Search Marketing Expo 2008 West Archives

Last week, we attended SMX West in Santa Clara, CA with a room full of exhibitors and cool schwag. Since I like schwag, Danny Sullivan told me that I had to rate the schwag in the exhibit hall, a task that I thoroughly enjoyed. In the end, everyone was a winner, but to be fair to Danny (and to make it a little competitive), I selected a few more outstanding pieces of schwag as the true winners.

Here was a very cool SureHits shirt:

And a very practical Chapstick holder:

Personally, I love these ABCSearch click magnets:

There are plenty of others, and I'll be posting every single piece of schwag over the next few weeks (and months, since I'm traveling again as of tomorrow) on Schwag Addict.

And so you know, Barry made me write this article. ;) The schwag is a great part of fostering some community (and great branding) and the fun stuff is always remembered.

Speaking of SMX West, Barry created a video that highlights the attendees. Ignore the music; it's from iMovie (he told me):

Enjoy!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

SMX West 2008 is now over and it was a great conference. The size of the conference did not take away from the intimacy people felt with the speakers. Most attendees are on their way back now, as am I. Here is a recap of all our coverage.

Before I post that, I must thank our contributors. Starting with our Tamar Weinberg of many hats including her own blog Techipedia, Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and of Link Spiel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, David Wallace of Search Rank and a new addition Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs.

Day One: February 26, 2008

• Keynote Conversation: Search 3.0, Search 4.0 & Beyond
• The Blended Search Revolution
• Decrypting Quality Scores
• Legally Speaking: Recent Legal News about Search
• Video, Images & Blended Results
• Searchscape: Latest Stats About The Search Engines
• Search Marketing & Persona Models
• SMX Boot Camp: Copywriting for Search Success
• Local Search & Blended Results
• The Economics of Search
• Defending Your Paid Search Budget Against New Ad Fads
• Paid Search Fundamentals
• Online Retail & Blended Results
• Is It Time For Search Marketing Standards?
• Avoiding Keyword Pitfalls
• SMX Search Bowl Pictures & Videos

Day Two: February 27, 2008

• Keynote: Louis Monier - Past, Present & Future of Search
• Search Engine Friendly Web Design
• The Personalized Search Revolution
• SEO & Social Media Marketing
• Will The Social Graph Change Search?
• Reputation Monitoring and Management Through Search
• Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains
• Keyword Research Tools & Techniques
• SEO 2.0 For Web 2.0 Sites
• SEO and Blogging
• The Online Offline Synergy of Search
• In Depth with SEOmoz PRO
• Just Behave, A Look At Searcher Behavior
• Search Engineers Q&A
• SEO & User Generated Content

Day Three: February 28, 2008

• Keynote - Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade
• Industrial Strength SEO
• Growing Your Small SEM Firm
• Web Analytics Roundtable
• Generation Google: A Talk With Today's Teens
• Analyzing The Competition
• SEO Q&A
• Search Marketing, B2B-Style
• Linking Q&A
• SEO Checkup

This panel of SEO experts reviews sites live on the web and offers advice on improving indexing and ranking.

Moderator: Rob Kerry, Editor, Sphinn
Panelists:
Jake Baillie, Managing Director, STN Labs
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance

First site: pbreview.com.

It's a paintball website, they don't sell the products, but have reviews of the products. It has had partial optimization (meta tags and meta descriptions). He doesn't have specific issues, but is looking for suggestions. The people find his site by either the search engines, or direct (they're regular users that use the forums.)

Rob: Going to look at inlinks. Are they anything to do with the company?

Jake: URL structure looks good, site architecture looks OK. New window spawn is a little annoying (from a user's perspective). Nothing terrible. Check title tags for individual products, you need to make sure that the titles are unique.

Jake points out a usability issue, that the breadcrumbs are very small. There are several steps to get to the end product page, need to make it bigger.

Christine asks if he knows where the revenue comes from. The AdSense ads are where you would normally see navigation, so people might immediately leave the site. It was good to put paintball as one word on the site, he might put it as two words in the keyword tag.

Jake: don't worry about doing a site map, the site is indexed and you don't need to spend time on that right now.

Looking at articles. They have catchy titles, you need to balance with compelling titles and putting in keywords in titles. They have outside content firm writing articles, one issue is getting in keywords and phrases.

Jake thinks they're leaving a lot of money on the table, they rank very well for many paintball terms. AdSense is probably not the best way to monetize.

Jake makes suggestion about standardizing some of the product reviews, have hyperlinks from some of the components in a review list to the actual component.

Next site:
United Safes Corporation. unitedsafescorporation.com

First recommendation was to see if they could buy unitedsafes.com, it's a parked page. The desired keywords are safe and safes. Suggestion to look at secondary keywords (gun safes, fire safes). You might also want to target brand names of gun safes. Put your products into Google products.

It's going to cost a lot of money to rank for safe or safes. Should try to focus on something like gun safes, and get inlinks with that phrase in the anchor texts.

Four 302 redirects on home page, not redirecting non-www to www. Google is indexing multiple versions of the home page. Contact developers to have them fix this.

Needs unique title tags, switch content order on title tags – put product first, then company name. Helps both SEO and click through rate.

Looking at "question about the product" page, looks like one page for each product. No unique content, looks like duplicate content. Either make one form that populates with the product with a cookie, or put a noindex on the pages so they don't get indexed. Also get rid of CAPTCHA on the customer inquiry page. You don't want to put in barriers to a customer contacting you on an ecommerce site.

Home page title. Do a little keyword research, put your most important keywords in the title, keep it under ten words. Right now only three words, so you have some words you can work with.

Need to pull headings out of graphic and put it in text, use CSS to make it attractive so search engines can see it.

Next site: thefruitcompany.com

Done well organically, looking at paid search, and ways to make it better. Fruit baskets is main term, ranks number one for that. They rank well, Christine is disagreeing with Jake. She feels that there should be a little more text since the site is targeted to women since they like text. Jake says it ranks one, don't mess with it. Site in general looks great, the one issue they can find is that the link to the home page goes to default.htm. Change title tags to something unique, that will really help with long tail. Suggest to make live email address in graphic to make it harder for spammers to get email address. Also needs to have site not go to default.htm for home page.

One thing is to look at offline conversion tracking and paid search conversion tracking. Hole in analytics is all of the people going to the 1-800 number.

Next site: dailystrength.org
Online life support groups, free signup. Asks why he wants the review. Wants to rank for main phrases – support forum, support group, chat, advice paired with a condition name (depression support group). 80% women. Conversions much better with second term (help, support). He's not on front page for anything (aside from domain name), but good on long tail because of journal entries and discussions.

Suggestion: use online in your keywords, because people may be looking for in-person support groups.

He realizes they don't have original content on home page. Not ranking well for many things. Jake trying to figure out why. Needs more unique content, stuff is looking like duplicate content right now even though conditions are different. Put a couple of lines of post under the recent discussions.

Next site: become.com

A couple of competitors are ranking really well for all kinds of terms, they want to rank better too. Jake: There are lots of subdomains, not really needed. Google treats each subdomain as a different site. You have to do a strategy for each subdomain, strongly advises to put it all under www. A lot of the huge number of indbound links are being wasted, because they are going to www and the site is using subdomains. The inbound links are very good links from good sources.

Jake: When you change back from subdomains, it will hurt for some time. Do one category at a time, use a 301 redirect. URLs need to be shortened, they are really long right now. Nobody will print such a long URL, it will wrap if you email it to anyone, and nobody will type it in directly. Don't keyword stuff the URLs and title tags.

Christine: A 302 redirect is being used to go from non-www to www, it should be a 301. You need to get some of the keywords on the home page in natural text. Even if you're a big company, you still need to have your keywords on the home page. She points out a broken part of search that doesn't take visitors where they want to go.

Jake suggested hidden divs for the reviews to help mitigate the use of Ajax for the reviews.

SEO & Linking Track

Linking Q&A - This panel of search representatives and search marketers takes questions about linking, from link building, to issues about buying links, to internal linkage and more.
Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Specialist, BrentCsutoras.com

Speakers:
Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager, Live Search Webmaster Central, Microsoft
Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google
Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Rae Hoffman, Principal, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
Peter Linsley, Senior Product Manager, Search, Ask.com
Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, ,Stuntdubl

This is a mixed panel of search engine speakers and marketers and they will be covering questions and answers.

Q: I'm planning on moving one domain to another domain. How do I keep my link credit?
Piryank: 301 redirects and duplicate the structure as much as possible.
Matt: Do a little at a time.
Peter: Keep the content the same.
Rae: Getting links after the 301 is done is also helpful to get the search engines to recognize you.
Matt: Look at your backlinks and ask people to link to your new site.
Nathan: This is a great time to engage a reputable SEO.

Q from Barry: Should I care about an .edu or .gov link?
Rae: A crappy link for 8 years is better than an .edu.
Todd: And that's because they are that old and have a lot of trust already.
Rae: I'd be really surprised about the user pages on domains versus the official pages.
Matt: The value is that those links have higher PageRank but the algorithm doesn't really factor (if link == edu or if link == gov).

Q about the nofollow with Ask vs. Google leads to a notification from Peter to say that not all links are created equal.
Matt: nofollow is a mechanism to ensure that it doesn't flow PageRank.

Q: What's the definition of a paid link?
Matt: Someone asked me "what if I buy a 6 pack of beer and I pay in units of 6 packs - is that a paid link?" If it's some other currency, it's still like a paid link. It's not a link that's most useful to users. Brian White has a good definition.
Rae: You created the value on links in the algorithm and you should fix it instead of banning me. I would rather us not to be stressed out.
Matt: Just to make it clear, every search engine wants to make their algorithm robust. We take community feedback.
Nathan: Some links are easier distinguish as paid. They are totally irrelevant to the site.

Danny: What's the best way to get feedback on this?
Google: We have a Google Webmaster Group. If you're worried, that's a great place to ask. You can also ask on my blog.
Piryank: We have forms on Site Explorer and other areas and are making it easier to add communication tools.
Ask: We are big on feedback. We should look at webmasters in the eyes and tell them that this is why it is.
Nathan: We have a webmasters forum and we're even hiring!

Q: Link counts - are they accurate?
Piryank: The link counts were off recently but it was an error. You can see less than 1% of the variation. The numbers are expected to be moving around.

Q: What about link baiting through gadgets - when is it spam?
Matt: Some links are higher quality and come from higher pages and sources. You need to realize the effort of the link. If there was a random copy and pasting job with a widget, the search engines will probably not value it as importantly as a "relevant" link.
Todd: There's gotta be balance and even in reciprocal linking, as long as there's balance - if all your links are UGC, it's going to set off a filter. Even the linkbait that is successful, having that influx of links now is not great for your site - search engines are going to recognize them and counteract them.

Q: What do you have to say about 301s? Do they carry 100% link credit?
Piryank: 301s carry all link juice forward but apart from that they don't cause any problems.
Matt: If you use 30 in a sequence, Googlebot won't like it, but to the most extent it does.
Ask: If you follow all the advice we gave before, you should be fine.
Nathan: It may not count 100% if you do the 30 in a sequence, but it generally counts.

Q: Link sabotage - fact or fiction? Can you hurt a website with links?
Rae: Definitely. I think that a lot has to do with the balance. I don't think I could take CNN out but I think I could take another site out by changing the balance of their links that is in favor of things that Google doesn't like.
Todd: If we can do it accidentally, you can certainly do it purposely.
Matt: But you also see why people's rankings dropped and there are perfectly good reasons for why the rankings dropped.
Peter: There is identity theft when people link to your site by hacking into it. The key thing is to keep an eye on your access logs. Look at the warning signs.
Piryank: If you find spurious links, report them so we can analyze the sources as potential targets.
Matt: How many people would then want to report links that they don't want? [A few people raise their hands.]
Rae: But what if people don't want to report those links?

Q: Outbound links? Make a difference?
Todd: Relevant links are good.
Rae: You need to think about the user. [Matt beams.]
Matt: You can't always control the links to you but you can control what you link to. That will affect your reputation and it shouldn't be a surprise.
Peter: Definitely linking to a bad neighborhood is not a good thing.
Todd: The abundance mentality: we don't mind linking to everyone and people are going to respect that.

Q: PageRank sculpting/siloing: should we do that?
Matt: In general, worry more about the high quality of your site. After you've taken care of it, then think about sculpting. Put your best pages on top - your best selling products should be linked from your homepage. The nofollow and metatags essentially do the same kind of thing. Google is against abusive manipulation.
Peter: It goes hand in hand with the users. Don't pay too much attention to sculpting until you think of traffic.
Piryank: All of these tools are for you to use to get the right effect.

Q: I have a website. Some company buys my company and the domain registration changes. Do you pass the credit when the domain registration changes?
Nathan: I don't believe there's a change from our end.
Rae: When we incorporated a company and we saw no change in our rankings.
Matt: The general case is that nobody needs to worry. It happens thousands of times a day, but you can go all the way to the edge: you buy thousands of expired domains and you want to redirect them around. You wouldn't want an expired domain spammer person to count. That's the case we look at.
Piryank: Ditto.
Peter: Under legitimate circumstances that's fine.
Rae: What if you buy mini-sites related to the same topic? Like 15 TV sites?
Matt: Mini sites is usually okay. Two or three is normal. Fifteen is a bit high. 1500 is the kind of scope I'm talking about.
Todd: If you're moving your business name, don't do your redesign at the same time. Space it out over time and be conservative on how you make your changes.

Lightning round:
How concerned should you be about policing old links to you that turned into a porn site?
Piryank: Site explorer report spam.
Matt: You can't control links to you.

Q: How do search engines view outbound RSS links? Problem?
Matt: Generally not. Link the original article in your syndication to know you're the source.

Q: What are your thoughts about spacing links?
Todd: 10,000 links at once is an issue usually.
Rae: Videos is probably the anomaly.

Q: Absolute or relative links?
Matt: We can't answer that in less than 15 seconds.
Rae: I care and I go absolute whenever possible.
Todd: Go absolute. Don't save 1K for this.
Ask: For the fear of having your own content copied, go absolute.
Matt: It's easier to move and harder to rip off. It's easier for search engines to know and not get mixed up.

Q: What happened to the download table feature in Google Webmaster Tools and is it coming back?
Matt: We'll have to look at that, but we just announced today that you can get your webmaster information in iGoogle's widgets.

Q: What's the deal with nofollow on Flickr?
Piryank really didn't answer that one. :(

This session looks at some of the best practices B2B marketers should follow when doing search marketing, including the use of downloadable material, actions beyond offering white papers, testing registration and landing pages plus more.
Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Galen De Young, Managing Director, Francis SEO
Ben Hanna, Vice President, Marketing, Business.com
Patricia Hursh, President, Smart Search Marketing

Ben Hanna starts

Research Background of business.com and their research.

The world of business search is different from what people may think. There is general search (Google, Yahoo, etc.) then second tier general search (look smart, Miva). B2B search (business.com, kellysearch.com), B2B niche search.

Each of these groups have networks as well, and they show up on search as well. General search engines showing up on B2B search. Complicated picture of ways things send to each other. Information from a B2B site can show up in organic results of big search engines and niche search engines.

Different types of sites are starting points during different phases of the business buying cycle. Closer you are to purchase, more use of niche sites.

General search engines – where people start when they first identify a need
Industry information site – supplemental research for niche products
B2B search sites – find all vendors and cut down to a short list.

Reaching business buyers is a challenge. Your business buyers are online -- 85% of business buyers will use the net during the purchase process – but so is everyone else.

Is B2B search marketing different from B2C? The answer is both yes and no.

Different:
Longer sales cycle.
- complex/costly products and services
- multiple decision makers
-"rational" decision process
- evaluate both solution and vendor

Unique audience
- limited number of buyers
- more experience
- different tolerance

Search marketing challenges
- multiple keyword meanings
- audience targeting capabilities
- competitive intensity

Things that are the same for both B2B and B2C
Still about the right audience, right message, right offer, and positive ROI. The Tactical approach is the same. Selecting keywords, developing ads, creating landing pages. General search engines play key role, but not only role.

Rule #1: Cover the entire buying cycle. Match your strategy to the buying process. Target ads, keywords, and offers to different buyer roles and buying stages.

Establish campaigns on these types of sites:

1st tier general search engines
B2B general search
B2B niche search
optional – 2nd tier general search engines.

Rule #2 Focus on traffic quality.
Poor traffic costs you money. User targeting tactics to improve traffic quality and ROI. Start which niche sites first, this can be set it and forget it. They're already targeting what you want to reach. Then expand yourself out to the big three (Google, Yahoo, Live).

Rule #3 Drive visitors to action and your strong points.
Target key audiences and list specific offers in your ads. Design simple landing pages to focus visitors on the offer. Missed two points here.

#4 Measure what you can and acknowledge limits.
Measuring B2B search marketing impact is tough, B2B search marketers are pulled in many directions. You tend to focus on easily observable metrics. Develop your program in simple, prioritized steps. Give yourself a break, you don't have to be a metrics pro overnight. Accept the value of different metrics. Avoid substituting guesses for real insights.

Rule #5: Measure both return on ad spend and time.
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is clearly important. 40% of B2B direct search marketers track this. However, only 20% of B2B direct search marketers tracked how return on time spent. To boost return on time spent, work from the niche outward. Start with campaigns on B2B sites, the allocate time to tuning campaigns on general search engines.

Patricia Hursh from Smart Search Marketing is up next. She is going to focus on PPC tips.

B2B marketers can use search to do a lot more than they think. They can use search to:
- support a brand
- uniquely position in a market
- drive demos and downloads
- generate registration, inquiries, and leads
- educate buyers/partners/suppliers.
- distribute information
- promote special events
- test marketing messages
- launch new products and services
- sell products and services online.

Think beyond lead generation. Visibility, Traffic

Combine Pre- and Post-Click efforts. Focus beyond the click.

10 Tips for B2B search advertisers:

1. Reach prospects early in the buying cycle

2. Advertise in the tail. This is good, because the tail phrases (three and four word search phrases).

3. Include non-branded terms. Measure the search history of a person who ultimately converts on a branded term. They may convert on a branded term, but they do a lot of non-branded terms while they are in the research phase. See if you can track this in your analytics package.

4. Use ad copy to pre-quality clickers. It's not about just anybody clicking on your ad, you want the right person. Address your specific target audience and pre-qualify clickers. Weed out the people you don't serve and who you don't want to click on your ad. This can lower your click through rate and lower your quality score, but can make sense in the long run when it comes to conversion.

5. Align ad copy with the search query. As they move through the buying cycle, their search terms change. Example of phrases used in buying cycle for a laptop. laptop computer -> laptop information -> laptop user reviews -> IBM laptop models -> IBM ThinkPad T61. Write ad copy that changes as they go through the process and is targeted for what they are searching for.

6. Microsites focused on specific industries. Don't necessarily drive all PPC traffic to your corporate website. Create a microsite very focused on your target audience or place they are in buying cycle. People won't get lost on a microsite.

7. Test page elements. What you think would work might not always work. A better conversion actually happened when the registration form was one click in instead of on landing page.

Recommend elements to test:
- Page layout
- Images
- Benefit statements
- Action triggers
- Names and descriptions of downloadable assets. Can be very different conversion rate.

8. Offer Action Options. By offering more options, company was able to get more inquiries.

9. Simplify registration forms. You can do this and have a robust follow-up process to qualify leads.

10. Implement a lead qualification process. Don't make the mistake of thinking someone who is downloading a white paper is a sales lead. They don't necessarily want a salesperson to call the next day after they download a paper. You need to sort out which leads are valid – remove bogus emails and phone numbers, etc.

Next Speaker: Galen De Young from Francis SEO: Organic Search for B2B

Business Purchases
People conduct more research than when in consumer purchases. The purchase is reviewed by multiple people, because of dollar value and the potential for long-term impact. Risk and risk avoidance is a primary motivator.

B2B Search
Strong searcher preference for organic results, both in views and clicks. Technical buyers have a stronger preference than average B2B, likely due to risk aversion.

There are multiple influencers, searches, and search terms being used.

Perceptions: If it's a high ranking PPC result, the company is willing to spend the money. If it's a high-ranking organic, they are potentially an industry leader.

There are usually no agreed-upon lexicons within industries.

Keyword Variations: Looking at four different keyword variations, there were 26 unique domains. It does matter what they type in and what you optimize your site for.

There are diverse approaches to searching. Subject matter, problem, person/role, product/service needed, geography, or searcher's industry.

Case study: Acoustics By Design. Company hasn't done much link building, the results are from the optimization rather than linking. Screenshots shown of how page is organized. Results: was in the sandbox for two months, after that site visits were up 6-7 fold. Click-through of 3800 unique keywords last year, and average keyword click-through was 3.6 words. Three months after indexing, increased backlog of consulting work from 45 days to 6 months, eliminated need for new business person, and reduced time senior people spent selling and gave them more time to do the work.

Keyword Research
Objective: Broad catch basin. Think about it from different angles. Problem, need, product, solution, etc. Word order, plurals, low-volume and high-value keywords.

Each significantly different search term requires a distinct landing page. Result: page proliferation. Two different terms may imply the same content. Find a way to handle them differently. Organize the site into intuitive, user-friendly navigation. Keep architecture flat, 1-2 clicks from home page.

Where to put in architecture
On the web, there could be several navigation possibilities: products, services, people, news, company information, case studies, newsletter content.

Landing Pages
Can't mandate landing pages like you can in PPC.
Understand your organic landing pages. Look beyond the rankings, you need to look at the meta description that shows in the SERPs, what is the landing page URL. This is just like ad copy.

Build page content for each keyword as if it is a landing page, because that's how it will function.
- Information
- Navigation to other pages
- Most desired actions.

Page Strategies
Know keyword target and 3-5 long-tail modifiers. Know it before you begin writing copy. Use it in other on-page factors (headings, navigation, links, etc.) and use in off-page factors.

PowerPoint Free! Put your questions about SEO to our panel of experts and get answers about ranking and crawling issues.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works, Inc.

Speakers:
Jill Whalen, CEO and Founder, High Rankings
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Todd Friesen, Vice President of Search, Visible Technologies
Greg Boser, President, 3 Dog Media
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts

Question:
What are the most important factors to try to rank in Yahoo? Any differences in what you should do for different search engines to rank well?

Greg: Crappy links work really well for Yahoo. Difference in Yahoo in the amount of time and the quality of links. He has separate strategy for Yahoo. They are more tolerant of higher volume of lower quality links.

Stephan: Paid inclusion. Todd also likes paid inclusion. Don't turn off paid inclusion, then you'll vanish. But it's a lot cheaper than PPC.

Question:
Three or four primary things to do to make sure they have a good platform to make sure they are successful for SEO. If I'm doing new website, what should they keep in mind?

Greg. RSS. Have feed-enabled site, clean, 2.0. SEs love feeds, gets you crawled more often. Don't do static HTML.

Jill: Do keyword research first, build site architecture based on keyword research.

Bruce: We do the same thing, organize the site architecture based on themes. Getting spidered is a big issue to being able to rank. Use site maps. Make sure content connected to home page.

Todd: Fairly flexible platform. Change elements in templates easily so you can adjust quickly to shifts in the search engines.

Jill: A good CMS is important.

Stephan: Keyword rich text links, need to be able to measure KPI. For example, compare how many unique URLs are getting spidered vs. how many are in the index, monitor that over time. Look at long-tail metrics. What are you measuring? Page yield? Page yield is looking at distribution of all of your pages and how much traffic are you getting from the SEs. Here's my pages, only 10% of my pages really only get visitors. How to increase ratio of pages that get actual visitors.

Question:
What do you do if page uses iframes or Ajax and client won't change this.

Greg: Ask why are you (client) doing that. Ajax is good for cleaning toilets, but not ranking. IT people don't think of search engines as another user. Ajax is great on the front end, but if you're serving multiple pages worth of content being served in Ajax, it's not being spidered and indexed. Many different ways to do it, but it is wroth doing it.

Todd: Another problem with Ajax is you lose a lot of your metrics. Looks great, but at the end of the day you only know how many people went to your home page but nothing beyond that unless you go with an expensive analytics package.

Bruce: Problem with using Ajax for part of site is you lose the functionality of your back button and other issues I didn't catch.

Question:
What tools do you use?

Jill: KeywordDiscovery.com, Firefox.

Bruce: His own tools.

Greg: Bruce has a great chart. Greg uses his own internal tools. Discussion on which version of keyword discovery to use.

Bruce: Three presenters at SES London, nobody used the same tools. Lots of things out there for people to use. SEO Book has some good tools. He thinks tools should be appropriate to mission. For linking information, use Yahoo site explorer.

Todd: Firefox stuff – web developer toolbar, search status. That's for a quick analysis.

Stephan: Has trouble just picking one tool, lots of good stuff. Touchgraph.com. Thumbshots ranking tool – shows lots of good visual comparison information.

Greg: Greasemonkey.

Jill: Google webmaster tools and google analytics. Tools won't do your SEO for you, you can't just push a button and SEO your site.

Bruce: Analytics will be an important SEO tool out there he feels. Ranking won't mean as much when behavioral search and personalization comes in. Traffic and action will be what is meaningful.

Tools you use to measure rankings:
Jill: You can't use rankings anymore. They can be different based on geotargeting, personalized search, etc. Need to get away from that and convince your clients to get away from that.
Todd: Trying to move away from rank reporting. Clients do want to see some of that, need to remind them that you made a bunch more money this month than you did last year.
Stephan: InQuisit.
Talk about several people having problems when they run rankings and Google thinking they are doing something wrong because they run so much stuff. Have to run slow.
Todd: InQuisit shows a good amount of long-tail information, (Stephan) you can see by city what your rankings are. Todd: Put InQuisit on a site, saw bunch of traffic from UK, put UK specific stuff on and got much better results.
Jill: Site search to see what people are searching for.
Bruce: Optimize and monitor for about twenty keywords, then looks at trending over time. When something is broken, then he looks at a deeper research process. He gets about 800 deferent combinations of words with his reports at the end of the day. 80% of traffic is from Google.com, rest is from Google in other countries.

Danny: Looking at competitive tools, Compete has good tools. Hitwise and Comscore can also do this. Competitive research session covered some of this.

Bruce: Will give people tools free for sixty days if you give him a business card and write Tools on it. Danny calls Bruce a crack dealer.

Danny: Is changing H1 tag bad for rankings? Does it make a difference these days?

Greg says he thinks it does make a difference. It's not the holy grail, but it does help. The more you can do reduce the chances that Googlebot will make a mistake in determining what is important is good.

Stephan: H1 is good, helps to put together theme for page. you don't want exact same wording for H1, Title tag, etc. You do want a consistent keyword theme on page, for a couple of themes, not ten or fifteen keywords.
Jill: For title tags, no specific number of phrases or words. She likes to do 11-12 words, that's three keyword phrases, still look good in SERPs, works well. Sometimes can be call to action.

Greg: Don't put commas in your titles. You're diluting the phrases you could rank for, and people don't think about clickability of that title. Your title is a call to action in the SERP. Don't make them read like they were written by a five year old.
Stephan: Try to keep the H1 tags fairly short.
Bruce: Doesn't seem to be a magic number for number of words, but do it in a natural way and have it be compelling.

Danny: Link building. Have you seen any change in the way you're doing SEO since "Matt's war on paid links"?

Jill: hasn't bought or sold, doesn't make a difference for her, recommends to keep it underground.

VBruce: Doesn't do paid links for rank, but they can help for traffic.

Todd: Yes, he does do paid links for ranking. You have to be careful (especially since Matt is sitting in the back of the room). It's all about disclosure to your client, what Google thinks about it, what the risks are, etc.

Greg: How to torch a competitor is to pretend to be them at a site clinic where Matt is in the room.

Stephan: Think creatively. A paid link could be PR. Get involved with a non-profit organization, such as donating money to a non-profit or volunteer time. You get mentioned on their website. Needs to make good business sense. Good corporate citizen, like karma. Think about organizations that fit your mission and that are compatible with you.

Greg: Really need to look at your space. Some areas on the web, you have to buy links to compete, just the way things are. He uses it as a short-term thing while he works on good content and longer-term ranking solution. Everything on the web is paid for, in one way or another. Bloggers friend with each other, non-profit example, etc.

Jill: You have to have something work linking to.

Bruce: If Matt walks up behind you and your first step is to shut your computer, you're probably spamming. If you can't say why you have this link, or you do say why you have it and your only answer is for PR, it's probably not a good thing.

Danny: Which to do, on page or link building, if you could only do one

Jill: On page

Greg: History of site

Todd: If you have right CMS, you can do all on-page for 3000 pages on site in an hour. Doesn't necessarily have to be something you can do. Need to have both.

Greg: Age an authority make a difference. Onpage factors on a trusted site will trump anchor text from a non-trusted site any time. Goal is to get to point where you can publish and you rank.

Stephan: Favorite type of new client is age, authority, trust of site but running horrible type of CMS with long query strings, bad internal linking structure, etc. It's great because you fix stuff and you easily double or triple their sales.

Bruce: Reluctantly agrees with all of these guys. You should do both in any case. Even if it's a new site now, it will be aged later on. Why not do it now so it's there when it's older? Don't think you should spend 100% of your time on one or the other.

Jill: They focus too much on off-page social media and ignore on-page. Need to get on-page done before you worry about social media.

Bruce: Someone came to him talking about they wanted to blog, social media, etc. and half of their pages had "insert title tag here" for title tag. Need to get that fixed first.

Question: What about using keywords in URLs and strings?

Greg: Don't use underscores, dashes are better than underscores. Having name in domain really helps you rank for that name. Don't do a bunch of keyword hyphen keyword hypehen all over.

Stephan: Don't do hyphens in domain if you can, run them together, looks better. In rest of URL, hyphens better than underscores, underscores are not yet treated as word separators (according to Matt).

Jill: Don't change your whole site to just to put keywords in domain.

Todd: resource issue. If you can do it, go for it. If it's real competitive, it might be the one little thing that gets you into the top ten. Prioritize things, but would be lower on list than site structure.

Stephan: Test it for yourself, don't just take our word for it. His experience with testing shows switching URL to keywords from number it did help rankings.

Bruce: Content is not just html. Images are being indexed. Keywords in URL can help, but not end all and be all.

Jill: Be sure to 301 stuff.

Question: If you're ranking well for underscores, should you switch to hyphens?

Stephan: Could help. Everyone else: If it isn't broke, don't fix it.

Question: What about duplicate content issues?

Greg: SEs pretty good at detecting dupe content, scraping sites don't work as well. Mashup sites on web can provide good content for user, but not for the search engines. Google knows you pulled that content from other sources. How to interject user generated content and unique content so they can convince algo that it is valuable content.

Todd: See it a lot in verticals like consumer electronics. When everyone is selling the seame products with the same description. Everyone is using customer reviews to add different content to the pages.

Stephan: Missed some. Need to have RSS feed, that's how people know you're the authoritative source. If you don't have an RSS feed, someone else will put it out and Google will think they're the authoritative source. Be sure to have a link to your company in the byline/bio in case your stuff gets syndicated. This tells Google you're originator of this content even if it is lower rank.

Bruce: Nothing worse than writing an article and having other people take credit for it. There are some things you can do about it, lengthy process.

Jill: You're not penalized for duplicate content, doesn't mean you're going to be banned or penalized. Your pages just may not show up, it's more of a filter than a penalty. Don't sweat if you have some of it.

Stephan: Filter is query-specific. You can show up sometimes and not other times, depending on query you search.

Question: Domain age, how important to rank.
Stephan: usage, not just age. If you've had it parked for nine years, there could be issues.

Question: Length of time for which you register an issues?

Greg: gives example of where it could matter. Older site can rank better and you can do good things with them that you couldn't do with new site.

Stephan: renew for multiple years if you can. Don't worry about really old domains.

Todd: Practical side of it is he has lost good domains because he's lazy and forgets to register. Do it for ten years, easier and cheaper.

Question:
Any last top tip to share with people for SEO?

Jill: sign up for high rankings advisor

Bruce: All of the reports and things you are going to be doing are going to be based on data you observe ..it's just data. Best thing you can do is get properly changed and apply intelligence to process.

Greg: prioritize, you can get overwhelmed by data. need to map strategies, do it in chunks.

Stephan: Sculpt your page rank. You don't need ranking for privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc. Don't need to pass juice to those, use a nofollow.

Todd: Number one reason SEO doesn't get done from an agency standpoint is there are resource issues, IT departments not in loopol. You talk to marketers, they're excited, but IT doesn't care. Big tip is to include IT. Take them out to dinner, send them gifts, etc.

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: John Marshall, CTO and Founder, Market Motive

Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance is first up to talk about this topic. This is a huge field offline but she will chat about the online tools.

- Goal is to acquire information that leads to intelligence that helps make better business decisions
- Get data from public sources
- Not industrial espionage
- Much of the data is free and online

Benefits of Competitive Analysis
- Identifies real competition
- Tells you your strengths and weaknesses
- Provides bigger picture of your business landscape
- Confirms your unique value proposition
- Helps determine success factors in your market
- Identifies opportunities

The Process:
- Identify online competition
- Background with domain and site history
- Look for strategic relationships and partnerships
- Look at marketing activities including SEO, PPC and SMO
- Opportunities here

- Identify competitors
- Type your keyword phrase into a search engine and see how is in the organic and paid results
- Look to see how well they are optimized

- Domain Information
- Whois via domaintools.com
- Shows ownership but
- People are using private registration
- Archive.org is a great tool
- Study backlinks via Yahoo Site Explorer and Alexa, plus Firefox plugins SEOQuake

- Organic search positioning with Web Position Gold, SEO Digger, etc.
- Tools for traffic data include compete, hitwise, alexa, comscore
- Tool, Trellian competitive tool

PPC Competitive Review
- What engines are they using
- What search phrases are they buying
- Study bidding strategy
- Review the quality of their ads and landing pages
- How many competitors are buying your top terms
- How are the PPC competitors doing in SEO

Tools for PPC:
- KeywordSpy
- KeyCompete
- AdGooRoo
- SpyFu

Reputation and News
- Google Alerts
- Google News & Yahoo News
- Forum Boards & Discussion Groups
- Search blogs, podcasts and videos via Technorati, Ice Rocket, Podscope, YouTube, etc.
- Better Business Bureau
- Dun and Bradstreet
- Epinions

Remember:
- Research tools are not always accurate
- Use caution in using the data for major business decisions
- Try to look at multiple sources
- Look for missed opportunities

Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research, Hitwise starts by saying they do competitive intelligence as a product.

He said, when going through customs, don't tell people you are in "competitive intelligence," funny stuff.

Then the company slide...

He shows some of the tools they have that you can buy. It shows click stream data via ISP data they collect. Very flexible and powerful tool.

He goes through the tool and how people are using it... I am sure if you email Bill, he would send you all the details and slides. ;-)

Sorry for not covering his presentation too well.

Visit iLoveData.com.

Jake Baille, Managing Director, STN Labs is last up.

- The best webmasters already investigate their competitors
- SEO is a game: know more than your competition, and you will win
- Most novice webmasters have no idea - use this to your advantage

The Whois Advantage
- Advanced webmasters just fake the info and dont bother with private registration

Regional IP Databases:
- First step to social engineering
- Use nslookup to find the IP address of the website
- Plug in the IP address to completewhois.com and findout who the ISP is.

Social Engineering:
- Getting someone to tell you something you shouldn't know
- You would be stunned at how often it works
- IT's OK to lie
- Don't ever expose who you are

Targets (talk to):
- ISP
- Company Marketing Dept
- Upstream Providers
- Significant Others
- Estranged Friends / Co-workers

The Script:
(1) Introduce yourself as someone your not
(2) Be friendly
(3) Learn from the travel industry, if you don't get what you want the first time, hang up, call back to talk to someone else
(4) Ask a question you know will confuse the person on the other end of the phone.
(5) Thank them for their time

All In Anchor
- Returns all the web pages linked to with that target term
- Good for discovering networks : take five keywords from one site, and run them all through allinanchor. Find the similar sites that appear.

Google Them
- Where are their links from
- Any dead giveaways (link from WMW profile page)

Search the Internet

CCA Introduction
- You have acomputer that can track and log
- You have visitors and competitors coming to your site
- You track your visitors to a tee with 42 different log analysis and conversion systems

Unnatural Traffic
- People who type in "allinanchor" in Google are not your target visitors
- People who type in link in Googlee are not your target visitors
- People who come through an SE cache are not your target visitors
- People coming to your site 20 times in two minutes
- Coming from whois.sc

Tracking and Logging
- Track their referrer and do something fun with it
- Mess with them

Generation Google: A Talk With Today's Teens - They've grown up with search engines as an everyday fact-of-life, rather than some magical new technology that's revolutionized finding information. This panel of "Generation Google" teens, as some have dubbed them, answers questions about how they search, view search engines and yes -- even do search marketing of their own.

Listen to a short audio preview!
Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works, Inc.

Speaker:
Evan Fishkin, quintessential Google generation teen
Harrison Gervirtz, CEO, Gevirtz Media LLC (and CPAShare.com)
Chloe Spencer, Blogger, The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site
Andrew Sutherland, Owner, Quizlet

This is a hot session with all teenagers who have totally rocked the Internet. I've already blogged about one of the speakers so I'm totally impressed.

What's your favorite search engine?
Everyone says Google.
Second favorite?
Evan: Windows Live Search.
Danny: You're so from Seattle.
Evan: I wasn't paid to say that!
Harrison: I use Google primarily because I have a relationship as an advertising partner.
Danny: What if Google left?
Harrison: I wouldn't use any. I'd leave. Okay, fine, Live.
Chloe: I'd say Yahoo.
Andrew: Once or twice a month, I use Yahoo.

Danny: Do you say that you "Googled" something?
Everyone says yes, but Evan said that he "searched" for something. Harrison said that he said a teacher teach him.

Danny: Who taught you to search?
Evan: My mom. But it may have been a school assignment.
Andrew: About 10 years ago or so, my cousin showed me Ask.com. I was looking at Sim Farm cheats or something.
Danny: Was it your parents, teachers, or friends?
[Silence.]

Danny: What about paid listings? Do you know the difference between regular results and the paid results?
Harrison: I always click. [Harrison's business is affiliate marketing, just so you know where he's coming from.]
Andrew: I'm conscious because I run websites and know that people would be paying for a click.
Danny: How about your friends? Do you think they know the difference between regular listings and paid listings?
Harrison: They definitely know what it is and I'm sure they accidentally click it.

Danny: How often do you go past the first page of the results?
Evan: All the time.
Harrison: All the time.
Chloe: Yes, all the time.
Andrew: One in ten, not that often.
Danny: Do you have a sense of your friends?
Harrison: They probably only search the front page.

Danny: Do you search and pop between windows/tabs while searching?
Harrison: I think I have 200 tabs open so I always switch between searching.
Danny: How about your friends?
Evan: Back and forth.
Chloe: Yeah

Danny: How often do you use search for your homework?
Evan: Only for English.
Harrison: Always. It gets most of my omework done.
Chloe: For projects, I use the Internet for homework.
Andrew: You can get all the information you want from Wikipedia. Teachers say you shouldn't use it but the majority of times it has useful information so I do.
Danny: How about your friends?
[They all nod.]
Harrison: Our teachers claim that all the results on the first page are paid. I pretty much set her straight and got in trouble for it.
Evan: I think every single day I'd have a teacher who recommended to search online.
Andrew: My library in my school has added 60 new computers and it's shifted a lot towards online research [from books]. We have research tools that are similar to LexisNexis. That goes beyond Google and has better content than Wikipedia.

Danny: Do you have a feeling that they think you're cheating by using search engines?
Harrison: That's what I was told.
Andrew: They're just jealous [that they couldn't use it when they were younger.]
Evan: They think it's important that you get extra tidbits from textbooks.
Andrew: When I'm writing an essay and I've read a book, I recently discovered Amazon Book Search, you can find the information right there. It makes things a lot easier and is still just as good.

Danny: I assume you have phones. How often do you use it to search?
Andrew: Zero. (He also says that his phone is like 4 years old.)
Harrison: Multiple times - I use my iPhones. (He also has a lot of other phones including a Samsung and a Nextel and something he called a "Juke?" Am I that old?!)
Chloe: I use it to download ringtones. (She has a Samsung phone.)
Evan: I have a [Microsoft branded] phone.
Andrew: I work online all the time and I'm plugged in so much so I like not having an iPhone and I like not having to check my stats all the time. If I'm with friends, I don't want to have to check my email. (You'll change, Andrew.)
Danny: What about your friends?

Danny: How often do you use search engines before you buy something?
Evan: All the time.
Harrison: Yes, I like to check product page.
Chloe: I don't shop online that much.
Andrew: I'll check out Cnet, Amazon, and eBay and between those I find good price.
Danny: How about your friends?
Evan: Froogle.
Harrison: I think that most of my friends don't shop online.
Chloe: Not really. My friends and I like to try on clothes before we buy them.

Danny: What do you search for the most? Entertainment, video, news, homework? What's the heavy activity?
Evan: Recently I had a history midterm and I think I searched for FDR's presidency about 500,000 different ways.
Danny: How come you phrased it 500,000 different ways?
Evan: My teacher requires intricate knowledge of FDR. He's an FDR buff and he wants to know everything.
Harrison: I usually look for homework answers and stuff that I'm marketing myself to see what's in the normal and paid listings.
Chloe: I search for a lot of things for my MySpace page and I have layouts that I look for.
Andrew: I do a lot of programming so I search for PHP functions and stuff like that. There's so many resources for programmers.
Danny: Can you characterize what you think your friends search for?
Harrison: Probably to find free stuff online.
Danny: I can so see marketers start using the word "free" in their marketing now.
Evan: I have a friend who is a guitarist so I know he's looking at resources online like YouTube to play guitar.

Danny: What kind of job do you think the search engines are doing? Do you think they can be better?
It's really agreed by most of them that search is good and there are no complaints.
Harrison: I think you won't find relevant results for pharmaceutical drugs.
Danny: Just to make Matt happy, Google does have a health search engines.

Danny: What do you think of a search engine for teenagers?
Andrew: It's stupid.
Harrison: I've never used it.
Evan: Maybe if they made a homework oriented project for schoolkids so I don't have to buy a book on biochemistry.
Andrew: People don't want to be labeled as teens. There's a social network called Eons which is dubbed as a social network for old people. It's a stupid idea. Nobody wants their demographic to be targeted like that. You're not going to go to a site because "it's for sixteen year olds." You go for the functionality.
Evan: I know there's Safe Search and all but I've talked with parents and people I go to school with and they talk about what they're worried about what their kids are looking online for (because it may be too kinky)...
Danny: It sounds like you're saying that you might want to suggest a search engine for younger kids.
Evan: Yeah, definitely.

Danny: What do you trust more when you get information? Social sites or search engines?
Harrison: Being a marketer, I don't want to trust anything.
Danny: Do any of you turn to social networking sites to get answers for anything?
Everyone shakes their head.
Andrew: You don't really consider social sites to be very educational or informational.
Danny: Before there were search engines, you had to ask people for information.
Harrison: They've made Facebook apps like "My Questions" but I don't think people use it for informational purposes. Perhaps, though, there is one person who uses it in the context that you're suggesting.
Chloe: I'm more MySpace.
Andrew: I'm totally Facebook.
Harrison: I'm on all.
Evan: Twitter.

Danny: What are your friends using?
Harrison: I'm going to have to say MySpace but there are people going to Facebook. It's starting to equalize.
Chloe: It's equal and I think that Facebook is becoming more popular among teens.
Andrew: I don't have a MySpace account and I think my school is mostly Facebook.
Danny: And the Microsoft tool, [Evan]?
Evan: A friend of mine uses Instant Messenger.

What do you use for IM?
Harrison: Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, etc.
Chloe: I used to use MSN Messenger but now I use AIM.
Andrew: AIM.
Harrison: I notice that a lot of people are using Gtalk so I use it to talk to my developers.
Andrew: The functionality is pretty much the same between all of them. No one wants to use separate applications. Use an application like Adium but personally I use AIM.

Danny: Are you worried about search engines not being green enough and environmentally friendly/
Evan: No.
Harrison: No.
Chloe: I don't see how they can, really.
Danny: But they're ravaging the environment.
Harrison: I've noticed how websites are "going green" and I wasn't aware of it. I never really thought about it.
Danny: And your friends?
Evan: I'm pretty sure that if Yahoo was responsible for killing a baby seal, he'd be all over it.
Andrew: My friends are eco-conscious but they're not specifically thinking about companies going green.
Danny: What about cars? Are you concerned about how cars may not be green?
Yes, they all agree, but they don't think about it in terms of search.
Harrison: Sometimes I look at my hosting bill and I asked "how much of that was actual electricity?" but I'm not really aware of the power consumption.
Andrew: I don't think we're aware of how much people power Google. It just works. For all we know, it's in someone's basement.
Evan: Back to the Microsoft things, they have a slew of Hybrids so I'm not worried about it.
Danny: And Google has solar panels.
Evan: I don't see solar panels driving around.

Danny: Are you worried about privacy?
Evan: Yes.
Harrison: No, not at all. My answer is probably unfair.
Chloe: No.
Andrew: When Facebook did the Beacon thing and the news feed, all my friends thought it was terrible. I didn't care about it because I knew the intentions behind it. People will see what their friends are joining and won't look too far into it. It's all perception. If someone tells you it's encroaching on your privacy, you'll believe them.
Harrison: I think it's on a more personal basis. They know a lot but they're not telling us. With Beacon, I was a little bothered by it; I don't want people to know what I buy. But with Google, I don't care as much.
Andrew: I use Google logged in but not with the toolbar. I used search history and it wasn't interesting so I turned it off.
Harrison: I use search history so that I can remember what I'm searching for.
Danny: Matt's looking at your history right now!

Danny: All your friends are using Google and some people are getting concerned that Google is getting too big. Is Google loved or hated between your friends?
Harrison: It's a love/hate relationship with all the advertiser regulations. My friends don't really have that issue.
Chloe: No, not really, it's just Google. I don't think about it.
Andrew: I think Google is like using a public bathroom. [Everyone laughs.] Maybe that's a bad example. Let's say that it's a public water fountain. Nobody cares what's happening there, I guess. Nobody thinks that there's a corporate thing behind it. It's just a tool, like Firefox, in your arsenal of the computer.

Danny: Do you ever search for information about your parents?
Harrison: I don't think it's really good to search stuff...
Danny cut him off: Do your parents search for their parents?
Evan: Yes.
Harrison: Yes, I think they look for dirt on them.
Chloe: No, not so much.
Andrew: Nope.

Danny: How about your teachers?
Evan: Yes, they want to know if teachers come recommended.
Chloe: No, not really. I know the site rateyourteachers.com and that stirred up a lot of controversy.
Harrison: Yeah, that site said that teachers are terrible and I don't like it.

Danny: Do you search for yourself?
Totally unanimously yes.
Danny: Are your friends searching for themselves?
Harrison: No, not really. I don't think they have a web presence.
Danny: Is it impressive to them?
Harrison: Not my friends, but my mom tells people to search for me.
Evan: You can't search for me. Rand comes up.
Everyone cracks up and Danny expresses his sadness for Evan. Rebecca Kelley from the audience says "Does Google ask 'Did you mean Rand Fishkin?'"
Danny: Does it ever suggest your father [Stephan Spencer] when you search for your name?
Chloe: I don't think so.
Danny searches for Evan Fishkin and says it doesn't say Rand, but "your mom comes up as #6."

Danny: Do you search often?
Evan: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, all the time.
Harrison: My friend mentioned a jet and I looked it up on search. I think a lot of people are starting to realize that it has benefits.

Danny: Let's take Google out of the equation. What do you use to find stuff if there's no search engine?
There's silence.
Evan: Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Harrison: Are there any Cliff's nearby?
Danny: What about the library?
Andrew: Yeah, the library.
Harrison: I never really thought about it.

Danny: What's the biggest problem with search that you need to have improved?
Harrison: It's unfair for me to say but deceiving advertising and misleading ads.
Nobody else says anything.
Harrison: I think there are a lot of people searching for drugs and they want information on it. I personally think it damages the search experience.
Danny: How would you solve that?
Harrison: Maybe a manual review or just to look at what's there.
Danny: I think you should go meet Jason Calacanis and be the spokeskid for Mahalo.

Now Danny's questions are finished. He shows the Google solar panel project to the teens.

Here are the audience Q&As:
Q: Do you feel boys search more than girls?
Harrison: It really depends on what it is. Video games are searched more by boys than clothes. Maybe more specific keywords are more girly.
Chloe: I know a lot of boys search for online gaming and girls aren't really into that.
Harrison: Except I did see something on the news today that acknowledges that more girls are playing video games.

Q: For social search, is there a difference between preppy kids and nerd kids?
Harrison: I'm sure that there are, but not in my town.
Chloe: There are nerds and popular kids, but I don't think there's a group that's "tech savvy."
Andrew: I think that everyone has a clique with the accounts they're attached to - there's MySpace and/or Facebook,
Evan: I don't think there's any tech savvy group. It's called high school.

Q: I asked about who taught you to search but when you're in school, do they have any Internet literacy courses on how to be smart on the web?
Evan: They try to teach you.
Harrison: They told us that Google is a scam and that Wikipedia is always wrong (and they even said that Wikipedia is for-money).
Chloe: I guess they do. We have computer classes but I haven't taken it yet so I don't really know.
Andrew: For the most part, we're the ones teaching the teachers. Sometimes we have info sessions with librarians. Sometimes they educate you about male pregnancy sites (to illustrate that not everything is true on the Internet). Kids who are 18 have been searching for at least 6 or 7 years. They know what's up.

Q: Do you think they ought to be teaching Internet literacy?
Harrison: They need to give us real information. I think they should have given privacy conerns like not to put your phone number online.
Chloe: I think they should give us information and how to get the most out of it.
Andrew: I think the most important lesson is how to protect your privacy. It's so easy to find this information online and it's hard to take it down.

Q: Do you think they teach you lame things because they don't know it themselves?
Evan: Our teachers told us that we're going to be encountering engines "for the first time" when we had a project and that bothered me (becuase it's not true). They haven't had training and don't realize we grew up with it.
Andrew: Most of my teachers are computer literate but we have so many things to learn about that teaching us about search engines is not a good use of their time.
Harrison: We often have to help them on how to use computers all the time.
Chloe: Most teacher have been teaching since before search engines so they're very traditional. They're aware of how big it is but they're not changing their teaching techniques for it.

Q: You're already doing stuff on the web. Is that going to be your career?
Harrison: Yeah. I don't know if I'll be an affiliate forever but I know I'll be in the Internet field.
Chloe: I'm actually interested in film so this isn't the field I was planning in being in. I might becasue I'm getting more into it and making more websites so it may be something I'll be in for a long time.
Andrew: I enjoy what I do currently as long as it keeps challenging me and there are new frontiers to develop on, I'll stay interested.
Danny: Do any of your friends want to be SEOs when they grow up?
Harrison: No.
Chloe: Nobody I know has really heard of that.

Matt Cutts had left the room. Danny sees him walk back in the room and said, "Dude, you didn't see the solar panels! Did you have to use the Google?"

Q: Do you have credit cards?
Yes, except for Chloe.
Chloe: I have an ATM card but I can't purchase stuff with it.
Harrison: I've been trying to accumulate miles. I don't know why I have but I am.
Danny: Do your friends?
Andrew: They have debit cards. I shop online for my own stuff. Most kids are still asking their parents for stuff.

Q: Are your parents visiting your Facebook or MySpace pages?
Harrison: I hope not.
[Oh, and his mom is in the audience.]
He says that he has two Facebook accounts - one for him and one for Facebook ads.
Chloe: Yes, some of my friends' parents try to communicate with them on their MySpace profile.
Harrison: I'm sure that if kids want to be on MySpace and they don't want to their parents to access their profile, they won't - becasue they'll say San Francisco, Guatemala instead of CA.

Q: Where ads are published, what would you trust more? One in a magazine or one that is online?
Evan: My friends would probably trust a magazine more.
Chloe: Probably a magazine. It's in print. The web can be deceiving.
Andrew: I don't think that people are really thinking about trusting ads. They are aiming to get what they want, and that's it.
Harrison: I think that ads have increased over the past year.
Evan: I'll admit. I shoot the monkey on the advertisements.
Harrison: Thank you.
[This session rocks.]

Q: Do any of you do product reviews?
Evan: If they're really unhappy with a review, they'll slime it. If they really like it, they won't take the time and effort to review it.

Q: You guys recognize search spam, right? Do you do anything?
Chloe: Yes, and we ignore it.
Harrison: I saw a sponsored listing that had one ad in every spot and that's the only time I reported it.
Danny: Do your friends recognize spam?
Evan: Nope.
Harrison: I think that people fall for it all the time.
Andrew: One of the things I noticed in my access logs is that a lot of people in their user agents were using FunWebProducts (it's the smiley spyware). A large percentage of users who were 13-16 years of age will have that. I was surprised that they're stupid enough to click on it, but they do.
Danny: Do they get the popups and not care what happens?
Harrison: They don't talk about total spyware. I don't think people read the fine print.

Q: Internet Explorer or Firefox?
Harrison: Opera.
Evan: IE.
Chloe: Safari
Andrew: Safari but I use Firefox occasionally.

Q: Macs or PCs.
Evan: As of rather recently, my friends are leaning toward Macs.
Harrison: PCs.
Chloe: PCs.
Andrew: Macs.
Q: And your friends?
Harrison: IE. I tried convincing my mom to use Firefox.
Andrew: IE7 is so much better from a web developer perspective and I don't think it's worth evangelizing Firefox anymore.

Revisiting the "do you think you can improve things on the search engine" question, Chloe said that there should be a separate search engine for specifically buying things. She never used Froogle.
Harrison says that Froogle can be improved.
Andrew: I think people need to make ads invisible again because people are tuning them out. For the average user or teenager, on search pages, people just look at the organic results, not so much the sponsored listings. It's very hard for them to look outside unless the text is really popping out with exactly what you want.
Harrison: I agree with what he's saying but I think that there are people who click on ads even if there's some awareness of sponsored ads. People are always buying stuff online.
Evan: A sucker is born every minute.

This session provides an overview of web analytics and how it can be used to analyze search marketing performance, followed by Q&A with web analytics experts and tool representatives.
Moderator: Jim Sterne, Founding President and Chairman, Web Analytics Association
Q&A Moderator: John Marshall, CTO and Founder, Market Motive

Speaker:
Gary Angel, President, Semphonic

Q&A Speakers:
Wes Funk, Omniture
Brett Crosby, Senior Manager, Google Analytics
Richard Zwicky, CEO, Enquisite

Gary gives an overview of what we're going to cover. One of the problems with these tools is that there is so much information, trying to decide what to do can be difficult. The start of this presentation is summarizing some of the ways to decide what to do.

Tool Basics

1. Data Collection
There are two main "flavors" of web analytics
- Software-as-a-Service systems implementing using tags
- Software you can run in-house that process web log files (and sometimes tags)
- Each of these can provide similar data and capabilities.

Tag-Based SaaS systems tend to be easier to implement and have better data-quality out of the box. The most popular systems on the market are currently SaaS-based.

If you have a lot of internal data about visitors (from a gated site, for example), it can be easier to integrate with software you run in-house.

2. Data Quality. Web Analytics data is notoriously unreliable -- and even at best, it's never a "system of record." The idea that "trending" data protects you from data quality problems is only a half-truth.

Key Data Quality issues include:
- Tracking visitors over time
- Knowing how long visitors spend on each page
- Knowing where visitors go when they leave
- Counting robots - automated agents as real visitors

Web analytic systems will never reconcile. It's never going to correlate with what the search engines are sending you regarding your advertising.

* What Really Matters?

1. Needs Drive Differentiation. Your measurement needs drive real-world tool requirements.

Some of the key factors that really matter:
- Visitor Segmentation. Ability to take a group of visitors and track their behavior.
- Dimensional Reporting. How many people that did x also did y. Look at people based on two different variables. Need to be able to move numbers around, not have a vendor that locks up the data.
- Setup. Even SaaS solutions take time to set up.
- Data Integration (Online). Data can come from lots of sources, the more the system lets you bring together different data the better.
- Data Integration (Customer)
- SEM Data

2. Visitor Segmentation. Many types of visitor segmentation.

Key Segment Capabilities
- Can Segments be created without tags? You don't always know what you want to look for in advance, you need to be able to go back and look at data later.
- Can full logical operators be used to define segments?
- What data can be used to define segments? Can you use every piece of data you get to segment visitors?
- Can external data be used natively and combined with web data in segment creation?
- Can Segments be created via data-drive techniques like neural networks?
- Can Segments focus on visit or visitor behavior?
- Can Segments be defined based on time and event sequences? Most tools don't show what happens over time, what someone did the next week.
- Can distributions be produced on key behaviors to assist in segment creation? How many visitors visit one time? How many visit three times? Are people doing the same thing over and over? Are you only getting average? Average is not the same as distribution.

Segment Methodology
- Are Segment samples or against all data?
- Are segments created in real-time or delayed?

3. Dimensional Reporting. N-Way Cross-tabulation (Viewing the counts of variable by one or more other variables) is an ESSENTIAL part of analysis.

Key Dimensional Reporting Capabilities:
- Visitor and Visit Distributions on variables
- Cross-Tabulation of all variables in Reporting
- Multi-Dimensional Tabulation of variables for Analysts
- Ability to export N-Dimensional Tables to Excel
- Ability to apply visitor segments to N-Dimensional Views
- Ability to distribute N-Dimensional Views once created
- NO DATA CROPPING on high-cardinality variables like PATH and SEARCH KEYWORDS

4. Management Reporting. Every online business spends time on management reporting. It is an essential element of telling the business story to key decision-makers. How easy is it to pull out data? Need to figure out how long this might take when you are evaluating a program.

Key Management Reporting Capabilities
- Ability to combine and tailor views of the data
- Ability to export data to Excel flexibly
- Near real-time segmentation that integrates with Excel Automation
- API to the reporting data

5. Setup. Building a tag is not rocket science. Many web analytics packages do require a fair amount of work on the tag if you want to take full advantage of their system. How much work do I have to do in advance? How much can I do on the fly? More you have to put in in advance, less flexible things are, and more of a chance of getting settings wrong.

Key Setup Capabilities:
- Ability to create most analysis (segmentation, campaigns, funnels, hierarchies) without tag changes.
- Light-weight tag
- Ability to capture data that is available only in real-time in custom variables
- Ability to capture customer identification and use it for data integration

6. Data Integration. Most businesses will ultimately need to combine online and offline data AND website and other online data. You need to be able to get all of your data in one place. You need to think about what type of data you need, and make sure that you can integrate that data. You need to look at this yourself, not just have the vendor say that it's easy.

Key Integration Capabilities:
- Ability to integrate with key online systems include email, paid search, competitive analysis, and banner systems.
- Ability to provide a data feed back to the client for customer integration.
- Open architecture, web service, API, or other seamless data access.

7. SEM Capabilities. Search engine marketing has its own unique demands and requirements. Hare are some of the key points if your primary web analytic interest is in search. Some of these capabilities may not be covered by any existing tool, but are things that would be really good to have.

Key SEM Measurement Capabilities:
- Track results by both actual search term used and search term purchased
- Track content match scores
- Day parting and time parting in the web analytics reporting
- Flexible attribution models. Nobody wants to deal with just the first or last campaign. How do campaigns work over time? Can you assign different weights to different campaigns?
- Cross-attribution reports (how much of Campaign X overlaps with Campaign Y)
- Ability to collapse search terms and analyze them as a unit (important for analyzing the tail). Most tools don't let you do this.
- Side-by-side performance of SEO and PPC
- Cross-Tabulation of geography by keyword

8. Additional SEM Measurement Capabilities:
- Tracking creative in the web analytics tool
- Ability to show common "combined" search terms (Term X then Term Y entry)
- Ability to Path over time at the Event Level
-- X visitors entered on PPC Search - Y re-entered on visitor search - produced a success
- Over-time report (visitors who entered on PPC during July did what in August, September, etc.)
- Page performance by entry type report (SEO, PPC, other campaign, direct, previous page)

Key Concept: Most tool evaluations focus on things that turn out not to matter at all when you actually have (and use) the tool. Pay attention to what you really need, and evaluate in-depth.

* Summary: Thinking About Fit
How important is web analytics to you?
- It's a function of how important the website is.
- You can't have a great website without analytics, but you can have a satisfactory one.
- Some tools demand that you invest more (in time and money). You need to decide how likely that investment is to pay off for you.

The following points weren't covered in the session, but included in the printed handouts. I typed them in already, so I'm going to use them.

How to get started:
- Think about your organization, culture, and knowledge
- Choose a tool/resource direction that is realistic
- Take the time to build a roadmap of what you want to accomplish

What you should worry about:
- Getting people is hard
- A good implementation is harder than people say
- Web analytics won't happen without both tool and resources
- The market is immature and there are no safe approaches
- What are you getting back -- if you don't demand interesting analysis, you won't get any.

-----
Jim introduces the panelists and asks for people to text/send questions in.

First question: Why should you use a paid solution instead of free?

Wes from Omniture: Sometimes data you need to get into is really deep and disparate systems. The next generation of that type of interaction is not just seeing those relationships, but able to do something with that data. Seeing a type of visitor, then treat that visitor accordingly.

Jim asks Richard and Gary for input. When do I need to move from Google to something else?

Richard: We often don't know. About 75% Our Enquisite customers also use Google analytics, and 20% use Omniture. Some of the features in the wish lists Enquisite released yesterday, and that's the type of thing you can get from a paid solution.

Gary: Analytics helps you look at the hard dollars from SEM, problem is so much else is soft dollars. This helps you look at the cost/benefit aspects. Biggest differentiator is not cost, but is the solution the right one for you. Free solution may be just fine.

Jim: asking Brett asking what's the sweet spot for Google Analytics, what problems can they fix. Brett: We try to address as many problems as possible. Money should be spent on doing the analysis and taking action based on the analysis. Observation about industry after they released the tool..before they released, it was a fairly niche industry. Once they released Google Analyticds, a lot more companies got interested in analytics. Noticed that everyone in the company wanted to have access to the data. Challenge was how to serve both the pros, and the people new to the tool. New version in May tried to put things in context to help people understand what is happening.

Audience Question: Recommendations of how to communicate to managers who still talk about hits ("how idiots track success").

Wes: Ask the executives the questions they should be asking. Do some of the work for them. Ask them the questions they should be asking the stakeholders.

Richard: Educational process. Give them a number, then explain what the number means and give them context.

Brett: Show a simple example of what the data means. Brett also points out how many people in the room are very knowledgeable in this field.

Gary: Believes the fault lies with us more than we want to admit. Execs are not stupid. They understand what matters to business, but we (analysts) don't know what language to use with them. People didn't understand value in analytics until SEM, then that helped make things clearer to everyone. SEM is an example of hard money and ROI that can be seen. Talk money, that's what matters to the business.

Audience Question: What are people's thoughts on the move to time on site, and the new trend of looking at user engagement. What does engagement mean? Look at goal of website. In anything, you need to look at the goal and see what it is you want people to do, then look to see if it's successful.

Help people to ask what is the right question. You may or may not care about time on site for your particular business model. Not every company needs to care about branding, but it does for some. You need to find out what matters. Don't just rely on traffic. Need to think about what traffic does.

Audience Question: Could each of you please give an example for a customer where their analytics data helped them to make $150k or more in money.

Richard: Customer doing Africa tours. They looked at the geographic location to see where they had higher conversions but little exposure. They did a campaign to target that area (UK), using localized spelling and other information specific to the UK. They had a 25% increase in world business by doing this.

Brett: He used an example of a surf apparel company. They had a large drop in sales from one month to the next, and couldn't figure out why. They looked at the visitor map, and saw that there was nobody coming from the East Coast. It turns out that the server was misconfigured and blocking IP addressed from east of the Mississippi. Another example is to look at bounce rates to see where content can be changed to reduce the bounce rates and increase conversions.

Wes: He gives an example of looking at where a user came from (via IP address) and adding text in the user's language. For example, a user coming from Spain would see a small text portion in Spanish letting them know where to go for more information in their language.

Gary: With big clients it's easy to get that level of benefit, but harder with small clients. Natural search visitors don't perform as well as those coming in direct, in many cases. Companies will go through lots of time/effort/money to get people to come in from natural search, but may be too expensive. Looked at where people came in, they came in deep into the site, so moved some of the good engaging stuff off of the front page and put it deeper to catch people's interest. Resulted in increasing number of pages people viewed when they came in from search. Also having internal search nearly doubled number of page views for people coming in from search.

Another example: wanted to identify which websites to get rid of. Got rid of about 100 sites after looking at value of sites. Look at which PPC campaigns to get rid of.

Richard: Sort referrals based on which page of search results people came from (page two, page three), target those to come through on page one. Has immediate effect on campaigns, increases authority of site as a whole.

Jim asks Wes: How do you value your search traffic when you're doing a company focused on lead generation, doesn't take credit cards. For them, downloading white paper or viewing webinar is what is important to that client. Look at keywords and understand what groups of keywords lead to what behavior.

Good thing is being able to tag types of keywords, visitors, etc. For example, do I need to focus on executives? Figure out which keywords execs use, up PPC campaign spend for that group.

Audience Question: How do we best integrate analytics info with offline dashboards to show how offline stuff is correlated with online?

Brett: Several common techniques. Easiest way to do this is to use some type of landing page or unique URL. Good way to tell if ads have effect. Not everyone goes to that specific URL though. Another way is to look at geographic visitors. Even if visitors go straight to website, you can see if place where you put radio ad is sending traffic. Try one creative in one geography, another creative in another geography, see which is better.

Richard: Who was typing in a query that was on a billboard, then looked at when and where visitors came from.

Brett: look at ads that have "go to Google and search for term x", people remember how to do that, good results.

Next question: What do you have that will help me with organic keyword ranking?

Wes: Ability to easily see the clicks that come in, add organic words to SEM campaign. Now easy to see report that helps you figure out which keywords to add to SEM campaign. Vice versa. If I'm ranked number one on a paid keyword, do I want to spend the effort to rank number one for that organically?

Brett: Lots of reports to help with this. You can see list of keywords, split paid vs organic, which SEs keywords come from. For paid, it shows where your keyword was placed (top of page, right of page, which slot). New feature is internal site search reporting. What did user type into SE to find your site, then what specific did they search for on your site? Example of searching for cookies, finding your site, then searching on chocolate chip cookies on your site. Decide to then send paid results to chocolate chip cookies. Another tool is website optimizer, multi-variate testing application.

Richard: Looking at extended reporting. Customer acquisition side is lacking, they try to fulfill this. Missed some here.

If we install Google analytics on our site, isn't that telling them how much money we make off of them and then they would charge us more? Brett says no, that information is not shared. A few more questions happened after this that I didn't catch.

Session Summary

You're getting -- or want to get -- more business than your small SEM firm can handle. Do you scale up by hiring more people? If so, what trade-offs do you face, and how do you scale successfully? These issues and more are explored during this panel.

Moderator / Speakers

Chris Elwell, President of Third Door Media, is moderating this session along with Dana Todd, Chief Marketing Officer for Newsforce, who is moderating the Q&A portion. Speaking is Fionn Downhill, CEO of Elixir Systems, Damian Finley, Managing Director at Epiar, and Lisa A. Wiliams, Owner & Project Manager of MEDIA Forte Marketing.

Chris introduces session stating that it is a very difficult session for the panelists as they will be bearing their souls in relation to their businesses. This session is more of a series of questions rather than speakers making formal presentations. Therefore I am going to try my best to recapture that in this post.

Was your growth intentional or were you a victim of your own talents?
What was the opportunity you identified in SEM? Do you assume growth is necessary?
Is growth intrinsically "good" and "necessary" or is lifestyle more important?

Damian - Tried to focus on growth and it did not work. They were not well know but once they started to get some initial success with clients, then things started to happen. They finally figured it will happen when it happens and they are seeing moderate but steady growth.

Lisa - Initial motivation is that she wanted to make a good living but on her terms due to family responsibilities. She talks about defining who you are and what you will offer to your clients. So seeing the need and being excited about customer success.

Fionn (pronounced 'fin') - She wants to get rich (laughs). After raising her children and having an initial career outside SEM, she started doing small business consulting. Her husband was an SEO optimizing for Alta Vista (when they were on the top). That evolved into the growing business they have today. Even with a well written business plan, she found it difficult to grow.

Who is you most important employee or contractor?
Who is your most valuable outside professional you've engaged?
Who has been your most influential mentor or role model?

Fionn - Husband was key to getting established. As for outside help - her attorney. Helped her with contracts and keeping her on the straight and narrow. As for mentor - an organization named "Score."

Damian - As for contractor, the company's co-founder, Bob, as he ha the vision to get involved in SEO. As for outside help - their accountant whose background is helping small business grow.

Lisa - Most valuable contractor is a designer who Lisa refused to name as she does not want to lose her. Their designer has been invaluable due to her understanding of web design and usability. Outside group - the attorney and accountant pieces. Lisa's mentor is her father who owns an offline business and can sell just about anything. He taught her to treat her clients so well, they'd never leave.

Questions From Audience:

- In terms of growth, when did you feel it necessary to incorporate a sales team and how do you keep contactors?

Lisa - Asks contractors what their expectations are. Approaches clients the same way.

Fionn - Stick to your terms when dealing with clients.

Damian - Finding good sales person was very difficult initially. Ken Jurina, their president still does many sales. As for contractors, some former employees became contractors who wanted to work from their homes.

Who do you hire (e.g., college grads, some experience, work at home moms)?
What positions do you hire versus outsource?
What retention tools do you use for hires?

Damian - Shortage in labor in Alberta, especially labor that has knowledge in SEO. They have had to train their own people. They draw some employees because of the company's prominence. They try to hire for account managers and strategy positions. Outsource content developers and copywriters. They also outsource public relations. As for retention tools, flexible time, the ability to work from home are some options they have offered. Also offers commission structure on sales ad doing some profit sharing.

Lisa - SEMpdx (Oregon based SEM trade group) has been a fantastic way for them to get employees and contractors.

Fionn - Hiring has been a nightmare. Opportunities to take on a lot of new business have put pressure to hire quickly. She advises to hire slow and fire fast. She no longer hires people with experience but rather college grads and train them through SEMPO Institute training and in-house training. Grads are interns with possibility to become permanent. They outsource content writing.

Questions From Audience:

- What kinds of attorneys do you use and what budget do you allocate towards them?

Fionn - Find attorneys that will work on hourly rates rather than monthly retainers. Suggest a corporate attorney.

 - How do you keep a fun, loose environment and yet keep strict work guidelines?

Damian - Started off with relaxed fun atmosphere but once they started to get clients, enforced dress code which brought a bit of resistance. They still do fun things like online gaming, movies or barbeques. Cell phones have been a big problem. They would rather phone be turned off.

Fionn - They have to be very structured. Some can't handle boss being all friendly but need structure to be productive. Doesn't allow playing around with IM, social media, etc. Have to stay focused and structured.

What's your competitive advantage and how do you communicate it?
How do you decide what products/services to offer?
What payment model do you use and why (e,g., retainer, performance, hourly)?

Lisa - One of their competitive advantaged is that they listen to client's goals first before laying out any pricing. What they offer is also based off client's needs. They sell that they want to be a "partner" with them in their project. One option is that they offer performance pricing.

Damian - Competitive advantage is transparency of services. They have some proprietary software that gives them and advantage in what they can offer. Don't try to be all things to all people. Outsource services that are not your strength. They have tried all sorts of payment options. They have settled on a "fee for services" model.

Fionn - Transparency is very important to her company. Everything is clearly defined in contracts.  Customer service is given very special attention. As far as products offered - based on client's goals. Might be SEO only or a combination of things. Payment model is based on hourly rate. Initial cost (set up) and then monthly retainer based on what they are actually providing. They also offer some hourly consulting, especially with teaching people how to run their PPC campaigns.

In Marketing -

What's most effective?
What hasn't worked?
What are you most enthusiastic about trying next?

Fionn - Building reputation and earning referrals and word of mouth are most effective ways of marketing for them. Running tight ship, writing for popular sites, SEMPO membership, speaking at conference, etc. What hasn't worked - PPC and relying on natural rankings. Leads from natural rankings have not panned out well for them. Currently Fionn is excited about a re-branding process they are going through right now.

Damian - Most effective is client referrals as well as industry referrals. Their SEMPO membership has brought them good referrals. What hasn't worked is PPC and Yellow Pages. Both are very costly with little return. Excited about presenting in conferences outside of search. That has been productive for them.

Lisa - LinkedIn has been good for them. Utilizing the recommendations feature has been effective. They also had success with direct mail offering a white paper.

What behaviors have you adopted/changed now that you're the boss?
How do you avoid the extremes.. myopia and distraction?
How did you transition from employee to owner  (i.e., from self employed to leader)?

Fionn - She is a doer so has difficulty not being a micro-manager. In other words, don't try to do their job for them. She mentions that there are many distractions she is trying to get rid of (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

Damian - Make sure you reward employees for trusted relationships. As for avoiding distractions - don't worry about following everything in the industry. Remember when you were an employee and treat current employees with respect.

Lisa - Initially didn't use project management tools as she worked alone. But once she had employees, she embraced project management tools and made sure she used them to benefit client projects.

David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, Search Return
Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex

Martin Laetsch, Senior Director of Search Strategy, Covario, Inc. is first up. He starts off by saying we just all learned a ton about SEO. He said for small sites, it not that hard to put the time in to work the SEO. But what if we have hundreds, thousands, etc of sites to optimize? There is not enough time in the day to regularly audit and SEO the sites.

Doing a semi-annual audit is not sufficient for most companies. It has to happen almost monthly, he says.

So much is going on in the search landscape, algorithms are changing, competitors are changing, search is changing. Your content is changing all the time. What do we do about it?

(1) You need standards and procedures
(2) You need a technology to manage this

- Standards and best practices
- Implementing the SEO Program
- Reporting

Steps:
(1) Detailed SEO audit must be done and then you need to take this audit and set up a repeatable process so it can be automated and so you can do this monthly or more often.
(2) Standards and best practices need to be set up. Document these things and once you have done the documentation then train everyone involved on how to do SEO. Take your documentation and get them into your style guide. Set up a knowledge base to document questions and answers. (A wiki works)
(3) Ensure continuous improvements ongoing SEO execution. You need technology to audit your site to make sure you are complying with your guidelines.
(4) Define and deploy a tool framework for analysis management reporting.

David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo!, Inc. is next up. He works for Yahoo the site not Yahoo the search engine. All the data he is showing is fake. He thanked the SMX team...

Yahoo does SEM for the same reasons everyone else does SEM. Search is the best way to get new customers. And Yahoo does a lot of it for a ton of their properties. Yahoo does tons of business models from subscriptions, ISP services, free tools, domain name sales, b2b services, lead gen, listings services and media business.

How can you apply a single metric to normalize results across so many different types of business models. The life time value of a person. How much is that worth. Just plug that number in and it is a great way to put a single measuring stick for what they are doing.

He does not get insight into how Yahoo Search works. They get no special treatment. They do get aggregate data, they have access to cool tools like Yahoo Buzz and they also can have the search team build spiders for data collection.

A lot of the work they do is to quantify the opportunity is with SEO. They built opportunity reports using a predictive model. They then chart it and show them versus competitors. They lay over the LTV (lifetime value) and then they plot projector revenue and profit data.

He then explained the process the use. He shows the organization structure they may use.

They use a score card to help measure success.

They develop a competitive visibility index as well. and they built an SEO dashboard, which looks very cool.

- Yahoo's SEO challenge is to scale easily in a complex landscape.
- Quantify it and value it
- Train everyone, SEO is a culture
- Hold people accountable
- Infuse SEO into the development process

Marshall D. Simmonds, Vice President of Enterprise Search Marketing, The New York Times is last up. The NY Times has a lot of brands including about.com, boston.com, International Herald Tribune, etc.

Not every SEO campaign is the same, even within the same company. It is just not all out of the box. There are ton of best practices and there is not a linear process. You need to look at where are you in the life cycle:

- Editorial
- Promotion
- Production

With the NY Times, they are constantly education, template optimization, pull down registration walls, expose archives, and monthly network wide communication. The success was huge, 223% growth in search traffic in 2006.

Hearst Digital Media has a different process. They audit the web site, actionable checklists to push SEO process, technical troubleshooting, teaching workshops. Lots of success here also.

ToysRUS/ BabiesRUS as well came from Amazon and had tons of problems. Removal of crawl barriers, training site producers on matching product titles and descriptions, giving appropriate control of content and understanding seasonal traffic. Success was good.

TVGuide needed CMS optimization, syndication strategy, search sustainability assessments, ongoing education and high level education sessions for senior management.

Time Inc, empower and evangelize, custom CMS, control to right people, build company wide awareness, getting all departments thinking about search and exposing much more of their content to the engines.

Big business makes mistakes:
- Walling off content
- Under communicating success
- Not checking in with IT, production, design, ad sales, etc.
- Meta keyword tags (automate)
- Implementing the changes (who is doing it)
- Manage expectations
- Lack of editorial oversight

Keynote

Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade - In this panel, luminaries from the major search engines discuss where they see search going as the decade unfolds.
Moderators:
Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO, Enquiro

Speakers:
Brad Goldberg, General Manager, Search Business Group, Microsoft
Dr. Larry Heck, Vice President of Search and Advertising Sciences, Yahoo!
Doug Leeds, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Ask.com
Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.

Chris asks the panelists: "Will Search as we know it survive?"
Brad: Someone told me that search is so bad today. You have to click, go back, click, go back, etc. They asked me if there's a way to improve. It highlights a phase where consumers are getting more sophisticated around their expectations. The users refine their searches very often, but satisfaction is high. I think search will absolutely survive but as verticalization increases, search will do a better job and become more useful and become more of a utility that people use for a broader set of tasks.
Peter: I think that search will become more natural interaction with data. You'll have more devices available to you and it will be more of a dialog back and forth. People will start to know things
Larry: There's search and what's going on in the background: the basic matching of approaches - we're not going to throw it away; we'll build on it. That will evolve. It will become more pervasive and relevant.

Gord: We talk about the evolution of search. What does that do for the grey matter up here and the data that's down there? How do we interact with the huge store of information as humans?
Larry: The way that we access the information will be different than on a PC. People will post their queries differently. Initially, the systems will not fare well.
Peter: I think it will be helpful. The average query is going to be longer. On the other hand, it's going to be harder to get the results back and we all take advantage of the fact that we have something that allows us to display 10 results. People like go usually scroll down to the 3rd or 4th result. But if we have a tiny little cell phone with a 1 inch display, getting results with 10 SERP entries is increasingly frustrating.

Chris: What about voice activated queries? It's going to require a lot of changing in search marketing.
Brad: The user experience will get better with time. The biggest change will really be for advertisers.
Peter: People need to get more sophisticated to understand the users' intentions. On a tiny little display, where's the ad going to be? Later on, if you are driving past the store and they remember that you had an interest in a product there before, search might evolve where the product purchase is suggested it to you.

Gord: Are you using relevancy as a proxy for usefulness? What about in the ad environment? Will you merge them?
Brad: There's an element of trust with the user. The user will want to know what comes back from the algorithm vs. the sponsored listing because they are becoming more sophisticated. We want purity within search. Search becomes more useful but I think we'll need to maintain separation of purity between ads and organic results.
Larry: As you go through a session, it becomes clear to the search engine about the users' behaviors, but we need to make a distinction between ads and organic results.

Chris: [I have no idea what he asked. Susan Esparza from Bruce Clay Inc. sneezed and I didn't hear the question.]
Peter: It's got to be separate and the user will be in more control.

Gord: Brad, you guys talk about implicit vs. explicit queries but that kind of went away. However, are you going to look at the context of the text and provide suggestions based on that?
Brad: I think we will see that outside the operating system and more in the context of the application. You'll start to see search playing more and more of a role but possibly in the background. We've been seeing hot to target people at work. If people are in an intranet, we might want to treat it differently than on the extranet.

chris: Search is evolving. Do you see that coming where there's a research assistant and realization of semantic web?
Brad: I'm not bullish on that. It's a great idea to be attractive to people with an element of personalized search. It sounds great but I'd be surprised to see it in a practical and useful way.
Peter: We like to think of different timescales when helping the user. In terms of personalization, I think there's some room for that, but the whole point of search is to find stuff that you don't have [already].
Peter: The search engine tool is there to make it more efficient. Search in terms of coverage and memory is better than humans. Maybe for small tasks, I can see some changes there, but the users have to be intertwined with the process. With respect to personalization, a lot of times we talk about customization. It has to be looking at you as individuals over a long period of time. In the moment, the task you're trying to complete may not be identified correctly. You may be able to compare that with the searches of other people. It will feel very personalized to you.

Gord: We identified a lot of signals and patterns like geotargeting. Given these signals that show promise, how smart can search get in the next month or two?
Peter: We're just getting started. We can just aim to do better at understanding the content.
Brad: I wonder how much what will evolve once you enter your first query. People see more and more experiences being accessible from directly within search or search-driven. How much is going to be the technology evolving versus the user being more sophisticated? The number of users who click on some tabs for advanced searching is incredibly small. The intent will become clear to us and we'll be able to refine it.
Larry: With respect to how intelligent the search engines become, the better question is about the effectiveness of the partnership between user and machine. How much more effective are we going to be as people?

Gord: The fact is that we have a similar interface and advanced search and the bar hasn't risen much with how humans interact with search. Are we expecting too much for them to use these tools available to them?
Brad: Today, search is really big horizontally. 70% of the top 2,000 keywords are navigational. Most people use this as a starting point to find what they want on the web. Pageviews really exclusively lie within vertical content. I think the change needs to be really more vertical. Once that change occurs, you'll see different user models for how people are better able to access and get into that content.

Chris: Speaking of verticals, local search is one of the most promising verticals and it's so horrible. What is it going to take to improve that? How close are we to driving by and suggesting products (as Peter suggested earlier)?
Peter: We need to know about the users and what's in the locations. We are starting to integrate Yellow Pages and the like.
Larry: It's a fundamental shift in the technoloy's part over time. The better the content gets -- which is happening now -- we will start to see this.

Gord: I want to talk about advertising on the SERPs. We're going from text based to a richer interface. How do you see that playing out in the next few years and do ads need to be more engaging or louder to be noticed?
Peter: The whole web is getting louder. Things are working more and we're seeing different types of media.
Larry: I think that the right setting, right framework, right incentives, and right measurements will help us provide the most value to the users that give CTRs that convert. Search engines need to work hard to push advertisers to change that. They certainly have incentive to keep up with creatives and quality. The economics will help as well.
Brad: Search has grown to be a successful marketing vehicle because it's quantifiable. The short answer: we'll see a lot of experimentation of different types of ad formats. The ingredients are there for people to experiment freely and we'll need to adapt.
Gord: Are we looking at a Darwinian approach here then?
Brad: I think that's fair.

Chris: Search has gotten better over the past decade but you can argue that advertising is irrelevant with the better algorithmic search. How do you reconcile this?
Larry: The advertisers are providing additional information which helps. There are a lot of economic reasons to keep them there.
Peter: I think everything has to provide something of value. As algorithmic results improve, you'll still see people buying ads.
Brad: We talked about the difference between research mode and transaction mode. In research mode, they want product information, ratings/reviews, but other people in transaction mode want more information related to the purchase. Search will become more sophisticated and we'll see separation that is intuitive to users. If you're in research mode, you don't want an ad that says "Buy now!" You want to provide information about the product.

Gord: I want to talk about personlization and Google backed off a little about talking about it. I understand why personlization is hard but if we look at incremental improvement, how valid does it have to be to start being a very valid signal [for ads]?
Peter: We need to know the types of things people are interested in. A lot of search is navigational as Brad mentioned and we'll take all this into consideration and separating that out. We can do personalization for specific ads and maybe not for other ads.
Larry: We want to make it feel personalized, but we don't have to use that signal so strongly. If we can identify what the person is trying to accomplish and then leverage it, the search engine can feel very personalized.
Peter: A good personalization example is horoscopes.

Chris: With personalization, it seems in a way that search marketers have less and less influence on the algorithmic side. Do you see that influence weigh even more for traditional SEO?
Peter: I think it's just a bigger opportunity for them.
Brad: You can see some examples of companies using viral marketing around video of ways to then take things that users may have never thought possible. From a marketing perspective, people are looking at SEO and other content too. They are new vehicles to get in the mainstream discussion for consumers. It's a question of who can exploit it the right way so that it doesn't feel like advertising.
Chris: It's really more of the great thinking and not so SEO.
Brad: I think we've only scratched the surface of what search can do as a marketing vehicle. There's so much more surface area and a lot of opportunity for innovation. It will be interesting to see what emerges.
Larry: Opportunity for search marketers increases more and more. Search is different in advertisements in text. As SERPs become richer, it's going to move back a little more to the traditional homepage.
Gord; This opens a lot of opportunities for search marketers but it may be different thinking than what you're used to.

Chris: Over the next decade, non-English content may dwarf English content. Are you going to work with that at all in processing that for English?
Peter: We focused on the algorithmic side and process results across languages.
Brad: Look at the scenario where someone is searching. Even for the next few years, they are probably mostly academic or research-oriented or technical material that someone is looking to access in a different language. It's probably not commercialized and advertisers may not work with that. It really depends on intent. But advertisers may also think about who they are advertising too - that opens up additional ecommerce questions.

Gord: What research area outside of search is particularly interesting to you when you look at the Internet from a human standpoint and for change? What really cool thing is being done?
Peter: The mobile space is important - having information everywhere. We need to open things up in terms of bandwidth and platforms but it has to happen.
Larry: One is openness in terms of leveraging all the expert pieces out there in specific areas and opening up the platform to aggregate the information and bring the best to the forefront. The other thing is intent of user - they can do it in a little box with a few words. There's an imbalance between the author and the technology. It will be interesting to understand semantics of intent. On the user side, we'll be facilitating more expressive ways of people stating what task they're trying to complete and getting better and better at it.
Brad: In the car, what will happen if you look at the set of technolgy - voice, mobile, simple purpose, etc - to meet a specific need? We don't want to overcomplicate the scenario especially when people are driving. We've touched upon some themes: local improvements, mobile improvements - that's untapped right now.

Chris: What one feature would you kill to have working in 5 years?
[Silence]
Brad: It's a tricky question. We're wondering what the right answer is...
Brad: For me, it would be how to enable people to search in a more verticalized way. That's really going to open up, whether on the homepage or the SERPs.
Peter: The connection between the user and the content.
Larry: Access to search everywhere. I want the same kind of access from my car than from my computer. We want the experience to be more relevant.

Gord: You were talking about convergence and more apps that will be pulled in to understand our choices in entertainment, etc. How do you see that working in the entertainment industry?
Brad: Search engines need to implement it so that acknowledges that environment. Live thumbnails and videos can be developed - scan video, present user with a very condensed version that they can hover over it and get the most relevant pieces to get the essence of the video at least on the SERPs. But then when you click on it and people will get the original source with the full information. You'll see innovation there.
Peter: I think that entertainment is a big opportunity.

Search engines love good content, but good content can take a lot of time to prepare. So why not turn to your users and visitors? User Generated Content -- UGC -- has the advantage of often being full of passion plus the "authors" who create it in turn may turn into marketers for your site. Learn more in this session.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Chris Winfield, President and Co-Founder, 10e20

Speakers:
Andrew Goodman, Founder and Principal, Page Zero Media
Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz, Inc.
Roger Montti, Founder and Owner, Martinibuster.com

First up is Roger Montti. He's going to concentrate on SEOing a forum or community site in order to make it rank better.

Optimizing a forum:
- Goals
- Remove Fluff
- Target Keywords
- Moderate for Search and Users

Goals:
- Attract more users via search
- Improve user friendliness
- Make your community site more useful

Roger's used these techniques, and his forum ranks quite well across the engines. This brings in a lot of new users. Sometimes if you put up a forum, you have it stagnate if you don't get new users. Also good for AdSense.

Attracting more users:
Benefits of optimization
- Improves ranking ability
- Improves long tail phrase performance. Users talking about the product is great, they use keywords you wouldn't use, but they use keywords that users would use in search engines.
- Raises CTR with better title and description. Often have to tweak your software to be able to put in the better title and description.
- Makes site easier to research and browse
- Improves user retention

To improve user friendliness.
Moderate topic titles. This makes it easy to research, and improves site navigation. A lot of people will make titles like "I need help" or "help me". Have you or your moderators change the title to something descriptive. You can leave an occasional misspelling, as people might type the same thing into the search engine.

Remove links to fluff.
You want to keep users and search engines focused on the content. This keeps the page rank flow going to the content instead of stuff like member profile. You need to tweak some of the forum software, as the features out of the box are not always best.
Fluff can include:
- Links to site visitor stats
- Links to member profiles from select pages.
-- From main page
-- From main page of sub-forums
- Forum links to moderator profiles.

Removing the fluff helps because:
- It allows maximum PageRank to flow to pages that matter.
- Helps pages rank better.
- Tightens focus of topics.

Improves site usefulness
- Too much fluff distracts.
- Helps focus on site mission
- Simplifies navigation and topic research

There are exceptions to every rule. The exception is when member pages have useful content.

Targeting Keywords
- Associate topic titles with title tag. A lot of forum software doesn't do this out of the box and needs to be changed.
- Associate topic titles with meta description. Meta descriptions are great for getting people to click through from SERPs.
- Moderate topic titles.
- Hard code pet keywords into main page of your forum: H1 the forum name and title tags.
- Alter code so topic title is a H1 tag.

Fun Forum Hacks
Site Map Generator for phpBB from www.phpbbhacks.com/download/4902
RSS Feed generator (Standard feature on Invision Power Board) www.phpbbhacks.com/download/5614

If you do want to show search engines different content (such as signatures in forum posts) you can do a nofollow, or show signatures only to registered users.

Andrew is up, talking about Pure-Play User Generated Content (UGC): Business prospects, tactics, and strategies. Why is he doing this, since his company does paid? He got involved with HomeStars.com that has a lot of UGC.

Name of company in each city is easy to rank on. Much harder to rank on terms like kitchen renovation and more competitive to bid. Graph of how much things have changed in ten years, looking at how many more sites are competing.

The bar has been raised.
- If Yelp has 400k relevant inbound links, 1,000 semi-relevant links probably isn't going to cut it.
- Content getting indexed doesn't help rank. You need unique content, you could have a lot of duplicate content when you have just basic business info for a page.

First Generation UGC: Examples
Open directory project
- army of volunteer editors categorized
- supposedly overcomes the scalability problem of directories
- directories then fell out of favor
- issues with quality control
- outcomes: much more widespread awareness of value of "crowdsourcing" before anyone called it that.

TripAdvisor - Users write reviews about their experiences.

Epinion, etc. - Among other things, blazed a trail of legality of opinions. Nobody knew what this meant legally.

UGC 1.0 Prototype: TripAdvisor
Search visibility strategy and tactics:
- Not risky
- Feeds Google, doesn't compete. Results – millions of top ten rankings. Long tail poster child.
- What's the incentive for users?
- Will ___ sink it? Long term, unless they evolve, this is what can sink UGC 1.0
-- need credible reviews (fake reviews can be a problem)
-- appropriateness of recommendations – matching like-thinking users.

Lesson Learned? ODP and Trip Advisor made a lot of money. Now you have all kinds of companies – Yelp and lots of others that Andrew only showed on slide for two seconds.

Unique advantages of UGC (potentially)
Search engine strategy:
- Dovetails with what SE want to index and rank well
- Doesn't compete with SEs but "feeds them"
- Is often just what searchers are looking for
- Marginal cost of creating more content is close to zero.

SE tactics: You need to architect site properly, and relatively easy to get link love as it's quality content.

UGC solves long-tail weakness of editorial driven media.

Changes on the way:
Cult of personality opinions vs. wisdom of the crowd. What are the real shortcoming of traditional media? It used to be an expert told you what you might like (Consumer Reports, wine critics), now it's someone like you telling you what you might like.

Andrew likes lots of sites, and likes to go very very quickly through slides and doesn't let us read too many of them. He does like Plenty of Fish, Yelp, and Squidoo.

What he's doing at HomeStars: They want it to be "The Zillow for after you own the place" [and have everything go wrong with it.]

Search strategy: key (similar to Yelp)
Tactics, important but more focused on quality that drives mentions and delights users (indirect). They showed up at a home show with laptops and had people write reviews right there.

Incentive? Similar to TripAdvisor, but localized. You want these people to feel like your online neighbor. Replaces, augments online word of mouth. Charitable + pecuniary incentives considered. They thought about the incentive method, and are still thinking about what to do. This has been somewhat unsuccessful. Non-monetary incentives work better. Light social networking key to building credibility of review

Andrew flew through a bunch more slides, again.

It's kinda like running a search engine (running the HomeStars site), you need to make sure the best results are most visible and ads are relevant. Credibility is a key.

Closing question: If it's not hard, it's not worth doing? Going from nothing, now huge, rich databases of new information are being built by the crowd and technology.

Rebecca Kelly is up next talking about her experiences with UGC.
She takes us through some examples and case studies
Why UGC?
- It's free. Duh.
- It's a simple way to create fresh, unique content for your site.
- More content leads to more crawling, more often, more pages indexed, etc.

Is UGC for you? Think about what do you want it to accomplish? How can you make it relevant to your site? Are you able to effectively monitor UGC? Time to monitor is a big deal.

Implementation.
- Promote it prior to the launch to create buzz.
- Maybe fudge the numbers a bit, don't make it look like an empty site.
- Acknowledge UGC sections after the launch, don't let it just try to stand on its own. For YOUmoz, she promotes good content to the main blog.

Monitoring:
- For a smaller site, you can do it in-house.
- For a larger site, use a flagging system and moderate as you go. Examples are social media sites or YouTube.

UGC Tip #!: One man's trash is another's treasure. Try to be as objective as possible with UGC. If you control the community too much, it can lead to hostility. Communications Decency Act is a good thing, you're not always held responsible for what is posted on your site.

UGC Tip #2: Don't forget to optimize.
Title Tags: example could be "User Name Member Profile Page | Fast Company"
Header Tags: put profile names or blog titles in h1 tags.

UGC Tip #3: Badges
Play to user's vanity. Make widgets that look cool and are easy to share. You can put a link back to the profile or story on the site, but don't be spammy.

Case Study: Yelp
They worked with Yelp and recommended URL changes
- Changed URLs from weird random characters to name of company being reviewed.
- Removed parameter strings to just /city for the location
- User URLs: change from parameter to username

Title Tag Changes
- changed from "Restaurants – San Francisco – Yelp" to "San Francisco Restaurants" – people more likely to search on the second version.

Rankings did improve. They have four million monthly users, and a bump of users in September. They added a "Yelp Bling" widget for your website to show what reviews you made.

Case Study: Drivl
- Their only goal was they wanted traffic.
- 250 page views/month and 90 inlinks to start.
- They wrote a bunch of stories, then moderated new stories. They created a widget to share articles.

Results:
- 529 stories submitted, 409 of which were user-generated.
- 2400+ user signups
- 3100+ comments
- 210k page views in June 207
- 116k monthly unique
- 24k links
They started out with having written a bunch of stories themselves, then users started writing more.

Case Study:YOUMoz
Launched February 2007.
Benefits to users:
- drive visitors to your blog/site
- build personal brand
- get input from the search engines / other marketers

Results:
- 435 posts to date
- hundreds of mentions from other sites
- about 800 links to the UGC section
- established strong community

Contributed by Keri Morgret.

Moderated by Danny Sullivan, the conference chairman. This will be primarily QA, so not everything will get covered as this format is more difficult to love blog than a traditional session.

Nathan Buggia from Live Search makes a short presentation announce a new improvement to sitemaps. How they work today: strict hierarchy based. He uses MSN as an example and shows how the engines have come together to extend the protocol (sitemaps.org) to allow cross linking between sitemaps on different domains. Now he is getting really technical someone else nerdier than I likely should have covered this session .:)

Sitemap files cannot be larger than 10MB Uncompressed. Tips: submit sitemaps in robots.txt file. Submit via webmaster tools and site explorer. Use the PING protocol to let us know of updates.

Q: Is there a way for people with multiple sites that address different regions and languages to map them properly? Evan Roseman from Google says this can be done in the Webmaster Tools area. Peter Linsley from Ask.com says that there are standards around telling what language is on the page, but people do not always do this right. They need to find a way to confirm that what the tag says is right. Danny also pulls up an article that he wrote on this at Search Engine Land in October 2007.

Q: Do you feel at a high level that SEO is good or bad? Sean Suchter from Yahoo feels that the community as a whole is doing fantastic things. Nathan feels one problem is that there is unequal access to SEO depending on what company you are. Their goal is to strive to find the best content out there regardless of how optimized pages are. Tools and blogs and forums are a great example of how SEO is a “big deal” and is a positive thing. Evan says that SEO is also good because you are making the site accessible for search engines which is also good for users with disabilities for example. Peter agrees it is a good thing.

Q: back to sitemaps, is it still worth spending the time to create an HTML sitemap? The engineers in consensus feel that the HTML sitemap is still important for human users. Where it used to be you would have to have all pages in them, now maybe you can just lit the 100 most important for human navigators, Danny suggests. The key thing is that if you are making the HTML sitemap for the search engines then it may now be a waste of resources when you can use the more powerful XML version (paraphrased).

Q: Are links in DIVs hidden by CSS or JavaScript crawled? Evan says that Google does crawl them. Sean thinks that they are crawled by them but would caution that they rank links based on value. If it is invisible to the end user, then there is a question there. Nathan says that Live search looks at all links on the page, but anything not visible is not considered. If it is apparently an attempt to manipulate, then they make take these into account in a negative way.

Q: If they cannot put a sitemap on the root level of the domain, what are the other options? Best practice is to put sitemaps file anywhere you want and use robots.txt file to show us where it is. Evan states you should use the Webmaster Tools to let them know. The Wordpress example is interesting, according to Sean, because it is a case where it is hard to confirm the real owner of the site. Only Wordpress actually knows who the owner of the site is…they would need to let the engines know that it is a legitimate change being requested by the owner.

Q: Do you follow links on 404 pages? Danny is curious why he cares. Peter says no, Evan says no. Nathan says no. Sean draws the difference between a “hard404” and a “soft 404.” Please use the hard 404 (not retuning 200) so that they can know for sure what the human is seeing. Nathan agrees that the 200 return can lead to duplicate content issues.

Q: what are some strategies to do better in Mobile search, and do links make a difference? For Yahoo, the things that are important are very similar to web search. Mobile has a bit of a unique thing in that some sites use WAP, and other are slightly designed for Mobile but using a light HTML. Use the same strategies and you should be OK. One of the big problems, according to Nathan is non-standard sites. They like the others use a “mobilizer” to help present the content on a mobile device, and non-standard code can make this end up looking really bad.

Q: Are HTML links still important? Yes. Nathan describes that you may not want to link to every single page, but instead make more links to categorized pages which in turn link to other pages.

Q: Why cant we get search results without scraping? Evan agrees that scraping is bad, mkay. Sean says there is some access through Webmaster Tools and Sean says there is some limited ability through Yahoo APOI. Nathan says Live Search has done really well with this.

Battery is dying so I am going to sign off. Very interesting panel.

Note this is live coverage of SMX West 2008, and there may exist grammatical or typographical errors in this post. Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Moderator: Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO, Enquiro
Q&A Moderator: Gillian Muessig, President, SEOmoz

Short presentations from each panelists and then some panel discussion and mostly Q&A. Well, I am not covering the Q&A, so I guess this will be quick.

First, Gord started. How do we use search as an extension of our working memory? Working memory is.... We have different types of memory. Long term memory, etc. Working memory is not unlimited, we only have certain slots to fill. Working memory is a white board and long term memory is like a journal. So the working memory has limited space, let's say four to five slots.

He then goes through an example of thinking up laptop names. So in his opinion, people use search a lot to fill up these slots.

We as people have brand relationships as well. When we see a Dell ad in a search, each of those triggers something inside of us.

As we move down the buying funnel what happens is, there is a lot of options open to us. We would like to think we rationally weigh each option, but that is not really what happens because we arent that smart. So we cut it down to 4 or 5, and this is called bounded rationality. Then we go from awareness to satisficing, to comparison matrix to head to head.

He then shows the golden triangle to finish off his post.

Michael Ferguson, Senior User Experience Analyst, Ask.com to talk about "Transactive memory" and search.

The brain is only looking at the trillionth of what it could look at at any one time.

Transactive Memory was proposed by Daneil Wegner. It says we can work in group and it is knowing what other people know. Over time we have a collective brain forming. He gives examples of his friends and how he has friends with different talent. He uses his network of friends to help him make decisions.

So how does this relate to search?

He shows Wikipedia as an network knowledge system. But search in the last year is starting to become an expert with universal and Ask 3D by anticipating needs. But search doesn't give you advice or walk you through things step by step - that may come. So then we move to social networks and we can bookmark expertise; from Flickr, facebook to Twitter (Lisa Barone is highlighted in his Twitter slide).

You want your pages and brand to have a personality, be trustworthy, to be distinctive, be helpful, and be approachable. This adds up by making you referable.

Ben Hanna, Vice President Marketing, Business.com is now up.

Searching For Me vs. Searching for My Company
- Two things to keep in mind:
-- People are people and
-- People are influences by context

People are People:
- You are the same person at home and at work
- Same physical and mental components
-- Body
-- Mind
-- Memories
-- Etc.

People are Influences by Context:
- Limitations of mind ensure we respond to the social environment
- Social situation creates discontinuity in thought and behavior
- Context can affect risk taking vs conservatism, being action oriented vs passive, persistence on a task, beliefs about others, beliefs about ourselves, sense of time, speech patterns and more.

Multiple Me's
- How I See Myself
- How I Am (multiple selves)

What This Means for Search Behavior
- High time pressure leads to search behavior that has greater cognitive lock in to start, faster scanning, reduced willingness to persist at search and greater frustration if cant find what one wants.
- Higher risk... and more words

He then gave some examples but going fast.

As SEMS, you need to think about your audience and the context they are searching and make sure your a way point in the pursuit of their goal.

Laura Granka, User Experience Research, Google is last up.

- Google does hundreds of search user studies
- Anonymized logs let Google look at millions of user queries in aggregate
- One on one studies with users

Online Search is an Acquired Skill
- Expressing needs as a query is very hard, users often start broad

Google is offering refinements to user queries

Rephrasing search needs is not always intuitive and shows the middle of the page rephrasing.

Familiar brands matter
- Users often rely on trusted /familiar sites
- Google uses Sitelinks for this.

Selecting a good result is hard
- So for health information they offer labels

Users don't always know what's searchable online
- Such as with local results, so Google offers local results in web search through Universal Search
- Another example is a search on Laura Ingalls Wilder and i have a dream

Sometimes people just want a quick answer with searches for weather or time and so on.

Session Summary

Rand Fishkin leads a thorough walkthrough of more than 30 unique SEOmoz tools & services and how to leverage them for search engine marketing success. From Page Strength, to the Link Directories, to the brand new SEO Analytics Tool and beyond, Rand shows you how to get the most from all of the features inside the new SEOmoz PRO (formerly "Premium").

Speaker

This is a sponsored session with Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz, speaking.

Rand opens up by saying that this is the first time they have ever exhibited at a conference (they have a booth in the expo hall) and it is also the first time they have ever sponsored a session. He then points out that PRO provides a new look and feel from the old Premium product SEOmoz offered.

He first talks about the Knowledge Base which I believe he said is updated every few days. There are already over an 1,000 questions included in just over a year. Rand also pointed that they currently have 1,900 PRO members. Knowledge Base allows a certain number of credits each month to members. When questions are asked, credits are deducted. Questions are auto-closed when SEOmoz staff feel they have been adequately answered.

Next he talks about the Link and Social Media Directories. The first is basically a directory of good valuable directories - not cheesy ones that were built just for SEO purposes - but good quality directories that can add value to a search marketing campaign. The second is a social media directory where sites are arranged by category.

He points out that extensive Guides that are available to PRO members. Some of the guides that are available include:

• Search Marketing Optimization Strategies
• Viral Marketing and Linkbait on the Web
• Illustrated Guide To Building a Search Friendly Website
• The Professional's Keyword Research Guide
• The Professional Guide to Link Building

Tips and Tricks are probably like Q&A but more in the format of short tips. The PRO section contains tips and tricks not disclosed on the public blog. Most tips are white hat but Rand admits some are a bit more gray shaded.

Video Training Series - These are accessible in SEOmoz PRO and include the following:

• An Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
• Search Engine Algorithms
• Search Engine Friendly Design
• Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting
• Content Development Strategies
• Social Media Marketing
• Blogging & The Blogosphere
• Analytics & Measuring Success

The Partner Services Discount Store - A compilation of services that provide discounts to PRO members. Some of the vendors include SMX, CrazyEgg, Text Link Ads, and Sure Hits.

Finally we get to the PRO Toolset which SEOmoz is famous for -

• Keyword Difficulty - Provides an idea of how competitive the keyword is and how hard it might be to rank well for them. Shows top ten results in Google and provides Page Strength.
   
• Page Strength - Provides a general idea of how strong a web site or page is.
   
• Backlink Anchor Text Analysis - Shows most common anchor text people are linking to a site or page with.
   
• Term Target - Compares usage of keywords in web pages (e.g., title tag, meta description, heading, page content, etc.)
   
• Popular Searches - Shows top searches of which Britney Spears typically dominates (unfortunately). Also shows historical data (they have a year's worth of data thus so far).
   
• Term Extraction Tool - Shows what terms a web page may be targeting by scanning the page.
   
• Crawl Test - Designed to see how healthy a web site is. Are thy indexed and what is last cache date are two factors that are looked at.
   
• Juicy Link Finder - Helps automate the process of finding quality inbound links. Shows detail such as PageRank, age of domain and position in SERPs.
   
• Rank Tracker Tool - Shows where you rank across a wide variety of search engines.
   
• Geo-Targeting Detection - Checks how well you are situated in local search scenarios.
   
• SEO Analytics - The newest tool in the SEOmoz toolset. Some of the problems it solves include when did I lose my backlinks, have pages fallen out of Yahoo's index, and other things like that related to your web site. Analytics basically gathers index data, link data and brand mentions and repeats the process over and over again, archiving old data so that one can track what is happening.

Upcoming community features include:

• Conversations, open tips and tricks and open Q&A.
• Page Strength is going to get some siblings - Domain Strength and Blog Strength.

Next a guy gets up (can't remember his name) to show a tool he built in conjunction with SEOmoz - Enquisite Pro. It is built around search analytics. The tool really shows the long tail of what a web site is being found or ranked for. You may be targeting a specific keyword or phrase and track that but this tool shows so many other variables. This is similar to what the ClickTracks Keyword Ranking tool does. This one goes a bit further allowing you to sort by country. The tool runs off of JavaScript being inserted on site. Pricing is based on volume and starts at $15/mo.


David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Moderated by Jeff Rohrs of Exact Target.

First speaker is David Feldman from iProspect. He describes a study done by iProspect and Jupiter research of how Offline Channels influence search. 67% of searchers are influenced by offline advertising. The first step is to “walk down the hall” and plan together with the offline marketing folks. Of the 67% of the searchers that were influenced, 39% ended up main a purchase. Knowing this, you should “walk back down the hall” and tell the offline marketers to include keywords that lead to conversions in search within the offline creative.

He will now share a more national example. The Priceline Negotiator…he plays an ad with William Shatner that focuses on the term “name your own price.” When he does a search, Priceline is both buying ads and has organic top potion for this term. This is good, but he focuses on the competitors that are in there as well. This is an opportunity to pay attention to.

James Lamberti is going to “pinch hit” for Stephen the other speaker who could not make it. James is from comScore. He will talk about findings from Key Research Studies in Partnership with Google and Yahoo! Key comments: buyers do not use search in a vacuum. What he means by this is probably pretty obvious…when you talk to consumers search is not the only thing that exists in their life. In fact, they may not even know when they searched or saw a print ad etc.

Chart: People who bought consumer electronics online versus offline purchasers. What were the most important influencers? “Search” 24% and 25% respectively, and “online banners” close to the same percentage. Next chart: “helped me learn about a brand or product” and “helping decide what to buy.” Again the search space percentage of influence was indifferent to online or offline conversion. How important was seeing the product in person? If buying in store, 69% felt is was important but still 49% of buyers online felt it was important too…these people would go into a brick and mortar location to see/feel the product and still buy online.

There is a clear lack of pattern in regards to where the purchase happens, but it is obvious that search is important to both. Of total buyers, 59% of all buyers searched first. He then showed a couple verticals where the numbers were lower or higher but I missed it. 83% of the sales impact of search is latent. Of those latent conversions, 17% direct purchase online and 20% latent search purchases online, but the majority (63%) are doing offline purchases after search. If you exclude travel and event tickets, the number jumps to 92%.

Calculating ROI, the full sales impact. Shows a variety of ROI’s ranging from $1.00 from direct online purchase to $4.00 for offline sales. In 2006, PWC estimated that >50% of ALL sales are impacted by search.

Data is a universal language. CMO’s relate to reach, frequency, and GRPs…don’t talk to them about keyword research etc…they want to know what the Gross Rating Point is. Another way to use search is as a “leading indicator” metric when relating to CMO’s. tell them the demographics and take that down the hall to plan with the offline marketers. This is a common metric that they will understand and can plan to.

Use test groups to measure actual ad effectiveness of linking to offline sales. Consumers are easily confused. The key is to understand that a single integrated message is absolutely critical. Search should not be performed in a vacuum. He shows data that supports the value of the synergistic impact of a coordinated campaign. Search is a desired outcome because of the brand search lift. Search is a sign that awareness has been built.

He shows a couple examples. Kellogg’s. They are seen as one of the leaders in digital from a CPG perspective…they are seen as quite forward thinking. They tied core products to organic positioning. The effort probably cost them a couple years, 100 people and a couple hundred million dollars. The problem is that it hasn’t translated to search success.

4 recos: understand the consumer use of search in your category. Diving deep to know where search fits in. Second: market with a single integrated message. Third: use “old school data” to your advantage - there is nothing wrong with speaking the language that has been in media for years. Lastly: measure the FULL ROI of search. This is not just a direct response medium by any stretch, in some cases not even at all. Link the return to what is happening in stores and to site traffic.

Next up is Ken Jurina from Epiar. He will talk about gaining insight using advanced keyword research. There are not four Ps in the marketing mix, there are five: “People” is the fifth. Uses of advanced keyword research for offline include business research and social research. “Authentic marketing is not selling what you make but knowing what to make…”

Ken is rolling through slides pretty quick… He shows the top 15 topics in online searches surrounding televisions. Then he shows another about salsas. the marketer selling salsa was worried about sales of pineapple salsas not doing well…the keyword research here led to insight that more people like mango salsa, so they ramped that up and sell much more of that in stores now.

Speaking your customers’ language…where to use the keywords. Obviously in areas of high visibility. Use them in offline print and media…combine both online and offline. What about product and service gaps? Keyword research will allow you to identify new products or benefits associated with them. uses the example of “countertops.” What kind of countertops are people looking for? This should lead to R&D around the demand.

Brand fragmentation and brand equity is also something that can benefit from advanced keyword research. “True brand loyalty must be earned and reinforced” quote from Larry Light from Arcature. How does search influence offline sales? Many people look for specific details about products online but do ot purchase online.

He shows some examples of Super Bowl Ads to see how well the big dollar spenders are doing with integrations. Shows the “Amp” ad with the “Amp yourself” tagline. They do not have a Microsite or any ads in search. Then shows some issues with the Taco Bell Think Outside The Bun campaign. Lastly he gives kudos to “mytalkingstain.com.” Victoria’s Secret did the best in terms of traffic with an 86% lift in traffic to the web site after the Super Bowl. Sex sells. Ken had some technical difficulties trying to show the ads.

Last speaker will be Joel Toledano from Krillion. They have done specific research around this topic of the “cross-channel shopper.” This is the fastest growing part fo the retail pie. All national retailers now support in-store pickup. Take Circuit City…2 years ago every single ecommerce purchase was sent to the consumer. In 2007, 55% of the purchases were picked up at the store. 2007 40% of Wal-Mart online purchases picked up in store. Both averaged more per sale…$154 more for Circuit City and $60 more at Wal-Mart.

What shoppers needs to know: who carries it? What does it cost? Is it in stock? Krillion drives in store sales, he claims, because they answer “who carries near me, plus in store price, plus first of a kind in store availability.” This is turning into a bit of a pitch…blah blah blah about what you used to have to do before Krillion came around to save the day.

Will now talk about a study that they did with the eTailing group. Large study of multi-channel shoppers. Over half of the 1000 users have bought a product for in store pickup. All of them said a high level of awareness was driven by the retailer ads. Next, shoppers researched multiple sources online before buying offline…72% will visit the retailer site. The last metric really stood out: 2 biggest factors that drive in store pickup. “Save shipping expense” and “convenience.” “I want to get it today.”

Note this is live coverage of SMX West 2008, and there may exist grammatical or typographical errors in this post. Please share your thoughts in the comments!

SEO & Blogging - Blogging can help SEO in a variety of ways. Blog posts are "syndicated," meaning your content -- and your links -- spread across the web. There are also dedicated blog search engines with readers you might be missing, if you're not blogging. This session introduces you to blogging and the SEO advantages it offers.
Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Chris Winfield, President and Co-Founder, 10e20

Speakers:
Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, MarketingPilgrim.com
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Services
Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book

Aaron wall is up first. "Your attention, please" causes you to get attention in the marketplace.

There's infinite competition: smarter algorithms and aggregators, social media, outsourcing, better/cheaper/faster publishing tools, ad tracking increasingly precise. Tragedy of the COmmons by Garrett Hardin. If you create opinionated original content, you'll be able to rise above the commodity status.

Blog growth vs. web usage - Technorati graph vs Web growth. The amount of competition is growing a lot faster on the web.

There's a lot of ways to grain traction: niche, strong formatting, filter, strong interaction, unique bias, post regularly, social interaction, monetize, push marketing.

Bias - a truth for every search. Gathering points - politics: religion, human rights, education, technology, etc. Technorati top 100 blogs.
Key attributes passion, open, original, consistent, opinionation, (dis)honesty

Own a niche: owning a smaller niche is an easy way to start building a personal brand. The #1 player gets more play in the media, the #1 player gets more self-reinforcing exposure, and better ad rates.

Format your site: get ideas from Seth Godin and Brian Clark's Copyblogger
- clean appealing design
- positive reinforcing tone
- easy to understand = trust and mindshare
- highlight best pages
- about us page
- easy for press to contact
- pictures/video/sketchcasting
- Write clearly (e.g. "Politics & The English Language" by George Orwell)
- Write headlines like a wire service writer
- Use simple words and short sentences
- Bulleted lists, headers, and subheaders

Read more, write less
- iGoogle and Google Trends
- Google News Alerts
- Custom RSS feeds
- Compare now and the past
- Save drafts and refine before publishing
- Stay on topic
- Cartman's Tourette's Syndrome YouTube video

Social Interaction
- Comment and link out (add value)
- Create community based ideas
- Ask for feedback BEFORE launching
- Actively solicit feedback and reply to comments
- Write for others
- Network offline
- Can't be afraid of controversy
- Get people to talk about you

Post regularly
- People appreciate regularity
- Pre-write draft posts for future ideas
- Offer tools or bolt on community stuff like job boards and forums
- Encourage contribution from others
- Highlight best contributors

Monetization:
- No AdSense above your content
- Sell branded ads or co-brand affiliate offers
- Create your own products
- Increase price to maintain high visitor value

Push Market (avoiding attention scarcity)
- Companies pay to advertise by giving away products they sold in teh past
- Build links - Yahoo directory and a few others
- Buy AdWords and AdSense ads, blog ads
- Sponsor other related sites
- Syndicate your content and write for other trusted sites
- Don't monetize too early

Andy Beal is up next. He's going to talk about tactics that have worked for him.

BOGO = buy one, get one

There are two audiences to your blog: the initial blog readers, so you need to ask questions, be enticing, and give scoops. There are also Google users so you need to optimize titles, change the word order, and add keywords.

Get killer slugs - don't always let the blog decide. Include popular keywords. Anticipate Google searches. Shorten the length. Don't change the slugs once you publish them!!!

Now get those indented links - Google should recognize 2 pages and indent the second result.
- Focus on just one page. Keyword rich content, etc.
- Build backlinks with anchor text
- Create/find VERY similar theme pages
- Link first to second
- Rinse and repeat.

Re-Focus the Page Content
- Think about a future purpose for that page. That page may not have the same content in the future.
- Optimize page slugs
- Top 10, Best 100, 7 Reasons, etc. Be helpful, give it away = FREE
- Get links
- Turn to the dark side
- Change focus of the page

Slack OFf
- Get other people to write for you
- Guest posts - offer links, author byline
- Writing contests
- Blog carnivals
- Performance payments - bonus for Digg homepage? (Dude, no!)

Performance - Improve it
- Monitor your analytics - watch for traffic spikes, increased page popularity, capture the audience, optimize existing and similar content, and look for new post ideas

Michael Gray is up last.

Dave Winer - blogs and the bet: he made a bet with the NY Times and said that blogs would beat newspapers for the top 5 news stories in 2007. 3 of the top listings were Wikipedia. Of the other searches on the page, blogs had 4 times the amount of the top 10 listings than newspapers had for news searches.

Search Engines and Blogs:
- Because blogs are frequently updated, they are able to attract the attention of spiders and that causes fast crawling and indexing
- The structure and implementation of blogs allows search engines to easily isolate content from the template

For businesses: it's a CMS that allows you to publish things easily without the new to involve the IT staff. Blogs use RSS technology to enable you to reach customer without the hassles and uncertainty of email.

Google is gathering a lot of the data you're using from their toolbar, Google Reader, etc. This data is being factored into personalized search and it may become more trusted to become a larger role in the ranking algorithm.

Google Reader Data is displayed to show people how well your behavior factors and what Google gathers.

Blog subscribers are defensible traffic - by cultivating people who are subscribed directly to your feed, your website becomes immune to fluctuations in search engine rankings.

Blogs fit well into social media space. Digg, SU, Reddit users know what a blog is. Stones that become popular are often picked up, shared, and linked to. Repeated exposure builds links and subscribers.

Blogs are also a reputation management tool. The rapid nature of blog publication enables you to react to a crisis and problem. The rapid indexing system allows you to control listings and sculpt the SERPs. Reporters and journalists use blog search as a research tool for information and professional commentary.

A blog can act as a sales tool. The "news" nature of blogs makes them the perfect platform for announcing and publicizing new products or services. Industry specific blogs: there's huge potential for affiliate or other referral based sales commissions. Disclosure is a standard practice in your industry.

Who is blogging?
- Southwest Airlines: Nuts about Southwest. (I learned that from Geoff Livingston at Pubcon.)
- Jetblue
- Coca-Cola (and they should remove the nofollow on their entire blog)
- Donald Trump
- General Motors
If companies like this are blogging, there's really no reason why you can't.

Wrap it up:
- quick and easy way to add content to your site and attract search engines
- a great entry into social media
- they are a tremendous link building blog (content on your site)
- subscribers make you immune to fluctuation in rankins
- provide you with an opportunity for interaction with customers

Moderator: Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Q&A Moderator: Rob Kerry, Editor, Sphinn.com

Very large room making it seem like we are empty.

First up is Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive.

CSS is html addition that allows webmasters to control design parameters such as margins, fonts, links, colors and placement.

CSS Advantages:
- Speed
- Decreases download time
- Easier to control positioning element
- CSS can easily communicate visited and unvisited links

CSS Disadvantages
- Font selection is limited with logos, condensed fonts and end users must have the font
- USability testing and focus groups might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly used on computers
- CSS formatted hyperlinks can dominate the content of a web page making the content appear unfocused

Text Formatting
- Can hide text and links with css
- XHTML headings can be used for h1s
- She shows more uses of css to try to spam the search engines that don't work

Hidden Layers
- X, Y and the Z layer

I am sorry, this session is way too basic for me - which is fine and Shari is an awesome speaker but I can't cover it anymore. :)

I assume this session is very very similar to ones she spoke on in the past. Here are links to those sessions:

• SES San Jose 2007
• SES NY 2007
• SES Chicago 2006

Hope I didn't miss anything new but I suspect most of it is covered there and yes, I personally covered this session in the past.

The red suited man, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com is now up.. to chat about AJAX and Flash, etc.

He explains what web 2.0 is again. NEw type of applications, no new technologies but AJAZ is a new trend. It brings deeper interaction with user. Web 2.0 gets users involved and it also isolates itself from past standards.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and show charts on how it works.

He said AJAX stinks. He quotes the "Why AJAX Sucks (Most of the Time)" article, see here.

You can only link to the application and not the "page." There are exceptions to this rule. You can reload the page for every click and you can cloak the page.

Tips on AJAX:
- Yes, you should use AJAX
- Make sure to ask yourself why you want to use AJAX, the reason must be good
- Let AJAX be an option for your users
- Error trap your links with 301s
- Let the pros do the work

The social Web 2.0
- user generated content is awesome
- content is expensive
- no keyword research needed
- misspellings are a non issue
- UGC content is much fresher (unless you are me, kidding)

Would you like to have 20,000 SEOs? i.e. UGC
- You need to watch out for spammers
- Teach your users SEO tips
- Just teach them specific tips that will help you (i.e. write good titles)
- Teach them how to get a link to their content, if each user did that, you can get a lot of links

Speaker Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance.com

Moderator Detlev Johnson, Search Return

What is keyword research?  The processes of selecting keywords which are relevant to your site and are used by potential customers as query terms.  Keyword research for paid and SEO are done differently.

Find new concepts by using keyword terms when looking for keywords

There are 3 stages of keyword research, start with brainstorming.

Keyword brainstorming and discovery phase using multiple sources and tools

Brainstorming.  When brainstorming, don't judge your words, goal is to cast your net widely and generate broad list.  Use keywords the market is already using, look at printed collateral and website for clues on keywords.  Use their site search box from the web site;  give insight to the number of words being used as well as the word themselves.  You can follow a visitor's path and see if the site is converting.

Traditional print.  Look at online and traditional print magazine, company and product reviews as well as online thesaurus

Interviews.  Learn the lingo of your customers, conduct interviews with customers  and focus groups look for targeted keywords.  Talk to the support and customer service people and ask what they're hearing.

Forums.  Review discussion forums and blogs, how are they talking about products and what are they calling them.

Competitors.  Create keyword lists by using diverse sources such as looking at your competitors, review their sites and their print collateral as well as their keyword buys

Log files.  Look at your log files, captures the exact phrase of what searchers have entered.  Look at single words not just the phrases, people using single words are associating single words with a phrase.

Keyword Research Tools

There are many many tools out there.  A few…Word tracker, Trellian Keyword Discovery, Yahoo (Overture)  Keyword tool, Google keyword tool, etc .

Wordtracker is the granddaddy of search tools, data is pulled from meta search engines, eliminates most  skewing issues caused by robots, differentiates between singular and plural, does have a free trial

When you look at tools, don't go by the numbers.  Look at the overall trend, run your phrases through multiple tools look for trends.

Keyword discovery - pulls from multiple databases (global premium, historical global, international, news, and bay) Provides seasonal data and a suite of tools that takes misspellings, fuzzy and related words into account. It is easy to import and export data.

Yahoo Overture Keyword Tool - not updating the database at the moment.  Still a nice quick tool to go to  look for trends.  Doesn't do misspellings, or plural/singular.  Good for quick brainstorming.

The Google keyword tool is free.  http://adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal  or in your Adwords account.  Google webmaster tools are good for diagnostics on a website.

MSN adcenter tools does a good job coming up with tools, early in development, getting better.  Search funnel shows what searches happened first and what searche  n                                      bb                                                          s happened later.  Higher level viewpoint of what's happening to keyword.  Also give demographic predications, can tell you if it's men or women.

Vivisimo (Clusty)  Clustering search engines provides clustered results.  Ask does this as well

Quintura  not real well known but allows you to navigate by  clouds.

Google trends allow you to compare popular phrases.  Monitor trends using it by phrase, city and brand

Google hot trends shows hottest current search in close to real time.

SEOBook has a great suggestion tool - good tool to use.

MSN ad intelligence a plug in for excel 2007  data source live.com and Adcenter, provides related keywords, extracts keywords from a URL givens insights on seasonal spikey keywords  shows geographic and demographic info on keywords.  Must have MSN account.

Technorati - is good for brainstorming terms shows related tag searches.  Also gives hot topics

Take the list of words you have and expand them by targeting variations of your keywords, apply actions to the keywords.

Seobook permutation tool  http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-list/generator.php

How do you know if a phrase is worth keeping on your keyword list?  It has to be relevant.  If the term isn't relevant to your site, drop it.  Is the term popular?  Is it an overrated popular term?  Wildly competitive term?  If yes, it might not be worth pursuing.  A less popular term may convert and provide higher conversions.

Try to get inside your searchers head and figure out what makes a person search for a phrase.    Searches are tied to stages of the buying cycle, there are stages of buying:

Problem recognition, information search, select alternatives, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision.    You can tell, depending on the phrase they searched on - where in the buying cycle the person was when he used the site search tool.

People search in three ways:  Navigational, informational, transaction.

Another way to evaluate terms is by competition.  You need to see how active the competitors are within the same marketing environment are they doing ppc, how much are the bids?  How optimized are their sites, look at linkage data and the anchor text they're using

Competitive intelligence tools to use:  Hitwise Comscore, Trellian's competitive intelligence tool, Spyfu, Keycompete, Keywordspy, Adgooroo, Keyword Analyzer

Once you've picked your terms, looked them over and done the research, it's time to do the test.

What are the performance considerations before picking keywords?  Run them through ppc before SEO'ing the sites.    Track the performance of the ppc campaign; use Google analytics if you can't pay.

Remember is not about the keywords you want to be found for, it's about the keywords the end user uses to find you.

The success to you search campaign depends on good keywords

Keyword selection takes time and is an ongoing activity

Don't use popularity as the only criteria

Get feedback.  And it a term isn't working - change it!

Contributed by Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link.

Can you find the same page on your site using different URLs? That might cause you duplicate content issues. Does your content management system put out parameters that block crawling? Own multiple domains pointing at the same site? Are you 301 redirecting them or leaving canonicalization to chance? Confused on even how to pronounce canonicalization, in addition to now being worried about it?

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, Search Return
Q&A Moderator: John Marshall, CTO and Founder, Market Motive

Speakers:
Brian Combs, Founder and Senior Vice President, Apogee Search
Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works, Inc.
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Navneet Virk, Director of Search Marketing, Roundarch

Brian is up first. He is going first, because he feels he is the least technical person of the group. He is going to speak about the business aspects of domains. He starts off with the credentials of his company. He doesn't code anymore, but has been in this business for several years.

* Webmaster versus Search Engine Optimizer
Both have moved from sole operators to extreme specialization.

Web Positions:
Designer, programmer, copyright, HTML coder, project manager

SEO Positions:
SEO Copywriter, On-Page Optimizer, Link Builder, Link Baiter, Programmer, HTML Coder

In general, you may need a specialist to deal just with issues about your domain.

* Do it Right the First Time
- Correcting errors is difficult and expensive.
- Don't wait until late in a design or redesign to address SEO issues.
- 301s don't necessarily pass all link juice. If you can avoid needing to use a 301, it may be better.
- A "static" URL may be easier to maintain. Dynamic URLs are easier to index these days, but making them look static can still help.
- Refer to directories, not files, to avoid file extension changes if you change from .net to .asp, for example.
- Avoid frames and Flash-based sites. Locational flash is fine, but frames are a tool of the devil.

* URL Structures
Use a single URL structure. Pick one and stick with it, both for internal and external links.
- Focus link juice of internal links
- Consistent external linking

Keywords in URLs
- Helpful, but not critical
- Can look spammy if you overdo them

Limit the Parameters
- Longer URLs can be hard to index
- Just say no to Session IDs! Use cookies if you need something that critical

* Domain Issues
Using Keywords
- Links are more likely to use keywords in anchor text
- Can have negative branding impact

Domain Variants are an Opportunity
- "Multiple Shelf Space" strategy. Allows you to try to get two domains in the SERPs.
- Reputation management. Can use it to push a bad site down in the SERPs.
- Must have unique content

Navneet Virk is next.

SEO Components -- many things. Content, Code, and Technical Architecture/CMS/Backend. These are reponsibile for different things. This session is going to talk more about the URL structure and teh technical architecture of the site. When we say accessibility here, we mean accessibility for search engines.

Optimized URL
Properties of an optimized URL
- accessible by search crawlers
- targeted towards the keywords
- readable by search engines and users
- unique for content (and vice versa)
- relevant in terms of domain (if possible) and sub-domains as well as directory nomenclature.

Big issue: URLs and content management systems.

Challenge: Complex URL structure as compared to non-CMS site.
Resolution: Configure the URL components to follow navigational elements (either directly from URL or breadcrumb elements)

Challenge: CMS inserts multiple parameters and dynamic components into the URL.
Resolution: Setup rules around allowing dynamic and special characters. e.g. replace all special characters, spaces, space encoding with a hyphen (avoid concatenating multiple phrase keywords). Try to embed navigation in URL if possible, put breadcrumbs in URL.

CMS can have multiple URLs for same page. This can also make it hard to look at statistics. Every time someone changed title of page (added comma, etc.) CMS made a different URL.

Challenge: Content duplication. Channel structure of CMS following navigation breadcrumb can create present the same content on multiple URLs based on user path.
Resolution: implement URL redirects to single preferred URL.

Challenge: Multiple URLs displaying the same content but differing in the order of parameters or lack of nonessential parameters.
Resolution: Implement robots meta tag to allow content managers to exclude content from search engine indices, or use robots.txt.

Challenge: Record name approach. Irrelevant parameter names and values not adding any relevant information or value to the URL.
Resolution: Implement database field to allow search CMS generated URL parameters can be replaced by user directed page or record name. Leverage record name for the URL. (make URL relevant - name instead of number in URL)

Vanity URLs
Vanity URL is a domain name, typically created by a company to point to a specific product or advertising campaign microsite or section.

Often leveraged by the sites with inherently complex URL structure to provide simpler, memorable and relevant URLs.
- used mostly for offline ads (print/TV)
- increasingly being used for SEO

Vanity URLs, however, also present the risk of content duplication penalties.
- exposing the vanity and system version of URL to the search engines can present same content on multiple URLs.
- implement permanent redirects from system URLs to the vanity URLs.

Leverage vanity URLs to target and serve "Keyword Personas"

Recommend to pick vanity URL as the default, since it is easier to remember and more friendly.

Tracking parameters in URL
Issues
- Duplicate Content: SE indexing URL versions with tracking parameter
- Inbound Link Dilution: inbound links to tracked version does not help in search engine visibility
- Skewed web metrics: If URL with the tracking code is returned for some queries on the search engines and clicked by users, it can lead to skewed reporting.

Resolution: Conditional meta tag. On-page scripting parses the URL of the page and adds a noindex meta tag on all version that include extra unwanted parameters.

Robots.txt - use wild cards in the robots.txt file to block spiders from crawling pages appended with a designated tracking code.

Secure or non-secure. https vs http

Search engines do not have any issues with indexing and presenting secure pages in the SERPs but you, however, want to make sure that you eliminate the risk of content dupe due to the potential of same content being served…missed rest of what he said.

Absolute vs. relative Links.

Factors to consider:
- load time. Load time may not affect se rankings, but it does affect user experience and conversions
- secure or non-secure sections of the site. Always use absolute links on the secure pages or there are changes that both https and http versions may get indexed.

Absolute links can mitigate the risk of content scraping, may be better for RSS

Also good for PDF
Missed last point

URL redirect

Challenge
Page URLs are unique IDs for the page. URL changes may lead to
- loss of ranking and history in SE indices
- loss of PR
- search engines directing traffic to dead pages
- loss of link popularity

resolution
- create and implement a traffic retention plan
- right technical approach for the redirects
- testing
- log analysis
- old domain removals from SE

Redirection tips

301 should be used, not 302 or javascript redirects. Implement page or directly level redirects instead of site level. Missed rest of what was said.

If running Apache, place “rules” within .htaccess or your Apache config file (e.g. httpd.conf, sites_conf/…)Make a backup first!

This example was given, and Stephan explained what each part of the rewrite rule meant. A bit thank you to Stephan for putting the presentation online, there would have been no way for me to write this all down correctly!

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)/?$ /get_product.php?id=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)\.htm$ /webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&langId=-1 &categoryID=$1&productID=$2 [QSA,P,L]

The magic of regular expressions / pattern matching
* means 0 or more of the immediately preceding character [this can be a problem. It might match on nothing. If you want it to match at least one number, then use the + sign)
+ means 1 or more of the immediately preceding character
? means 0 or 1 occurrence of the immediately preceding char
^ means the beginning of the string, $ means the end of it
. means any character (i.e. wildcard)
\ “escapes” the character that follows, e.g. \. means dot [this says that you really do mean a period, not that you're using it as a match any character]
[ ] is for character ranges, e.g. [A-Za-z].
^ inside [] brackets means “not”, e.g. [^/]
() puts whatever is wrapped within it into memory
Access what’s in memory with $1 (what’s in first set of parens), $2 (what’s in second set of parens), and so on

Regular expression gotchas to beware of:
“Greedy” expressions. Use [^ instead of .*
.* can match on nothing. Use .+ instead
Unintentional substring matches because ^ or $ wasn’t specified

Proxy page using [P] flag
RewriteRule /blah\.html$ http://www.google.com/ [P]

[QSA] flag is for when you don’t want query string params dropped (like when you want a tracking param preserved)

[L] flag saves on server processing

Got a huge pile of rewrites? Use RewriteMap and have a lookup table as a text file

If you're on Microsoft IIS SErver
ISAPI_Rewrite is helpful for those people that have to fight with IIS, not too different from Apache. My condolences though if you have to use IIS.

In httpd.ini :
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule ^/category/([0-9]+)\.htm$ /index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=$1 [L]
Will rewrite a URL like http://www.example.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=207 to something like http://www.example.com/category/207.htm

301 Redirects
In .htaccess (or httpd.conf), you can redirect individual URLs, the contents of directories, entire domains…
Redirect 301 /old_url.htm
http://www.example.com/new_url.htm
Redirect 301 /old_dir/ http://www.example.com/new_dir/
Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com

Pattern matching can be done with RedirectMatch 301
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.+)/index\.html$
http://www.example.com/$1/

Or use a rewrite rule with the [R=301] flag
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,QSA,R=301]

[NC] flag makes the rewrite condition case-insensitive


Conditional Redirects
Selectively redirect bots that request URLs with session IDs to the URL sans session ID:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} PHPSESSID
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^msnbot.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slurp [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Ask\ Jeeves
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,L]

Utilize browscap.ini instead of having to keep up with each spider’s name and version changes

URLs that lead to error pages
- Traditional approach is to serve up a 404, which drops that obsolete or wrong URL out of the search indexes. This squanders the link juice to that page.
- But what if you return a 200 status code instead, so that the spiders follow the links? Then include a meta robots noindex so the error page itself doesn’t get indexed.
- Or do a 301 redirect to something valuable (e.g. your home page) and dynamically include a small error notice?

Next speaker: looking at international issues with Cindy Krum of Blue Moon.

International Site Architecture: Are we speaking the same language?

Challenges:
- multiple languages, currencies measurements, seasonality
- different search engines
- different e-commerce laws
- difference in marketing aesthetics

Site Architecture can help address these issues. Site Architecture Options: One site, server side translation, and multiple sites.

Things to consider:
- Design, development, and maintenance cost
- Server configuration and location
- Needs to work well with CMS and order fulfillment
- Email, direct marketing, affiliates, and PPC
- Traditional Advertising
- SEO

Looking at SEO for all of these architecture options.

One Site Approach

Using subdomains and subdirectories. If you divide by language, write the name of the language in the language you are targeting. Example: www.Deutsch.yoursite.com

Pros:
- easy to set up
- links and traffic all point to one domain
- more pages in the index
- flexibility with messaging (seasonality is one example)
- grouping by language prevents dupe content
- country specific hosting option (subdomains)

Cons:
- homepage in wrong language can be confusing
- home page only ranks in one language, but multiple countries
- grouping by country risks duplicate content (grouping by language does not). Example of two countries that speak English. One site for each country, but this results in duplicate content, because both are in English.

Tips:
- Specify Target country for each site in Google Webmaster Tools
- Redirect country specific domains to appropriate subdomain or subdirectory. For example, buy something with .de domain then redirect for right site (German example)
- internal and external links issues. You want links from sites with the appropriate language, and using appropriate anchor text.

Server Side Translation Option. Server determines location via IP, then shows right page.

Pros:
- Best user experience
- It can work with legacy CMS, meta data, content, feeds
- Robots translation software is more scalable

Cons
- Harder to set up
- Natural inbound links could be to section with wrong language
- Translation software must be checked, may not always target right version of keyword.

More tips
- Don't set a location in Google webmaster tools
- Redirect country specific domains to appropriate translations
- Allow users to change language/location and set language cookie, in case IP sniffing doesn't work
- minimize on page javascript, or have everything happen on server
- language meta tag, html language

Multiple Site Option:

Pros
- incrementally low startup costs
- can add sites one at a time
- rank well in multiple country-specific search engines
- country specific hosting

Cons
- more sites - more sites to update (inventory, news, specials, etc.) need to update on all sites
- multiple site - multiple seo efforts - harder to rank in .com
- forced to target countries instead of languages
- no stemming algorithm.

Tips:
- Target country in Google wematser tools
- external links:
-- want appropriate language sites with appropriate anchor text
-- country specific domains
-- local address

Blended approach:. Send all traffic to .com domain, people choose where they want to go. Most realistic for worldwide presence. You've already got ranking in .com, then you can build out country specific sites as needed. Buy domains as quickly as you can, even if you don't need them right away. It can be costly to create.

Specify countries for individual sites, but not on the .com site. Link your multiple country sites carefully and logically. Don't link all country-specific sites to each other if you don't need to.
external links
- international links to international site
- country specific links to country specific site
- let users know you're taking them to another site
- use java translation/ip sniffing on homepage

Contributed by Keri Morgret.

Moderated by Jeff Rohrs of Exact Target, with Mike McDonald of Web Pro News doing the QA moderating. He introduces the panelists and hands it off to the first speaker.

Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com will do a basic intro of what online reputation management is. Realizing that the perceived value of your brand is defined by information found on the internet, therefore requiring constant monitoring…”

Why do it? 52% of individuals put their trust in what others have to say about your reputation. Shows some other stats I didn’t catch. ORM in action: he will focus on monitoring. What are the benefits? Product ideas, customer reactions, keywords, blog sentiments, news articles, industry trends, scandals, product recalls, client opportunities.

What to monitor: company name, name of CEO/executives, name of products, business partners, employee blogs, competitors, and more. How to monitor? You can set up RSS feeds for free with a variety of tools. Moreover.com and Yahoo are examples. You might want to monitor your reputation in mainstream media. Google news is a great mainstream media aggregator. If you did nothing else but monitor Google, you should see about 70-75% of the news about your business. Monitor news buzz at digg.com. Subscribe to the red button to get the feed regularly from Digg.

Blog posts: use Technorati for monitoring this. You can also subscribe to the results here and send via your favorite RSS reader. Google also has a great Blog search engine as well.

Look for bookmarks. Using del.icio.us you can monitor when people mention a product name. This can be used to keep an eye on TMs. Images: go to Flickr, type in name of CEO, and off to the races. Same with video.google.com…keep an eye on the same names. Again, you can subscribe to the RSS feed. You do not have to keep going back. Monitor tags: use keotag.com to do this. You can switch among the various tag-using sites right within their interface.

Forums: use boardtracker.com to monitor. Miscellaneous: (he wrote “Miss Ellaneous”). Monitor your Wikipedia profile, customer reviews in Amazon or ePinions. Copernic’s Tracker is a great tool. Google alerts will help you to monitor Google properties by email instead of RSS. Twitter is also really important…lots of conversations bubble on twitter before they ever make it into a blog post.

He will be giving away 50 copies of new book this evening in expo hall. Trackur.com is a new site of his you should check out. Also see radicallytransparent.com.

Jeff asks how to assess the quality of the different tools that are out there? Andy suggests searching “reputation management monitoring tools” and you will find a nice selection…not much bad out there right now. This is still a young enough space that you can build your own tool and/or provide your own reputation management services.

Next up is Chris Bennett of 97th Floor. “Understanding Google’s Algorithm to better Your Reputation management Objectives.” He suggests if you ever lose your voice and have to do a presentation, to gargle Tabasco sauce…it actually works. First thing to do is to understand your foes. Why are the negative rankings there? How do they rank? How recent is the cache. Use basic SEO knowledge to first understand why they are ranking. The more you understand this, the better you will be able to prepare to attack the issue.

You can combat some foes easily by simply being a copy cat. Create equal pages…pound for pound, keyword for keyword, comment for comment, links for links. A lot fo the stuff is rants and raves…and it is like justified keyword spamming since people will mention the name over and over and also in the comments. “Rinse and repeat.”

Do’s and don’ts: don’t interlink your social media pages. Don’t waste your time filling out 100 profile pages, with airy light weight content. This is typically not unique or good content. Do: build quality social profiles. Use your company name as the profile. he suggests taking the time in Digg and StumbleUpon to become a true member of the community…don’t just use it to spam articles or pages. Use co-citation. Stay in it for the long haul. Build pages as if reputation management isn’t an issue. Write it as a legitimate marketing piece, and don’t rehash the same stuff over and over.

next up is David Wallace the CEO of SearchRank. He will talk about using social media profiles to manage the first three pages of the SERPs. He is not endorsing using this for keyword rankings, but rankings for your brands and names. What does your online rep say about you? the thing about the Internet is that you are communicating to the masses. the consumer has a lot more power. It is inevitable that people will talk about you. Sometimes the conversation is not so good. Internet – allows people to communicate to the masses. Blogs, review & comparison sites give people the power.

What do the pages say about you? Most companies will hold the first or second spot…so why worry about this? people look past the first listings. There are a variety of ways to gain more control over what is said about you. You can use multiple domains or sites all the way to using social media networking sites. Where to start? There are literally hundreds and hundreds of opportunities to create user accounts at social media and social networking sites. he gives a list of some of them, including Facebook, MySpace, MyBlogLog, Mashable, etc.

Use your company name as the profile name, like Chris said. The social media sites are already teed off at SEOs because they feel we are abusing them. So be legitimate. Add contacts and join groups…be active, get involved! Link to other social media profiles (don’t overdo this, like Chris said). he then talks about where to add the profile links such as in the About us page, within blogs or blog posts, adding contacts in social media sites will help indexing. Link to social media profiles in process releases.

David uses the example for the search for “SearchRank” and how many listings he has going all the way down to the third page. He has most of the links (much like when you do a search for Chris Boggs you’ll see the same thing ;) ). This will help you manage the first three pages of listings. Will end with additional benefits: there are branding opportunities, you can build link popularity, you can attract traffic if in the right industry (like entertainment industry – MySpace users). Interaction with public allows for two way conversations. Lastly there are great networking opportunities by using this tactic.

Next up is Niki Fielding from Digital Brand Expressions. She will talk about having a contingency plan to be prepared if any negative listings show up. Most of the focus on the panel today has been regarding natural listings. You should also look for paid search listings…if someone is really targeting your company they will use this to attack as well. “Proactive SERM” is a strategy for fortifying your brand before there is a problem. Acknowledge that negative info can and will be out there…instead of hoping to make it go away, it is more realistic as marketers to be able to create a sort of counterbalance.

By developing a game plan early, you give the search engines the opportunity to start finding this brand information often on your site. Adding social media to the mix ensures that the brand will be found and that the messaging in part will be what you want to be out there. Again this is a practice of counter balancing the negative. For SEO think about the content that you most want to appear for your company or brand and optimize accordingly. For paid search have campaigns set up and ready to go to defend the brand if needed.

Develop “outpost appropriate content.” Different messaging at Digg than Facebook. Many social media outposts are disappointed with how SEO is being pushed on to their audience. Digg doesn’t want anything to do with anything that even looks like optimization. Instead of looking at everything as a direct marketing effort, look at it indirectly and become part of the community. ZoomInfo – claim the information on your company. This shows up very quick in SE’s for brand searches. Same thing for FastPitch for executive names. Use LinkedIn. At Facebook set up a profile and actively manage it. Shows an example of a client that wanted to reinforce their reputation through the program. Within 2-3 weeks of them hosting their Facebook page, it is showing up #3 at Google for their company name.

Last speaker is Jonathan Ashton from Agency.com. “Playing brand defense when complaints hit the search results.” How to find ways to incrementally improve on the ability to mitigate complaints about your site/brand. Asks how much you have to spend to stand out in the crowd? Search can really magnify the impact of a single complaint. You cannot control messages in a third party environment. Millions are spent in branding can evaporate in an instant for an individual customer with just one bad stories. Shows examples of major brands like Tylenol, Wendy’s chili, The Ford Pinto, and how the “bad buzz” can last forever. Kryptonite replaced all the locks for any one that could be opened with a Bic pen. This was smart…Tylenol also did a good job in the rep management.

In the area of social computing, word of mouth, customer reviews, comparison shopping, etc now carries more weight than Madison Avenue. Recommends the book “Co-opetiton.” In some cases your competitors may actually be able to help you improve the view of your brand. What do you do after the “xxxx” hits the fan? Uses AllState as an example of a brand under siege. They are up against allstateinsurancesucks.com and allstateinsurance.org which is the “AllState or Allsnake?” site. Proactively get in front and try to own as many domains as possible like this.

The solution is to push the complainers beneath the fold. Build link popularity for pages that can move. he shows a screenshot of the Wikipedia listing at #11 and suggests that in the spirit of co-opetition you build some links to that page to move it up, ads well as even optimize the content within the page a little (of course the second part is against the Wikipedia rules – which Jonathan doesn’t mention). He also uses the example of Bekins movers and the issue they have with bad listings around “customer service” terms. Their own customer service page doesn’t even use the page title “Bekins Customer Service,” which would be a great start..

He then talks about Orkin’s problem in this area. Slide tiled Orkin: Bug Control or Buzz control (don’t worry Rob C. I’ll get a copy of that section of the deck and send it to you). One solution for them would be to engage HR to optimize the actual job listings at Monster and Job Builder with links to them. Another idea would be to optimize the Orkin Insect Zoo more heavily. He even suggests helping out the sites about “Ruth Orkin” and “Bob Orkin” to move their listings up above the bad results.

He then talks about Barrack Obama’s issue with this problem. Bottom line: you cannot put the genie back in the bottle, so use the other pages in the SERPs to push down the complainers.

Note this is live coverage of SMX West 2008, and there may exist grammatical or typographical errors in this post. Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Will The Social Graph Change Search?- All eyes seem to be on the growth of Facebook and how it is using the "social graph" -- i.e., the social data showing who is connected with whom -- to build a business. Can social data be applied to improve search? If so, would it shake up the current search space? And what impact might it have on SEO? This session explores the hype, reality and possibilities.
Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Aditya Agarwal, Director of Engineering, Facebook
Sean Lyndersay, Principal Program Manager, Live Search, Microsoft
Cris Pierry, Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Chris Sherman is up first.
What's social search?
Simple definition - Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgment. Informed can mean many things, including egregiously uninformed. There really is no "standard" definition of social search.

What's the social graph? A picture of the search behavior of a group of people, making "unseen" connections between them. It's most effective when the group is made up of trusted people.

The very first guide to the web (Tim Berners Lee, 1990) was somewhat social. We've always had social search. Tim wrote down a bunch of sites he knew of and descriptions.
Then Yahoo was originally created by a team of human editors.
Mta tags were created in 1996 to help content owners influence search engines and were a massive failure

Algorithmic search is social - fundamentally, search engines reflect human bias (programmer choices). Also, search engines observe human behavior - click paths, popular URLs, etc and use this to modify algorithms (Yahoo processes 14TB of user behavior a day). New personalization efforts are also used to refine search for everyone.

Why, then, did social search emerge now? Algoirthmic search has plateaued and leveled out. Nothing is dramatically innovating. Innovation is harder than it used to be. The major players have a user base that is very well established and they can't afford to risk changing anything because they may alienate their users.
Humans are still better at some things than computers. (ex: Flickr)
A major factor: many if not most of the players in social search are leveraging the work of volunteers. People are donating their effort to organize things and to improve services. That's a huge competitive advantage. You don't need a paid work force.

Types of social search:
- Shared bookmarks and web pages: relying on people to find interesting content and share it - delicious, MyWeb, Shadows, Furl, Diigo. They are social but they are, for most users, used as a personal tool.
- Tag engines (blogs and RSS): also called "taggregators" - primarily searches blogs and RSS feeds: Technorati, Bloglines, Ask Blog search, Blogpulse.
- collaborative directories: created by teams of volunteers - Open Directory Project, Prefound, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Wikisearch and Wikipedia
- Personalized verticals: search service that focuses on a narrow slice of the web. It used to be difficult or labor intensive to create a specialized search engine or directory, but not anymore. Google Custom Search Engine, Eurekster's Swickis, and Rollyo are examples.
- Social Q&A sites: They've been around forever - Aska's, Usenets, BBSs in the past. Yahoo Answrs, Answerbag, Allexperts today.
- Collaborative Harvesters: users nominate interesting content and others vote for it. Examples: Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, Sphinn. Aggregators include Original Signal and Popurls.com

What are the problems? There's a herd mentality that dominates collaborative harvesters. Friends support friends. DIgg has a stealthy "bury" squad that it refuses to acknowledge. You also need a catchy headline to get the attention of others and it trounces substantive content.

Part search, definitely social: Facebook, Craigslist, Judy's Book, Insider Pages, LinkedIn, Squidoo

Other problems:
* Scale and scope - too much expansion of the web, particularly now that there's video.
* We also have issues with tagging - language is ambiguous. Orange - a juice, a fruit, a color?
There's a lack of controlled vocabulary. There's also human laziness and idiots who don't know how to tag at all.
* Spammers: it's a bad thing and there are no algorithmic safeguards. Users get frustrated because spammers seize control.

What will ultimately work:
- A combination of algorithmic and people-mediated search (Ask's new Edison Algorithm - anytime somebody clicks on a search results, they take a title that the person clicked on and use those as tags for the page in a library. This tag library is an amazing approach. Yahoo is doing the same thing with Yahoo Answers)
- Trust networks: you trust people to show you content.
- Increased personalization and user control over result filtering
- Social search will probably work best for non-text content (photos, music, video, widgets, etc). Why? Search engines are still fundamentally searching text but they're not so good with non-text content.

Social search is disruptive:
- Social search is already impacting algorithmic results and will have an even more significant effect in the future

Social search will become more popular and important over time. People are less predictable than algorithms so you should expect potential problems. Take advantage of the tools.

Aditya Agarwal mentions that he believes that Facebook is the map of social connections.
Sean Lyndersay from Live Search says that there is a problem with trust. Over time, search engines will be exploring this space and figuring it out.

Q: Why are you investing in it?
AA: The type of content being generated is always changing and is always being created. Social media allows us to create accurate mapping of the social graph. Any data that helps us do this is helpful.
SL: We need to understand the difference between the edges of the social graph. There's an explicit social graph - friends and family who have shared experiences with me. Outside of that are implicit social graphs: based on watching my behavior, we have commonalities (but we don't know each other). When it comes to the latter half, for search engines, in many common scenarios, recommendation is a huge part in that system. Social media is often where people talk about other people. It helps people make informed (and uninformed) decisions about the products that they buy and the services that they used. Search engines have a lot of work to do to figure out what's good and what's bad. The social media -- people's opinions -- are very critical of being able to complete the task or action that they chose to do. Social media has an edge over generic media with respect to how people find things.

Q: A lot of search marketers reach out to social media communities and there's backlash. Do you have suggestions on how to proceed?
SL: This is obvious but authenticity is the key. If you're trying to pull one over the community, you're wasting your time. The stuff that attracts people's attention is humor, coolness, and good content. Do I have any tips? Not so much. It's what you shouldn't do. Don't go to Digg and plug yourself. Don't create a fake blog. You should make it easy for people to recommend your content, though. Add those social media buttons.
AA: The most interesting thing is to write creative and engaging content. What's construed as marketing and what is construed as useful to users? Think about the latter. Put another way, don't try to game the system.

Q: In the peer search space, we have an outbreak of privacy concerns. In social media, a lot of the users want to put as much information about themselves as possible on the websites. What steps can they take to protect themselves?
AA: Facebook helps you communicate: share information with friends. We try to give the users to control how and what they share. Privacy is hugely important to us.
SL: A lot of people don't expect that this is happening when they put things in the system. Search engines are just crawling information but then people realize that the stuff that they entered 4 years ago now show up on the top of the page. We want to make sure that user know what the intention is and nothing beyond that.
AA: There's a delicate balance between using the information and making sure that the information is not being used for bad purposes.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Specialist, BrentCsutoras.com

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz, Inc. is up first. Most the audience knows who SEOmoz is before coming to the conference. SEOmoz does a lot of social media, and the company has been built up on this model. He has 55 slides in nine minutes...

What is social media marketing? Before we ask that, what are the goals of online marketing? web site traffic, growing brand awareness, biz development. Social media can help with all these things. How? By interacting with the participatory communities on the web. You can create and promote viral content with social media. One method is Leveraging UGC sites for technical goals. Reach key influencers via blogs and social news portals.

Why is engagement with social media valuable? SMM supports branding and mindshare goals. SMM bolsters search engine marketing goals (via links). SMM helps with traffic and conversion goals.

Why now? Why social media now? Social media has grown tremendously growing 668% from April 2006 to April 2007. Blogosphere engagement has grown tremendously as well. US users are reaching blogs via links on other blogs.

How does SMM help with SEM? Links from editorial recommendations are the best. Links from education sites, news sites, niche sites, popular blogs, high quality social media sites.

Who creates these links on the web? The social media type of people do. We must reach these users. To get in front of them you must turn them on and not turn them off. How do you do it? He put up a URL to his site, I think seomoz.org/gopro

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services is up next to give some case studies.

Hewlett Packard:
- Photo Sharing
- Social News
- Social networks
- Blogs

Lots of people like to read blogs on printed paper. So they created "print this blog post" buttons. They leveraged various sites to create buzz about them.

American Greetings:
They did a viral halloween e-card contest. They put a dog head on a human body. They now rank well for halloween cards in Google.

Life Insure:
They created an article about death for them. 19 Things You Need To Know About Death. They rank number one for life insurance in Google because of those links.

Gawker Media:
They have lots of small blogs. Number one traffic source is Google, they get over 5 million visits from Gogle to Gizmodo per month, and Digg sent 3 million.

Barbara Boser, Social Media Director, 3 Dog Media is next up. Over 60 articles hit the Digg front page and stumbleupon picked her as a top stumbler and now she is speaking here.

There are hundreds of social media sites on the web and there is only one Digg. Digg sends more traffic and creates more links than any other. So she will review that.

You have to commit and participate, so you need to be active there. Be prepared, the first two months you can build your profile, get yourself noticed and learn the communities and understand what is popular there, look for tools to aid you and subscribe to as many new feeds you can that relate to the site.

YOur profile is important. MAke sure your profile is not similar to any top user. Be anonymous and likable. Choose a unique name. Choose a memorable avatar. Get a gmail account and IM that goes with your user name. Use the same identity on all the sites.

Add friends:
- Start with top users
- See how top users who have mutual friends
- Add people to IM
- Add friends who are super supportive
- Avoid friends that will be high maintenance

Voting:
- Be one of the first ones to vote
- If you think the post will go popular, leave a comment
- If someone asks you to vote, make sure they know you did it
- Vote often
- Stumble when you vote

Submitting:
- Learn how to write titles and descriptions
- Dont submit duplicate stories
- Dont submit 2-3 stories per day
- Dont submit from your site
- Vary up your sources
- Share your stories with users that sent you stories

Networking:
- List the sites your a member of in your profile
- Encourage people to contact you
- Add Your IM

Don'ts:
- Dont make multipple accounts on same IP
- Dont ask random people to digg

Results
- She hows some success sites

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Services is last up. He knocks the "other conference" jokingly.

Social Media Friendly Consumers:
- Leading edge tech people
- They are mavens

Using Social Media for Current Events
- Playing the social media news game brings a lot of traffic in short term. The key is to convert them into subscribers for your blog and a way to keep them

He showed an example of a hot Digg story. He then showed a fashion blog example.

Twitter:
- Twitter is a short micro blogging site. He explains it in more detail.
- Short attention span people love it

Why Use Twitter for Marketing
- Use as a permissive marketing tool to reach bleeding edge customers
- Takes advantage of pull tech like RSS
- Subscriptions are in control of the users

Twitter as a Traffic Generator
- Tie your blog into your twitter account and post updates
- Don't always throw your posts but also put other info posts in there
- You can use twitter to facilitate to publicize your SMM efforts

Twitter as a Sales Channel
- Drive customers to products or offers
- Twitter has high CTR rates compared to email or PPC ads
- You can use scheduling tools to promote and publish links to coordinate with your marketing and advertising efforts.

Lower the Barrier Between Your Customers
- If people monitor your twitter, be in touch with them
- Due to the short character limit, its fast and easy to communicate

Twitter Samples:
- NY Times
- Techmeme
- Orlando Times
- HDTV
- Mixx
- Yahoo Ad Buzz

Twitter Sales Channel Examples
- JetBlue
- Carnival Cruise
- South West
- Thisnext
- Amazon Deals
- Woot

Tips for Getting more out of Twitter
- Build profile before getting friends
- Decide on your information and sales blends
- Use tools
- Answer direct replies
- Encourage people to subscribe to you

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Fionn Downhill, CEO and President, Elixir Systems

Yahoo had to go, family emergency. So first up is...

Phil McDonnell, Software Engineer, Google, Inc. is first up. Google uses web history, it is great at disambiguating what the searcher wants. It finds results most relevant for a user and provides subtle ranking changes. He explains they are not going to drastically change the search results, it won't be "crazy" he said.

Web history policies:
- Transparency - allows users to view data stored
- They do not currently use Gmail, Orkut data in web history
- Security - enables user privacy through secure login
- Control - empowers users to selectively include and exclude data
- Portability - gives users ultimate control to transport their data anywhere

Marketing to Personalized Search:
- Create compelling and interesting content
- Appeal to users instead of search engines by finding your niche and bring the right result to the right user
- Simplifies search experience
- Simplifies marketing needs
- Changes are subtle so SEOs do not need to rethink marketing plans

Working With Personalized Results:
- Sign out of Google to get non personalized results
- Or append &pws=0 to the end of the URL and it will turn it off for that search

Steven Marder, CEO and Co-founder, Eurekster is next up. He explains what they do, Swickis. :) Not going to give the sales slide here, I suspect most of you know what they do, if not, check out their site.

Social Search Widgets:
- Swicki customized widget
- Surfaces community activity / user generated content including popular, suggested and recent terms
- Drives grabbing and sharing through widget distribution
- Multimedia search capabilities and tags
- Drives user engagement
- Increases search activity and query traffic

He then shows examples of this in action.

He then shows examples of Search 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0.

Social Search:
- Social media meets search
- Algo plus humans
- Blend of intent driven search and discovery
- Publisher guided, community sharing
- Community...

For Marketers:
- Leverages key characteristics of social media
- He is flying...

Challenges:
- Should they apply the social graph to this?
- Trusted relationship or expert source guide?
- High quality content via UGC?
- How can publishers get a feedback loop?

The Search 4.0 landscape is about the progression to a customer search area. They leverage the power of search to discovery tools.

They are rolling out the Eurekster SERP 4.0 page. He then brings up a demo.

They are learning as they go but content is king and deepening the user relationship will really help.

Cris Pierry, Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search was unable to make it. So Chris Sherman talks a bit about what Yahoo is doing. They have delicious, yahoo search builder, yahoo shopping has a pinpoint search feature, they announced open search a couple days ago.

Louis Monier: Past, Present & Future Of Search - Cuill Vice President of Products Monier (formerly with Google, eBay and AltaVista) will describe efforts at Cuill to set new standards in search, in addition to providing perspective on developments in the field.

The primary thing is that people need to find information on the web. Let's look at the past. Human activities linked to one network that has never been achieved before. This is on par with writing - a total turning point.

The Internet at the time went through the first phase that every new technology has to go through: rejection. People were writing very anti-Internet quotes.

"The Web is only as good as its index." At the time, something was needed to navigate the web. Only a full text search will do. Search was so fundamental to the web that nobody rejected it. There was such a need for it. Query, relevance, keywords = terms that became daily words.

The first search engines were slow and covered a tiny part of the web. In 1995, Altavista launched. It was good because it had a whooping 16 million documents and was able to respond within a fraction of a second. It had features that nobody dreamed of - you can find people linking to your homepage. This was the feature that essentially started search marketing. It was the first modern search engine by many people's definition and within months became the strongest search brand on the web. It dominated for awhile.

But around that time, there were other brands that showed more pages. Because a SERP is much more expensive to produce than a news page, search engines tried to get people to stay on the site as much as possible. However, this was incompatible with the mission of search engines to send you someplace. In '98, spam and aggressive marketing almost killed web search. Most queries would turn page after page of irrelevant data that were not related to the query. Search engines were very naive at the time; they didn't know how to deal with these crappy results.

One university experiment had a new idea for relevance: link analysis. That's what became Google. Link analysis resisted keyword stuffing. The edge of Google here made people switch to them. The mix of this secret weapon and discrete targeted text ads is Google. More power to them.

For several years, Google alone was working on search and got a head start. Today, there's a big product space - one dominant players and a few out-of-breath competitors.

For some queries, there's a best answer. It's so easy that there's one button (I'm Feeling Lucky). But for some queries, there is no one best answer. For most queries (long tail), answering these queries has not progressed within the last 10-12 years. What are the obstacles? Phrasing the proper query is often one.

Now what? We can use help in what to do next. We often need help figuring out what we mean. Sometimes we don't know what we need. The anology is ecommerce sites. The first result may not satisfy your query. What's the web equivalent? From a certain point, it's still 1995. We're still using the engines the same way. Besides the massive capital investment, we saw the same 3 ideas:
1. Vintage 1960 information retrieval. There are a many words per a possible query. Keyword density may work in this area. (Do a search for "cool stuff" and find as many references of those words in the document)
2. Pay attention to links and anchors. This was made famous by PageRank.
3. Put your users to work. Which result gets the most clicks? Move that one up.
There are user interface issues: basically 10 links. This is the search engine of 10 years ago.

What exactly has changed? What's new? Mostly it's scale. We're talking billions, not millions, of pages now. The web has also moved in terms of speed.

Does size matter? Search engines can have all the pages or the best pages. Size clearly must not matter. You already get too many results. Think users. Think search marketing. Access to a few well-known websites should be enough as long as it covers all your interests. To be fair, you should also consider the intersts of your friends as well - and their friends and so on. So yes, size matters. It is impossible to figure out what is interesting to you and others.

There is some good content off the written path that search engines don't show you. How do you know about these pages? It's an interesting thing to think about.

I don't want a list of just the most popular pages. Search, for me, is not looking about my keys. It's about research, exploring, and finding what I need with insight

The future: will we get this? There are many contenders - in no particular order:
- Human powered search. We have directories and they produce a great job: high quality content but the coverage is tiny. It's not scalable though.
- Personalization. Track users and we can fill in the blanks. The unescapable example is diamond: diamond (jewelry) vs. a baseball diamond. It will only achieve so much, though. If I search for a present for my wife, they might get the wrong idea.
- Social search: my friends already have the answer. I don't see how my friends' search history will contribute to my question. How many people will it take to intercept my query? Too many. I don't think it's a very serious contender.
- Vertical search: a specialized search engine can take a narrow slice of interest and do better than a broad search engine. It nobody wants to manage 10,000 bookmarks which is the challenge of vertical search. We need a search engine for bookmarks! For things we care about, they probably go to a specialized store. But sometimes you go to the supermarket because one place has it all. The same reasoning applies to search. One size fits all typically works because people don't want to manage this whole ocean of knowledge. This will limit the reach of vertical sites.
- Natural language processing: search engines should try to understand as much as possible in documents and queries. The problem is how much good language is there on the web? Not enough! There is also a problem: the great wall - e.g. Java (not coffee, not the Island, but the programming language!)
- Semantic Search and the Semantic Web: The definition is that webmasters are going say exactly what things mean. But what's their motivation to take this tremendous amount of effort to do this?
- Artificial Intelligence...? I think it's hard to go from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. We need progress. That's more realistic.

Back in the early days of Altavista, a friend surprised me with a new use for a search engine: using it as a spell checker. That's a definition of research! (e.g. blogology vs. bloggology - latter has less matches.) This is the first time I realized that search engines can be used for more than just navigation. That was an insight for me. How many results do you get for this query? That was informative.

In Altavista, we extracted interesting words from the results to show you them in an interesting way. That's how you can get terms related to your query. That's also how you can learn some terms that are related to the query. You can use aggregate information from the results. Surprisingly, it has worked very well for other domains.

Research assistant - different opinions for queries. This is a lot more than navigation: analyzing what's on the web.

Conclusion:
Search engines are the only game in town - the only way to discover things on the web.
Size matters.

Right now, underway is the SMX Search Bowl. Where you have Danny asking questions created by the Search Engine Land team to the various teams. The teams include Ask.com, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the SEM All Star team. Here are those images and videos:

Hope to post the list of questions later.

FYI - Google won by a landslide.

Update, the questions have been posted at Search Engine Land.

When done right, pay-per-click (PPC) search ads can be a company's most valuable marketing channel. But there are common pitfalls that can mean the difference between a campaign that bombs and one that makes you the rock star of your marketing program. Fortunately, many of these are easy to fix, once you know what to look out for. This session will cover danger areas such as match types, content network ads, ego bidding, failure to track properly and more.

Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster
Q&A Moderator: Anton Konikoff, Founder and CEO, Acronym Media

Speakers:
Addie Connor, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor, Inc.
David Szetela, Owner & CEO, Clix Marketing
Amy Konefal, Director of Search Marketing, Closed Loop Marketing

Matt introduces himself and Anton.

Amy Konefal is up first, sharing information on match types. In particular, looking at problems of broad and advanced match types.

How concerned should you be with broad and advanced search match types?

Examples are given (with screen shots) of badly matched broad matches.

Ebay motors was bidding on car parts and it was matched to fish on MSN broad match. Bass is a type of fish, bass is also related to a car speaker which is related to a car part.
Google broad matched "Print Cartridge" to "Leopard Print"

A list of several other keywords and their out-of-control broad/advanced match:

"diet" to "when will I die"
"digital camera" to "babe cams"
"software make" to "make your own windmill". They were showing up for "make your own" everything, including "make your own girl"
"create a photo album" to "sexy lady"

Other bad broad matches that we can at least understand where they came from.
"wedding album" to "wedding photographer"
"Samsung ML-2150" to "Samsung ML-2250 toner"
"domain registration" to "domain web hosting"

What are other saying about broad and advanced match? Several blog post titles are shared about how unhappy people are with the broad match type.

As she was researching this, she found a forum moderator states "In the end, how much money has this cost you? Not much." In response, a table from a Google AdWords Search Query Performance Report was shown, where client spent $109,000 on irrelevant queries, plus $642,000 on unknown "other unique" queries. They're bidding on printers and printer supplies, but showing up for computer desks and digital photo albums.

Pitfall #1: Terms can match to queries that are completely unrelated to your company's offering.
Keyword of running shoes. A phrase match could show up for running shoes for women, cheap running shoes, trail running shoes. Not all may be appropriate. If you look at expanded broad match (the default), you can see stuff that is way off. This could include running shorts, foot locker, running.

Pitfall #2 Broad match not only expands on a keyword, but will also contract a keyword.
Keyword - north fleece jacket.
Broadens to: North face blue fleece jacket.
Contracts to these with high volume that are not very relevant
north face
jacket
fleece

Pitfall #3 Less relevant traffic can starve the budget from the High Value traffic that you really want. They looked at a client and saw that a lot of their budget was being wasted on very irrelevant broad matches. If you can get rid of the bad broad matches, you can move the budget to the keywords that are appropriate.

Pitfall #4 Local targeting issues when geographic terms are bid on. Examples of "Local Targeting Gone Loco". NYCHotel.com discovered they were showing up for Honolulu Hotel
Another advertiser bid on Massachusetts Toyota Dealer and discovered they were showing up for Toyota Dealership Baltimore

Pitfall #5: The invisible cost for free impressions
Racking up irrelevant impressions on advanced and broad match can result in
- decreased CTR as impression volume inflates disproportionately to clicks...
- therefore lower quality scores...
- therefore higher CPC for the same or lower rank.

There IS a time and place for broad match, if it is managed properly and cautiously. For this client, exact match has the highest ROI, then phrase match, then broad/advanced match. First thought would be to get rid of broad, but it does account for a large chunk of revenue that is actually within acceptable margins.

How to do things right:

Match Type General Guidelines:
1. Take the time to build a comprehensive keyword list for strategic terms - including all plurals, relevant stems, reversals, relevant synonyms, etc.
2. Avoid broad/advanced matching on general terms.
3. Build out an extensive negative list. The negative list might even be longer than the keyword list.
4. Don't stop here. Monitor and analyze your search query performance and log files to add more negatives and update campaign.

Buy the most valuable traffic first. You're going to have the highest volume in phrase and broad/advanced match. If you have extra dollars, then spend it in phrase and broad/advanced match.

Potential Solution #1: Eliminate Broad and Advanced Match altogether.
- Good solution for advertisers who:
- Have limited budget
- Have low keyword coverage (impression share).

Advertisers who have switched to ONLY phrase/exact match report:
- Fewer impressions, but more relevant impressions
- Higher CTR
- Higher quality scores
- Higher rank for less money
- More coverage for your most strategic terms

Potential Solution #2
A responsible hybrid of broad, phrase, and exact coupled with aggressive negatives.
Good for advertisers who
- Have sufficient PPC budget to afford broad/advanced
- Have broadmatch traffic that is producing an acceptable ROI
- High keyword coverage

Advertisers who have gone this route report:
- More impressions and more clicks on a broader range of terms, some strategies and some not so strategic
- Some lower ROI, but it can improve over time.

Next steps:
Analyze your impression share metrics and/or AdGooRoo coverage stats (paid tool). Analyze your log files and/or Google search query performance report.

Next speaker:
Addie Connor, giving talk about architectural concerns.
Avoiding the first PPC Pitfall: How to create an account structure you won't regret.
Why is account structure important? Thinks of it as the skeleton of any campaign. If you don't have strong bone structure, you won't stand or walk, just crumble
- Flexibility and ability to meet business objectives
- quality score - keyword, creative, and landing page relevancy. Hot topic right now. Have a good account structure will really help with this.
- efficiency and easy of use.
- reporting.

Variables to consider when creating an account structure
creative serving need
- static headline vs. heading using keyword insertion
- keyword insertion- heading and ad text. Need to create several ad groups to do this best
- insertion types (KEYWORD vs. KEYWord vs. KeyWord vs. Keyword vs. keyword)
- Landing page if URL is on Creative level and for relevancy
- Display URLs
- Sales and Promotions
- Business needs
- geo-targeting needs (does one state convert higher than another?)
- intra-dayparting and day parting needs (in Google, only at campaign level)
- reporting format and needs
- optimization goals
- campaign level budget
- content vs. search (not talking about content, only search for this presentation. Recommends not using content and search with same account structure)

The same account structure can be used across the three major search engines, and allow importing from other engines. There are exceptions:
- Keyword insertion
- Use of alt text
- Title characters
- Negative keywords
- Limits (number of ad groups)
- Geo-Specific Keywords

Example Scenario: Insurance Company

Goal: Fill out quote form for life and health insurance.
CPQ Goal - $15 for life, $12 for health
Life insurance offered in 40 states, heath in 22 states
Florida with higher conversion rate

Graphic here that I'm not going to replicate. Because Florida is higher conversion, separate campaign for them. Geotargeting only 80% or so accurate, so you have national ad, and have state-specific keywords. Could have example of someone from Texas looking at insurance in Florida for their winter home, you want this included, even though they're not looking for insurance in Texas (and geo-targeting would exclude this).

Building keyword lists and ad groups
- create tight ad groups keeping creative, category, reporting, and landing page in mind
- build keywords and ad groups simultaneously using spreadsheet matrix
- use key phrase in ad group name to allow for the creation of creative templates.

Shows example creative matrix. Can't type fast enough to explain this.

What if the account is inherited? How can you deal with those account sructures?

- evaluate current account structure
- if bad, evaluate current quality socre
- if quality score is bad, start from scartch
- if good, quality score can be preserved in both Google and Yahoo! if the same account is used and the current creative is used. Pairing of keyword to ad text. Keep the same keyword and the same ad text, that quality score will transfer over.
- MSN has confirmed that it starts each account at the highest quality score, so it's always advantageous to create a new account.

CourseAdvisor is hiring! They're outside of Boston, contact Addie

Next is David Szetela, who is sitting in for Brad Geddes. David is with Clix Marketing, only does PPC. A year ago they looked at why content advertising sucks so badly.

My 10 biggest content advertising Mistakes.
1. Not realizing contextual is very different from search.
- Readers are not searching for you
- More like banner or print advertising
- Blog readers are in research phase, not buying phase

2. Leaving content network on

3. Believing in the bot fairy
- GoogleBot examines keywords
- GoogleBot examines blog page content
- match type and negative keywords refine targeting
- ad is place on a page with relevant content.
It's belief in this fairy tale that leads to ads appearing on the wrong sites. Problem is that people will click on anything, no matter how irrelevant. Accumulation of these clicks that kills money, as they don't' convert.

4. Believe search keywords are the same thing as content keywords.
- Keywords are not discrete entities
- keywords describe target sites - not your product/service
- theme must be one of 594 published themes
- no more than 30-50 keywords per ad group.

Think of this as the keywords should be the type of page where you want your ad to appear.

5. Not knowing the 594 themes in Google's content matching algorithm.
Electronic version of this slide shows all 594 themes, available on blog as well.

The themes are in the placement tool for creating a targeted campaign. His column on Monday explains why this does not work. If you paste in URLs of sites you know have AdSense, you are often told that many of them are not available for advertising.

6. Using keyword bids and match types.
- match types are irrelevant (except negative)
- individual keyword bids are irrelevant
- negative keywords are necessary.

7. Using search ads in content ad groups.
This is a problem because people aren't looking for your ad in content.
- Ads need to stand out
- Yell, don't whisper
- Be mroe competitive - e.g. free shipping
- Test, test, test. You can have a wide variety of ads with content network.

8. Not knowing content ad rank rules.
Different rules for quality score.
Magic positions for search are 103
Magic positions for content are 1-4 (most common adsense units are four ads)
- below 5, impressions drop dramatically
- quality score still counts, but not as much

9. Believe content quality score was like search
- Keyword-targeted and placement-targeted text: CTR, Theme, Bid, Landing Page. More heavily weighted for CTR
- Keyword-targeted non-text: CTR, Theme, Bid, Landing Page (but no ad text)
- Placement-targeted non-text: CTR, bid
- Best Bidding strategy: Start High, Go Low?

10. Ignorance of Target Sites
Example of insurance bonds showing on sites for James Bond, including bondgirls.de. Clicks, but no conversions.
- Google Placement Performance Reports
- Shows performance (clicks, conversions) by site where ads are served.
- Eliminate poor performance with site exclusion tool.

Possibly Great Strategy:
- Set up separate keyword-targeted campaign. David heard from Google employee that 100k new sites are added to the adsense network each month, but not sure if he believes this.
- run placement performance
- Use site exclusion to eliminate poorly performing sites
- move top performers to a CPC placement targeted campaign
- rinse and repeat

Live coverage provided by Keri Morgret.

Search Insights Track

Is It Time For Search Marketing Standards? - Now that several groups and organizations are offering certifications in search marketing without massive online debate and uproar, does that mean the oft-discussed idea of agreeing to common search marketing standards of behavior could happen? Let the discussion -- and likely debate -- begin! This session explains the issues involved, with viewpoints all around.

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget
Q&A Moderator: Dana Todd, Chief Marketing Officer, Newsforce

Speakers:
Chris Boggs, SEO Manager, eMergent Marketing
Paul Bruemmer, Director of Search Marketing, Red Door Interactive
Brian Combs, Founder & Senior Vice President, Apogee Search
Ian McAnerin, Founder & CEO, McAnerin International Inc.

Shoutouts to Chris Boggs who blogs for us and gave us a little shoutout in the session!

First up is Paul Bruemmer. Is it time for search marketing standards?

The trust system in this room is based on standards. Everything is really governed by standards. They work quite well in professions. It would be great to have this in the search industry as well.

Examples of SEM standards:
- Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have sitemaps (sitemaps.org)
- Google, Ask, and Microsoft anonymize log data
- November 2007 FTC - advertising concerns

Industry is maturing - 62% growth in 2005. The market is slowing in 2008. Saturation point is approaching.

Signs of maturity: growing number of training programs and certification courses.

History - back to August '98 - early attempts to get rid of spammers. In 2008, again, there's a call for certification from several different folks.

SEMPO has a metrics and standards task force to develop guidelines for search marketing. SEMPO states that they're not a standards body, however.

IAB - online best practice resource which is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft
- basic search engine policies
- checklists to help advertisers
- search marketing howtos
- etc...

Next steps: demand for standards by concerned individuals and search agencies by contacting SEMPO Task Force on Metrics and Standards. If SEMPO won't take up the task, then talk to IAB and DMA. Standards are going to provide us with sustained growth.

Up next is Chris Boggs. Are standards a black and white issue?

Create tactical risk consideration guidelines related to search marketing.
- End document should clearly define SEM tactics and provide a risk rating based on adherenece to search engine established guidelines.
Who owns the document? SEMPO - 700 members in the SEM industry
2 primary phases: define tactics and rate tactics

Required phases - adoption of search markketing standards - proposed process
Define standards of behavior - requires a definitions of tactics.
Adoption of definitions - this is a lengthy process and probably will ignore some perspectives
Establish ratings - example: why would you cloak? Sometimes there are reasons why cloaking is necessary. Based on degree of danger.
Publishing and promotion - You'd probably want to put it on a separate domain (not attached to an existing site). A wiki format is possible. Promote it heavily but monitor the reputation. This is a breathing document, not a "set and forget" document. Search changes daily. Tactics change every day.

Define:
Establish a glossary:
Simpler tactics: keyword research, rankings reports, creating page titles, meta gags, adding headers
More difficult but less widespread: labeling images, labeling other non-text content (flash), providing workarounds
Known no-nos: white text on white backgrounds, deceptive IP delivery
These standards must be committee driven rather than community driven because otherwise it will take forever.

Rate and promote:
There are levels of risk - no risk, little risk, moderate risk, high risk, not advisable
Clearly establish that not all tactics are included in the glossary: don't want to give away the recipe to search engines or to our competitors.
If a tactic is not clearly defined, a marketing manager should pause to question why.
Promote using all available networks and major industry associations.

Consider this topic with your head and less with your heart because if your heart gets in the way, it may not get too far.

Brian Combs is up next. SEM is known for its holy wars. Here are some recent discussions: "Are paid links evil?" and "Is bid management dead?" There's a lot of dissent.
How do we find consensus on purchased/rented links and link baiting techniques?

SEM firms are on a continuum. Anything outside of what Google says is okay is wrong to people, for example. Some behavior is clearly unethical, like misleading clients and engaging in risky practices without disclosure. Others: selling traffic delivery as search engine optimization, managing campaigns with untrained staff members, and performing SEO for uncompetitive yet impressive sounding keywords.

Last up is Ian McAnerin. We can talk about marketing standards and be detailed or very light. Ian wants middle ground.

Morals = personal code of conduct for the self (religion, philosophy)
Ethics = social. Code of conduct related to interactions with others (law, etiquette)
Standards = documented agreement on specifications, rules, and normas (Thou Shalt, You Must)
Guidelines = documented agreementson general principles and processes, usually to clarify or provide context for standards (You should, try to)

Google doesn't provide standards. They provide guidelines. Ian finds that interesting because you usually need standards to provide guidelines.

Why do you need standards? For guidance, credibility, and protection. It gives you a hint of what training you should need. You should give the industry credibility (and yourself). If you get sued and you said "I followed XXXX's best practices," it will be easier than if you don't have standards.

Argument against search standards: restraint of innovation, loss of control or unfair concentration of power, blurring morals vs. ethics and standards vs. guidelines, too broad or narrow specification, and enforcement.

Restraint of innovation - standards need to be a living document and evolve with time. New criteria and technology will emerge and change over time (like social media).

Loss of control - power corrupts. Lack of power corrupts too. Search engine optimization is a business. Take calculated risks to compete or innoovate. Mistakes will be made.

Blurring these morals - Google won't allow you to bid on beer on AdWords but they will let you bid on Wine. That's a moral decision, not an ethical decision.

Too broad/narrow: there's a difference between an SEO and an SEO consultant. The industry defines the industry, not search engines or any other group. Business ethics have almost universal support unlike other areas such as specific search engine guidelines.

Enforcement and authority: who are you and what gives you the right? Lack of legislative authority - it has to be opt-in. Must be seen to be neutral - not a "money maker" or publicity scheme. Public awareness is also important.

For testing, clients and potential employers love standardized testing but SEOs don't. Teaching and tests should be separate. Set a lowest common denominator. Testing can help train and encourage standards. PPC and SEO should be separate tracks. The cost of entry should be low enough to allow people in other countries to participate.

Code of ethics - should be applied to everybody and while being clear to the public. It should protect the integrity of the industry.

Professional standards - specific and measurable means of identifying compliance with code of ethics. Best practices.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Mike McDonald, WebProNews

Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance is first up. Blended results give you more opportunities in the search results. It creates an engagement opportunity. It creates traffic, links and buzz about your site. She then explains what blended results are, but I covered that like a billion times today.

She shows a sample of bare Escentuals, which uses videos to demonstrate how to use their make up. She shows a similar thing in Yahoo, but searching for "how to use bare Escentuals." She shows how to tie a tie, returns images, and two videos for me. She shows that these videos are getting links to them.

HSN is taking advantage of video optimization as well. They also have a MySpace Video page, see here for it. HSN is very active in their YouTube profile and they have over seven-thousand videos out on the web.

What Matters:
- Ratings
- Votes
- Comments
- Profiles
- Names
- Links to profiles

Social Media Sites are great
- News; digg, reddit
- Sharing
- Etc.

Your Own Site:
- Housing your own videos
- Housing your own podcasts
- Images
- Ratings and reviews
- Forums

Analytics:
- You need to track referrers
- Add parameters to URLs
- Assign values to engagements
- Remember conversions isn't just an immediate purchase

Chris Smith, Lead Search Strategist, NetConcepts is next up.

Will It Blend with Shopping Search Sites?

What phrases invoke the product search results in the Google web results? Very specific searches invoke them, such as product name searches. He then shows specific examples.

When creating feeds, upload product titles that match up for what people are searching for.

Same with Yahoo, searches like nikon coolpic s51 brings up products. He finds it harder to get products listed in Yahoo and Microsoft, compared to Google. He shows a search for zune mp3 player in Live Search. He shows the titles of the links and says, make it english.

- Create feed and optimize according to source of best potential benefit
- Create good accurate item titles
- Use long tail terms in title
- Always include pictures
- Insure pictures are available through image search
- Seller ratings play a big role in rankings in Google
- Product ratings are important
- Product names and brand names in item titles may work better
- Site PageRank
- Prices
- Website popularity for keyword
- User click behavior and time on product page
- Quality score, keyword density, Word order

Phil Stelter is now up, not sure if he works anywhere right now. Waiting for him to say a company but who knows...

- Optimize your product feeds
- Optimize your Yahoo SSP feed
- Cover off on basic site optimization

Yahoo SSP may be the original blended result, because this existed for a while.

Prioritize your work by the potential return and he shows comScore numbers on which engine is the biggest and baddest.

Two major implications:
(1) Organic strengthens it's role as a research and brand vehicle.
(2) SEO refocuses from keyword to user relevance.

He then shows the golden search triangle (amazing how it is still used today, isn't this from 2004? I know they updated it).

Starbucks closing tonight and he shows how it is huge in Google Trends. In Google search results, thee is not much there for starbucks closing or starbucks. He then looks at Yahoo, the one search picked up on it but still nothing special. Ask.com shows more pictures and more diversity but nothing more about the news. Live Search shows local results but no marketers coming in there and making money on it.

A good example of marketers taking advantage of it is with an old navy search. A YouTube video comes up for old navy Google search, < a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-7luX488iY">here it is. And this guy runs creative for Old Navy. This is a good example of taking advantage of universal search.

Tips:
- Create quality content
- Find a trend and whip it
- Respect the sources
- Become a reference
- Test now
- Embrace new dimensions in search

Paid search allows you to generate traffic from search engines by purchasing ads, usually on a cost-per-click (CPC) / pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This session covers the basic of how to purchase placement from the major search engines, including best practices for success with your ads.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn
Q&A Moderator: Anton Konikoff, Founder and CEO, Acronym Media
Speaker: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Matt is talking about why he loves PPC.
Example of Bebop Baby Shop. The business opened in August of 2007, no publicity, and needed to get people in the store. They decided to start a PPC campaign, and one month later they had 124k ad impressions, 300+ qualified visitors, and cost was $185 -- less than one ad for the local newspaper. Sales three months ahead of projections.

The investment in PPC is very measurable, and more measurable than many other types of advertising. Gives example of company under-investing in PPC campaign. He tried to keep the ad spend as a percentage of total revenues. He kept the percentage the same, and the sales tripled.

PPC and SEO are Complementary.
You can get going quickly if you are a new site, and PPC provides good market research. You can discover which words convert. You can also help manage your risk of algorithm changes. If you have PPC, you have some protection against another Florida update. PPC is also helpful in providing a predictable, dependable flow of traffic.

PPC allows you more control over messaging.
You can control your messaging through your ad text, while you can't always determine what text is shown in the SERP for an organic search results. You also get to determine what page your visitor lands on, while you can't always do that with organic search.

Process creates sustainable advantage
It's not just about keywords, ads, or bids. It's not where you are at a moment in time, but what you're learning as you go. Plan on working in a disciplined manner.

Use systems-level thinking. Align your campaign goals with larger company goals. It's not just about increasing visitors, but it's also about increasing sales. It can be good to be in a small firm, since you don't have to go through several levels of management to change your ad or landing page.

Track your performance and make adjustments. Be methodical, measure and test everything that you can. Don't react too quickly, but don't get analysis-paralysis. You don't want to make changes based on too little data, like having only five clicks on an ad text.

Overview of Paid Search

Search Engine Networks

Definitions:
Keywords : Words or phrases that users type in to find what you are selling.
Ads: The short text/graphic ads that represent your elevator pitch.
Landing pages: where your ads take users and turn them into customers. You don't need to create landing pages for each and every campaign, but you don't want to always take people to the home page of the site.

The process involves managing all of the above; tracking your results, conversions, ROI; and testing your ads and landing pages.

Search Landscape for 2008
Google has 68% of search engine market share, the others have the rest of the share. Didn't see country or other details about this market share.

Search engines and search partners. The user types in a query, and they are actively seeking what they type in.

Content network websites. The user doesn't type in a query, but they encounter the ads when they are doing something else (reading an online newspaper or other form of content). Content ads are important, but different from search, and do not treat them the same.

Screenshot showing which is free and which is paid in Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, Ask search results. Ask is different, they double-serve results. You can have two different ads in the same search result page, as they take ads from Google. Can be cheap, since no one is interested in spending on a place that has such a small marketing share.

Screenshot of content network ad, showing ads for wine on a page with content about French wine and food. For content ads, you want to put ads that are low engagement. For lead generation and low engagement types of program, content network is good. If you're selling expensive server gear, it's not as good.

Search engines ads ARE NOT content network ads. If you don't understand content ads, turn them off until you are ready. You need to explicitly turn them off, since they on by default. In Yahoo, it's under administration tab, and under edit campaign settings in Yahoo. If you have content on, take a look at home much you're paying for content and see if that is working for you. Likely it's not if you've never known that it was there.

How does PPC Work?

We all know the questions:
What's the best position for your ads?
Does the highest bid always get the top spot?
How much will I pay? (Max CPC vs Avg. CPC)
What's all of this crap about Quality Score?

For some of these, you might as well ask how long is a piece of string.

The speaker heard some reports about how men versus women look at search results. Men clicked the top result. Woman will look over page, look at links, then decide what to click. If you believe this, it may affect what position you want for your ads depending on the type of item you are selling.

What's the best position?
He gives a schematic of Google and Yahoo search results. In Google, you don't automatically know if the first position is on the right or on the top, you need to sign up for Google analytics.

In a perfect world, you'd put together a couple of ads, bid, put in a landing page, and get first result for cheap. Here's what really happens: search engines want relevant results. Pretend that you can search for a color blue. Solid blue would be in first position, less blue would be in second position, etc. If the highest bid determined the ad display, the results displayed may not be quite as relevant. A search for blue would show a result for red if the bid is high enough. This is the basis for a quality score.

Quality score: First is look at ads and keywords, decide who is going to be in the first x results.
Ad rank = quality score times max bid.
What goes into a quality score:
Relevancy: Keywords -> ads -> landing page. How well do they fit together
Historical Performance (CTR)
- your keywords
- your keywords + ads in combination
- your ad groups, campaigns, account. If you have an ad group with over 100 or 200 ads, split it out. Put your higher performing ads in one group and lower in another ad groups, help get your quality score better.

CTR is normalized by ad position, search engines know that first position will get more clicks, and they take this into account.

Visual example given of bids, relevance, and placement on page.

Who pays what CPC? I missed some of the explanation here.

Please forget everything you just learned about ad rank. Please remember only that ad rank exists. Concentrate on creating great PPC campaigns. Yes, it's helpful to know that it exists, but there is no way to know all of this information. Know that you don't have to be the highest bid to be in a higher position. A rough quality score (great, good, poor) is given to you.

Setting up and managing campaigns

What is your primary goal of your campaign?
Leads, sales, brand building.

How do you define success? More difficult because so many companies are not solely online.
Online vs. offline sales conversions
It may be steps on the path towards sales conversion, not necessarily the huge purchase.

How do you measure success?
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft offer free conversion trackers
Third party web analytics tools (Hitslink, WebTrends, Webside Story, etc)
How much the phones are ringing
Total company sales and profits increasing

Start measuring actions. Don't measure just CTR or CPC. Even pure internet companies get trapped by the PPC stats, but need to look at bigger picture.

Budget Properly
Put controls in place to prevent runaway ad spend. Set daily budgets, and budgets for campaigns. If you are under budget, you can always increase.

Asks if any clients are present, then gives an example of how something got screwed up. No cap on campaign, wanted to put in negative keywords, but went to wrong screen and didn't get negative in front of them. Huge ad spend for a few hours.

Be aware of natural seasonal up ticks. Holidays, other events can cause spikes. You don't want to cripple campaign by constraining the budget. Recommends to set display accelerated to make sure that you do get all of your ad spend in, instead of letting Google guess what the best display rate is.

Set ROI and ROAS Targets
Measure at the aggregate level, get more granular over time. Don't measure an individual keyword, unless it's huge like student loan or home mortgage.

Establish cost per lead/order/action
measure by search network, campaign/adgroup/keyword
Essential to ongoing success.

Remember that sales cycle can take a while, and you don't always know how keywords led to sale. Could be the first or last keyword used, or not recorded if it's over a month from the start of the sales process.

Case study of Pets We Loved, they make pet bereavement products. The challenge was he was a cash strapped small business. They looked at what PPC people were clicking on (dogs) but most of the orders were for cats. They took the dog keywords offline, and refocused the ads and website content on cats.

You need to structure your account well. Don't just name it Campaign #1 and Campaign #2. He explains the structure of a PPC account (campaign -> adgroup -> keywords). An example of a good organization would be to have ad groups by breed of dog, with keywords for each breed, and ads relevant to each bred.

Landing pages

Potent area for PPC campaign optimization
If your landing page doesn't work well, why are you sending PPC traffic?
Make sure your ads are going to live pages.
Minor improvements can lead to big gains

Get visitors to the content the yare searching for - Quickly! Even if it's ugly, if you have the content they are looking for, send them there.
Home page may be ok for single product sites
Send visitors to the best interior page. Don't make them click multiple times to get to what you are advertising.
Consider developing and testing landing pages for PPC traffic, can have good results.

Landing page impacts quality score
Use keywords in your meta title, description, keywords
Include keywords prominently on page in text and image
Don't go overboard on this part. Do think about it, but don't spend all kinds of time or SEO stuff on it.

Building keyword lists

Start with your own brain. What words do you use to describe your stuff? What words do other people use? Use keyword tools that Google and Microsoft offer.

Organize keyword lists. Move from generalized lists to small, tightly themed groups. Makes it easy to manage and write ads.

Get Rapid Keyword Software. Lets you do lots of combining and cool features, $59.

Briefly mentioned keyword matching, broad, exact, phrase. Presentation will be online and you can see more information there. Google and Microsoft work almost identically, Yahoo works a little differently.

Negative match keywords are a big deal. Helps prevent ads showing on non-productive searches. Improves CTR, quality scores, and reduces costs. Example of person selling wool capes, and shows it for batman capes for Halloween.

Do regular keyword cleanups. Use negative keywords, remove low performing keywords.

Example of a client that was bidding on sock monkeys. Looked at broad match, people were looking for sock gorilla and other non-relevant searches.

Skipped over two slide here.

Ads can be designed to act as a filter, not just draw clicks. If your keyword is ambiguous (like "home care") you need ads that clearly identify the purpose. Talk about in-home care so people don't click on it for home repair.

Increase your CTR by writing great ads. A variety of copy styles exist, and have other people write ads to get different ads to get different ideas.

Two minutes left. Mentions geo-targeting and day/time targeting are good.

Live coverage provided by Keri Morgret.

Session Summary

You worked so hard over the years to build a respectable budget for paid search, and now the search engines themselves are pitching non-search ads at you or others are suggesting you try the latest ads on a social network. This session looks at when you want to stand up for search, with strategies on keeping your budget strong and arguing that new ads require new money, not a slice of paid search funds.

Moderator / Speakers

Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Agency & Search Marketing of ExactTarget, is moderating this session along with Rob Kerry, Editor at Sphinn.com, who is moderating the Q&A portion. Speaking is Brian Combs, Founder & Senior Vice President of Apogee Search, Adam Jewell, Search Engine Marketing Specialist at NetPlus Marketing, and Kchitiz Regmi of Milestone Internet Marketing.

Brian is up first. It is not all about budget. The larger investment may be time itself. Know your numbers in order to defend your budget. Also be able to separate different paid search models - keyword search, content match, etc. Now there are often hidden costs in testing. Another way to defend ad budget is to allow your paid search to inform other type so advertising. That's it for Brian - pretty short and sweet.

Adam is up next. In defending budget, first clearly define your online goals and what success actually means. Focus on the highest leverage ROI drivers to maximize ROI across all advertising and promotional programs. Use web stats to evaluate effectiveness of programs.

In defining goals, clarify if it is sales, leads, traffic or something else. You have to be able to show that you have reached or exceeded those goals if you are going to effectively defend the search budget. If you can use analytics to show sales compared to search leads, search is always going to show that it is a great ROI. The key is presenting that in a compelling manner.

In summary, allocate budgets to highest ROI generating outlets. Test new opportunities but don't leave money on the table by under funding search. Adam then showed us several "real life" examples of programs that might get cut while others might receive more funds thrown at them. It involves taking a look under the hood to see what is working and what is not.

Finally, Kchitiz is up. He is going to focus on arguments defending the importance of paid search. He points out that you can capitalize on video ads with YouTube. It is not just text ads anymore on Google. He then shows examples of Google paid results, paid result on Google Maps, ads on YouTube and even on mobile phones. In other words, paid search continues to grow in its reach. Another defense for paid search is the ability to geo-target. He goes on to show how targeted paid ads can be - something that is not available with many other forms of advertising.

Finally, showing positive ROI will go a long way in defending a search budget against new ad fads. With analytics, the effectiveness of a paid search ad can be demonstrated very easily. Don't forget to use landing page testing to prove the effectiveness of paid search.

Now the Q&A portion begins. Rather than try to capture every question and answer, I will point out some highlight from this portion of the session.

• One person asked what the opinion of the panel is on "in-text" ads. Brian answered that if you get good pricing, you can get a good ROI. Conversions rates will very likely be lower.
   
• What happens when affiliate marketing is kicking paid search's butt? You can't ignore the reach of paid search ads. Also, not every company is going to be able to even run an affiliate program.

David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

The Economics Of Search - Economists working for the major search engines? Absolutely, and they try to predict where the search economy is going. This session looks at some of their work in predicting and modeling the space.
Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Mike McDonald, WebProNews

Speakers:
Peter A. Coles, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Michael Schwarz, Marketplace Designer, Yahoo! Research
Mark Mahaney, Director, Internet Research - Citigroup Investment Research
Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google

Michael is up first. He's a marketplace designer at Yahoo.

There are 2 questions:
How do we balance interests of users, advertisers, and the search engine?
The key areas of economics of sponsored search and where the market is going.

There's no tradeoff between revenue and satisfying advertisers and users. Maximizing value delivered to users and advertisers approximately maximizes search engine's profits (it's a theorem). Do interests ever conflict?

What's the future of sponsored search?
In the short run - the main competitor of Google and Yahoo in sponsored search - organic listings.
If search continues to dominate the sponsored search results, the business model will have to change.
Major challenges: making sponsored search more relevant, better measures of user experience, better advertiser tools, and more targeting and smarter advanced match.

Convergence of search and display advertisement:
Search is about current intent and display is about demographics.
Search for direct response display for branding.
Search is spot market display contracts.
Historically, search was selling for $0.05 a click and up - display for $5000 and up. The dynamics haven't changed much.
Different buyers and different sellers.
Convergence is happening as we speak.

Hal Varian, chief economicst at Google, speaks next about how to bid on AdWords.

Choose your keywords - the most popular keywords are not necessarily the most cost-effective. Use the keyword suggestion tool - it is based on real search behavior.
Look for long tail keywords: you only play for clicks. More than 50% query strings occur at most once a week.
What is the user looking for?
Searchers are sophisticated: SKU searches, etc.

Costs per conversion:
Note: conversion = acquisition = sale

Value per click and cost per click.

Determine the bid:
Profit = value per click * number of clicks - cost of clicks. - vx - c(x)
If you increase your bid from b to b' - clicks go from x to x', cost goes from c(x) to c(x')... wow too much math.
Then he shows an example. There are way too many numbers for you to understand this. Heck, I'm sitting here and I don't even understand it.

Budget: if your value per click exceeds your incremental cost per click you are making money on each additional click. Wh y do you want to stop? Why do you want a budget constraint at all?
If you are actually running into your budget constrain you are doing something wrong. Why? Because by lowering your bid you will get more clicks for the same total cost, so your profit will increase. However, it may make sense to have a budget constrain to avoid surgest in clicks.

Summary:
- Use the keyword tool. The more keywords the better.
- Use conversion tracking and analytics to estimate value per conversion, conversion rate, and value per click
- Determine bids that maximize profit by bidding up until your value per click is greater than your incremental cost per click.
If you persistently hit your budget, think of reducing your bid.

The next person up is Peter Coles from the Harvard Business School.

There are 2 sides of the marketplace. Neither wishes to join the marketplace unless there's signifcant representation of the other side. The two sides: advertisers and publishers.
It's difficult to enter the platform when other platforms already exist.

The term is multihoming. Can you as a participant join more than one platform at the same time? Publishers: generally not. Which ads do you want to put on the parts of your page that get the best clicks? You can't typically put one network of ads. You can't multihome.
Advertisers, however, can sign up for multiple networks. There's a tradeoff though - the reach that you get from the network compared to the costs of signing up for that network.
There's a challenge for new networks to enter.

Entry: chicken and egg problem.
Mobilzing a network is particularly challenging when there are strong cross side network effects. No publisher wants to be the first one to join the new network that enters. It's hard for an ad platform to make an emergence.
Nobody wants to be the first.

Approaches to entry:
- Incremental growth?
- Big bang (buy another ad platform, maybe)
- Using a flagship tenant - focus on one side.
- Innovation: double edged sword.

Segmentation: an approach to entry
- Focus on a specific market segment (vertical)
- Example is stubhub (vs ebay)
- Example is technology (Digg.com - now that Digg is going broad, start your own site. Chances are, I'll use it.)

Cross subsidization
- Make deals with low profits or margins now to produce benefits elsewhere within the network. Microsoft could outbid to gain third party sites because increased reach might add value to existing sites.

Takeaways:
- Strong cross side netowrk effects in ad platforms make entry challenging
- Segementation as an entry approach
- Differentiation, usually a powerful competitive force - can be a double edged sword.

Last up is Mark Mahaney of Citigroup.

US Internet Advertising Outlook - forcesating 22% year to year growth in net advertising to $126 billion in 2008
E-retail - forecasts 16% to $158 billion in 2008
Online travel - 14% to $106 billion in 2008

Now switch over to search. In 2008, about $11 billion is spent on search advertising. We're in an interesting environment; there's a slowdown in growth. We're seeing an impact in the financial community.
What we've seen is that amongst the Us major search engines, Google's share has declined. This may have been one of the reasons why MS bid for Yahoo.
Search budget share > search query share. Google's share of budget could exceed the search query share.

How big could mobile search be? 35 monthly searches per installed PC. Mobile search is a fascinating opportunity. In some point, 1 search per handset = $2.5 billion. This is the power of one. 10 monthly searches means mobile search will exceed PC search (by 2010).

Microhoo = it's hard to see this Microsoft/Yahoo deal not happening. Our bookies are all betting on it. Microsoft has to bid higher. This is one of their few opportunities to try to compete effectively with Google. They made this one of their top 3 growth priorities in 4 years and nothing has happened. and this is the only game-changing move that can happen.

3 questions:
1- Will MicroHoo lead to a search query shift among consumers? Will searchers change thier search habits?
2- Will the MicroHoo merger create a better search engine?
3- Could a larger #2 search engine draw search budgets away from Google?

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex

Found a hot spot for power and to comfortably blog a session. Plugged in and blogging in live mode.

Chris Smith, Lead Search Strategist, NetConcepts is first up. Common search phrases that invoke local include location name like city names. The most common combination is a business name / category, biz name, category with location, biz name / category in location, near location and around location. For example, Circuit City near Santa Clara.

He shows local blended in Live Search and shows at the top of the organic results are local search results. If you click deeper on the local results, you see more results. How do search engines rank these local results? He shows that with Live Search user rating plus proximity to center of location may determine the top placements in local search.

He then shows Yahoo and shows how has a slightly different look for local, still three listings here, as with Live. Yahoo has similar ranking formula but he thinks Yahoo has more signals, including page popularity. He also says that maybe Yahoo's delcious site may impact the Yahoo local results.

Now Google, Google now shows ten local listings - up from three results. They show a map, and yes, the results are near center of city. Some criteria include regular SEO criteria. Google has increased the amount of info in the one box. Google is increasing travel/maps market share according to hitwise. Google has a limited set of business categories. Businesses without street addresses wont be listed. OVer emphasis on centroid proximity non optimal. Normal probabilities with cannonicalizign listings, proper, geocoding and spamming.

Tips:
- Get an address near central location of the city

:)

Gab Goldenberg, Owner, SEO ROI is next up - seems like a brother. ;-) He is from montreal, ranks well for SEO Montreal in Google in the local.

Cast Study:

Bought MontrealSEO.ca for the keyword rich domain. Before that, he was on a blogspot domain. So he wanted to 301 the blogspot to the new domain. Before the 301, he did a sticky forward technique. Then he submitted to Google local, the montrealseo.ca domain. He he has three listings in Yahoo for seo montreal, numbers 1 and 2 and 10. Google couldn't figure out his canonical intent at that time. He built links and then added reviews in Google Maps.

Planning: Begin with the end in mind. He gives some ideas on doing videos on local business owners. Do local reviews for sites.

Make sure to set up a review funnel
- Mail/Email follow up
- Incentives
- Good and bad
- Direct or Review API

He then gives the ten commandments of paid links,,, I'll keep that for people who came to the conference.

Eric Lander, Associate Editor, Search Engine Journal is next up.

He shows a Google OneBox example for Santa Clara Sushi. He then shows how local results are blended into a search result, the Google Local plus/minus box. Yahoo is a bit more traditional, Yahoo one ups Google by showing a rating by users there. Live Search is very traditional but was a bit more disappointed.

Verified Listings:
- Manually verified feed via Google Local, Yahoo Local and Windows Live.
- Feed Based Solution to submit for businesses with many locations, such as ReachLocal, Localez and infoUSA.com.

Who are Trusted Sources?
- Internet Yellow Pages: SuperPages, YellowPages, YellowBook
- FeedProviders: InfoUSA, Localeze
- Social, Review & Niche Sites: Yelp, CitySearch, Automotive.com, etc.

Tips:
- Cross link your contact pages to MapQuest or other mapping service
- Verify your unverified listings, multiple data sources can lead to troubles
- Free Tools: Localeze's merchant profile manager lets you update your business profiles for free
- Search categories and users: Local search is very much social, user reviews, etc.

On the Q&A panel are the speakers plus:

Brian Gill, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Local
Kevin Hagwell, Senior Product Manager, Live Search Maps, Microsoft

Moderated by Dana Todd, who is heavily involved with both Sitelab and their new venture, Newsforce. Congratulations are also due to Dana who just was reelected to the Board of Directors of SEMPO. The “SMX Boot Camp” series of sessions seems to be primarily focused towards beginners. There are not too many better speakers than Heather Lloyd Martin and Jill Whalen to teach attendees about copywriting for SEO. Without further ado, let’s kick it off!

Dana introduces the speakers and mentions that way back in 1998 or so, she saw both Jill and Heather first present on the subject of writing for search engines (SEs). It was a new thing to consider: now your creative had to be crafted with spiders (search engine crawlers) in mind as well as humans.

Heather Lloyd Martin from SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions is also the author of “Successful Search Engine Copywriting.” Her presentation is titled “Increase Sales with SEO Copywriting Strategies.” She introduces that her and Jill will be discussing the foundations of SEO copywriting, and how it is different form direct response copywriting. She will discuss about 5 main points, including: how to create content, places to include key phrase, and how to works with titles and descriptions.

Why care about content? Quotes Seth Godin who said simply “the best SEO is good content.” She agrees that between technical considerations and linking, other things are important to SEO, but feels that the content will drive the rankings. SEO content across the buying cycle - shows a triangle with sections from top to bottom: purchase, research, awareness. The awareness phase is when people now they want to find out more about something. Then they do research, and eventually make a purchase. Some keywords actually fit all phases of the buying cycle. A lot of ecommerce people focus only on the top of the triangle…this is faulty because there is a lot more activity going on earlier in the buying cycle.

She shows a site called “Amsterdamescape.com” and explains how she is impressed with the way that they have optimized the content. She shows that they have taken the time to create pages specific to many of the searches related to Amsterdam, and yielded lots of rankings at Google as a result. I have to add that I personally feel the page she highlighted, which is about pickpockets in Amsterdam, does look a little “unnatural” to me because of the optimization. This may be partially because they are not native speakers, but in my opinion they could use a scrub to make it more human-friendly. However, as Heather points out, this is an example of how a smaller site can effectively compete against much larger sites, through the use of extensive content.

A lot of ecommerce sites were not concerned about content because they figure with their thousands of products there is enough. Not so, Heather says. She uses the example of ice.com and the “jewelry education” section which spends a page describing Diamonds, with links to further information about gold and pearls.

How to work with key phrases? How do you place them in the copy? Jill will be explaining lots about this, so she just wants to touch on it. Heather sees in the forums a lot of comments about “optimizing with keywords not being that big of a deal..” Shows an example of “the Place Below” restaurant in London and how the content is overstuffed, making it look less appealing. She asks the audience how many people would eat there based on reading this content and no one raises their hand.

For maximum success, place 2-3 key phrases in: your main body or text copy, headlines and sub headers, calls to action and hyperlinks. Sound difficult? She says that this often actually makes it easier to make writing more specific. Instead of using “our inventory,” use “our complete line of table lamps” or “our data recovery service.”

She will now talk about how to improve conversions starting directly at the search results page (SERP). The SERP will incorporate the page tile and the description snippet, which becomes the first chance to convert the searcher. Leverage the power of titles. From a copywriter’s mentality, titles are like the headline. Those who write titles often spend more time working on the title than anything else. Heather describes using the “site:www.yourdomain.com” command in the Google search box to evaluate your current tiles. There is a problem if all of them or many of them are the same. If you walked into a bookstore and saw all books with the same title and different content, how would you differentiate?

Best practices for creating a title. Make it read like a compelling headline. Create unique titles for every page. Include the main kws. Don’t necessarily target the brand or company name. She recommends keeping to 50-75 characters. She likes using benefit statements in the titles (i.e. Free Shipping).

The description snippet. She knows that search engines often do not use the Meta Description. They will pull a snippet of text that is around the search query. So, if you place benefit statements around the main key phrases, you will likely have a more compelling snippet used for the SERP description.

Leverage other forms of content. With Universal Search., content is a lot of things now. She will focus on consumer reviews. She cites a study that said that 9 of 10 people will look to consumer reviews prior to a major purchase (citation needed :p – 89% of statistics are made up). She recommends using these.

Overcoming common challenges – there is a give and take between what we can do and what we cannot. “Insanity is doing the same thing over an over and expecting different results” Albert Einstein. Do not expect vastly different results with minor tweaks. If there is no time to create content – use partnerships or outsource it. There is a lot of grey area- you can create some content and outsource the rest. If you cannot get signoff to create new pages, try to edit current pages for key phrases. Also tweak the titles to reflect the new focus, and additionally, use headlines and sub headlines. The decision makers can actually start to see minor results and then may buy in for a greater amount of new content.

For a quick solution to unique titles, see if IT can dynamically create them and allow for later tweaks. You should always hand-create titles for the most important conversion pages. Heather asks how many are affiliates? The problem with that is that the content is the same across multiple sites. One of the things you can do as much as possible is to add unique content around the boilerplate stuff. Again, rewrite the main conversion pages first, and then figure out a plan for gradually doing the rest.

Parting ponderables: smart SEO copywriting closes the loop between the engines and your offer – so the right approach is crucial. Good writers can create seamless search engine-targeted copy w/out losing conversions. Create spider friendly content can drastically improve performance. Final word: use benefit statements! She announces her brand new site that went live last night at 3 in the morning:searchenginewriting.com.

Next up is the venerable Jill Whalen of High Rankings. She will expand on some thing Hetaher spoke to and some other things as well. Copywriting SEO myths: “Your page copy must…”

- Be a certain number of words. Myth…make it as long as it needs to be to say what needs to be said

- Use bold or italics. Myth…this sometimes looks silly.

- Target a specific keyword density. Myth…there is no specific keyword density that you need to write to.

- Be optimized for only one keyword phrase per page. Jill could not disagree more with anything than this. You can get more success using multiple phrases…optimizing for one phrase can make the copy look contrived and silly.

- Be optimized for the long tail. Don’t get her wrong, long tail is good…but this isn’t optimization. SEO is about optimizing for phrases that lots of people are searching for.

Search engines don’t know about you. Websites are not online brochures. You have to assume that visitors have never heard of you. She shows an Australian site NIWA Science that she can’t figure out what the site is about by looking at the home page and the same thing with the “Springload” home page…if she already knew what they were, the content may make sense to her. Every page must provide specific info as to what the page offers. Do not make it into a puzzle. Use plain language that actually uses the keyword phrases. There is nothing scary about SEO copywriting, just trying to be a little more descriptive.

Good content should be on the “regular pages of your site.” Those are the pages that should have good content…you don’t necessarily need to cerate educational sections or whatever (paraphrased). What is good content? Your job is to answer the question of the searcher at the SE. Provide them with information. Speak to the target audience.

Content that is king is written for users while keeping the SEs in mind. Think about the users first. It is all about this delicate balance. Good content starts with good keyword research. It is really all about uncovering the words that people will use to find your site. Base your copywriting around those words. How to choose the keyword phrases? Use the most relevant. Is this keyword phrase exactly about what I offer? Then optimize for it – do not be afraid of it. Choose all the most relevant and specific phrases. You cannot be too general…if you sell houses your will not likely optimize for just the word “house.” You have to include geographical words, etc to make them relevant.

SEO copywriting for the home and main category pages: These are the pages that tend to get the most weight from link popularity, so you should sue your more competitive terms on these pages. use the broad ones here and capitalize on their popularity. You may want to list the products with a short summary, and then actually link to the products or sub categories. She uses her own site’s service page, and how she organized the content with brief intros and links.

SEO copywriting for the deeper product-level pages: Use more specific terms with strong keyword rich headlines. Use strong anchor text pointing to those inner pages from the higher level pages. the anchor text should escrive exactly what you are going to get. Shows an example of a cosmetics site that optimized a product page for crystal bath salts. her analysis led her to feel that the site should eb targeting “bath sea salts,” which is actually a more often searched word than crystal bath salts, and less highly competituive than kjust “bath salts.”

SEO copywriting for news pages: Use natural long tail keywords. Don’t use PDFs. Host your press releases on your site (amen, Jill). News items titles should be descriptive. For example: Title = “Consider the compliance risks and benefits of electronic test ordering;” or “Using technology to improved denials managements.” Don’t use “read more” unless you are also using a descriptive link to the same page.

Where to use keyword phrase: title tags are the most important, in her opinion. meta descriptions – she feels that SEs are actually using these much more often these days, so take care to insert the keywords. Anchor text, not only for outside links, but also for the internal links. Make sure that your site architecture allows this. Use keywords in clickable image alt attributes. And of course, use them in headlines. Whether or not it is an H tag, Jill actually doesn’t feel this makes a difference.

The engines have to see your content. Design issues can be a big problem, like using graphical headlines. When the images are not clickable, the engines may ignore the alt attributes. All Flash or graphical sites: avoid them because SEs cannot read them. Also you should avoid any technical programming that can “trap” spiders. Make sure that the engines can grab the text from the page.

Jill’s nitty gritty writing tips: be descriptive, not using “our product” or “our service.” At the same time don’t stuff it in a zillion times. Edit the current text on your pages and replace it with keyword phrases where appropriate. Shows a couple examples of generic creative versus optimized creative which actually “says what the stuff is.” Don’t use just single words – expand them into phrases. “Furniture” can become lots of different phrases. “Rustic wood furniture,” “solid wood furniture,” etc.

Ultimately you do not want to fake real content, fix your site! No need to create a bunch of useless articles about the history of doorstops or something…most likely your current pages can be “fixed.” Do not use “doorway pages” that are not an actual part of the site. She usually doesn’t; have this in her deck but someone just came through her class that had been taught an old SEO tactic from pre-1998 of using doorway pages.

Remember that content is indeed key. Hire real copywriters to do this…sure everyone can write, but that doesn’t mean they are legitimately able to be effective copywriters. Good content brings highly targeted visitors that want exactly what you have to offer and then converts them.

Note this is live coverage of SMX West 2008, and there may exist grammatical or typographical errors in this post. Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Session Summary

This session looks at how personas can be a powerful tool for improving paid search performance, covering how to create them and case studies on their use in PPC. Personas are a way to model the basic types of visitors you expect to come to your site and tailor the arrival experience to them.

Moderator / Speakers

Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro, is moderating this session along with Anton Konikoff, Founder and CEO of Acronym Media, who is moderating the Q&A portion. Speaking is Brian Bond, Vice President Marketing and Products at Future Now, and Ian Lurie, President of Portent Interactive.

Gord introduces the topic, stating that personas allow you to dig deeper under the surface. He polls audience asking who is using personas now, who plans on using them in the future and who doesn't even know what they are.

Why use personas? Looking at psychology, one can study how people come to decisions or how people rationalize. However, recent studies reveal that our rationalization is very complex. Persona studies allow marketers to dive deeper into why people make the decisions they do. He talks about the decision making landscape of which a lot of it is not done rationally but sub- consciously.

One has to understand the objectives - define decision criteria, determine budget scope, as well as other elements. Even though we appear to be different, in reality we are more alike than we are different. Persona study is trying to understand how customers are going to react to web site and products. Understanding the similarities in people will help simplify the persona process.

One area Gord looks at a lot is how people interact with search engines. He talks about channel capacity - we have very limited short term memory. In regards to search engines, we can only consider 4 - 5 things at a time. This is why is is so important to have visibility above the fold. Comparing heuristic decision making to optimal, we start off with simply an awareness. That evolves into what is called satisficing (no that is not a mis-spell). We then move into the comparison matrix and finally head to head comparison.

Gord finally points out the difference in how men and women use their brains. Men use one side whereas women use both sides of their brain. Search engines are more of a man's domain whereas web pages are more geared towards how a woman functions.

Next up is Ian. He is going to explain to us how we actually create a persona and use it in search marketing. He first gives us Wikipedia definition of a persona. His short version - your brand's imaginary friends. You use these to qualify how you are going to conduct your search marketing campaign. You can not effective market unless you understand how your audience is feeling.

The process of creating a persona involves research, brainstorming, writing, creating campaign, segmenting  your audience and then measure, adjust and repeat. Research involves demographics - where do you live, do you have kids, what is your income, etc. He reminds us that you cannot build personas from keywords alone. In developing personas, you must talk to real people. Use surveys and the like but get a feel for what real people are feeling and thinking. In brainstorming and writing, avoid the following - the CEO data source (someone who is too engrained - can't take an outside look), stereotypes, the quest for perfection, and thesauritis. Creating the campaign is where you begin to define your keyword list. He then goes on to show us an example of a persona.

Finally Brian is up. Brian is going to show us the power of personas and how to plan in our marketing. Looking at data, we can sometimes forget we are dealing with real people. Part of the power of personas is having empathy for the user - caring how they feel and what they think. He asks us to compare this empathy for the user to writing a letter to a very dear personal friend. That letter is going to be different if written to a close friend as opposed to a stranger.

Empathy needs to then be combined with insight into human behavior. What are people's motivations and buying modes? Brian points out that some empathy for customers is better than none and more is better than some. Now having empathy is good but how you use them in your SEM campaigns gives them power. It is not about what you did sell but rather what you did not sell. A web page either contain the content people are looking for or at least contain links to the content they want. It really comes down to placing yourself in the other person's shoes.

Personas really revolve around diving into the psychological and behavioral process of people and then designing a marketing campaign or web experience with them in mind. Subtle things matter when they are the things your customers care about.

Now time for the Q&A. Although I did not try to capture everything that was asked and answered, I did pick up the following points:

• Read "The User is Always Right" for a better understanding of this subject.
  
  
• Best data to look at is to look beyond data and talk to real customers as well as your sales people.
  
  
• Surveys tell you what people think they would do, not what they really do.
  
  
• To under stand differences between men and women, read "Think Pink" and possibly a book on evolutionary psychology.

David Wallace - CEO and Founder SearchRank.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Fionn Downhill, CEO and President, Elixir Systems

Gregg Poulin, General Manager, Compete.com, Compete Inc. is up first. He starts off about the long tail and search is the quintessential long tail. 8 billion search queries on the web and only 5.2 billion search referrals. Everyone is chasing Google for the share. Yahoo lost 25% market share over the last year.

Google is for men, Ask and Microsoft more for women and Yahoo seems to me in the middle.

Searchers don't care about market share - typically a searcher will complete their search on the search engine they started with. Search is more than direct response, 62% of search activity is related to purchase.

A searcher's focus changes over time.

SEMs need to be in more places at one time, not just Google. Know your customers and how they use the search engines. Say the right thing at the right time.

Jon Stewart, Research Director, Technology & Search, Nielsen Online is next up. He looks at search through the searcher's perspective.

Search Growth vs. Internet Growth:
- The size of both the search universe and digital media universe show modest growth
- Search query volume has outpaced all internet page views, drawing 13% over the last year compared to 10% of overall digital media

Searcher Demographics:
- A larger percentage of the older audience searches but young people search more heavily.

The Elite Quintile:
- Top 20% of searchers ranked by search volume
- Average searches per person (top 20% do 128 and lower 80% do 16 searches)
- Average number of search engines used (top 20% 2.3 and lower 80% 1.5)
- Gender (top 20% male 51% and female 49% :: Lower 80% make 45% and female 55%)

The Accidental people are those who search twice or less during a month. Gender is pretty much split here.

Searchers are more valuable:
People who used search to navigate to a retailer at least once on average spent 25% more. They also have a 4% higher rate of conversion.

Nielsen's View of US Search Market Share:
- Google 57%
- Skipped rest of slides

Searcher Overlap:
- 42% of Google users are loyal to Google, but 24% of Googler's use Yahoo, 10% use Live and 9% use both Google Yahoo and Live
- 10% of Yahoo users are loyal
- 2% of Live users are loyal

Loyalty Indicators:
- Heavy searchers are not loyal at all, 33% of them are using five or more brands in a month
- Normal searchers 37% of them are only using one engine, 10% are using five
- The majority of Google searchers are using Google as their primary (77%), 46% Yahoo, 38% f Live and 25 Ask and 58% AOL
- Repeat searchers: Google is retaining a lot of their searchers over time compared to others

Drivers of Search:
- Default home page settings: There is a high degree of overlap between home page setting and search volume on Yahoo. Over half of all searchers are generated by people with a Yahoo brand home page setting. Default home page does not play a large role in whether a person uses that engine as their primary one. Yahoo is the exception with 49% of their primary users having the Yahoo home page setting.
- Default / auto search: Default search does not play a significant role in driving search volume. Google is the exception with nearly half of their searches generated by people with Google set as their search provider. Google and Yahoo make the best use of the default search. 44% and 26% of their respective primary users have the same branded auto search setting.

James of comScore, Inc. is now up. Market is maturing. Dominance is regional. Intense users lift marketing. Search engine volume does not link up with search engine revenue. Those are the key points.

US Search Market up 8% vs. December 2007. Total US searches for all properties at 14.6 billion, up 28% versus January 2007. January returns market to pre holiday levels, following seasonal swoon. Driving growth includes more people searching and more people searching more often. Three fourths of US search market growth driven searcher intensity increases of 20%. An increasing searcher base, up 7% versus January 2007. Searchers are making more search visits while searches per visit are holding steady. Search growth being driven by heavy users. Heavy users are getting heavier as time goes on, up 23% this year.

Google is up 53%. All of the top 5 search engines with the exception of Yahoo showing search volume increases vs January 2007. Google is up over 50% versus last year. Google, is by design, committing to the user and taking a hit on ad revenue - so they are gaining massive share by doing this in the short term.

Sizable search volume comes from outside the search engines. eBay is the largest with 467 million searches in January.

72 billion searches conducted worldwide in January 2008. There is a huge amount of potential for "international search pollution." He then shows stats by local country search engine - too much to blog. But Google does dominate globally.

Micro-Hoo vs. Google
- Google will still be twice the size compared to Microsoft and Yahoo together
- Microsoft further extends Yahoo's sizable lead in Japan
- Little is gained in Brazil

Searchers increasingly use new methods to conduct searches
- 11 percent from toolbars
- 6% from address bar
- 2% from affiliate sites

Ask gets a ton from toolbars

Toolbar searchers are more loyal and engaged.

qSearch Click:
- Paid search coverage strategies differ
-- Yahoo and AOL show increases in coverage vs. Jan 08
-- Google and MSN have lowered coverage rates by 4 to 12 points respectively
-- Google is by designing pulling back on coverage and committing to the user

- Total Clicks Growth
-- Overall click growth of 18% being driven by organic click increase of 19% year over year
- Paid is 18%
- Holiday season drives Q4 paid search increases with Ask seeing the biggest Q/Q increase of 36%
- Google reported paid click growth of 9 percent Q/Q aligning closely with comScore's 8 percent growth Q/Q
- We see fewer ads on Google
- All engines reported paid click growth in Q4 versus Q3 2007

Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research, Hitwise is last up. A vanity search on Bill Tancer on Yahoo returned an ad named "Tired of Bill Tancer" and linked to compete.com. So he is freshening up his presentation because of it. Funny...

Google has 66%, Yahoo 21%, Live 7%, Ask 4$ and others have 2% - data as of February 23, 2008. Google continues to increase in market share, Yahoo search slight decline, Microsoft decline and Ask increased.

Microsoft and Yahoo news broke and everyone wanted to talk about search. But what about the actual destinations and properties. Bill first thought about all of Yahoo's number one properties.

Search, clicks and recessions. The recent news about a recession based on click data - he thought it is crazy. If paid search decline is a sign of recession than search referrals to e-commerce sites would decline, but his Hitwise data did not show that. Tancer said, there is no recession based on Google data. He plotted click stream from Google to shopping sites year over year and it showed we are up.

He then showed Roger's Adoption Curve.
Bill showed it took six weeks for YouTube to dominate the space. There was an adoption curve there, early on. Bill looked at YouTube type of sites and rolled their data back to before the sites were popular and looked at the data. He found that innovators, early adopters and early majority were the majority of people involved prior to the sites going popular. So they looked at what are these people doing today, where are they searching?

They are looking at Yahoo, Clusty, SniperPoint, Zvents, Chiff and Mahalo.

Consumer Demand Trends:
- Kicking it old school, human-reviewed content (Mahalo)
- Universal search result format
- Deeper local content
- Natural language search
- Meta crawlers still popular
- Personalization

Video, Images & Blended Results - This session looks at how video and image content is being blended into the main results at major search engines and provides tips on increasing the odds that your content makes the cut for the first page of results.
Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Rob Kerry, Editor, Sphinn.com

Speakers:
Benu Aggarwal, CEO, Milestone Internet Marketing
Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting
Todd Friesen, Vice President of Search, Visible Technologies

Q&A Speakers:
Henry Hall, Senior Product Manager, Video & Image Search, Microsoft
Deepali Tamhane, Yahoo! Search

Todd Friesen is up first.

Right now universal search is one stop shopping: results include video and images. Google did not invent universal search. Ask.com did.

Why come up with universal search? Different users have different needs. 14-year old Sally wants videos of her teen idols. 17-year old Joe wants pictures of porn (well, maybe. Todd didn't say that). My mom doesn't know what she wants.

Data rolled into universal search: web search, book search, images, local/maps, news, video, products, blogs, and more.

Blending summary:
- Image results - top, occasionally on bottom - additive (in addition to the 10 results)
- Video results - best example of blending - subtractive
- News Results - top, bottom, middle - additive
- Product results - top, bottom - additive
- Blog results - bottom
- Book results - bottom - additive

Eric Enge talks about a case study.

Image search volume: comScore numbers say that 7% of all searches take place in image search engine. Other industry figures suggest that the total search volume is 15% of all search. Difference is a lot of image search queries occur within the web search results.

Enquiro shows the F-pattern in the way people scan the listings. They recently did an update to this with an image blended in the results. They are subtracting links instead of adding.

VisualDX Health case study: a site that lets you learn about diseases that are visual (skin diseases, etc). He shows pictures of skin diseases (ew.)

The images themselves are a good target for image search optimization. You learn about the disease you may have and when you go to the doctor, you'd be better informed.

Optimization steps:
- Site used parameters on URLs. Parameters identify which images to show. This causes a problem of duplicate content.
- Enabled enhanced image search: let your images get reviewed by other users so they can give information about what the image is about. When Google sees commonality in recommendations, it starts to treat it as real information about the images and uses it to help your rank. This worked really well for the particular site.
- We saw that the site was not restricted by Google SafeSearch: Google filters pornography and explicit images. Google provides an appleals process to get allowed in.

- Images in blended search: 28 terms related to Visual DX health across 4 engines. Examples: acne, psoriasis, milia, scabies, etc. We did that in two forms. Take a term and append the word "pictures" appended to the unit. You can see the results with images on top. Taking these observations into account, we recognized that basic search optimization in Yahoo (at least) has the same images as in the regular blue links. Google and Ask are a bit different though. 73% of the time when you append "pictures" to a search query, those results showed up in blended search. If you didn't have the phrase "pictures" appended, only 30% of the time did this particular set of terms display images in the SERPs.

The third person to speak is Benu Aggarwal.

Videos exist but they're not searchable.

Why should a small business focus on videos? Well, it's free. Search engines show the video results.

3 out of 5 users consume online vdeos every day. Video reaches a monthly 111 million pageviews.

Steps to create and promote a video -
1 - keyword research: story boarding, script/voice talent
2 - video production: raw footage, voiceover
3 - optimize the video for web delivery: encode the video
4 - surround video with HTML
5 - create media RSS or video sitemap
6 - video submission - track your video views

Top Video Networks: YouTube, news websites, cable/network TV sites, MySpace, Yahoo, Google Video, AOL Video, MSN Video, etc.

She shows a case study that illustrates the power of having video search.

Optimize image search by adding images to Flickr, Google, and others. Every little bit counts!
Flickr has image tags to optimize.

Also, optimize for local - address and image names. Display address in text. Phone numbers should have local and toll free options. Image names and ALTs should have city and state keywords if applicable. Add physical text at the bottom of every page. A location map is good (with the aforementioned advice).

Top 10 tricks
1. Make video and image optimization part of your promotion strategy
2. Always include meta data while encoding your videos
3. Brand your video by adding watermarks and calls to action
4. Create media RSS, video sitemaps, and submit RSS to search engines
5. Keep all video files in one directory and surround with HTML
6. Editors should think like searchers. Find relevant keywords
7. Add viral/social effect by using tag clouds, ratings, and comments
8. UIse videos for monthly promotions, education, or for other promotional purposes
9. Name images by properly describing and saving them as keywords
10. Use Flickr, community maps, local search engines, and others for image optimization

Deepali Tamhane of Yahoo comes up and says that image and other optimization is very important, just like it is for a web page. Tags also mean a lot in images. Metadata is important as well and is highly evaluated.

Henry Hall decided to sit around for questions. He has nothing to add. Aw.

Jeff Rohrs from Exact Target is moderating. He introduces the new format of being able to ask questions online, during the course of the session, which will be compiled by Rob Kerry and presented to Jeff for the QA section.

Clarke Walton, a self confirmed “lawyer and a spammer” from his firm, the Walton Law Firm. He will talk through some recent trademark usage laws and disputes. He will start with reviewing the current trademark policies. MS AdCenter revised their TM policy in September 2007. They are no longer creating white lists of advertisers that are permitted to use TMs. This was causing fights between advertisers and TM owners, so they axed it. The heart has not changed – cannot bid on keyword, ore use them in advertising copy.

Shows a chart with Trademark policies summarized for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google: any advertiser can bid on the term as a trigger keyword. Not allowed in ad text. MS will not allow on either, with exception of authorized resellers, information site that does product reviews but does not have affiliate links or links to competitors, and if using the mark in a dictionary sense. Yahoo policy is the functional equivalent of the MS policy. Google is by far the easiest in his mind. Up until 2004, Google did not allow bids on the keywords, when they decided to change it up.

The Utah TM Protection Act. “came out of left field.” Instated by Utah in March 2007. The big idea was they were to create a TM registry, where TM owners could register them in an electronic registry. Stupid idea because it has a lot of constitutional problems (Dormant Commerce Clause – look it up). In April 2007, ISPs (Google, Yahoo, et al) had a closed door meeting with Utah legislators, and the law got revised in September 2007. The law may not be approved until 2008.

Three recent cases – Langdon v. Google Inc. 2007 WL 530156. Langdon is a “griper” who does not like the NC government or the Chinese government either. The ads he wanted to run were attacking the governments. He was upset, and sued “pro se” (without a lawyer). Easy decision: SEs are not compelled to run ads if they don’t want to.

Next case: J.G. Wentworth SSC Ltd v. Settlement Funding LLC. The defendant has been buying the keyword of the competitor (Wentworth) but not using it in text of ad. Are the trigger words up to the level of “use in commerce.” The decision is that buying the trigger as a keyword is not confusing the consumers if the search results do not display the TM in the text. He feels that this policy will eventually become uniform.

Last case: American Airlines v. Google. August 2007 – 55 page complaint about Google selling the TMs as both trigger keywords as well as advertisers using the TM in the ad text. They feel the TM policy is way too burdensome on the TM owners, since it is very difficult to track all those that are using the text in the ads. Google filed motion to dismiss in October 2007. Judge denied and issued only a one page order, instead of detail. So not sure what way this is heading, but do know that in November 2007, Google finally answered AA’s complaint. The interesting thing about this is that AA is a very deep pocketed plaintiff, and has the money to “go the distance.” Clarke feels they may have a good chance here in proving that it is too difficult to police.

The US Copyright office is now accepting electronic filings and they are looking for beta testers. Providing copywriters with an incentive discount ($10 off) to use this new online system. See: copyright.gov.eco/beta-announce.html.

Note Jeff Rohrs asks a question of the panel here but I will use this time to catch up and edit the above. Next time, come to SMX and you can hear it all!

Sarah Bird from SEOMoz is up next and will cover in depth “Communications Decency Act Section 230 Immunity.” “Are you confused about who can be held liable for online speech?” Looking at Blogs, Forums, Match.com, Craigslist – anything where you are publishing your content and someone else’s.

She talks about publishers’ liability “in the olden times.” It used to be that print media could be held responsible if they printed something that was considered offensive. Distributors of the media could not be held responsible…they do not publish it and aggregate, they just make it available. Then the Internet came along, and “Stratton-Oakmont v. Prodigy. They said that Prodigy was liable for statements made by someone about the plaintiff on an online bulletin board. If they had not tried to edit anything on the board, they would not be found liable. So if you want to edit the blog/forum, you are open to liability, but if you do not edit them, you are not liable. Interesting. This decision created a disincentive for publishers to limit objectionable content.

In response, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996. Quotes: It is the policy of the United States: (1) To promote the continued dev of the internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media, and (2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists on the internet, unfettered by Federal or Sate regulation. In short, “we are all benefiting from this.” She admits she has a personal interest in this due to her role at SEOMoz.

What is the solution to the problem? The CDA created immunity from suit providers and users of “interactive computer services” (ICS) for 3rd party content. “Information Content Providers” (ICP) are still liable for the content. The act is written very broadly, which is good and bad. Good because it can be finessed as the Internet continues to develop. Bad because it does not call out a “Craigslist” type site as being responsible in all cases. The exception: The CDA 230 C1 explicitly exempts from its coverage criminal law, communications, privacy law and intellectual property claims.

She wants to re-emphasize you can still sue the information content provider, if you can catch him…this can be difficult if someone covered its tracks. “Most regular folks” don’t have deep enough pockets to investigate and find someone if they are trying to remain anonymous. No provider or user of an ICS shall be treated as the publisher of content created by a community user…but print newspaper can still be held liable.

2007 news Flash – Fair Housing Council of San Fran Valley v. Roommates.com (CV-03-09386-PA) May 2007. This target the choices people have when they seek a roommate that can be related to religion and race. This case is unusual because it involves civil rights instead of slander defamation. Roommates.com performed the function using drop down menus. The FHC was upset because of the discriminatory slant. This also holds true in “regular” advertising for properties and homes, which are strictly regulated to avoid the appearance of discrimination. Should the site be held liable for violating the Fair Housing Act? Questions and considerations this should spur in your mind: what does internal conscience tell you? A print newspaper publishing similar ads could be sued. The site was creating a functional database by limiting users’ options, which is something we want to encourage. Who really is the author?

This is why the CDA will always be flawed…is the author the person who filled out the profile or roommates.com for providing the choices in the drop down? The biggest tension is the difference between the ICS and the ICP. One you’re liable and the other not. The divided opinion of the court: majority decided to hold roomamates.com liable and treat it as a publisher since they had enough control over the content and was organizing the content in such a way that they no longer get immunity…this is a huge move away from the previous case history. She is rushing through the last slides because she is well over on time…

In October 32007, the court decides maybe they got it wrong! They decided for a “do-over.” They have temporarily recalled the decision and the old decision is not legally valid. So this is still in limbo. Things that are certain: if you passively host 3rd party content, you are immune from suit. If you pre screen objectionable content, you are immune, if you exercise traditional editorial functions you are immune. Also goes over some uncertainties that I missed.

Last speaker is Eric Goldman. Both the other speakers pause to say that he is the “definitive” blogger in this space, and that they did research at his blog prior to this presentation…Eric tells them to keep speaking (laughs). He is a Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, and his blog is Ericgoldman.org. He talks about the credits that Yahoo and Google had to give in the recent settlements with click fraud. He feels the lawyers got the most cash and the advertisers did not do as well. In the case of the Google settlement, there were about 550 advertisers that chose not to participate and became potential individual plaintiffs. So far this is still ongoing.

Other related topics to click fraud: Miva.com got sued because the statements that they made in their filing under-portrayed the click fraud risk to investors. He feels this and some others are also in the “chicken scratch category.” Open issue v#1: “Just how bad is click fraud?” (Note Eric is not using a slide deck so I am not going to catch everything here). Also we know that advertisers are not able to make a good assessment of what they are losing to CF. He feels personally that it doesn’t appear that CF has been a significant drag on the marketplace. He is sure we could find examples of people that are cutting back due to this, but this brings out the question if everyone has really moved on from this topic?

The second open issue is whether there will be a new class action suit? He feels it is likely, since the lawyers made good money on this last time (laughs). He feels the Utah Act presented by Clarke will die. However, we should point out that there are still 2 anti-keyword advertising on the books, in Utah and Alaska, which specifically deals with advertisers using adware. So if you are advertising via adware the laws exist which restrict the display of pop-ups in those states.

Eric will now provide some of his opinions on current cases. He feels that the main battle ground is the search engine policies. He feels that we can move forward on this directly through the se policies – contact Google directly and have them change the verbiage. The other 2 battlegrounds are the courts and legislators. The legislators will wake up one day and freak out and decide they have the power of the pen to enact laws to control the Internet (laughs). We are still trying to work through in the judicial systems what the appropriate rules should be – the courts are so split that there is no short description of the current state of this area of law.

He also feels that AA v. Google is a clash of the titans and something will have to give. The other case he is closely watching is a case called Rescuecom. Judge denied a claim on a controversial ruling which is now in appeal (findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3718/is_200409/ai_n9451533). He lastly wants to call attention to another section of the law that Sarah spoke of, this time 230 C2 instead of C1. Kinderstart case is related to this…

Jeff goes to QA and I will now finish trying to get rid of typos. Best quote from the QA by Clarke: “this points out that there are a bunch of blow-hard law professors that do not know what they are talking about.” Great tension on the stage between Clarke and Eric, who challenged openly Clarke’s opinions. I have to personally point out that this was a very interesting and fun session to attend – great job everyone!

Note this is live coverage of SMX West 2008, and there may exist grammatical or typographical errors in this post. Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Paid Search Track

Decrypting Quality Scores - Life used to be so easy. You paid more than your competitor, and you ranked tops as a result. Now the perceived "quality" of your ads can make a dramatic difference in how much you pay and are positioned. Unfortunately, since the exact formula of calculating quality scores isn't revealed by the major search ad networks, marketers have some deciphering to do. This session looks at ways to increase the quality scores of your ads.
Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Anton Konikoff, Founder and CEO, Acronym Media

Speakers:
Andrew Goodman, Founder and Principal, Page Zero Media
Jon Kelly, President, SureHits

Q&A Speakers:
Mary Berk, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
Nick Fox, Director Business Product Management, Google
David Pann, Vice President, Marketplace Design and Matching, Yahoo!

Andrew Goodman is up first.

Before we get into detail, think like a search product manager on teh side of the user trying to determine what a high quality ad is:
Low quality is bad experience on site - sites or pages that mislead users. Also, low quality is misdirection or poor relevance - advertising on irrelevant keyword or keywords that are pretending to be relevant.
See how simple it is? Nearly everything they're doing can be subsumed under those two categories. The old formula that only used CTR to rank ads (along with bids) isn't sophisticated enough to achieve these objectives.

Three generations of paid search ad ranking
- Goto.com/Overture: pure bid for placement
- AdWords .20: Max Bid X CTR - various approaches
- AdWords 2.5, 2.6: quality based bidding.

How it works - there are two quality scores. Minimum bid decides whether the keyword is active at all. The other quality score affects ad rank.

There are two distinctive types of quality
1. The overall formula is composed of signals of relevance and quality related to your keywords (their CTR history and more).
2. A sometimes hypercritical assessment of your website and landing pages.

You can diagnose your situation with the Google AdWords tool.

People thought that Google invented this to avoid arbitrage. Clearly stopping the bad guys was a goal.

The sandbox effect on the organic side requires a lot of money.
The "dig out" process:
- Media company wants to buy traffic and launches new verticals.
- Past high quality not helping - many QS starting low and can't figure out why
- Also, slow ad activation on timely news items
- Multiple theories for low quality scores
- Frustrated - new ad experiments
- Frustrated - tips from Google rep
- Uptick - some history establishing itself. Why are we getting low quality scores? Promise of a review by the technical team or vague theories followed by something else...

What is it?
- Did we build the right thing over time through testing?
- Did we cause someone to look at it? Is it manual since we alerted our Google rep?

Account-Wide effects? Think in terms of your account history - as it becomes more mature, there's a halo effect.

How to be careful when setting up new accounts
- CTR is still your anchor

How to be careful when setting up new accounts
- Consider how much QS can tell you about how Google views you
- Anatomy of a high QS kickoff - step by step
* Narrow keywords
* Hand built ads
* Tailored landing pages that work
* Geo-specific helps
* Segmenting and microtargeting

Funny stories: watch out for popups!

Jon Kelly is up next.

Ad quality is essential to the economics of search engines. Because of that, it's essential to your campaign. If you have puzzling results, you're not alone.

Quality score affects ad rank and minimum bid. Let's look at ad rank -
Quality score brings the value of the CTR back into the engine and builds an effective CPC value for the engine.
CTR x Bid Price X 1000 = eCPM for the Search Engine
ex: $10 bid, 5% CTR, 50cents/impression, $500 eCPM for the engine. Search engines have a goal to sell the space for as much as possible so moves the highest eCPM bid on top. Landing page quality maximizes long term eCPM.

Key QS factors - relative CTR by position, account history, and landing pages (minimum bid)

From a math perspective, beat expectation.

Total throughput management = your key metric is value per impression:
Click Through Rate x Conversion Rate = Total Outcomes / Impression for any given ad
Why? Your 2 key metrics are often at odds. "Qualifying" words raise conversion but may lower CTR. "Enticing" words may raise CTR but may lower conversion.
Example: "cheap" is an enticing word. But is it cheap? Maybe you'll get a good CTR but will you get a conversion?

Throughput checklist -
- Track total throughput (CTR & conversion together) for all ad copy variants
- Make sure you isolate the variables
- Track the $ sales only if creative changes impact product choice or quality
- Creative should match the scope and quality of your offer
- Match landing page with ad copy
- Experiment with different grouping structure
- Homogenize ad groups
- Only exact matches count (regardless of what you have set up)
- Use day parting to focus on high demand and conversion periods

How the engines can improve
* More transparency is needed into the scoring method - other factors, for example??

Myth: you can't succeed if you don't have a major brand. That's not true. You can.

Q&A:
Q: What do you do if you have an abysmal quality score? Should you start fresh?
David/Yahoo: We've seen that this is because of keyword selection. Find relevant keywords and you won't be hurt. Do some AB testing.
Nick/Google: Check from a user's perspective and see if it makes sense. We have an ad score quality diagnostic tool.
Mary/Microsoft: That check is the best thing you can do. Scrutinize your site to see what the end user sees. A ton of advertisers don't realize that they have popups, paid links above your content, and simple things like that.

Q: How many clicks does it take to establish that initial quality score so that the campaign is considered mature?
Mary/MS: It determines on the search engine.
David/Yahoo: It depends if you get clicks. Tail terms need fewer versus other terms. We want to give all advertisers a chance.
Nick/Google: It depends on the keyword and the situation. If the keyword has a history of being bad, it will be harder for you.

Q: What do you think about DKI into landing pages? Can this be flagged during a manual review?
Jon: I've found success with this method.
Nick: It's a great way to add relevance to what the user is looking for. But be careful of two things. Don't insert keywords that create nonsensical ads. The other thing is that you should deliver people to a page that is relevant to the ad text.

Q: How would quality score optimization vary for search versus content?
Nick: Great question. You need to think as organic search differently from paid search.

Q: Should you create separate landing pages for each search engine?
Jon: No.
Andrew: It's a slippery slope.
David: User experience comes first and foremost.

Q: What about the black box element with lack of transparency? Are there any tools that you recommend?
Jon: Focus on your analytics.
Nick: There are 3 Google tools. One project is called Shine the Light on Black Box. On your campaign management page, you can get more information on your campaign. (Nick is talking way too fast so I can't get his second tool nor can I really get what he was saying on teh first tool. He is also really quiet.) There's also a search query report to see what keywords are more relevant.

Q: An advertiser is unhappy with their quality score. How do they escalate the issue for human review?
David: Use your account rep.
Mary: If all else fails, contact our editorial team.
Nick: Check if there's a landing page quality issue.

Q: How can I reverse engineer my competitors' Quality Score?
Jon: Look at the ad rank - it's the ad and click through rate, not the landing page. You need to worry about ad rank.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

You and ask questions online via a special web page as the speakers give their presentations. Then in Q&A, the questions will be answered. Vanessa is modding up this panel. Ask was unable to come last minute, but Vanessa showed off the Ask.com user interface.

David Bailey, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google is up first. Universal search is all about organizing the worlds information and making it universally accessible and useful. Now we have more than just web results, we have news, video, books, blogs, maps, code search and so on. The best way to provide access to this information is through one search box.

The Google search box is where most users are and it wont require users to remember how to go to specific vertical engines.

Another reason for universal is to display custom features for specialized results such as pictures, maps, ratings, publications, blog names, and its not just for Google, it is for other properties as well. The most important thing is to keep it fast, simple but most importantly, relevant.

He then shows some recent launches in this universal front.

• Local business review snippets within the search results
• Ten local businesses for broad queries in search results
• Much more video, mostly from external sites are displayed in search results
• More images, with explicit triggering on the long tail (this is a new launch this week)
• Grouped blogs, now found within the universal search, at the bottom (shows up rarely right now)
• Grouped books for topical queries, typically at the bottom (been going on for 1.5 years now)
• Comprehensive books blending as well, not just at the bottom of the results
• Also they have been internationalizing the universal blends in non USA Google
• Increasing the diversity on the page, that is the overall theme

How does it work? He says they have a lot of complicated stuff hidden behind a simple search box. But in reality... The Universal Search Architecture works through speculatively search against all Google's indexes, then they decide what to show only after they collect all the data, they use it for smarter ranking to add coverage anywhere on the page. The basically send the query to all the vertical engines and brings back the results and then the ranking algorithm decides what to show and where.

The challenges include the ability to expand and optimize the massive infrastructure, rank applies against oranges and how to display the information. They optimized the servers, queries and so on. Many of the techniques used to rank web pages can be applied to images and other verticals - they use PageRank, phrase matches, anchors. They also use other signals when available, such as freshness, user rating, table of contents matches. They also look at the web results for clues about other type of content to show. For example, a search for green bay packers is not looking for Wisconsin moving companies.

Universal search is a technology play.

He showed real graphs of how the ranking algorithm works but he did not explain them and no one picked them up - they are just graphs.

What's Next?
- Keep improving relevance
- Ramp up newly universalized categories (blogs, shopping)
- Better exploration

What happens to SEO?
- Business as usual with web results are still Google's bread and butter and will remain dominant and the usual webmaster guidelines still apply
- Take advantage of specialized results by publishing high quality and well captioned images, create a Google Video sitemap, updated business listings in local business center, submit your feed to Google product search and create a high quality company blog.

Sean Suchter from Yahoo Search is now up. He shows Yahoo's old static, text based UI and now is more graphical user interface (showed an example search on Bob Dylan). Yahoo has a lot of music content, movie content, lots of quality photos from Flickr and others, videos from on and off the network, local business results also, maps. Plus the ability to refine restaurant options by location. City visitor guides, hotels by chains location, also with complete information for unique hotels. Athlete searches. Categorized results for consumer electronics. Health information results.

Now he talks about the new Yahoo open search platform, which we blogged about over here. He shows how Yelp can offer a plugin for the Yahoo Open Search platform giving them a way to dictate how Yahoo should enhance their search results. That is it, quick presentation.

Raju Malhotra, Director of Product Management, Live Search, Microsoft is now up. He was going to show us a skiers journey through blended search. Blended search offers a compelling consumer value and an SEO opportunity. It is to satisfy the evolving consumer needs and different expectations in different consumption modes (find/discover/explore) and SEOs can benefit by understanding #1 and #2 better.

Microsoft watches how people use search - they camp out and watch the consumers. Consumers use search in three main ways:

(1) Find: Targeted questions, high frequency of usage, short sessions, examples include weather, local, listings, stock and directions.
(2) Discover: Clear need but less steps are less clear, long and repeated sessions, high emotional investments and examples include buying strollers, health information and so on.
(3) Explorer: Browsing through with no specific target or goal, long and repeated sessions, examples include hobbies, entertainment and interests.

The rest of the presentation is done in live demo mode, no more slides... Here we go skiing...

Opens up Live Search in IE. He enters in the search box..."snow report tahoe" On the left hand side is the snow report by mountain and then you can click on mountain for more detail. Now he changes his query to "ski shops." Up come local listings for ski shops near San Jose. Then he shows the maps and reviews and one click directions.

Pause, 1/3rd of all queries are local intensions. More than 40% of people on the web use mapping online. If you own a ski shop in San Jose, make sure you are there. He then brings up Live Search Webmaster Center and explains you can add your biz listing there.

Play:

He then enters san jose traffic into Live Search, it brings up a map with traffic details.

Those were all "Find" queries, what about "Discover."

He enters in "Digital camera" cause you need a camera on your ski trip. Camera images come up, you see ratings, prices, guides and reviews. Clicking on a camera gives you more details.

Pause: Shopping queries are fairly significant on the web. Most shoppers start on a search engine. 70% of those queries are at the product category level (i.e. stroller). At webmaster tools, you can upload your product catalog there.

Play:

He then enters in "snow blindness" and it returns results from HealthVault in the search results. 80% of the online community looks for health content at least once per month.

He then enters in ski alpine video into the search engine mouses over some videos. When you mouse over the video, it plays right in the search results page. Then you can click on the results and see more videos. They give you an easy way to explore videos.

That is his walk through from find, discover to explore via blended search at Live Search.

Q&A Time...

Search 3.0, Search 4.0 & Beyond - Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan has been covering the search space for 12 years. In this keynote address, he explains how search has recently left behind the Search 1.0 and Search 2.0-eras to reach Search 3.0 today: blended search. He also covers the growth of Search 4.0: personalized and social search, with some further looks at what's to come.
Speaker:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Hi guys! I'm sitting in the front row at SMX West. I'm wearing a shirt that says "I'm blogging this." Say hello. Please. My BFF already said hello to me several times and now I want to meet you. Thanks!

Danny introduces the conference and tells us there are unique SMX pins for every confernece! Yay, schwag! (If I don't go to an SMX conference, you need to hook me up. Remember that for SMX social media, guys!)

Now we're talking about search like we're supposed to.

Last year search made a huge generational leap and not many people are understanding the scope of it.

Search 1.0: first generation web search. We spider page and look at the location and frequency of search terms on the page to see which terms are most relevant. You might keyword stuff to optimize the page for search 1.0. Search engines were easy to game at that time.

Along came Google. They started utilizing off-the-page factors. Clickthroughs were measured. A major off-the-page factor that was considered was linkage: "democratic nature of the web." (aka PageRank - through PR is how important a link is, independent of content).

You can't really trick search 2.0 or so they thought. But eventually people gamed it - the "miserable failure" George Bush Googlebomb is a clear example. People manipulated the links for their gain.

Where do we go from here? Two key advances Danny expected to happen from talking wth search folks have now happened:
Search 3.0: blended results
Search 4.0: personalized and social results

Let's talk about blended results. The answer to everything is not a webpage. Search engines will begin to hit specialty databases in the right occasion, pushing the right tab behind the scenes (pictures, buying, news headlines). Invisible tabs was the term Danny used.

What if there are more specialized databases? You can't shove them to the front page. So now we have blended search: Google Universal Search, Ask 3D, Yahoo Answers, Live Search Scope

Blended search is now the generic term to mean vertical results get blended.

Search 3.0 is Danny's term - he wants to wake marketers up. "You know what, forget PageRank. You need to be looking in a lot of these veritcal areas because those areas are growing."

Why is it called vertical search? Vertical search slices downward (news, weather, images, etc.)

Google Universal Search: May 2007. They automatically query databases, book information, blogs, shopping, etc - with more sources to come. The idea is that the relevancy of each vertical's results measured against others, Google says. If this video search result is the third most relevant result, then it gets thrown into the regular SERPs.

If you search for San Jose hotels, you'll see 10 results of hotels. If you search for "diet coke," there may be a news result on the front page. It's an opportunity for you to qualify as a news source if you believe that your web page is a news source. Search for Facebook and find a YouTube video. Search for a product and find Google Products listings. The possibilities for blended search are really endless.

Ask 3D has a 3 pane design. The third pane morphs and combines all vertical stuff in the page - images, news material, etc.

Microsoft Live also integrates some vertical search. Search for Britney Spears and you will see images. She was also #1 in their celebrity search engine.

Over at Yahoo, they have been pushing shortcuts: events, music, movies, etc. Today, they came out with Yahoo Search Monkey - every publisher can blend information of their own into their listings. As a publisher, if you find out something compelling, you can make use of this program so that everyone sees it.

That's the overview - verticals are new and more prominent doorways to search results. Web search is not going away but it will be more of a "backup." Exact metaphors and presentations are still being developed. Vertical has less competition and itself tends to be more "old school" Search 1.0 ranking factors.

Search 4.0 integrates personalization and social search. It reshapes results based on what you personally visit, what others you know do, and what people in aggregate do or visit. Google is pretty much the only engine doing this right now.

Google Personalized Search looks at your web history and gives sites a ranking boost by what you visit. If you visit a site a lot, it will be ranked higher. Some other pages will be pushed down.

One of the key things about it is that it changes the playing field as a search marketing perspective.

Personalization Factors: iGOogle Personalized Home Page content, Google Bookmarks, Search History (clicks), Web history (visits). Google will use these to personalize your search experience.

The beginnings of social search: Eurekster experimented with friend clicks reshaping results in 2004. Yahoo My Web promised to let us tag and use a network to reshape results. Neither of these took off.

Danny wrote an article entitled "The Promise & Retality of Mixing the Social Graph with Search Engines." It's not new. Eurekster said that "swickis" are much better - people choose the sites that should be in a vertical search engine. Yahoo dropped off. People don't really tag on web search. They might use it for delicious but not for search itself.

What about Facebook and the social graph? The social graph is potentially useful. You watch what others are searching on. You monitor clicks in a more "trusted" environmnet and reshape results based on what your friends seem to like.

..but who are your friends?

There are concerns about fake friends and privacy - do you have to filter to "true" friends? Do you then still need to consider what you'll share? Do Facebook and others instead work on an aggregate level?

If you are trying to succeed in 4.0, you might have to put buttons on your website to give in and hope that people use it. People bookmark great content, so write it. Compelling content rewards you.

For other search engines: watch and see. Watch social news sites like Digg and social bookmarking sites like delicious and social networking sites like Facebook.

What about the regular comment: "I don't want to be a social media marketer! Damn kids! It's not SEO!" We cover it because it has power to be out there. Link building was an independent activity ca. 1995. You build links because links got you traffic and you do SEO because SEO got you traffic. When Google started making a lot more out of links, you realize it's a lot more crucial. Likewise, social media is going to stay and you need to know people who can help you.

SMM+SEO = Wonder Twins
* It builds links back to your content and brings visibility.
* It lets you leverage an authority site which is useful for reputation purposes or to get out faster than a "regular" site can. Your brand new website might need some trust but if you make use of sites like Digg, you can get your content out a lot quicker.
* Del.icio.us might influence results - Yahoo is trying this out. It stands out and people are likely going to understand social bookmarking in due time. It's something you need to know.
* Google Reader might do the same thing - how many people are subscribed to that RSS feed?
* Social media prepares you for more to come.

Search 5.0 - what's next? Danny says he might "start to lose it here." Human editors might be in search 5.0. Search 5.0 is search 1.0. Mahalo sometimes feels cluttered but it's nice to see the attempt. Wikia remains to be seen. These are both brand new and are things to watch.

When there were fires in Southern California, Mahalo was really on top of it versus other search engines. The downside is that it's overwhelming for human editors.

Hakia is another search engine that uses categorization based on headlines and not by human editors. You may not need editors in the future - but the overwhelming factor might remain.

Danny said he wanted to do another keynote to discuss some recent developments (but he has no other keynote, so he's talking about them here):

Microhoo: no one knows what will happen or what each company should do. Danny sees this from a search perspective, but others see it from a software perspective, and so on. "Scale" argument hasn't convinced him. "Employees" argument hasn't convinced him either. Traffic remains the most compelling argument and indeed it might be the best way for Microsoft to move ahead. Personally, Danny says that he's liked the three big different players and hipes that a Yahoo brand does make it.

Video cometh: "Video killed the search star?" Search is kind of boring in a lot of ways. You do a lot of hard work and make pennies on the dollar that you're spending. Money is expected in cool video. But pushing video ads isn;t necessarily search. AdSense isn't search nor is it with video. Video for AdWords does look to be search related, though, and perhaps it will bring new money into paid search campaigns giving them an easier-to-understand coolness factor.

Recession Worries: Will it hurt search? Nobody really knows. Search thrived during a recession (dot com crash). Buying may dip, but it's not going to stop. Search may be more essential than other types of ads. Danny's wish list - Google and others sphould break out actual search from other types of ads. Danny's article on this: "Search Stocks & is Search Recession Proof?"

Search marketing reputation issues:
"Many business owners have been fooled by the allure of search engine optimization -- and I'm one of them [but it doesn't work for me]" ~media
"I actually despise being labeled as an SEO" ~shoemoney
AMEX has words of warning - "don't waste money on so-called SEO specialists" - American Express's Open Guide, January 2008. Danny wrote an article about this recently - "A Bad Month for the SEO Reputation"
Can reputation improve? In the past, we've been called as bad or worse. Each time, some see reputation issues as a crisis or problem that must be solved. Yet SEO continues to crow and be in demand. It sucks, it isn't fair, but maybe some standards can help ease the emotional burden.
Seeking solutions:
* the biggest issue isn't white hat/black hat, but ripoff artists that both hat colors dislike.
* Centralized complaints area; agree to be listed, good or bad, with right to respond?
* Better PR for SEO, more case studies on how it helps?
* Is it time for Search Marketing Standards? - I, Tamar, will be covering this panel later today.

Oh, and Craig Newmark likes us.

SMX West is under two weeks away and we at the Search Engine Roundtable are excited to be a part of this new exciting conference. The conference has just over 50 sessions, and I am proud to say we hope to be covering 44 of those 50 or so sessions.

Our contributing live bloggers for the SMX West event include our Tamar Weinberg of many hats including her own blog Techipedia, Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and of Link Spiel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, David Wallace of Search Rank and a new addition Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs. I will also be covering about 11 sessions. So we got most of the sessions covered. Thank you all for pitching in, we all appreciate it it!

Here is the conference coverage schedule:

Tuesday - Feb, 26
9:00am-9:45am
Keynote - Search 3.0, Search 4.0 & Beyond covered by Tamar Weinberg
10:30am-11:45am
Keyword Research Tools & Techniques covered by Debra Mastaler
The Blended Search Revolution covered by Barry Schwartz
Decrypting Quality Scores covered by Tamar Weinberg
Legally Speaking: Recent Legal News About Search covered by Chris Boggs
1:15pm-2:45pm
Copywriting For Search Success covered by Chris Boggs
Video, Images & Blended Results covered by Tamar Weinberg
Search Marketing & Persona Models covered by David Wallace
Searchscape: Latest Stats About The Search Engines covered by Barry Schwartz
3:15pm-4:30pm
Paid Search Fundamentals covered by Keri Morgret
Local Search & Blended Results covered by Barry Schwartz
Defending Your Paid Search Budget Against New Ad Fads covered by David Wallace
The Economics Of Search covered by Tamar Weinberg
4:45pm-6:00pm
Online Retail & Blended Results covered by Barry Schwartz
Avoiding PPC Pitfalls covered by Keri Morgret
Is It Time For Search Marketing Standards? covered by Tamar Weinberg
6:00pm-8:00pm
SMX Search Bowl covered by Chris Boggs

Wednesday - Feb, 27
9:00am-9:45am
Louis Monier: Past, Present & Future Of Search covered by Tamar Weinberg
10:45am- 12:00pm
Search Engine Friendly Web Design covered by Keri Morgret
The Personalized Search Revolution covered by Barry Schwartz
Branding & Search covered by Chris Boggs
1:30pm- 2:45pm
Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains covered by Keri Morgret
Will The Social Graph Change Search? covered by Tamar Weinberg
Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search covered by Chris Boggs
SEO & Social Media Marketing covered by Barry Schwartz
3:15pm- 4:30pm
SEO 2.0 For Web 2.0 Sites covered by Barry Schwartz
The Online-Offline Synergy Of Search covered by Chris Boggs
SEO & Blogging covered by Tamar Weinberg
In Depth with SEOmoz PRO covered by David Wallace
4:45pm-6:00pm
Search Engineers Q&A covered by Chris Boggs
Just Behave, A Look At Searcher Behavior covered by Barry Schwartz
SEO & User Generated Content covered by Keri Morgret

Thursday - Feb, 28
9:00am-10:00am
Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade covered by Tamar Weinberg
10:45am- 12:00pm
Industrial Strength SEO covered by Barry Schwartz
Web Analytics Roundtable covered by Keri Morgret
Growing Your Small SEM Firm covered by David Wallace
Generation Google: A Talk With Today's Teens covered by Tamar Weinberg
The 10 Truths Every CMO Must Know About Search Marketing covered by Chris Boggs
1:30pm- 2:30pm
SEO Q&A covered by Keri Morgret
Analyzing The Competition covered by Barry Schwartz
2:45pm- 3:45pm
Linking Q&A covered by Tamar Weinberg
SEO & Usability: They Can (And Should) Coexist covered by Barry Schwartz
Search Marketing, B2B-Style covered by Keri Morgret
4:00pm-5:00pm
SEO Checkup covered by Keri Morgret

Guess what? There are seventeen days until SMX West to be held in Santa Clara, CA. And guess what else? I'm going to be attending, as is Barry! It's going to be great fun. Are you going to be there?

In case you're wondering, we're obviously going to provide conference coverage, and here are some of the extracurricular activities to occur in the evenings:

On Monday night, February 25th, there will be an SMX Bash. On Tuesday night, you'll be able to attend the Search Bowl. Wednesday night will host the Google Groove party.

In other words, you'll be having a great time. Sign up now if you haven't already. :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.