Search Marketing Expo 2008 East Archives

Give It Up: White Hat Edition - This session has SEOs sharing favorite, little-known and powerful techniques that wont get you banned in search engines from trying.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Kimberly Krause Berg, Usability Consultant/Owner, UsabilityEffect.com
Kate Morris, Search Engine Marketing Manager, RateGenius
Tyler Shears, Online Marketing Manager, Databanq Media
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive

This post is under embargo until November 7, 2008, at 9AM PST.

Shari is up first and she's going to talk about searchers intent with search engine's intent. You're designing for people who use the search engines - not for the search engines themselves.

When you design a site, you understand user goals, company business goals, and search engine goals. Understand those goals before usability tests. What does she do? She searches. She gets her keywords from keyword research tools (WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery), she does user interviews and usability testing (1on1 contact), and she looks at the how - analytics and click streams.

A few weeks ago, she was training some writers and they needed to rank for election terms. Google gives a lot of information about intent. There are some tabs on top like Web, News, Images, etc (blue tab) - you can SEO based on those aspects.

What about Wikipedia? Most people think it's evil. Wikipedia is telling you why SEs are delivering results that they do - it means it's an informational search!

When people use a SE they want to do 3 things: go to a website, find information about a topic, and they want to do something. Sometimes they want in-depth information. When they buy high ticketed items, they may do a search before adding to cart - 63-80% of web searches. Wikipedia in the SERPs is a strong indication that it's an informational search.

What about a search for "refrigerators?" There are product links on top. You may see product links and informational pages (HowStuffWorks). You also see Best Buy, Whirlpool, etc - these are category pages. Why should category pages appear in informational searches? That means that people are probably looking for a list of items before making the purchase. Look in search engines, see which results are appearing, and apply that to the type of web page.

If you search for "refrigerator" (without plural), things are different. It's an informational search here but it won't have the reviews and like. There's something to remember about search listings - title tag, meta tag, and URL. For informational searches, the snippet is HUGE. That's very important for the conversions. (She wrote about it on SearchEngineLand in May!)

There are also navigational searches - like "barack obama" - people look for that name and they want to visit his official site. These people rarely go beyond the #1 and #2 positions and will probably stay there for a long period of time. That's why sites like this are ranked high. Therefore, have realistic expectations about positioning. Use the right pages, right keywords, right place in search results for different searcher intentions.

Michael Gray talks about how to optimize Flickr photos to drive traffic

Take pictures people want to see.
* Use a good subject and have a good quality picture.
* If it's a dull subject and it's really a good picture, you can make it like a piece of artwork.
* Another subject could be a good subject and bad quality picture - people will still want to see it. Think Bigfoot.
* You can have a really bad picture that nobody is interested in. If you're taking these pictures, you're an idiot.

If you have a photo with the name DSC0392.JPG, you should optimize - put the keyword in the title. But for a title like "Walt Disney World," think about something narrowed down - "Magic Kingdom" is still broad. "Cinderella Castle" is broad too. Add the month or the year. That helps make it unique. If Google sees the same title on pictures, they'll filter it out. Chances are that will be yours!
- West Side Cinderella Castle Magic Kingdom Walt Disney World is very long tail and probably won't get filered.
- Keyword rich titles avoid duplication.

Build as many internal links to that picture as you possibly can. Use Flickr groups. Submit to multiple groups - find the relevant ones. Submit to multiple groups. Titles of pictures will be your internal linking text.
- Get your pictures to have ratings and comments. Higher ratings will give you higher ranks than others. There are groups of people who vote your pictures. Submit only your best pictures to this group. Follow all group rules. Have thick skin when you do this - there are some guys who will take the professional photographer angle and criticize your image.

Use Tags: name, city, location. There is no right way for Multiple Words - some people will split the words up (las, vegas instead of "las vegas") and some won't (lasvegas). Don't use too many tags.

Creative Commons - license pictures so others can use them. They will give you credit. Also, consider commercial re-use. Take pictures bloggers want to use.

Bring it all together:
- Submit higher quality pictures and pics people want
- Don't add links to all of your pictures.
- Only add links to the ones that get traffic. Links are nofollowed but that's okay you just want the traffic.
- Add a link to the most relevant deep page on your site, not homepage.
- Drive traffic not just from Flickr. Eventually you will drive traffic from multiple sources.

Some tools that help:
- Picasa
- Flickr Bulk Uploader
- Picnik - onlne photo editor
- WordPress Photo Uploader Plugin

Kate Morris is next and talks about developing links from the inside out.

#1: Tell what you know.
Hiring a student - we've all been interns. Why is this a link building tip? They are undergraduates and are willing to do anything you give them and they are moldable. You can also get graduate students and employees that are going to school. Here's why: .edu links! Every student and every university has space on a website. Ask nicely to display what they're working on, the clients they're working with, and more. That's another .edu link. You can also link from organizations.
Also, they can just do other link building and that will be pricess for them down the road.

What do they spend most of their time doing? Research projects. What do we hate doing? Research projects! They love to write - let them do that!
They are your content developers. White papers = school papers. They're young and creative.
Pay your interns for their work. (Paid links? No, that's not it.) They will just be happier in their position.

Yahoo! Answers has been priceless because it's community building. She works in auto refinance and Yahoo actually has something related to this.
Don't automate your answer though.
Give details. Talk to their specific situation.
Add the whole URL on Yahoo Answers. If you're chosen for the best answer, it will be indexed!
Be transparent. If you're representing a company, tell them that you are. That transparency gives you more trust. She has built more business through this than any other link building campaign she's worked on.
Also, clean up the spam. You are good at spotting what is not good for the end users.
Vote and check daily.

Other answer services include Live Search QnA and WikiAnswers and Answers.com

Partner and affiliate links: if you have partners or an affiliate system, contact them for links! Use trackable URLs, SEO URLs, and blog posts. Ask them to write that blog post about you. Partners can build partner link pages. They're not the BEST links but they're still links. This is the easiest way to get people to talk about you. Use the network that you have.

Tyler Shears talks about white hat link building. stop looking at links to "get down the road." It's part of your business model. People don't think that they should have it in their business model.

Simple steps: start a WordPress blog on your domain. It gives you an opportunity to connect with your visitors and get them engaged. You should also focus on social media submissions.
Just having great content, though, doesn't work. Find out industry standards. Find what's hot. What are people talking about? Use keyword research tools to generate the exposure. Certification type programs will work for relevant industries.

Many people don't really use directories but should. Create a directory, create a listing for the top 100 businesses and email them with their listing inforamtion. Require the businesses to place a badge on their site to claim their listing in the directories. Rotate anchor text and link.

What about juicy links? InternetMarketingNinjas.com and Linkscape are great tools.
- Link sponsorship emails are spammy.
- Giving out free SEO advice is the best way to get in touch with every webmaster. Point out WWW vs. nonwww, missing duplicate title tags, completely flash site, internal architecture suggestions. The benefits are that you can build a business relationship (affiliate, email marketing, content). If it develops into something further and they link back to you, the chances are the link will be more valuable after they listen to your SEO advice.

Kim Krause Berg is up next. She's going to talk about a real life case study and reputation management through organic SEO. She had a friend named Nathan DiStefano who is an artist. He wants high rankings. But another guy named Nathan DiStefano wrote a review in Amazon about a vibrator. How do you fix this problem?

He has nathandistefano.com and it's in the #1 spot. The #2 spot is the Amazon link, though. How does the good stuff get pushed up?
- The site was old. There were too many images. It had a blah title tag. Google had a good meta description. The life of domain. He offered art for sale but didn't sell any because of a high bounce rates and no external links.
- Got another domain, nathandistefanoart.com. Basic SEO optimization techniques were applied.
* Wrote a testimonial which ranked #2
* The bio page was expanded upon (so that people would want to link in).
* Connected with art galleries
* Promoted new URL in new business cards
* Local information added to metatag

What else can you do? Make an Amazon account - combat it where it's at. Write reviews on art and music - local books if possible.

Google:
In 3 month's time, the site was in the #1 and #2 spot. The description says it's the official site and shows what he does.
The #3 spot is the Chamber of Commerce link, #4 is his MySpace page, #5 is his Facebook page, #16 is his first website with his old domain.

Yahoo:
Results in Yahoo were even better. Magazines were doing interviews with him. Kim's testimonial was in the #3 spot, new site was in the #2 spot, and the old site was in the #1 site. All other sites link to and reference the new site.

Stephan Spencer talks about some other things
- Keyword competitive ness - intitle: operator shows pages that are more focused on your search terms than the pages returned without the operator. If you have a high ratio of 500:1, then people aren't optimizing for that search term becasue it's not in the title tag.
- Anchor text: it's still an important signal for Google. Use the allinanchor: to see the strength of the anchor text. A low ranking indicates that you've got some work to do for improving anchor text of your backlinks.
- Indexation: do a &start=990&filter=0 takes you to the last pages of results and turns off omitted results.
- inurl: - lets you see past the first 1000 results. Refine into a subdirectory and add a directory or filename with inurl.
- Mumber range helps restrict results set to a set of model numbers, product numbers, etc. Number range with inurl isn't supported. Product number must be on page. e.g. somesciencepage.com "product/1700..1750"
- Number range operator is also great for copyright year searches. Use with intext: operator to improve signal-to-noise ratio: intext: "copyright 1993..2005" -2008 blog

Supplemental index doesn't exist. It's obscure now. Google closed the site:domain.com *** - adfadff loophole that returned all the supplemental results. Supplemental results aren't labeled either.
- You can try site:www.domain.com -allinurl:www.domain.com will supposedly return main index pages only. You can also use a supplmental index ratio calculator - http://www.mapelli.info/tools/supplemetal-index-ratio-calculator/

Filetype refinement with filetype:operator
- confidential business plan - template filetype:doc
- forrester research grapevine filetype:pdf
Matches the file extension on the URL.

Date stamping
- Look for date range within the last 199 months. &qdr&m=199

Cache - look at content that is subscriber only. But what if you want to look at a cached page without a footprint? Use the cache: operator and add &strip=1. This won't load Javascript or images.

Similar pages
- related: operator - it shows who links to you in addition to he URL you speciifed. This limits to a result set of 26 through 31. It's useful for identifying neighborhoods.
- He shows some InternetMarketingNinjas.com tools that show link opportunities.

OR operator
- words in the search query are ANDed by default, but you can use |
- site:edu | site:gov creidt cards "web | email" by *" for a search query -
- No cached link? Use Google trasnlate and translate it from English to English.

Creative Commons - he loves this.

GOOG-411 - You can even map results.

Rob Kerry is last up. HE talks about link love.

- Websites love free content almost as much as free money. Suppling data/content makes your site an authority and strengthens your brand. It's cheap alternative to bying links or social media "gurus".

A case study - a site that offers financial news to major publishers. They rewrite stories toavoid duplicate content issues. They integrate a copyright link on every sotry. XML feeds ensure that content is loaded on a publisher's domain so that results in link juice.
- Results in Sky News, AOL, and more.

Benefits - powered by logos can strengthen brands and copyright links and benfit SEO. The content publishers are choosing the links and are happy. Youy can gain links fro,m super hubs that never sell inlinks. It can work in any industry.

Examples: car insurance - offer gas prices comparisons or new car reviews. Poker - provide a feed of player stats or tournament news. Kitchen applicances - offer recipes that make use of any appliance.

This session takes you on a whirlwind tour of search marketing tools you’ll want to consider adding to your toolbox.

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Ken Jurina, President, Epiar
Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts

Ken Jurina talks about his tools first.

Firefox extensions:
- They work right into your browser. They're quick, powerful, and free.
- Not many critiques.
- Great for auditing websites, there are many extensions such as SEOpen, SearchStatus, Groowe Toolbar, PDF download, Roboform Toolbar, Web Developer, Customize Google, and more.

SpyFu gives competitive insight into PPC/organic insight. It works within the browser and is free but you can pay for more things.

Browsershots shows what your site looks like in many browsers. It's a bit slow and may time out but it's great becasue you can taggle screensize, Flash, Javascript, and more. It's also fun if you're bored. It's free!

GSiteCrawler - gsitecrawler.com
- You an simulate crawls, get XML sitemaps, and view duplicate content issues. It's slow, though and it can get in a loop with dynamic URLs.
- How much does it cost? It's free!

Google Insights for Search identifies phrases by topic/brand/category you want to rank on. You cna geotarget where you sell your products, identify product seasonality, and identify if news tories relate to spikes in searches. The critique is that there are no "real" search frequency number - only relative comparison. There's this cool breakout tool area that shows phrases that spike in search frequency which can help in keyword research.

Time Fox - functionfox.com
This is a time tracking tool that will help you from a productivity perspective. It has free upgrades and no contracts.

Epiar Marketview lets you datamine and analyze keyword research and isolates what people put into a search engine.
- It's not free though :(

Deb Mastaler is up next. She says that her focus is on tools that help link building.

She talks about RoboForm and how when you're link building over and over, the redundancy kills you. Use RoboForm as a timesaver. It's very inexpensive and you can control the data that gets input into different directories.

Free tools include:
- Xenu's Link Sleuth : checks for broken links and verifies normal links, images, frames, plugins, backgrounds, local image maps, stylesheets, and whatever else. It takes a lot of room but it's the most thorough app for checking links.
- Link Valet: it does the same thing but doesn't require a download. It's not as inclusive as Xenu.

When you're looking for authority sites, you want sites that rank well. You can try
- The Langreiter Tool: this compares site rankings across different search engines in a graph.
- Googleguy.de: compares sites and linked side by side.
The downside: they can't be exported.

Searching for authority sites:
- Deb mentions that SEObook has some great tools, including HubFinder which is at http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php
- HubFinder is a colocation tool. It compares backlinks of 2 or more sites and points out their co-occurring backlinks.

Link Harvester makes sorting out duplicate links from the same site eash, which allows you to quickly and deeply query the Yahoo or MSN backlink database. It's at http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php

Paid tools include:
SEO Elite: seoelite.com
PR Prowler: prprowler.com

Backlink Analyzer: http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/ - it does the same exact thing as SEO Elite and PR Prowler but it is free!
- It's a free link analysis tool that shows what anchor text is linking to a page or site.

Firefox backlink analyzers:
- SEO Link Analysis: http://yoast.com/seo-tools/link-analysis/
- Link Diagnosis: linkdiagnosis.com
It gives you visual representations and link data on the site.
- Bad Neighborhood tools scan outlinks on your website. You're not responsible for the links that go to you but you can control outbound links. http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

Utility searching sites:
- SoloSEO and Backlink Builder find sites that give you the ability to add links.
http:/www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html

She talks about directories and places to find relevant links. She also emphasizes that hiring an intern is gold!
- Directory Big Boards, ISEDB, Blog Catalog

You also need to utilize social media tools
- Buzz tool from Pierre Far - ekstreme.com/buzz - follows trends from Technorati, Google Trends, blog posts tagged with a keyword, social bookmarks, and more.

Backlink Social Celebrity will tell you how many times you site has been socially bookmarked and where. It's also made by Pierre: http://ekstremecom/backlink-social-celeb - look for these sites that make a lot of noise.

Competitive Research: Domain Tools is helpful as well. You can get similar domains and their age starting with the oldest.

The Dapper.net tool lets you provide users with content and services through widgets, RSS feeds, Google gadgets, and many others. In a nutshell, it creates RSS feeds for sites that don't have them.

Email extractor: A commercial tool - http://www.webextractor.com/index.htm - it pulls contact info off pages and onto spreadsheets for easy contact.

Twitter Alert tool: www.tweetbeep.com - get an update each time your URL/name/keywords are mentioned on Twiter.

Last up is Stephan Spencer.

seo-browser.com - you go to any URL and see what the spider sees. It's handy because only the first anchor text counts

Command line fun
- wget, lwp-request, lynx (which is a text-only browser)
You can also use strings, od, rsync, convert, etc. He wrote a blog post on these on stephanspencer.com.
lw-p-request -S bananarepublic.com
- shows headers, for example.

Thumbshots.com
- give a search term, choose engine, and compare it with another search term.
- you can even do operator searches

InternetMarketingNinjas.com - expensive tools but worth it
- Strongest Subpages, Top 10, Forward Link Title Tag tool,

SEOmoz Pro
- Linkscape
- Trifecta
- PageRank Strength tool - which has historical PR

Raven toolbar for Firefox allows for fast switching between multiple social media accounts, link acqusiiton planning, and ROI tracking

Metatags sidebar tool for Firefox.

Netcraft toolbar lets you know what the site is running (Apache, IIS, etc.)

WASP - Web analytics solution profiler - it gives you data on the analytics and the parameter that are being passed in Javascript.

Woopra - cool analytics tool for Wordpress

Robot Replay - a fun tool that lets you paste Javascript and it will record the mouse gestures as the users traverse your site so that you can play those back and watch the users move the mouse around

YSlow is a Firefox addon and shows you the things that are slowing down your pages for loading.

Xino (spelled correctly) checks PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings, and more.

QuarkBase is a handy tool that shows different stats about your website and competitors.

Enquisite is a search analytics tool that rocks. It allows you to see which search terms are on page 2 and also city by city, you can see the varied search rankings (not only on datacenter, but city!) They're releasing a feature on Friday that lets you look for converting terms on one engine that are not converting on another engine.

Stephan also preaches GTD (getting things done, David Allen) and says that Things for Mac is awesome. Journler is another tool. OmniFocus is like Things. iGTD is a final tool.

Some guy in the audience preaches Excel. Stephan says that Text to Columns and Pivot Tables are awesome.

Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com explains that this room is for in-house SEOs, all day.

Eileen Winslow, Sr. Director of SEO, MeziMedia is up first to talk. She worked at Shopzilla and even BruceClay in the past. She believes in having a devoted SEO team.

Top 10 Questions She Gets:

(1) How Does SEO Work? She explains how it works. Basically getting your site more and higher visibility in the search engines.

(2) What Does SEO Do? There is technical optimization to make them search engine friendly. Then content optimization, then link building and then reporting.

SEO Projects:
- Tech optimization
- Page Revamps
- New pages
- Reporting
- Etc

SEO Operations:
- Keyword Research
- Taxonomy
- SEO tags
- Link Requests
- Content
- Community

(3) Why Should I Care? Free Traffic + Conversions = Bottomline Revenue

(4) Who is on your team? Director, manager, analysts, and assistants.

(5) Who does your team work with?
(A) Product owner; content, usability, network admins, project managers, engineers
(B) CEO; biz intel, sales, sem, biz dev, and PR

(6) How Do Projects get on the Site? From idea to approval, to spec, to build, to priority, to plan to demo to QA and to launch.

(7) How do projects get high priority?
- Forecasting is critical
- Join efforts
- Piggy backing on things already being done
- Trading resources
- Building SE into roadmaps
- Success breeds confidence
- Tip: Not everything is high priority

(8) How do you target operations?
- 80/20 rule
- Marketing calendar
- Thematic clustering
- Project support
- Glory keyword
- Tip: You cant fix everything, especially at once

(9) How do you measure success?
- SEO revenue, SEO incoming, conversion rate & RPI
- When to report? weekly, monthly and quarterly also post launch and 2-8 weeks post launch.

(10) Why is traffic up or down?
- Give clients an action plan on what you will do.

Brian Piepgrass, from UpTake is next up.

Start ups.... You likely have a small budget. You also likely have strong motivation, because time is of the essence. Space might be tight in your office. You also have very little process in a start up. You do get to work with your whole team.

4 Habits of Successful Start Up SEO:
- Insert yourself into the important process
- Build Rapport
- Limited Budget
- Missed this one

Suggestion 1: Get involved in the development process
Suggestion 2: Take on an "official role" if you can
Suggestion 3: Promote a "culture" of Traffic & SEO

Building Rapport:
- Target Your Boss
- Target your brand guy or traditional marketer
- Target your developers

(1) Drive links every day
(2) Check stats every day
(3) Recognize when your in over your head and if you need, find great people

Bill Scully from Siemens is next up.

Invest in yourself:
- Listen to SEO and Online Marketing Podcasts
- Checkout WebmasterRadio.FM and Search iTunes
- Read newsletters and blogs
- Download whitepapers
- Check on twitter

Analyze your web logs and reports
- Key campaign traffic changes
- Goal changes
- Overall traffic changes
- 404 errors
- Optimize problem areas

Work with Teams:
- Conduct weekly meetings
- Conduct one and ones
- Attend IT/Web Dept meetings
-- Application changes
-- Structure changes
-- New project scopes
-- Remind them of SEO

Finding the Right People is hard

Attend a WebEx
- Search Marketing Expo
- SES
- Marketing Experiments
- Schedule demos with companies

Communicate with everyone, supporting them, and make sure they feel they are getting credit. They will keep coming to you, and you can gain bigger budgets. Make them feel like they are successful.

If you can, create a quarterly newsletter to send out to the teams.

Experiment with things, try new things, try ad formats, ad networks, try SEO techniques. Go to SEO conferences at least twice per year.

Audit templates
- Check nofollows
- Make sure robots.txt is ok
- Check 404s
- Check redirects

Schedule training sessions

Update XML Sitemap
- Rerun your site map software
- Upload new file to site
- Submit it

Closing
- Plan your calendar
- Invest in yourself
- Communicate
- Make internal customers successful
- Always sell value

Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo! Inc. is last up.

She came into Yahoo as a one person team and had to build things up.

(1) The main thing she needed to do was get buy in from the top level.
(2) Then create accountability
(3) Set up underlying process and train teams such as training, resources, CMS that are SE friendly and reporting.
(4) Implement the work

She then lists out the teams and players...

Challenges:
- Where to Start?
- Lack of top level buy in
- Lack of accountability and no implementation
- Lack of education
- Chasing your tail with search site refresh
- Closed doors

And she showed us this new video, Ill embed:

Awesome!

Googleopoly - With its search share approaching 80% in the US by some measures — and a deal to put paid results on the second largest search engine Yahoo — and expanding into new areas all the time, are we in Googleopoly? If so, can anything slow Google down? And if we are in an era where Google will be dominant for some time, are there strategies search marketers need to keep in mind?

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School
Shelly Palmer, Managing Director, Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC
Kevin Ryan, CEO and Founder, Motivity Marketing
Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikia Search

When you think of Google, who do you think of?
Jeff Rohrs talks about the exposure of Google and its reach. He asks if you're afraid that Google is too ubiquitous. He asks if you think of Google as Sergey/Larry or if you think of Google as the Borg and something that will assimilate you and take over. Is Google a monopoly or not?

Jeff: When does antitrust law come into play?
James: It's the opposite of competition of undercutting each other. Monopolists raise their costs sky high. It's not illegal to have a monopoly but you can't do unfair things to get one and once you have one, you can't exploit them unfairly. It's illegal if you have a monopoly to drive competitors out of business.

Jeff: Google is not one thing. It is many many things. There's organic and paid sides of the house. As someone who runs SES and SMX, are you hearing concerns about advertisers worrying about this growth of Google?
Kevin: When you look at search traffic, every service uses a site of measuring. Advertisers are concerned obviously because they are not liking this Google/Yahoo partnership. The details of this partnership were intentionally vague so that you couldn't understand it. Someone from the DOJ isn't going to know. The rest of the world doesn't know what they don't know. As a general rule, people don't know that having one source of information and being restricted to this is a bad thing.
Jeff: In organic search share, Google's growth is huge in many countries.
Chris: We're going to see competitive responses. I was at SMX China last week and of all companies and all places, Microsoft revealed a new suite of tools for advertisers for complete transparency for bidding process, quality score, and more. I found the transparency remarkable. I think this is going to force Google to open up. Wikia search and so on are pushing the transparency. We're seeing other forces here. Google is not interfering with the competition and it's increasing in a good way.

Jeff shows a few graphs on the dominance of Google on a variety of properties, like maps and video. Does that concern Shelly?
Shelly: We have to think a little bit about this before we decide it's a concern. Google is an ecosystem and it's not likely to go anywhere unless someone forces them to. Google, unchecked, is pretty much unstoppable. All of my clients are really caught in a funny place. Not only is Google a medium but it's a metric. It changes the game. Here, the medium is the metric. I want to look at my Google Analytics to determine how I was as a brand marketer through other media. Google is a metric by which I measure my business. When you talk about things that are crept into the fabric of my business this way, there is a lot of dissent. They sell the currency of intention. They won't stand in your way. Google wants to get you from where you are and where you want to go. They charge you a toll if you click on the non-organic side. But they just need to make you stay. Google is so part of the metric of how you do other media and that's because of its size. That's something you can't unseed culturally. People say to run a campaign and look at Google. Google is a deliverable metric to your client.

Jeff asks Jimmy about Google growth and Wikia Search as a potential competitor.
Jimmy: When I think of Google's monpoly, I want to make a distinction between the search service and the advertiising business. Search doesn't have many network externalities from the end user. If we're all friends on Facebook, however, and I want to switch to another service, it will be hard. This is very different from the advertising marketplace, particularly the intentionality marketplace where the buyers need to go where sellers are and the sellers need to go where buyers are. It's really hard for anyone else to supplant that. I can launch a search engine anThd I'll be thrilled to get 1-2% of the market. To launch an advertising marketplace, it's really much harder.

Jeff: On the paid search discussion, on the advertising side of the house, are there any legal implications for dominance?
James: It depends on what they do with that dominance. You need to think what the substitutes are. The Google/Doubleclick merger was more worrisome than the Google-Yahoo deal because buys on Google/DC. It's hard to see people being clobbered by Google.

Jeff: So let's see who is worried about this partnership. Rather, let's see what it even is.
Kevin: If I've understood the 17,000 documents, it's an exchange of inventory or a handshake to figure out how to monetize together.

Jeff shows a list that has more skeptics than advocates in the Google and Yahoo deal. He also shows the Google-Yahoo advertising agreement fact page.

Jeff: So what are your impressions of the deal?
Kevin: I love Google's culture and what it means to the working environment and how they organically built everything. To me, that's something to be admired. I worked in ad agencies and you throw people on the bus to get ahead in life, but you don't see that at Google. A part of me says that it's a great thing and maybe the world would be better off and we should join the collective. The other part says that Google = search + android + analytics + .... + - that, to me is impressive. If we define monopoly as using this power to force competitors out, if you look at all of these pieces together, it looks to me like that power is not being used in a nice way.

Jeff: Shelly, you see a different perspective - what is it?
Shelly: Personally, I could care less whether they do this deal or not. Speaking for advertisers buying, it's not a good thing. You can think of Yahoo and Google as WABC and WNBC television with slightly different audiences that have different media mixes. This mashup will take my ability to do that as an advertiser out. As subtle as this may be, sharepoints in advertising are the metric that matters most. This mashup doesn't let you be great at that as a buyer. From a media perspective, it's not a great thing.
Jimmy: My thoughts are very close to the opposite of what Shelly said. I think that Yahoo made a huge mistake by not being bought by Microsoft.
Jeff: We're in agreement that this is a defensive move from that takeover?
Jimmy: It's certainly an alternative. For Yahoo, that's a huge problem - to some extent, giving up this something that is a core functionality of their business. Their approach is "why bother trying to build this if we can outsource it?"
Chris follows up on Jimmy's comments. He said that the deal has been suspended indefinitely and Yahoo and AOL may merge. If that merger happens, he thinks Microsoft may buy the combined property and that will kill the Google/Yahoo partnership. That's the combination he sees and doesn't expect this to happen. (This is going to be good.)
James: The deal makes me sad because someone who ought to be trying to do something better is giving up on it.
Shelly: First of all, that ship sailed. The Yahoo guys put up a white flag. It is sad but it was a business decision. They agreed to put this off until the DOJ reviews it, though. A combined Yahoo-AOL is a content behemoth. It would be the #1 email client and IM client in the world, but that value may not be convered into wealth. If Microsoft did it, it would be hysterically funny. The only way that would happen is if Steve asked Jerry out for a cup of coffee.
Jeff asks about the human element.
Shelly says is that Microsoft is an evil empire (and not Google). Yahoo/AOL at some level is going to do something. Before the age of the Internet, we can think of two of everything competing head to head - Coke/Pepsi, Bud/Miller. But next to Google, who is the search guy? Next to eBay, who is the auction guy? There are no binary systems that rotate against one another. Maybe this kind of environment isn't set up for that.
Kevin: It's a debacle or clusterfuck ("I'm just quoting him. I'd never say that word.") Google built everything organically and this is a decisive shift in strategy. Yahoo tried to build through acquisition. They build amazing things, the founders cash out, and you're left with white collar ditch diggers trying to go to their 9-5 job. Most of the clients that I work with are acquiring and figuring out how to structure their companies. The worst you can do is acquire too quickly. If you look at the acquisitions of Yahoo/Microsoft, they botched their acquisitions into disarray. If that would happen, it would be a Clint Eastwood situation.

Jeff: Google build the search organically but they did some strategic acquisitions. Not Google has its own brand -- you "google" to search. Does that give you pause? While Yahoo/Microsoft have their own properties, but search is so strong, does that give Google a disproportional competitive advantage that is a utilititarian monopoly?
Kevin: Those acquisitions came a lot fewer and a lot smarter. I want to know who is searching and what they're searching for. Before TV converges with our computer screen, we're going to see more search and behavioral targeting because it's a means of collecting data. What are you searching for? What are you looking for? That doesn't worry me as much.
Shelly: America is a funny place and so you can only be as big as you can be. Certain things need a lot of scale. Every time you think of Googleopoly, I think of when DOJ tried to break up Microsoft and there wasn't a guy in the room who didn't know what a browser was to make a learned scholarly call on whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. I think there are opportunities for all interesting things like Wikipedia. These positions can be leveraged to move your own agenda forward. People should talk about that instead.
Jimmy: If you hear that Yahoo is promoting their brand through their search, this is no big deal to anybody. That's why they lost in search. One of the ways I like to think about search is as a form of journalism - you're reporting on the world. You need to face the same kinds of questions - if you're the NYTimes, do you want to write unfavorably about your advertisers? NOt if you're the NYTimes. If Google is promoting Google Maps over MapQuest becasue they want to promote their own property, that doesn't sound so good. I think Google Maps is promoting itself because it's just better than MapQuest. But there's also Gooogle Knol and Knol sucks. Right now, it would be completely a shock to everyone is Google started promoting Knol prominently on the SERPs. That undermines the Google brand. They can be strategic in the future when Knol (if?) is of higher quality.

Jeff: Google is synonymous with search. Wikipedia is synonymous with encyclopedia. Is Wikia synonymous with anything?
Jimmy: I have no idea. I'm just having fun.

Chris: You mentioned maps and YouTube about Google's promotion of products. I would be willing to bet that no more than 10 or 15 of those products can be named. There are outliers who haven't gained traction.

Jeff shows a slide that says that Bloomberg said that United was dead. CNN thought Steve Jobs is dead. This is a cultural concern about what is truth. What is our responsibility to this to ensure accuracy?
James: People need to look beyond the first page of results.
Jeff: Is Google culpable?
Shelly: Google is a pipeline. It's like blaming radio waves for what's carried on the radio. Google picked up a date -- it should never have been on Bloomberg. When people react to these search things, you'd think they'd know better. With the Steve Jobs thing, it was picked up by Digg and Twitter and then Silicon Valley insider wrote an article about the importance of citizen journalism -- but everything about the report was wrong and everything was inaccurate. There's a lot of misinformation. Where in the food chain are things falling apart? There's a mob mentality. It's like the game of telephone. We're coming to a time where Bloomberg soon won't be able to control this information.
Jimmy: People believed the Steve Jobs thing becasue the source is CNN. If you heard about it on Wikipedia, people would be like "so what? Let's check the sources and see if it's actually true." Most people know that Wikipedia can be wrong.
Kevin: "Unfiltered unedited news" - the only problem with that term is the word "news." News is crap.

Jeff: If that topic isn't scary, let's bring up another entity that is centralizing the power - the government. If Google knows what I'm searching, surfing, clicking, receiving via email, and purchasing (Google Analytics), and calling (Android), should we be concerned because of what the government may want to do? It's out of Google's hands then.
Shelly: Someone made a compelling argument for Google's data. Does anyody really care? If the government wants something from you, the electronic footprint that everybody leaves without Google is so incredibly frightening [that it will happen anyway].
Jimmy: If you are Osama bin Laden or someone of intense interest, they may subpoena and gather that data. For most people most of the time, it's not like your divorce attorney is going to go out and subpoena records for 5,000 differnet websites. One stop shopping is more interesting.

Jeff says that Wired had an article that Google doesn't disclose things about its properties. There was a Google server farm that isn't on Google Maps (so why is everything else on Google Maps?) Does that give you any pause?
Chris: When was this image taken? 2 years ago, Microsoft was accused of obliterating Apple because Apple's information wasn't in the satellite imagery. Is this Google protecting their own interests or was the satellite imagery outdated?
Jimmy: Did Google admit that they censored the image?
Jeff: The implication of the article implied that Google did. Chris's point is very good. My follow-up is "how do I figure that out?"
Chris: Go to Microsoft Live and find the same images. Google doesn't show you the date on the image. I personally laugh becasue Google has said the same thing to me that they don't disclose this and that.
Shelly: There's an important thing that needs to be said. Anyone who does any statistics for any purpose, you can unbelievably predict what a population will do - no matter how good you are, you cannot predict what an individual is going to do.
Kevin: There are places that we are not entitled to see. We need to have confidence in the people making these decisions for us but we don't. People are stupid. The collective wisdom and the entire foundation is flawed.

Jeff: What about Google's phone using Android? What does this do about Googleopoly?
James: It is the best moves for competition that you've seen in this space. The mobile space is dominant in phones and now we have 2 players in the open space of phones. This is the competition that drives innovation and drives prices down. In the mobile space, this is a wonderful development.
Jimmy: Anything to knock the carriers in the head would be fabulous. (I agree but I want some Sprint love, please.)
Kevin: We're force fed carrier crap. No one owns the local information and the local space is crap. We're hoping it doesn't happen at Google.
Shelly: Android would be more interesting in 4G. We don't know what phone companies are going to do - they sat on DSL, after all - but they bought 100% of the usable 700MHz that can turn the phone into spectacular things. The carriers, however, own that spectrum. It's a great shot at competition but there's an FCC rule inside of this that says that they have to be open to other networks and theoretically that rule applies to 700MHz as well. We'll see how long the lobbiests will let that stand. This phone can never realize its potential unless the network exists.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! is first up to talk about Search Monkeys.

Search today is limited choice, personalization, visibility, influence and limited innovation. But the web is evolving and search must also evolve.

Search Monkey:
- Publishers Collaborate
- Meaning behind the link
- Richer experience
- Relevant and personal
- Faster task completion

He then shows Yelp and how the search monkey relates to that.

Monkey breaks down into a media portion, task links, structured data and sharing.

Two types of search monkey apps:
(1) Abstract results, like Yelp
(2) Infobar, a bar of info below the result. The infobar can be for any site, not just urs (such as wikipedia).

SearchMonkey Template evolves to a new template.

How it works?
- Structure data
- Tell users about it
- Build the app (he explains how, but if your a developer go to http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/.

He then shows a few more examples of those Monkeys.

Here is the gallery of Monkeys: gallery.search.yahoo.com

Why should you care?
- More control over your results
- Help you users find you
- Higher quality traffic
- CTR lift as high as 15%
- Competitors are doing it already

Eric Lander, Associate Editor, Search Engine Journal is next up to talk about Google Sitelinks.

What are sitelinks? Enhanced links under the first search result.

Google does this because they want to improve the user experience, help users navigate to your site and refine results.

When do they show up? company brands, important names, proprietary phrases. Also for reptitive behavior searches and Google Analytics.

Sitelinks are showing up more often for more queries all the time.

Fundamentals:
- They are totally automated
- Sitelinks use an independent algorithm
- Always appear in same order
- You'll want to use webmaster tools
- Keep the right mind and set or you'll go crazy

In Webmaster Tools you can control Sitelinks by tell them why you want a link to be removed.

Blocking Sitelinks:
- 90 day blocking period
-- You can block unblock easily
-- Count resets if viewing sitelinks page
-- Problem with multiple user accounts
-- About two week turnaround
- Google will show 4 or more, so you need more than 3

Case Sensitivity & Sitelinks:
- Apple is a good example

Timing:
- Sitelinks and Current Events
-- They dont get along
-- But you can work some angles to get it working
-- His tests are about 60 days old, so add a "current events" sitelinks so you can work with it over time

Best Practices:
- SEO basics
- Internal page strength
- Use webmaster tools to learn the reports and export links
- Sitelinks are Spider based and robots.txt apply and careful with your 301 use.
- XML Sitemaps Tests
-- Kate Morris' test with Rate Genius
-- Using the priority level had an impact
- Tagging and Social
-- Technorati
-- FriendFeed
-- Twitter
-- MyBlogLog

Order of Importance:
- Internal links (your navigation)
- External links (do tagging)
- Webmaster Tools

Benu Aggarwal, President and Founder, Milestone Internet Marketing is last up.

She starts off showing universal search examples. She then shows Sitelinks. Moves into local results. She recommends you own your business in Google Local, so you get your direct link in Google universal search.

Social Media is impacting your SERPs from UGC, blogs, videos, Twitter, etc.

Define your web site taxonomy, architecture and foundation.

Optimize your pages for local search.

Go after those video results.

Flickr is great she said.

Social bookmarking sites, digg, etc.

Sorry, market spiking down to under 500, a bit distracted now...

Should social media marketers disclose if they’re working on behalf of a client? Should relationships with power submitters be divulged? Social media marketing is still evolving, and this session looks at some of the ethical questions the area is struggling with.

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, Key Relevance
Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President, Director of Insights, Edelman Digital
Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear

Li speaks first about the ethics of social media ethics. She asks, "what is ethical social media marketing? Can we take the same ethics into social media?" Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Back in 1995, you were able to link everywhere and there were no questions about ethics because things were a lot slower. But now it's 2008 and we have Google and high speed TV. If you do something bad nowadays, this will bite you in the butt before you know it. When you think about pushing the envelope, be careful. When you are dealing with big brands and a major time investment, you have to be a lot more careful than for those throwaway domains/companies.

Too many people say "oh, this is a great opportunity to get a lot of links." When you're doing social media for links, you shouldn't be. Links are simply a byproduct. SEOs have been accused of being snake oil salesmen -- even from social media enthusiasts.

Ethics, by definition, is the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of users. Who decides the ethics? Nobody actually decides -- they can just give you a guide. Your audience "decides." They will tell you whether or not what you're doing is right or wrong. They will speak with their pockets/purses or via word of mouth marketing.

WOMMA provides 5 fundamentals for marketing.
* If your customers are happy, they will say good things about you.
* If you're honest or genuine, it will be a good thing.
* They also support sharing of stories.
* Word of mouth cannot be faked.
* Word of mouth marketing empowers the consumer.

Her example relates to General Hospital and a blog for Dr. Robin Scorpio about naming her nonexistent baby. You can do this if the community wants it!

Are avatars ethical? If you use the Eagles as your avatar, is that ethical? It depends on the community you're in and who you're talking to. The community will tell you what's ethical.

What's your intent? Are you trying to get fast traction in the SERPs only? If so, you may get caught.

You should also check your gut. Would you do this to your mom or grandmother? If you think you have had it tough, Li has had it worse. Her mom is a priest. (So the answer is "probably not.")

The next person who speaks about this is Marty Weintraub. Avatar theory is his topic. An avatar is how people represent themselves online. There's a remarkable lack of consensus regarding appropriate usage, corporate brand ambassadors, personal political agendas, etc. Should we market with it?

A continuum of black and white: you need to do a gut check and be honest. It's easy to con yourself. Marketing in public spaces is perfectly legal especially with disclosure. There are laws in the UK that prohibit non-transparency.

He then quoted me and some other people. I'm a bit red right now.

There are a lot of people who are using sites and they're normal - not marketers. How do we integrate without peeing in the pool?

Is social media about links? Ummmm...
It's the killer interrupt channel for paid search? YES!.
Is driving promotion and traffic worth anything?

A commercial avatar definition - social media participation for corporate gain.
Should you reveal your corporate affiliation? Is your intent selling? Are you going to monitor report and advise? Are you a girl/boy/straight/gay? It's various shades of who you are.
Are you hostile? Are you naughty or nice? Some people can't control themselves.
Who owns the avatar? Is it a blogger or the agency? Is it the agency or the client?

There are 10 common avatar models but the ideas are here:
- Season to taste, many permutations and unique approaches
- Don't kill the messenger.
- Judge not, even Google is not God

The interersted friend - extremely well developed persona that are evaluated by psychologists. They target lists of authority users by topic. They only manipulate to serve. Let them think they thought of it. Personal derivative of blogger team or mostly fictional. Makes real friends. Blogger feels emotions and shares. It does not defend the brand. IT builds links by bookmarking content. It sells by sophisticated and subtle manipulation. The ownership is negotiable.

What about the dofollow linkbulder? It is done in massive amounts. There are no personas.

The troll is the semi anonymous idiot who can do nasty things to your company.

The diital assets sharing profile- they are profiles created on sharing sites for real like Flickr and YouTube. They're owned by the company and the gift that keeps on giving. Link build to profiles, for example.

When a troll really doesn't like you, they can get a twitter account on another company's name.

Steve Rubel blogged this before I liveblogged it on his much-better post on Ethical Social Media Marketing. But in case you don't read his post, you can read mine. He talks about how the social media space is going to change. He's going to cover three things: the collaboration imperative - if you follow things you believe in, ethics will follow. There's an amazing intersection between search, social, and public relations. Ethics need to be considered there as well. Finally, the global economic climate needs to be considered because there will be changes soon.

The collaboration imperative: The term social media marketing is one that Steve hates. He recognizes that it's something that sticks. Why does it suck? All things social online is media. Also, all media is increasingly social. What is social media nowadays? We're not really sure. More importantly, social media marketing as a term or practice implies that channels are advertising venues to market your products, and they're not. They're still public spaces. You need to think of them as the internet's versions of the national parks. Respect their beauty. If we don't, we'll pollute the environment and make them less enjoyable for everybody. This is especially true for people who live there everyday.

He has a problem with how people use social media sites. They think it's a venue for advertising but it's not. He says that 50% of social media programs fail. Why? People wo participate in Facebook, Twitter, or blogs are doing it for a reason. They're not there for marketing! They're there to share ideas and unite based on a passion for something.

To succeed in this new world, brands need to move from taking tried and true marketing tactics and retro-fitting them for the new environment. We need to stop thinking about talk and buzz. Instead, there is an imperative that marketers engage publicly by collaborating with their audience towards a shared desired outcome. Follow that path. Be action-oriented toward a win-win outcome and transparent in the process and ethics won't be an issue. Stop retrofitting old topics into a new environment.

The other idea is the intersection of Search, Social, and PR (public relations, not PageRank). Google has become so powerful. Even if people don't know what Twitter is, they all gush for Google and can't live without it. If we're living in a globe of diehard Googlers, we're seeing that those of you who work in the SEO profession, Google and search engines increasingly reward high quality content that is socially connected. There are 3 buckets of high quality content: When you think of high quality content, it's either produced by brands, media companies, or by ordinary citizens. You can link this all back to PR professionals. The PR professionals generated that extreme.

The ethical implications are huge. The ones who do the best are the ones who go in the sphere and create the content. You need to be transparent. He says that he has a blog with 50k subscribers, 5k pages, and a PageRank of 7. That's scary and is a big responsibility. He mentions that he has HP as a sponsor to his site. What if he has a bad experience with a Dell laptop and says something about it? He could influence search results. However, that could be the most unethical things that he could do (especially with HP being a competitor to Dell). This, however, is becoming the norm. If we don't play our A-game, we're in trouble.

He's optimistic that he's part of the PR profession - it's a safe haven in this environment. Ethics are key! Ethics create trust and trust is king. Edelman has a study called the Trust Barometer and looks at what sources people trust. Over time, people trust each other more than any other source.

We're in an era of transparency because there are blogs and videos everywhere. Things can show up in the SERPs. The network fuels all of this that includes traditional and social media. Transparency and trust are evergreen. PR can help people navigate this environment and it won't go away in any economic downturn.

We still have a long way to go in terms of addressing measurable ROI. Relations and trust can be assessed over time, though.

He ends with the following: if we continue to set ethics and measurement guidelines when it comes to social media, search, and PR, we'll all win.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Bryan Horling, Software Engineer, Personalized Search, Google is the only panelist.

He starts of with a query. He queried "dinner." The top two results are wikipedia and whatsfordinner.net. He said he is unsatisfied by these results. He then showed the personalized version of the same query and it showed recipes of foods he loves. Search is not a "one fit all" marketplace.

Why Personalized?
- Get the user tot he right information as soon as possible
- Many searches are inherently ambiguous
- Getting the right results sometimes requires knowledge of the user or their context

He wont talk about:
- Search preferences
- iGoogle
- Customer Search Engine
- Subscribed Links
- Google Desktop
- etc.

History...

Early Personalization at Google:
- Kaltix acquisition in 2003, which was 3 guys from Stanford. They wrote a paper on personalizing PageRank for users.
- Personalized search on Google Labs in 2004, explicit (specify your interests)
- Personalized search launched in 2005, implicit (based on your web history)

Google Principles:
- User privacy
- Transparency (inform user when things are changes)
- Security
- Control (allow users to delete data)

He then shows off the web history section in Google at http://www.google.com/psearch. It shows you all your search history when you were logged in. You can pause web history and you can also "remove" web history, one by one. Or you can clear your entire web history and Google wont use it to personalize your results.

Search Details:
Google now shows how they personalized the results at the top right of the search page. They have a link to "more details," which explains which personalization techniques were applied. Works well.

Localization:
- Using the searcher's geolocation to affect search
- Different levels of granularity
- Both explicit and implicit information

Country Localization: Google will use the Google local version engine i.e. Google.com versus Google.co.uk, will show different results based on the country specific engine.

Metro Localization: One step down is more specific, such as narrowing the results based on your metro area.

City Localization: Such as for searching for weather or pizza.

Personalization:
- Using the searcher's personal context to rank results
- Recent searches (short term)
- Web history (long term)

Recent Searches: A search for jordans - most people want the shoes. But there is also a furniture store named that, so if someone searched previously for ethan allan and then immediately changed to search for jordans, it will show the furniture store. I tried it just now and it works.

Web History: Searching for galaxy will typically show astronomy related topics. But if someone often searches for soccer related topics, that person may see the soccer team.

What Does This mean for SEMs?
- Half empty -- collecting metrics is harder and seeing how your pages rank is harder
- Half full -- Easier for people looking for your service to find you and easier to retain customers who prefer your business.
- Top position is not winner take all.
- Create compelling and interesting content
- Appeal to users, not engines

You can control personalization for your searches:
- Use search details
- Disable it by appending &pws=0 to search RUL
- Sign Out
- Firefox extension, greasemonkey script
- Edit or turn off web history

Now we got time for Q&A...

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

This room is kind of empty, I guess because it is competing against a political campaign. This is being recorded on video for later. In any event, this panel isn't new but Danny stopped doing it at some point. He now brought it back. They will show examples of spam and guideline discussions.

Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft is first up.

Search engine wants to find the best content on the web and deliver it to their user. They have algos to determine what is the best content and most trusted. Spam tries to manipulate this. He then showed some examples of spam on the web. He showed a site guaranteeing 10,000 visitors in an hour, for $30 per month. He then shows RSS to Blog, which "steals" content from other sites and puts it on your site. He then shows Phantom Cloaker tool, it cloaks the results. Porn and Junk is not necessarily spam. Junk is a page with a little content or ad full pages - these are not spam, but they are filtered out mostly.

If you think you have a penalty, you do this:
(1) Check if you have a penalty at
- Live Search : http://webmaster.live.com
- Google: http://google.com/webmasters
- Yahoo doesn;t

(2) Review webmaster guidelines

(3) Identify issue

(4) Fix it

(5) Request reinclusion in webmaster tools for each engine

Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Search Quality, Google Inc. is next up and said, "what he said."

He goes into cloaking. Users sees one thing and search engines see another thing. Many times, this is not the webmaster doing this but rather your site was hacked and someone else is doing this to your site. One way to do this is via JavaScript redirect. Another way is to hide text on your page, for example via CSS or using font size that is one point.

Sometimes the spammer doesnt hide the spammish content. They just stick it on the page. Clearly a poor user experience. FYI, he is showing examples.

Doorway pages: creating tons of content in the hope that many of these pages rank in the search engines. Flights to [city], where the pages are almost identical.

Scraping - steal content from other sites. Search engines try to do duplicate detection. Often, you will see the text wont make sense after the reading a sentence or two - cause they try to change it automatically. It reads weird.

He then shows off the webmaster tools on how Google notifies you of a penalty.

Read the Google Webmaster Central Blog also...

Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering, Yahoo! is last up to talk about link spam.

What is Link Spam? If you start to get a lot of really bad links, really fast - that looks bad and looks like spam. It is possible that someone is doing this to hurt you and you can't control it. So they try to just eliminate those links, so your site is not penalized. If you start to link to bad sites, then something is wrong. You control who you link to.

How does this happen? One common way is via a link exchange.

Detect spam:

- Log files
- Site Explorer
- Contact Yahoo Support
- Dont fall for link exchanges or accept money for links
- Use nofollow on links in user generated content

Still Poor Results?
- Make sure you cleaned things up, are you sure you did?
- Consult SEOs
- Then fill out the webmaster support form at Yahoo

Now Q&A:

Q) Danny asks about paid links and white paid links. :)
A) Nathan says, there is a lot of pressure to build links. Microsoft looks for trusted source links and they recommend staying away paid links. But going to SELand and becoming a contributing editor is a good way to get links. There are many ways to get great links. You do not necessarily need to pay for it.

Aaron says, use the buyer beware concept. Google may have dropped the link value of those paid links from those great sources. So be careful.

Sean said there are a lot of sources of links. Most of the links on the web are not commercially driven, he said. The sites doing well have a lot of organic links.

Q) How do search engines handle hidden links, such as with AJAX, for navigation.
A) Aaron said you sometimes need to look at individual cases to see what the intent of those links are.

Nathan said if someone does something small, they wont penalize someone. Display none is not as bad as display it off screen (like too far right or left) is less deceptive, generally.

Q) Link exchanges, at what point...
A) Sean explains it is not the few links here or there. What he sees are hundreds of thousands, it goes "crazy" the amount of links you see. It is at a huge scale.

Q) What is up with Google removing the directories from the guidelines?
A) Aaron said, They saw a ton of fly by night directories. They saw many webmasters feel they need to submit their site to tons of directories as opposed to building out great content and a great site. So it was removed because this is not what webmasters should worry about.

Q) What are you doing to detect free counter spam?
A) Aaron first explained how these links work. They detect these things...
Sean said as a webmaster, be careful what you put on your site.

Q) Why not get rid of the toolbar PageRank values when people buy links on that value?
A) Aaron said people want a ball park range of what their reputation is. Aaron said, they try to show people that this is one measure. There are other things like link structure, etc.

Danny now pushes him on getting rid of it. People who want it, want it to sell for reputation. Do you think getting rid of it will help things?

Aaron replies, its hard to balance that. Some people use it as a measure to figure out how to improve to their sites.

I then asked, does the internal PR value match the toolbar value, outside of it being out of data. i.e. do you lower the exported value by X if they got a penalty for selling links? He said no. PageRank is only worth a specific measure of the overall algorithm, so an authoritative site will still rank well, even with a low PageRank, but that PageRank is not adjusted outside of it just being older than what is used internally.

Q) Danny beats up on Google saying that sometimes you may mark a site as spamming, when it is not. So you should tell us exactly what is wrong, be transparent! Why not?
A) He repeats what Danny said about spammers can use this info to benefit themselves.

More good Qs but ill save some for those who paid for the session...What Is Spam?

This session looks at how to leverage linking from within your own site to maximize your rankings in search.

Why even care about your internal linking? Because you can help yourself with your own site, so why waste one of the easiest link building opportunities out there.
Using nofollow and other techniques for "PageRank sculpting" has risen in awareness over the past year. It’s even been recommended by Google. How does it work, when do you want to do it, and is it worth the time? Techniques and case studies will be shown.
Don’t forget the anchor text. What you say in your links can matter! And saying it in a variety of different ways might be better than using the same exact words over and over. Tips and advice about writing for internal links.
Don’t forget the humans, when it comes to internal linking. You still need to have links showing in a way that benefits your human visitors. Meanwhile, you might have to convince the humans in your IT department, upper management or other stakeholders about why recommended internal link tactics deserve support.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Speakers:

Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc
Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting Corporation
Anton E. Konikoff, Founder/CEO, Acronym Media
Leslie Rohde, Founder, Windrose Software

Leslie Rohde is up first and says that internal linking is the first place to start. He asks the audience how many people have small companies (<12 employees) or if they're monetizing their site to gauge interest.

Internal linking is awesome because you control it. You control your own pages and you control your own links. Internal linking focuses the effects of external links. He tells people that good ranking starts at home.

Ranking is simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy. 70% of ranking comes from 3 factors - on page factors, link reputation effect, and PageRank.

Briefly, he describes the details about writing your page correctly:
- Title includes keywords for ranking and persuasion for humans
- Meta description sells the click
- Body copy engages the human visitor

Link reputation - he says that links speak louder than pages. Think about Google BOmbing - click here, privacy policy, home, etc. However, is your home page about "home?" You should tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Fragmented reputation - "partial" truth, common nav bar issues, complete title help, and footer links. He explains this phenomenon by looking at links on Home Depot. If you link to "cooking," chances are you're not talking about cooking -- you're talking about cooking appliances.

Content as investment: pages cost money, pages create PageRank (not LinkRank! - pages cost you money). PageRank helps ranking. Ranking creates ongoing traffic. It's a one time cost that creates residual benefit.

He talks about PageRank sculpting with an illustration. Which pages? Ranking takes focus. Use lasers, not floodlights.
Choose your focus - not all searches are created equal. Competition and conversion and lifetime customer value are important.

What can you do with PageRank sculpting? Without going into detail, he talks about the home page push and how there's all this linkage going from the home page. The mid tier push focuses on category.

Next up is Eric Enge who talks about PageRank sculpting

He talks about the robots.txt and says he doesn't recommend it as the major tool but that it can be utilized in PR sculpting.

He shows a slide called noindex illustrated (obviously, he has an illustration) and then shows some syntax. He also shows a case study with a duplicate content scenario: he noindexed pages so that the crawler can find and remove pages. You can remove this by using the URL removal tool in webmaster tools. Don't use Robots.txt because if someone links to the page, you want to pass the link juice even though you don't want it indexed.

He explains that it can also be used for content syndication.

He also describes PageRank sculpting - you may want to nofollow those site links like "about us" and "Advertise with us."

One more - https and https dupe content. The problem is that it has relative links in it versus absolute links. A lot of sites have this problem. You can resolve this in a few ways. You can make the links absolute but in this cae he actually recommends https robots.txt file and nofollow the links to the https page.

Adam Audette is next. He says that text links are good - you need to watch those image links. Just make sure there are text link options elsewhere on the page or with the image.

He shows a small 150 page site that has flash and images but not many good text links. (You can use the web developer toolbar and click on "view link information.")

Contextual links rule - they have semantic meaning!

Anchor text is very important but it's not a magic solution. One of the things that we see is that people point to content pages with this anchor text. It's not enough to put keywords in the anchor text. The pages need to relevant and high quality. If they happen, anchor text can be another helpful factor.

As sites grow, anchor text influence increases.

Links are action points for SEO *and* for people. Click here is a pretty good call to action! Think of ways to use that efficiently.

Mix it up - anchor text should vary!

Link consistently - standardize internal links

Link/Page relations: as he said before, link text should match the page it targets and there should be relevant keywords that surround the links.

Are your pages important? Pages without a lot of links pass a signal.

Link thresholds: general advice is that you should have 100-150 links max. It's actually case by case. More links can mean less usability.

Related link structures - you can do this with big sites. Use related linking to flatten a site. Shopping.com does a really nice job of using related links on their pages. They also use breadcrumbs which is important too.

- Tag pages - have users tag pages of manually build. Create tag categories and add RSS feeds. Amazon.com does a great job at this.

Anton is up next and he talks about how linking has raised pagerank and increaed the amount of visitors - he changed the navigation to text navigation from images.

Practical internal linking - can you prove that it will work? Is it worth the time and resources? How do we balance the user experience?

Internal linkng - success measurement. It's difficult to isolate net impact on rankins. Was it nofollow or an anchor text change? Maybe it was an external linking?
Another metric set is indexing levels - getting pages indexed and crawled frequently. Check crawl patterns and click through rates on links.

Do an internal page audit
Before you change links or anchor text, consider the click distribution, page abandon rates, user click paths, and paths to conversion.

Tim Armstrong, President, Advertising and Commerce, North America, & Vice President - Google, Inc.

Before I start, I have to say that this was probably the worst-understood keynote of all time. The speakers in this room did not work too well. :(

Danny: Since 2000, Google is well known. Is it too big or too powerful? What's your response about google being a monopoly.
Tim: On our side, the answer is no. When I started there, Google had no market share and in the past 8 or so years, it has more market share and we're happy that the business has grown in general. We're providing great results for our users. We're getting people the information they want. On the monetary side, we've done a great job of cramping monopoly behavior by making things very transparent. We have quality scores and bidding pricing - in essence, one of the things I think you see is a less innovative Google/Internet. We want to be an important player but it's not a Google ecosystem.

Danny: With Yahoo and the ads, what's the status now?
Tim: The Justice department has asked for more time and all parties agreed. We signed the deal and gave a 3.5 month period for the DOJ. We went into the deal being very open platform.

Danny: If they don't like it, do you go ahead with it anyway?
Tim: We're not going to comment about it but at this point we're going to let everyone review it. A lot of things have happened around the deal - some people aren't supportive but one of the things that have been interesting is that larger advertisers is that Google has allowed all players to play evenly. One of the fascinating things from this is that a lot of big companies think they have power over smaller companies but it doesn't matter who is who in Google's system. We're happy to have it reviewed and we're going to let everyone talk about it and we'll see what happens in the next few weeks.

Danny - He asks about the A&A because they don't like the Google-Yahoo deal.
Tim: Most of their advertisers are customers of ours. We're talking to these companies. Most of these companies have great relationships with Google and Yahoo and get great returns. We'd love to have them understand the deal better.

Danny: (He asks about quality score, I think. The sound system in this room sucks and I'm sitting about 10 feet away from Tim and Danny.)
Tim: Going back historically, given that we've come up with quality score and bidding prices, in general - that core ethos - the respect to end users is important. We still have meetings about how things impact users positively or negatively. The core thing is about the quality of landing page and the experience and time it takes to access these pages - that all came from user feedback.

Danny and Tim say something about making free tools available. I'm not sure what this relates to. Sorry. I still can't hear anything.

Danny: Why can't we have the old style Overture/GoTo feature set and get transparency there?
Tim: We're discussing this. I think as we try to define what the quality is for advertisers, we're going to be more transparent about what these things are. One of these important things is listening to customers. You can expect us to become even more transparent over time.

Danny: I want to understand Google and the ad agencies as things have evolved.
Tim: I don't think we can compete with ad agencies. A growing number of our clients use ad agencies. A lot of people don't understand and call us names - in reality, the SEMs grew a tremendous business - you look at acqusitions from holding companies and see this. The notion that Google is an enemy is outdated. I think that the people who deal with us think that we're the best partner they have. We really help businesses grow. The statistics show this.

Danny: There's the notion that Google is going to deal directly with clients.
Tim: I don't think that Google owns the clients. I think that agencies are the best people to connect. Going back to the monopoly question, in this sense, there is no monopoly. The only company or people who can connect the dots together are the agencies. If we're the direct line into the client, sometimes it's not helpful at all.

Tim talks about how Google becomes digital and Google is touching in search and display and other media. We're going to invest in all this engineering and we want to optimize on this and that's what we did. We started with some principles - people needed to understand what other people were doing (we did employee swaps). Most people come back with a totally different perspective. On the system front, Google has a tremendous amount of information. They have 40-50 million dollars and they want to benefit from it - what platform works and how do they set it up? Also, they need to measure the ROI - driving those things.

Danny: Who doesn't still get search? The search marketers thought they'd be gobbled up but there are people who are going their own way. Surely, everbody gets it now, right?
Tim: Good news - there are many people who still don't understand search. He talks about CPG and some other stuff.

Danny: There are lot of opportunity out there, but think about mobile. They say there's moble opportunity and then time goes by.
Tim: Think about Local. If you flash back 5 years and you do searches for this, there was very little information. Fast forward to today and the offline information was very pertinent 3 or 4 years ago.
Mobile is growing and video has a lot of potential. We see that search on video is a very important topic. It has the potential to be adwords-like in its long term value to the consumers from an advertising perspective.
Video is a few differtent markets - some have banner ads but the version 2.0 has overlays. Version 3.0 is [something different, but he said it so quickly that I didn't get it. I told you the sound system sucks.].

Danny: You tested video ads in the search results through AdWords. Is that still running?
Tim: Yes. Are there cases where video will be more helpful or more impactful? We're trying to figure that out.
Danny: And you had a banner ad!
Tim: Images have always been helpful for us. We're trying to figure out if image ads work on images. It took us a long time to decide to test this. We have to measure user interaction here.

Danny: What about offline areas? Newsaper, TV, radio - how is that doing?
Tim: The reason why we got into those is becasue our customers asked. Some customers aren't spending all their budget. The newspaper business hits 70-80% of the market, radio is 80-90%, and the TV property on the dish network/NBC touches a lot of households. If you look at success, TV is successful.
Danny: What will SEMs do if you have other products?
Tim: With video, SEMs have the best opportunities.

There was another question and Tim said Google will grow upon it.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn introduces the panel. He basically shows the age of the panelists, at least in web years. :) He describes link building as a "cat and mouse" game between search engines and SEOs.

Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link is first up.

Why are Links Valuable:
- They connect sites like threads in a web
- Links provide paths
- They are an indicator
- They are value indicators

She goes into how the internet came around. Soon after came search engines. Search engines use to just read content. Then came along Google who went beyond content and looked at link analysis (PageRank).

Link Popularity:
- It measures the quality and quantity of links pointing to a web site.
- All major engines use
- Off page factor
- Link love, juice, pop, rep

4 Components:
(1) Link Quantity
(2) Link Quality (authority of host sites) PageRank is a lot different than it was, it is more about quality over quantity.
(3) Anchor Text, it is a query ranking factor. This is the most powerful component in links.
(4) Link Relevancy. It helps establish where you belong. Search engines read text around links. Linking out and being linked to establish connections. Build links within your neighborhood. Links to and from contextually relevant or "thematically related" sites convey more authority

Authority Sites:
- Rank well
- Well known
- Have strong inbound links
- Are insulated against algorithmic fluctuations

Bottom Link Line... Focus on linking efforts on securing keyword rich anchors from authority sites.

Part Two: Ranking Influences...

Avoid:
- Control your rate of link acquisitions
- Repetitive anchor text
- Dont use the same tactic over and over again

Optimal Linking Success:
- Screen partner sites carefully
- Place links in content areas
- Understand all links have value
- Redirected links or links passing through third party sites will not pass link pop
- Avoid losing PageRank, be consistent in your links (www vs non, etc.)

Link Learning and News Sources
- She lists a bunch
- Link Harvester
- Hub Finder
- Langeriter.com
- GoogleGuy.de
- Quirk.biz/SearchStatus
- SoloSEO.com/tools/linkSearch.html
- bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.html
- google.com/alerts

What's Working?
- Everything still works but link building strategies using content generation tactics work best.
- Traditional, edus, wiki, content targeting, media, press releases, directories, reclamation, trust links, local links, article writing.
-- Create a media contacts database and then break out editorial and commercial sources.

-- Look at review sites and contact those people leaving reviews.
- Directory Submission, general, niche, rss, article, podcast, blog, wiki, local.
-- Avoid directories hosting excessive ads
-- Check pages for nofollow or robots.txt
-- Steer clear of directories with a lot of wite wides
-- Yahoo Directory worth it for newer sites
-- Niche directories tend to be less scrutinized such as Directory Big Board, ISEDB and Blog Catalog can give you some ideas.

Article Writing:
- Write a shorter version for syndication and write a longer version for your site.
- Answer questions in your article
- Add bio to your articles
- Add links within content if possible
- List of article directories given

Content Network:
- Publish content on any topic
- Distributes content to engaged audiences through its web site and content partners
- Some use nofollow

Guest Blogging
- Search for "looking for writers" + keywords etc...

Link Bait:
- Digg, Propeller, Mixx, SU

Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com

November 1st, will be his 15th year doing link building for pay. 15 years!

Link building is PR work, public relations...

In 1993, he had 10 places to submit to. He showed off the Netscape What's New page. That is where you built links. In 2008, it is endless - where you can submit links. Big change was Google and PageRank. You want click traffic and you want that helps you rank. Some links can do both. That is the holy grail.

Effective link building is PR, linkbait, link buying, etc.

The approach is to get trusted links, its not the link, its the author of the link. Find out where people care about your topic and reach them.

Link building has to vary based on content, focus and audience.

Your link tells a story about your site. Like a transcript or "rap sheet."

You don't need a lot of links to do well.

FYI, here is Eric's presentation: ericward.com/smx/.

What do people find when they search for you by name? Is it negative? If so, what do you do? What can you do? Depending on the situation, there are a range of tactics that may help. This session explores the issue.

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:
Veronica Fielding, President and CEO, Digital Brand Expressions
Jordan Glogau, Partner, Internet Reputation Management
Simon Heseltine, Director of Search, Serengeti Communications
Michael Jensen, Co-Founder, SoloSEO

First up is Veronica Fielding. She talks about proactive reputation management - how to fortify yor brand before there's an issue that arises. She recommends to develop a game plan before there are problems and having something in place if a problem were to arise. It may not prevent the information to trickle to the surface but it can help you address issues and leverage them for the issues that may be causing your brand a problem.

There are 3 essential considerations:
- Determine which content sets and chalnels you will use, in what combinations, and how often: SEO, social media, and paid search are part of this mix.
- Prepare your messaging and be consistent. Make it channel-appropriate. You don't want to be Digging information that doesn't wor. Weigh your options for Facebook elements. Your myspace page should be different from Facebook because of the different audiences.
- Determine how frequently you will check in and talk with your audiences.

Implementing your SEO portion of the plan gives the search engines time to find and index the relevant content on your site and on other sites that link to yours.
Having paid search ads gives you realtime placement if a problem arises and quick adjustments make the copy relevant for off-setting negative inforamtion.
Leveraging indexable social media adds to the numbero f quicj spidered sites that can be drawn upon to come to your brand's aid. It's also a forum for transparent dialogue with your brand's stakeolder.
Use Wikipedia prudently. There may already be an entry for your brand so don't get caught tinkering with the content. Address yur concerns on the article's "Talk" pages.

There are key social media sites to consider:
- Your brand's blog
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Facebook
- MySpace (for consumer, not B2B)
- YouTube
- Flickr
- Rollyo - create your own search engine
- ZoomInfo (name may exist, but you should claim it)

B2B strategies:
LinkedIn: consider making it for the company as well as for key exectives whose names may be searched in association with the company
Facebook also helps

Simon talks next about reputation management and what people look at. Some people don't always look for their name and they don't actually see that there are negative results. If you look at the SERPs for reviews, you may not even see everything -- think about reviews for products. Sometimes you may find things in blogs or forums, the latter which may not even be indexed.

From this, you can learn how people are talking about you and what they are saying. You need to analyze the sentiment and to see whether things are positive or negative. "The biggest disaster since Titanic" - is that positive or negative?

Who are the influencers? You need to find out where the discussions happen so that you can concentrate your resources. If the sentiment on Facebook, for example, is neutral, and the sentiment on MySpace are positive, you may want to contact MySpace fans to speak to your evangelists.

Find out what people are saying and where they are saying it. How do you do it?
1. The ghost of the recent past. Get Google and Yahoo alerts and check your email to find out about specific key phrases.
- Twitter is similar - do TweetBeeps, for example.
- RSS feeds are your friends.
- Digg and other social voting sites are similar.
- Sites like zevents
- Wikipedia lets you subscribe to RSS
- YouTube has RSS
Most social sites have RSS
2. The ghost of the actual past
- Top end - big brands - TNS Media Intelligence and Nielsen BuzzMetrics
- Open SOurce - Nonprofits - The BuzzMonitor

When you look at it, RSS feeds only deliver updates and new information.

Client study with a medical group -
- getting about 50-75 notifications per day
- historical buzz monitoring recovered over 150,000 listings, so use old data too!
Use a tool!

Monitor your buzz - get a baseline with a deep scan into the past and continually monitor to the recent present.

Michael Jensen talks about reputation management for local businesses.

Local is a unique space becasue of ratings and reviews, but beyond that, it's everywhere. It's in the SERPs, social media, there are search engines devoted to the local space (Yahoo), directories (Yelp), and more. There are also mobile apps (GoodRec is an iPhone application). There are also local niche sites (Andy's List for contractors).

Ratings and reviews; a customer's first impression. If you search for a dentist, who are you going to call and who aren't you going to call? Visual elements really do help with regards to choosing the desired local provider.

Art of persuasion: do you read reviews before you go somewhere? He asks the room and almost everyone raises their hand. Reviews can be very persuasive, both positive and negative. Enough positive outweighs the occasional negative. You need to push the right button with potential customers.

Every review helps as a vote of confidence. One negative review can have a huge impact if there are only few reviews.

In the future, features that are not necessarily check-boxed are in the terms and text of a review. Search engines said that they don't really use the text much for ranking factors and such.

For monitoring local, there are few things that are available so manual monitoring is helpful. SoloSEO will be working on tools soon!

Be defensive and proactive in the social space - get constant positive reviews in a lot of local sites. There are 2 main barriers: your customers are not motivated and they aren't technically savvy. You should motivate them with a coupon or free gift and make it easy for them to review - tell them where they can review. Check out leavefeedback.org, a tool that he created.

Local business should have a system for getting reviews. Have coupons or cards on hand, train employees to give out, get information or other information.

Be creative - give away free wifi at a local restaurant and when they access it, redirect them to your review site. Have a kiosk. When you're a restaurant, give them a handheld tablet so they can write the review then and there.

Get "recommended." It boils down to SEO. A link is a recommendation. Use the local chamber of commerce, professional associations, related businesses (realtor + loan officer), local events and sponsorships.

On the offense side, average out poor ratings with positive reviews. Create a system and get those reviews constantly. If you receive a poor snippet, surround that with positive reviews. Respond to critical reviews. Update your business listing to reflect changes and improvement in response to poor reviews.

Last up is Jordan Glogau. He talks about the Internet is the Truth Machine - it's a book from 1996 by Jams Halperin. Some invents the perfect lie detector. Once the machine has been invented, it's impossible to tell a lie. Over a period of time, the technology gets shrunken to the size of a wristband. To some extent, the internet has become the truth machine without having a lie detector.

That's not really accurate but it is part of everyday life. The results are not perfect - it's far from it. The results are fast and maybe too fast. It can effect your business like a heart attack.

OMG - Don't Google our name!
- Is it affecting business via sales?
- Can the root cause be addressed?
- Can it be fixed and will it stay fixed?

The first Immortals is another book by Halperin who says that we live forever. The metaphor is that this is like Google and the rest of the Internet.

Evaluate the problem: is it personal or is it about a business? Is it affecting a person or business? What kind of sites? Who is attacking who and why?

Types of sites that can be problematic: review sites, news sites, government, anti-whatever, Wikipedia, social media

How do you counteract and push this down?
- Link building
- Counter blog
- Controversial: link buys
- Wikipedia - build trust with your editor and don't think about it if not!

Active antagonists: what if you have a country club, for example, and you have a disgruntled ex-member? You may have to prepare for the long haul and get your staff involved. You may have to counter all the time.

General tricks and advice:
- Use unrelated links to move down bad links
- Interlink between blogs
- Collect information on links and build a link list on your sites for Google to find
- If the quality of the links/blogs is a concern, you shouldn't use the paid blogging services.

Bad for business - if you don't fix your problem it will never go away.
- Poor customer service will always plague you if you don't address it.

Rep-port: Simple to run, color coded, email reports, and free of charge.

Do Traditional Advertising Agencies "Get Search?"

It's clear from this panel (and now the feel of SMX East 2008) that we're entering the third age of SEM, which is about the the entire big-agency world folding into search, social, paid and content. Holistic and effective integration, driven from top-down-creative-think, is becoming the norm more and more.

The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on West 34th Street center is teeming with folks at their first conference and seasoned vets' alike. The "Ad Agencies & Search Marketing" panel was a harbinger of the world to be, the world search already is, the big agency world. Search is taking its rightful place as the 800 LB gorilla at the marketing mix table. Each of the speakers shared lovely insight regarding their experience as search grows up.

Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist and SEMPO Board of Directors began by offering stark insight. Much as traditional search marketers would love to dis' agencies she feels times are changing. Sara pointed out that agencies DO "get it" on a massive scale now. This evolution comes a as a result of mergers, acquisitions and consolidation in the industry. The session comprised of Moderator-Sara interviewing the distinguished panel, with no .ppt presentation slides.

Her questions were insightful, probing and...you had to be here to totally appreciate the experience in the room. Here are a selection of concept-statements discussed in this rapid fire back and forth exchange amongst industry peers. Much of my impressions during this session embody actual quotes from speakers. Some not. I invite the speakers do climb in this thread and provide input and any notes they had coming in. Wish we had a recorder and transcriptions guys :).

Jason Clement, Director of Search, Wieden Kennedy
Do agencies get it? It depends who the agency is. Creative agencies who are holding overall strategy might not get it. However, this notion that agencies can't have successful search departments is completely false. We're hired because we make the best "media neutral decisions" surrounding the media planning process, so as to make best recommendations to serve clients. Unlike traditional SEMs who are "bound to the books" of the business they, do when it comes to how much they can spend, advertising agencies tend to have a broader base and a little bigger stage to grow campaigns financially and creatively.

One thing missed as agencies picked up search, is the creative. Mapping creative strategy back to search has been difficult, to have creative ideas to launch sites and applications that are truly search driven. You can take search and move it beyond the media buy and really start thinking search as a "communications tool."

Jason dismissed the varying price of similar deliverables, anecdotally proffered by an audience member. The questioner noted that, to his mind, in a stack of redundant estimates and analysis, the agency recommendations tended to be exponentially expensive. Jason basically said that he doubted that any of the agencies charging less,could bring execution, might not know the business they were pitching to and might not bring the overall value of a pitching-agency. Thanks for being cool about the question Jason :) .

Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search, The Americas
So Chris, do agencies get it? "I think it depends on what it is. "It = paid search = Google" is a known quantity for most agencies. I think they get, it there's a concern, there's attention. Agencies are more problem = solution rather than opportunity = solution." PPC has a cost and ROI association so agencies can relate. When it gets into organic search things "get more questionable for both the agency and their clients." "Let's understand how we ad value to the process and go from there."

You've got a 10 year industry, search. It's hard to transition client communications, from the perspective of traditional media. It's hard to teach traditional team members that search provides incredible insight into customers' behavior and is no longer a direct response medium. There's a massive change going on and at the end of the day, talk always comes around to Google and their "amazing nimbleness."

We as an industry have to evolve past gimicky practices and limited knowledge being a basis for a business. If you can deliver the strategic value of search then you can be well paid for it. What do you DO to earn the money? One of the nice things about agencies, is that there are people who have been in the industry and that's cool to have. When providing search services from inside an agency structure, the clients sign on they want an agency of record and everything kind of gets boiled into that. GroupM Search has kept the relationship direct with clients want integration in a different way, direct. Clients like the checks and balances by the search unit being a "watchdog" to keep their other players. He listed other compelling reason.

Aimee Reker, SVP, Global Director of Search, MRM Worldwide
Do agencies get it Aimee? "We as an agency get it to where our clients they're able to touch all parts of the opportunity." If you've got 250 different brands and products, you've got to really have a relationship with your clients and get them to execute search initiatives. There is "zero problem with senior management not getting search" in her shop. Sites that were not built perfectly are "part of an evolution we're all going through together."

Aimee says that they embed search specialists on every team, but it starts higher up when briefs are created. The search teams work with the designers as they're building out their comps. They work with the technical team on the requirements. It's a little "microcosm of glue," working across the media teams. This helps the search process be "better, brighter" and more effective at the overall agency level. All channels including social media, coding, PPC, SEO is all available to any project. Everybody's part of the "search" effort. We point out to our clients how does search fits in the big picture for your company in a 5 year plan.

MRM Worldwide has full transparency with all their clients. In some places they may not have solutions and bring in other partners. "We are an open agency model" and work with other media shops or other outsourcing when something is slightly out of their expertise.

MRM makes sure to mine compensation for strategic development, as a crucial link in the concept chain. "If you do search well, you spend less, so we have to be paid for strategic development." Also, MRM Worldwide demands relationships with all the other players at the table. "It's just that important."

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear, a search focused Minnesota advertising agency.

Whether you're a CMO - or someone who needs to educate, advise or influence one - this session will educate you on the 10 critical important concepts surrounding search marketing and its role within the entire marketing mix that CMOs must understand in order to be successful. A panel made up of senior level search marketers across a variety of industries, business models, and sizes will share their experiences, advice and perspective on these 10 critical truths and how understanding them has influenced their CMOs.

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Panelists:
Michelle Stern, Client Services Director, iProspect
Willie Fernandez Director of Marketing, World Travel Holidays
Jennifer Doss, eCommerce Marketing Manager, Hat World and Lids
Jill Nortman, SEO and Web Analytics Specialist, Allegis Group
Jen Miller, Manager, Delta.com Online Content and Marketing

This session is sponsored by iProspect.

1. SEO is an ongoing process.
Why do CMOs need to pay attention? Search marketing should be an integral part of an entire marketing strategy. It's difficult to communicate the right issues. Enable 360 degree communication.
Jill: SEO is really less of a function and more of a process. It's ongoing - you can't set it and forget it. You need to be involved because the Internet industry is constantly changing. Recently, social media sites are being indexed. Having a presence there is very important, especially to articulating that to your CMO. Blended results are also a new phenomenon - if you aren't keeping up with those changes, you're missing the boat.
Jen: SEM is an ongoing process. Delta marketing is separate from content production. When she manages paid search, she was working with the content group on how to optimize the website. But then they realized that content and marketing are one so both organizations have been combined. It's been a lot more beneficial for them. It's a front-end process. From an organizational standpoint, it was successful, but it took a long time.

2. Being #1 isn't everything and sometimes is not even possible.
Willie: Being in the cruise space today, the #1 term you would want to rank for is the term "cruise." However, from month to month, being #1 not only was causing them to reach their budget quickly but the word wasn't converting well. They decided to scale back and found terms that should have been #1 but weren't. They saw that their budgets were not being stretched out as much and they were finding those other words convert better. In a 4 month exercise, they analyzed 2,000 and scaled back to the point that there was a positive ROI on words that were losing money month to month.
Michelle: In paid search, revenue is really key. Being #1 is not always where it's at. Analyze your keywords and determine what value your keywords are based on ROI. That will allow you to afford the keywords that ought to be in position #1.
Jennifer: We have a very extensive keyword list and a dozen of those are the most efficient. We do rank on those keywords, but like cruises, hats is a keyword that can't necessarily be #1. Look at the multi-keyword phrases and you can rank higher. Because they are specific, they convert at a higher rate. 70% of all clicks come from the first page, so concentrate on getting on the first page and then work your way up. Being #1 isn't as profitable, so looking at where you're ranking and your spend and if you're meeting your ROI goals, maybe the lower positions are a better place.
Jen: You may want to optimize for a one-word phrase but it's too competitive. Think about the top converting/clickthrough keywords instead.

Chris: How much of a challenge do you find addressing ego - "we have to be #1!"?
Jen: It's about education, trying to share strategy and saying that it's about integration with other channels and how they play against each other.
Jill: With PPC, you have to pay to play. Being in position #2 can save you a lot of money. As long as you can remain on page 1 or above the fold, that's something you should also strive for.
Jennifer: Education is a primary element. Directors in our department will ask why we're not #1, but we have to explain budgets and resources to them.

3. The long tail is your friend.
Michelle: Long tail keywords give you more qualified traffic. Also, there's less competition and that increases chances of being visible on those terms. That feeds into the third benefit which is when there's less competition, that equals less costs.
Jen: Mine through the data to see what people are searching for and bid on them.
Willie: We expanded our keyword base by about 10,000 keywords, if not more. We saw that people are searching for something but then they've decided what they want. For example, "christmas cruises from New York" or "carnival cruises from miami" has proven to be very successful.
Michelle: You need to start broad and develop more long tail terms over time based on clickthroughs.
Jill: The importance of analytics is critical before you start bidding on keywords.

Chris: So it seems that analytics and tools are really key.

4. Both paid and natural SEM are crucial.
Jennifer: For us, we want to have as many listings as possible on the results page. 54% of our search revenue comes from our organic listings and 46% comes from paid. Visibility in both increases our brand awareness. In our paid listings, we can control the ad copy but you can't do that as easily with organic listings. We use that copy to promote special sales and offers. You can also control the landing page for these so you can go to higher-converting pages. She did a test and saw that depending on the destination URL, there were higher conversions. Try to find funds to do tests and how being listed might help your organic listings because of the increased visibility.
Michelle: In addition to what Jennifer said, you need to be in paid and organic listings. 70% will click on organic listings and 30% click on paid listings, according to research. You should be in both places becasue there are different types of people. If you're in 2 parts of the page, you'll probably get the click.
Chris: What about a brand lift for being in organic and both?
Jen: When Delta was not visible for brand in paid search, their visits went down. What does that show? There are different customers for different things, as Michelle said. To her point, we found that paid customers are must more shoppers and they're more ready to convert. It pays to be visible by brand. We knew we had to take the risk even though there is obviously a budget issue with this.
Jill: We have found that clicks in our paid advertising usually are those who are the first time visitors to our brand.

5. Customers hear their language, not yours.
Jill: She reads a quote that says that one of the biggest mistakes is that people campaign with the messaging that the company wants to push rather than what people want to hear. The messaging slogan will tie back into what happens online so don't just speak from the brand. Think about the users. She talks about the automotive industry and how in the past, it was about crash data, but now it's a big issue about going green and gas mileage. Why? That's what the people are looking for.
Willie: Sometimes we got in touch because we used industry terms in our ad copy. The bounce rate was through the roof. We couldn't understand why, so we ran a focus group and we started to understand that we were talking amongst ourselves and not to our site visitors. We toned it down and translated the industry terms to pain English and consumer friendly terms. We started to focus on some user-centric terms on other pages - e.g. cruise reviews. After a customer has purchased, they would want to review cruises before they purchase. They build up cruise reviews on product pages. The bounce rates dropped and they saw an increase of conversions by 45%.
Chris: I observed companies using thier own site search tool to identify holes.

6. Web pages aren't the only assets you need to optimize.
Jen: We interface with communications with users, so we need to get our content distributed. We launched a blog, and we use press releases and videos (YouTube channels). How do we optimize these areas? This is obviously important.
Jill: You want to take advantage of content beyond the landing pages, like video. Tag that video, make sure the title is in line with the message, etc. You also want to be there on a paid perspective. But even with branded and nonbranded search, you need to think about social. Those results are showing up. If someone does searches for this, you want to be in the landscape and you want your social ads to show up.

7. Integration is a must.
Michelle: It's really critical to share information so that you can benefit from your marketing campaign. Marketers who are responsible for media plans need to communicate to search marketers to capture demand through search. Search marketing should also communicate.
Jen: We recently had a campaign where we needed to talk to travelers based out of NY. We decided to bid locally and geotarget to NYers. We changed the language for these users. Paid search gives you the opportunity to supplement another campaign to a different audience.
Chris: we've been talking about search and online, but what about other marketing? Do you do any of that?
(Silence.... I guess they need to read the coverage I wrote earlier this morning on integration!)
Jennifer: We don't do much TV/radio, but when we do, it's in conjuction with our vendors. We do special promotions though occasionally.
Jill: There was another session this morning (yay!) that was basically about integration or die. The disconnect was that your message offline may not be the online for some people. 67% of people were motivated to search online for what they heard offline. Nearly 40% of those searchers ended up converting. Who wants a 39% conversion rate? We all do! (If you are a first time SERoundtable reader, go check my coverage from this morning.)

8. Tools simplify everything.
Willie: We have inhouse tools at our disposal that we built that indicated that newspaper ads are a dying breed. We wouldn't have known this without tools. We learn about the long tail keywords, so without those tools, we wouldn't know where to bid.
Jennifer: We have about 10,000 pages and our content is forever changing. We had to manually manage that beforehand, and it wasn't efficient. With the help of iProspect, we put a few things in place, like a Google sitemap, a template that helped us for dynamically generating site optimization tags, and more. Sometimes creating/building tools can take time and development can suck time, but in the long run, it makes us remain up-to-date and current. We don't necessarily have the resources inhouse but thinking about tools does help you become more efficient.

Chris: What do you do to demonstrate the value of ROI?
Jen: We tried to transform our site optimization from the backend to the frontend but transparency of tools and accessibility to those content producers so that people can be evangelists - we don't get guidance from the agency. They can mine the data themselves and find what's relevant. We have analytics tools that are self-service. We all become part of that process and share information.
Michelle: Case studies of what you've been able to do in the past helps to drive the momentum for going forward.

Chris: In this economy, is there new money or do you have to take money away from other marketing efforts?
Jill: Before shutting down offline altogether, in the state of the economy, we're seeing that the budgets are shifting. They're honing in on the return of over campaigns in the past year. There's more efficient spending by shifting funds.
Michelle: We're not seeing anyone reducing search spend and that's because search is so measurable. You have to keep it in an economy like this.
Jen: As long as you get rewarded, you should continue. It's easy to justify.

9. Don't bid solely on branded terms.
Michelle: I would definitely say this. You run the risk of your competitors benefitting. What I mean is that - think about someone searching on a non-branded term. Most people are still researching, so your competitor will get that customer.
Jen: At Delta, we talk a lot about incremental tickets. We don't have content on every single destination we're going to -- yet. In order to have a void, we bid on those unbranded terms so that we can capture that researcher who convert into an incremental ticket, a ticket that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Optimize for that unbranded term as much as possible.
Jennifer: Bidding on the unbranded term will help as much as possible. About half of our revenue comes from the unbranded term search. Sports fans search by their teams, not by the brand name, for example. We pay very close attention to those keywords. I read a retail study that said that 55% of traffic came from nonbranded and 49% of those who purchased clicked on a non-branded term and 12% clicked on both!
Jen: People usually search initially on nonbranded terms but then they actually search on the branded term when they are close to buying.
Jennifer: You need to look at your list and revise/develop the terms.

Chris: There has been in the past during recessions a move away from brands. That would play into this entire thing to have a mix going forward.
Jill: You can always get paid optimization to complement your organic efforts. Sometimes that offsets the cost.

10. You must set goals.
Jill: You need to focus on the goals and then focus on the tactics to get there. Then you need to get creative with your goals - of course everyone can agree on some conversion points but you need to think outside the box, for example, offsite optimization and social. Monitor the number of friends that you acquire each month. The same goes for video. Some videos increase 25% monthly for us even though they've been up for over 12 months. Case studies are another opportunity - keep track of that and make sure you're seeing regular growth. They are really good goals to have.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land who showed up late due to a technical issue with what people call "WiFi."

Michael Benedek, Vice President, AlmondNet is up first. Behavioral advertising is the delivery of ads based on their behavior online. There is lots of opportunity in behavioral ads.

Bringing in the video component...
- Linear video ads (prerolls)
- Non linear (overlays)
- Companion Ads (text, display, etc.)

67% of internet users are viewing video ads at least once per month (eMarketer).

Behavior and Post Search
- 5% of their time declaring purchase intent on search engines
- 95% of time browsing ad supported content on "other" sites
- Most searcher complete their purchase-related research two or more weeks before handing over their credit card

Implementation Challenges:
- Standardization is hard (too many video players)
- Scalability
- Video content categorization

IAB's Response:
- Introduced VAST
- It is an XML standard
- Designed to standardize

Gregory Markel, Founder & President, Infuse Creative is next up.

He explains why video optimization is important... Let's assume it is important, I wont go through all his valid reasons. Pew Internet released a study on what people are watching.

He showed that if you search corvette video on Google, up comes three video results.

Video on mobile is growing with iPhone and all the clones.

Submission:
(1) Video on your site
(2) Upload video
(3) RSS techniques

He shows how to upload at YouTube. He said they increased cap size from 100MB to 1GB but do not, there is currently still a 10 minute limit. It is not just about the title or text in the video description. It is not just about views. It is about the community around the video. I.e. ratings, comments, favored, inlinks and embedded videos.

Soon you can buy higher rankings in YouTube, he said.

He shows Yahoo Search, media RSS feed submission.

Tips:
(1) Define goals
(2) Analyze competition in YouTube and Google.com
(3) Research keywords and title/descriptions
(4) Add/Modify "in video" branding/call to action/URL (watemarks, speak your brand and annotations in YouTube)
(5) Decide submission strategy/type
(6) Spread the word, encourage community, remember mobile
(7) Monitor and track your progress and tune.

YouTube has search suggestions, so right there, it shows you what is popular. Just start typing. Also, type a search result and sort by view count. Submit beyond YouTube. YouTube by default gives you a mobile friendly channel. He then shows annotations. Piggy back off popular YouTube videos as a response video. Lead in your description of your YouTube video with a live URL to your site.

What's New?
- Google.com serving side by side video results
- YouTube adds quick list and duplicate video link
- YouTube bulk uploader
- Paid results in YouTube
- Paid search user interest targeting
- Trueveo and vSnax for iPhone video search apps

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search Optimization, Performics is next up.

The new Google audio indexing tool is being demoed. It basically does speech recognition. Right now, only for the political channel - as a beta. You can search for all videos in the political channel that match a keyword phrase. Plus you can skip to those points in those videos. Google will probably expand this to other videos.

How Does it Work?
- Google uses its own speech technology
- Ranked by spoken keyword relevance, youtube metadata and freshness

Speech to Text is still not perfect and she shows examples.

He then shows off the power of YouTube for Video SEO. Web results show video.

Tom Wilde, CEO, EveryZing is last up. He gets to go on stage as the down breaks below a - 700 point drop.

Objectives:
- Increase consumption of online media
- Create multimedia advertising inventory
- Control and protect content distribution

Challenges:
- Findable
- Navigable

Search engines dont do a good job with indexing videos. Text still drives discovery.

Publishers need to match supply and demand.

Publish across the curve from topic pages to landing page (too long tail). Organize your content into topics and publish them in a manner search engine can find it. Then make sure each content piece has a landing page.

Create a Good Target for Search Engines:
- Properly formatted page titles and URL structures
- Related topics link to additional topical pages
- Multimedia snippets derived from speech processing provide relevant text for GYM crawlers
- Dynamic media player with "Jump To" functionality
- Page populated with multimedia and articles relevant to topic/entity

Challenge #2: Multimedia Site Search & Navigation
- Goal of site search is to maximize content recall while optimizing precision and relevance.

The web search experience on your site, needs to be similar to how Google handles it with universal search.

Continuing on from how newspapers and magazines can tap into search, this session looks at how social media marketing offers some unique opportunities forthese publishers.

Moderator: Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street

Speakers:
Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Specialist, BrentCsutoras.com
Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies (The NewYork Times Co.)
Chris Winfield, President, 10e20

Chris speaks first. Why would you want to be involved in social media marketing? You can get recognition in a wider audience. You cna create new touch points - so many people can now discover your content. It can enhance your credibility especially with more delivery. You get "first mover" status if you break news soon. You cna get new Public Relations opportunities. Also, you get traffic. Links are really important. He shows some client changes that show increased views. It increased traffic 135% in a 6 month period with close to 3 million visitors from social networks and blogs. It had 12 million ad impressions, and increased natural inbound links by 2,666%.

How do you get there?
- Do research - where are your visitors coming from already? Where are they coming from - Facebook, forums, etc?
- Where are people talking about your stuff?
- Who is linking to you?
- What has worked so far?
- Where is the most potential for our growth?

Start making decisions. Find out where people are already - talk to your customers and readers and learn the demographics of the social networks that they are using. A lot of social networks have specific audiences and you don't want to force a square peg into a round hole.

Now make internal changes.
* Don't alienate your existing audience. You want to make your with pop-ups. You don't want to have all your content like that because it's a turn-off for social media users.
* You need to look for evergreen content.
* Make it easy for people to share your content. Don't have 80,000 little social bookmarking buttons. People won't use it.
* Get key employees and stakeholders on board.
* You also need to open up. Blogs have fresh content. Stay on top of the curve.
* Have a good RSS strategy.
* Microblogs such as Twitter are very useful. Don't just be a "feed." You want to gain new followers and new customers.
* Outreach - your links mean a lot to bloggers.

Social news and bookmarking sites are really important for publishers. You've gotten on the homepage and getting traffic is great but it's not the end-all. You have other bloggers that are coming on and looking for content. A lot of people go to social news sites and find content. Some people then share it in other communities. People are IMing it to people and then it gets down to the "mainstream press" and forums.
- What does this mean? Eyeballs.

What is good content?
- Breaking news: everyone knows about the bail-out plan and the BBC was the first publication to get it out there (which is ironic).
- Lists: they've been around forever. An example is the 10 commandments. They worked then and they work now.
- How-to's: how to do things.
- Surveys/Rankings: think about the US News Best Colleges
- Getting something that is extremely comprehensive. What content would someone want to bookmark or come back to at a later time?
- Controversial/Opinionated content.
- Best of's: Best movies ever made, etc.
- Calculators: life expectancy calculator, etc.
- Video
- Widgets etc.

Final tips:
- Promote great content
- Contribute to the communities
- Make the sites work together
- Don't have all your employees vote from the same IP ;)

Adam Sherk is up next.
Survey of magazine sites: - between Q1 and Q3 is that traffic from social media ranged betwene 0.6 and 18% of total site traffic. Among social media referrers - Digg, 24% average, high 52%, Stumbleupon 24/60, Facebook 4/7, Reddit 4/13, delicious .5/1, and Myspace 3/5.

He shows the conversation prism by Brian Solis (Google it - it's pretty). You need to interact with people. Discussion of content often happens off your site but it's okay - sure, you want people on your site but you want to get out there and engage in that conversation and those dialogues with them so they can come back to you looking for more information.

It's not enough: social media strategies are great but it's just a start. When you think about it, it's just one way. With social media marketing, you need to directly engage with your audience and build that up so that they can go back to your site. Active participation and real participation can bring them back.

Steps to social media success:
- Monitor and observe - learn the landscape
- Locate your audience and find opportunities
- Formulate a strategy
- Engage and participate
- Evaluate and adjust

Adam uses Plurk with me, and I feel good about that. He mentions that Plurk, a competitor to Twitter, has a large community of knitters. As for why, we both don't really know, but it's interesting to know that people leverage communities in such ways.

Tactics:
- You need a brand ambassador who drives the strategy and sees where the opportunities are.
- They officially represent your publication. It's a full-disclosure (corporate level SMM). Give them time and resources to develop strong profiles and relationships. For example, set 50% of their time for 6 months. Get a figure that will let someone specifically put in time towards these activities. In terms of doing this, you can jump into these communities and spam your stuff, but that won't work. This needs to be genuine. Social media experience helpful but personality traits are most important - you need to have a natural networker.
- Their efforts must be trsnparent. Do not hide company affiliation. Do not engage in activities that could be interpreted as manipulative.
- Remember: your brand ambassador won't be there forever, so plan for the transition.

Appropriate participation
- Be a genuine member of communities
- Be transparent
- Look before you leap
- Regularly and actively participate
- Build good relationships
- Engage in dialogues
- Share interesting, useful, relevant content

Avoid:
- Hiding your affiliation
- Being overly promotional (he has a 90 day moratorium where people can't share their own content until they have shared other content)
- One-way communication
- Poor quality content
- Off-topic content or comments
- Fake persons or comments
- Violating community rules/terms of service
- Spamming "friend" networks
- Paying for submissions

The brand ambassador drives it and that's one person but that person may leave too. Plan for that transition. It's not just your brand ambassador; it's your editorial staff too. The brand ambassador is great but you need to get your writers directly engaged as well.

Employee participatin: your employees are likely already active on their own. Capture that energy and let it work in your favor. You need a corporate social media policy - define clear guidelines for sharing content and discussing the publication, and emphasize etiquette to avoid inappropriate exchanges that can damage your reputation.

Encourage and empower your employees to represent you indirectly and (when appropriate) directly.

Don't forget the people who love you! You have fans and fan evangelists. What about taking advantage of current fans and telling them about exclusive features? They are specifically joining the communities because they love them (think Facebook product pages and Friendfeed rooms, among other areas).

Not everyone is going to like you and you have to remember that.
- Interactions, feedback, and comments will not always be good. Your comments may get buried.
- Turn negative situations into an opportunity to build relationships
- Sometimes you just can't win, but your attempts to reach out will be noticed and documented.

How do you measure this stuff?
- Social media traffic
- Inbound links
- Pageviews, time on site
- Actions taken on the site
You can do this today.

Also, not as important:
- Submissions, votes, bookmarks, tweets, etc.
- Comments
- Cross pollination, secondary coverage

- Qualitative, positive, neutral, or negative
- Speed of viral spread/lifetime of memes
- Brand visibility vs. competitors

It's gotta be two way communication and it's gotta be real.

Up last is Brent. He talks about the platforms that people should participate in.

Social media is broad. He talks about the sites that you get the most results out of for the time that you spend.

The first site is Reddit, a social news aggregation site. Reddit does not have the "popular" page like Digg. It's algorithmic throughout - the front page is the top 25 articles based on their algorithm and it updates every 1 minute. You can be promoted to a popular page that can guarantee you exposure (like Digg). You need to be consistent throughout your success.

He says that politics is a very powerful category on Reddit. Offbeat is also great - funny, WTF, and offbeat. Business/world news are also rather popular. Reddit has an algorithm on every page. You can get onto the Reddit front page within 2 minutes and then be gone right after that. You need to consistently participate to do well on Reddit - if you hit the front page, you can be gone a second later.

Reddit has an anti-spam/anti-marketers "algorithm" that prevents you from being able to consistently push your own content. If you submit something and it is always followed by your friend, you may be the only one seeing it.

When you are going to submit content, try to be in the top 10. It's pretty broad. Don't force it if it doesn't fit.

The most popular site is Digg, at least for marketers. Digg used to be more tech-centric but we're now seeing more business news and offbeat content. Pictures and videos are also very popular. In general, pics/videos are very popular because they don't require a lot of work\ on behalf of the "reader." Digg has power users and they can help a lot. Domain authority is also important.

The next site is StumbleUpon. You submit things in categories - people sign up and choose categories that they look. They can see one piece of content one time within that category. It's a wave of visitors (as Adam said previously, it's the gift that keeps on giving) that can occur consistently. StumbleUpon is coming out with a new launch for category popular pages.

It's very important on SU to know which categories have the most number of subscriptions. You used to be able to sign up for their paid program and on their backend, they will show you the subscription numbers (but you can see from the tag cloud on buzz.stumbleupon.com what the most popular categories are). They also have a very good spam mechanism - if you submit stuff way too often, it will not let you do it consistently anymore. Review other content regularly and submit other content as well.

Yahoo! Buzz is another social site that came out that has a similar premise. It's category driven that allows you to vote to get to the popular page. There are no power users. The big driving areas are politics, celebrity news, entertainment, and sports. Search trends are part of their algorithm - if you utilize their commonly-searched upon keywords, you're likely to get a boost.

Propeller is another social sites. If you submit news content and get to the top 5, you're featured on AOL's news page. Big categories include politics, tech, science, and love. Politics are important and groups are critical for value. Comments are a part of their algorithm (but they don't care what the content of the comments are).

Other sites:
- Meneame is the Spanish digg.
- Delicious: howto and resources do very well.
- Fark is for humor and offbeat.
- Newsvine is kind of fading but it has a strong userbase.

Social media tips
- Have a persona
- Submit to the right community
- Mix it up
- Don't dupe
- Submit at the right time
- Use focused titles and descriptions
- No spelling errors, jargon mistakes, or bad information
- Watch your stats
- Do it right or don't do it
- Be social

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Local is Greg's baby. Greg explains that local is about tying online to offline. Greg will be posting Q&A from Google on Search Engine Land.

Mike Blumenthal, Partner, blumenthals.com is up first. I really respect this man, so I am excited. He first shows a Hitwise chart showing marketshare between Google, MapQuest, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google projects maps info into not just Maps, but also into web search, smartphones, sms, voice, iphone, desktop and so on.

He analyzed 25 data points in a hundred businesses to determine what factors influenced local search rankings. Here is his presentation from SMX Local. He goes through some of the patent, going through really technical stuff such as:
- distance from center
- business name
- business category
- content
- explicit anchor text
- score of web site
- # of links referring to business
- highest score of those links
- total # of web page citations
- geo references
- reviews

Location Prominence score is the new local PageRank.

Research contributors:
- David Mihm
- Miriam Ellis
- Tim Coleman
- Dave ORemland
- missed the rest of the names

Here is Mike's presentation.

Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMC is next up.

Predictions:
- 26% of small and med sized businesses plan to incorporate video on their web sites in the next 12 months
- 40% SMB respondents said they intend to add customer reviews to their sites
- 30% will add links or place ads on social sites or blogs.

He then showed the search heat map.

Watching for Source Consolidation:
- Industry consolidation cannot be at the cost of local relevancy
- There must be a consolidation in data providers. Implementation is too cumbersome in the current environment.
- Deal a day industry. The only thing harder than implementing on so many properties is keeping up.

Neat Things:
- Sekai Camera "Air Tagging" is very cool

Google's New e-Fluence Score:
- Talked about in Business Week
- Google rates social media users on their influential abilities
- HUGE impacts for local/mobile search
- Using manual tools like Trackur and other SEO techniques.

Review Nation:
- Everyone is reviewing everyone
- Reviews influence buying behavior
- Negative reviews can put you out of business
- Zillow, ServiceMagic, etc.
- Monitoring your reputation is more important for local businesses than anything

Craig Greenfield, Director, Local Search, Performics is next. He said the most significant change in this area is the AdWords policy change with the URL policy change. This impacts businesses with many locations.

Make sure your lead gen program is in line with your operators marketing abilities.

FYI, the whole time, his presentation is not being displayed on the projector. Someone should tell him... Or maybe he doesnt have a ppt?

Make sure your address information is clear on your web site and all up to date on the yellow page sites.

Steve Espinosa, Director of Product Development, eLocal Listing is next up. You are going to start seeing specific profile pages for each industry, so small businesses wont have to pay big bucks for a web site, they pay for a premade landing page.

Evolution of the Profile:
- A/B Testing for you on this site
- Complete conversion tracking
- SEO for both local and natural
- Evolve with current tracking

Yahoo Local Listing Tips:
- 5 Star Reviews
- Yahoo Enhanced Listings
- Keyword in Business Name

This will drive 1.8X more calls per month.

Trusted Sources:
- Link to your local listings
- Anchor text the link with key phrase matching the key phrase you placed in business name
- Google is more like to rank a source like Yahoo Local rather than your web site.

Video:
Enquiro showed companies received 2.2X more attention on the results page if they had both adwords and natural listings. They found that 3.34x with click through when a video is on the page.

Videos can be attributed as a web citation in Google Maps if properly linked and indirectly connected to Google Local.

Tips:
- Research your vertical and find out where Google looks for information
- Google pulls data from trusted sources
- InsiderPages.com, CitySearch.com and OpenList.com
- Yahoo Upcoming, Meetup.com and Google Coupon are good web references

The title tag of the web reference is getting a lot of weight put into it.

Bonus Tip:
Free phone tracking via Google. Create an audio campaign, get started and then stop. Then go to "call reporting" and then Google will log everything for you. Create tons of these numbers for free.

I love that tip! Wonder how long it will take to go bye-bye.

Eric Stein, Director, Local Markets, Google is last up.

Google will continue to open up maps. By providing those types of tools, they can help solve problems of search. He said he has to take away that audio trick, but they might open it up another way. Too many small local businesses dont have a web site. It is up to SEMs to help these small businesses market themselves.

Results Take TIme, Metrics Saves Jobs. Newspaper and magazine SEO is all about the fundamentals and often like turning a battleship around in bathtub. Achieving buy-in with executives, CMS managers, associating content with keywords, training and "excitement" were reoccurring themes among this storied panel of experts. After Danny Sullivan kicked off SMX East, New York 2008, today's Moderator was Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal.

Marshall Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, The New York Times
The New York Times is a big family, including About.com Seventeen.com, TV Guide, HP, Time.com and Sports Illustrated. They have extensive experience in China. The New York Times is 100% in house. For other properties they work with, NYT provides services range from consulting, strategy, execution and support.

Marshall asks, "What stage in the life cycle" is this site, in terms of SEO. To begin there is no one size fits all approach to SEO. The New York Times had a registration wall. It all began with "sitting people in a room and teaching them about SEO, helping them understand what their role is. "Establish a knowledge and expertise base for success. Achieve buy in, which happens at the executive level. Ask , who are you, what is your core strength. Find any kind of success that they've had in the past. Case studies of competitors success is a very useful tactic.

Create An SEO Culture
Research, Google Trends, Insights, Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Site stats, successful and unsuccessful searches. Know the CMS quirks and languages. "Best practices may not apply. Best practices apply as in any facet of SEO. "What we're trying to do is extend beyond the confines of the New York Times" CMS. "We like to ask the questions that readers should be asking." Marshall says to give everybody the tools including analytics. He likes to create "ah ha" moments in teaching SEO.

If you're not diagnosing what the CMS does or does not do, it's going to fail. If you don't give the team fields (SEO attributes like HTML Title Tag) that need to be adjusted then you won't be able to pick off the hanging fruit. Look for the small wins to where you can turn the tide in your favor so far as getting by at the basic levels. Where you have executive buy in, you may not have the ears of the CMS folks for technical integration.

Ad networks and commerce are great places to get data to achieve systemic buy in. Branding and popularity are also benefits. Remember that the results take time and metrics saves job. Customize analytics reports for the receiver. Ultimately every CEO is going to do ego searches on Sunday over coffee. Ranking is OK to talk about but not the "be all and end all" because users might not be digging in that place.

Julie Rutherford, Marketing Director, Washington Post posed the question: "SEO Evangelists vs. Formalized Project, which delivers better bag for the buck?" Julie helps with brands such as Budget Travel, Newsweek, Slate, Sprig and other brands. They have lots of opportunities to practices SEO. They first stared SEO back in 2003. They had done some basic testing, started link building with major directories, brought in consultant to do cross-company training and started regular meetings and updates. In 05' they moved to harder projects including topics index, site maps and site structure.

Then they had to move towards a business reality of justifying SEO as a "cross disciplinary" project that required departmental evangelists. SEO requires "executive/C-level buy-in to unlock resources for heavy duty projects. She stressed that SEO is not an exact science and good business justification is required to fully move SEO through your organization. Metrics and tracking are, as always, key.

"On the ground evangelism and formalized project processes, gaining evangelists among the design, editorial, production, marketing, technology, PR and product managers are roots for SEO Success. "Marketing in our case was really the central" part of SEO success for the Washington Post team. "We had a lot of success by "really really" working with our product management groups, as regard CMS and other aspects.

Establish council or SWAT Team, get a project manager, insist on accurate reporting, enable and empower evangelists to uncover their own metrics, regular company updates with winds and metrics and reward performers. Follow up on business justification with executive buy in and provide tools/incentives for self management.

Ulli Muenker, Search Marketing Manager, BusinessWeek, spoke about launching a new SEO program and winning over editorial. She spoke of empowering and "winning" the editors and content creation folks after achieving executive buy in. from the business perspective, this is about marketing and product development, which spawns SEO efforts. The variables are product management, analytics, user experience, partnerships, marketing, technology and web design.

The first step is to get the high level buy in from editorial. Show potential traffic increase compared with competitors' and search traffic. Comparing to competitors is usually a great way to achieve buy in. Then find an SEO champion with influence over various groups/departments in editorial.

Take the time to demonstrate "the importance" and effects os SEO before and after page optimization." Look for the eye opening "wow" (second wow in this post). Step 3 is to speak the "SEO excitement" in all editorial's groups and departments. This demonstrates how their individual articles get more exposure. Show them "what's in it for them." She kept referring to word of mouth SEO buy in as "SEO fungus," LOL.

Conduct training by running regular individual and small group sessions. Use metrics to illustrate competitors' rankings and traffic. Create peer relationships to overcome skepticism and make writers knowledgeable about SEO so they become evangelists.

SEO Techniques For Editorial
Priority #1 is headlines. Editorial doesn't always know that the article headline is the title tag and therefore the listing in Google. Online headlines are different than print headlines. Main points to edit include being straightforward: no puns, sarcasm, jokes, and abbreviations. Include keywords that you want to rank for and create headlines that are fully understood on their own, without sub-headline or image.

The second priority is creating a keyword rich sub headline and copy beginning. This can also be used as the meta description. Step 3 and 4 are about creating a good internal linking structure and keyword rich copy without making it "sound dumb." Gain the editorial teams trust. You can help them get more explore in Google. Try to understand their mindset, especially a print mindset. Build relationships, set up regular training session and create excitement and buzz around SEO.

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search Optimization. Erik preaches a "Two-Pronged SEO Approach for Publishers"
Static Optimization Strategy means long term optimization around static local keywords. Specific audience profiles are developer for users who interact with each of the site's landing pages.

Profiles if readers and their interests drive the content mapping process, which mates each page to a targeted query. Keywords are then categorized by audience interests For instance a "sports junkie profiles," uses phrases like Cleveland Indians and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A restaurant Seeker profiles uses "Cleveland dining and finds their property, "Cleveland.com"Ask, "what keywords do my audience profiles use on the engines?"Then drill down into the subcategories like, fine dining or other niche.

Let this drive your decisions on the type of content you'll like to have out there. Think of these as "Content Magnets," which can be created to attract a specially targeted profile. Think about your sweet-spot. "Make editorial decisions on what to write, research-based and without being "too clever." Optimize headlines and tags. Use search data to validate your keyword decision and increase the "search shelf-life" of the story. Use Google trends to show the ebb and flow of cultural news interest. If the keywords remain hot, write separate stories under different URLs optimized for those keywords. This can extend your shelf-life.

Get into Google News by having original content. Keyword optimize the URL, be literal with your headlines using H tags and write balanced copy. Optimize your images and captions and keep them near the articles. Supply a frequently updated Google news feed and monitor it. (Google. prefers inline HTML 4:3 images above 12K). Keep fresh, keep constant, separate your stories into new news, breaking news and other divisions. Finally he suggested that we "own our stories."

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear, a Duluth, Minnesota Search Marketing agency.

Quick correction, the NYT does not own "Seventeen.com, TV Guide, HP, Time.com and Sports Illustrated" those are client of our consulting group, Define Search Strategies. The New York Times does own About.com.

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

The room is pretty empty, but I guess that is because this is an extremely specific session. Maybe 50 people? If I had to guess.

Cindy Krum, Director of New Media Strategy, Blue Moon Works, Inc. is first up. She will explain the "death of the dot mobi."

Mobile is Important:
- Mass Mobile Convergence (it can do so much more)
- Most personal marketing medium ever
- More interactive marketing possibilities
- Bridges the gap between online and offline

Mobile is Different:
- Mobile bots
- Mobile algorithms
- Smaller screens
- Simplified Rendering (on non iphones)
- More sophisticated searchers (they search differently, more long tail)
- Immediate intent

Why Now?
- Real mobile web browsing because of devices like the iPhone. It is easier and works well. Other devices are coming out that work like the iPhone.
- Flat rate data pricing
- Faster download speeds
- More processing power

dotMobi = Bad for SEO
- Bad for SEO
-- Splits traffic
-- Splits links
-- Splits index size
-- Doesnt benefit from history
-- Risks duplicate content
-- Confusing for users
- Not preferred in mobile search (the dot mobi ext)
- Limited useful life time span

Mobile Best Practices
- Basic SEO Best Practices
-- Blended search best practices
-- Local search best practices
- Avoid heavy code, flash and JavaScript (iPhone does support JS)
- Mobile search engine submission
- W3C Mobile compliance standards
-- XHTML & Accessibility Standards
-- External CSS
- Browser Detection or Self Selection
- Redirect the dot Mobi to your main site

3 Mobile Site Architecture Options

(1) Do nothing
- Look at mobile demand and traffic. Do people really need a mobile version of your site?
- Test Existing Site with transcoding, without transcoding, on true browsing phone and on mobile browsing phone.

Advantages:
- Easy,
- Cheap
- Forward Thinking cause phones will get better

Disadvantages:
- Transcoding only works through search
- Page urls and links are transcoded
- Mobile user experience hard to control
- Risky for the brand
- Gives your competitors an advantage

(2) Mobile Only Pages

- Create a mobile site on sub domain or sub folder

Advantages
- Just update existing code
- Adjust level of content

Disadvantages:
- Traditional home page must work on mobile
- Extra click from home page
- Duplicate effort
- Duplicate content risk
- Confusing if significantly different

Mobile Traditional Hybrid Pages:
- Multiple CSS sheets one for mobile one for normal
- Same content but different rendering instructions
- Rearrange content
- Display = none if you dont want to show it

Advantages:
- Just add a new stylesheet
- Same content
- No dup content
- CSS only has to download once

Disadvantages:
- Not 100% reliable
- iPhone wont always pull mobile version
- Hard if CSS not already in place
- Display none ...

Gregory Markel, Founder & President, Infuse Creative is next up. He will be focused on iPhone strategy.

He shows the Google Phone, new Blackberry and new Nokia all with touch screens, all GPS enabled and all "true web" enabled. This is why it is important. Location is also a reason, be the first to be there. He explains that iPhone GPS uses cell towers, GPS etc to get your location.

He said, keyword searching is dying on mobile. There are apps that replace this need, he said. He shows that there are a lot more searches on the iPhone then a normal mobile device.

iPhone App sales are growing twice the rate as iTunes music.

The browser experience on the iPhone is vastly superior than a traditional mobile browser.

iPhone users consume 6 times more data than the average mobile user.

Mobile Search has increased 68% in the US.

US consumers are more interested in the iPhone than any other phone, according to Google Trends.

The major search engines are detecting and offering iPhone specific experiencing. Google and Yahoo both have apps as well.

Apple is aggressively pursing business customers.

He then demos Google on the iPhone:
- Google detects your on the iPhone and knows where you are, and may serve up location specific results
- The search results are pretty much the same as a desktop experience, he said.
- iPhone browser will make phone numbers clickable (not google specific, but keep that in mind).
- Paid results are not the same, because on the iPhone they only show results at the top of the page, none on the right. So you better have top AdWords listings to show up.
- Google provides a free Google Search app. It offers search suggestions, pulls from your contacts, location specific by default.

It is important to note, the Google App uses the built in localization feature of the iPhone. While Google search, in Safari on iPhone, does not. Markel does not specifically say this, but Google is only showing localized results based on your IP information, but Google.com cannot do this by getting your GPS location (as far as I know). The Google App can and does do this, but not Google.com.

He then shows the UrbanSpoon app from the iTunes App store.

He mentions that Google does index iTunes links. I covered this a bit back, under the title Is Apple Cloaking Their iTunes Content, With Google Looking The Other Way? When Markel reads this, he will learn that this is really not an "SMX Exclusive." But this has been going on for a while now, even before the App Store. In fact, Matt Cutts of Google commented on it.

Tips:
- Check your clients web analytics to gauge current daily iPhone usage
- Remember the location specific nature of iPhone

Alex Muller, CEO, Slifter is last up. He will focus mostly on the App environment.

- Wide distribution
- Built in audience
- No specific iPhone web index
- Lower quality leads
- SEO and SEM Costs are higher
- Development cost to detect and display for iPhones

iPhone App Store:
- Advertisement
- Wide distribution
- Eager audience
- Consumer utility may be a detriment (depends)
- Longevity (how long will this last)
- Build, test, approve...
- It is expensive to build

Vertical Search
- Such as fandango
- Highly targeting
- Narrow audience

Downloadable Apps
- Loopt
- Highly engaged to end user
- More committed user
- How do you participate
- Major cost to developers

- 80% iPhone users use data
- iPhone users consist of about 7% of US market

People have been talking about search being integrated with other types of marketing for ages. How's it going? Is search now second nature when creating an advertising campaign? If not, why not? Thoughts and examples of integration challenges will be shared in this panel.

Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist and SEMPO Board of Directors

Speakers:
Peter Hershberg, Managing Partner, Reprise Media
James Lamberti, Senior Vice PResident, Search and Media, comScore, Inc.
Robert Murray, President, iProspect
Don Steele, Vice President Digital Marketing, MTV Networks

Robert Murray is up first. He asks if we're soccer fans and if we've been to soccer games. In the game of soccer, integration is key. When you have 11 players on the field and they're all united for one common purpose, the results can be inspiring. He equates this with marketing online and offline.

Some background: search marketing does not exist in the backend. Unless you've been living under a rock, you have heard to "integrate or die." However it's packaged, the message is simple - integration matters. But what are marketers doing about that? What techniques are they using? If they're not, why not?

He found research from JupiterResearch in August 2007 where he pulled data from consumers - offline marketing on online behavior. 67% of polled individuals were driven to perform a search after they were exposed to some sort of offline messaging. Further, 39% of those people actually made a purchase of a product or service and not just from any company they found in the search results but from the initial company that exposed them to the offline messaging.

This year, they did more marketing between April and June of this year - 289 qualified search marketers completed the survey for 3 objectives:
- to uncover extent to which search efforts are integrated with offline marketing channels
- to reveal techniques used
- if there were any obstacles faced

The concept of integrating search with offline marketing channels is not new. Only 55% of the search marketers polled, however, did this. 34% of these actually integrated with direct mail, 29% integrated with newspaper or magazine ads. 12% integrate with television. However, that's odd - TV is one of the biggest influencers in online search behavior.

If people aren't integrating, why not? 19% said a lack of budget, 15% said lack of human resources, 13% didn't consider it, 11% lacked the senior management buyout. Others said that the offline marketing was separate from online marketing. Some also said that they just didn't do offline marketing.

What techniques are people using when you're integrating? 84% said that they're integrating a web address prominently in offline messaging. 66% said adding the company name. Robert says that this isn't integration - it's coordination. That should be a given. Only 26% are using the same keywords offline that they were using online, which he finds shocking.

What does this mean for you? Some people are put at a competitive disadvantage.

Like a soccer coach, the CMO is someone who works to build a strategic plan that drives towards coordination. CMO needs to make sure that data is shared continuously. You want to reward this behavior in your organization.

If you're a search marketer with a lot of great information, you should share that with your offline counterparts. The offline people should come to the table as well.

Testing is also important: this can save time and money.

The bottom line: we're all in this game to win but the marketers doing the best job integrating search with all other forms of offline marketing will most likely take the cup home.

James Lamberti of comScore is up next.

Are we there yet? He's going to talk about 3 things that are still missing - the all important consumer (and how they're left out of the conversation), measuring the full value of search (most people aren't), and search-driven planning and strategy.

Advertising a la "madman" - 1950-2001 RIP - you give them awareness, they go through the funnel, and they buy. Not anymore, he says. The world is complex - there's eyeballs, then offline media, online media, social media, and friends and family. In the center of this is search. All of this stuff that happens to the consumer and is simple for the marketers is search. comScore pulled up data to show that 17.1 billion US searches occurred. 194 million searchers searched about 8 times. Search is growing double digit numbers off the base of billions of billions of queries.

Most people search based on the brand trademark and brand communication, even graphically, he displays in a slide. As a desired outcome, you're getting people to search. How can I make sure my search marketing catches that activity?

He shows data that says that 55% of generic queries are undermeasured and undervalued. 45% are branded. Therefore, you need to think about the more generic searching. If you're just hanging on your trademarked terms and ignoring generic, you're missing a huge part of your addressible market.

Why are people searching? It's not seeking coupons, it's not navigational - they really want help and information for a purchase decision. Nonsearchers are often looking for promotions versus searchers. They're at a point of influence.

Measuring the full value -
It's not dead. We need data that's familiar to us to get the conversation going. He shows real data that was aggregated across 6 month and 9 million people hit a specific campaign with a reach of 6 million reach. He explains a computer search had a 69% reach because 6 million people were buying computers a month.

If you calculate your ROI compared to competition and you're getting less, you're at a huge disadvantage. Your competitor will have more paid impressions, more clicks, and they will gain share.

He shows multi-channels retailer actual results - multi-channeling - market mixed models. He says that you should provide the right data and the results will show that the organization will need to be spending more money on earch.

4 pieces of advice
1. Establish common ground. SEO marketers want to be talking to offline folks and the CEO - get the types of data that will get them interested.
2. Measuring full value is key. Know what the offline multiplier impact is.
3. Measure search as a desired outcome.
4. Treat organic and trademark as unique efforts: most organizations ignore generic through inappropriate comparisons to trademark. If you under emphasize generic, you ignore a huge part of the market.

Up next is Peter Hershberg about Microsoft as an enterprise brand. Microsoft is in dozens of businesses from Zune to Office to Live to XBOX to Small Business Servers. He is focusing on Vista and the work done with Vista. There are a lot of products associated with the Vista brand and there are also stakeholders. There are also a lot of goals that are conflicting.

How do you approach this problem and how do you deal with it? The first way to do that is through education - there are challenges because there are 5000 marketers with individual search budgets. Therefore, you need to create universal processes for budgeting, management, and reporting to measure success on an apples to apples basis. You also need to compaign metrics to marketing goals.

How do you do this? The strategy is to contribute to a Search Center of Excellence to sehare best practices and processes in search. It's like a forum for all the policies with campaign data and other information. There are training sessions (Search 101) tailored to the needs of each Microsoft department and its line managers. They are recorded and archived online. They also established a uniform 3-phased approach for taking fully integrated campaigns from concept to launch over a 5 week period.

Offline absolutely drives online behavior specifically in the area of search. As high as 80% of all internet sessions begin at a search engine, according to data. Something piqued their interest to perform that search.

Here's a Microsoft and their consumer campaign: some people are seeing the commercials with Seinfield, for example. People are going to start searching if they see the commercials. They need advanced knowledge about campaigns so it makes it possible to predict the unpredictable. They had access to the script so they bought the most obvious keywords including random (shoe circus, worm churro, etc.) If someone was searching for those, it was because they had seen the ad and wanted to know more about it. Keywords that are disconnected from Windows and Vista but resonated from the commercials were included in the campaign. Sometimes the least obvious things drive those searches.

Microsoft and Corporate Communications: active keywords that include Vista as part of a phrase. Close coordination of paid efforts and PR improved Vista caomapgin results - selected related keywords, aligned creative to increase response rates and conversion rates, and coordinated landing pages that linked to articles.

The whole idea of aligning goals with the channel has been mentioned, but the goals for Microsoft were related to reach and frequency to drive to site engagement. Where reach is concerned - how many of my customers saw my message? How often did they see it? For engagement, what did my customers do once they visited the site? This all ties into optimization.

The most interesting thing is that search is driving marketing intelligence. When we think of search, we're aggregating tons of data which is being used in the interest of improving results in the campaign. Search is a realtime focus group and you can analyzizesearch traffic and behavior to gain insite that can influence the entire mix: marketing messaging (emails, banners, onsite), media selection, communications strategy, and more.

How are we able to do this with Microsoft in Japan? Print was the biggest driver of traffic there. They found that this can optimize the banner campaign. The result was a 3x rise in the conversion rate.

The lessons learned
- Educate all stakeholders and understand their roles
- Repeatable rocesses for effectively shaping assets
- Measure success in the search channel - recalibrate goals to match strengths of the channel
- Repurpose search learnings to inform the overall marketing program

Last up is Don Steele of MTV.

Why we market: Branding, Awareness, Target, Interaction/Sampling.

How we market - there are some billboards that he shows that do brnading and targeting and awareness.

They use search for marketing.
* Branding: Search engine space is the new billboard for branding.
* Awareness: Search is awareness for visibility for shows.
* Target: Search also targets as it delivers a timely and fluid message to users who are expressing an interest in it.
* Interaction/sampling: Smart search campaigns should encourage interactive behavior whree a brand is delivering upon a user's expectation

He shows a search for "bill cosby" and how there's a paid ad that shows the Cosby Show on TV Land. It's the only paid link there.

He shows other examples with other related brands. When the Elliot Spitzer scandal came out, a big search was for spitzer jokes. They were able to do very well there.

How can you sell this internally? Well they are a media company and if they're not advertising, they're making a big mistake.
- Core audience
- Reporting
- Self selection
- Evangelism

The biggest challenge is that we can do billboards and search, but these tactics are not equal. You need to talk to people who are self-selectedness - giving people what they're looking for.

Sara asks a question about frequency reach.
Peter says that search is more measurable. But we only pay on a cost per click basis. We're dismissing the value of all the impressions. Back to his Microsoft example, in the Vista campaign, he served 5 billion impressions on MS's behalf. There is no meaningful way to show the reach of impressions.
Sara admits that it's a relatively new phenomenon.

In case you hadn't heard (or couldn't guess), Search Engine Roundtable is, as always, liveblogging Search Marketing Expo East 2008 which will start next Monday, October 6th, in NYC.

The conference coverage is not quite finalized just yet, but we're putting finishing touches on it as we speak.

We're also taking volunteer livebloggers, so contact us if you're interested. So far, we've got a helper in Marty Weintraub of aimClear (thanks much, Marty) and we'd love to have you join us too.

Don't forget, if you're not attending the event but will be in the area, you can always meet up with us at the charity event next week.