelect
- New site launches
- IT developments
- Corporate acquisitions

Methodology that works for big brands:
I. Organize
II. Analyze
III. Educate -- constant education for new and old employees.

How did we enable in-house talent to get these results?
- Build a well-organized SEO program
-- On-site SEO program manager at each NYTCo property responsible for leading cross-functional etam to push optimization agenda.
-- Engaged team of marketing, tech, research, editorial and even sales -- Everyone has a role in creating and maintaining search intiatives.
-- Share success when a newly visible section gets great links or achieves good rankings
-- Be a resource for employees that are heavily involved in the SEO outcome, and also for those who aren't focused on search.
-- Be a liaison

Who can you hire for SEO?
- Skills:
--- Can come from many different interenet and/or marketing experiences
--- Marketing background -- understands importance of metrics
--- Thorough understanding of "Best practice" search optimization techniques and marketing methods with current knowledge of latest and future industry trends in the search arena
- We execute strategy and measure results on an ongoing basis
--- Metrics save jobs

Incentivize based on performance of properties, incentivize based on total search referrers on a TOT basis. Set milestones related to site/section performance. Make SEO training part of new employee curriculum.

Bill Hunt: Defining Opportunity

This is the carrot or stick part that Marshall alluded to... I like that "metrics save jobs" thing... the problem is metrics also lose jobs, hence the carrot or stick.

What are things your execs ask?
1. What is SEM and why should I care?
2. Tell me how this helps me meet my objectives?
3. Where do we stand today?
4. What is our competition doing?
5. What do you propose we do?

Why calculate your opportunity? It makes the business case and justifies the investment. It also allows you to focus your activities and identify gaps. Make sure you set expectations and keep it real. Monitor your performance and keep track of your metrics.

To evaluate your opportunity, take your "goal words" and look up the estimated searches per month for each (this goes into your matrix). Next, look in your log files and find out your current SE traffic and what percent each is of your overall traffic. Make a column for your current Google rank for each term. (Execs like ranks, it's a simple concept they "get"). Next, project your visits. Next, calculate the value of a visit. Now show the revenue opportunity. Break it out and show what the costs and ROI.

Importance of understanding intent... we've created a model we call the Searcher Mindset. Mindset > Goal > Keyword > Projection. Determine which types of searchers you reach/try to reach and use each of their unique motivations and behaviors and apply your goals to predict/project the keywords you need and what kind of traffic (and therefore dollars) you shoud expect.

By showing that you increased traffic X% to these pages that are important to the company, you're cementing your case and ensuring your budget. Remember, there is rarely "new money" so give solid justification of what should be cut and the business case for change. Understand the goals of the current budget allocations and show how search can compliment or increase results over current spend. Explain competitive pressures and missed opportunities. Prepare for turf warfare and budget battles.

Eat the elephant... one bite at a time!

Bill Macaitis: How to get a project through

This is one of the most common pain points. I want to go through and discuss all the SEO roadblocks. Like editorial doesn't like it when you tell them you want a certain keyword density.. design looks at you funny when you say "no flash".. finance won't give you any money because it's supposed to be "free".

1. Define your opportunity (see Bill's portion of slides)
2. Evangelize -- lots of people don't understand SEO... so help them
3. Sell all the stakeholders
4. Find allies
5. Focus on small wins -- let people start to see the impact for future buy-in
6. Focus on your money words -- your money word is whatever your CEO's favorite pet words are. If the CEO is happy, everybody is happy
7. Education
8. Weekly meetings -- monitor projects, keep everyone in the loop, keep the communication going
9. Build relationships
10. Bribes -- do what you can to get the ball rolling on your project
11. Face to face -- Meet with the roadblock person... email doesn't suffice
12. Internal competition
13. External competition
14. Show past successes
15. Show past failures
16. Utilize ranking reports
17. Prioritize your projects
18. Put names against projects
19. Utilize deadlines -- hard deadlines keep things moving.
20. Accept no excuses for seo projects not getting through or getting started.

Kara Jariwala: Tools You Can Use

-- Keyword research is always where we start and metrics is always where we end.

-- Pick out the "just right" to track. There are words we know are "too hot", the search volume in a particular month is just off the charts, but then the following month is drops off tremendously. There are words that are "too cold" in that there just isn't enough volume there to justify bothering with them.

-- Automate your research. There are different software packages you can buy; most are ASP type of models. Automating your time consuming research frees up your time to focus on strategy.

-- Give your clients digestible pieces of data.

Melanie Mitchell: The Large Site Challenge

If your corporate culture or structure doesn't believe in or buy-into SEO, you simply cannot succeed. When I came to AOL, I had to ask them to change the entire way they do everything. The entire corporate structure was configured in a way that made optimizing for search completely impossible. To make SEO a big part of our strategy, we had to weave it into the corporate DNA, and make people aware that we're all responsible for it -- from the CEO on down.

The Six-Point Plan

- Create core search team (Subject Matter Experts, Systems Architect to connect the dots, Tech Lead (business analyst to interface w/ programmers), Front Liners (programmers), Program Manager, Project Managers)

- Set priorities, goals and incentives. In our case, we track search referrals, and we ties these referrals to people's bonuses -- this makes it more important to people :)

- Provide training. If you're going to hold people responsible and accountable, you have to provide training. In our case, it's required and graded and those grades roll up to supervisors/managers.

- Set internal standards. Make sure what you're doing is defined. It helps you check to see how you're doing.

- Provide tools. Help all of your departments be successful with their seo strategy.

- Measure and track (and adjust). Track pages indexed, search referrals, user behavior (abandonment, return visits, page consumption)

Thoughts to take with you

- You can't ignore search.
- You need executive buy-in.
- No accountability, no success. Your whole effort needs to have teeth.
- Be transparent with the data.
- Be willing to do what it takes.

Interesting Concepts...

-- Melanie Mitchell recommends webconfs.com -- free tools (spider simulator, keyword clouds, backlink checker), she also said AOL uses an internal version of Nutch (an open source search engine) to evaluate the AOL properties she oversees. According to the Nuth website, because it's an open-source SE, there is "no bias" in the results, and the ranking algorithm is visible and known.

-- All of the panelist seem to agree that search needs to be independent of other departments, or perhaps mostly independent with dotted line reporting to IT/Marketing/Finance, etc.

posted cshel in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 5:45 PM Comments (1)

August 22, 2007

Link Baiting & Viral Search Success

What better way to get links than by doing something that makes people feel compelled to link to you? That's link baiting -- coming up with an idea, a service, even a controversy -- that gets people talking and linking your way. A viral campaign is similar -- a program, a system or an encouragement that gets people linking to you over time. This session is designed for experienced marketers. Beginners should only attend if they've gone through the Link Building Basics session earlier in the conference.
Moderator:

* Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:

* Chris Boggs, Manager, Search Engine Optimization, eMergent \ Brulant, Inc.
* Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
* Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz.org
* Cameron Olthuis, Independent Online Marketing Consultant

Chris Sherman introduces the session. Link baiting is an appealing strategy because you're giving something really good for link love.

We start with Rebecca Kelley, who totally rocks.

Linkbait is content on your site that targets the "linkerati." A lot of people think that linkbait is manipulative because you're getting people to link to you in a malicious way. But it's not. If it's interesting content, people should have no problem linking to it. Therefore, viral worthy content and an audience = link love.

When you have a campaign, you want to focus on the linkerati who are the tech savvy people.

Some opportunities there include:
- Researching your sector's linkworthiness. Get some ideas from Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us.
- Discover the big players in your field. Look if they're discussing trends you want to focus on.
- Leverage that community after you do your launch.
- Target the right kind of sites (the ones that are more appropriate to your content). Tech news fits on Digg, but offbeat news might be better on Boing Boing and Fark.

Designing appealing content pieces:
- Select a content focus. ex. Mingle2's "How Dating my Ex was Like Playing Doom II on Nightmare Mode." the person who wrote this studied Digg, got 4000 diggs on this submission and got 1700 links.
- Mesh together your branding and viral elements. Relate this to your sector. It wouldn't really work to write about Apple and the Wii in the mortgage industry.
- Target your keywords. You want linkbait that is relevant. Make sure the title of your piece gives you the right traffic.

Appealing does not necessarily mean complex. The web2.0 look feel is good, but not essential. Simplicity works. An example is a drawing of a flowchart (scanned in, not even Photoshopped!) It got 2500+ Diggs.

Target the Linkerati's emotions. Rand Fishkin wrote a post about emotions that make links. Linkerati are very emotional people. They're angry; they're excited about product launches; they like controversy. They like getting riled up and talking about things.

Don't forget vanity. People who are very likely to link are people whose egos are stroked. Matt Cutts talked about how David Klein, a chiropractor, took pictures of people drawing pictures of what they want to do - David created images and got links. (Matt linked him. I read it.)

Leverage the community you research. Do a little pre-launch PR. Ask opinions before launching your piece. Since you're involving them in the process, they're more likely to take interest and spread the word if they have a contribution to it. Once you do launch it, stay on top of the traffic and manage your site. The first 15-30 minutes are crucial to handling traffic. That's when the top linkers and bloggers will see your piece. A successful piece can get up to 10k visitors an hour especially from sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Try to have static pages to handle the load. You want to receive ongoing value from your linkbait. Take advantage of your traffic increase after you launch something successful because it will bump the users (who are sticky!). Good linkbait has continuous relevance over time.

Drivl's 22 Worst Place Names in the World - 2400 Diggs, 1300 links, 192 comments, and 4000 page views (6.5% of the total pageviews on the site). It continues to pull in traffic and visitors - the content is timeless.

Keep in mind:
- Linkbait is not a sure thing. Don't get discouraged.
- Linkbait doesn't necessarily target your typical audience. You have to keep this other mentality - "I'm targeting the people who will link to me" rather than your typical users.
- Linkbait isn't a quick fix. It's a fun and clever wait to get links but it's not an easy solution.

Cameron Olthuis is next.

Linkbait is remarkable content or feature on your website that compels other people to link to you.
- Informational content
- Controversy (Jason Calacanis against SEO)
- Humor (funny content, funny images, viral videos)
- News (being the first to break a major news story or offering thoughtful opinion on a story)
- Tools (mortgage calculators, SEO tools, etc.)

What are the benefits?
- Links. Linkbait is link building in mass. Traditional link building is not fun to do and it's time consuming.
- Link profile. The best links show up naturally and show up from all different sources. They are not reciprocal.
- Traffic. Social sites can drive insane amounts of traffic.
- Branding. When you're on these social sites, people perceive you as the authority.
- Bookmarks. Not only are bookmarks links, but people are saving these because people want to revisit these pages in the future. It's great to have that additional traffic source.
- Media publicity. These social sites can get you in front of major news sources.

Case Study: Drug Rehab center. It's typically perceived as boring. How can you get linked to?
First, I want to see what the community likes that's relevant to this. So an example is del.icio.us. Search for the keyword/tag "drugs" e.g. the effects of cannibus on a web based lifestyle. People actually like this even though it's informational (it's also funny).
Second, brainstorm with your coworkers, friends, family, and the client. Brainstorming can give you many multiple linkbait ideas.
Then, create the content. "Guide to Identifying and Recognizing Illegal Drugs." These need to be very interesting and social media friendly pages. When these people are clicking, they're not spending time on the site. Make it easy for them to scan the info - intro paragraph, table of contents, etc. It was submitted to Digg and did great. It got 1300 Diggs, 150+ comments, 1000+ links, 50K unique visits within the first 48 hours., #1 for illegal drugs ranking.

Keys to promotion:
- Having a power account. Your success rate is much higher. Tips: Provide value to the community. Don't submit your own articles. People look at your past submissions and think you're boring. If you go out to other sites and link to them, they're perceived as more legitimate.
- Good titles and descriptions. This will make or break your linkbait piece.
- Submit it to the proper category.
- Target the proper sites. Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Netscape.

Example: Search Engine Smackdown. This is a flash game where you learn about SEO by battling a founder of the search engines. It got a lot of great links and worked out for us.

Ideas beyond content:
- Flash content
- Viral videos
- Mashups
- Images
- Widgets
- Tools

Jennifer Laycock is next. She says that the core purpose of linkbait is to build links. The reason it works is that people are looking for things to talk about. There are millions of blogs (she says 71 million, but Greg Jarboe is sitting next to me and he keeps saying 98. In any event, that's a lot!)

Viral marketing is about marketing. It's great for building your brand and for driving conversions. People build relationships online. We know that people listen to their friends. With these new communities popping up in social media, people are building trust relationships with others that they haven't met and may never meet. It's viewed differently than traditional advertising.

So why do this? The cost is in your idea. You usually have a higher development cost (creativity), but you're not paying for placement, CPM impressions, etc., so if it goes successfully, you do very well.

It also creates brand evangelists. The added benefit of having people speak about your product increases your credibility.

You also get a rapid response rate. The spread of email, blogs, and social media spread is instant.

How do you do this?
- Ask yourself: what sparks passion in your customers?
- Look at what hasn't been done before.
- Look at how your ideas benefit your users.
The real big question is asking if your audience will risk their reputation on this. If you have people who have relied on you for restaurant reviews, for example, and you give them misinformation, will they trust you again?

Quick tip: using other people's resources is a great way to be viral.
Get ad space without buying an ad. Example: Widgets. (Flickr, MyBlogLog, blog quiz - cheap ideas - dating sites can do "are you a romantic, what type of flower are you?" and vacation sites can do "what's your ideal vacation spot?")

When opportunity presents itself, be ready to act. Jennifer shares her story about her issue with the National Pork Board. She sold shirts on her site to help local milk banks and one of the slogans on the shirt was "the other white milk." The National Pork Board sent her a cease and desist notice. When she thought about it, she realized that this is a social media match made in heaven.
She did the following:
- Prepared the right story: indignation and humor
- Have a buzzworthy hook. The lawyer handed that to her on a platter - they used the wrong wording and assumed she was pushing a breastfeeding fetish (when they were, in fact, clueless).
- She created a call to action. Something as simple as adding something on the end like contact information can help. And she did that. (And they didn't like it.)
- Make it easy to spread with bookmarking tools.
- Planted the seeds - emailed friends.
She also started adding a link back out to people who linked to her and that pushed her site higher up.

It paid off great. A traffic spike was 400% (80,000 visits). She got great branding spike. It was a great topical blog spike. Her sales spiked 700%. She also had a community spike - tons of comments come in to this day. (I linked to it less than a month ago!)

She ended up receiving an apology and the cease and desist was revoked. They also offered a donation to the milk bank.

Last up is Chris Boggs who is not owned by Microsoft like I wrongfully implied last week. He works for Brulant now.

Some of the past sessions we've covered are - Link Building Basics, Are Paid Links Evil?, SEO Q&A (up next! Yes, I will be blogging that.)

Not everyone can leverage Digg. How can you build links without this? Let's talk about those strategies.

Best practices:
- Free and paid directories
- Quid pro quo: give something to get something. This includes link negotiation and buying links.
- Link baiting
- Links from Matt Cutt's blog!

People have talked about Yahoo! Site Explorer and I wanted to show an example of some of the research you can do with that. Chris is sharing how he uses it to get links.
- Check the inlinks.
- Remove links from the internal domain.
- You can watch links from the entire site or to a particular page.
- You don't want all your links to point to the homepage. You should focus on linking to subpages. This works in general because most of your content is likely not on your homepage. Linkbait increases your deep-link ratio.

Exercise when building links: how many degrees of separation can you map? If you're talking about high blood pressure, you're probably going to look at sites that are related to that. But you might run out of sites. So maybe you'll want to find other related ideas - heart disease, exercise. I like to go out to at least 6-7 degrees of separation. The search engines should realize that there's a semantic connectivity between that and your topic.

How does this work for linkbait? Once mapped, additional research is required for link baiting efforts.
1. Examine buzzworthy topics for each area.
2. Look for trends (Nielsen BuzzMetrics / Umbria)
3. Participate in communities discussing the issues.
4. Create "ubiquitous" linkbait, which will be more likely to draw links from a larger variety of websites (and thus look very natural). The added bonus of this is that the majority of the links should be coming from sites that are relevant.
5. Build on successes, or try again.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 5:38 PM Comments (2)

August 22, 2007

So You Want To Be A Search Marketer!

Moderator:
Misty Locke, President & Co-Founder, Range Online Media

Pradeep Chopra, Co-Founder, OMLogic

Internet has changed the business marketplace, not limited by time, distance or capital.

SEM is considered the best options and SEM industry is growing at an incredible pace.

Talent:
- Demand exceeds supply
- SEM is the core of marketing
- Today is the best time to be an SEM professional

Why a Career in SEM?
- Flexibility
- Skills are portable and global
- SEO: One of the four cutting edge jobs (Source: RHI)
- Innovation and adventure
- You don't need a professional degree
- Salaries are attractive

Salaries Overview:
- Executive entry level 30-45k
- Specialist 3-5 yrs 50-75k
- Expert with etc...
From ClickZ

What Skills do you need?
- Communication
- Passionate about Internet
- Networking
- Quicker Learner
- SEO is technical, PPC is creative
- Sales & Marketing

What Lies in the Future:
- Web 2.0
- Rich media
- Behavioral
- Conversions
- Beyond US
- Verticals
-- Retail
-- Travel
-- Finance
-- Education
-- Social Networking
-- SEM

Key to Success:
- Use SEM for finding a new job
- Continuous Learning and certification
- Leadership role

Dan Perry, SEO Producer, Cars.com

Believer in interviewer skills in getting the job.

Preparation:
- "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." Ben Franklin

- Expect to meet with at least three people
-- HR: Did you like on your resume?
-- Boss: Can you do the job?
-- Boss' Boss: Will you fit in?

- Questions to answer:
-- Where do you want to be in 5 years?
-- Strengths and weaknesses
-- Biggest accomplishment/failure?
-- Friend/coworker boss describe you?
-- Best decision you ever make?

- Never bring up money
- Don't say you have offers elsewhere, even if you do
- Don't ask for more vacation
- Know your number and stick to it
- Consider entire package
-- Insurance
-- Relocation details
-- 401k match (and vesting)

Interview Process:

- Do you have a question for me?
-- Always have a question
-- Be specific (no culture questions
-- Think about this one and have a few

Final Thoughts:

- Be prepared to compromise (working on groups and teams)
- Develop diplomacy

David Wallace, CEO and Founder, SearchRank

- David stumbled into this industry, got his computer in 1996. April 1997 he went to a seminar on making money online, became an affiliate of web design. They launched niche web site to attract customers. They developed a contractors resource directory in Arizona. They relied on free organic results. Started then building their own sites and then added SEO services.

Today way to learn SEM:
- Free resources like Beginners Guide from SEOmoz, blogs, forums
- eBooks, SEOBook.com, etc.
- Online Courses, SEMPO, Bruce Clay, SECollege
- Conferences, SES, PubCon, SMX

Take this knowledge and apply it to a site.

Establish a site to learn from:
- Choose a niche (something not highly competitive)
- Secure a domain name (new ones can be a hurdle)
- Establish the web site (design yourself, hire someone, or use automated solution)

Applying a Search Marketing Strategy:
- Conduct keyword research
- Apply organic search techniques
- Set up paid search campaign
- Track progress

Networking with Others:
- No matter where you work, networking is important
- Develop business partnerships with ad agencies, web design firms, etc.
- Network online with SEMs through forums, blogs, social media
- Network in real life at conferences, local, etc.

Brand Yourself as an Expert:
- Write informative articles
- Participate in forums
- Participate in social media
- Start an informative blog

Things not to do:

- Don't spam forums or blogs
- Don't steal other's content or sales copy
- Don't come off as a know-it-all
- Don't promise what you can't deliver

Stay on the cutting edge

- Live and breath it
- Active in forums
- Subscribe to quality blogs
- Never be afraid to experiment
- Buy savvy SEMs drinks at SES

Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service

How to Avoid Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Manage Client Expectations
- Only promise what you can actually deliver
- Set reasonable time/date expectations

Set Reasonable Limits
- How much time will be spending on the project
- How much time will you be available
- Avoid the temptation to become the equivalent to an in house SEO

Conflicts of Interests
- Disclose any conflicts before you close a deal
- Decide if you are going to limit yourself to only one client for a particular area
- Avoid competing with your clients

Manage Your Risks
- Don't let your business depend on one client
- Don't let your business depend on just one web site
- Don't expose your clients web sites to unnecessary risks

Keep Learning and Growing
- Pick and follow some of your favorite blogs and limit yourself
- Use recap or roundup bloggers
- Experiment with your own sites and build your own test labs

Use Sub Contractors
- Use sub contractors to scale up or down quickly
- Use them to compensate for your areas that aren't your core competency or expertise
- Be careful using sub contractors for mission critical functions

Contracts
- Know when you need and don't need a contract
- Large companies wont work without a contract
- Understand "Work for hire" and copyright

Accounting:
- Get a good accountant
- Learn how to use accounting to your benefit
- A good accountant will save you more money than you are paying them each year

Jessica Bowman, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Business.com

You are now a student that is constantly learning

Learn the basics:
- Work.com
- Google Hacks
- SearchEngineGuide
- SEOBook
- Search Engine Visibility
- Cat Seda
- Attend conferences
- Attend training programs
- Most training will come from hands on experience

As You Get Started:
- Outsource aspects of your project
-- Strategy
-- Technical site audit
-- keyword research
-- Trouble shooting issues
- Q&A

SEM is Constantly Changing:
- You need to stay on top of it
- Especially if you will charge for it
-- Read Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable and Sphinn (thanks)

Big Changes Occur
- Cloaking can get you banned and it once was acceptable, she said
- Link exchanges once worked well and not always so good
- Link buying was once acceptable, not anymore
- You must stay on top of this
- Expect to spend two hours per day on reading

As You Work:

- Systematic process in place
- Document
- Gaps between client meetings require documentation
- When you are consistent, productivity increases
- Once solid, it you can outsource portions of the project as needed
- Things you can document:
-- Gathering rankings
-- Keyword data gathering
-- Gathering link data
-- Directory submissions
-- Portions of site audits
-- Optimization QA

Build Industry Camaraderie
- You need other people to talk to about questions

Know What you don't know

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 5:35 PM Comments (1)

August 22, 2007

Local Search Marketing Tactics

Session Overview:
This session looks at ways search marketers are tapping into an audience using local search engines, online yellow pages and other local search methods.

Moderator:
* Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:
* Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing
* Justin Sanger, President, LocalLaunch!
* Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Let's get the party started with Chris -
Show of hands for what type of marketing budget folks have - small, medium and large budgets - pretty even.

Marissa Mayer made the comment that Google has a large opportunity in local and more specifically mobile. 82% of local searches contacted a local business 60% making a purchase.

Justin
Local Search is a trillion dollar marketplace - whether you talk mobile, mapping or any aspect. Advertising opportunities are unrealized and significant.

The hype is about the fact that it's worth so much. Stats show us that a trillion dollars will be affected by local search. Some 93% of local search conversions take place offline.

Question is how you track local campaigns, but make no mistake that the market is here.

2.2 billion monthly queries with local intent. All behavior is inherently local - restaurants, shops, restaurants. The internet is learning to augment that behavior.

Local results real estate on Google has grown over the last several months because of demand and user experience.

SME's are starting to move ad dollars into search marketing.
- They represent 98% of the 22 million US businesses.
- 5-6% of the SME base have adopted online marketing!
Targeting for these players
- Local search tools
- Paid inclusion
- IYP's
- All of this is confusing to the SME's
Six Steps that a small business can use to take advantage. These are the most important steps to realize your place in the online marketing world.
1. Content control and dispersion
2. Empowering ratings and review channels
3. Riding the coattails of the authorities
4. Understanding Google references
5. Simple and structured optimized pages
6. Local link building and strategic IYP purchase
The beauty of the local marketplace is that it doesn't have to cost a fortune!

Content Control
- Driving the marketplace is content.
- All of the local search sites want to add local business and resource content.
- Think beyond your website
-- Think about how your content can live and breathe on each of these unique locations.
-- Start with the base content, meaning the basic information and optimize the profile.
-- You goal is to ensure that the majority of places online know you exist and know what you do.
-- You content needs to live and breathe in this environment
- The structured content catalyst
-- Drives local search
-- Drives positive local experience
-- Reach new business prospects
Riding the coattails of authority
- Becoming more difficult for companies to optimize for a local search against the local directories.
- Use these directories you can increase your own visibility
- Your job is to ensure your business is there!
- IYP are not dying - there are dominating very specific searches.
Empowering Ratings and Reviews
- User generated content is a critical driver for your business online.
-- Qualitative content in the form of user reviews and ratings should be embraced
- You can propagate social reviews and ratings for your business. Kick start it yourself.
- User reviews help determine rank in the search engines. Provide incentives to your customers to rate your service.
- Search engines are polling review and rating sites to provide local search content. These can support your business profile online
Google Reference
- Study Google Reference to find out what authorities Google is relying on.
Optimized Web Pages
- Make sure your pages are structured and can be crawled.
- Follow the very simple best practices
-- Complete address information
-- Global footer
-- Mix up your address construct
-- Mix up state names and abbreviations
- Each address derivative is an opportunity to tell something a little different
Local Link Building
- Use Google references
- Find out who the authority is locally and make sure your information is clean and available.
- Use solid linking including geography and vertical

Patricia
Tons of searches, highly fragmented, 22 million confused businesses.

6 Tips for local search advertising - staying focused on PPC and local advertising.
7. Integrate - use more than 1 way of targeting
8. Focus - look at the decision criteria of the searcher
9. Capitalize - get local and challenge the big guys
10. Drive - get the user to come in or pick up the phone
11. Understand - the options for ad placement
12. Utilize - local can be useful for big brands too

Integrate - Multiple Marketing Methods
- Tested 3 concurrent PPC campaigns
-- Geo-targeting
-- National campaign with local keywords
-- Branding campaign - used branding message
- But why?
-- Got cost effective cost per acquisition in all 3 campaigns
-- Test all the methods and follow the ROI.
Focus - Decision criteria - what are people trying to do in search?
- Target the proximity of the search
- Immediate availability
- Price or discounts
- Referrals and opinions
- Experience and ambiance
Local Speak
- If you are a local restaurant competing with a chain - focus on the local aspects of your business. Choose your history and local flavor.
Drive - bring them in
- Google Maps
-- Focus on local products like map, driving direction, ratings and hours.
--- Ex: Local business ad in Google maps
--- Ex: Google local business coupons
-- Get in to local business ads
--- Check to see if you're in the directory - if not get added.
--- Easy to create ads and show them on maps after that.
- Yahoo! Local
-- Use Yahoo! Local listings
-- 3 options - basic, enhanced and ??
-- Recommends featured ad (if you can afford it)
--- Great thing about it - it's easy to manage.
Understand your ad positions
- Your ads will show up in the Yahoo Search results in a proximity based search.
- Google will do the same thing.
Local Search for Big Brands
- Valuable for big brands, national chains, dealers and franchises.
- Use national integrity combined with local message.
Summary
- There is more than one way to reach the local search - test them.
- Ad products offer a variety of options places and prices - do your homework.
- (missed one - went by too fast)
- Test measure & refine

Matt
The best lessons are learned through screw-ups. "Did I really do that"
Focus on paid search for locals

Case Study: Local College
Goal: Increase MBA enrollment
Situation: very local, turf is well defined
Unique local challenge: very narrow geo-area makes it difficult.
Test: Set up 2 campaigns
- Set up a geometry around the area
-- Zip code & geo targets
- Set up a national campaign
-- IP results are not always good which is why they used the national campaign
- Both campaigns had "good local scent"
Oops, they turned on content
- Email started flooding in from overseas. Originally thought to be a mistake. Turned out to be a glitch in the local algorithm. It turned into a conversation starter about new international programs.
Lessons
- Don't bother with zip codes.
- It's ok to be wrong and admit it.
- Lucky is good.
Case Study Two: Care Providers
Goal: Connect Families with Nursing Home & Care Providers
Situation: National provider - local clients, intimately local problem, lots of keywords, it's a big country.
Unique Local Challenge: deliver ads that will help solve a problem. Create a manageable campaign as a national company without local offices.

Test
- Wanted to paint a campaign across every state
- Forget the national campaign after states were running
- Keyword list grew by 51x
- Google and MSN had geo-targeting options
Went Live
- As soon as the national campaign was turned off - the traffic fell off, conversions fell off, client was furious.
To Fix
- National campaign was brought back online
-- National and locals competed
- Realized that the national had really long history
-- Down bid the national and up-bid the state
Lessons
- Keyword + State outperforms keyword+st
- Be careful using abbreviations
- Good keywords for local campaigns
-- Near Boston
-- In Boston
-- Boston area
-- Western, area, east, west, north, south.
- People search on county names when thinking broad. Counties are very powerful terms.

Q and A
Q - Is there a way to find "best of" and "top 10" in newspapers and local web site to make it easier for us to get into them?
A - Matt - You have to know you territory.
A - Justin - Great question - very ambitious. Check the papers, trade associations and local chambers.

Q - How you see tourism being affected through local search?
A - Justin - Tourism has been profoundly impacted by local search. 80% of all business takes place within a 20 mile radius. Target the entire national because customers can come from anywhere.
A - Patricia - See much better response rate on local ads versus national based on extra line of local text in the local ad.
A - Justin - Utilize geo-qualifiers in your ads and keywords to target your users.

Q - Is there any way to track the value of local search when your listing information is being displayed in the SERP
A - Justin - Yahoo! Enhanced will show impressions of your listing. The best way however is to get into call tracking. You have to go through great lengths to find out and track the information.
A - Patricia - Assign some value to visibility. Some products can help you define a visibility score.
A - Matt - How many search on your key terms? If you are, stop doing it. You are establishing a negative behavior for your IP address and Google will rotate your ad out or down. Start using the Google ad preview tool instead.

Q - Do you have any tips for optimizing a city search listing? Are there ways of utilizing city search and other tools to optimize listings.
A - Justin - City Search wants to get better data because it reduces their cost of acquisition. Treat the profile pages in these services as you would your own site. Follow SEO best practices.

Q - Can you tell us your experience building out keywords using various types?
A - Patricia - It varies quite a bit from campaign to campaign. Broad match can save you time, but be careful because it can be used to broadly and cost quite a bit if money. Tactics have included inputting a keyword in each of the 3 match types and study the results.
A - Matt - Use broad match for research and then start to move things to exact and phrase as you refine your campaign.

Q - How can I cope with small maps on the search results that don't include my service business?
A - Justin - Maps don't matter for service business as much because most service businesses come to the home. You still need to be advertising, utilize different tools.
A - Patricia - If you're serving a whole region, set up a paid campaign to serve the region.

Q - Have any of you targeted wireless ads to local search?
A - Matt - Check out David Dalka's blog as he is tracking the space.
A - Justin - Best answer is to deal with the Internet in its current form - use Google maps, use content tools that create mobile content. Look into Google mobile syndication. Make sure you are out there as these companies move more and more to mobile.

Q - How do you deal with the idea that local is more work for less result versus a national campaign?
A - Justin - The beauty of the local customer is that they have a very identifiable customer and the incremental value of a customer is significant.

Q - When you look at primary data sources - InfoUSA, Axiom, etc. - What if you've never been in an update cycle for them - how do you address the challenge of that delay?
A - Justin - There are some tools but not many. You have to keep fighting. Keep doing what you're doing.
A - Patricia - Stacey Williams has put a great presentation together about getting your data into all of those directories. Don't forget that you can also go into Yahoo! Local, Google Maps and others to tell them.
Q2 - The engines seems to weight the data sources more heavily. If you're not already in the primary data source, you have to wait.
A - Justin - More and more the engines are relying on the site/business owner to be the de-facto source of the information.

Q - Do I need to be concerned with duplicate content as I am updating my profile everywhere?
A - Justin - No, it won't. They are geo-vertical directory pages, therefore the content being displayed is there along with other results so the page is unique.
A - Chris - Agrees that it won't be a problem.

Q - Is there the possibility that the services will see different call tracking numbers as a less valid result.
A - Justin - Yes. The call tracking numbers will be replaced by the next authority. Spend the money, log in to Google business center. Pay the money to manage your listing.

Q - Should I have the same phone number in a Google Base and Organic Local results - I want to track the campaigns separately.
A - Justin - Sure if you want to be able to track performance across these different channels, then yes you may want to use different phone numbers. Especially in those areas where you have a local advertising outlay.

Provided by Steve Krull.

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 3:10 PM Comments (2)

August 22, 2007

In House: Big PPC

Jeffrey K. Rohrs welcomes that panel which includes representatives from Adobe, Fox and Intuit. Bill Macaitis from Fox Interactive Media begins by giving an overview of Fox's network of sites that includes MySpace, photobucket and American Idol. Fox has recently taken the move to consolidate SEM into one in-house team of 15 to work across all of the Fox websites. An important part of Bill's work is with PPC arbitrage (the good kind), using a large network of high quality content sites. Ad sales is Fox's largest revenue source, although they also look at other monetisation efforts such as sales, subscriptions and e-commerce. He stresses that it's important to tie all your systems together to get real time data, including your financial backend, ad server, web analytics and PPC bid management system. You're then able to calculate real time revenue and makes running large scale PPC campaigns easier and more cost effective. Targeting high quality content and high revenue sites offers better returns and bid management software is important in order to keep the money flowing into the most profitable keywords. Keep increasing the money you feed into campaigns until cost equals revenue and then optimise so that the best profit levels can be made.

Olivier who works in-house at Intuit begins by explaining the issues that they faced when he joined the company, with each department running their own PPC campaigns and little internal communication. He formed an organised design of personnel structure and moved into creating a single department to focus on all brands and keeping Inuit's objectives aligned. Agency resource was also consolidated so that a single company was used for their campaign optimisation and keyword expansion. The result was significant cost savings and a resulting increased (and continually increasing) profitability. To keep these efforts aligned, there's a continued effort to ensure that keyword duplication across campaigns doesn't occur (bidding against yourself). Testing campaigns is also essential, should multiple products be targeting the same set of keywords.

Dena Yahya from Onetime.com is introduced as someone who has experience in managing over one million keywords within the travel sector. Each member of her team is given their own vertical and is empowered to make key decisions on their campaigns - helping to stimulate their initiative and job satisfaction. Keywords are divided into different buckets and are optimised from the tail to the centre. Regular analysis is extremely important to ensure that budgets don't get out of control, although you shouldn't micro-manage. A/B test the products and pages that you market and optimise your landing page based on how it effects conversions.

Jay Middleton for Adobe outsources all of Search Marketing (he's a team of one) and takes an overall view and management of strategy. In the perfect world there would be no keyword, product or audience overlap and and no internal conflicts and goals – although that's never the case. Adobe manages over 175,000 keywords worldwide with multiple agencies and products. With such a large company, it's often the case that inter-division competition occurs, especially when new products and companies are acquired. Software suites and bundles cause chaos with campaigns and interlinked keyword groups.

posted evilgreenmonkey in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 2:26 PM Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

Search APIs

Moderator:
Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Jon Diorio, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Google AdWords, Google Inc. was first up.

The AdWords API allows:
- Account management
- Campaign management
- Reporting
- Traffic estimation

The API helps manage more accounts and campaigns faster and more accurately.

Sample USes:
- Automate the regular generation and retrieval of reports
- Automate cumbersome bid management
- Automate complex inventory management
- And more

Resources Include:
- Developer's Guide (<-- most fundamental)
- Developers Sandbox
- AdWords API Blog (<-- most important)
- API Email Notifications
- API Developer Forum
- FAQs
- Sample Code
- SOAP Toolkits

There are 9 different services:
- Campaign Service
- AdGroup Service
- Criterion Service
- Ad Service
- Traffic Estimator
- Reporting
- and more...

AdWords API Versioning:
- They no longer break things
- Goal is to reach a feature parity with the front end
- Older versions are maintained for four months
- Version "Diff" information is available in release notes

Usage, Units & Billing
- AdWords API utlizes a unit based system
- Each ooerating performed on an AdWords account consumes a certain number of API units
- While some types of operations may consume a single unit, others may consume more
- On a regular basis, each developer will be billed $0.25 per thousand API units

www.google.com/apis/adwords

Dan Boberg, Managing Director, Sales Technology, Yahoo!
Yahoo Developer Network gives you:
- REST web services
- Desktop based environments
- RSS feeds
- Presentation libraries
- Developer centers
- Applications gallery
- Open Hack day

API Programs:
- Advertisers Program (YSM marketplace)
- Developer Program (open access and online support)
- Commercial Program (enterprise class support)

There is a new API commercial program
- Open to All
- No fees for API access
- Open and transparent
- Commercial grade technical and marketing support
- Massively scalability production platform
- There are fee based services for SLAs

Goals:
- Building partnerships

Commercial Program Addresses Specific Needs:
- Reliability
- Scalability
- Support with SLAs

Q4 time frame for application directory and they also want to add certification for certain applications.

David Flesh, Senior Director, Product Management, SEMDirector

Which Engines Have APIs
- Ask
- Business.com
- Baidu
- Gogole
- MSN
- Ingenio
- Lycos
- Yahoo
- Miva
- Mirago
- Mamma
- Kanoodle
- LookSmart
- Local.com
- Simpli.com
- SortPrice
- etc.

Challenges
- Not a standard around developing those APIs
- No common data schema standards across search engines
- Organic API data is either non existent or offers little value
- Occasional inconsistencies between cost data reported through the API and what is actually billed
- Changes to metrics that are reported are not called out in the API, therefore it becomes necessary to implement checksums to make sure historical values are consistent from week to week
- Quota for large clients
- Lack of special character support from some APIs strip out meaningful data
- Deleted campaigns are not always noted matching performance metrics with account structures is difficult

Documentation and Support:
- Great job of documenting things online
- Inquires to reps are ignored, passed off, or responses are refer to documents
- Personal support is offered

Improvements:
- Panama
- Google asking for feedback on APIs
- Missed Opportunity metrics reported by Google
- Noticeable improvements in MSN support efforts

Roadmap Requests:
- Organic search API
- Increase quota limits
- Provide percentage of clicks seen at varying average position
- Provide the number of queries for a keyword
- Demographic data
- Improve sandbox capability

API Futures:
- Standards
- Common Ontology or Schema

Julienne Thompson Hood, Director of OutSearch™, Advertising.com

- Automated, reliable information exchange between campaign and engine needed 24/7
- Campaigns are managed across multiple engines on a portfolio basis...

Best Practices
- Develop core applications that let them translate data into their own systems
- Identify most important business needs and decide which API features to take advantage of
- Write application to compile and provide meaningful reports on your most important data elements, costs, bid updates, etc.
- Test new features before implementing
- Utilize user forums

She posted a cheat sheet on search APIs by engine, I can't type it, sorry.

Tips and Tricks:
- Feature parity among engines
- Yearly releases among products
- Development lead team
- Data visibility
- API usage costs

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 2:21 PM Comments (1)

August 22, 2007

SEO Through Blogs and Feeds

Not yet running a blog? Not syndicating your content through web feeds? Then you're missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. Learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization.
Moderator:

* Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief, The ClickZ Network

Speakers:

* Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
* Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
* Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google
* Doug Hay, Principal & CEO, Expansion Plus Inc.

Rebecca starts talking, and I realize that the sound system in this room is really bad. This reminds me of what Lisa wrote about at SMX. It sounds like she's talking into an air conditioner. I hope I can hear the rest of the speakers.

Stephan is much more audible. Maybe Rebecca is just shy.

Since everyone knows what RSS is about, Stephan skips his slides about feeds and talks about optimizing your RSS feeds.
- Full text feeds, not summaries. It has rich HTML in there which is really important.
(Rebecca just moved the mic away from Stephan. Now he's not as loud but you can still hear him. Score.)
- You want to have as many items in the RSS feed as possible - 20 or more. The default is 10 but you should have more for the syndicators.
- Offer multiple feeds: category specific, latest comments, comments by post, tag feed.
- Optimize in terms of keywords in the item title and site title
- Have a compelling description
- Don't put tracking codes into URLs (e.g. &source=RSS). That's bad for splitting PageRank.
- An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories.

Have a good description - not "Just another WordPress blog."

Optimizing your blog:
- Rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure. People rely too much on the date based archives. Dates are horrible for the anchor text. The anchor text is as suboptimal as you can get. It's all bad. Nofollow those date-based archives or comments.
* Tag clouds and tag pages (UltimateTagWarrior plugin). Add keywords in your internal links. Tag clouds are very powerful. You can specify the maximum.
* Related posts (Contextual Related Posts plugin). Once you have tags on your page, you want related pages to be linked. Related tag pages and tag conjunction pages are very helpful.
* Title tags: SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress. It is a free plugin written by Stephan Spencer. It lets you assign unique title tags to every single post, category page, etc.
* Top 10 posts (Popularity Posts plugin)
* Pick a great plugin.
* Next and Previous posts
- Build inbound links
* Add Technorati tags to your posts (must claim your blog first)
* Get onto bloggers' blogrolls
* Trackbacks and comments won't help with linkgain.
* Use "Sticky" posts - you can set the keyword theme consistent and stable. Always appear at the top of the page. It's a way to add keyword rcih intro copy to a caetegory page or tag page. An example of this is the Adhesive Plugin.

The next person who is speaking is Rick Klau from Google. He's a former Feedburner employee but we know that was acquired by Google.

What's new:
- Syndication is increasingly popular
- Social networks are encouraging feed distribution. You
- Feedburner's "pro" features are now free (TotalStats and MyBrand)
- Yahoo Pipes makes RSS more customizable. You can mix and match content from many RSS feeds.
- Sitemaps support feeds. You can tell engines where your content is.

A few things specific to Feedburner that you can take advantage of are:
- When feed items are rendered in the aggregators, you know about it. You know that people are reading your feed content. That makes it easier for you to determine the impact of your feed. You can find out link clicks.
- MyBrand - you can map a CNAME to feeds.feedburner.com (use feeds.yourdomain.com instead of feedburner.com) but you need DNS know-how.
- You can get detailed visibility. Know which items generate activity.
- As Stephen said, full text is better than partial text. Big text on the slide: "It's the link, stupid." I think that more than anything the reasons that publishers want to look at full feed vs. partial feed is because they want people to show the content. It has nothing to do with monetization.

Best practices for Search Engines
- Noindex: if you prefer to keep this out of the search index, Google and Yahoo support this.
- Robots.txt
- Auto-discovery "advertises" your feed's availability to browsers and bots. This one line of code tells everybody visitor where your feed is so you can subscribe to it with one click. You can also know which services know you (which bots have accessed your site).
- If you're producing a podcast, please include show notes. Search engines love those.

Facebook lets users import notes so you should leverage social networks for distribution.

Doug Hay speaks next. (At this point, I do think Rebecca is just shy. Doug is quite audible as well.)

Google wants to see content and escalating amounts of content. From a marketer's point of view, you want to analyze the utilization. RSS is great on a blog. RSS feeds outside the blog platform are useful too, and I'll talk about that.

Any marketer has to have a strategy. RSS is a good strategy:
- Increase the rate of change on your pages. Add more content.
- Add more optimized content through RSS feeds
- Reach new niche markets
- Have ability to drive more qualified traffic to your site
- Have the ability to provide more inbound links.

An example: you can deploy RSS for text, video, or audio, or all 3 combined. With video/audio, provide text because search engines can't understand video and text.

Applications:
News articles
Product information
Customer education
Destination information

In addition to syndicating the content, add social media tagging.

Case study: Vision Media. They have an online/offline publication in history, philosophy, ethics, morality, and so on. Their pages have been revamped with RSS. Before RSS was implemented, they weren't in the first 1000. Subsequently, they ended up with top 10 rankings (4, 3, 10, 3). Through the syndication process, Reuters in Africa picked it up. Social networks got picked up by Digg, had 295 Diggs, and got over 5000 visitors to the site.

Last up is Greg Jarboe.

Everybody has a blog - 98 million people do. There are only 100,000,000 websites. Soon there will be more blogs than websites. If you don't have one, it's too late.

Greg wants to show something interesting: you don't need to have a blog to benefit from blogging. He shows an example of a guy who had great traffic. People looking at popular search terms - look at Google trends and blog about it becasue chances are, your competitors have not.

Using a tool called Buzzlogic, we mapped 40 influential bloggers and journalists who started joining in the conversation. Fifteen wrote about the stories and doubled about the traffic to the site. Getting influential bloggers to write about something can increase your record subscriptions. Blogger outreach brings more sales.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 2:14 PM Comments (2)

August 22, 2007

Keynote Conversation With Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google, talks with conference co-chair Danny Sullivan about Google's moves in search, including recent changes to add more personalized and "universal" search results.

Before the event, Vanessa Fox came up to me and told me to blog about her. She doesn't work for Google anymore, though, so I don't know what she wants from us. Go away, Vanessa.

I just took 8 pictures of Vanessa and she had her eyes closed in all but one of them. Wake up, girl.

(Vanessa posing)

Now, Danny and Marissa sit down and they're about to talk about really cool stuff at Google.

Danny: How is the impact of universal search?
Marissa: We're really happy about how it turned out. We changed a lot of the infrastructure. The users seem to be really liking it and finding what they're looking for. We know we have a way to go, though, but we wanted to go beyond 10 links and give better, richer answers. Search results should be like an encyclopedia - images, text, and other resources. Today we have images, video, news, and books integrated into the results. We will also try to pull in other results into the main SERPs.

Danny: It's been interesting to see how the pages are evolving with AJAX like clicking on PlusBoxes in maps.
Marissa: We have a few bells and whistles that we call zippies and are working really well.

Danny: Do you think we'll get a lot of other results in time?
Marissa: Yes, we're looking at things that are a lot more radical.

Danny: Are we having more sources going into Google Video?
Marissa: We want to organize the world's information to make it useful. It didn't make sense to organize videos just from Google Video and YouTube, so we're looking hard to incorporate other video properties. It's up to the content creator to decide where to put their videos. We want to find videos from all these places.

Danny: Google Personalized Search ramped up and in May, web history was launched. How's that been going?
Marissa: In the future of search, there are a lot of changes. We get better every single day. In 10-15 years, we will be better than we are now. We think we can see more relevance for the users and help them find their answers faster by knowing more about them. Many people are opting in for it. It's really interested to experiment with the new science of personalized search and how we use this data to get better relevancy.

Marissa: We're trying to do this for ads and for search. They really need to match. The query and response should be the same. We want parity in the way we match ads and the user results so that people don't have to reconstruct their queries in artificial ways.

Danny: What personalized options will be available in the future?
Marissa: We're looking at things like locations, address books, web history, and we're asking our users to opt in for these features. Once we get those explicit opt-ins, we want to experiment to achieve more relevancy for personalized results.

Danny: One of the comparisons is with Amazon - when you searched for music years ago and Amazon still tries to assume that I'm interested in it. How do you want to deal with that?
Marissa: We want transparency and control. You can look at the information that Google has to personalize - the searches you've done, what you've clicked on, etc. You can remove that to reverse the effect of that particular action.

Danny: What about subtle clicks?
Marissa: That's a hard question. We've wondered if we should mark the results for personalization. But there's a spectrum. How much personalized results are being affected? If we mark personalized results and non-personalized results, it isn't the right model. We're looking at marking some of the results, but it's a gray area for us right now in how you should treat them.

Danny polls the audience: how many people want to have their personalized results marked? (A good number of hands goes up.)

Danny: You can't toggle results in the webmaster end for personalization. But Matt said you can add &pws=0 at the end of the URL? Can we have a button instead?
Marissa: We've looked at having a toggle. Our view is that personalized results will become the default in the future because they provide a relevance boost to that user. We want personalized results. I think it's a valid request though.

Danny: We're going through a lot of privacy which was kicked off by Google. Now everyone is doing that but you are still building detailed profiles of users. How do you deal with that?
Marissa: For users who want a relevance boost, we're having people sign up for a service. As part of that signup, they agree to privacy policies which is there to protect them. We may have a longer history because you've opted in. We're ultimately putting these on systems that are more protected.

Danny: We touched in the personalized experience and there's the iGoogle portal. You've had the growth in gadgets and now we have Facebook that people are saying is the new Google. How does Google view Facebook?
Marissa: We're really happy with iGoogle and Gadgets. I see a lot of parallels with that and Facebook applications. With that said, there's a similar vain between both programs: they're open platforms. It's not necessarily a walled garden. The power of these programs is that anyone can create a gadget or a Facebook application. That's why they're both growing. Both provide a great opportunity to build a deeper relationship with users and also this is great for distribution. I have a Netflix queue and it's part of my homepage experience in iGoogle. It's a robust form of advertising. It's not a small piece of text; you can provide functionality and information that's responsive and interactive with the user.

Danny: Do you have to go out and have a bunch of profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn to understand these services?
Marissa: I have profiles on all these services.

Danny: I wanted to know about other search engines. Wikia will be coming out to compete with Google. Jason Calacanis, a great friend of the SEO community (everyone laughs) decided to create Mahalo. How does Google deal with the human search engines?
Marissa: Google is painted as the algorithmic purist. That's not our view. The algorithmic approach is important. That said, once you had the basic algorithm, you can layer human elements into it. We have properties like Google Co-op where people can label items and Google Notebook which has human interaction. But you need to layer the two together - algorithms and human elements to achieve relevance.

Danny: Can you tell us about adding comments to Google News?
Marissa: Google news has always been focused on providing clusters. We want to provide multiple viewpoints. Krishna, the engineer behind this, wanted people to see one story and also what other people were saying behind that topic or organized presentations. We want people to see that comments. Now only can people read these published articles but they can also read the commentary, so that's why we wanted it to be compelling.

Danny: I wanted to shift over to Google Local. I wanted to talk about the usability in terms of fun or voyeurism of Google Street View?
Marissa: Street view is all about finding things faster. It's nice to be able to see what a store looks like from a street address. We want people to find things faster. The product is not about looking at faces or license plates. We're going to blur the faces and license plates. The spirit of street view is more about understanding what places look like.

Danny: A hot vertical is mobile search. Tell us about that.
Marissa: Google is seeing more and more mobile activity. Mobile saw this big increase. It's clear to see that people are switching off their computers and switching on their cell phones. This is true even with the iPhone - there was a big bump. We launched 1-800-GOOG-411. There's a nice integration with that and the iPhone. You get free 411 service. From that service, you can search for a particular business names, categories of that business, and related results. When you're on the phone with them, you can say "Map It," it sends you the map in an SMS message. It's very interactive. (She illustrates it on her iPhone. She has an iPhone. Cool.)

It's a particularly great application to get a lot of information.

Later, Danny asks Marissa what her favorite non-Google property is. She says Facebook, particularly with the way you are able to connect to people and write about the connections.

Then, Danny asks Marissa what her favorite Google property is. She says she cannot do that because it's like choosing a favorite child. But she likes web search, Book Search, and Google Desktop.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 1:22 PM Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

Successful Site Architecture

San Jose SES
Successful Site Architecture

Moderator: Barbara Coll , WebMama.com

Speakers:

Matt Bailey, SiteLogic
Derrick Wheeler, Axciom Digital

It's the last session before the Google Dance. Not a packed room.

Barbara intros the session. It's the 6th year of this talk, according to Barbara. Two speakers. Both are veterans. They'll cover the details and give you info to take home. They'll review classic errors.

Irishtourism.com is her choice for an example of a perfect site, both SEO and usability wise. She introduces Derrick Wheeler first.

DW:

Who has been to the top of success mountain? Web arch, quality content, unique and user friendly are the blocks in the foundation. SE's have to go to your website via URL, follows links, reads content, etc. He has a funny illustration on power point of all the things that happens in eng's. Search crawls, indexes, users perform targeted queries, se's rank users click on ranked pages and users take action. This is what you need to be sucessful. It will impact your website.

Internal linking - SE's use them to discover URLs, deterine relevance and understand the importance of the page. If you link to a page a lot, you tell the SE the page is important. Shows example of URLs source code and how SE's identify them. SE's can't follow JavaScript..we've heard this. He shows an example of script and how and why SE's can't execute the script. They can't follow the path to a product page and this blocks it from the index. He shows examples of URLs that SE's may be able to follow. Internal cross linking is how you tell SE's what pages are important. Navigation architecture is used for this. He has a screenshot diagram of this. He shows a page of a web page that has an image that has no alt attribute in it. Top navigation should be text so SE's can understand the content. They can't with images.

Form based navigation is a problem for SE's who can't use forms. Inconsistent linking creates duplicate linking. Creates a poor user experience. Shows a breadcrumb nav example URL that's very complicated the way its constructed. Same pages, different URLs, is an issue for SE's. Shows examples of breadcrumb navigation that end up as dead ends for SE's and users. (You have to see his presentation to get the visuals for this. He's showing code.) If you don't have to redirect, then don't redirect. There's another example on the screen of a press release link structure starting from a homepage. SE's use URLS to determine relevance.

Be careful with the number of parameters, number of directory levels, total length. He prefers shorter URLS with fewer keywords over long URLs with stuffed keywords. He recommends 'URLs with dashes rather than underscores for usability issues. You can't always see the underscore. If you use parameter based urls link consistently to a single version.

He shows a screenshot of http request/response cylce. Describes the actions servers take depending on the URL status code. Most websites link to your domain (shorter URL), even if you redirect. Shows an example of a site that constantly redirected users to different urls but the content was elsewhere. The circle of death is the robots.txt file that people leave on the server by accident. If you leave it in there, SE's can't index the site with it in there (used during the development stage to prevent search engines from crawling during a build.) Remove it after launch.

Note: My battery is getting low so I'm stopping here to save some of it for Matt's part. Sorry!

Barb presents Matt Bailey next. I may have to cut out early...

He begins with joking about search engine submission is no longer necessary. The process of submitting websites is extinct. The SE's will find you. If you build it properly, they will come. Build it right the first time.

Discusses the Target lawsuit and the fact that it was inaccessible to those who used screen readers. There were no alt text. It relied on image maps. You had to use a mouse to use a form or fill things out or make selections. If you don't use a mouse how can you do this? Target resisted a judge's demand to put in alt text.

Read the Google Guidelines. You can save money if you do that. They do update them. They'll tell you what they want. Use text links, sitemap, do keyword research, use title and alt tags and more. Google's guidelines are similar to the accessibility checklist at W3C. Provide a text equiv to every non text element. Provide redundant text links. SE spiders are very reliant on accessibility. They can't see. Don't use a mouse. They rely on the architecture to get through your site. He shows a Target page without the images. It's blank, with a little content. All of the sale information is in images with no text equiv. If you have to select a country first to get into a website or language, if a drop down menu requiring a mouse action, SE's can't get into the site. The Target URLS are extremely cluttered and very long. Shows example of usable URL, with a favicon.

Keywords in the URL rather than confusing parameters. Talks about branding with favicon. They appear in your bookmarks.

CSS and standards. Can validated CSS help you rank better? Do sites using CSS will I rank higher? There is an indirect correlation between them. CSS allows content to be the primary focus of th epage. Design elements and mark up contained in external files. Reduces page "clutter". CSS vs tables. Shows a screenshot of how a page looks with table tags to SE's. It's search friendly but SE's look at the left most table, then the next column, down and then the next column. They stack the tables on top of themselves. The content is moved to the bottom of the page. (My note: Mobile phones do this.) Okay, Matt just used this as an example. We think alike, ha ha. He suggests viewing pages in mobile phones to see how SE's stack code. He says to use Google Webmaster Central. Look at sitemap.org and use them for large websites. SE's agree that sitemap.xml format is the best protocol. He says he uses as a last resort.

posted cre8pc in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 22, 2007 5:19 AM Comments (2)

August 21, 2007

Landing Page Testing & Tuning

Getting someone to click on your search ad is only half the battle. Once visitors arrive, the landing pages you display to them are a crucial component in converting them into buyers. This session looks at ways to test and tweak your landing pages to get that conversion. NOTE: The session is designed for those who are already familiar with how paid placement works. If you are new, be sure to have attended Search Advertising 101 on Day 1.

Moderator:
* Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers:
* Scott Miller, CEO, Vertster
* Tim Ash, President, Site Tuners
* Jamie Roche, President and CEO, Offermatica
* Tom Leung, Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer

Tim Ash - Conversion tuning crash course - ½ day workshop condensed into 20 minutes.
- What is tuning?
-- Follow the 3 main online marketing activities
--- Acquisition
--- Conversion Retention
-- Increase conversion through tuning
- Many companies drop the “part in the middle”
-- Don’t neglect the landing pages
- Economics of Conversion
-- CPR = CPC/CR
-- Fix your site to lower costs
-- CPA is going up if your conversion rate does not improve.
Who should design your site?
- Agency, marketing dept, IT, boss or nephew?
- The right answer is the customer!!
- The only thing that matters is the process the users are going through. People with wallets win!
What can you tune?
- Landing pages that lead to trackable actions.
- Price of product or service
- Elements
-- Headlines
-- Layouts
-- Navigation
-- Color Scheme
-- Form Layout
-- Button text
-- Sales copy
-- Graphics
-- Calls to action
- There are no “Universal Truths”
- Do not copy your competition - test your customers instead.
Types of testing
- A-B Split
-- Test one at a time, send equal traffic to each.
-- Easy to track and implement
-- Typical Test Size: 1-10
- Multivariate
-- Tests several variables at once
-- Compress your data into one test across all the variables.
-- Typical Test Size: 100
- Proprietary Tuning
-- Infinite
Mistakes to Avoid
Do not ignore the baseline
- Compare to a baseline - not just week to week
-- Beware that things could get worse and it could be hidden in a week to week analysis
-- Always measure relative to the baseline
Not collecting enough data
- Collect more data to increase confidence in the numbers
- Get enough data!
#3 Ignoring Variable Interaction
- It’s not the picture or the headline - it’s the interaction between the variables
Google sees strong effects between elements.

Get the combination of elements that gives you the best conversion rate.

Testing Theme
- Less is more
-- Remove the clutter - leave the persuasion and trustmarks.
-- Shorten the forms - remove unnecessary elements.

Tom Leung
Google agrees with everything Tim said.

Why is testing important?
- More than just usability and conversion
- It’s about users
Economics are tough - you spend a lot of money to Google, SEO’s and your visitors still leave!
The goal is to get you more green. More non-bouncers.

Tested the Picasa homepage and found a 30% increase in download rate. Tested 200 versions of the page using Google Website Optimizer.

Technology is only a tool - plan and manage the process! Know which pages to test and why, what variations you want to test. Which parts of the process - form, download, click, purchase. Know when the test is complete and know what you’re doing next.

Options
- Do it yourself
- Hire an expert
- Talk to design agency or SEM

Optimizer
- 4 types of JavaScript to copy and paste to your page
-- Control - assigns user to experiment ID
-- Section - alternates content for experiment
-- Tracking - follows the different elements
-- Conversion - did user hit the goal
- Show the user different combinations and measure the results.
Setting Up a test
- Pick a page
- Tag it
- Type in the content
- Launch

Instantly create variations by adding them to the tool.
The Google dashboard will show you the chance each test has to beat the baseline.
The best combination is often not the full combo page, but a mixture of elements.
The only way to know is to run a test.

6 Tests that you can run
- A/B
- Multivariate -
- Split path
- Multi-page multivariate
- Time-based
- Do Anything

Scott Miller
You can use their software to test yourself or let them run the tests.

Test 1: The Offer
Offer components:
- Headline - should describe value
- Supporting Copy - bullet, text, image captions
- Value proposition
- Risk Reversal - reduce the risk of an online transaction.
-- Test your privacy policy, live chat, free shipping offer.
- Scarcity - limiting the availability of something - use messaging or promotional message.
-- Dell does a good job of this.
-- Time crunch pushes you to make the purchase.
- Price/Promotions

Tested Hacker Safe logo
- Simple A/B test site wide
- Objective
-- Conversion
-- Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)
- 14.8% conversion lift
- 15% lift in RPV
Takeaways
- Balance risk reversal, value and scarcity.
- The only way to get there is testing

Test 2: Getting Attention
Elements which can influence bounce rate
- Logo
- Headline
- Tagline
- Imaging
- Audio/Video
Ran an L16 Algorithm Taguchi test
Ran against all PPC traffic
Setup
- Hero Shot
- Call to action
- Button color
- Low Banner
- Guarantee

Of the 16 variations, the Hero Shot, Call to action Header and Low Banner were the most important.

Anything underneath an image naturally gets attention. We look underneath to find out what it’s all about.

Test Results
- 40% lift on lead generation through 3 rounds of testing
Takeaways
- Focus above the fold
- Conversions ,mirrors eye tracking study
- Blink of an eye mentality
- Before you can convert, you must get attention

Jamie Roche - Offermatica

“Personalization and the value it brings”
Normal people can use the tools.

As different people require different experiences, we are moving toward personalization.

Is the best page the best answer? No, different people require different experience to bounce less.

Reduce bounce by increasing relevance. Increase relevance by user type and bounce will drop.

Relevance is the key to targeting customer categories or customer stage. Make it relevant through personalization.

Showing content of interest has improved RPV and conversions.

Myth - Personalization is very difficult.

Dynamic insertion of search keyword on landing pages has shown increased conversion.

The most important thing to do when you start personalization is to group your customers into big buckets.

Grouping your audience
- Behavior - new vs. returning, category
- Time-Based - time/day/season
- Source - Paid, organic, email
- Environment - geo, IP, resolution
- Registered Customer - CRM, analytics, demographics.

Steps to Personalization
- Think about where you are going to start
-- Focus on wrong areas.
-- Focus on areas where you cannot make the change.
-- Upper medium landing pages from paid are a good place to start.
- What can you remove when you test personalization?
-- Look at the site and remove elements - registration solicitation
- Start with the big stuff
-- More fun to see big results
-- Once you start showing success, attention will be drawn and budgets will be opened.
- Two types of optimization
-- Evolutionary - it always seems to start this way. They are less likely to produce results.
-- Revolutionary - Eventually have to do something drastic. It mail fail but you’ll learn.
--- Make this test as extreme as you can! Stretch it out.
Barriers
- Change is blocked by
-- Brand people stop the change and they fight you.
-- IT gets threatened and wants to keep it to themselves.
-- Standard operating procedures.
- Overcome Obstacles
-- Trojan horse - simple change. Go around IT. Host the page
-- Fight for branding changes - get 5% of the traffic and win them over.
- Benefits to working through barriers
-- Brand can evolve as they see results.
-- IT is happen not to serve the whims of Marketing
Do Right Now
- Do a keyword repeater
- Get into category affinity - even if you have just 2 groups. Create versions based on interest.
- Change story for repeat visitors - if they’ve seen it change it.

The key to performance is relevance. The key to relevance is showing the right people the right things.

Q and A
Q - When does your test become your baseline?
A - Tim - When you have enough data to support your results. The answer changes over time.

Q - Am I safe to consistently use testing tools in a natural search experiment?
A - Tom - Google published a help topic with guidelines for testing. What you show Google bot should honor the spirit of what you’re testing. Don’t show babies and sell online poker. If you are testing clean then you will be fine. It is in all engines best interests to improve user experience so please test.
A2 - Tim - Balance between stripped down page and crawler friendly pages.

Q - How do you set up a test and maintain the user experience page to page?
A - Scott - Has the ability to define testable objects within a template and they can be maintained throughout the user experience.
A2 - Jamie - Optimize the experience and not just the page.

Q - When we run multivariate test how do we know which variable worked?
A -Tim - Run a confirmation test when you have the results to confirm the results.

From Steve Krull

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 10:12 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Are Paid Links Evil?

Search engines, especially Google, say don't do 'em. But some search marketers say paid links work. Are paid links subverting search quality? Or are they simply a fact of life, here to stay? We explore the issues, in this session.
Moderator:

* Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

* Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
* Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru, Google Inc.
* Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl
* Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC
* Andy Baio, Founder, Upcoming.org & Waxy.org

First, they showed a really cool link at Rentvine. Here it is. It totally rocks.

Matt is up first. Are paid links evil? He says that this is the wrong question. But the right question is - Do paid links that pass PR violate search engine quality guidelines? The answer is yes.

The FTC has said that you must disclose whether you are being paid to market.
Disclosure on the web: the web is used by both people (surfers) and machines (search engines)

What is adequate disclosure on the web? It is understood by both machines and people.

Make a clear disclosure: this won't pass PageRank -
- Redirect URL blocked by robots.txt
- redirect through URL that does 302
- JavaScript
- nofollow
- Meta tag with nofollow

Some people say that Google says that you can't buy links. That's a common misconception. You can buy within search engine guidelines: AdBrite, Quigo, IndustryBrains, adCenter, YPN, etc. But we do have a problem with links that are used to pass PageRank.

He shows an example of a type of link that is a Linux site that has a bad neighborhood linked on the bottom with unrelated links. Furthermore, there is a sponsored links tag but it's an image and doesn't get larger when you resize the font.

It can be difficult to buy links - think about this:
- Buy for a limited time?
- Buy run-of-site links? Buying links on every single page?
- Buying links from sloppy sellers?
- Checking if a link seller cloaks?
- Can a competitor spot your paid links?

How do we tackle paid links? Google uses algorithms and also detects it with humans. Recently, Rand Fishkin posted about paid links - and detected all but one link algorithmically. Google is willing to take strong action against PPP links.

Then Matt gives us a bunch of links and we clap.

Michael Gray is next. He's wearing a Google shirt. He says that Matt paid him $100 to wear the shirt (in the interest of disclosure).

His first firm statement is that "Google is not the government." It's just a corporate message. Google is not the covernment.

Google developed an algorithm based on links. That is flawed. They expect you to change your business model and implementations to compensate for flaws in their algorithm. Last quarter, Google made 1.12 billion dollar. They want you to sacrifice your profits to keep them profitable. They want you to do that for free. (The audience is going crazy.)

nofollow was implemented to combat blogspam, but Michael says that it hasn't helped. 3 months later, Google changed the rules. Google then took advantage of this to keep them more profitable.

What constitutes a paid link? Google has linked to people. If you blog about the Google dance and blog about it, you're giving Google link love. There's no way to tell if these links are paid or not.

Why Google is opposed to paid links: they work. It's nearly impossible to rank in any competitive SERP without paid links, except if you're Wikipedia. Google runs a competitive advertising product and they want to keep it profitable.

Creating Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD)
- Google tries to convince you that by buying or selling paid links, you are breaking the law or unethical. Google is not the government. They cannot pass the laws and cannot judge your ethics. (audience adds: "yet.")
- Google creates fear by losing your ranings and traffic.

Google has overstepped its bounds. Its mission statement is to organize the world's information. They do not have the mission to tell you how to set up your site. They do not have a mission to buy or sell advertising. They do not have a mission to tell you how to run your business.

Thank you.

The audience ROARS.

Todd Malicoat covers 7 reasons why he's a link libertarian:
1. Semantics: Michael has great points - when is a paid link paid? Every link has a relative value and cost.
2. Incentive-blame the algorithm: In 2000, we had those PageRank pixels that showed you how much you should pay for links. They help your rankings. Top rankings are costly. The algorithm encourages linking. Off-page relevance detection was lacking.
3. Economics of paid linkings: the indifference principle - all else being equal, someone should benefit from a marketplace like this. Efficient markets hypothesis.
4. Transparency and Relevancy: advertising has never been fully transparent.
As a consumer, I like it.
As a marketer, I love it.
As a SEO, it's not my responsibility.
Paid links help with traffic.
Bill Gross proved paid advertising was more relevant.
5. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt vs. Transparency
6. Competition is Good: AdSense needs a competitor.
A note on buying links - places to buy links - Wholesale, Text Link Ads, Google, YSM, Text Link Brokers
7. There is such as search thing as Search Engines.
- Trade links with sites that benefit your users
- Buy links to increase visibility of site
- Never use nofollow becasue it wouldn't exist.

If you are convinced that paid linking is viable, know your competitors are going to do the same thing - so link costs may rise. You may incur a manual review or a penalty.
The invisible nofollow - you think you're getting PR and you're not.
Size matters. Big brands = strategic media placement. Small brands = link buying.
When is black really white? When your brand is big enough and you will go through the fallout unscathed.

Caution to buying links: intent and extent: don't fish with dynamite. Stay under the radar.

Why I will never report paid links: my competitors teach me a lot. I doubt much would get done. I buy links too and think it's okay.

A modest proposal: links should not hurt. Sellers should not be responsible. FUD should not be spread for short term gain. Let the market calibrate itself.

Takeaways: stay relevant, don't talk about it, don't make it obvious, disclosure from FTC was an opinion, understand what works and why, and understand the risks

Todd Friesen talks and says that there's a middle ground that is being presented. Google will say "all paid links are evil" but he illustrates the harder competitive over-the-top industries like online casinos. Are you going to research your links or not?

The egregious stuff like online viagra does ruin the web. But you need to also be relevant and compete. If you follow all the rules, you might not compete. Stay in your space.

Todd's point: if you do this, do it with your eyes open. In the worst case, you're flushing your money down the drain. Outside of the buyer and the seller, there's nobody knows who bought that link and if it was paid for at all.

Greg Boser is next. He says if he's really late, he'll drive really slowly in the carpool lane. Matt mentioned the pollution of the web, but Todd pointed out that Matt's example is very extreme. Google should stop rewarding sites that does the Digg effect, etc. It takes Google away from contextual relevance. Siteowners should be responsible for good quality links that won't pollute the web.

The Yahoo directory is filled with a bunch of crap. There's a lot of affiliate spammy sites. Yahoo is taking your money to "evaluate" your site to see if it's worth being added ot the directory, but the quality isn't there.

Let the siteowner make good judgments about who they do business with and make it contextually relevant. Stop rewarding anchor text to the degree that you do and it will go away on its own.

Last is Andy Baio who is the founder of upcoming.org which was acquired by Yahoo. He thinks that quality links are not polluting the web. It's closer to the extreme cases that Matt was illustrating.

He wants to let people know he's speaking on behalf of everyday users, not Yahoo. Everyone wants the web to be usable and they all have a stake. It's a question of ethics: are you making the web better or are you making it worse? Some people don't realize the implications of this form of advertising. Most brokers won't resort to email spam or comment spam. You don't do it because it's unethical.

You shouldn't trick search engines and do shady operations. This alters the results in an unnatural way.

Google is not purging some sites from the top of the SERPs because these sites are not as good. Link spam is still effective in a lot of categories.

Popups were novel once but they impacted the quality of life online eventually. Paid links seem innocuous but may go in the same direction.

Matt Cutts adds:

If you want to have a long term impact in the SERPs, you want links that stick in the long term. Look for whitehat ways to get editorially chosen links.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 8:43 PM Comments (7)

August 21, 2007

Fun with Dynamic Web Sites

Web pages or product listings stored in a database or a dynamic page assembly system can be "invisible" to crawler-based search engines. Discover solutions to this problem and the other unique issues that need to be considered by those running dynamic web sites. In addition, discover why dynamic sites needn't be a problem but a benefit when dealing with search engines. This session is moderated by Detlev Johnson of Position Technologies with Laura Thieme of Bizresearch, Mikkel deMib Svendsen of deMib.com and Jake Baillie of STN Labs

Mikkel gets things rolling by discussing some of the problems and solutions for dynamic sites. The problem is access. Engines may have problem indexing pages. He talks about the IRTA model - Index, Ranking, Traffic and Actions. Simplify technology to make it easier for users and spider. He talks about a virtual bridge between users and spiders. An example of this is dealing with the complexity of dynamic URLs by using a mod rewrite.

Things that are not a problem -

- That you store your information in database
- Question marks - this does indicate to engines that the web site uses a template
- SSI (server side includes)
- File extension

Mikkel points out that there is an infinite number of indexing problems.

- Long URLs
- Duplicate content - session ids, time stamped URLs, etc.
- Technologies - AJAX, etc.
- Spider traps
- Server downtime or slow responses

Indirect issues include -

- Support of cookies, JavaScript and Flash.
- Geo targeting and personalization
- Form (post method) navigation

There are multiple solutions to any problem. One example is mod rewrite where you take multiple parameters in a URL for example and rewrite it so that it is one parameter. He also says you do not need a dynamic site especially if you have a half dozen pages or so. Another option is to have dynamic elements in static sites.

Laura is up next. When dealing with a dynamic site, the first thing to look at is URL structure and see how well pages are indexed in search engines. Look at current rankings as well. Ultimately overcome technology, resource or political issues.

She shows us an example of such an easy fix - home page titles and uses Peir1 imports as an example. She suggests targeting some of the most popular terms. She also points out that the site had extremely long URLs but only Google was having issues indexing them. Another very easy fix is optimizing category titles. She suggests placing several keywords or variations in title tag in order of importance. All the things that can be optimized on static sites, can and should be optimized on dynamic sites as well.

She shows several examples of large e-commerce sites who neglected to optimize title tags. She warns to watch out for CMS and ecommerce solutions that are not search engine friendly. The speed that changes are implemented through MSN may indicate future success for Google. Also consider optimizing a data feed for Yahoo! Use 301s when changing pages.

Finally Jake steps up to the podium. First thing Jake points out that dynamic sites are not a problem. They haven't been for five years now. SEO is more of a design philosophy as opposed to changing little things here and there. He points out that there is not requirement that a URL actually point to a file so there is a lot of fun things you can do with dynamic sites.

First thing Jake talks about is using dynamic 800 numbers to track conversions. He uses the example of JustFlowers.com who uses the same 800 numbers across multiple ads. Dynamic sites can assign dynamic numbers on the fly. By doing this, one can track how ads are actually converting.

He then talks about serving different content to different users. USA Today for example will deliver a nicely formatted web page for mobile phones even though you may be using the same URL on the phone as you would in a web browser on a PC.

Another fun thing you can do with dynamic sites is to use cookies and sub-domains.

Mine failed search results from your logs. People mis-spell all the time and sending them to "no results found" pages will create a good user experience. Learn what people are searching far where they get no results, and adjust your web strategy.

Use mod rewrite to switch out images from those who steal them from you.

I decided to hang around and try to recap some of the Q&A.

Q: Do user and spiders see SSI differently?
A: If engines can see that you are including files, then you have a security problem. In other words, they only see the final product, not the raw html. The spider is just like a browser.

Q: How do you check to see if your results are in supplemental index?
A: Spider your own web site and then export into spreadsheet in which case you can see titles. Then if you see repeat titles, you know you might have a supplemental index problem.

Q: If client is shopping for search engine friendly e-commerce platform, what do they look for?
A: Ability to be indexed. Check other sites using that software and see if there are indexing problems - duplicate content, not indexing, etc. Secondly look for how much flexibility you have in changing site.

It was difficult to actually write down anymore from this session as quite a few things Mikkel and Jake talked about, you have to just "be there" to really get it.

David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 7:41 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Advertising Track: Search Ad Buyers Forum

Moderator
Dana Todd, Founding Partner SiteLab International

Speakers
Jeff Nienaber – Sr. Marketing Manager, All Star Directories
Liz Serafin, Senior Director, TMP Directional Marketing
Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Did-it.com
Isobel Sopoglian, VP of Search, NewCars.com

This session was all over the place so here’s the main points.

Yahoo’s Panama: trick or treat? – Isobel Says it’s getting yummier. Their getting higher conversions but not getting their traffic up like last year. Blames the keyword matching for the problems. Kevin compares it to a big box of candy that only has 1 piece of candy inside. There’s a treat but its smaller than what expected. Liz likes the geo-targeted for local but traffic is still low compared pre-integration to Panama. Jeff says you need to be much more engaged instead of setting and forgetting.

MSN: too many sugary snacks, no substance? – Liz is starting to like MSN. Seeing pretty good conversion rates and lots of traffic. Complains about targeting – hard to test because users have to be logged in to passport while searching. Jeff sees a little better volume but is still waiting. Kevin says it’s a sugary snack in a childproof container. Fortunately the API has gotten better and compares that to the “yummy part” Isobel also sees great conversions and says the API is much stronger than in the past.

Cost of Google’s candy keeps rising – Kevin talks about the upcoming bid changes and quality score. If your quality score and bid is high enough they’ll move you above the organic positions. If your willing to bid up and quality score and bid pressure is bidding high enough this increases your chances to be in the top spot. The minimum quality score is going to be more important. Jeff says it’s a lot about the vertical that you’re playing in.

Panelists: share your best “treat”!

Jeff: Exploit programming errors! Google Adwords DKI Hack. It exploits the trademark. Insert DKI in an all caps format in the title. Lasts 24-48 hours. Not recommended because you will get a nasty letter. If you do it, try testing from 3-5 in the afternoon. (I personally would never do this. Why do something that you know is wrong just for a few hours or a day of “success”.)

{KEYWORD: Law Enforcement Training}

Kevin: Sneak in a High Position when it counts. Find geographies that have a high conversion rate & set up campaigns for high opportunity keywords that become profitable in those Geo’s. Your competition won’t even know they are losing position if you pick the right Geo’s.

Seasonal Campaign Clones. For seasonal campaigns setup clones, pause them to rotate instead of changing out your creative/landing pages in single campaigns. Preserves highest quality score and keeps history.

Liz: Leverage data from the engines. Recent reporting and interface enhancements are providing additional data to help you make campaign optimization decisions. Over the past few months the search engines have bettered their reporting capabilities. Pay attention to quality scores. You aren’t able to see specifics but you can see a range. The impression share report is useful to see how much traffic you’re missing out on.
Search query report from Google. If your doing broad or phrase match you can see your high traffic keywords. This gives you ideas as to what negatives you should use and where you have a job to be done in terms of adding keywords.

Account campaign performance by time is also a nice feature. Make sure you gather enough data to be statistically significant however.

Isabel: Keyword Insertion Trick – Avoid having lots of very small ad groups but still have a perfect creative. Use keyword insertion and use the Alt Text feature.

Identify terms that don’t sound good in given creative, and utilize the Alt text feature at the keyword level of Yahoo! Check the box and enter a phrase or keyword that is more aligned.

Trick to get visibility into Geo ads – Select a location in yahoo homepage like weather option (insert the geographical location you want to test) – Search a keyword on the web search box – Geo results will be displayed in the Yahoo search page. Works only on Yahoo!

Who’s giving razor blades in the apples?

- Advanced Match Drivers – Important to use negative match. Inconsistencies on how Google has been matching terms.
- Errors in Google geotargeting – Isobel talked about a user and even though they hadn’t put in a geotargetted query if they lived in San Francisco that they saw results in Michigan and other states. They added those states as negatives and the problem was solved.
- API taxes – are they impacting you? Kevin says unless the API is being abused that it doesn’t really solve any problems. Isobel mentions that when they were testing they were eating up a lot of quota so they had to make drastic changes. Required some reengineering. Microsoft is the only one that doesn’t charge for that.
- Googe CPA: trick or teat? – Kevin thinks it’s a trick because they want you to use their pixel to calculate the conversions. Easy to double count and double pay because of this. Only a few people in the audience have used the CPA and just 1 was satisfied.

Provided by Justin Davy.

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 7:28 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Video Search Optimization

SES San Jose 2007
Multimedia Track: Video Search Optimization

Speakers:
(Moderator) Sapna Satagopan, Associate Analyst, JupiterResearch
Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, LLC
Jeremy Clem, DoubleClick/Performics
Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst Online
Stephen Baker, Chief Revenue Officer, Everyzing

Session Description:
Producing video content? There are video search engines that specialize in gathering up your video and making it available to searchers seeking such cnotent. This session looks at how to make your video more visible in these specialized services.

Sherwood Stranieri: The Potential of Video Search Marketing

You can see here that the video sites are very strong, whether you measure them in just people who use them, streams, views, etc. YouTube's market share exceeds all the other video sites' shares combined. No wonder Google bought them.

Video is a compelling SEO channel.
- Social media and viral marketing are the strength behind video SEO
- Video in 2007 is still mostly an entertainment play.
- Social/viral can transfer value to your SEO efforts through video:
-- Digg, etc. >> blog >> thousands of links
-- Those links result in a sugar rush of traffic (mostly untargeted, come and go traffic)
-- But those links also contribute to your site's rankings - and that puts you in front of your target audience.
- Thanks to viral, a video webpage can outperform a conventional webpage in standard search results.

Video for Content Providers
- From bloggers to television networks
- Teaser strategy: upload a few select videos to portals like YouTube: provide links back to related videos on your site.
- The goal is to get them back to your site to view ads and explore your other content
- Video seo is a key element in establishing "video.yoursite.com" - and viral-driven linking helps that.
- Finally, videos now appear in Google's Universal Search. Video SEO now is mainstream SEO.

Video for Pharmaceutical Companies
- Less fun, but not uninteresting (think discovery channel)
- On-site strategy doesn't have to dovetail with portal strategy
- On-site:
-- Interviews with patients make the drug more real, more trustworthy.
- At the video portals:
-- Newsworthy topics: AIDS, flu outbreaks, fad diets.
-- Mechanism of action: animations of how the drug works (cool site potential at Digg, etc).

Video for e-Commerce
- Follow the buzz
- Showcase your hottest products
- Showcase anticipated uses
-- Demo high-tech products
-- If you sell power tools, build a deck
-- Cars? test drives.
- iPhone: the poster child for a video aware product launch.
- Be entertaining
-- YouTube is not a tradeshow.
-- Even a boring product can inspire a fun video
-- BlendTec destroys an iPhone: 1.7 million views.
-- Digg, Slashdot, MakeZine, and Gizmodo love weird/unusual videos.

Video for Consumer Packaged Goods
- Who wants to see a video about laundry detergent?
- Some products can create tremendous buzz -- be choosy and/or get creative.
- So far, it's mostly been accidental fame.
- Videos with millions of views start to rival your TV advertising

Now with Universal Search, videos can become a prominent and permanent addition to brand equity.

Wrap-Up
- Video pages are strong contenders in regular search results, thanks to viral-driven linking.
- Most of today's video search "success stories" are happy accidents.
- Product demos, testimonials, entertaining commercfials, anything that adds dimension to the product.

Jeremy Clem

The opportunity:
- 75% of Internet users watch an average of 158 minutes of online video in May, 2007.
- They viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams
- 72% watched news video online, 27% at least once a week
- 76% help drive the viral (pass to friends)

The market share:
- 49.12% YouTube
- 12.82% MySpace TV
- 5.27% Google Video

Roadblocks:
- Search is still very dependent on text from videos corresponding web page.
- Lack simple and consistent taxonomy for site producers to use.
- Video technology unfriendly to search engine crawlers.

The people that reap the benefts from spikes in search volume, as far as video goes, are people who have their web pages well optimized for the "hot" keywords. Make sure you surround your video with html.. include content. See new CNBC.com videos for examples.

Social bookmarking tools should be added to video pages. Make it as easy as possible for people to distribute your content.

Make is easy for crawlers to find your video content. Keep all of your video content in one place. Perhaps a single directory off your root directory. Consider a Video Site Map. Make sure you're providing RSS feeds... yet another distribution feed. Tag your video files with relevant keywords. Tag video scenes and be as specific as possible. Allow your videos to be embeddable (as long as legally permissable depending on your content).

Brand Yourself in Video
- Target generic video search terms like "news video" to build online brand awareness

Video Optimization Best Practices
- Train editors to think like video searchers
- Encode for the right keywords
-- Title, description, and keyword fields are key
-- Remove metadata noise
- Use keywords in filename
- One video per URL (avoid flash and pop-up players)
- Add tagging

Gregory Markel

I'm going to skip over why video search is important. You can pull this presentation off the web when we're done here. You can go back to this and I want to have time for the meat and potatoes.

Video Search Engines
One of the important things to note about the video SEs, is that some of the smaller players can provide astonishing results (when you least expect it) so don't neglect the small guys.

Video SE types:
-- Crawler based: A small number fo video search engines like Tueveo.com actively crawl the web looking for video content on your website.
-- Upload: These types of video SEs require that you upload your .mov, .avi, .wmv, etc. video source file. Exmaple Myspace.com, AOLvideo. YouTube, etc.

Boost your uploaded videos by having your "friends" comment on your videos, forward them to other friends, submit them to the social booking services, etc. Make sure your videos are tagged appropriately.

Optimize your RSS feeds with proper tagging and keywords.

There are two basic user approaches to video submission and view tracking:
1) Manual Submission
2) New! -- Automatic Bulk Submission -- Tubemogul (tubemogul.com) is a start-up out of Berkeley that submits your video to 9 engines. It's currently free and they provide reporting tools that show views, charts and graphs, etc.

Tips:
- It appears YouTube is taking a single frame from a minute and 20 seconds in as your still image. Make sure THAT one is a great image and not boring.
[ Tips list is HUGE and he ran out of time. Download his presentation for complete list ]

Stephen Baker

We're going to focus on some of the technologies that make videos more visible to the crawlers. We're a startup. Started in 2005 as Podzinger and recently rebranded so we wouldn't be pigeon-holed as just for podcasts.

Our core technology is Speech to Text, and we offer media merchandising - search and publishing solutions, live and on-demand, and software as a service.

The core online media problem is that the crawlers are just looking at keywords, metadata and anchor text. There's nothing about the what's in the file itself. However, if you can create a transcript of the content, you can provide the crawlers with a wealth of "aboutness" of this file. Transcripts are crawler friendly and content rich pages.

Once you have the transcripts generated, you can than move on to automating some of the currently manual processes like tagging and adding keywords because they can be culled from the transcript itself. The tags, of course, improve ad targeting and create a contextual advertising opportunity.

posted cshel in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 7:15 PM Comments (2)

August 21, 2007

Search Engines On Click Fraud

Paul Vallez, Director, Product Management, Ask.com Search Marketing

Ask originally launched with a smart pricing mechanism. They use performance based pricing. They define base line metrics and then optimize to reach those numbers. They use max billable CPC caps and they also remove referrals that lower their models.

Click Fraud Red Flags:
- High density of clicks from a single traffic source to a small number of keywords
- Large variance between eCPC on ASL vs other tier 1 networks
- Sporadic traffic spikes
- Large volume of clicks with no traffic source

Exposing Meaningful Data
- Exposing key delivery metrics allows our expert SEM services teams to work closely with our clients (fill as many metrics in the URL)

More Advertisers Controls: Traffic Source Blocking
- Advertisers review their click logs to determine which sites are driving down campaign CPA metrics
- Important data points include date, clicks, keywords, conversions, and traffic sources
- Identify sources of traffic driving up your CPA metrics and work with your SEM manager

Dynamic Ad Delivery
- Without pacing rules an advertiser could spend their budget on a single publisher
- To ensure advertisers get even distrubtion throughout the day, we've implemented pacing rules to ensure...

James Colborn, Group Manager, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, Microsoft Corp.

Invalid Clicks
- Partnerships to work on standards
- Innovation in tools and reporting
- Testing the algorithms and black ops exercise
- Technology with real time filtering and offline filtering process
- Click investigation with dedicated support team

What are click quality reports?
- Click quality reports are a new reporting capability in adcenter to see low quality clicks

Low quality vs standard quality, what is the difference?
- Standard quality is traffic they charge you for, the low quality is the traffic they dont charge you for
- Low quality includes unclear commercial intent, unusual patterns of behavior, and origin of source

He shows some screen caps of reports

He recommends you go to the adcenter blog, the support page and contact them via phone

Reggie Davis, Vice President, Marketplace Quality, Yahoo! Inc. is now up.

- Marketplace Integrity Team
-- They monitor yahoo's partners and recommend actions to improve quality and drive publisher policy

- Click Through Protection System
-- Front end filtering systems such as black lists, behavioral, duplicates and historical analysis
-- Bad IPs, robotics browser IDs and behavioral rule parameters

Click Investigation Process
- CS Triage
- CAR Triage
- LPA (loss prevention analysis) Analysis

They are noticing a declining advertiser complaint. They only average a 100 complaints a month.

- Quality based pricing launched
-- Not all clicks are equal
-- QBP Philosophy

- Domain Blocking is coming soon (up to 250 domains at first)

- Traffic Quality Center has been launched

Traffic quality is an ongoing challenge. They have improve communication, increase transparency and provide more advertiser controls.

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager, Trust & Safety, Google Inc. is last up.

There is a legal definition of click fraud and a real world definition.

There are many sources of click fraud including manual clicking to botnets and more. The main incentives is to attack advertisers and inflate your affiliate income.

Detection is similar to email spam detection.

Google builds in an intentionally high false positive rate.

3 Part System:
- Proactive filters are automated and real time (proactive response)
- Offline analysis (proactive response)
- Investigation (reactive response)

- Overall the vast majority of clicks are valid clicks.
- Less than 10% are being proactively marked as invalid (no action required from advertisers)
- 0.02% of clicks are invalid at the investigation or reactive stage

Detection Methods:
(1) Simple rules such as multiple clicks from same IP
(2) Statistical anomaly detection such as compare observed behavior and so on.

Features:
- Smart Pricing
- Reporting with Auto Tagging and Invalid Click Reports
- Control with site targeting, site exclusions and ip exclusion

Smart Pricing:
- Launched in 2005
- Not related to invalid click detection systems
- Maintains a predictive model of click efficiency
- Provides strategic discounts to advertisers for clicks prediction to be less likely to result in conversions
- Results lead to track effectiveness based on conversion data and ROI

Transparency:
- Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center
- Second advertiser invalid click forum coming to NY, chapter on click fraud and more.

IAB Click Measurement Working Group
- Definitions and standards
- Independent audit process for click fraud protection
- Industry guidelines

What should an SEM do?
- Track campaigns performance carefully
- Use auto - tagging for any click data analysis
- Become familiar with click fraud false positives
- Report any suspicious activity for investigation at google.com/adtrafficquality

- Google marks hundreds of millions of dollars per year as invalid
- Reactively detected invalid clicks are less than 0.02%
- Don't rely on averages or industry estimates

Q&A
Shuman says the difference between Click Forensics and Google's numbers are like comparing Apples to Oranges. But then Click Forensics disagrees with Google. Click Forensics is saying the 0.02% number from Google is really what? So now we know Click Forensics is not discounting clicks that Google is discounting automatically, because Click Forensics doesn't trust Google.

Lots of confusion here...

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 7:05 PM Comments (2)

August 21, 2007

Creating Compelling Ads

Getting clicks on your paid listings can be a challenge. You need to compel the consumer to click through, yet your ad must also comply with editorial standards controlling what you can say and even the punctuation you can use. You also want the RIGHT type of click. Choose your words poorly, and the wrong audience will come, costing you money and offering no hope of conversion. This session looks at ways to get the right clicks. NOTE: The session is designed for those who are already familiar with how paid placement works. If you are new, be sure to have attended Search Advertising 101 on Day 1.
Moderator:

* Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers:

* Brad Geddes, Director of Search, LocalLaunch.com
* Vic Drabicky, Search Strategist, Range Online Media
* Mona Elesseily, Director of Marketing Strategy, Page Zero Media

Allan Dick says that you have to create good ads so you don't waste money on PPC.

First up is Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media. There are some things you should keep in mind when you focus on ad copy. In order to test well, you need to create a good foundation and in order to do that, you need to create killer ad copy.

A good idea is to look at what your competitors are doing. You should also try to have a good grasp of your unique selling proposition (USP): what distinguishes you from your competitors. You need to create compelling ad copy that jumps out at the audience.

Competitive Analysis:
- Ad Copy "Free Shipping" Example. 3 of 5 in her example use that. In that case, it may be worth testing alternative shipping offers especially around busy seasons like Christmas. That can yield significant increases in conversions.
- Test, test, and test.

Ad Copy - best practices:
- Cater ads to different buyer's needs:
Test the following: price (state it in ads), price vs. no price might work too.; information that reassures buyers (i.e. official site or 24/7 phone support); time sensitivity or a deal ending soon - encourages them to buy sooner than later.
- The ad copy should be appropriate "in feel" to the industry category. Sometimes you can't do "Need Thermal Oxidizers?" Try "Get Thermal Oxidizers"
- Consider the "buy cycle" - for terms like financial planning, financial planner, financial plans: try -
Financial Planning Services
Long term growth with a
margin of safety. Try this quiz.
www.bank.com
- For people further along in the buy cycle, like IRA, get IRA, buy IRA:
Need to invest in an IRA?
[etc.]

Multivariate Testing: uses mathematical formula and algorithms to test many things at the same time. Using advanced statistical methods, you can test a few ads. A large number of ads is impossible to do.

Good prices vs. great prices
Same-day shipping vs. fast shipping
www vs. non-www

If you put certain ad copy on the first line and others on the second line, you may put "ship same day, order today" - you might see different impacts. Try it on the first line instead.

You can't really divorce ad copy from landing pages. Adding some completely remapped pages helps yield better conversions. Simply displaying features and benefits to a page can raise conversions for specific products. Don't be complacent in your landing page - keep tweaking.

Testing in multivariate testing:
- Headlines
- Offers
- Buy words - try, get, etc.
- URLs with www vs. URLs without
- URLs with a subdomain versus without
- Different landing pages

Free tool - adcomparator.com

Next up is Brad Geddes. He talks about Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) - getting keywords into ad copy. You can add a keyword that reflects everything in that ad group. How do you make that 1-to-1 relationship where the intent is reflected in the ad copy itself?

Why DKI?
Putting keywords in the ad copy
Building ad copy keywords
Great for part numbers and testing
It can lead to a higher clickthrough rate.

With DKI, you can target the ad to the particular user.

DKI on Google:
Syntax:
{KeyWord: Default Text}
Default text is what shows if the keyword cannot be inserted
Default text is displayed if the ad copy line exceeds character limits.

You can test DKI anywhere in an ad.

With Google, however, in the ad copy, you can use different capitalization techniques to see what shows up in the ad copy. For example:
{KeyWord: Default Text}
{Keyword: Default Text}
{KeyWORD: Default Text}
etc.

But the order of keywords in an ad group matters. Someone might search for "plasma tv sony" and it will look funny if that comes up in your ad copy. Keep that in mind.

DKI and Expanded broad match: Google AdWords inserts what the search query matches to - not the user's query.
e.g. query is homes for sale, but your keywords are condo sale or townhouse sale - that's what will show up.

Yahoo DKI also offers this functionality. Yahoo doesn't control the casing from the insertion of the keyword. They have something called alternate text. Alternate Text allows you to specify exactly what you want to show.

Microsoft came along and took DKI to a brand new level. There are 3 different ways to insert keywords automatically. There's a drop-down box, a parameter system, and text entry.

Tip: Use the Help link in adCenter. It has useful tools.

Be aware of your ads - use competitive research because if everyone is using DKI, there's less effectiveness. Always be aware of how your ad stands out.
Check it out in different geographies, so be sure where your ads show up in different geographies.

DKI best uses:
- Helps bring a 1-to-1 relationship between keyword and ad copy
- Saves time on very large keyword campaigns
- If all ads look the same, test in the 2nd or 3rd line of the ad copy - and don't forget how it looks in different geographies

Last up is Vic Drabicky.

Using creative to maximize campaign success.
Using creative creatively.
Rules to live your life by.

Creative Basics -
- Challenge is improving already high brand CTR
- Strategy: use 2-3 differnet versions of the creative; test various key drivers like the official site, quality of brand, seasonality
- Results - 3 different creatives showed different CPCs. You need to take it all the way to the conversion.

Maximize seasonality: increase last minute gift card focus if applicable.
Like before father's day: add copy that says "don't forget dad!"

Maximize geotargeting (weather). Take advantage of spring-like weather in NYC. Test geotargeting in top markets.

Capitalize on events:
- Challenge: associate Nike with sports moments and events (sports branding) but avoid being an obnoxious marketer.
- Challenge: Be effective and relevant.
- Strategy: Good luck on the Boston Marathon.
- Results: increased market share and incremental customers. 90% of the customers hadn't purchased in the past 5 years.
- Branding.

5 steps to improving search and creative results
1. maximize creative to your campaign goals.
2. maximize creative around your business ebbs and flows (seasonality) - do something like a month before, not a week before. Holiday stuff = mid october.
3. Target your creative to your customers and locations = geotarget
4. Effective search branding must be done creatively.
5. The goal may not to get every click, but to get every profitable click.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 7:01 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Converting Visitors Into Buyers

Getting visitors to your web site is only half the battle. To be victorious, you need them to convert into customers by making purchases, signing up for services or fulfilling whatever are your goals. Learn about making this conversion. The latter part of the session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about changing them to improve visitor conversion.

Moderator:
* Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers:
* Nigel Ravenhill, Director of Marketing Communications, Scanalert
* Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder, Future Now, Inc.

Quick intro right to Nigel. Let's hear from Nigel!

Nigel
The business model of Scanalert is predicated on trust. Trust is one of those things that gets in the way of users converting on your site.

Trustmarks
- Seeing growth on the internet which has room for growth. Various trustmarks (certificate symbols, hacker safe)
Ran A/B Split tests with marked versus unmarked sites
- Used 30 day cookie
- Tracked conversion rate
- Captured: cookie type, date, date and time of sale, order key and IP address
Compared conversion rates across these tests.
Ran 140 tests and found that the average delay from cookie to purchase was >19h hours.

What affected delay
- Competitive scope
- Price
- Demographics
- Brand recognition
- Number of competitors online
The more competitive the market, the delay is longer because the user is shopping for the best price.

2007 Ran another test
- 480 tests on 470 sites
- Sales 2.6mm
- Visitors 128mm
- Conversion 2.06%
In 2007, users across all sites took longer to buy. 26% took more than 3 days to buy. 57% purchase within 1 hour.

Random sampling of sites shows that delay changes by vertical. The range of the 12 or so vertical is Flowers at 3:31 to 92:50 for small aquarium supplies.

Verticals that are more competitive show weaker conversion rates - Paintball (very competitive) 0.43%. Aquarium supplies

Move your cart abandonment to site abandonment and look at it over more time.

Influence the conversion rate and retention by:
- Appearing to be real
- Publish hours
- Eliminate garage startup stories
- Don't wait until shopping cart to give comfort
Extending cookies to 30 days will help populate returning carts.

Make related products easy to find
- Use search box to refine search
- Meaningful site navigation
- Related products cross-sell
- Bestsellers list

Help the customers choose
- Employ a variety of things to bring comfort - customer service, FAQs
- Answer customer questions
- Help the customers share information
- Enhance the shopping experience with Buy Now changes and save cart type options.

In Closing
- Find reports at www.scanalert.com
- If you make it difficult to find what the user wants - they will leave.
- Marketing Experiments tested cart recapture through email and had a 240% conversion rate on those recaptured carts.
o If you can capture the email, you can resend the cart to entice the purchase.

Brian
Bigger challenge - has written many columns and books on conversion and now has 30 minutes to sum that up. Trying to provide the real core in seven quick tips.

What is it that makes us not give people money?
- Trust maybe? What sort of trust factor has been created?
- Customers need to know what's in it for them.
- When people focus on conversion they think about usability, they use analytics and other tools.
In 1880's Frederick Winslow Taylor began studying usability - how to work more efficiently.
They were rewarded to being part of the test - his focus was about users and tools.
People think about the web as a tool but it's really a communication vehicle.
"No one wants a user"

Moving to analytics
Web analytics is great for understanding something happened on your site.
- What happened
- Why did it happen
- When did it happen
- It's like CSI - you need to analyze data and see what happened.

The tools tell you what happened - funnel reports, exit reports, complex scenarios.
- Let's figure out how that information can help us make money.
- Analytics is about the people not the numbers.
- Either you help them get what they want or you don't.

Eisenberg's Hierarchy of Conversion
- Must be functional - can I take an order, process a lead.
- Can people get to it - do they get 404's, is it readable for users with disabilities?
- It is usable - useful and not too clunky we'll still buy.
- Intuitiveness - is it engaging - does it feel right? Only 26% of visitors report an e-commerce experience as engaging.
- Persuasion - is it convincing?

Buyer Behavior and Modeling
- Which type of person are you and what stage are you on in the buying cycle.
- Determine angles of approach and then help people buy by solving their problems.
The name of the game is Opportunity Cost
- Visitors are ready to spend money and you're not taking it.
Testing alone is not going to solve conversion problems. You have to know what you're testing.

Look at your page from various perspectives - buying a movie.
- Spontaneous - will these types of users find what they want immediately?
- Humanistics - is the data structured for this type of user.
- Methodicals - can you search/buy by genre?
- Competitives - search by actor and/or title.

Learn to cheat the process
- Use the 4 basic characteristics and work for each of them. Ask yourself how each of these perspectives are being met with your pages.
- It's hard work so people invest in traffic, but conversion rates are dropping.
- People are spending 10% or less on what people are doing once they get to your site.

Study the funnel and know what causes users to fall out.
- Users are forced out by friction - you scared them away!
- You've paid for the traffic and then scared them away.

The 3 Cheats
- Who are we trying to persuade - use the 4 perspectives?
- What action do we want someone to take?
- What do they need to take the next step - build their confidence and give them a reason to click?

How to Cheat
- Define your basic profiles.
- Define the conversion goals.
- Give them what they want - do the creative testing - A/B or multivariate tests.

What to Do?
- Product images tell a story - use them to sell the product. Give them the detail they need. Don't use standard photography - be different.
- B2B needs merchandising too - persuade people to read what they download
- Pictures appeal to different personality types.
- Test headlines and hyperlinks - spend a lot of time testing headlines.
- Test using fractions instead of percentages - it worked but we don't know why
- Test sell versus customer focused words.
- Get them to click on the call to action.
o If you have one that "is not good" - test them - use shadowing, provide assurances.
- Don't copy people who you think know what they're doing.
- Add assurances at the point of action - return policy, customer service information, guaranteed response times. Lands End does a nice job at this.
- Do what people expect from you - don't hide what people need to do.
- Watch what you say on your buttons - test "Buy Now", "Add to Cart" etc.
- Think small - keep the pages lean and mean. Optimize images.

Does your site stink?
- Are you giving your customer the scent of relevancy?
- When keywords appeared on the page, the page was 70% more successful.
- A page either has the content the user is looking for or has links to that content.
- The reason they leave is because you did not give them what they were looking for.

Drop-offs
- 1 Click 9.56%
- 2 Clicks 54.6%
- 3 Clicks - 16.56%
- Only left with 20% of the people you initially attracted

Figure it out:
- Who is our customer
- What action do we want them to take
- What does the customer
- Stop focusing on the user!
- Cover the motivations of each type of buyer

Guidelines
- Images tell a story
- Test headlines and copy
- Calls to action
- Point of action Assurances
- Make is obvious what you want them to do
- Don't make them wait

Q and A
Q - Do you use focus groups to uncover motivation?
A - Bryan - Most of the data can be found in-house if you look. Anytime you can spend talking to people who talk to customers can pay huge dividends. Connect to the customers at all times - spend time talking to and listening to them
A2 - Allan - Uses Bazaar Voice reviews and the

Q - Do you have to put all of your information above the fold?
A - Nigel - Put as many assurances into your landing page as possible to establish credibility. If you cannot establish the credibility, they will not convert.

Q - At what point do you design persuasion into your web site?
A - Bryan - Plan it into the merchandising. Early on in site design and the click paths that you are designing.

By Steve Krull

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 6:20 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix

SES San Jose 2007
Advertising Track: Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix

Speakers:
(Moderator) Sara Holoubek, Free Agent Consultant
Misty Locke, President and Co-Founder, Range Online Media
Curtis Dueck, Senior Account Manager, Epiar, Inc.
Bill Mungovan, Director of Search, Carat Fusion
Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Strategies International

Session Description:
Search marketing should be considered as an essential part of any overall marketing campaign, online and off. In this session, we look at successes from considering search from the very beginning, failures that result if this is not done and how other marketing can also help search.

Sara: This is a favorite topic of mine, especially considering that we're all heading into planning time when budgets are set. First, I'd like to know a little bit about you guys... how many of you work for an agency or SEM? How many represent brands? Press? Bloggers? Very nice.

Curtis Dueck, "Search Informed Marketing and Search Frequency Research"

Marketing is connecting supply with demand. In order to effectively meet demand, you must first see it clearly. How do you do that? Search Frequency Research

Analyzing what people are searching for helps to decide how to segment and prioritize what you're going to be selling and what you might stop selling, or at least stop advertising heavily. (Are more people searching for plasma tvs or LCD tvs?)

It also helps to suggest new products you might begin offering. (Perhaps you already sell candles, but people are searching for soy candles specifically. It could be something you might add to your product line.)

Also, if your brand name is being frequently misspelled in searches, you can take steps to intercept those searchers before they end up at a competitor's site. (Bid on the typos perhaps.)

Search Frequency Research allows you to make informed, strategic decisions based on the trends indicated by the types of searches being performed and their volume.

Bill Hunt, "Trends that are turning the world upside down"

- The customer is in control.
- Technology innovation and broadband penetration foster environment of consumer's need for relevant and on demand information
- Marketers held to new levels of accountability to Business ROI vs Media ROI
- Escalating content choices creating new complexities for marketers
- Consumer shopping behaviors have been radically altered
- Budgets are shifting to better map to current media interaction

Search marketing's value proposition is putting messages in front of people who overtly and explicitly express an interest, via a keyword, in your business.

Search is a critical marketing element both from a research perspective as well as a marketing tactic. The better we can integrate into the marketing mix the wider the adoption into the client organization we will have.

Raising Brand Awareness
- Aligning the campaign with messaging that is consistent with that being delivered across other media channels
- This provides a consisitent through the line communication for a consumer

Multi channel searchers have a greater depth of interaction. 35% of searchers remembered "on demand" vs. 25% of those exposed to other media.

Take advantage of these changing times...

- Feed the need for control and create compelling iformation consumers will pull and interact with on demand.
- Test your offline messaging with paid search advertising before it goes live.
- Embrace search in a 360 world.

Misty Locke, "Coordinating Media Efforts"

- Do we only see the Direct marketing benefits from Search?
- Do we not see Search as valid marketing tool in coordination with:
-- online media activities (search w/ email, for example)
-- offline media activities (search w/ tv, etc.)

88% of all consumers making in-store purcahses in key retail categories have conducted online research prior to purchase.

(Three really interesting case studies, check the SES San Jose website for powerpoint of Misty's presentation to see the slides)

Bill Mongovan, "An Agency Perspective"

Online vs. Offline Advertising Spend
- $20B will be spent online in 2007*
- $10B of which wil be spent on search**
- $150B will be spent offline

Search is a Function of Demand
- Search is the ultimate form of pull marketing
- Search inventory fluctuates with demand influencers
- Vital to understand all of the brand influencers that impact search demand.

Case study slides... see power point...

[ One of the interesting things Bill spoke about was how their search and display teams are managed centrally, and when they see an increase in performance in display, they shift budget from search over to display and then vice versa, in almost a "stock trading floor" fashion. ]

Search reacts to ALL advertising. Any offline or online marketing efforts increase searches.

Integrating Search Summary:
- Allocate enough budget to capture increased volume created offline.
- Connect with offline media plans before client approval
- Map keyword bundles to overall goals, not just lower-funnel acquisition efforts.
- If you client doesn't allocate enough budget to search, a competitor or an aggregator will.
- Search is still cheap!

Questions and Answers

Q: How do you get everyone in the same room and break down traditional walls?
A: Misty - We start with people we have day-to-day interaction with (client side). We track everything that the clients do to prove to them that these things work. Providing reporting to their other marketing efforts shows that we can work together and makes them more inclined to get into the same room.

Bill M -- Within Carat it's not difficult because we all sit together anyway.... the offline/online people, you have to give offline it's due to get them into the room with you. The way that we found is to just explain why it's in the client's best interest. We get that TV is still king, and we're not trying to steal their budget, but we have to close the loop.

Bill H -- We give them a what we do, why do it type of presentation. We educate the client as well. Often times there are stratgey sessions w/ clients, so when I see them coming in for one of those, we try to sneak into those so we can put the search in front of the client. There are some creative ways to make the clients aware of search. Education is really important.

Curtis -- Keep your message simple and talk to the person w/in the organization who will pocket the profit.

Concepts and Items to Note...
- Tie your tv flighting to your paid search
- Remember that most of your potential customers/sales are not currently your customers.
- Use your test budget to test the terms your clients don't feel are important to show them how well they perform and underscore their importance. Let the numbers (and dollars) prove your point.

posted cshel in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 5:45 PM Comments (1)

August 21, 2007

Writing for Search Engines

Kevin Ryan begins by introducing himself as the new Global Strategy Director of Search Engine Strategies and goes on to welcome Heather Lloyd-Martin. Heather starts by introducing the topics of SEO copywriting and how to take advantage of content opportunities. An example is AmsterdamEscape.com, who had bad duplicate content issues and was actually banned from Google for 18 months. They ended up having to spend $4,000 a month in AdWords in order to keep traffic coming into the site. What Heather's company did was to explain to them that content is king, and getting them to build the site with this in mind. They created pages such as "Do's and Dont's when visiting Amsterdam". Once back in the index, they starting ranking for terms such as "Amsterdam nightlife" and "Amsterdam apartments" through their new content pages. The new traffic allowed the site to scale back on PPC and save $48,000 a year.

How "fit" is your site? Look at the review page titles, pages and topics. You can check the health of your content by doing a site: command and see what page titles and descriptions are being used. Make sure that all of your page titles and descriptions are unique - don't keyword stuff as it's only short term. When clicking through from the search result to a page, make sure that the landing page is relevant. Also ensure that the words which you're looking to rank for, make sure that those terms and similes appear on the appropriate pages in a natural fashion. Create stubby content - try to write around 250 words per a page, you can write more if it's appropriate or an informational/research page. Don't pack your keywords into the first paragraph of your content, it will look odd and just put off your visitors. Remember to target a term and a topic in the page titles, headings and and subheadings.

If your content isn't converting, don't just edit the content - consider rewriting it from scratch and you're better able to integrate the terms you're working with. As meta descriptions are shown in the search result pages, you can use it to market to a user and also include the terms they're looking for. Titles should be unique and compelling on every page, this will help you gain better positions and click-through rates. Look at adding in marketing messages that will stand out from other results on a search page. Think to yourself “why would someone click on my listing?”. Don't necessarily target your company name, it's something that you should test. Your product may convert better than your brand. If you can't get your rewrite signed-off in a company, try editing a less-important page on your site and monitor changes in conversions and visitor click-paths. If necessary, see if the IT department can dynamically create page titles using existing Content Management System data and then manually edit them at a later date.

If you're not sure what to talk about, think about FAQs, SEO friendly press releases and manufacturer information pages. If you have copywriters in-house, consider giving them training on how to write with SEO in mind. If you don't have copywriters, outsource the work or look at hiring either a specialist SEO content writer or train a new employee to do so.

Jill Whalen is up next to talk about editing content for the search engines. Don't write fake content such as useless articles, press releases or blog posts. Keyword stuffing is also a big no-no. Good content is the regular pages on your site that sells your services and explains your products. It also starts with keyword research to find out what words and topics people are searching for. There's no point being number 1 for phrases that no one searches for, target terms that will generate traffic. Search Engines can't read content in graphics or flash, you can use ALT attributes although they're not as valuable as real text. PDFs are indexable, so publish any documents and press released that are not currently linked to on your website.

Remember that users come first, make sure that everything makes sense to real people and not just purposely sprinkled with keywords. Be descriptive in links and page titles e.g. "Our B2B Marketing Services" rather than "Our Services". Optimise for key terms and not for keywords, because ranking top for single word terms is not possible for most people. Don't rely on stemming (search engines considering word variations as the same), use plurals, past tenses and other similes in your website. Consider words with multiple spellings, don't use both spelling form on the same page - include variations deeper within the site.

posted evilgreenmonkey in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 5:34 PM Comments (2)

August 21, 2007

Images & Search Engines

Regular search engines can't understand text trapped within images, and this session looks at strategies to combat this problem for the image-intensive site. It also examines how to generate traffic using your images via image-specific search engines.
Moderator:

* Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Speakers:

* Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360
* Chris Smith, Lead Search Strategist, Netconcepts
* Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
* Cris Pierry, Director of Web & Multi-Media Search, Yahoo! Search
* James Jeude, Senior Product Manager, Ask.com

Anne introduces the session and introduces Shari Thurow as someone who once said "search engines see text and then they see crap."

Shari Thurow comes up first. She is going to talk about graphic intensive sites and the problems with them - when they're good, and when they're bad. She'll also talk about graphic image searches and how search engines "see" graphic images. Finally, she'll give us some graphic optimization tips.

SEO for text files depends on the following things:
- Keyword rich text: use the user's languages. When people look at your page for 5-8 seconds and you take the page away, if they don't mention your keywords, it's probably not keyword focused.
- Information architecture and interface: giving search engine spiders and site visitors easy access to keyword-rich content (easy navigation/information architecture, page layout, URL structure).
- Link development - number of quality third party links pointing to a URL.

You have to provide context for all the graphic images on your site. On text files, there's primary text vs. secondary text.
Primary text: title tag, visible body copy, top of the page text vs. bottom of the page, and anchor text. These are used by all search engines to determine relevancy.
Secondary text: metatag, alternative text, domain and filenames. Some search engines deal with this, but not all.
Alternative text is like this: <img src=blah.txt" alt="nameoffile"> If you remove graphic images, you can see alternative text. It's okay to do a graphic intensive site if you have a very well known brand (because of incoming links), but if you don't, then you want to steer clear of graphic intensive websites. You'll probably do better with CSS and graphics. You want keywords in primary text and secondary text in order for your images to show up in the search results. This is where Yahoo! rules.
Example: Nissan. Look at the Nissan Yahoo page versus Nissan's main page. Yahoo provides far more context than the actual Nissan text.

Graphic image search is the second most popular search in the search engines. Proof: think about adult searches. (Enough said.)

How do search engines see images:
- Graphics are made of bits and not text, so they cannot compare query words within a graphic image.
- Search engines rely on indirect techniques. Primary text, secondary text in the context of the page. But it's cool that they can tell the difference between a male face and a female face as well as being able to tell color.

Adding images to a page with a lot of good content sites is helpful: title tags, primary text areas, footer, breadcrumb, whatever.

Also, they assume that a JPG is a photo or illustration. Filename is important for graphic image optimization - use hyphens and not underscores. Search engines can determine what the photo is by the image. e.g. logo.gif is a logo, atm-machine.gif is an ATM machine, but clr123rt.gif conveys no useful information.

Other tips: Use captions on your website where possible. A great example of keyword implementation is the Land's End site.

Conclusion:
Make sure you format graphics correctly (GIF, JPG)
Name your graphics correctly that makes sense to the target audience. Don't let your software app name your graphic.
Use captions or labels where possible. These will act as contextual cues.
Make sure the page is optimized for targeted keyword phrases if you cannot create captions.
Usability counts: minimize download times and use alternative text.

Shari also shares information regarding a book she wrote that is available tomorrow (August 22): Search Engine Visibility. Cool.

Liana Evans is up next. She's focusing on retailers and companies.

Why should you care? First, it is the second fastest growing vertical search. Google's Universal search has changed the entire landscape of how you should think about images - how you should think about reputation management, shopping, and news. These images are another way of getting free clicks.

Hitwise shows growth of image search between April 2005 to April 2006. It's growing very high.

Opportunities: hot products, niche markets, comparison shopping, universal/blended search, and reputation management.

Example: Image search for Squakers (a toy for 2007). Most of these images are coming from CNN, blogs, and not so much the retailers. But retailers can jump in on this - make sure your images are optimized.
Google and Live Search had results for this Squakers query. Only 8 images in all are retailers!

Looking at niche markets, you might be selling something very unique (e.g. flameless candles). Of all these searchers, there were no major retailers in this space.

Comparison Shopping with or without search engines: Shoppers are visual - make sure there's an image in there.

Three months ago, before universal search, the results were different. Universal search has changed the rules. You need to think about this.

Yesterday, we did a session where Greg Jarboe showed that Hurricane Dean did not have an image on Google. But less than 24 hours later, you can see an image there. The landscape is changing.

You're going to see more media and images blended with your searches. Results change daily. Attach a picture that is named correctly when you send a press release. Create a sitemap for Google/Yahoo of your images.

Reputation management: images can be found no matter what, even if they're on a site that's hidden like Facebook. Are they representing you in the right way? Let's look at a search at RIAA: they're not managing their reputation because the image that shows up is a logo that says "screwing musicians and consumers since 1952."

What about the NJ blackmailed beauty queen? The images she had on the net were circulated just because she thought her image on MySpace was blocked. She didn't think about those images that are out there. But you also have to think about trusting your friends.

Tips: what matters - image names, alternate text, content around images, page image appears on, anchor text used in ilinks to images, and image folders being available to spiders.

The next speaker is Chris Smith from NetConcepts: sharing images and using sharing sites - can you use those sites to get more links to your website?

Image sharing sites include Flickr, Photobucket, pbase, webshots, 23, Fotki, MySpace, and Facebook. He looked at different elements: PageRank, # of pages indexed, title, tags, H1, and links allowed. Some sites weren't doing so well but Flickr was doing a lot more.

Flickr optimization: they essentially create a profile page about an image and that profile page is well optimized in itself. Flickr has built a strong site for getting pages indexed.
- Title, H1 text, captions, tagging, cross-grouping, comments, sharing, ALT text, optimal linking hierarchies, date taken and page views displayed, and an interestingness algorithm.

The goal is to get more links to your image profile pages so that those pages get more PageRank and that drives usage back to your website.

Optimization tips:
You should get good quality pictures so people can link to you.
Pictures with good contrast work better because there are many interfaces that allow you to see the image and thumbnails. Images that look good in thumbnails get more clickthroughs.
Be broad in experimenting with subject matter for pictures intended to drive traffic and conversions - factories can show product manufacturing; Bed and breakfasts can show furniture, restaurants can show event rooms and meals.

Flickr optimization:
Add a unique title
Add a description or write an article in the description area.
Always tag your image with keywords.
Make your photos publicly viewable.
Consider loose licensing of your pix - share them. (Creative Commons). You can ask for reproduction as long as they give you credit.
If the photo is location specific, geotag the picture.
If many location specific pix, consider GPS cameras with EXIF data.
Create thematic sets for your photos.
Search Flickr groups and share with them.
Share with news organization.
Add links to description fields back to your website.
Post as many pictures as possible.
Post each picture's page over to del.icio.us, using handy submission tools on the bottom of the page.
Target high popularity keywords.
Image freshness may also affect relevancy.

Other thoughts:
Google Enhanced Image Search
Google Maps

Search engines are looking to improve image search.

Next up is Cris Pierry of Yahoo Search.

He says that search engines are trying to improve but they would like information in the EXIF data. The users are looking for good quality images.

Participate on social networks.

Make sure your images is unique. Yahoo removes duplicate images because they don't add much value to the user.

Finally, James Jeude at Ask joins. James is cool; I met him last night. It is nice to see him on the panel :)

He discusses: how do you make yourself image search friendly?
- Build to fix your audience's expected behavior. Don't expect to appeal to multiple image search scenariors simultaneously, but you can do so separately and sequentially.
- If your site is a hobby site, they have iconic images that might be linked to.
- Fast moving sites should try to get inserted and highly linked.

If you appeal to popular terms, effectively, from a tech standpoint, there are thousands of images. You need to have a good website which will bolster your search image rankings.

If you appeal to rare terms, clearly label it or caption your photos.

Geographic image tagging helps.

You also want to catch misspellings and synonyms. You don't want it to be in your description - but maybe put it in your metatags.

Embed words in an image as alt text.

He then shows examples of bad image naming and text issues.

Make sure your images have a good thumbnail becasue people will want to click on it with that.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 5:26 PM Comments (2)

August 21, 2007

Search Marketers On Click Fraud

Jon Myers, Director of Search Insight, Latitude Group

What is Click Fraud?
It is an internet fraud.

He shows how Eric Schmidt told people to let click fraud happen.

There is click fraud, he shares some stats, but the stats are very debatable, on who you ask.

He shows how the media is now involved in click fraud.

This will lead to hype, confusion and concern.

Google took a stance quit quickly, such as running a report on "invalid clicks." Google does click quality adjustments. Google also talks about issues at their Inside AdWords blog.

Microsoft does very well and they have nice screens and reports.

Yahoo, he only has good things to say. He mentioned Reggie's Yahoo's click guide, was in the audience. They launched a click quality center.

There click auditing companies and councils out there. There are so many out there and they keep growing. There is the Click Quality Council and it is a great thing to see.

The victims are client and advertisers, SEMs and agencies are victims also. And search engines are victims also, because there is a limited volume.

Tom Cuthbert, President & CEO, Click Forensics is next up.

Yahoo launched traffic quality center and so did Google. And he is happy to see this.

He explains that Google has changed their top placement formula. They are putting a heavy weight on cost for those ads.

He shares the recent results from the Click Quality Center, see http://searchengineland.com/070719-085703.php

70% of those sites in YPN are made for ad sites or private domains on Google side is it 76%.

ClickScore is a process of looking at each click. The average score is 581 for search and 390 for the content network, and the higher the number the better. They are introducing ANA SiteScore, this will look at a site and give the site a score. ANA is AdNEtworkAdvisor, and it is in a beta right now.

When questioned, he said he has no idea where Google gets their numbers. He doesnt know why there is such a big discrepancy between their numbers and Google's numbers.

John Linden, Chief Technology Officer, Think Partnership to talk about the opportunities out there.

(1) The first step is to know if this user (IP address) have a history of problems. Remove countries or low quality user agents. This is the most least affective step.

(2) FeedPatrol uses a client side validation script to help identify bots and/or scripts from real users. Most bots use real IPS and variable traffic patterns, and mixture of known user agents.

(3) They use client side validation to help identify if the user intend to click on your ad or not.

(4) Even legitimate clicks can underperform for advertisers

The systems feed off each other, so you need sever side tied to client side checks.

Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc. is last up.

How many of you were thinking of click fraud in 2002? Not many raised their hands. She explains most of you do not know how people have been dealing with the issue historically.

So she shares some stories about the history (Sorry, not sharing those stories).

She would like to see more information for the data that they have. They are telling us what they are not billing us for. What she wants to see the conversion data and how that comes into play. Give us more data on how conversions play in click fraud.

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 5:18 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Ad Testing: Research and Findings

Ad Testing: Research and Findings
Track: Advertising
Focus: Ads
Skill: Advanced

Session Overview:
Have you been doing deep testing of your ad campaigns? Fear not -- the panel in this session has and will be sharing tips you might want to try yourself. How important are headlines, descriptions and other elements in your control? How do consumers interact with the ads?

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

Speakers:
* Gordon Hotchkiss, President & CEO, Enquiro Search Solutions Inc.
* Anton E. Konikoff, Founder and CEO, Acronym Media
* Jonathan Mendez, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, OTTO Digital
* Nico Brooks, Director of Search Technology, Atlas
* Clay Bavor, Product Manager, Ads Quality, Google

Gord
Let's kick things off with Anton Konikoff from Acronym Media

Anton
Ad testing is more than a one dimensional activity. Will go into when, where and how to test ads. Anton looks at the world through keywords – "keyword driven marketing"

Keyword Driven Marketing
- Equates a keyword with the customer
- Focus on the language the customer uses to decipher the meaning and target the messaging accordingly.
- Important to keep customer voice and intent in mind when testing.
- Equally important for B-B and B-C
Why Do Ad Testing
- Gain insights in a controlled environment – quantifiable results.
- Help understand the effectiveness of the messaging
- Identify the appropriate products/offerings
Key Metrics
- CTR – but as a process metric and a final metric
- Conversion Rate by Ad – this is the ultimate measure of success
Setting Up Ad Testing
- How many ads should you test?
-- Whatever you're comfortable with really. (though he says some may disagree)
- Sample Size
-- How much data
--- 100 clicks might be enough but 1000 is certainly better – it depends on the campaign.
Ad Copy Testing
- Test Headlines and Display URLs
- Keep your headline consistent and test the description. Then move back to test headline.
- Test the call to action – is it price point?

Pull out the best performer of description test and then test headline.

"The Click Through Rate is Irrelevant" – gets in trouble for this view, but has seen low CTR generate high conversion rates.

More Granular Tests
- Punctuation
- Capitalization
- Proper Case vs. Sentence Case
- Accent Usage
- Keyword Insertion
Sirius Radio Case Study
- Tested $30 rebate vs. One Month Free
- Period: 1 month
- $30 rebate conversion 3.5%, free month 1.5%
Common Pitfalls
- High CTR may be bad
-- Is the traffic qualified
- Too many variables?
-- Be sure you know which change made an impact
Google Image Ad Testing
- Tested 3 TV commercials on Google site targeting network & Quigo Video beta test
- 3 different ads, different actors and slightly different messaging. Initial screen was the same.
- CTR was consistent – but weren't only testing for that.
- Metrics
-- How far did the customers watch
-- What was the CTR
- Findings
-- Winner 60% completion and 30% higher CTR using simple split test.
Path to Success
- Start with the most simple/straightforward test
-- Apply more variable over time
- Be brave and bold in testing radical hypothesis. Challenge the status quo.
- Set aside a budget only for testing
- Set up a testing process that is ongoing and consistent. Find the right mix of elements and continue to push testing.
- Always test something!
- Don't settle for current results. Improvement is always possible through structured testing.

Nico Brooks
Let's talk about suggestions for doing ad testing, how to measure performance and share an idea about the research. Plus going to share a little bit of data

Suggestions
- Separate branded and non-branded keywords
- Look at history of the ad clicks/interaction that lead to a conversion –
-- Don't just look at the last click.
Defining route knowledge – it's how we think about where things are. Know where something is (like a business) without really knowing the exact physical location.

Big Idea
- Much of search activity if motivated by route knowledge.
- Analogy – Ants and Compost Bucket
-- Ant problem at commune. So long as the bucket was moved, the ants would not get to it.
-- The ants used route knowledge to find the bucket and when it moved, the ants couldn't find it.
- How we think about where something is has to do with how we get there.

Applying to search data
- Users remember how they got there before. They may not remember the URL, but they know how they got there. So they go the same way hoping to get the same result.

Search Study
- Segmented 275k clicks between first visit and reports as well as branded vs. non-branded
Results
- Repeat visits were nearly % of total clicks.
- Brand data was more than 50% of clicks
- Repeat and Branded was nearly 1/3 of all clicks.
- Repeat plus branded accounted for nearly 70% of clicks
Suggestions
- #1
-- Separate branded and non-branded keywords
-- Branded keywords aid navigation and boost interest
-- Non-branded keywords create interest – which is good from a customer acquisition perspective.
- #2
-- Navigation clicks may be masking the true value driven by other keywords and ad types.

Jontahan Mendes
It doesn't have to be scary or overly quantitative. Start simple and small then get more advanced. Great tools – some free, some not so free. You can also do it without a tool, just using a spreadsheet.

Keys to Successful Testing
- Always have a single question to answer.
-- The best test will answer that question and ask many more.
- Have a large differentiation between elements that you are testing.
-- Draw out the differences
- Temporal Behavior
-- Results during the week may be different than those over the weekend
- Collect enough data to reduce margin of error and increase confidence.
-- Too little data may induce false positive.
- Segment results
- Act! Take action on results and keep on testing.
Why Test
- Testing is better than guessing.
- We test because despite how smart we are we can learn.
- Don't Guess!

Ad copy testing itself can yield a significant change in conversion.

Why do ads work?
- Impression upon the user
- Interest Ads generate interest in the product/service
- Expectation that you will find what you want
- Persuasion – our goal is to sell the product/service

Test Ads by Match Type
- Created redundant ad groups and test against one another by match type.
- Understand, test and measure the impact on your campaigns.
Brand Keywords – waste of money?
- Tested 1 week on 1 week off
- No seasonality.
- Ad went to homepage
- Single version of the ad
- 30 branded keywords
Did they drive traffic? NO.
Did having the ads increase conversion? YES – up to 32%
Having the ads was a huge win.

Case Study - Best ads to increase conversion?
- Took 4 elements and 3 variations and dropped it into an array for testing.
- Design was 9 tagged ads (URL tagging)
- Tagged landing page & thank you page.
- Ad optimizer was turned off.
Results
- Some ads really tanked. Some lift and one gave 36% conversion lift.
- Gave a window into each factor that had something to do with success.
- Description line was found to be the winner – but beware because it varies from test to test.
Bake Off
- Winning recipe versus predicted recipe
- Final winner gave a 52% lift for the client

Gord
Was going to talk about a Google research project – brand, non-brand – top versus side sponsored. 8am today came the realization that the presentation would have been about how people respond to different parts of the real estate, but he decided to toss the presentation.

Instead he is breaking the box and looking at the new testing box.

What's Next?
- Search results page has been pretty static the last several years. We are introducing many new variables to testing so a heads up is probably better.
- Pace of change on the SERP is going to increase.
- On the cusp of search experience changes

Strive to maintain balance between ads and organic result relevance. Need to raise the bar on ads to provide a richer experience. Value of images, video in addition to text. Leads us to better targeting – the keyword – knowing more about the customer through personalization.

If the natural results get better – will users stop clicking ads?

When an image is introduced on a page, users in eye tracking study used the image to divide the page. Users looked at result immediately adjacent to the image. Scanning ran down from the image (in slot 3-4) which is different from what is seen in non-image based search results.

Ask users are learning how to navigate the more complex page and are doing it quickly. This will impact advertising.

Tested a personalized search page. Using various groups of data, paid and organic results. Also used personalization to identify the user. Displayed products, stock and stores that carry your favorite product.

Results: Users oriented themselves to the organic and top sponsored listings. Note – the interface was a surprise.
- Interaction with the page was pretty typical with about 8 seconds.
- Page had a left side bias
- Sponsored locations – top sponsored did well, other 2 did almost nothing
- Time Spent on page – Organic results got lions share however, shop local section was pleasant surprise.
Wrapping Up
- Cannot count on same linear scanning activity – which has driven testing historically.
- As images appear we "berry pick"
- Richer ad choices and personalization will drive the experience.
- Lines will become blurred between organic and sponsored listings.
- Information scent and top left relevance are going to continue to be dominant behaviors.

Clay Bavor
Spend time providing perspective on how Google views ad testing and campaign optimization. Plus talk about a tool that was recently released.

- Goal is to show relevant ads, making sure the user experience is good.
- In the long run, a good user experience is good for everyone.
How to make the user experience very good?
- Ad testing will drive the best user experience
- 2 things to do
-- Step back and look at keywords. Are they conceptually grouped?
--- The more targeted t
-- Don't drop the ball on the landing page. Take some time and make sure they correspond to the ad text and keywords that are driving traffic there.
--
- Think of ad testing as putting yourself in the user's shoes to drive high quality traffic.
Check out "Search Query Report" in Adwords.
- You can find a summary of keywords that are driving traffic which will help you improve the overall performance of campaigns and ad groups
Circle back to the user experience
- Target effectively for the user experience your users want
- Keep the users in mind
- Test and re-test

Q and A
Q – Can some shine light on ad with highest CTR is not the ad being served the most?
A – Anton – Idea of ad optimizer is to distribute traffic to the best ads. Other factors are involved – landing page and other quality factors.
A – Google – Not sure without looking at the specific instance.

Q – Did the eye tracking study, did you track the demographics?
A – Gord – all classified as heavy searchers. Sophisticated searchers.

Q – How can we manage client's historical data if we split out keywords?
A – Clay – It shouldn't be a problem. Google stores account history and is never lost. Keywords and ad test history will be there. Don't be afraid to experiment. Some small churn in quality score, but should adjust pretty quickly.
A – Anton – You should always look at keyword groupings. It's especially important for contextual ads and looking at ad groups for contextual matching.

Q – When I a/b testing ads, they perform better together than either would on its own, can someone explain that? Can you help me think about landing page testing?
A – Jonathan – Look at landing pages, they take some work but looking holistically is the right approach. Test all elements together if you can.
A – Anton – Landing pages are second in testing. Make sure you are following best practices first. Make sure they are targeted and crawlable. Best practices will get you 80% there.

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 4:39 PM Comments (1)

August 21, 2007

Podcast and Audio Search Optimization

SES San Jose
Podcast and Audio Search Optimization
Tuesday August 21, 2007

Multimedia Track
Detlev Johnson, Moderator, SearchReturn

Speakers:
Daron Babin, Webmaster Radio
Amanda Watlington, Searching for Profit
Rick Klau, Google

The room isn't full this morning, which surprises me because this is a hot topic. I covered this session in Chicago (I believe it was) and the room then seemed packed. I didn't stay for the Q&A session but this is the type of session that generates a lot of questions on everything from how-to to what equipment to purchase or use.

Detlev: Welcomes everyone to SES. Was it worthwhile? Audio search is something difficult for SE's to produce an audio powered on the web. Trying to figure out what's in the file is difficult, with audio. Popularity of
iTunes makes audio optimization vital.

DB:
Begins with how many familiar with Webmaster Radio. How many are just learning. You learn a lot hands on, while doing it. Not a ton of forward progress seen what we do for audio. Wants to show pitfalls, deploying
productions, how to save money, bandwidth issues. Are people listening? In droves, he says. If you create compelling content, people will listen. Is it worth it to get into audio arena? Production time is costly. Cost
of production (human resources). Equipment and gear costs. Encoding is a pain. You need to think about types of prod you do, live? Live to hard drive then to RSS feed later. Analytics - who comes close?
Bandwidth. Quantifying listener ship is important. Make content compelling. Make your speech on topic. Don't ramble into a mike. Real specifics. Reason is to transcribe audio file. It's easier with good content. Banter
is fine to engage listeners. Listeners want to hear what you say you'll talk about. Their time is valuable. Entertain them a bit. They want to educated and entertained. They don't want to know if dog is being neutered.

Prepare for growth over time. Recommend securing a sound host or content delivery network and work a deal. Handle load is vital. Establish a good relationship with your host or CDN. Most are not upfront with you. Transcription is important, transcribe everything. Leave no word unspoken. It's the equity in your organic fortuitist display of originality. Originality with passion = downloads. Show ex of repeating names when transcribing. Adds to density. Ensure proper on the page criteria no engine can complain about finding new original and very relevant content. Categorize content to rank those words. Optimize ID tags. Get to your numbers when you can.
Analyze your data. You can drive feed revenue. Optimize your feeds. He breaks up one show into 4 parts, removes the ads using robots.tx disallow. There's a lot of people exploring podcasting including the "big
boys". Think ahead of the game.

(During his talk, someone in the audience had their laptop open and suddenly it began to broadcast a live radio show. It took several minutes for it to be shut off. Daron Babin thanked the guy for the example. Everyone laughed.

AW:

Asks for hands for newbies. Why should we podcast, as marketers? We have the task of selling the medium as well. It creates an emotional appeal, due to human voice. New outlet, new medium of getting the message out across. We listen differently. We're human. It adds a human atmosphere to whatever it is. From content side, pros and cons. Engage consumers by creating dialog. Requires a level of transparency. Indexed by SE's but this must be measured and tracked. Podcasting can be done inexpensively if you have compelling content. Shows a slide of universal search results - paid listings, maps and local, podcast listings appear for "Orlando paid vacation", 2nd organic listing is a podcast. "2 bites same apple" - text and the podcast. She doesn't cover how to record. Takes too long to discuss equip. Decide standalone or pod show w/episodes.

Name your show. Consider the name of the show and name of episodes. Different keywords. Make sure your showname is not in use, like domain names. Changing later is difficult when you have a listening audience.
Each show needs own title and name. Write title and desc for both show and episodes. Transcribe or just abstract the show contents. Prepare keyword list for the show and determine how you will brand it, the
show, etc. Write audio tag info in advance. Review iTunes cats to see where you fit. Edit audio tags yourself. Download and test tag editors.

Optimize your ID3 tags. ID3 = metadata for MP3, 4, WMA, AAC or Ogg Vorbis audio files. Max tag size is 256 megabytes and max frame so is 16 megabytes. Go to ID3.org for more info (her slide had tons of tech info on this alone.) Search engines read metadata. Title, date, name of show or episode name, name of host, track episode number, urls, are things to stuff into content. She shows a screenshot with app tool that optimizes tags. Use a unique name. Use a shortened name plus date or episode number. Important for users and directories. Separate feed for podcasts from your blog or web site. Separate page for every episode. Use separate landing pages to avoid broken links. Have a page with list of next episodes. Optimize landing page. Include a player for those who want to listen online. Describe file size. Consider adding a transcript link to your web page.

Create and validate feeds. Submit your feeds. Track and monitor submissions to all the feeds you submit to. Similar to old days of submitting to SE's. Use your PR, word of mouth, use marketing communication to
drive listeners, feature links to podcast. blog about your content and link to it, don’t expect traffic to grow w/o help. Watch for changes, submit broadl7, landing pages for shows. Amanda participates in a weekly
podcast every week and is always "Surprised" they have listeners.

RK:

Feedburner was acquired by Google and is being integrated by them. He is with Google. Podcast market is changing quickly. Web based capturing market share. Social networks gaining as place to consume and
distribute podcasts. Meta data is essential for discovery. Syndicate. Ping. 800 thousand feeds managed by feedburner. 75% iTunes, Google, My Yahoo, Miro, (Democracy player) the remaining 25% referrals and repeated content.

Shows page of fragmented via services, apps, etc. Syndication is done by referrals. Directories drive attention to podcasts. Websites drive in people. Don't consider them separate from podcasts. Ex. put podcast on
homepage. Market for podcast listeners is a fraction of how many iPod users there are. Expect this to grow. 70% of new American car will be setup for MP3 players. Social networks. Facebook launched ability to
add third party apps. You can add podcast content to Facebook.NPR Podcasts is the name. This is another new way of being introduced to podcasting. Young people like to add podcasting to Facebook. Create a
feed but avoid exposing code. Give them simple pages they can understand how to enable delivery of your content to them. Opt for iTunes. Read Apple's Tech Spec. ITunes does not index item metadata. Do not
abuse keywords. Categorize your podcast. iTunes only looks at 12 keywords. Use iTunes summary tag. Categorizes for them is online on Apple's Tech Spec page. Add show notes rather than just listing just episode
numbers and link to file. Content in show notes show up in Search engines. Ex of husband and wife podcast and their hilarious bad vacation experience. Their audience grew over time because of their content found
in SE's. Be sure to PING. Enable "Pingshot" to ensure timely content updates. Use Ping O Matic if not using Feedburner. You can submit feeds to directories. Ensure auto-discovery is enabled.

Know which bots know you. He shows a page of names of them.

posted cre8pc in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 3:04 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Web Analytics and Measuring Success

How do you know if you've been successful with search engines? You can check your "rank" at search engines for particular keywords, analyze log files to see the actual terms people used to reach your web site or make the ultimate jump and "close the loop" by measuring sales conversions and return-on-investment (ROI). This panel explores ways to measure success and what statistics you should really care about. Allan Dick of Vintage Tub & Bath is moderating along with Matthew Bailey of Site Logic Marketing, Lionel Largaespada of Fathom Online and Laura Thieme of Bizresearch presenting.

Matt starts things off. People typically pull up their analytics, look at their dashboards and freak out. Those that are on top are the ones who define their goals from the start. How can you measure without a goal to measure it by? Seems simple but many miss that important point. Web sites without analytics are not worth running. You are losing money... you just don't know where. Pages visits, top ten pages, unique visitors, etc. are from the caveman days. They don't really define what is going on.

SEO - if they can't find you, you aren't there. Usability - if they can't find it, it snot there. Analytics - they tell you what just happened. Analytics are not necessarily about the numbers but the process. What hinders people from getting to point A to point B? This starts with segmentation. Numbers don't show you the whole picture. Without segmentation, you will not know the whys. It tells you the factors that lead to the actual numbers which will then help you to adjust your strategy.

If you use a single conversion rate for example, a e-commerce site, you cannot tell which products are doing well and which are not. You need to have conversion rates for each product and even each section of page of the site.

Three C's of analytics -

- Context
- Comparison
- Contrast

Find what works. Look at key performance indicators, then segment (where did they come from). This will tell you what they are looking for. One thing Matt points out is that product pages or specific interior pages typically convert better than having someone enter at the home page. As far as engagement, visitors from blogs and articles are engaged longer than for example social news sites such as Digg. Reason for this is that a blog for example if like a word of mouth referral. Social news really draws people who are just looking for the latest news and trying to keep up on things. So the context of the link is important. In other words, go after links that will not only give god ranking juice but which exist in a context that will help visitor engagement.

Next up is Lionel but not before Alan mentions that his company got stuck in the "caveman" phase that Matt was talking about. He discovered a lot of metrics they were looking at did not allow them to focus on what really needed to be done. When they re-defined their metrics, they were able to make better judgment calls.

Lionel polls the audience as to how many are actually using an analytics package and secondly how many can make heads or tails out of the information. The response for the second question was less than the first. Lionel's definition of web analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantative internet data to optimize sites and marketing initiatives.

82 percent of people reading analytics think it is confusing, mostly because there is too much information to collect. As far as where people are coming from when they land on our sites, there are so many inlets. Trying to measure the effectiveness of each inlet is a daunting task. Therefore we need to consider technology that goes beyond typical analytics packages. Good "marketing analytics gathers data across all channels - not just online. This can include mobile, print, call center sales, sale people, brick and mortar, etc

A question to ask s what data do we really need to make quality decisions. A second question is how do we even get this information. Third party tracking is key to integrating your marketing programs for analysis. A goal with analytics should be to connect disparate conversions into a single analysis.

Getting started entails setting up campaign objectives, what data is available and what is not, don't limit efforts based on data, plan to work regularly with data, and re-evaluate data options. He repeats what Matt said in that all data needs to line up with the actual goals the company has set out for themselves.

Towards the end of his presentation, Lionel shows an example of how they used cross channels to analyze a client campaign and make marketing decisions based on the data they received.

Finally Laura takes the stage. She asks how many are blogging and actually tracking that activity. The landscape is changing in what you need to track. Are you also analyzing campaign activity at the keyword level. The initial information marketers see when logging into PPC management consoles is their dashboard - CTR, CPC, impressions, ROI, etc. However are you using tools available to look at advanced KPIs? Companies need to ask themselves the question of what is their acceptable customer acquisition cost. They also need to make sure that the data they are looking at is accurate. Is everything you use to track installed and working correctly?

Track everything -

- visibility
- spider activity
- traffic
- sales
- latency
- KPIs
- ROAS
- competitors
- social media

She then highlights some of the tools that are avaiable - Omniture, CoreMetrics, Web Trends are a few that were listed.

Favorite reports -

- NetTracker - Robot/Spider report
- Google Analytics - Network properties/Network location
- Google Analytics - Goal conversions

Don't discount the traffic that blogs can bring but do look at it, analyze it and make marketing decisions based on it.

Analyze bounce rates by keyword in order to lower them. Of course there are going to be obvious keywords that will bounce users but you want to use analytics to identify bounce rates for keywords that should create more stickiness.

With web analytics, being analytical is not enough but should be combined with creativity. You have to spend time with clients to discuss what web analytics reveals to you.

David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 2:54 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Copyright & Trademarks: What SEMs Should Know

Moderator:
Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Clarke Douglas Walton, Attorney-at-Law, Walton Law Firm is up first to talk about the DMCA take down notice.

The DMCA is the digital millennium copyright act, which is an amendment to copyright law in 1998 and section twelve is important.

A DMCA involves the copyright owner, the ISP and the user (infringer).

The copyright owner finds a copyright issue, and files a take down notice with the ISP, the infringer has a chance to respond to the notice.

Copyright owners like this because it is easy, fast and cheap. Online service providers like it because there is immunity.

Minimum Requirements:
- ID the copyrighted work
- ID infringing material
- Copyright owner or agents contact information
- Statement a good faith belief of infringement
- Statement that filer is authorized
- And a signature

Where can you file a DMCA?
- Online Service Providers
-- Host
-- Search Engines
--- Organic
--- Paid Search
--- AdSense
-- Any user generated site
--- YouTube
--- Discussion forums
-- List of online service providers at copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/index.html

What can I complain about?
- Copyright is original work of authorship in a tangle form

He then showed examples of DMCA take downs.

DMCA Drawbacks
- US Geographic limitations
- Wont help with other legal problems such as trademarks, domain name and defamation
- No real penalty to infringer

DMCA Tips:
- Be sure you own the copyright
- Be sure it is an infringement
- Be sure all six elements are included
- Make it easy on the service provider

Eve Chaurand-Fraser, Online Compliance Officer, IAC Search & Media to talk about the ISP side.

They prefer to let the two parties deal with it, but it doesn't always work like that.

Ask.com has a copyright policy, which includes the DMCA part.

What Not To Do:
- Don't be vague
- Don't be argumentative
- Don't be threatening

She shows examples of screen shots that should make it easier for them to prove copyright issues.

The Ask.com site has a form you can use to make it easier.

What about Trademark issues?
- They can use the trademark as a keyword to display the ad
- They can use the trademark in their ad copy

Ask.com tolerates the use of trademarks as keywords but not in the ad copy.

Ask.com gets about ten of these DMCA requests per week. And only about 1/3rd are copyright issues, and maybe about 1/3rd are trademark issues and the rest are not legal issues.

Mary Berk, Director, adCenter Marketplace Quality, Microsoft Corp. is next up to talk about trademark policy, but she is not a lawyer (disclaimer).

Microsoft is now updating their trademark enforcement practices but their policies have not changed.

In the past, an affiliate to bid on a trademark required a lot of work, today it is easier. Once a trademark owner submits a claim, they will start watching your trademark term but it doesn't mean they will get it right. They will do their best.

Advertisers cannot bid or use a trademark term in their ad copy.

Why are they changing?
- It is difficult to manage all agreements between affiliates and trademark holders and advertisers
- It is frustrating to legitimate advertisers to go through a verification process
- They want to keep relevance for the end user
- It's good for everyone to have common practices, and these are inline with common practices

Benefits:
- Advertisers will have faster approval process
- Rules are clear cut
- Add relevance for end user

Challenge:
- Trying to identify the direct competitors in countless industries

What to expect with new changes?
- Late August to early September , adCenter reps will speak with trademark owners
- Sept 10th they will implement this policy

Reporting Trademark concerns:
- URL is long and hard to type (sorry)

Submitting a TM concern form can be done via snail mail, email or web form.
- Web Form asks for name, contact info, basic information and what trademark is at issue

Then Microsoft will review your claim and take action

But Microsoft needs your help with this.

Deborah A. Wilcox, Partner, Baker Hostetler is next up to let SEMs know what they need to know about on this topic.

She starts off by explaining that technology is much faster than the courts.

When you can't get action on your problem, it is time to bring in outside cancel.

Gathering Evidence:
- Identify the real parties involved including competitors, search engines and other distributors.
- Make sure your IP rights are in order. IF you own your trademark, copyrights and domain names. Register them at uspto.gov and copyright.gov
- Take screen shots
- Determine the hard that is being caused to the business, be specific

Types of Legal Action:
- C&D letter (cease and desist) is longer but effective
- UDRP actions
- Lawsuit

Emergency Relief
- Ask for temporary restraining order
- Preliminary injunction within a couple of months

What to Seek through Litigation
- Profit details
- Details on scope and extend of problem
- Promise is cease infringing
- Corrective advertising
- Recall
- Judgement "on the books"
- Monetary recovery
-- Attorney fees
-- Infringers profits
-- Damages
-- Statutory damages if infringement of register copyright, cyberquatting or counterfeiting of registered trademark (it is much easier if your registered)

Eric Goldman, Assistant Professor of Law, Director, High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara University School of Law (someone I site often).

He said he finds it interesting how "pro plaintiff" the session is. So he will take the counter approach.

Every company is both a consumer and producer of copyright and trademarks.

(1) Don't be duplicitous.. Don't feel you can enforce your rights if you engage in the same practices. Such as if you are using robots to gather third party content from web sites, then it is not right to complain if someone is doing it to you. He has a client like this. So he is adding a robots exclusion to not be duplicitous, plus offer an API to give people a way to get their content. Another example is if you don't like other companies buying your trademark in search ads, then don't buy trademarks for your search ads yourself. This happens all the time, he said.

(2) Invest your dollars in IP protection and enforcement wisely. What this means is... If you see someone is infringing on your IP, just don't freak out. He doesn't mind when a splog steals his content, it is not worth his time to go after them (agreed). Invest your money in more marketing instead. He explains that some of these lawsuits can cost you big time. He gave some funny examples.

If you want cash, you need to register. Be careful with the creative commons license.

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 2:33 PM Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Link Building Basics

Link Building Basics
Discover how search engines rely on link analysis as an important component for rank web pages. Learn also how to increase traffic to your site by building quality links in an appropriate manner.
Moderator:

* Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, SearchEngineWatch

Speakers:

* Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* Christine Churchill, President, Key Relevance

Eric Ward couldn't make it again. :( I will never meet Eric in the flesh. I wish you well, Eric.

Mike talks about why your pages should be ranked higher than others. Search engines look at the web as a graph. We spend a lot of time talking about getting indexed. But on the other side, what is it when someone does a search that makes one page come higher than another?

Search engines build an inverted index. Search engines keep only one occurrance of a term. There's no point for them keeping 30 billion copies of the word "the." TThe best way to imagine how this works is that if you look at a textbook and you look for the word hemaglobin, and it says it appears on page 172, 195, 213, etc, the word is pointing to the page. A page becomes known for the importance of the word and the word points to the important pages. The more times the word is on the page, the more relevant the words are for a search query. I learned this in 1997.

In 98, a professor named John Kleinberg wrote a paper about the prevalence of words on a page and how they should rank in the search engines. In the same year, a couple of students wrote a paper called PageRank about the communities surrounding particular pages. A search for "Japanese auto manufacturer" didn't bring up pages like Nissan, Toyota, etc. But if you add a hyperlink with that text to that page, it shows up. The point is that it's not about what you say about yourself on the page, it's about the other people in the community says about you.

Sometimes in this industry when you talk to SEOs, they'll talk about reverse-engineering the algorithm. It's not possible. Search engines can see links in many different ways. The more people who link in related areas (cocitation), the more relevant the search engines believe they are.

Google Anxiety Syndrome = GAS.

The new science of networks: hubs and authorities. Not only do we spot the hubs and authorities, it has evolved into becoming topic-specific. Now you think of quality of links, not quantity. The more quality links, the better. How does that work in the real world? 40 million web pages were crawled and 100,000 communities. Communities can be very broad: computer makers branch to software makers, hardware makers, digital camera makers, etc.

10 essential takeaways:
1. Remember it's quality material that attracts good quality site links.
2. Search engines look at the anchor text in links.
3. Search engines have already decided who they think is important. Use search engines (link:www.yourcompetitor.com) to find linking partners.
4. Reciprocal links and buying links - major directory such as Yahoo. Yeah, Matt Cutts says it's wrong. I don't mind buying links at all if it's a good site. Reciprocal links are okay if you don't overdo it. Look for vertical directories: submit your site + Golf, for example, for a golf industry site.
5. A well run affiliate program can bring you plenty of traffic and deliver plenty of sales. But an affiliate porgram can also cause havoc with your linking strategy. A redirected link like Commission Junction or ClickBank, for example, can deplete the power of direct links you may have already had.
6. Don't be choosy about who you link to.
7. Don't try and fake your linkage data of fake domains simply to point back to a page on your main site. If nobody is linking to your fake domains, it's considered a spam island.
8. How do you ask for a link? Asking for a link is about asking if you can do business with somebody. Be careful.
9. Acquiring links is time consuming. Should you get someone else to do it?
10. Unless you want to be Yahoo, why waste time building a link directory? Build time spending content.

The internet is all "about connections, nothing else" - quote from Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the WWW.

White papers: Underneath the hood - link quality explained; Filty Linking Rich.

Christine Churchill is up next. The reality of getting links, you realize that you get a lot of traffic but you get a lot of bounce rates unless the linkbait is quality. You can't do it overnight and have a ton of links that push you up in the rankings. You have to have quality.

Tip: a lot of times companies have existing links from good sources but they may not be great links. I recommend that you go back to those sources and negotiate those links - ask them what you want. Tell thm what you want it. A lot of time people will do it simply because you've asked.

Tip: Look at sources of links. Pick up the phone. Emails are often disregarded. Pick up the phone and form a relationship with them like a business relationship.

Tip: Look for links in your vertical. Look at results pages - find what people are linking for in the same terms that you want to rank for. If they are not competitors and they're potential partners, form a business relationship. I'm not a fan of reciprocal links.

Tip: Don't get all your links from one place. When you are doing your link building, go to a variety of sources. You don't want only blogs, or only PR sources. Make it look natural.

The reality with link building today is that you have to budget for it. It's not cheap. People burnout very easily. It's intense work and takes a lot of drive.

Don't overlook sources in your local community. Local businesses can take advantage of chamber of commerce and professional organizations.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 2:07 PM Comments (1)

August 21, 2007

Keynote Conversation with Jim Lanzone of Ask.com

Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone talks with conference co-chair Chris Sherman about Ask.com's challenge to its more trafficked peers to steal away searchers, including how the launch of its new Ask3D interface is going.

Chris Sherman introduces Jim and asks about the product, and we're off!

Jim: We've always looked beyond technology and thought about the consumer. When we launched Ask City, we created a 3-panel interface that corresponds to the three stages of search. We knew we were onto something when we saw that the standard 10 blue links wasn't necessarily the best way - we wanted to give them the right thing at the right time. We're giving them more content and tools. The reaction is phenomenally fast-growing. Our internal metrics are up a lot. We'll keep putting our focus on the user in the next generation of search.

Chris: In terms of those numbers, is it an increased market share or is it too early for that?
Jim: Market share is good to see on an annual basis. Frankly, with what comScore came out yesterday, the whole concept of market share came on its head with eBay queries being counted. We're more concerned about our internal growth.

The only motivation we need is that we have billions of searches every second that goes by, there's a search that is not being satisfied. We think that we need to address that and the market share will take care of itself.

Chris: You have a relationship with Google, but what about a love-hate relationship as they're your competitor?
Jim: There's a reason why we're a partner with the biggest ad network. We've been partners since 2002 and it was controversial since we chose them over Overture. The first deal we announced was a 3-year $100 million deal. If we renew, it will be a multi-billion dollar deal. We're friends with them, and when we're off the court, we're cordial. But when we look at search, we're competing for users. We have our own angle on how to do search well. It's what we call coopetition - competition in search but cooperative partnership.

Chris: Ask had a near-death experience in 2000. How did you pull through?
Jim: I came through acquisition in May of 2001 when stock was at $0.79. All the investment was in the software business. There were 17 different ad products on the page to be profitable. The first thing we did was that we narrowed the focus. Then we bought a 7-person search engine called Teoma and we integrated it on the search engine in September of 2001. All of our gains have come from usage on our site while other competing engines faded away.

Chris: I've heard some analysits say that Ask is going to become the IAC search engine because of IAC's ownership of Ticketmaster, etc. How do you work with these partners?
Jim: On one hand, we prioritize some of these guys less - we give them less favoritism. For us, we look at them as sources of data. We took raw data from Ticketmaster, for example, and built our own search structured engine on top of that, which allowed us to get under the hood differently. That's one reason why Ask City did so well because of the quality of search.

Chris: I'm interested in terms of your own internal culture - in terms of Yahoo, they're fairly compartmentalized; but Google works in small teams. Microsoft is the huge cross-functional team. What kind of approach do you take to leadership in Ask and how do you work together?
Jim: We put a lot of emphasis in putting the right brand together. 75% of our employees are engineers of some sort. We're not looking for all Stanford graduates. They all work together. We're also very virtual. A lot of employees are in Edison, NJ. We put a lot of emphasis on the combination of art and science and make sure it works together as a product that is coherenet and intuitive.

Chris: It seems like this year we had an outbreak of concern of privacy. This year, however, the search engines responded and you created Ask Eraser. How do you see the privacy issue? Do you think the users need to give up privacy for utility?
Jim: I think it was a slow-news summer because that got such publicity. We're concerned about privacy. For people who are concerned about privacy, we launched Ask Eraser. If people don't want tracking, it will be removed within a few hours of opting in. If it's important to you, the nuances won't matter.

Chris: Will you still be able to do personalization with this implementation?
Jim: You need to opt-in for these. We're not turning any of these features on automatically.

Chris: I seem to recall eTour as a remote control for the web and it's remarkably similar to StumbleUpon. Are you going back to that?
Jim: We raised a lot of money and we had an IPO set up. The business model was pre-search. It worked for some people and not for others. This was about the next generation of searches. Whether that fits into search today, we're not sure about that. We're focusing on search for us so I don't know if we'll revisit that.

Chris: You mention that some people are not necessarily interacting similarly to search results. What are the implications of this on traditional SEO?
Jim: What surprises me is that 50% usage of the page is not in the web results. Search suggestions are being chosen 10% of the time. When you count all of these other featues, it's really changing the way that page is. Some of the emphasis needs to go on video, image, and other content that is on the page. We obviously put content where our competitors have ads. There's more content above the fold on Ask than on other search engines. People are clicking the More button less because they're finding what they want on the page, so it gives the editorial side a chance to swim. We're not just thinking about how we tweak the results. We want to give the right exeperience at the right time. When you start thinking that way, it's different than what search was 5-10 years ago.

Chris: Since you have a partnership with Google, why would people want to advertise with you as opposed to Google?
Jim: Your placement is higher on the page than on Google when it's more relevant and money. Placement is more important. You also have direct access to the data. For certain advertisers, there's a lot of money to be made in tuning ads for Ask. A new reason to come with Ask is that our contextual ads are served to 71 million users.
Chris: But contextual ads don't convert as highly becasue it's not search. This is really a compelling question - what is your reach for these ads?
Jim: It's like any other contextual advertising channel. There will be so much growth on the user side as it becomes bigger with the value we create. You can fine tune the ads.

Chris: You say that search is undervalued, but I think that keywords are going to get a lot more expensive.
Jim: I think this will happen over time. I think we have ads in tuning with the industry - it's hard to isolate metrics over any one time. It's going to be worth a lot more money. It's natural in any auction based system that things get more expensive. It's more valuable. Everyone is going to put their money on the good keywords.

Chris: How sophisticated do you think the big brands are with search marketing today? Where are the bigger players in terms of their awareness of search, allocations of budget, and so on?
Jim: It hasn't been great. A lot of companies have to learn a lot about IAC. A lot of firms are beinging SEMs inhouse. They are getting better at it but they still have a lot to learn. Traditional ad agencies need to learn a lot about online advertising. They're going to need the expertise of everyone in this room to help.

Chris: Mobile search is an area you're focusing on. How do you see these vertical areas in the blended approach?
Jim: Think about in terms of 3 pages - the first page where you search, the second where you see results, and then going deeper. The deeper might be a vertical where you jump off, or it could be someone's webpage. That's how the first smart answer was created. We focus on verticals because we saw user behavior: I see how people are searching and there are things that they can see beyond 10 blue links. Mobile is interesting becasue that's not a vertical; that's a platform. In the next 10 years, we're all plugging into the same grid. The trick is how do you deliver information to that platform? It's amazing to be able to type in P, have a search suggestion for Pizza, and then get information about your local areas using GPS. It's a good area to innovate in.

Chris: What else do you want to focus on in mobile?
Jim: We want to bring the web to the mobile device. There's no search box on the mobile page. Some people didn't want to scroll through all these links becasue web pages aren't being customized for mobile. I don't think mobile isn't all about local. How do we bring the web to mobile? We're focusing on that.

Chris: How do you work with the carriers who limit to other search properties?
Jim: I think that these carriers will need to satisfy the needs of the users. We need to all work together and get along.

Chris: Google is taking an FDC auction of air space. Do you think there's any chance of that going through?
Jim: I don't know. It's very far focused from what we do.

Chris: Let's go back to what you're doing on Ask. User experience is important. How are you diving deeper into personalization?
Jim: We're doing a lot more. The first thing is that everyone sees this on their Amazon recommendations - just because I searched once for "fishing" doesn't mean that you are interested in fishing. I think that personalization has gone overboard in some areas. The sweet spot of enhancin the value of the results is on the collective. That's something we're focusing on in our Edison algorithm. Collective is important and personalization is at a sublevel. We see this in bloglines; the number of people who go personalize their page is not a mass market number. We're going to build those tools.

Chris: You mentioned the Edison algorithm. Ask was going to be tagging content every time people clicked on a link. Are you going to use the words as the title of the page as tags?
Jim: It's going to take an incredible body of information - so it's not as simple as taking just that data.

Then Jim talks about my BFF and how she covered a recent Ask.com advertisement that compares Ask to other search engines like ~~Google~~ Altavista. Yay Lisa!

Chris: People still underestimate the role of internet in their lives. How do you see it in the future?
Jim: Conversions is a big factor. Blogs are the start of it. It's about images, video, audio, etc. It will become your personal navigation device in the upcoming decades. People don't want to take the trouble to customize pages. They're going to want to expect this one box, whether it be their computer, TV, or phone, to deliver what they're looking for at any given time.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 21, 2007 1:26 PM Comments (0)

August 20, 2007

Search Engine Friendly Design

Session Overview:
How can you build a web site from the ground up that pleases both crawler-based search engines and your visitors? Discover how "search engine friendly" design can tap into free traffic from search engines. This session is especially suited for beginners who need an overview of important design issues to keep in mind. More technical design issues are covered in the Successful Site Architecture session on Day 2.

Moderator:
* Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Speakers:
* Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive

Anne
Always pleased to be able to introduce Shari Thurow who wrote the book on "Search Engine Visibility." Read this book and you'll know almost everything we know!

Shari
Ouch, I have a racquetball injury. When I talk about search friendly design I come from the trenches - I am a developer. Born in ColdFusion & HTML, I've been a developer for many years and have been working in search since 1995.

My presentation is not necessarily all "my opinion." It's based on analytics.

Goals
What is Search Friendly Design?
Building Blocks
- Text
- Link
- Popularity
Design Considerations - Home Page

What Search Friendly Design is not!
- A page design to be #1 in the search engines.
- Whenever you design a site, design for users - the people that search.
A Search Friendly Design is a user-friendly site designed for users

Design your site for:
- Primary Audience - end users
- Secondary - Search Engines both human and crawler based.
5 Basic Rules of Site Design
- Easy to read - really means two things
-- From the user standpoint - design for teen is different from baby boomer.
-- From the search engine standpoint - design means the content is accessible.
- Easy to navigate
-- People should know where they are at all times.
-- If they are confused, they should be able to find their way back.
- Easy to find
-- On the search engines, directories, industry related sites.
-- Product and service information should be easy to find when users come to the site.
- Consistent layout and design
-- Refers to the allocation of real estate.
-- Conveys reliability, dependability and trust.
- Quick to download
-- Majority of a web page should download in 30 seconds or less on a dial-up.

These 5 rules are not mutually exclusive.

Easy to Find Detail
- Find me on search engines, directives and industry sites.
- Go directly to relevant page
-- Give users "sense of place"
- Within 7-8 clicks, users want to find information.
-- They will click up to 25 times if you provide a scent of information.
- Keep important information above the fold
-- In many cases, there is no scent to the information that sits below the fold.
- Contact Information
-- In terms of link development - people want to know you are a trustworthy site.
-- Four places for contact information - Header, Footer, About Us, and Contact.

Search Engines (the other 3 rules: 8 total including the 5 above)-
- All Search Engines
-- Index text
-- Follow links
-- Measure popularity
- If you don't add text and a means of access, the search engines will not find or rank your site.
- When people come to the site, the page has to be focused.
- Provide access - URL structure, navigation scheme, and cross-linking strategy - for users and search engines.
Many people falsely believe Search Engine Optimization is a linear process
- Bring in SEO early in the design phase - it can save both time and money.

All three of the following factors are critical to the long term success of the site.
- Site & Page Architecture
- Keyword Rich Text
- High Quality Link Development

When people visit, does the page seem focused? Put the keywords in the following locations:
- Title Tags
- Heading
- Contextual link and cross-links
- Product descriptions
- Graphic image w/alt text

Two most important places are Title tag and Body Text
- All search engines use body text to determine rankings.

Primary & Secondary Text
- Primary - all search engines use primary text
-- Title Tags
-- Visible Body Copy
-- Headings
- Secondary - some search engines use secondary.
-- Meta tag content - important for display.
-- Alternative text - important for accessibility

How you title and headline has an impact on how people link to your site.

Text Summary
- Use words that people use
- Put keywords in titles, visible body text, anchor text, Meta tags and alternative text.

What goes into a search friendly design?
- Navigation
- Cross linking
- Type of page
- Page layout and structure
- URL Structure

Navigational Links
- Text links are the best!
- Navigation buttons and image maps - buttons are friendlier than image maps.
- Menus can be hit and miss for search engines. JavaScript and menus cause problems.
- The least friendly form of navigation is flash.
- Don't avoid using a non-friendly navigation scheme just because of the search engines. Do what's right for the user. Shari likes using multiple types.

Tip - Always have at least two forms of navigation on your site.

Contextual Links
- Bread crumb links- be specific and communicate a hierarchy and sense of place to the audience.

Tip - When you design a site set out to impress the target audience not the boss or his wife.

Embedded Links
- Make sure you put embedded text links in your news and press releases.
- Don't overdo embedded links it will make it hard to read.
- Don't overdo #2 - it looks like search engine spam.
- Embedded links are a natural call to action

Site Map
- You do not want the site map to be a sea of blue links.
- Annotate the site map with keywords to make it easier to read.

Call to Action
- On a web page, you have to tell people what you want them to do.
-- If you don't tell them, they won't do it!

Information Pages
- Contains information for your target audience.
- Use user language
- Factual information not sales hype
- Spider friendly
- Simpler layout
- Visually match the rest of your site

Information pages and doorway pages are not the same.
- Information pages are for your audience.
- Doorway pages are for rank.
-- Doorway pages are used for cloaking (which is bad)
- Information pages have high quality links

Types of Information Pages
- Tips Pages - great place to give additional use information and details.
- FAQ Pages - providing useful additional and relevant information and compliments product or services pages.
- Glossary - having a reference page can help define some terms that may not be popular but useful for your audience.
- Category & Gallery Pages - good places for cross-link optimization (Look at Lands End as an example).

Cross Linking
- Provide vertical and horizontal cross-links
- The more "pogo-sticking" a user does between category and product pages reduces the potential they will convert.

Beware companies that build information pages
- Red Flags - these are all names for doorway pages. Check the presentation for the full list of 18 page types.
-- Doorway Pages
-- Hallway Pages (sitemap to doorway pages)
-- Envelope Pages - end users don't see frames but search engines do.
-- Directory Information pages
-- Shadow domains
-- Micro Sites
- Spammer Flags
-- Instant link popularity
-- Permanent positions
-- Guaranteed positions

Link Component Summary
- Use 2 forms of link navigation
- Use text links effectively
- Web site usability

What is popularity?
- Number and quality of links.
-- Major engines use link popularity to determine position.
- Number of times people click
- Number of bookmarks
- A number factors go into your popularity and it is constantly changing.

Popularity Factors
- How good is your content
- How do sites link to you and where the link take the user - is it relevant?
- Usability - how are you handling the user on your site.

For inbound links keywords and anchor text should be different from different sources. Too much similarity is a red flag to the search engines that you've bought links.

Link popularity and Link Development takes times
- Recommend looking into News/Press Release Optimization

Good and Bad Home Page
- Splash pages are horrible!
-- Search engines don't like them and they don't do anything
-- Flash is also used for splash pages - which cannot be crawled.
- Text, links and popularity drive home page design.
- If you desire a heavy graphics or flash home page, use content below the fold that is descriptive and uses embedded links to give the user information.

Don't be afraid to turn in spam to the search engines

Factors that go into a quality home page
- Hard to get important keywords on the homepage but please try
- At least one spider friendly navigation scheme
- Visible link to the site map
- Link to the most important sections of the site

So, what should you walk away with?
Follow the 5 basic rules of web design
- Put the words the audience uses and give them easy access.
- Tell the search engines that you think the terms are important
- Get objective 3rd parties to validate your content
- It is not the search engines job to make your site rank - It's Yours!

Q and A
Q - In the title, is it bad to put your toll free number?
A - No, it may help in local search because of the way the results are displayed.

Q - Site transition from .htm to .php, how do we handle it?
A - Use 301 redirects. Change of address card for computers.

Q - Are other types of sites, other than news, ones that you would recommend for links?
A - Some news sites are spam. Most blogs don't get rank. Look at industry sites and directories. Yahoo directory is important. Web portals. Reference sites. Education sites that are well built.
A2 - You need high quality not high quantity links.

Q - Should I improve my site navigation - we've had success but some things are getting old - I'm scared to change it and lose traffic?
A - Did you test it? Meaning did you test the navigation on your users? If you don't test it on your users, don't make the change until you do! People click on graphical image links more than they do CSS links.

Q - What are some strategies you would use to remove internal roadblocks to change?
A - Sometimes it takes a 3rd party or their web site to help make the case. If something isn't working, do something different. If it means spending $1000 for a good consultant, then by all means do it.

Q - When you have an older page with inbound links, how does that affect the link quality?
A - Use a 301 if the content is updated. If the content is gone, use a 404. Sometimes you may also want to look at a robots.txt exclusion, but it must be based on the situation.

posted rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 20, 2007 8:38 PM Comments (2)

August 20, 2007

Searcher Behavior Research Update

Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007
Search Track: Searcher Behavior Research Update

Speakers:
(Moderator) Gord Hotchkiss, President & CEO, Enquiro Search Solutions
James M. Lambert, SVP, comScore Networks
Pavan Lee, Microsoft
Oliver Deighton, Google
Stuart McKelvey, President & CEO, TMP Directional Marketing

First Speaker: Pavan Lee, "Searcher Moms"

Research Overview: Why are we interested in this topic? As you know, Soccer Moms are a very important segment to marketers because they are the key decision makers in buying decisions for cars, vacations, clothes, etc.

What we tried to do is measure internet usage and media consumption, and explore their search engine usage with regards to cpc.

We have four key findings. Moms are an Internet and Search savvy audience with significant buying power and need for information of products and services. They are heavy media consumers, using the Internet at least an hour a day as well as heavily consuming other forms of media.

In terms of SE usage, Moms are very experienced searchers and consider search engines the most efficient way to find information. They are also very search engine loyal. If they cannot find what they're looking for, they are more likely to modify their search terms or search through multiple pages of results to find information than change search engines.

Two thirds of moms use the search engines to gather information about products prior to making major purchases. For this reason, search should be included in overall marketing strategies when Soccer Moms are considered a target demographic.

80% of the moms searched for at least one of the CPG categories. What they are looking for is: comparing prices, finding store locations and gathering additional information prior to purchase.

90% of moms consider search useful in online purchases and 80% consider search useful in offline purchases.

So, clearly, search plays an important role in influencing the purchasing patterns in a highly desirable and influential demographic.

Second Speaker: James Lambert, "A Preview of the Digital Shelf -- The opportunity for search in packaged goods"

When you talk to a CPG (consumer packaged goods) company, help them understand search by helping them understand the motivation behind the consumer's behavior.

Most CPG's are focusing primarily on consumers with an immediate need (I stained my carpet), but they're missing out on reaching people in specific life stages (new house/new baby), and people with specific long term situations (I suffer from allergies).

In sizing the search marketing opportunity, we find there are 143.6M adults in the US Internet population with a 12% monthly site category penetration. When looking at the major categories, Food gets 93.7MM monthly unique visitors. Baby products receives about 36MM.

Next, another common misconception among CPG companies is that consumers "want coupons", when in actuality, they're looking to simply get more information about the products, find where they can buy the products, etc. Searching for a deal tends to be a non-searcher behavior.

The other interesting point is how this links to other media. These consumers consume all types of media and are heavy users of them all across the board; higher than that of non-search users.

Third Speaker: Oliver Deighton, "The Brand Lift of Search"

We took people over the age of 25 who were planning to buy a car in the next 6 months. We asked them to put themselves in a situation where they're interested in a fuel efficient cars. The users did the search and then were exposed to a SERP. We then broke them into 5 groups. The total testing group was 2700 users. We also took 100 additional people from the same demographic group off the street and exposed them to the same SERPs and did an eye tracking study.

We found a 2.2x lift in aided brand recall when the brand is in the top sponsored AND the top organic results. (Conclusion: Presence matters)

A 16% point increase in brand association when brand is in top sponsored and top organic results. (Conclusion: Not only are you gaining market share by having top paid and top organic results, you're taking market share from the other brands)

When a brand is in top sponsored and top organic results, purchase consideration increases 8% points.

Consumers are less likely to consider purchasing a brand that doesn't appear on the search results page. Brands not on the SERPs drop 16% in terms of how often their brand is mentioned when consumings list which brands they'll consider purchasing.

Even in branded queries, presence in top sponsored and top organic listings boosts purchase intent by 7% points.

Eye tracking reveals consumer insights

When you look at where the eye is going on the page relative to the ads, there is a lot more fixation on the headlines and the urls.

- Your investment in your brand, in general and across all media, benefits search.
- Advertise on unbranded and branded keywords.
- Tailor your ad to prospects, those with no established brand affinity.

Fourth Speaker: Stuart McKelvey, "The Usage and Value of Online and Offline Local Search Sources"

Our objective is to understand the use and value of online and offline local search sources such as internet YP, print YP directory assistance, mobile, newspaper and search engines.

We asked "What is your primary source of local business information?" Respondents indicated more than a third still rely heavily on a print YP.

In terms of site selection, respondents use Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), local search sites, and general search sites (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, etc).

Local searchers are less likely to have a specific business name in mind than IYP users. IYP searchers are more likely to be searching for services, where general searchers are more likely to be searching for a product.

We asked what was the primary factor in selecting a business to contact, and the response indicated that business location was the largest factor and other users reviews was the least influencing factor.

The most common activities resulting from the online search were in-store visits and contacting the business via telephone.

The majority of respondents (61%) went on to make a purchase at a local store, most often by visiting the store and making an in-person purchase.

Additionally, nearly 8 out of 10 (79%) searchers believe that businesses that are listed at the top of the search results paid to be there.

Over 60% of these searchers believe that the top results are the most relevant to their search.

30% of consumers stated that they used the Internet for researching -- not buying.

In addition, 2 out of 10 consumers cited the fact that they preferred to speak with people offline before buying online.

In summary:
- Location, location, location. It's an offline world.
- "General" search engine users are only half of the online local search population.
- When combining online and offline local search, the search engines are primary source to only 30% of the panel.
- "Shopping" & "Direction" specific vs. non-specific
- Online drives significant walk in and phone traffic
- Printed Yellow Pages surprisingly valuable to the survey respondents.

Fifth Speaker: Gord Hotchkiss, "Eye Tracking"

How do you do eye tracking on what the SERP may look like for personalized results?

Problem One: Predicting the Future
- Google Universal Search results today
- Ask 3D results today
- Our guess as to what personalization will look like on a Google in 12 months
- Our guess as to what Google might look like in 3 years. (2010)

Problem Two: Testing the Future
- Personalization for Google: 2008 and Google: 2010
- Signed out panel into a test Google account
- Gave them a scenario (see if the iPhone is for you) and let them have a free session
- Went through search and web history and personalization

Golden Triangle vs Chunking
When we introduced a universal search onto the page, rather than seeig the traditional golden triangle, the user divided the page up into chunks to be scanned later. It's more of an E shape. The users first went to the upper left, but then went quickly to the picture, then read the listing immediately adjacent to the image. The premise there being that the "special" presentation of that listing must have some special about result.

Graphics "Fencing" Scanning
When a graphic has borders or bounds, users visually extend the lines of the box and divides the page with a "fence" that the user does not scan beyond. When the image is set lower on the page, the user scans more of the page. Higher on the page, less of the page is scanned.

Interesting...

- The distance radius of the businesses most searched for in local search? 1-20 miles. Most users prefer to buy w/in 40 miles of their home.

- Users scan multi-column listings as quickly as they scan linear listings.

posted cshel in Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose at August 20, 2007 8:25 PM Comments (0)

August 20, 2007

Contextual Ads & AdSense Clinic

This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about improving them to do better from Google AdSense and other contextual ad placements.
Moderator:

* Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media, Zonder.com

Speakers:

* Jennifer Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com
* Jeremy Schoemaker, Founder and CEO, Shoemoney Media Group Inc.
* Bryan Vu, AdSense Associate Manager, Google

First victim: socialissues.wiseto.com
Project from Thompson Gale, a large publisher, that took a lot of its articles and put them online and are looking to make money. Contextual advertising was their first guess.
Shoemoney: There's a cloud and it's in an iframe. It's hard to target. (Bryan investigates and says it's actually not.)
Jensense: Fo