Search Marketing Expo 2008 Seattle Archives

This is conference coverage of the Search Marketing Expo Advanced 2008 event. There was an "embargo" on releasing these session notes until this time. Enjoy these outstanding SEO tips.

Give It Up! - No more secrets time. In this session, our panel of noted SEOs all share some of their favorite and largely overlooked SEO tips. Then we turn to the audience for more sharing. Attendees vow not to blog what's discussed for the now traditional 30 day waiting period. Search reps in the audience agree to a 30 day delay in fixing any loopholes, too -- or give up their own secret.

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

Q&A Moderator: Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink

Speakers:

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz
Todd Friesen, Vice President Search Strategies, Visible Technologies
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Rob Kerry, Head of Search, Ayima Search Marketing
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
Marty Weintraub, a guy from Duluth and an aimclear.com blogger

I'm on embargo. 1PM PST on July 3rd.

Danny says that there aren't women on this panel. He is going to kick out three guys next time.

Stephan Spencer talks about conditional redirects. He says he doesn't want you to do conditional redirects if you have an affiliate programs. Do unconditional redirects, especially Amazon.

He is sharing a Link Ninja tool that they've had for a few years.
- Underlying principles
* the 80/20 rule that there's high value links that drive a lot of value
* Logarathmic nature of PageRank
* Thus PR8 and PR9 and PR10 are highly desirable
* Topically relevant
* .edu and .org

Google Directly Mining Tool - spider the google directory - directory.google.com - google's robots.txt allows it.
- Extract site name, URL, pagerank, and dump into a database. Mine this database via web interface to look for sites with super high PR by category and TLD. Optionally collect supplemnt info in a second pass (site age, TBPR, link neighborhood, monetization, present of attribution links, paid links, export to TSV file).
He shows how it works and gets a full report for the TBPR and populating a spreadsheet with all of this. He shows sample output with all the cool data.

Other ideas and methodologies:
- Proxy server based SEO - use a server as a middleman when you have a complex inflexible CMS e-commerce platform that you can't make changes to. You can have sitewite rules and page specific rules. Think scalable SEO and automation. Page-specific rules are best done through an admin interface or bulk upload.
On top of that, add thin slicing. Think "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. Overthinking can be detrimental. Make quick decisions. It only really works if you're an expert.
e.g. hand optimize title tags across hundreds of page quickly (prioritized)
Focus on title tags, H1s, URLs
Don't obsess and you don't have to be perfect. Iterate instead.
If you don't have an admin interface, use a spreadsheet and import.
There's an SEO title tag plugin that has thin slicing.

Optimize URLs in an interative format. URL affects searcher clickthrough rates. Better URLs = shorter ones get more clicks. Iterative testing and optimization would be cool. You can do that with WordPress. If you change a post slug, the WordPress core automatically does a 301 redirect from the previous slug. You won't lose juice from that. He explains that you can mass-edit your URLs using the SEO Title tag plugin.

Marty Weintraub has 62 slides. Danny is afraid that this is too long. In 7.5 minutes? GOOD LUCK.

Three favorite overlooked SEO topics - defensible.

Fool's Gold Link Exchange.
- reciprocal link exchange -
Clients understand reciprocal link exchanges. We nofollow everything. It's not a link exchange anymore. Some people have no idea that your authority juice is or the traffic and promotion value. They don't know what link farms are and they don't know about sculpting. Why do this? Clients understand it. SEMs want devasting unique 1-way link strategies. The opportunity - links trading partners don't understand the basic pathology of links. We send this to our clients and tell them to send it to their link trading partners.
- Unless website marketing amateurs study or hire and experienced natural search agency, they simply don't know enough!
Ethics of this is in the privacy policy - it's for branding, traffic, site referral purposes. At our sole discretion, sites will have nofollow!
- Clients dance the link exchange hootenanny. Trading partners perceive holistic reciprocal promotion and traffic. It's highly effective for local SEO. The true spirit of social community. Invite 70 direct competitors - highly relevant links. The client gets all the link juice. Stagger your delivery and put it in your privacy policy so that Matt doesn't get you one day.

Nested iFrame Community Crawler
- Automated browser crawl of targeted communities. (MyBlogLog)
- We automate a browser crawl in targeted communities. LEave ambasssador's MBL and other community bread crumb badges behind. You're vanity baiting targeted authority community members. They see your avatar day after day.
- StumbleUpon, Sphinn, MBL
Tactic: research vanity bait topics (alltop, technorati, Google blog search) - make a bigass list of all your friends. Log into all the services. It crawls all the site every second.
Ethics: we make clients participate in the communities that they're active in. Ignore web developer and other plugin so that people don't know where it came from.

Persona SEO with social media profiles.
Why SEO? Great SEO comes from frequent participation. Worthy content will result in friends, buzz, and SEO, links.
Close cousin to the sphinn scrape-all-users and auto-add-all-users as friends tool.

Using social media profiles, it's distributed interior linking. Friend, join groups, that creates a massive anchor text to your profile and if leveraged, it can be very powerful and defensive and offensive reputation management.

Authentic participation and hard work. It works for competitive niche keywords. Serious forethought is needed.

Keyword: soy candles. It's 65% difficulty in Rand's tool. The profile is a 51 year old female chick. There is a legitimate reason for this avatar to exist. She's a world class photographer, a 90s Prodigy instructor at NYU (she's bookmarking a lot of content!). She's totally hot. Persona blogging is twisted and brings oodles of traffic. We know she's bisexual and participates in monthly Lesbian poetry slams in Denver.
- Don't forget to optimize that soy candle picture on flickr!

Next up is Michael Gray: how to beat the Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Score.
- Search engines - stop trying to be a moral compass. Stop sidestepping the questions.

Landing page quality score is a lie. Landing page quality score algo has nothing to do with your landing page. It looks at organic factors. The better organic rankings, the better your quality score.

He shows the methodology to do this. Campaign - sanjia ringtones
- He ran it for $10.00.
- Landing page is a standard page.
- He ran another one for $0.75
- Landing page is identical.

What's the difference?
All of these campaigns were in the identical account. Keywords were identical. Ad copy identical. Landing page - identical.
The difference? The domain name was different. Domain from 2006 was $10 and the 2008 domain was $0.75. It's not just the domain age. They're looking at the number of trusted links over a period of time. You need to prove to Google that you're trustworthy and need to do that over a specified period of time. It will go up to $10 if you don't get those links.

The quality score goes through iterations - just like the sandbox.

George Bush does not sell ringtones (yet). You're not looking at the landing page if you believe that.
- Main factor - organic stores
- Trusted sites have low pricing because they're good
- Nontrusted sites are bad and have high pricing
- New or unknown pricing - unknown and unknown pricing.

As Google updates its organic trust rank every few months based on link data. Unknown sites move into trusted or nontrusted categories.
If your website moves into a non trusted price jacked category, buy a new domain, create a new ad group, and move all keywords.
Lather, rinse, repeat

Google is a data borg. Every piece of data you give to Google through toolbar, email, analytics - you're giving it to Google and it can be used against you in a court of Google. Think twice before you give them what you give them.

Rob Kerry is next. He's a white hat green hat monkey. But he says that some people will see this as black hat. These aren't ideas you should use on non-brand sites.

1. Microsite creation: creating many anonymous sites which appear as third party links. Independent websites that link to your main site.
- Benefits: complete control of inbound links, control and manage anchor text, often cheaper than buying links, sell links to non-competing sites.
To do this, get free/cheap hosting and domain names. Avoid .infos but because everyone sees them as spammy and duplicate class C class ranges - different hosting networks to be more independent. Choose a CMS like WordPress. Roll out content. Link over to the main site once aged.
Don't: use the same whois data, register domains on the same day/week, get links from the same places, use the same content on different blogs, and use the same templates and linking structure.

2. Automated content - generate unique content using software.
Mikkel deMib Svennson introduced us to Markov Chains last year at Give It Up!
- it uses a mathematical equation to create unlimited content from a single source.
- downside is it's hard to perfect and the content produced doesn't pass human review
Also, multi-souce sentence arrays. Write original piece of content. Rewrite each sentence 5 times. Each must be unique but say the same thing.
Variant 1: Link development is the process of attaining links to a website in order to increase the site's perceived value and popularity.
Variant 2; Increasing a website's perceived importance and popularity through the acquisition of inbound liks is called Link Development.

If you're not a coder, get someone off elance or a Russian. They're usually very Good. You can get someone to explode sentences to big arrays as variables. Randomly pick one sentence, then the second one, then the third, etc. The result is 6 articles with 25 sentneces that turns into 28 quintillion articles according to Yahoo answers (6^25). You still can get quite a bit of content.
Benefits:
It passes human review because it makes sense. It's always sentence 1, sentence 2, sentence 3, and it looks unique. It's the fraction of the cost of copywriters. You can distribute articles across your microsite network. Submit content to every article directory with embedded links and offers the unique content to other sites in exchange for links (they'll think it's unique content).
This is white hat, isn't it? It is, because content is king!

Issues: not all generated articles will pass dupe tests. Full sentences can leave a fooprint
- So use CopyScape to check before publishing articles. Randomize words within sentences - "don't" is "do not", "pub" is "bar", etc. Then you'll have more than 28 quintillion articles.

3. On topic spamming. Auto post comments and trackbacks to blogs and guestbooks that relate to your site. This isn't really spamming. It's a time saving device for Rob. He uses technology to use exactly what he'd do but he's not as fast as a computer.
- Useful for getting links into your network of microsites. Free links for affiliate sites. Rank for long tail terms. Increase site visibility.
e.g. target the term "red wine." Run precise searches on Google and Yahoo (site:.edu +comment + "red wine" + "you must log"]
- scrape all URLs from comments. Create an array of comments to post - "I'm still trying to find good red wine. Can you help me find good California Red wine?"
- Get your coder to create bot to auto post comments to the blogs
- Use your target term as your name, which will form anchor text in the comment.
Benefits:
It looks human, massive success rate, even passes through pre moderation, nany blogs still don't nofollow comments or trackback list. Yahoo and MSN still have problems handling nofollow.

Todd Friesen is up next. He has a cool website called traintalkwithtodd.com where he posts his Twitter messages.

- Old blogs - this is one that he's had success with. Go and find old blogs on blogspot or Wordpress (better on blogspot, though, because you can find ones that haven't been updated but they rank for keywords that drive you nuts). You look at the profile page. He might have a hotmail address too. Hotmail addresses get recycled to public domain if they don't check it. Request the login credentials. Then go back to the blog - get the password sent to you, and now you own the blog.

- What about hotlinking images? If you hate that, you can fix that bastard. Make it a pornstar picture. Or say "XYZ is a thief." If someone links to your images, that's a link to your image. Pop open that .htaccess file and 301 that image link to wherever you want.

- Todd isn't a social media guy but he has these ideas about what you can do with Digg. You have a great domain that has hit the front page of Digg but you can't use it anymore because Digg has banned you. YOu can't get unbanned. What do you do? Scrape content - put the list of funny things and throw it on a new domain and submit it to Digg, call your Digg army, wait for the fervor to die down. Then redirect off of it.

- Custom 404 pages. Why do you use custom 404 pages? You've had a product go out of stock or whatever so you put up this 404 page. Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL will take you out of the index. But people may link to that page - why would you put up a 404? 301 that one level up. 301 it to an associated product instead then! Custom 404s - why would you ever want a page taken off the internet if there were links to it? You can recover from it but you should still do related pages.

- Reputation management is important. Help clients hide skeletons in closets and clean up messes. Occasionally, the sites you're monitoring on a regular basis goes down for a few days. He's not advocating DDOS attacks. Monitor sites in the space. The second you get an email that a page is down, use the Google removal tool so that Google can remove it (for at least 6 months to the date). It buys you 6 months of time to get positive content.

- DaveN suggested this: Google bowling is alive and well. Because different link brokers moved from sponsored links to inline linking, his theory is that there's a filter that looks for too many new links from old blogs that are tied together so they can knock sites out. Say you have an old network of 40 blogs; add a link to a site you want to knock down in the search results.

Rand Fishkin is up last. He has 58 slides.

- Searching for links
Less common query operators. Use the related: tag. Find out who your competitors are related to with the related: tag. Top ranking sites. These are sites to get links from even if they're not directly related.
intitle: search. The intitle: results are very different. Go across playing fields. They've earned the ability to be there but not the trust to be there.
inurl:
intext: intext is crap. It doesn't work.
inanchor:
The last 2 are broken, he thinks.
allintitle, allinurl, allintext, allinanchor (last 2 not working)
Do wildcard searches (everybody likes *) - what's very popular? When you plug in a product search (dell desktop *), you can see what people are typing in and using as their keywords - good competitive keyword analysis.
Temporal searching - you don't have to obey the little dropdown. You can modify the query in the string - as_qdr=d43

Linkfromdomain: only offered by MSN/Live Search - what domains are linked to from a given domain
ip: tool to see who is linked where. They set their DNS to resolve to Google's address.

Competitive link searches - Yahoo! Site Explorer. Append a parameter - yahoo will show you links through their regular search interface. link: inanchor: works there

Google blog search - accurate link data at Google. Literally see

Exalead - link: operator - order of importance.

Alexa also shows links, as does Technorati.

linkdomain:zzzz. region:europe - great for geotargeting.

Experiments in advanced queries - linkfromdomain: + linkdomain: - or linkfromdomain: + site:

Pages in order of importance www site:yourdomain.org.

Brand mentions with no links "seomoz -linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org"

Linkingto multiple competitors but not yoursite linkdomain:seobook.com linkdomain:searchengineland.com

COmpetitor Domain and Add URL searches - "bruceclay.com" "add URL" -site

Keyword + inURL directory

Tracking manual link building efforts - use a unique word while conducting manual link building and track progress through engines.

- Google local ranking tips - in order of importance
1. Registration with Google Local
2. Perceived closeness to center of city
3. Number of local reviews
4. "Local" link popularity
5. Local phone number
6. Participation in the online menu services - Zagat, menupix, menupages, allmenus
7. Quality of local reviews
8. city name inclusion in anchor text
9. Local non-Google directory listings. Gayot, Zagat, citysearch, lilaguide, superpages, Yelp
10. Keyword in the business name
11. Domain authority
12. Address inclusion on webpages

- Reputation tracking techniques
Google Temporal Web Search - do a search for "seomoz" within last 24 hours
Google blog search
Google links Search
Google news search
Summize Twitter search

Obligatory black hat slide: Google bowling - point the DNS of your banned sites so they fall out of the index pretty darn fast.

Donna Burnett gives a tip:
- Google has this wonderful site tool and part of their AdWords - doing keyword research, type in a keyword into Google, then grab the URL out of Google, go to the site tool and put that URL into the tool - it spans every keyword possible in the search results. It works great.

Some guy gets up:
- Local is frustrating, he says. He was flamed for being inept. Use categorization from superpages and disable Google categories. If the categories don't work well for you, disable the categories completely and use Superpages. Went completely unlisted to the top of Google in about 10 pages.

Didn't have a chance to go to SMX Advanced? Mike McDonald and the whole WebProNews team decided to make a video to show you what you've missed in a video with Danny Sullivan entitled Love, Search, and Bots.

Here's the video for your enjoyment:

Thanks to Mike, Roger, Tiffany, and the whole WebProNews team for an enjoyable (and silly) video. It's true; we discussed a lot of those things ;)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

What an outstanding two days of search marketing. SMX Advanced Seattle 2008 is now complete. The sessions were awesome, the food was delicious and the networking was excellent.

I am proud to say we were able to cover twenty sessions between Tamar, David Wallace, Justin Davy and myself. Thank you for your help guys, I personally appreciate it and I know the industry appreciates it also.

Here is the coverage recap:
Day One:

1. Keynote with Kevin Johnson at Microsoft
2. Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques
3. Winning From The Start: Getting Ad Copy Right
4. Money For What? Search Marketing Payment Models
5. Bot Herding
6. Conversion Optimization: Winning After They Arrive
7. Creating Value In Your SEM Businesses
8. Buying Sites for SEO
9. Closing The Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead?
10. You&A With Matt Cutts

Day Two:

1. Search Friendly Development
2. Search Marketing & Surviving A Recession
3. International SEO
4. What You Should Be Measuring -- But Aren't!
5. Platform Considerations for the Microsoft Stack and LAMP Stack
6. Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know
7. Bid Management Today
8. Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues
9. Expert Technical Review of Your Website
10. Give it Up (coming in 29 days...)

Yes, we have blogged the Give It Up Session, but it won't be posted until the embargo lifts.

Session Intro: This session will bring together experts who will use all of the information and tactics learned throughout the day and apply them to detailed site reviews of the code and infrastructure of sites submitted in advance by the audience.

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include Evan Roseman, Software Engineer at Google, Mohit Srivastava, Co-Founder of Faves.com, Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft Webmaster Center, and Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect of Microsoft.com at Microsoft.

This session will include actual case studies. First example is Faves.com. Wanted to capture long tail keyword searches so distributed long tail content across many linkable pages. Tried to make sure not to have duplicate content but some fallover is okay.

They used enhanced image search within Google Webmaster Central which help to drive additional long tail traffic. Include a relevant image on each page to take advantage of this.

They also had a branding problem Was called bluedot.us in which users were confused over the .us name. Faves.com is more in line with what they actually offer. They 301 redirected every URL to its counterpart of new domain. They made sure old and new site maps were verified with Google. They also attempted to reclaim links that were pointing to old domain.

The effect of domain/brand name change initially was drop in traffic and rankings but eventually came back. No drop in pages indexed though. Some of the things they did was to contact Google employee through a friend, posted to Google Webmaster Central, implemented SEO best practices and then waited 100 days (time it took to rebound).

Now Vanessa is going to go through some live sites. I am going to try to post some nuggets out of what was discovered to improve/fix the sites that were represented.

1. HealtheCareers Network - long URLs, incomplete parameters, required cookies, half cold fusion/half asp, no site map, and lots of 500 internal server errors were just some of the problems with this site.

2. Disney.com - Flash site so when disabling Flash and JavaScript, you see nothing. No content and no links to any html content. Google cache shows nothing but title. Also seem to be cloaking, not showing ads to Goglebot. Remedies - provide indexable content, submit site map to indexable content. Also don't use "all Flash" but CSS, DHTML and Flash elements.

3. BodyWork U - Two primary audiences with no call to action items. Site also looks like directory from home page. Way too many links on home page. Also blog is irrelevant. Looks more related to SEOs than bodywork and massage. Site also has duplicate title tags as well as title tags that are very similar. There are lots of internal server errors. Panelists claimed crawling site was very slow like server is lagging. Panelists praised their 404 error page.

While this session was more of a live review of sites then "presentation style," you can easily see that there are many problems that can plague sites, even ones of the caliber of Disney. It truly demonstrates that there is a bright future for SEO and SEM services!

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Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Session Intro: Provides a checklist and workflow for diagnosing your web sites for SEO obstacles using freely available diagnostic tools.

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include David Golightly, User Experience Developer Lead at Zillow, Jonathan Hochman, President of Hochman Consultants and Chris Silver Smith, Lead Strategist at GravityStream / Netconcepts.

Vanessa starts off with the question of "what really matters?" Accessibility, discoverability and conversions are the big stuff that matters. The place to really start in investigating potential problems is the search results themselves. Is problem related to indexing, ranking or crawling? Identify problem first.

Chris is then introduced as first speaker. Diagnosing problems involves a wide range of criteria. Most issues are basic and easy to diagnose - things like mis-using robots.txt tag, inadvertently blocking spiders and the like. First question to ask is "are pages actually indexed?" If not, there is a problem! Does site URLs have sessionIDs and if so, are they doing anything to resolve that? Google Webmaster Central is useful to get a bird's eye view of what Googlebot sees when visiting your site. The title tag and meta tag data they show can be quite revealing and interesting.

Chris uses www.web-snifer.net to check server header status codes to ensure pages are reporting the proper codes. He uses www.seebot.org to view web pages like a search engine would. You can also use a Firefox Developer toolbar as well. Firefox Link Counter Extension provides useful link data. Chris makes reference to SEOmoz's SEO Toolbox as a good source of tools for diagnosing problems. One such tool shows other sites that are resting on your IP address. Use Google Sets to ID your competitors. You can also see sites that Google thinks are related to yours.

Jonathan is up next who will dive into some diagnostic stuff. Using a NoScripts add-on, Jonathan can turn scripts off and discover problems. He shows a problem with the SMX site when scripts are turned off as well as Gillette. He recommends the Googlebar (not Toolbar) which is a Firefox plug-in. It has a one-click button that shows you Google's cache. Another Firefox add-on he mentions is Live HTTP Headers which shows header status codes.

With regards to rich media applications, you need to be able to feed the bots content they can understand. Replace html content with rich media content by manipulating Document Object Model (DOM). For Silverlight, create SEO-friendly insertion code or  better yet, bug Microsoft to provide a solution.

Xenu's Link Sleuth will crawl href links just as a search engine bot would. It makes it easy to find and fix broken links. It will also help you to create a site map. Firefox Web Developer Add-on has multiple functions that are valuable.

Watch out for problems with frames, iframes, Flash and Silverlight. Each object is treated as a separate thing and not as a part of the host page. Ajax as well can be problematic and it may use iFrames frequently.

Finally David is up to show some problems they found at Zillow. One problem they had with old database is that it was not highly configurable for multiple data sets. They also wanted it to be responsive to a wide range of user options. One problem they had was that many of the functions Zillow had were dependant on Java Script. With JS turned off, users (and search engines) were not able to use site. As of 2/08 only 200,000 out of 80,000,000 homes were actually indexed. They also did not rank well.

They also improved navigation to help bots find pages. Using breadcrumbs, they help bots find very interior pages. Ajax on the top, not the bottom. In other words, AJAX should be built on top of functioning web page and not other way around. SEO should work in concert with great UX.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and answered.

1. Is there any automated tools that check to see that redirects are working correctly after they have been set up?
   
   Jonathan recommends Xenu's Link Sleuth and Vanessa recommends using Google Webmaster Central.
   
   
2. What are nofollows for?
   
   Chris answers to control flow of PageRank (PageRank sculpting) and to stop flow of link juice to undesirable pages. Also to control blog comment spam.
   
   
3. Does private WHOIS put you at disadvantage?
   
   Chris says probably not. Vanessa says so long as you are not spamming, should not be a problem.
   
   
4. To optimize or not optimize pop-ups?
   
   Do you want it as separate page? It may not be good entry page. If JavaScript, is not going to be indexable anyway.
   
   

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Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster
Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Director, Search Strategies

Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Did-It is up first.

Does Bid / Campaign Management Matter?
- Maximize the campaign's opportunity
- Manage Complexity
- Reduce HR time required to manage campaigns
- Provide actionable reporting while taking its own
- Provide a platform for hypothesis

Auction pressure creates a winner's curse. By that he means, half the top there is a brilliant marketer and the other half the time you are the idiot. You may be competing against marketers who are acting irrationally.

Bid Management Overviews:
1996 - 2001: SEO evolves, paid bid alerts, did it, go to, google
missed rest...

APIs were originally used for just managing bids. Overtime, the engines made commitments to make the features of the GUI available directly in the api.

If bid management is going to make an intelligent decision on your behalf it has to predict the best move. The objective is to figure out which clicks are the most valuable. You can do personalized click routing, profiling and so on.

Bid management technology has to react to real time markets. Bid landscape is changing, inventory fluctuations, changes in elasticity, delta between bid and billed CPC. changes in conversion due to a variety of causes, changes in conversion value/quality, inventory levels, and budget changes.

How do these technologies evolve?
- Engine level tools, self service, full service
- High volume data and low data volumes
- Levels of control
- Sensitivity adjustments
- Utility to use blended success metrics
- Testing suites / click routing and variable appending

Never-ending optimization concept. The feedback loops and constant testing starting at the high volume segments.

You need to decide which metrics you will use. Think also about segmentation levers such as geographic, dayparting, day of week, network source, demographics and so on.

Chris Zaharias, VP Search Sales, Omniture is next up. He first shows some cool equations of bid management examples. Point is, he as a marketer doesn't understand all the crazy math...

Bid management is aggregating data, data modeling that data, optimization based on it and bid changes. Behind this are the user interfaces with forecasts. The reporting interfaces have a way to go. Good bid management systems should show you a forecast of what you need to do and spend. What would you get from position one versus position two or three and so on.

What data signals do bid management tools have?
- Impressions
- CTR
- Clicks
- Conversins
- Orders
- ROAS
- CPA

What we are missing in this includes:
- Micro metrics, micro conversions such as
- Product Views
- Carts
- Cart Adds
- Cart Removals
- Checkouts
- Average order value
- Cost Per Step Metrics
- Step By Step Conversion Rates

Data Limitations / Uncertainties
- Traffic Estimation
-- 30-50% off, 70% of the time
-- Solution is to leverage your data
- Revenue Forecasting
-- Impressions clicks
- Recency

Types of Bid Management
- Rules based lets you control things but lack of certainty and time issues
- Portfolio
- Algorithmic

Don't buy on price alone. Know what model you want before going on. He mentions the Yahoo thing today and Google's auto-matching.

George Michie, Principal, Search Marketing, Rimm-Kaufman Group is next up.

Requirement #1:
- Proprietary, Sound Statistical Foundation
-- Bid based on observation value, not position
-- Bid as granularly as statistically possible
-- Variable balance btw recency and volume
-- Smart mechanism for folding in ancient history
-- Treats low CR/high AOV terms differently than the converse

Requirement #2:
- Robust and Flexible Tracking
-- Redirect or JavaScript
-- Item level tracking
-- Sales, Margin, Leads or Hybrids
-- Variable cookie windows
-- Support internal analytics systems
-- Smart Brand, Non-Brand Allocation

Requirement #3:
- Atomic bidding

Requirement #4:
- Back-feed capability
-- Frauds and Cancels
-- Margin
-- New to file vs house file
-- Business vs Consumer vs Government
-- Order Allocation
-- Account funding / lead valuation

Requirement #5:
- API Integration

Analytics Imperatives #1
- Right balance between human and machines
-- Anticipatory bidding

Analytics Imperatives #2
- Day parting with brains

Analytics Imperatives #3
- Match type, syndication and geo targeting
-- bidding needs to handle differences in traffic quality

Analytics Imperatives #4
- Flexible keyword attribute definitions

Analytics Imperatives #5
- Deep, Flexible Filtering Field
- Granular level
- Very deep as possible

David Rodnitzky, CEO and Founder, PPCAdBuying.com is last up.

Bid management is one piece of the pie. There is ad text optimization, there is keyword selection, landing page optimization and much more. Bid management software is also not magic.

There are lot of considerations around bid management software. Am I qualified to evaluate these software? What do I want to do internally, what do I want my bid management company to handle? Can I absorb the additional cost of bid management and still meet my business objectives. Do I have engineering resources available to integrate the software? How will I define success? Will I be able to benchmark success.

Questions to Ask: How difficult is integration and disintegration? What do you offer beyond bid management? Do you offer a free trial? Are there additional feeds? Who pays if your system/team makes an error? How do you handle returns/offline transactions/other special needs? Who will be my day to day contact? Does your system support my specific business objectives?

More questions: Can you get a short contract our out clause? Keep up to date on vendors? Where you wowed by a powerpoint? Do you really need to vie your head keywords? Have you considered performance pricing alternatives? How reliable are vendor references?

Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know - It's more than just rankings and traffic reports to measure the health of SEO efforts. This session focuses on analytics that SEOs should be considering.

Moderator: Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz

Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee, the rockin smallbusinesssem.com dude

Speakers:

Brian Klais, Executive Vice President, Search, Netconcepts
Laura Lippay, Group Program Manager, Search Strategy, Yahoo
Jonah Stein, Founder, ItsTheROI
Richard Zwicky, President, Enquisite

The first speaker is Brian Klais.
10 Essential Natural Search KPIs.

There's more to search success than measureing ego term hits and rankings.
- How do we evaluate channel performance?
- What's the missed opportunity cost?
- How do you identify pages and markets to focus on?
- How to prioritize further investment
- etc.

The metrics include:
- Brand to non brand ratio, unique pages, missed opportunity cost, ROI and brand reach, page placement, yielding pages, visitors per phase, indexation rate, and more.

Case study data of an anonymous merchant which gets 73% of traffic from Google, 12% from Yahoo, 4% from Google Images, etc.

Brand to non brand ratio - a lot of people get traffic from their own brand name. They're happy with that, but he says that you should really focus on the long tail instead.
- Long tail search = 40x brand search
- There's remaining opportunity
The non brand queries dominate.

How big is your site?
- You can't answer that if your site is database driven. Look at how many pages the bots see. Non-duplicate pages crawled by your favorite bot.
- Look at the size of your site. That forms the top of the funnel. Think: email sent. It gives color to...

Indexation rate:
- Pages crawled vs. indexed
* Your advertising inventory
Why aren't some pages that are crawled not in the index?

Yielding pages is a critical concept. Of all pages in the index, how many drive traffic? How many aren't?
- Identify those "free loading pages" - title tags, etc.

If you know what pages drive traffic, at what rate are they not driving traffic? How many vistors do they not get? Visitors per phrase roll up into a metric.

Page placement - inequality equals opportunity. Identify those opportunities to get them from page 2 to page 1 becasue you can get a 3x increase in traffic (in this particular situation)

Engine Yield Rate - ROI of the engine's crawl.
- Google is returning 3.6 visitors for every page that it crawls. Yahoo returns 0.3 visitors for every pag.e MSN live is 0.1 visitors.

ROI and brand reach are critical metrics but it's difficult to calculate the cost of this especially internally - labor cost, expertise, etc. He advocates focusing on brand, don't discount it. You're winning unbranded keyword searchers to your site - how do you measure that?

Missed opportunity cost? How you calculate it - there are 50,000 pages on this site. 20% are generating traffic at a rate of 11 visitors per page. Every order is a 2.8% conversion. It''s $34 per page. Think, though: what more can I get? What if the market size is 5x more? 50000 unique pages x $34 per page - $1.6m/month = $15m/year

Laura Lippay is the most important person at Yahoo. Prove your worth. Do what most SEO's can't. Dazzle your boss by proving how your SEO is better - wow your boss with the grid which is inspired by Bill Hunt's opportunity matrix (Craig Hordlow's balancing paid and organic listings session).

What is it?
- Keyword based data -
- Balance SEO/PPC and paid inclusion -0 what channels perform best
- Referral Gap - where do we have content but aren't performing well
- SEO content opportunities - what search terms do we not have content for?
- Make SEO traffic and value projections - if we ranked #10, what is the dollar amount?

What do you need?
- Use a graph for all these projections. Graph looks like this.

She shows a grid of how you can measure this data.
- Gather keywords
- Add keyword data for performance comparisons
- Just see the performance of one channel
- With search volume and CTR byposition, make projections.
On a big set of terms, when you have this, you can see the worth of it if you put effort into it.

What is the worth of a #5 ranking, or a #2 ranking? You still need to be realistic.

Showcase your skills: add demographic data, ranking data, and use those to create reports.

Jonah Stein is here!!!!!!!!!!! He's cool.
- Five forgotten metrics:
1. Customer lifetime value. Most people don't track this. We spend time looking at analytics package but we forget to look at the big picture. About a year ago, Eric Enge and he did an analytics study and they realized that the AdWords conversion tracker was getting more data than ever - becasue of cookies even if ROI is stolen from your SEO campaign.
- Stolen ROI: keyword revolution (brand claims ROI on the short tail, long tail, and brand); campaigns steal ROI - email blast, coupons, internal promotions.

What you really need to do is - customer relationship manager - real ROI and LTV.
- write permanent cookie on first touch - capture source, keyword, and date
- write first touch data to CRM on conversion event
- capture missing data at every touch point (order surveys and support interactions like chat, phone, and email)

Once you have that info, you get more accurate LTV and ROI -
- Captures cancelations, adjustments, and reorders

Crawl frequency tracker from blogstorm.co.uk - he gets about 100k visitors a month. He shows how much times he's visited by each spider. Crawl frequency turns out to be a meaningful statistic that you can find out on-page.
- Toolbar Pagerank is deliberately misleading - Google doesn't want us to know.
- Crawl frequency, however, is useful for you. Obfuscating this will lower the quality of the index.
- Relative CF is great for diagnostics - shows canonical URL, replaces supplemental index

What governs crawl frequency?
- Numer and quality of inbound links
- Sitemap settings
- Server data
- Content update frequency

How often crawler visits, crawl depth, saturation, etc.

Measure crawl rate - seometer.com, crawl rate tracker from Patrick Altoft, log file analysis, custom solutions, etc. It's really a simple PHP script to see when spiders arrive. If you have developer resources, do it yourself.

Pageviews to conversion metric - send them to the right page. When we say the number of pageviews per user, that doesn't mean it's good or bad. It could be that your SEO was done really well (you took them to the right page. Or you abandoned people).

External links - we don't look at how many links we give out. The number of external links per page - it's great to have a wide footprint of pages. As SEOs, we need to pay attention to how many links we're putting out and to what pages.

He had to cut his presentation short but it was very good.

:)

Robert Zwicky is next! He's cool also. I met him in a cab in NYC, I think.

We're all SEOs and our work is undervalued. Chart on the board links to the pages on the SERPs that people click through on your site. He pulls down data with 3 million queries - text based, image based, etc. Referral traffic from page 1 is at 90%. Most people don't go beyond page 1.
He says that Rand Fishkin is a traffic whore. Anyway, he wants to figure out how to do better because not many people are signing up for Pro memberships (and you all really should. I wrote a guide for them). Anyway, he wants to know what drives traffic from page 2 to his site. Using the Enquisite data, you can tell where the links need to come from in order to bump up that traffic. Drill in and focus on terms that you want to to drive converting traffic - you'll win every time. You may not have to optimize on page. You need to figure out what's not performing in your target market. Use your analytics to let you win everytime.

Session Intro: Practical tips, tricks, and workarounds for search-friendly architecture.

• Microsoft Stack
  Including IIS, ASP.Net, Silverlight, Microsoft SQL Server
  
  
• LAMP Stack
  Including Apache, PHP, Ruby, Flash/Flex, mySQL
  
  
• CMS Considerations (such as .NET Blog Engine, AxCMS, Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla)

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include Colin Cochrane, SEO Analyst and Web Developer at Metamend Search Engine Marketing, Thomas Deml, Senior Program Manager at Internet Information Services at Microsoft, Nikhil Kothari, Principal Architect at Microsoft, Duane Nickull, Senior Standards Strategist at Adobe Systems and Jeff Pollard, Chief Technology Officer at SEOmoz.

Jeff is up first. He talks about SEO tweaks for Apache:

• URL Canonicalization - need to decide on 'non-www' or 'www' and then redirect to main. Jeff shows some Apache code to accomplish this which you would add to the .htaccess file.
   
• 301 Redirects - he shows some code to accomplish 301 redirects in Apache, again in the .htaccess file.
   
• SEO Friendly URLs - clear concise URLS. Easiest method to employ is CakePHP format.

For more info on this, check Apache documentation.

Next, Jeff talks about PHP which has been around since 1997. It is extremely popular and easy to code. One SEO tweak Jeff provides is a method to remove the PHPSessionID where a long session ID may be inserted in the actual URL or pages. Another tweak has to do with 404 error pages. Make sure it returns a 404 header instead of 200.

He moves on to MySQL which has been around since 1995. Only SEO tweak you can really accomplish is related to performance. He says you can do lots to optimize MySQL performance for quicker crawling by search engines so in the end they can crawl more pages.

Finally he provides a quick overview on web frameworks which are typically very good for SEO. CakePHP, Symfony, Zend, and Ruby on Rails are good web frameworks to use.

Next up is Colin who will talk about ASP.net. Issues with ASP.net are similar to what Jeff talked about - URL canonicalization, custom error pages, meta data management, performance and crawlability.

Colin shows actual screenshots of how to deal with all these issues in IIS 6. While I cannot reproduce those here, you can very likely find resources and screenshots online. One thing to keep in mind include making sure error pages are set up correctly or they could return a 200 header response to search engines, meaning they are okay when in reality they are not there.

Next up is Duane who will talk about Adobe Systems. He shows us how search engines are doing a better job diving into Flash. However, you can't really force search engines to adopt technologies sites use, so what is one to do? He talked about using MVCs to deliver multiple data to various sources (i.e. users, bots, etc.). Adobe is working to help search engines index their technologies.

Next up is Nikhil. He is going to focus on indexability. This is crucial when building rich web applications where you have single pages that fetch additional data using XMLHTTP based on user actions. You therefore have to add indexable content back into the page. He is not endorsing serving up different content than what a user would see but rather content a search engine can understand. Using site maps and strategic navigation will help in the discoverability of content.

He shows us how to use the div tag and the "display=none" to place alternate content in the html in a media rich application. The only way a user will see it is if they don't have the rich media plug-in. For example, if the application is Flash and a user does not have a Flash plug-in, they will see static content. If they do have Flash plug-in, they will never see static content but a search engine will.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and answered.

1. With alternate content in html, should you also build in a link structure?
   
   Duane advises that it is best to have one set of data and to avoid having duplicate sets of data.
    
2. Does offering alternate views as discussed in the session label you as a cloaker? Will you get dinged?
   
   Duane won't answer for engines but says in his experience, he has not had any problems with it. Vanessa pointed out that if you are serving content specifically to bots such as Googlebot, you could get dinged. Better to serve content for users like in Flash example above. In other words, okay to serve search friendly content but I think IP delivery would raise a red flag.

Note: In this session, a lot of screenshots of actual code were shown which is almost impossible to capture in a live blogging environment. You might be able to get those from the speakers themselves. PowerPoint presentations are also available to SMX Advanced conference attendees.

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Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Moderator:
Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Akin Arikan, Senior Manager, Internet Marketing, Unica Corporation
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Rich Devine, Director of Search, ZAAZ
Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, Rimm-Kaufman Group

Christine:

63% of purchases by consumers who conducted online searches for various product categories occur offline - Source: Google - Comscore Study March 2006

Why Offline?
- In many cases some industries push for phone calls because their able to close the sale.
- In some cases the sales process is complicated with a high dollar product so the power of the voice pushing to an offline area is effective.
- People want to physically see the item at a local store.

Simple:
Make an assumption based on sales
Anecdotal data. Ask the salespeople or call center people to ask customers where they learned about the item. Many times this is very inaccurate.
In-store surveys. Surveys ask customers how they found the product

Intermediate:
SWAG it from limited pilot tests
Use a unique phone number in ads from pilot campaign
Determine an online-offline ratio
Extrapolate to future sales

Offer coupons or special offer codes

Unique Pricing. Place unique pricing on a search landing page

Advanced:
Customer Tagging - Tie in online cookie with the offline customer number or credit care data of offline purchase

Use of Unique Phone Numbers
- Simple javascript that will tag the customer
- Cookie that serves the same number across the site
- Tracking that ties back to your keyword in your campaigns (recommended) Singular vs. Plural can make bid differences

Pay per Call
Keyword Driven Traffic

Ryan:

Typical Measurements:
- A/S: Ad Spend to Sales
- ROAS: Return on Ad Spend
- ROI: Return on Investment
- CPO/CPA: Cost per Order/ Acquisition

A/S = (1-COGS - Variable Costs) /2
ROAS = 1 / (A/S)
Roughly target 1/2 of Margin

Track your order level info, tied to the keyword

Rich:

What is your level of success besides your conversion. Look at specific events or "microconversions" before the final conversion.

Build a monetization model that assigns dollar values to particular actions on the site level.

It's imporant to look at the values of certain site behaviors that lead to later conversions.
Example: Orders through Call Center, Local Retailer, Locate Online Dealer, Product Showcase/Detail Visit

Building a Monetization Model:
Confirm Business Goals
Align site goals to business goals
Establish accurate key site metrics
Identify key site behaviors or "micro-conversions"
Assign value to key site behaviors

Discover and use all available data sources

Typical Metrics:
Monetized return on ad spend
Monetized revenue per click
Monetized revenue per referral

Akin:

Search is not alone: Social, Online Ads, Offline Ads, Direct Marketing and Relationship Marketing. These all impact the success of search

An Atlas study found that for 8 out 10 advertisers, running online banner ads in parallel to search increased their results greatly.
In one example, when online ads that were running in parallel to search were turned off they had to pay 10% more per conversion.

With microsites you can cookie your visitors and watch what their doing at a later time. Example of doing this is the whiteboard.ups.com

In the blogosphere you can't turn things on and off. There is blog monitoring software available to track your brand in the blogosphere.

Q&A:

What method do you use to find the value of your microconversions?

First you need to look at your analytics and identify core site behavior. Focus on what your core business objective is and value that activity. If your looking at leads get your revenue data and divide that by your

number of leads or key site behaviors and that would be your first step. You can then back into your other key site behaviors.

Identify your measures of success and those should be your microconversions.

Are the microconverions happening in other channels offline? What would they cost there and back into your values that way.

What keywords should get the credit for the sale, the first or the last?

It's recommended to reach a conclusion and then apply a rule. That means either splitting the credit or choosing one or the other.

Many times people come in through a non brand click and then come back to the site via a brand click.

Contirbuted by Justin Davy.

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget
Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Director, Search Strategies

Ian McAnerin, CEO, McAnerin International Inc is first up. Geolocation is the identification of a web page as belonging to or being relevant for a particular country. ccTLD, IP address and link analysis are ways search engines identify your site or page belonging to a particular country. ccTLD is the first place they will typically look. If you have www.domain.com, domain.com and domain.ca all pointing to the same page, it will associate the site as being a Canadian site. If you don't have a ccTLD, the spider will look at the location of your host IP, if the server is in Canada, then your page might be associated to Canada.

When would you want to not use a 301 redirect, and show a 202 response? If you want to show the .com URL but also want to show up in a local engine, then there is a tactic you can use. Hard to write, email Ian if you want more info. ;-)

Language and Culture:
- Local terms (football)
- Different types of spelling
- Popular culture references
- Translation issues
- Cultural Issue

Semantic Expression Equivalency Document:
Original English -> English SEED -> Chinese SEED -> Chinese Document
EN --------> EN -------> EN-ZH --------> ZH

In summary, you take your original english page and you bullet point your points of the marketing speak. You express how you want it expressed, the emotion in that document. It is now a soulless document that says what you want it to say. Then you have that document translated into the other language. Then you give it to a real copyrighter in that language and have them write it well.

Linking Issues:
- Too many links - big problem with asian sites
- Nofollow, First anchor text counts (not sure if this is still true)
- Strategic internal linking is excellent way to deal with multiple languages
- Language switching:
-- No surprises
-- Clear indication of target, same page, different language, not the home page of the site, but the page.

Andy Atkins-Kruger, Managing Director, WebCertain is next up. He is a linguistic marketer.

(10) Use UTF-8 character encoding. Google calls it unicode.
(9) Don't translate the metatags and page titles. Be careful with that translation.
(8) Adopt a global PR strategy. He lists a number of PR companies.
(7) Manage 301s. There are hundreds of links going to page not found on international sites.
(6) Keyword URLs
(5) Source local links from local sites and sources.
(4) Use smart geo-selector. IBM has a geo-selector on their web site. A way for people to find the localized version that suits them. Flags at the top. Page to Page links.
(3) Expert keyword research
(2) ccTLDs or Local Hosting
(1) Language and content presentation

Kristjan Mar Hauksson, Director of Internet Marketing, Nordic eMarketing is now up.

- ccTLD and it has a huge impact (buy them at Eurperegistry.com)
- IP address makes a difference also, he has seen the results
- Language and Culture is often overlooked. He gives examples of funny translation issues.
- Inbound links, they are really important.

Case Study:
- Strategy, localized languages, ccTLD
- 6 to 30% rise in relevant traffic, 4% more sales, etc.

Sorry for not covering his presentation in that much detail. I am very bad with understanding accents.

Cindy Krum, Sr. SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works, Inc is last up. She is focusing on site architecture.

Different web issues:
- Multiple languages, currencies, measurements and seasonalities
- Different search engines
- Different e-commerce laws
- Inconsisrtent marketing aesthetics

Three Approaches:
- One Site
- Multiple Sites
- Blended

Things to Consider:
- Design, development and maintenance cost
- Server configuration and location
- CMS and order fulfillment
- Email, direct marketing, affiliates and PPC
- Traditional advertising
- SEO

One Site: Everyone goes to a .com and then send people to subdomains or subfolders. You can do it by country, by language or by keyword translated.

Pros: easy to set up, links and traffic all point to one domain, more pages in the index, flexible with messaging, grouping by language prevents dup content, country specific hosting option as subdomain
Cons: home page is wrong language, home page only ranks in one language, grouping by country risks duplicate content

Tips:
- Use webmaster tools as much as you can. Target country feature.
- Redirect country specific domains to subdomain or subfolder
- Internal and external links
- Language meta tag, HTML language and local address

Multiple Sites: ccTLDs

Pros: incrementally low start up costs, can add sites one at a time, rank well in multiple country specific engines, country specific hosting
Cons: More sites equals more sites to update, multiple sites is multiple SEO efforts and harder to rank in .com, forced to target countries instead of languages

Tips:
- Target country in webmaster tools
- Use external links correctly
- Link your multiple country sites carefully and logically
- Language meta tags, html language and local address

Blended: both subs and ccTLDs. People go to .com and then send people from there to international sites.

Pros: most realistic approach, can start with .com and build country specific sites as needed
Cons: most costly to create and maintain and update

Tips:
- Specify your country in webmaster tools, but not the .com
- Link your multiple country sites carefully and logically
- External links should be logical
- Let users know you are taking them to another site
- Use Java translation and IP sniffing on home page

Session Intro: Many expect a recession to hit and no one knows how search will weather it. This session looks at strategies and tactics for those who want to prepare in advance for a worse case scenario.

Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President Marketing at ExactTarget is moderating this session along with Jessica Bowman, SEO Strategist at SEM In House doing the Q&A moderating. Speakers include Andrew Beckman, President of Location3 Media, Dave Davies, CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Russ Mann, CEO of Covario and Jon Miller, Vice President Marketing at Marketo.

After speaker introductions, Jeffrey polls the audience whether they think we are in a recession or not. Most agreed that we are in a recession. Looks like this is going to be more Q&A than presentation so I am going to try to do my best to capture what is being asked.

1. What worries you and/or your clients that are driving marketing decisions?

Russ says the fear of national recession. CFOs are tightening up, scrutinizing purchases and the like. Jon says larger companies with larger pockets may increase budget to take advantage of smaller competitors. So more spending from big companies and less from smaller which creates opportunity. In recession, people are more concerned over bottom line results as opposed to branding efforts.

2. With regards to larger companies spending more, will we see price spiking in paid search?

Andrew says it would be a good time to take advantage of SEO and link building instead of going after high priced PPC keywords. He is in fact trying to get clients to move money away from traditional media. Dave says that analytics are key as they can prove whether adverting is successful of not, unlike other types of traditional advertising.

3. In our current environment, where do you place your first advertising dollar?

Andrew thinks people will get back to the fundamentals (i.e. targeting the right phrases, SEO, etc.). He goes on to say that businesses should do a better job analyzing post click results such as using heat maps and the like. Dave agrees, saying that companies need to make sure they have basic SEO covered. Russ thinks first dollar should go towards customer research to define strategy. We can't just be search experts but need to be business experts as well. It revolves around understanding the customer. Jon says when budgets are tight, you get fewer leads so optimizing those leads is crucial. Improving conversions becomes more important than ever as you have less money to burn. Try to get more out of what you already have.

4. Do you expect expect the consolidations of industries to be impacted by this so-called recession?

Russ thinks we will see a polarization. You'll see big players with big pockets trying to gobble up smaller companies but at the same time there will be fragmentation as well as new companies staring up. Dave thinks we will see some degree of consolidation but that is not contingent on whether we are in a recession of not. It has already been happening and will continue to do so.

5. Jon asks his own question regarding SEO - "How do you show clients that you are getting value out of SEO?"

Andrew says with good analytics, he can show whether good rankings are producing conversions or not. He sees SEO as much more cost effective and can prove that to clients with analytical reporting. It is a struggle however but doable.

6. Jeffrey polls search marketers in audience what they are prioritizing as far as marketing for clients.

One audience member says SEO. Andrew points out that it is cheaper to do SEO from the beginning than to do it after-the-fact (i.e. PPC campaign, site redesign, etc.). Dave says one of the most overlooked things is titles and meta description tags - something that is so easy and cost effective to adjust.

7. Any other tactics besides what has already been discussed?

Jon says it is more important than ever to really track the marketing campaign. Define what is working so you can feed it as well as what is not working so you can kill it. Andrew says the metric that we really need to focus on is the conversion percentage. He also talks about affiliate marketing, saying that search marketing and affiliate marketing can work hand in hand.

8. How do you deal with prospects who have interest in SEO but in an environment where positioning cannot be guaranteed?

Dave says they do guarantee rankings so question cannot really apply to him. Andrew says it is more of a time process, showing them the growth of keyword saturation by developing content and increasing inbound links. Russ shows new prospects case studies to prove the possibility of getting results for them. While you cannot guarantee 1s place results, you can educate clients that SEO is a process and constantly evolves.

9. Because economy is worse in some places than others, how can marketers deal with this?

Andrew says you can use geo-targeting (PPC) to avoid bad areas. Russ jokes to go East (Asia), in other words take advantage of developing and evolving countries.

10. How do you get clients to not cut ad dollars and where are they currently squandering?

Dave says we all waste money in different ways. He then reminds us once again to analyze what is effective. Jon thinks biggest area where people waste money is where they are simply "shouting" to the market.

So, the key takeaways from this Q&A style of session are as follows:

• SEO is the most cost effective thing you can do so utilize it as a foundational search marketing tactic.
   
• Take advantage of good analytic programs because you can show clients how effective search marketing is.
   
• Measure very closely to define what is working and what is not so you can concentrate efforts on what 'is' working.
  
  

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Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Search Friendly Development - Highlights the most important elements to consider for search engine optimization (SEO) when building a web application infrastructure and provides tactical details about how to implement those elements. Topics include:

* Developing a crawlable infrastructure
* Considerations when developing rich internet applications (using technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and AJAX)
* URL rewriting, redirection, canonicalization, and visitor tracking

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google
Sharad Verma, Sr. Product Manager, Web Search, Yahoo

Nathan from Microsoft is starting the day off and tells us the "Truth about SEO." There are a lot of big hard problems: affiliate tracking, session management, rich internet application, duplicate content, geolocation, understnading analytics, redirection, error management, etc. HTTP is a stateless protocol. With search in the mix, all designs built from 1995-2000 kind of have broken in 2005 and beyond. Cloaking isn't ideal. What differentiates advanced SEO from normal SEO is analytics. Being an advanced SEO means you have more experience or are at a larger company but you need to make sure all appropriate things are instrumented and use it for your logical thinking. Do not implement something because someone told you on a panel that it's a good idea. He doesn't recommend PageRank sculpting. But everything on the web is an opportunity cost. A competitor might be doing what you aren't doing.

Watch out for complexity as well. That's something that a lot of people get caught up on. If you build cloaking or conditional redirects into your website, it gets very complex. Multiple URLs will cause problems; you have to track 404s, getting rankings, etc. All these variations are complex. It's hard to find problems.

Look for the simplest architecture possible to solve the problem for agility.

Microsoft says cloaking is not all bad but it's not the second or third solution that they recommend. Every search engine says don't do it, though. Try it with caution.

All websites have the same first problem: accessibility. That's where people should start especially if there's no analytics in place to tell you. Can crawlers access the site? Do you have Flash or Silverlight or 301s or 302s or images? It's a simple topic but Microsoft has a team of SEOs who focus on the top websites and these "101" problems are still problematic there.

Take a look at the main content: title tags, H1 page, and does the content on the page exist? Look at canonicalization. People look for link building campaigns, but another way to approach the same problem is to look at canonicalization - do you have 5 URLs pointed to the same page that divides reputation? That's an important indicator.

Search engines are always changing. People might say that the big thing this year is "siloing." That may change next week or next year (especially if Matt is in the audience). If it works for me, it may not work for you. The webmaster guidelines are always constant. All search engines agree on the same thing. Work with us instead of against us.

He uses Nike.com as an example so we cna get the first run experience. The first thing you see is that flash is loading Flash loads and you select your language, region, and then it loads again. They play a video that runs for 1 minute. The first run experience is 8 seconds to get to the video. Nike is a brilliant company, he adds. They are great at brand marketing. "Just do it" is a marketing slogan but a cultural icon as well. If you approach the web with the same immersive experience, it may not work the same. The first run experience is 8 seconds, but maybe some others don't have 8 seconds. Maybe they have 1 second. Some people like to shave off milliseconds of the page load time because that keeps the visitors there. There's 3 seconds of caching a cookie as well. If you don't have time to be immersed, it's not great. If you have a mobile device, it's not great. If you're blind, it's not great. If you're ADHD, you can't wait that long.

It's also not great for search. The HTML behind the page shows the title tag is there: it's "Nike.com." They're cloaking (which is well known). The search engines see a lot of better content. Nike has over 2 million pages on their website and they're not cloaking everything but they're cloaking a lot. When their cloaking broke, people didn't notice because they weren't crawling as search engines. Cloaking is hard and complicated.

Opportunity cost and analytics: every investment you make is another investment that you can't make. If you're investing in cloaking, others may not be investing in cloaking and they may be affiliates of your company. A lot of websites for "lebron james shoes" look like Nike websites but they're not. For every problem you have on the web, there are many possible solutions. We'll talk about opportunities and options for solving these problems.

He shows an alternative implementation. You throw a rich object at the top and throw Javascript that runs the div. It's a rich level expeience and a down level experience in the same web page.

Advanced SEO does not equal spam. SEO does equal good design.

It's a lot less expensive and more impactful to plan for SEO. Design for your customers, be smart about robots, and you'll enjoy long lasting success.

Next up is Sharad Varma from Yahoo. He talks about his past visit to Peru (Machu Picchu). He talks about how the Incas built the city over a mountain but it was not discovered until 1911 becasue it was covered in dense forests. It was completely covered and hidden from the view. But today, it's easy to get to. You can take a bus or walk there. Today, it's accessible and easily discovered. That's the emphasis of this talk. You need to serve your human users and your robots. No matter how you design your site, you need to consider people and robots.

Search machinery behind the bots: there are 3 cranks (3 fundamental processes) - crawling, indexing, and ranking. You have diminished webmaster control as you go from crawling, indexing, and ranking. You have the most control over crawling and the least over ranking.

Since crawling is where you have most control, let's find out how spiders crawl your website. You start with a URL, download a website, extract links and download more webpages, and then the crawlers find invisible links (Javascript, forms, etc.), but they do more extraction. Sometimes they see links and don't crawl. Some links may be in robots.txt or they're not high priority enough according to search engines.

How to search engines find your content?
- Organic inclusion from crawling but it depends on links from reputable sites
- If you're not satisfied with the amount of crawling, there are feeds that let you submit the content.

Organic crawl:
- Search engines are taking baby steps to understand Javascript and cannot crawl. Turn off JS on your browser and navigate your site. That's how you can tell if it works. (e.g. search Gucci.com with JS turned off).

In Flash, make sure your site is accessible by robots. Provide alternate navigation.

In dynamnic URLs (many parameters), the biggest thing is that they're difficult to read. Usability standpoint - they don't create a rich experience. They also lead to duplicate content and spider traps. Instead, create human friendly readable URLs. Use 301 redirects for dynamic URLs to static versions. Limit the number of parameters. Rewrite dymanic URLs using Yahoo! Site explorer. He says that someone actually won't visit sites with complex URLs. I can understand that.

He explains how to use Yahoo Site explorer to rewrite dynamic URLs where you can remove up to 3 parameters and then set up a default value. To get there, log into Site Explorer, go to Manage (for the domain), and then click on Dynamic URLs.

Duplicate content is essentially multiple URLs leading to the same content. The consequences are less effective crawl and less likely to extract links from duplicate pages. You can 301 duplicate content to the canonical version or disallow duplicate content in robots.txt.

Best practices:
- Flatten your folder structure (e.g. www.domain.com/digital-camera-reviews instead of www.domain.com/reviews/cameras/digital-cameras)
- Redirect old pages to the new pages with 301 and 302
- Use keywords in URLs
- Use subdomains when appropriate
- Remove file extension from URL if you can
- Consistently use canonical URLs for internal linking
- Promote your critical content closer to the home page

Feed based crawling - the sitemaps protocol. Tell the crawler where to find all the pages on your site, especially deep content. See sitemaps.org. Try to use all the metadata that is supported by the protocol.

Tabasco is Yahoo's secret sauce.

Robots exclusion protocol lets you tell search engines to crawl and not to crawl - printer friendly, duplicate content, folders that you don't want users to see (exception: CSS). The crawl-delay is another tool you can use - the number of times the crawlers will visit per this value. If the delay is 900, the crawler will visit your site once every 900 seconds. You want to be careful about this. It supports fractions. You can start with a lower value and then amp it up if necessary based on behavior.

Robots protocol also supports - noindex, noaarchive, noslippet, nofollow. nocontent, noydir, and one other one that I didn't get.

SiteExplorer is very useful to use to explore information and inlinks, sitemaps, etc.

Search engines want your content. Break down accessibility barriers, let the crawlers in, and they'll do their job.

Maile from Google shows how to enhance your website. The crawl section shows you how to maximize your site's accessibility to search engines, indexing, and search results (pretty results that people will want to click on)

Crawlable architecture:
- When you first design a site, you want to start with progressive enhancement. You don't begin everything with Flash. Start with HTML, links, navigation, and then start adding fancy bonuses like AJAX and Flash. It's a complement to your site and not in lieu of it. This reduces dilution of PageRank when sharing links between Flash and non-flahs version.

A site that is rich in media but does things very well: YouTube. There are videos, site navigation, title, descriptive content along side rich media.

When you use flash, Google approves of sIFR (the idea that if you have Javascript, it detects if Flash is installed and it replaces the text if there is). Takeaways: the text matches the content seen by enabled users. It's not for search engines but also for users who use screen readers.

You might be using AJAX: use Hijax. If you want a user to click on foo=32, you're also creating a static HTML link. Search egines often ignore fragment (ajax.html#foo-32) but respect parameters (?foo=32).

Webmaster Tools can be helpful, the help center, the webmaster blog, and the discussion group.
- It includes the crawl pipeline: crawl errors in Webmaster Tools.
- You also can see the internal link structure. Verify that links are findable.

Now let's look at indexing. Promote your crawl content. Preferred domain should be www or non-www. Figure out what you want. She uses ajaxonomy.com as an example. It dilutes PageRank.

Affiliate ID and tracking IDs cause duplicate content. Keep it as clean as possible. Internally link to a canonical version. Store the information in a cookie. When you do something like this, you see a session file with cookie data. Yahoo mentioned you have dynamic parameters in Site Explorer. Google uses sitemaps as that alternative. In the location field, put the canonical version there and not the affiliate link.

You can also have video sitemaps on Google with title, description, and a thumbnail for those who have rich sites. There's also code search, mobile, and news sitemaps.

Sitemap submission also gives you index stats.

Response codes:
- USe 301s for permanent redirects. Signals search engines to transfer properties from the source to the target. It's important if you're modifying URL structure or moving sites to a new domain.
- Serve a 503 if you're bringing your site down for maintenance. Don't serve a 404!

For search results, there's the title, a snippet, and then a URL and then there are sitelinks. You can't control sitelinks (they're determined algorithmically).
- Create unique and informative titles. Every title is a good signal to users as to what the URL's contents are. Don't show "untitled." Webmaster Tools will show you title tag issues.
- Snippets provide the user with more context for search results. The quality of your snippet can impact your clickthrough. Some snippets are fairly long-winded or cryptic. How can you use this? Meta descriptions! They are utilized by Google. Focus on title tags first and then meta descriptions.

Utilize Webmaster Central, not just Webmaster Tools. It's such a hot topic - there are posts on the blog with fresh information about security. You undo a lot of great work if you get hacked. For small sites, there are security checklists and there's a recovery list for when you get hacked (so you can be reindexed more quickly).

Session Intro: What's a You&A? That's where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google's web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt's been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief at Search Engine Land is moderating this session along with Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services at Beyond Ink doing the Q&A moderating.

Danny starts of the questioning which will be followed by questions taken by the audience. Danny asks about the Lyndon Antcliff incident where he got a lot of exposure for a fake story. Was this link bait that went to far? Matt says they don't want to be the "truth" police. Matt says it was different than a prank like April Fools. It was more deceptive than that as it had no disclosure that it was fake. Matt looks at it then as more intentional than accidental.

Matt says to not take any action on a story that is fake like that one was would be irresponsible. He sees it as an attempt to get links even if you have to "lie" about it and feels that is just wrong. In reality, it was a move to protect Google users from lies and deception.

Moving on, regarding paid links, Matt asks how many people are willing to burn sites or entire networks over paid links. Michael Gray raised his hand but not many others did. He points out that it is best to do what is good for your company long term, not just today. Don't be the Mily Vanily of search. trust and credibility is very valuable.

Matt refers to a blog post he just put out where Google just made some documentation updates. You can check it out here.

Now we move on to the audience.

1. First question is related to widget bait.
   
   First of all, link bait can be good as it is stuff that just makes people link to you. As far as widget bait, some of Google's first encounters with widget bait was with web counters that hide links to off-topic sites. They of course took algorithmic action against that. So, links in widgets, are they hidden and are they off topic? Those are not going to fly with Google.
   
   Furthermore, when people place widgets on their site, do they really know what they are getting in to? Links that are editorial are going to stand the test of time.
   
   
2. Next question related to search results showing up in search results...
   
   Matt says that typically engines can't fill out forms but in some cases the spider may do so because they are trying to move on to another site. They are willing to take these out if they show up in the SERPs.
   
   
3. Danny brings up the fact that Jason Calacanis allows his search results at Mahalo to be indexed. Should this happen?
   
   Matt points out that their result are more content than raw search results.
   
   
4. What about cloaking? Amazon was used as an example.
   
   Matt says cloaking is cloaking and points out that they have taken out big sites that cloak. Don't cloak because it puts you at high risk.
   
   
5. On the minus 60 penalty and other 'minus' penalties, what's the deal?
   
   Matt sidesteps question and says they are not going to go into great detail on penalties but rather that they want to deliver most relevant results. He does say that sometimes people are looking a bit too hard.
   
   
6. Danny follows up by asking are there differing degrees of penalties?
   
   Matt says, "Absolutely!" He does not elaborate though.
   
   
7. On bot herding, is it cloaking, IP delivery or something else? Danny uses Wall Street Journal as example.
   
   Matt hasn't looked at that issue. He mentions the "first click free" policy meaning that the first page the user sees is the same as Googlebot. In other words don't deliver one page to user and another to Google.
   
   
8. How does Google differentiate paid links from natural?
   
   They try to do so algorithmically. Matt says there are stupid ways to buy links. You can leave footprints that makes it easy for Google to spot. They are willing to take manual action as well to deal to them.
   
   
9. Do all links pointing to a particular domain enhance the value of site as a whole?
   
   Won't go into it even though Danny asked him three different ways.
   
   
10. Can you hurt other sites by pointing dirty links to them?
    
    Matt says they have worked very hard so that it will not happen. That tells me that it can happen -- it is just difficult. He does say that efforts will be better spent building your own site rather than throwing mud at your competitors.
    
    
11. Page sculpting, do you need to bother with it?
    
    Matt says in most cases you do not, so long as your architecture is set up correctly. It is a better use of time to work to get good links than trying to control flow of internal PageRank. It does not create a red flag if you do.
    
    
12. What is it like being a moral compass for SEO?
    
    Matt does not feel that way. He says the vast majority of time, people know the right answer. They do not need him as a compass for what is right.

As typical, Matt did not reveal any grand secrets. Surprised? It is always neat to see Danny try to get stuff out of him however.

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Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Session Intro: When paid search results in leads, are you keeping track of them in an organized, efficient manner? This session looks at integrating leads with Salesforce, ensuring that leads related to search but happening offline get properly tracked and other issues related to lead management.

Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land is moderating this session along with Chris Winfield, President & Co-Founder of 10e20 doing the Q&A moderating. Speakers include Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of ClearSaleing, Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Paid Search Services at Apogee Search, John Tawadros, Chief Operating Officer of iProspect and Lauren Vaccarello, Director of SEM and Analytics at FXCM.

First up is John. He begins by asking if we recall the last time we ate too much, drank too much and said too much. Tracking web site stats cannot be done too much. He then goes on to say that if we are not tracking every detail of a lead, we are missing the boat. He shows us several real examples of how if they track the most minute details, one can learn a lot of what advertising works and what does not.

Tracking in this kind of detail show that the combination of TV, search and blogs provide the best marketing combination that yields the greatest results. In other words, you cannot track too much data. Pretty simple presentation that really asks us "how much is too much." For John, he wants to know it all. At least then he has the option to sift through what he needs and doesn't need.

Next up is Alissa. She asks what does your company really want to get out of its marketing effort. Most often it has to do with money. What then are you using to measure that success? All leads are not created equal. So how can you separate the wheat from the chaff.

Pull paid search info into your CRM system. She then shows us three case studies. First example shows that keyword that generated the most leads produced the worst conversions. Shallow success can mislead. You can also find buried treasure when you track a campaign at this level. Second example discovered that Yahoo traffic was not the kind of traffic they wanted which then prompted them to change the way they spent budget at Yahoo. Third example, even though an improvement, led to lower lead to sales conversions.

How to implement? Create custom fields in CRM system. Add referral URL for SEO purposes. Update tracking URLs. Make sure not to duplicate variables in tracking URLs. Set cookies as well to track user activity. Also add hidden fields that will pull values from the cookies. Most important -- test and report. Adjust campaign accordingly.

Caveats to remember -- ay attention to statistical significance, take your sales cycle length into account, look at junk leads as well as sales, and consider an intermediate step of looking at cost per opportunity.

Adam is up next. He shows us three different ads, one of which is much cheaper than the others. The common move would be to eliminate the more expensive ads but if you can show that the more expensive ads convert better, you can justify spending more for those ads. You really need to show how much you have added to the bottom line. In his three examples, he showed that the ad that cost the least made only $20 profit whereas the most costly ad made $2,200 profit.

He next talks about the stages of the customer buying cycle. Problem recognition is first. This is followed by information search. They then look for alternatives before making a purchase decision. Finally they make their purchase. Knowing this allows us to make shifts in the way we market.

Next he talks about phone call tacking.  Adam's company combines cookie tracking along with generated session ID and phone call data to track phone leads. Sales rep upon determining customer is on web site asks for session ID number and can then monitor the activity of that lead.

Finally, Lauren is up. Who needs conversion tracking? Any sort of lead generation site, especially where most of your money is made offline. Benefits of integrating tracking is that you will define the quality of the lead. You get true conversion tracking. Omniture, ClickTracks and Webtrends are all analytics programs that integrate with Salesforce.

Now the sales department is going to always combat the marketing department. How do you go about working with them? Bribery works. Give a certain set of sales people the better leads list so they will be on your side. Watch out for poor planning.

Some strategies to increase ROI? Go for low hanging fruit. Build useful reports for sales force. Build time to sales reports for sales teams as well. Give best leads to best sales closures. Finally, stop wasting money. Look for where money is bleeding and stop it.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and answered.

1. How do you know if conversions are a result of a good sales day or marketing?
   
   Adam says that you have to look at statistics over time rather than on a day by day basis.
   
   
2. Are there more robust tracking options than cookies?
   
   Human input into tracking systems such as Salesforce can tack beyond people deleting cookies because it can associate with name or even company name.
   
   
3. Compare acquisition costs between three major players.
   
   All seem to agree that Yahoo and MSN cost less but the volume is just not there as it is with Google. Adam said however that he doesn't look at CPA because if you track further you can sometimes see that it is a false metric to measure success by.
   
   
4. If conversions are low, how can I know if it is advertising, sales team or even crappy web site?
   
   Look deeper into leads -- where they are coming from and how they end up. That may help track down the cause of low conversions.
   

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Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Buying Sites For SEO - Forget the debate over buying links. How about buying entire web sites to gain success in search. This session looks at how to find the gems out there, criteria to consider, ways to negotiate and how to best leverage your new purchase. Tips, tricks, success stories, and painful lessons learned will be shared.

Moderator: Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts

Q&A Moderator: Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple

Speakers:

Gab Goldenberg, Owner, SEO ROI
Todd Malicoat, Internet Marketing Consultant, Stuntdubl
Jeremy Schoemaker, CEO, Shoemoney Media Group
Jeremy Wright, CEO, B5 Media

Shoemoney isn't here. He had a prerecorded presentation that we're watching.

In 2004, he was listening to some guy named Chris on a panel and all these domains were out there that expired but were linked to by .gov and .edu websites. Most of you should know that these are pretty valuable links. They're generally more trusted (at least in '04 and '05). A lot of people didn't take Chris seriously at the time. He built a spider to find these sites and checked them against the Yahoo directory and DMOZ directory. After doing 1.5 months of work, 1500 domains were out there in the wild that had amazing links.

Google had given weight to the age of links and not so much the age of the domain, as he saw. He disagrees that age of domain is the important thing; linkage is more important. (On a side note, I, your liveblogger, have some new sites that are just a few months old that rank very well probably because of the inbound links.)

He made a blog about Joe Lieberman and it ranked #4 for Joe Lieberman. Then he switched it over to a niche site (like Joe's BBQ grills). It was completely delisted in Google after that. There's something going on about categorically and niche zones It's not as easy to throw random content on them and hope that they rank as well.

There's a limited shelf life on these strategies.

Now, it's harder to do the domain name game. But his blog ranks #3 for really competitive poker terms because he took a lot of domains that were related to poker links and expired and then 301'd them to his domain name.

So now we're evolving into buying more domains for branding and not so much for SEO. The value of SEO has fallen a little bit from year to year (as he says). Try not to focus on spammy word domains and more on branding. Fighters.com and AuctionAds.com are domains he bought for considerable amounts of money; the keyword matching is there.

Jeremy Wright is the CEO of b5media. And he's here. Sweet.

He talks about metrics he uses to buy sites.

They own and operate 700 sites with 10 million readers, 30 million pages, 35million pageviews per month. It's established itself as one of the top 5 blog networks in the world.

The biggest blogs in b5media are Problogger and Copyblogger. (My note: If you haven't heard about these, that's not good!)

Capturing value.
- We buy sites for revenue, he says. "We're a media company, damnit!"
- Potential or specifically unrealized potential
- Core metrics: existing traffic, uniques, revneue, feed subscribers, and Google PageRank
- Secondary metrics: age of site, stability, age of domain, amount of content, existing SEO metrics, staleness
- Tertiary questions: Is it or can it be a blog? Does it cover a unique area? Does it add non-core value we can put a number to?

Tools used:
- Blog valuation calculator (internal tool which is available on ensight.org)
- Compete
- PageRank
- Another internal tool called Search Depth calculator

Business Blog Consulting.com
- 6k visitors per month, no real revenue, PR7
- Blog valuation calculator: 5k
- Search Depth calculator: 2.5x
Valuation: Low 6k, medium 12k, high 18k, offer 13k, bought for 12k

He talks about other sites, like innsite.com and writers.net.

Mistakes you can avoid
- Always verify traffic with analytics and omniture or sitemeter
- Don't believe the potential someone pitches you on. Arrive at your own
- Don't deviate from your playbook - write one
- Don't be afraid to buy partners early if you see success
- Avoid properties that depend on specific personalities being bought in, for the site to retain its value to you
- Watch out for inflationary schemes (buying traffic, bought traffic, stuffing revenue, etc)
- Buy early, buy often, admit faulure quickly

About SEO - we believe in networks. We believe in ad networks and consolidation and advertising buckets. We believe that small publishers face the challenge of SEO. We want them to make money back. Any idiot can buy sites for 2x yearly revenue but can you define it as a model that gets you success?

Working with b5media:
- We're looking for ad networks, international joint ventures, people who are interested in playing with stuff.
- We're not interested in your widget or brand search engine

Gab Goldenberg is up next.

Buying sites for SEO is a bit like climbing Mount Everest. He thinks it's a historically challenging climb if you get into it. Do you research and plan things out ahead of time. You want to protect your plan and changing conditions along the way, and you want to have a good base camp to start from (like a good domain to work off of).

What are some of the principles of buying sites for SEO? What might you like to research? Given recent developments at Google, for example, what will you look at?
Protect sites from getting its SEO value reset (like Joe Lieberman's site being reset - getting total control without any risks)
Then he'll tie it in with a case study

If you go around to site buying marketplace, you'll find that content is undervalued. If you consider the value at a replacement cost, you can pay a journalist for a feature length piece. You can compare that with online content, it's really undervalued. You want to look for indices for high quality websites. Google looks for deep content that isn't linked to.
How do you find sites that are trusted like this by Google? You can do site: search for the website.
Look for a footprint - an identifying characteristic that many websites share. Look at a CMS and see their footprint. If it ranks for these terms, then you know that the site has good quality. That's why Wikipedia, about.com, and a lot of other sites get ranked well - because of domain strength.

We want to buy a site. Now if you change the whois and the hosting, you can get the site value reset to nothing. How do you protect your investment? Use a trust. It's a legal mechanism whereby one person (the trustee) holds legal value to the property and a beneficiary holds beneficial value to the property.

inurl:"blog/index.php?s=" + "powered by Wordpress"

How do you make a trust? This is legal information; speak to a lawyer. The three things you want to make sure are in your contract:
- Intent to create a trust
- Certainty over the property - anything that's important in the domain (including hosting)
- Beneficial title for the site

At the end of the day, the single greatest value you're buying is the domain. One case study he shows is that he launched a piece of content about a Mercedes car dealership in his city. It was a post that ranked well for car dealership which gets 1000 clicks for a top listed ad. If you're buying a domain, you need to consider the strength.

Last up is Todd Malicoat.

He is apparently very reticent, according to the reticent Stephan Spencer.

There's a lot of opportunity to buy old sites.

- Finding old sites
Think like an old site. If I was an old site, where would I be, and how would I find that site?
Creative queries
Automation

- Contact site owners:
Be credible
Be brief
Be lucky.

- Valuating a site:
Domain, age (more of the links rather than domain), links, themes, traffic, revenue

- Negotiating and closing a site purchase
Lowball, but don't offend
Get a price
Counter
Agree
Sign agreement
Escrow service
Transfer - file and WHOIS

Session Intro: Hanging out your shingle is not building a business. Creating value that others will recognize and ultimately pay to own (read "buy") takes vision, planning and execution. In this session, you'll hear case studies from SEM business executives who have conceptualized and implemented strategies and tactics that make their companies intrinsically valuable.

Chris Elwell, President of Third Door Media is moderating this session and speakers include Bruce Clay, President of Bruce Clay, Sean J. McMahon, President of EngineWorks and Matt Naeger, Executive Vice President Operations at Impaqt.

Sean is up first. You need to build value beyond client engagements. What is value? A fair return for something or a monetary worth. He then points out that he was one of the co-founders of TrafficLeader, which was sold to Marchex. He talks about how in the old days before engines updated their indices in real time, they were held hostage to waiting for product pages to be indexed. Therefore they added value to their company by co-creating the paid inclusion model. Inktomi was their first partner in this. It was pitched that they could monetize their natural listings while improving index relevancy. Other engines were to follow.

If you focus on creating value into every client relationship. market value will follow. In the case of Marchex, they saw TrafficLeader as having all these relationships with search engines. This was value beyond revenue and client rosters. They view an acquisition of TrafficLeader as giving them direct access to the search engines.

Sean then begins to relate his experience of what he is doing now -- which is providing high end search marketing. He is doing things smarter now than he did with TrafficLeader. One of the things he has one to build value beyond client relationships is to extend keyword research into understanding what their marketing messaging should be even beyond search. He provides a real life example with client -- Lisa Cline.

Up next is Bruce Clay. He provides some history as to how his company has grown. Started as one man company in 1996. Now he has 39 employees and 11 openings. Over the last 5 years they have had 40 - 70% growth compounded. They have offices all over - London, Cape Town, Sydney, Tokyo, China and looking at Brazil. His business is based on quality verses quantity.

One of the values in his company is not only the level of service but the fact that they offer training and a set of proprietary tools. Bruce points out that they like to train employees from ground up. Account managers are in on the proposal/contract process. Every client has to become a testimonial.

They make their clients take their training course. Otherwise they will refuse to serve them. The idea is to empower them with knowledge so they understand what they are buying and so the project flows smoother. I can totally understand this theology.

Now he talks about when someone actually wants to buy you. First analyst will ask for client list and phone numbers. This is followed by them learning procedures. Accounting info is looked at after this. Then employees are audited. Another thing that is looked at is your business plan. Retention / renewal / satisfaction is key.

Actual valuation of a company is 4.3 x Revenue or 11.3 times EBITDA.

Finally we have Matt presenting. He starts by saying that you need to decide what kind of company you want to be and what kind of clients do you wan t to work with. Those types include enterprise, SMB or boutique. Then you have to decide what your are comfortable in managing. Only take on clients that fit the size of your company. Keep your reputation in mind. The client is interviewing you but you should be interviewing them at the same time.

Don't be afraid to share knowledge with clients and the industry. Blogs, articles, etc. help accomplish this. Let your clients in on what you are doing.

Matt provides a brief history of his company. Started in 1999. Initial clients included anyone -- no selection process. They built business by educating clients as to what SEM is. from 99-04, they grew at a rapid pace. They did not have brand recognition until they decided to build the brand through industry events.

Some of the challenges they face along the way included too many clients with too little time. Also the Jupiter Constellation of having to grow for growth's sake.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and answered.

1. What are some vehicles you use to improve retention rate of employees?
   
   Matt answers that providing ownership to employees is very helpful. Give them the opportunity to add what they think is value to the company. Employees are more important than clients. Bruce says they originally tried to hire people with experience but that was fruitless so they decided to self train. Bruce also feels like employees are most valuable asset they have. Sean agrees. He also believes in giving your main employees some kind of ownership.
   
   
2. Next question is related to Bruce's valuation numbers. Where did he get those?
   
   He replies that he gets it from newsletters he receives and points out that valuation depends on assets, whether you have software or just services., etc. Another tip is that if anyone thinks your company is worth buying that it is also a company worth keeping.
   
   
3. When you bring on new client, do they get an assigned account manager?
   
   Matt responds that it depends on size of client.
   
   
4. Do account managers do work themselves or simply manage / communicate to others?
   
   Matt says that account managers are trained and are doing some of he work themselves such as SEO strategy and the like. Bruce points out that their account managers do not do the work but simply manage the clients/accounts.
   

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Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Moderator:
Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing ExactTargert
Speakers:
Scott Brinker, President and CTO, ion interactive
Rob Bergquist, Widemile
Tom Leung, Business Product Manager, Google
Jonathan Mendez, Founder and CEO, RAMP Digital

Tom:

Website Optimizer is designed to convert traffic. You can learn more about it at www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
You can test simple things like location of buttons, color, copy, layout. Testing isn't just to improve your conversion rate but it helps you to keep from killing your converion rates when making changes.

Google is starting a new promotion today called Website Workout. Visit www.google.com/WebsiteOptimizer/Workout to sign up for a Free consultation. You need to enter by June 17th.

Scott:

The gravity of click-throughs: Click = landing experience. All clicks aren't created equal. They differentiate on who they are. Branding is always impacted. When someone lands on your page after clicking on your

ad they get an impression of business. Landing pages are more than just a page. You can get creative in design and experience including rich media, avatars, things that typically may be considered no no's in

classic landing pages. Social media interfaces and mobile optimized experiences are also valuable.

3 different ways to scale, optimize:

Test Scaling
Increase the number of alternate landing pages
a/b vs. multivariate techniques
As far as the outside world is concerned, still just one page
Diminished returns ("the wall")

Horizontal Scaling
Increase the number of distinct landing page "destinations". Landing pages that are tailored to tight messaging.

Vertical Scaling
Expand the scope of what a typical landing experience is. Microsites are an example of this. Multi-page experiences can allow you to bring in behavioral data.

A conversion Path:
Segmentation - User gets a choice to determine segment.
Offering - Tailored to their segment
Deepening

Jonathan:

All the information you know about people matters. If you give people control over the information, this will make a bigger impact. Consumers know more about what they want then you ever will.

Give the user tools to define their experience and then direct them to your site. Example was a 300x250 dockers ad that let a potential shopper customize their docker pants and once this is done they are directed

to the dockers site with these pants to purchase.

Robert:

87% not satisfied with their campaign conversion rates. 60% doing no testing or optimization of any kind. Majority of those testing use only manual a/b testing.

3 key steps are:

Analyze your audience and its needs
Embrance your marketing and design best practices
Test everything - all your assumptions

Session notes contributed by Justin Davy.

Bot Herding - Search spiders and bots are pretty stupid when the come to your web site. If you don't guide them, they'll generate duplicate content issues, miss important pages in favor of junk, not realize where existing content has moved to and have other problems. This session looks at some advanced techniques in herding bots, when IP delivery can be what hat and how search engines view cloaking issues today.

Moderator: Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz

Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee, FOR HIRE. Email him. He rocks.

Speakers:

Adam Audette, Founder, AudetteMedia
Hamlet Batista, President, Nemedia S.A.
Nathan Buggia, Lead PM, Live Search Webmaster Center, Microsoft
Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo, Inc.
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Evan Roseman, Software Engineer, Google
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Michael Gray is up first. Why don't people condition their mailboxes? Let's say you're buying a new house and you can't afford air conditioning except for in a few rooms. When you make more money, you might add more AC units. Once you get more money, you're going to put in central air. No matter how much money you make, are you ever going to air condition your mailbox? No, because it's not a good use of your resources.

Let's take that analogy to your website. You're building a site but have no money. You don't have a lot of links. You don't have a lot of PageRank. Are you going to send that PR to your contact page? Does it make sense? You're looking to send PR that makes most sense to you.

Think about how much PR and link equity you have. If you're a big company, it doesn't matter. But smaller sites need to worry more about where you send your PageRank. Send it only to pages that drive conversions and sales.

What can you sculpt out?
Who wants to rank for their privacy policy, terms of use, or contact us?
Locations - unless you are multi location business, put your address in footer and sculpt out location pages.
Company bios - unless you are involved in reptuation mamagement, then sculpt them out
Sitewide footer links, advertising stats, and legal pages don't need it.

How to sculpt:
- Nofollow is quick and easy but search engines may be looking at it and people may know that an SEO is involved.
- Javascript - old school, relies on client side technology, currently bots don't crawl it but it may change in the future
- Form pages, jump apges, redirect pages - they're more complex to implement and maintain, and search engines currently don't follow them but that may change

Be consistent or you're shooting yourself in the foot. Don't let them in one way and not let them in the other way. Always use robots.txt and meta noindex in conjunction with any PR sculpting. Account for outside links and any spider or search engine quirks.

Should you do this now or should you wait?
- If you hasve critical issues, this takes a backseat: take care of your fires, then do it
- New sites should use this

Adam Audette talks about 8 arguments against sculpting pagerank with Nofollow.

1. More control? Having a mechanism at a link level for spidering is good. The rub is that we don't know everything. We don't know enough or how much PageRank we have on a domain. We're attempting to control the PR on a domain and we don't know how much PR we have on a domain, a single page, how much PR fluctuates, and how much a link is worth in PR. It's very imprecise.

2. It's a distraction. There are a lot of things we can do to make our page really great.

3. Management headaches: when you have a large site, you may have numerous departments working on the same page. With turnover, unless you have procedure in place, it's confusing. Ask: why are 5 links nofollowed on this page and what department handles this?

4. It's a Band-Aid. People are using nofollow to alleviate symptoms on site and they're not addressing underlying causes like good structure and design.

5. Where's the user? The user experience is not being addressed. Lots of PR to float mediocre pages? Are we giving more power to high authority domains? The web is a level playing field and we're not focusing on what's online. On the web, big business doesn't always dominate.

6. It's open to abuse. People can do things in sneaky ways and we don't know - it can be abused. How are search engines going to react? We really don't know because there's no standard on nofollow. Matt Cutts has stated that "the mechanism is completely general."

The blaance of advanced SEO - what's right for your users and what's right for search engines

7. Too focused on search engines. This is about creating sites for users, not for search engines. Cater to search engines. Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist? These are quotes from the Google Guidelines.

8. There is no stnadard. Every engine treats nofollow differently. It's also way too focused on Google - nofollow targets Google primarily. It's all about Google's PageRank.

You can go to his followup on www.audettemedia.com/nofollow

Next up is Stephan Spencer. He talks about herding bots away from duplicate content.

Duplicate content is rampant on blogs. Herd bots to permalink URL and lead everywhere else (archive by date, category pages, tag pages, homepage, etc. with paraphrased optional excerpt)
- Not just the first couple paragraphs - the MORE tag
- Requires you to revise your main index template theme file

Include a sig line and headshot photo at the bottom of post/article. Link to the original article and post permalink URL.

On e-commerce sites, you have issues with multiple parameters, product descriptions, guided navigation, paginations with categories, tracking parameters.

Selectively append tracking codes for humans with "white had cloaking" or use JavaScript to append the codes.

Pagination: not only creates many pages that share the smae keyword theme, but also very large categories with thousands of products result in hundreds of pagess of product listing getting crawled. A lot of pages may not get indexed.
- Nofollow the "View all links" or funnel all pageRank through keyword rich subcategory links. Your mileage will vary. Test all of this.

PageRank leakage?
- If you're using robots.txt disallow, you're probably leaking PR
- Robots.txt disallow and meta robots noindex both accumulate and pass PR
* Meta noindex tag on a master sitemap will deindex the page but still pass PR to linked sub sitemap pages

Rewriting spider-unfriendly URLs - use URL rewriting server module/plugins such as mod_rewrite recode your scripts to extract variables out of the path_info part of the url; regular expressions in rewrite rules are great. IIS servers have ISAPI plugins. Rewrite rules are great if you have a bunch of rewrite rules. You can also implement 301 redirects using rewrite rules.

Note: [NC] on rewriterules means nocase.

He shows a conditional redirect example. I can't type it out without typoing, but he explains that if there's a PHP session ID, you can redirect for certain bots.

You can drop error pages out of the index, but if people link to you with a space after the trailing slash, you can 301 redirect that instead of it being www.domain.com/%20. You can prevent indexing of the error page. Do a 301 redirect to something valuable to something like your homepage and dynamically give you an error message.

This presentation is at www.netconcepts.com/learn/bot-herding.ppt. You can read it for yourself! w00t.

Next up is Hamlet Batista: white hat cloaking - six practical applications. Go cloak, he says.
- There's good cloaking and bad cloaking. IT's all about your intention.
- Always weigh the risks versus the rewards of cloaking
- Ask permission - or don't call it cloaking.
- Mention "IP delivery," not cloaking.

When should we be cloaking? We're talking about white hat cloaking. We're going to talk about practical scenarios and alternatives. How do we cloak? How can cloking be detected? What are risks and next steps?

Practical cloaking -
- Content accessibility when you get search unfriendly CMSes
- Rich media sites
- Content behind forms
Membership sites
- Free and paid content
Site structure improvements
- Alternative to PR sculpting via nofollow
Geolocation and IP delivery
Multivariate testing

Practice Scenario #1: proprietary website management systems that are not search engine friendly.
- Users see dynamic URLs, session IDs, canonical issues, missing titles and meta descriptions. But the search engines can see something else: SE friendly URLs, URLs without session IDs, URLs with consistent naming conventions, automatically generated titles and meta descriptions.

Practical Scenario #2: a video or flash/video intensive website.
- USers see flash. Search engines see text representations of graphical images and elements, text representation of all motion/video elements, text transcription of all audio in the rich media content.

Practical Scenario #3: membership sites like SEOmoz Pro (hello, I'm wearing an SEOmoz shirt today)
- Search users see snippets of premium content on the SERPs, and when they land on the page they're faced with a registration form. Members see the same content that search engine robots see.

Practical Scenario #4: sites requiring massive site structure changes to improve index penetration.
Regular users follow a link structure designed for ease of navigation. Search robots follow a link structure deesigned for ease of crawling and deeper index penetration of the most important content. He explains that it's like a train on a rail - sometimes the path will change. In this case, there's a path for the best penetration of the index.

Practical Scenario #5: geolocation
Regular users see: content tailored to their geographical area should be provided. Robots say that this should be okay

Practical Scenario #6: split testing
Regular users see content experiment alternatives. Search robots see the same content consistently

How do we cloak?
- Robot detection by HTTP cookie test
- Robot detection by Javascript/CSS test
- Robot detection by visitor behavior. Computers are predictable. They follow links in a certain way. They spend a certain amount of time on links.

He also has another 3000 slides that he can't show us because we're out of time. That is all. Thank you for reading.

Session Intro: At one time the model was simple -- agencies got 15%. That's not the case with search engine optimization or paid search advertising. Digital media and measurable ROI spawned a school of new services and nearly as many pricing models, such as retainers, billable hours, pay-for-performance, keyword management fees, percentage of media spend. But with so many options on the table, which pricing model works best?

Comprised of a panel of SEM firm executives, this session will present the various search engine marketing pricing models in use today. Specifically, each panelist will discuss the pros and cons of a specific model -- from both the client and vendor perspective - including why they're effective and the important considerations associated with each.

Chris Elwell, President of Third Door Media is moderating this session and speakers include Ken Jurina, President of Epiar, George Michie, Principal of Search Marketing at Rimm-Kaufman Group and Paul Wilson, Chief Revenue Officer at iProspect.

Ken is up first. He first defines what SEM is -- SEO + paid search + paid inclusion. He then cautions to beware of analytics hole meaning that you should provide proof of your work. Otherwise you are simply tracking rankings and that alone which is not good enough.

Profile who the client is. Are they smaller, mid-size or large. Smaller companies will buy in quicker but will have small budgets. Mid size companies provide some level of stickiness. The large companies may not always have large budgets. There are also many layers that place obstacles to getting stuff actually implemented.

Typical industry pricing models include retainer based, pay for performance, fee for service and hourly consultation. One pitfall on hourly is that you are probably never getting the best reward. Ken's company uses the "fee-for-service" model most often. Campaigns include keyword research and analysis, on-page optimization, inbound link building and reporting/analytics on all these factors.

Ken points out that not all client's needs are the same. Web site audits are a very good way to get your "foot in the door." Bottom line is that differing services may be needed for specific client projects.

Some disadvantages of the fee-for-service model include no residual payment for years of good ROI. Also the constant education and reeducation process. Finally having to adjust deliverables over time. May be helpful breaking pricing into phases rather than a one price for all as it allows clients to "taste the goods."

Ken strongly suggests detailed proposals and solid contracts. They show seriousness and professionalism and lay out what is expected of each party. They define work without necessarily having to provide a guarantee.

In differentiating services, you have to be able to offer a value proposition. Define what your competitive advantages are. Focus on organizational strengths. Most important is to guarantee an exceptional level of service.

Next up is George. He first of all points out that they do paid search only -- no organic search marketing. They wrestled with pricing issues in the beginning. The idea was to charge a fair price where the client feels like they are getting value. Of course there is also the goal of actually making a profit. They wanted to create incentives that would motivate client to "do the right thing." Aslo important was to build a scalable model.

When they started out, they expected to be the highest priced and highest quality service provider in the space but discovered they were actually very low priced. They actually have lost accounts because their pricing was too low.

He then talks a bit why they di not choose a "rev-share" pricing model. First of all there is too much easy money on brand trade search. He also didn't want to dicker with clients over credit allocation or in other words -- who is responsible for what.

They also didn't like straight cost mark-up. On the low end, they did not make any money, they didn't get paid for wasteful spending, and for larger clients, fees become divorced from the cost of providing the service. He warns that if your fee structure gets way out of line with the service that is provided, it may encourage your clients to shop around. For example, client is spending a million a month and you are charging 15% or $150,000/mo.

Their solution was to charge a percentage of ad spend with a minimum monthly fee. Thy also have a maximum monthly fee. This keeps fees in line with service that is provided. Their pricing is as such: 12.5% of ad spend, minimum monthly fee - $3,000/mo.; maximum monthly fee - $12,500/mo.

Benefits of their model is clients are profitable for them, they are able to attract Marquis clients, clients who are "capped" are kept super happy (there is no incentive to waste money), and finally there is stability as no single client determines their bottom line.

Finally, Paul is up to finish the presentation. Paul starts off asking how many people watched the Indy 500 but shows a slide of NASCAR. WTH? Moving on, I believe he is trying to convey that pricing requires a team effort.

He talks about the pay for performance model. Bonus targets, incremental fees and percentages are all aspects of this type of pricing model. The pros of performance pricing is that goals are aligned, and protects against bad performance. Cons - constant monitoring, accurate tracking data, goals may change, challenges measuring SEO and paid media, and finally over and under performance.

In getting started, define conversion metric, define value of conversions, then factor in all costs as service provider, and finally pressure test. In making a performance model work, you need at least 12 months of historical data to look at. From that, establish baselines. You also have to build in a "what if" analysis and adjust metrics accordingly. lace everything in contract form.

The main idea in performance pricing models is to create a relationship that is a win win for both parties.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and answered.

1. How do you customize pricing for performance based models (question for Paul)?
   
   Look at historical data especially sales cycles. Maybe define benchmarks which is meet, bonuses are paid.
   
   
2. What do you do with clients who cannot meet minimum pricing requirements? Do you send them away?
   
   Ken answers that he investigates what client is doing overall for advertising and many times can uncover waste that will allow them to shift funds to search. He also has been flexible with allowing clients to make payments. If nothing works, they then have a select group of consultants they can hand projects off to. Paul may refer them to educational resources such as SEMPO. Otherwise, hand them off to companies that have lower pricing structures.
   
   
3. Have you considered a tiered type model as opposed to a cap-style model (question for George).
   
   They have used tiered but warns that it is an accounting nightmare.
   
   
4. Does Paul have any input as far as "adjusting" corporate pricing models when they do not align with client goals and/or budgets?
   
   Yes, they do have a discovery process that allows them to customize pricing structure.
   
   
5. How do you adjust incremental pricing after 3 years?
   
   It is challenging because initially you are up against historical data whereas as campaign ages, you are up against yourself.

One thing I personally go out of this session after each presenter revealed their pricing structures is that my own company does not charge enough! Price increases coming. ;)

---

Session coverage by David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

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

Speakers:
Jason Doran, Yahoo!
Benu Aggarwal, CEO, Milestone Internet Marketing
Mona Elesseily, Director of Marketing Strategy, Page Zero Media
Brian Kaminski, Managing Director, iProspect San Francisco, iProspect
David Szetela, Owner and CEO, Clix Marketing

Jason: Ad Group structure is foundation of success

Poor Ad Group structure and keyword selection make up about 90% of failing ads we see.

You're in a dialogue with potential customer how will you respond

Your creative is a 2 second dialogue with searches. Be clear, relevant and call out your competitive edge.

Most clarity issues stem from carelessness. Take some time to review how your creative's will scan. Even simple errors can cripple your ability to compete, think about a lawyer who is spelled "lawer" in his creative. What message does that send to the user?

Be relevant. Be as specific as your search about your offer – match the scope of their interest. Only narrow scope to qualify clicks.

Make it relevant to their query – include when possible

Use alt text to smooth over areas where including the keywords isn't possible.

Determine your competitive edge by looking at the competition. What aren't others saying that you could say to differentiate yourself? Ex: How long you have been in business.

Alternative/Default Text to solve common problems and drive performance

Identify keywords that you think may benefit it may not be your entire ad group.

Mona:

Understand your market

Search for terms your bidding on. "Free Shipping" Example 3 of the top 5 ads in that example offer Free Shipping. What can you put to differentiate yourself such as "Ship Same Day" Testing is the key and you must differentiate between your competitors and yourself.

MSN Labs offers search funnel tool which allows users to see the terms that are searched before or after a particular query. It gives you an idea about what searches are thinking about and that you can include in your ad copy.

MSN Labs seasonality tool forecasts seasonality patterns and helps you determine when searches are most tuned in to particular messaging.

SpyFu.com offers a glimpse into your competitors and what their up to.

Create compelling ad copy

Try testing the following:

- Price

- Information that reassures buyers i.e. official site or 24/7 phone support (if applicable)

- Time sensitivity like a deal or offer ending soon

Ad copy should be appropriate "in feel" to the industry category.

Need Thermal Oxidizers? vs. Get Thermal Oxidizers. "Get" worked much better in this case.

Consider the "Buy Cycle"

Are they researching or ready to take a particular action.

Multivariate ad testing

Headlines
Offers

Buy words

Urls with www. vs. no www.

Use of sub directory and no using (website.com/something vs. website.com)

Adcomparator.com is a Free Multivariate ad testing tool:

Brian:

In sports a lot of times it comes down to the final minutes or even seconds in the game, to determine the winner. We must take advantage of everything in order to get the competitive edge.

Why it matters:

Time
Cost

Cluttered Marketplace
Campaign Performance
Quality Score
Competitive Advantage

Avoid the herd mentality where you change everything. Focus on what's working and what isn't.

Think about Testing, Integration and Competition

Testing:

What makes you special as a company? Price, Service, Selection, Certification, Reputation etc. Emphasize what you do well. What causes clicks and conversions for 1 keyword may not work for another. Don't focus to much on CTR% your purpose is to drive conversions so test your ad copy toward the ultimate conversion.

Integration:

67% of all searches were driven by an offline stimulus. Copy messaging from print, tv, radio, etc. It doesn't mean direct copy. It's important to be consistent especially when you rank well organically as well.

Competition:

Always keep an eye on your competition. Just as college and pro teams have scouts in search you need to always keep an eye on your competitors. Think about keywords, Messaging, Deals.

Benu:

1. Research
2. Ad copy

3. Ad Set-up

4. Manage Ad & ROI

Case Study with Travel:

Ad copy with good description and a compelling offer makes a big difference. They disabled their content network because of low budgets so that gave them more control over some of their other variables. Testing variations of DKI. Initial Bid amount was very high to secure high CTR. High CTR, High quality score resulted in lower CPC eventually.

Even with geo-targeted campaigns, very specific adgroups were used – one for the branded terms and one for non-branded terms. Use negative keywords.

David:

Content Ads Are Different That Search Ads

Ads need to stand out on the content network

Yell, don't whisper

Be more competitive – e.g. free shipping

Test, test, test

Keywords on the content network should describe the kinds of pages where you want your ad to appear. If your selling tires, and you know your target is men who like to hunt, then that should be your focus.

Words in your ad don't have to relate to words in your keyword list.

Content Ads Need to Say..

"This ads for me" – connection to the site
There's a reason for me to look closely at the ad
Pre-Qualification (optional) – make sure the wrong people aren't persuaded to click
Pre-Sale (optional) – describe the action you want them to take on the landing page
Call to action (e.g. "Start Saving Now!)

On the content network, quality score is CTR centric. It's better to start your bidding a little higher and then lower over time.

Q&A:

How do you track the impact of the initial part of the buy cycle and then tie it back to the final sale?

One way is by monitoring the relationship between tail terms and the impact that has later on brand terms. The flaw there is that they aren't able to tie back to a specific person however. You can track quality visits which mean the user performs a few actions that are of value to you. It does require some effort.

How accurate are services like spyfu.com?

A few of them seemed to like it while the others didn't comment. (Personally I'm not a fan. If you're curious as to how accurate it is, you could start by running a search on your own sites. From what I've seen th...

Contributed by Justin Davy.

NOTE: This coverage is live coverage, there will be typos, grammar issues and more. We try to post the coverage ASAP, which leaves issues.

Moderator: Greg Boser, President/CEO, 3 Dog Media
Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee, SEO For Hire

Greg welcomes the familiar spammers... Rae wont be able to make it last minute, so Todd is sitting in for the Q&A. The panelist introduce themselves.

Roger Montti, Founder & Owner, MartiniBuster.com, is up first. Such a tease, they pause due to technical issues, its been at least four minutes now. 7 minutes later, Danny comes up to the podium to help out. He brings the presentation machine over to the table in the back and will run things from there. Should we all turn our seats around?

Roger starts of talking about .edus. They are the most "whitest hat" links you can get. No one gets banned for them. They pass "hand checks." Roger said he will concentrate on natural citation and not the black hat stuff.

To get these EDUs, see what is going on with the industry heavy weights and look at charitable opportunities. To see the heavyweights, see the top spenders on AdWords for a query and check their backlinks.

EDUs are not special, they are not the magic bullet. EDUs are desirable because they are usually not in bad neighborhoods. They are typically free. In maps of link relationships, these pages are generally going to fall outside relationships that are known for link manipulation, etc.

EDUs may not be desirable because they are not authoritative content, link pages are link fest, pages may not have inbound links and non-expert pages are the links you'll get.

Tips in Yahoo Link Commands:

• linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "bookmarks"
• linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "links"
• linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "favorite sites"
• linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "your product or service"

More examples:

• linkdomain:example.com site:.edu sponsors
• linkdomain:example.com site:.edu donors
• linkdomain:example.com site:.org sponsors
• linkdomain:example.com site:.org benefactors

Other modifiers include:

• Hotlinks
• Bookmarks
• Links
• Directory
• Resources

Jay Young, Owner, Link Fish Media, Inc. is next up. Yes, more tech issues. This time Michelle is up on stage debugging. It is now working. He will skip the ethics behind link building.

The thing you need most in link building is "brass balls and big bucks." There is no place for fear in link building. You need a lot of money.

Places to Get Links:
- Directories
-- Best of the Web
-- Yahoo
-- DMOZ
-- Joe Ant
-- Blog Catalogue

There are still a lot of "very trusted directories" that pass a lot of authority, he said. Every link building campaign needs to start with directories. Buy yourself a DMOZ editor.

More Places to get Links:
- Non Profits
-- Arguably editorial
-- Tax deduction
-- Normally very good neighborhood
-- Helps a good cause

More Ways:
- Join SEOcialists
-- Digg
-- Reddit
-- Stumble

Brokers:
- Big Name Text Link Brokers (will not out them, he said). Using them, he said, still works. Find them, use them and spend a lot of money with them. He does it, it works.
- Blog advertisers
- Smaller Brokers 2,000 - 10,000 sites
- Specialty Brokers
- Amateur Brokers (DP forums, 20 or 30 sites)

Link Bait
- "Call Rand" he said.
- He talks about the recent debated linkbait idea.
- In the end of the day, he said, "We are not in this for morality, we are in this for marketing." He is serious.

Buy Links
- Vital for the success for a competitive campaign
- Be as relevant as possible
- Be as natural as possible
- Vary your anchor text
- Use co-citation (link out to Wikis, etc)
- If you get busted, the link will get busted and you won't be busted (i.e. he said the site passing the link will be hurt, not yours)

Darker Methods (that still work, if done in moderation):
- Comment Spam (do it manually)
- Trackback Spam
- Reciprocal Links (be very picky when doing this, if they got a page for recip links, then opt out)
- Three Ways
- Link Farms (dont spend a lot of money here)

Outside of the Box:
- Widgets
- Templates
- Template Sponsorship
- Contests: Free iPhone
- Content Trades

Tips:
- Hire Bartenders as link builders because they have a strong work ethic, they work autonomously, fast on their feet, technically inclined, multi-tasker, social
- Avoid buying links from forums
- Avoid buying links with hidden links
- USe moderation and common sense
- If the competition is too clean, mess it up a little (buy them a lot of nasty cheap links and point it at them)

He puts up a slide, stop being afraid of this guy:

Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts. Greg introduces him as a PowerPoint genius.

High Value Link Targets:
- 80/20 rule
- B/c of the logarithimc nature of PR, its a more reliable metric the higher the score
- PR10s: usa.gov, nsf.gov, w3.org, real.com, energy.gov
- Adobe has 9 PR10 pages
-ERCIM is a PR10, now PR9
- Email him for a longer list

Build a link building spider:
- Look for sites with one-click away from Google
- Look for sites with super high PR
- With preferences for site that already give link love to sponsors
- Populate a database with all that site data
- Want specifics, go to Give it up tomorrow (re: Google Directory)

Link Build Your Existing Links:
- Use tools to mine your current back links
-- Internet Marketing Ninjas
-- SEOMoz tool

Networking in the Blogosphere:
- Comment on blogs that dofollow
- Submit to blog carnivals
- Be a contributor to a group blog
- Be a guest blogger on someone elses blog
- Get involved in comments and built rapport before requesting a link. Find old inactive free hosted blogs
- A tip jar indicated the blogger is desperate for cash
- Have a blogger install a WordPress plugin that injects links naturally

Paid Links:
- Manufacturing link authority vs focusing your existing link authority
- Dont try to artificially create link authority through paid links

Redistributing Home Page Links
- Improve quality of Google SERPs for Ling Tail non-brand search terms
- Sculpt PageRank
- Two Levels of Improvement:
--- Redistribute a percent of your home pages inbound links to relevant sub pages
--- Ask them to change the anchor text too see further gains
- Paid link? Yes, potentially, but editorially earned, so OK

Conditionally 301 Inbound Affiliate Links:
- Be like Amazon, more info at here
- This only works if you manage your own aff program.
- Also demand a naked link on their legal notice page

Networking in Meatspace
- Build relationships with bloggers by networking at conferences, etc.
- Register and attend conferences that link to their attendees
- Contribute to conference wikis
- Give free talks at libraries and campuses
- Get involved with local meetups
- Invite W3C to speak and get a link to your event on w3.org/WAI

Wikis:
- Contribute to Wikipedia
- Contribute to other wikies, NewPR Wiki, WordPress Codex
- Create your own wiki (SEOGlossary.com)

Link Baiting - Viral Content
- Videos (he gave samples)
- Quizzes/Personality Tests
- Widgets
- Microsites (counter counterfeit commission)

Utilities
- WordPress Plugins
- Firefox Extension
- Release software as open source

Stroke Egos

He then flies through a ton of slides, cause he is over.

Q&A Time

Keynote - Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, Microsoft - Kevin Johnson oversees Microsoft's Windows and Online Services businesses, as well as sits on Microsoft's Senior Leadership Team, setting overall strategy and direction for the company. In this keynote, Kevin will cover Microsoft's aspirations in the search and online advertising space, including the roles of Live Search and MSN.

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

Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Director, Search Strategies

We're focused on four core businesss:
- Our desktop business
- Our enterprise business: Windows server, etc.
- Our consumer electronics business - XBOX, etc.
- Our online business - and the center of this is the advertising platform. The more inventory you have, the better you can deliver. It's a scale of economics. It is a software problem. There are algorithms that will determine what ad to serve to improve the buy-sell process. We have software that provides workflow. It also is an area that requires a significant investment in capital.
When you look at the industry, we believe that the industry will be better served if there are n number of players where n>1. We're invested and committed to provide choice for advertisers and publishers and consumers.

Danny: Is there a danger that Google will be so entrenched that you're unable to compete?
Kevin: Google is already entrenched so you need to have disruptive ways to change the paradigm. We need to innovate on the horizonal relevance of search and the navigation. We want to amplify verticals that relate to commercial intent. We want to connect buyers and sellers. We're going to be thoughtful about the fact that we have an entrenched competitor but we need to deliver an innovation to grow our share and to build our value in the market.

Danny: What's the most innovative thing you've done? Most disruptive?
Kevin: We have had image search, voice related search for innovation. We integrate Farecast. We have Cashback. We want to do things that are good for merchants and advertisers. We're innovating on the user and business model side to differentiate the product to benefit the advertisers.

Danny: Talk to us about the Cashback program. Are there results?
Kevin: The team monitors it everyday. People are on top of that on a realtime basis. But over a year ago, we had a concept that said that commercial intent search is connecting buyers and sellers. Why is it that the middleman keeps the money? Maybe we should reward the consumer for the action. This concept of cash back has been conceptualized for over a year. We had Live Search Club to test consumer loyalty. In launching it, we had 2-3 points of growth in share in a 60 day period. It was a different model but it was a test to see if customer loyalty would work in the long term. That led us to the Jellyfish acquisition and leading this to a commercial experience. We want to change the paradigm of the model and it needs to be in conjunction with the user experience.

Danny: Any other loyalty programs we're likely to see?
Kevin: We're going to see a continued focus across three major verticals (entertainment-video, commercial intent queries/shopping, reference) and a braod horizontal (broad relevance and capability for navigation). The first way to amplify this is around commercial intent. As we improve Cash Back, we'll make it a great value proposition for the consumer.

Danny: What's the biggest obstacle in getting people to use your search product?
Kevin: The brand, Google, is a very strong brand. People think that Google = search. We need to differentiate the product experience. We need to get users to try it so that the user experience can create a brand perception. Then we need to do marketing that reinforces the brand perception.

Danny: What's the biggest advantage?
Kevin: Commercial intent queries make about 30% of search queries but it makes up 80% of the revenue, so we need to keep carving out paradigms for this.

Danny: What's Google's weakness?
Kevin: The user experience hasn't changed much, and they're used to those 10 links. That's their Achilles heel. But in terms of what we want to do, we need to be different and innovate. I think there's a new paradigm that consumers will want and will embrace and it's up to us to be able to deliver on this.

Danny: There's the Live brand. Why not go back to MSN or Microsoft Search? Why not change it - or will it change?
Kevin: There's an opportunity for us to fix those brands. We acknowledge that we need to get that fixed. If you have suggestions, we'll take them.

Danny: Does fixed mean change?
Kevin: Fixed means fixed. We need to send money to build it.

Danny: What about the Yahoo acquisiton?
Kevin: We need to discuss alternatives that are not a full combination that has some positive attributes to it and we'll see where that dialogue leads.

Danny: Where else are you looking to make changes?
Kevin: You think of distribution broadly. You can get it with service providers, PC manufacturers, downloads, etc. We're going to work the full range of those alternatives. Some are better than others to enable the user to try and experience live search but it's a combination of distribution and good marketing. To do good marketing, you need to have your brand stand for something. In some sense, you need to leave with the user experience and get distribution so that people are trying it. All of those activities are underway. We need to make clear differentiation in terms of commercial intent.

Danny: What about Firefox's search default and drop down box? Only Google and Yahoo are there.
Kevin: We want to give the consumer choice. You can set your default of Live search and I think that IE provides a better experience.

Danny: Do you think that search is being overcredited for conversion occurring online or do you think it's undercounter?
Kevin: Search provides line of sight metrics and analytics for the advertiser and that's a wonderful thing. We want to provide engagement mapping - providing line of sight and applying it to display ads and rich media ads. Why is that? The advertiser to have that view can balance their media and see the best way to drive conversion (whether display ads, rich media, search, etc.) Engagement mapping embraces a bunch of elements and puts it in a framework.

Danny: Speaking of Live Search Books - if search is a long term game, Google is already scanning all these books. Microsoft said that you wanted to do that and you said it was a centerpiece of what you're doing but then it went away last week.
Kevin: Being able to crawl the web and index books is still valuable. What we did in our book scanning product is that we scanned 750k books. We're going to continue doing this, but because of the advanced tools and because 1st party publishers are embracing tools to do it themselves, we're going to crawl and index so people will still search and find. Having an open approach is important in putting the publisher in control of his/her content. We'll certainly be there to help them do their scanning but the fact is that the industry is maturing and we think more publishers will already be doing it themselves.

Danny: What about the Google/Doubleclick acquisiton. Shouldn't you do what they did and split the search company off?
Kevin: When we acquired aQuantive, we also got Avenue A:Razorfish. Our principle is to operate it at arms length - as an independent agency. We think this makes our ad platform better. We've signed up over 100 publishers including Facebook and Viacom and Digg and many others. Our company has been built in partnership. The fact that we want an ecosystem that people can make money is still true in the advertising platform. We want them to grow and thrive and have a healthy business.

Danny: What's Microsoft's tagline?
Kevin: We're working on a search and display platform that can provide choice for the industry. We have software services that are monetized with online advertising and some that aren't.

Danny: What do you think of the progress?
Kevin: We want to get more publishers and inventory. That inventory has been related to display and video. We need to strengthen search. That's a reflection of search query volume and share. If we can carve out the commercial intent queries, that's going to be a very positive thing for the ad platform.

----

Q&A:
What improvements are being easier to use - perhaps an offline editor?
Kevin: Last September, I was at ad week in NY and I worked to get their feedback. Some people said the tools need to be easier. Some said that we need to submit keywords that don't take so long (shortened cycle times). The third was getting more inventory. That was the feedback that I took personally from that trip and with adCenter we continued to release improvement. We're launching an offline tool this week - that's one step in the process.

Microsoft is the man and Google is the way to get at the man - how do you address this perception?
Kevin: In any industry, choice is good. We want to give choice to consumers, publishers, and users. We need to innovate.

What about Gatineau? Are you going to be able to ramp it up? Can you give it a better name because people can't spell it?
Kevin: Feedback noted.

Can you believe it, it is almost a year since the first ever SMX Advanced show hit the stage. Next week is the second SMX Advanced show, following several successful SMX presentations, hosted by Danny Sullivan.

Like always, we at the Search Engine Roundtable will be providing the most comprehensive coverage of the search conferences. We will be covering virtually all of the sessions being offered by the conference. There are three sessions per time slot and we have coverage of all three. Helping Tamar and I with the coverage includes David Wallace of SearchRank, and Justin Davy, both who have experience providing our style search engine conference coverage.

Here is our schedule of conference coverage, which is subject to change last minute:

Day 1: June 3rd
9:15am - 10:00am
Keynote - Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, Microsoft by Tamar Weinberg
10:45am - 12:00pm
Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques by Barry Schwartz
Winning From The Start: Getting Ad Copy Right by Justin Davy
Money For What? Search Marketing Payment Models by David Wallace
1:30pm - 2:45pm
Bot Herding by Tamar Weinberg
Conversion Optimization: Winning After They Arrive by Justin Davy
Creating Value In Your SEM Businesses by David Wallace
3:15pm - 4:30pm
Buying Sites For SEO by Barry Schwartz
Closing The Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead? by David Wallace
Funding, Valuing & Selling SEM Businesses by Tamar Weinberg
5:00pm - 5:45pm
You&A With Matt Cutts by David Wallace

Day 2: June 4th
9:00am - 10:00am
Search Marketing & Surviving A Recession by David Wallace
Search Friendly Development by Tamar Weinberg
10:45am - 12:00pm
International SEO by Barry Schwartz
What You Should Be Measuring -- But Aren't! by Justin Davy
Platform Considerations for the Microsoft Stack and LAMP Stack by David Wallace
1:45pm - 3:00pm
Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know by Tamar Weinberg
Bid Management Today by Barry Schwartz
Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues by David Wallace
3:15pm - 4:30pm
Give It Up! by Tamar Weinberg
Amazing New PPC Tactics by Barry Schwartz
Expert Technical Review of Your Website by David Wallace

We are all looking forward to SMX Advanced and I am personally looking forward to possibly (but not definitely) hanging out more with those that come.

See you next week!