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 pres