Search Marketing Expo 2009 East Archives

October 7, 2009

SMX East 2009 Big Session Coverage Recap

SMX East 2009 is now complete and below we posted a listing of sessions we have covered in real-time. The count came to 32 sessions covered, which is a ton.

Of course this could not happen without the help of our volunteer live bloggers, including:

You may not have noticed, but I didn't make it to SMX East today. I had a fever this morning and decided to not get other SEO/SEMs sick, so I stayed home. Keri and others picked up my sessions and brought you the coverage, in my absence.

Here are the sessions we covered:

Day One Session Coverage:

Day Two Session Coverage:

Day Three Session Coverage:

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 3:34 PM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO

Below is live coverage of the CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp & Brian Ussery - Beu Blog.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO(10/07/2009) 
2:00 Sheara Wilensky:  

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO – This session looks CSS, AJAX and Web 2.0 dynamic design techniques that can cause search engine indexing and ranking issues, with solutions to consider. Programmed by Jane & Robot.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Benj Arriola, SEO Engineer, BusinessOnLine
Richard Chavez, SEO Manager, iCrossing
Bruce Johnson, TBA, Google
Kathrin Probst, TBA, Google
2:02
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2:04 Sheara Wilensky:  Vanessa Fox: This might be the most technical session that we have.
2:05 Sheara Wilensky:  How many of you use Ajax on your site and are looking for good SEO answers?
2:05 Sheara Wilensky:  How many are looking to replace it?
2:06 Sheara Wilensky:  Richard Chavez from iCrossing is up first.
2:06 Sheara Wilensky:  Richard: What is AJAX? What are the SEO challenges with AJAX?
2:06 Sheara Wilensky:  Let's get started.
2:06 Sheara Wilensky:  [talks about his company, iCrossing]
2:07 Sheara Wilensky:  So, what is AJAX. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Used on the client side to create interactive web apps or rich internet apps.
2:07 Sheara Wilensky:  Some of the challenges of AJAX:
2:07 Sheara Wilensky:  1) Uses extensive amounts of JavaScript, so bots have difficulty getting through this.
2:08 Sheara Wilensky:  Google does a pretty good job, but Yahoo and Bing have difficulty.
2:09 Sheara Wilensky:  2) Lack of client-side or ON PAGE content. Content is stored server side so is not necessarilty on the page itself. Content is rendered via the AJAX engine.
2:09
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2:09 Sheara Wilensky:  3) Stop Crawl parameters: Bots do not typially pars data past the "#" tag, data past the "#" tag is ignored.
2:10 Sheara Wilensky:  4) All content is rendered under one URL, mixed content themes dilute kw relevancy.
2:11 Sheara Wilensky:  Tactical Suggestions:
  • Create identical alterntive content- leverage apps such as SWFobject to render SEO-friendly version of URL.
2:12 Sheara Wilensky:  JavaScript navigaition: Alter JS nav to remove any commands with thing the URL quotes. Reference JS control externally and call file via class or ID attribute.
2:14 Brian Ussery:  Richard suggests XML sitemaps, footer navigation, supporting (X)HTML and submiting sitemaps via Google Webmaster Tools.
2:14 Sheara Wilensky:  Additional suggestions:
  • Create crawlable paths such as sitemap page, footer nav, tiered sitemap structure.
  • Supporting HTML content.
  • XML Sitemap file.
Whatever method you choose, make sure you have unique content displayed.
2:16 Sheara Wilensky:  SEO Tactics Deployed: (example with Wachovia branch location on a Google map)
  • Individual location URLsisolatd from JS controls.
  • Tiered sitemap structure linked from homepage.
2:16 [Comment From Barry Schwartz]
Google's official announcement at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html
2:16 [Comment From Michael Martinez]
Google Webmaster Tools Team just proposed a standard to make AJAX crawlable. Cf. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html
2:17 Sheara Wilensky:  Discusses use of SWFobject and hash tag.
2:17 Brian Ussery:  For technical folks, "hash tag" = fragment #anchor
2:18 Sheara Wilensky:  Giving a case study.
2:19
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2:19 Sheara Wilensky:  Some key takeaways:
2:19 Sheara Wilensky:  Make sure your onpage content is visible, tiered site structure, make sure all your technical problems are solved up front, ensure URLs are crawlable.
2:20 Sheara Wilensky:  I highly rec. getting SEO intergrated in the building, it's easy than implementing it after.
2:20 Sheara Wilensky:  Thank you!
2:21 Sheara Wilensky:  Vanessa: Some of the resources can be found on janeandrobot.com/resources
2:21 Brian Ussery:  Vanessa points out resources at http://www.janeandrobot.com/resources.
2:22 Brian Ussery:  
Up next:
Bruce Johnson, Google Web Toolkit Lead Google Atlanta, GA

2:22 Sheara Wilensky:   Next up is Bruce Johnson, Engineering Manager at Google.
2:23 [Comment From Montana]
I have a question about hiding content with CSS or JS and its effect on SEO.
2:23 Sheara Wilensky:  Bruce: We work on developer tools at Google, giving developers the ability to create very sophisticated AJAX applications.
2:24 Sheara Wilensky:  Very JS heavy.
2:24 Sheara Wilensky:  Again, this is somewhat redundant, but WEB CRAWLERS dont always see what the users see.
2:24 Sheara Wilensky:  JS produces dynamic content that is not seen by crawlers.
2:25 Sheara Wilensky:  Example: A Google Web Toolkit app that looks like this to a user [image], only looks like this to a web crawler.
2:25 Sheara Wilensky:  Why does this prob need to be solved?
2:26
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2:26 Sheara Wilensky:  
  • Web 2.0:More content on the web is being created dynamically (69%)
  • Over time, this hurts search
  • Developers are discouraged from building dynamic apps
  • Not solving AJAX crawlability holds back progress on the web
2:26 Sheara Wilensky:  Here is a diagram - a crawler's view ofthe web, with and without AJAX.
2:28
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2:29 Sheara Wilensky:  So crawling and indexing AJAX is needed for users and developers.
2:29 Sheara Wilensky:  How do you know which AJAX states should be indexed? You want some way to opt in, and say this is a special state you want crawled. Obv cloaking will always be an issue. The larger the app, the harder it is to maintain.
2:30 Brian Ussery:  According to W3C "hash tags" (fragment identifiers, #anchors) point to the same source so engines are working on a way to please engines and change states.
2:30 Sheara Wilensky:  Now Kathrin of Google steps up:
2:31 Brian Ussery:  Solutions could be to let crawler run script but this is expensive, indexes would be old and stale not to mention only major engines could execute this level of crawling.
2:31 Sheara Wilensky:  Kathrin: So why don't the crawlers execute the JS on the web?
  • Very expensive to do, and time consuming
  • If all the crawlers were to execute all the time- and only the major search engines could attempt to do this- a few months down the road, the changes to your website won't show up bc the engines are busy with the JS and not updating their index.
2:32 Brian Ussery:  Another solution might be to allow servers to execute.
2:32 Sheara Wilensky:  Web Servers execute their own JS at crawl time to avoid the above problems, and gives more control to webmasters. It also can be done more automatically and not require ongoing maintenance.
2:33 Sheara Wilensky:  A diagram: Pretty URLs, vs ugly URLs
2:35 Sheara Wilensky:  The crawler will do its thing, find URLs, some will be pretty (with a hash fragment and an exclamation mark) so the crawler knows to index it. So it will map the pretty URL to the ugly URL.
2:35 Sheara Wilensky:  In the second step, it will go and request that URL from your web server, so it passes the hash fragment on to the web server.
2:35 Brian Ussery:  Adding "#!" instead of "#" alone will tell engines content is crawlable and should be indexed...
2:35
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2:35 Sheara Wilensky:  In step three, the web server will reverse the mapping and recreate the pretty URL.
2:36 Sheara Wilensky:  In step 4, It will then invoke a headless browser, so you will get back an HTML snapshot.
2:37 Brian Ussery:  This is the headless browser concept a.k.a. "Ichabod"...
2:37 Sheara Wilensky:  The HTL snapshot will then go back to the crawler, which will index it, extract links from it, and keep going.
2:37 Sheara Wilensky:  Crawl time: Anytime the browsers update their indices.
2:37 Sheara Wilensky:  At search time, which is almost all the time, they will get a pretty URL, nothing changes.
2:38 Sheara Wilensky:  Web servers and webmasters will agree to opt into the scheme by indicating indexable states.
2:38 Sheara Wilensky:  The webservers will also agree to execute JS when they hit ugly URLs.
2:39 Sheara Wilensky:  The next point is that webservers will now agree not to cloak. For any of the search engines, if you give diff content to the crawler than you do to the user, you will risk elimination from the index.
2:39 Brian Ussery:  Google proposes a special token indicating content to be indexed by engines. The token is exclamation point #anchor.
2:40 Sheara Wilensky:  To summarize, we are going to go though the life of a URL process.
2:40 Sheara Wilensky:  We are proposing to the developer to tweak URLs to pretty URLs.
2:40
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2:41 Sheara Wilensky:  So here is a summary. We are currently working on a proposal and prototype implementation.
2:41 Sheara Wilensky:  Please visit the Google webmaster central blog and help forum to discuss and leave feedback.
2:41 Sheara Wilensky:  Thank you!
2:43 Brian Ussery:  
Google's presentaion is available via:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html
2:44 Brian Ussery:  Everyone seems to be in favor of making AJAX crawlable....
2:44 Sheara Wilensky:  Last up is Benj Arriola.
2:45 Sheara Wilensky:  Don't leave this session yet...
2:46 Sheara Wilensky:  Benj is speaking on CSS and Code positioning in SEO.
2:46 Sheara Wilensky:  I am going to talk about how to position your code in CSS.
2:46 Sheara Wilensky:  [very quick because almost out of time]
2:48 Sheara Wilensky:  An experiment done in 2006 talks about link text state, and 2 links going to the same page. SEOmoz also did a blog post on the order of 2 links going to the same place. Basically what they are saying is since the 1st link goes to "blog" and the second link goes to "celebrity news blog" only the 1st one counts.
2:48 Sheara Wilensky:  An experiment: We had 3 links using unknown words going to the same place.
2:49 Sheara Wilensky:  Note: this experiment was done in a controlled environment.
2:49 Sheara Wilensky:  When you search for the links, it was going to only where the link was located - not tracing where it was going to.
2:49 Sheara Wilensky:  The second link was also showing the link where the page was located.
2:50 Sheara Wilensky:  But the first link text was reading not only where the text was located,but where the link is going to.
2:50 Sheara Wilensky:  So in our opinion this was validating the experiments done by SEOmoz and the other guy.
2:51 Sheara Wilensky:  So what's the significance?
2:51 Sheara Wilensky:  A lot of ppl use footer links to improve SEO but they don't consider the order of the links.
2:52 Sheara Wilensky:  A good tool is firstlinkchecker.com to check the order of dupe links.
2:53 Sheara Wilensky:  So we have a left side bar and a right side bar, the main content goes first before the sidebar which is good because it's more kw optimized. So float left in CSS.
2:53 Sheara Wilensky:  You want the main content to come first before the sidebar bc it's more kw focused.
2:54
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2:54 Sheara Wilensky:  What if you have 3 columns? Center come first, sidebars float to the left and right.
2:54 Sheara Wilensky:  What about yout top bar nav?
2:54 Sheara Wilensky:  BTW - if you do a float right, remember to do a text-align left.
2:54 [Comment From Michael Martinez]
Matt Cutts addressed the dual link issue in 2008:
2:54 [Comment From Michael Martinez]
http://www.linkspiel.com/2008/07/mattcutts-bat-phone/
2:56 Sheara Wilensky:  In summary, main content is important to come first in the code. Only the first anchor text is considered by search engines. Control the direction of floating
columns, and control top bar nav with absolute positioning.
2:56 Sheara Wilensky:  That's it, we are out of time!
2:58
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 1:50 PM Comments (2)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Analytics For Social Media

Below is live coverage of the Analytics For Social Media from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Analytics For Social Media(10/07/2009) 
2:02 Keri Morgret:  

Analytics For Social Media – Trying to understand how your social media campaign is going? Standard web analytics tools might not be enough. This session looks at some specialized tools to consider.

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

Speakers:

Chris Bennett, Co-Founder, BLVD Status
David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
Agustin Vazquez, Analytics specialist, NVI
2:03 Keri Morgret:  We're waiting for the session to start.
2:06 Keri Morgret:  Correction: Chris Sherman is the moderator.
2:08 Keri Morgret:  Chris Bennett is up first.
2:09 Keri Morgret:  What should you track?
  • Traditional Metrics
  • Micro Conversions (non traditional)
  • Indirect Results (aftermath)
2:11 Keri Morgret:  Traditional Metrics
  • Referring Traffic
  • Conversions
  • Brand Search/Type in traffic
Shows some google analytics screenshots of looking at page views, comparison to average traffic for times previous. Social media traffic is different from your regular traffic (often higher bounce rate, less time on site). Need to look at which pieces are better with the metrics.
2:12 Keri Morgret:  Referring URLS:
  • Quantity
  • Quality
  • New Traffic Sources (can be good to find new sites for getting social links)
2:14 Keri Morgret:  Conversions.

Often conversions are less, but there have been some good successes, and you can get sales, including branding that comes from it.

Identify top referring sources.
2:15 Keri Morgret:  Look for surges in brand queries and direct type-in traffic.
2:17 Keri Morgret:  Micro Conversions

Outgoing LInk Clicks
RSS Subscribers
Twitter Followers
Facebook Fans
Newsletters / Opt In lists

In Google Analytics you can do goals, and do a head match for your outgoing link (like Twitter). You do need some code wrapped around the link. There are also third-party scripts for this.
2:17 Keri Morgret:  BLVD Status (his company) has some tools for this.
2:18 Keri Morgret:  Indirect Results

  • Backlinks
  • Total search traffic
  • Search keywords
  • Conversions that come from search (social media ROI)
2:20 Keri Morgret:  He's showing stats examples from a case study.
2:21 Keri Morgret:  They got keyword rankings because of a social media campaign.
2:22 Keri Morgret:  He'll have a report available soon on this. Interesting dashboard he's showing now.
2:23 Keri Morgret:  David Berkowitz is now up.
2:24 Keri Morgret:  His powerpoint is available at bit.ly/smxsocial
2:25 Keri Morgret:  Looking at Key Conversation Indicators (KCIs). Can measure several things, like conversaion valume, sentiment, topics of conversation, purchase considerations, brand associations.
2:25 Keri Morgret:  Brand Health Scorecards.
2:27 Keri Morgret:  He shows several scorecards for food, soda.
2:28
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2:28 Keri Morgret:  Persona Development: Who is the client's customer online?

Younger males are more likely to be more active in the online space and most attractive to target. He shows a graph of the target market for a product.
2:29 Keri Morgret:  Younger social media participants are more likely to create content online.
2:30 Keri Morgret:  He gives a persona example of Newbie Nick, who is highly engaged in social media as an active participant. The data is from Nielsen @ Plan, July 2009.
2:31 Keri Morgret:  What kinds of sites are they going to, viewing, what type of content they are creating.
2:31 Keri Morgret:  Travel influencers are most vocal and can influence broader audiences.
2:32 Keri Morgret:  Where are these conversations occurring? How many people are they reaching?

Twitter represents the largest source of mentions for this particular client. However, social network conversations are underrepresented in this report due to privacy restrictions.
2:32 Keri Morgret:  In order of amount:
Micro-blogs (Twitter)
Blogs
Forums
Social Networks
Images
Videos
2:33 Keri Morgret:  Blogs have the majority of reach when posts are weighted by impressions. Do take some of this data with a grain of salt.
2:34 Keri Morgret:  People are sharing and asking advice to make informative purchase decisions about Client.
2:35 Keri Morgret:  Missed some slides here due to technical difficulties.
2:36 Keri Morgret:  He's looking at a case study for car rental. They looked at social mentions about what mattered, like personal service, car selection, getting to the location, etc. They categorized positive/negative/neutral.
2:37 Keri Morgret:  In shopping conversations for Client, many are spreading the word but are not necessarily buying. Graph of purchase funnel analysis for client online conversation.
2:39 Keri Morgret:  Do look at the competitive set. Their client does have the most positive buzz among the competitors examined.
2:40 Keri Morgret:  Now we have Augustin VazquezLevi @oggy

he's going to present a case study
2:41 Keri Morgret:  Case Study:

  • Client description
  • Client's immediate goals
  • Potential danger to brand
  • Short term success
  • Final info
2:41 Keri Morgret:  Client description

Vertical: Major men's magazine website, like a "Cosmo for guys"
Traffic: over 10 million monthly visits
Target is males 18-35 years old

Based on about 140 articles
2:42 Keri Morgret:  Short term success defined:

Revenue from display ads (CPM). Increase page views and visits
Generate.... (missed this)
2:42 Keri Morgret:  Quick and Immediate traffic

Multi-page articles = 3x more average page views per visit

Multi-page articles containing 2, 3, 4, or 11 pages.
2:42 Keri Morgret:  Lot of negative comments when multi-page articles were used, comments from Digg and social media.
2:43 Keri Morgret:  Someone copy/pasted a five page article as a comment. 400 people up-voted this comment and left replies.

Was this detrimental to short-term goals?
2:44 Keri Morgret:  They went and counted the percent of negative comments, and compared to the number of backlinks generated. When they were angry at the brand there were more backlinks.
2:45 Keri Morgret:  Social traffic vs all traffic for one particular article.

All traffic had an average of 37% drop after first few pages, while socially referred traffic had a less severe average dropout ratio of 22%. Quite surprising!
2:46 Keri Morgret:  Long term success threatened?

Recruitment of new readers (repeat visits were still higher than average traffic)

Brand perception and promotion of site: seen as a drop of natural submissions on social platforms and more effort required to push.
2:48 Keri Morgret:  Calming the mob

Finding a reasonable article length without compromising page views. Best ratio seemed to be around 3-4 pages for a top ten article.
2:49 Keri Morgret:  Be creative with your metrics.

"Social Metrics" -- like any other metric it's useless without segmentation.

Some segmenting ideas:

  • Vertical of the article: sports, finance, science, entertainment, etc. Benchmark with each other.
  • If pushed on a particular platform, try segmenting by submitter
  • Effects on different platforms
  • etc
2:54 Keri Morgret:  We're in Q&A and the internet connection is failing, so I'm closing this session. Thanks for watching, everyone!
2:56
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 1:50 PM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Pumping Up WordPress For SEO

Below is live coverage of the Pumping Up WordPress For SEO from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Pumping Up WordPress For SEO(10/07/2009) 
12:41 Sheara Wilensky:  

Pumping Up WordPress For SEO – WordPress is an incredibly popular blogging platform and CMS system. This session shows you how to quickly tune WordPress with plugins and settings to get the most out of technical SEO. Programmed by Jane & Robot.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Jon Henshaw, Co-Creator & Product Manager, Raven Internet Marketing Tools
Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
Jordan Kasteler, Co-Founder, Search & Social
12:50 Sheara Wilensky:  Vanessa: So how many of you use Wordpress now? (hands raised)
12:50 Sheara Wilensky:  How many are not?
12:50 Sheara Wilensky:  We have some great speakers!
12:51 Sheara Wilensky:  There are a lot of things you can do for Wordpress, plugins, etc. that we are going to talk to you about.
12:52 Sheara Wilensky:  Jordan: First thing I want to talk about, before you install Wordpress, create a robot.txt file to block some stuff out you dont want crawled.

By default you will have the Wordpress template, so get rid of some stuff, some of the default links.
12:52 Sheara Wilensky:  I like to rename images, css classes, extraneous code to customize the template so search engines don't lower your quality score.
12:53 Sheara Wilensky:  In the header.php by default, theb blog name is first.
12:53 Sheara Wilensky:  There is a good meta robots plugin to control dupe content.
12:54 Sheara Wilensky:  Make as much static as possible when you are going through your code. Alot of code in WP is dynamic. If you can make some things HTML, not everything needs to be PHP, it will speed up the page loading.
12:55 Sheara Wilensky:  Another good plugin is Slug Trimmer, which will pull words from your URL structure such as a, the, of, etc.
12:56 Sheara Wilensky:  In your category area, fill out some category descriptions to get your categories ranking.
12:56 Sheara Wilensky:  Getting breadcrumbs into your blog is great for usability as well.
12:57 Sheara Wilensky:  You want to create a custom 404 page and monitor through Google Webmaster Central, and 301 redirect accordingly.
12:58 Sheara Wilensky:  Internal Linking - you can use plugins, there is a plugin for Popular Posts, Sticky Posts plugin, Insights Plugin is a cool one.
12:59 Sheara Wilensky:  External Links are important of course. After you publish a blog post, you can have WP ping all these services, you will get it crawled very quickly.
12:59 Sheara Wilensky:  Security is imp for SEO so noone hacks in, protect your WP-config file, password protect WP-admin directory.
1:00 Sheara Wilensky:  Update your admin to a unique user name bc that's default so will make it easier to hack.
1:00 Sheara Wilensky:  Worpress Firewall Plugin is a good plugin to use.
1:00 Sheara Wilensky:  Thanks!
1:01 Sheara Wilensky:  Next up is Jon Henshaw of Raven Internet Marketing Tools.
1:01 Sheara Wilensky:  http://hen.sh/aw for some great tools.
1:02 Sheara Wilensky:  I like to run a lot of WP sites at once. Wordpress MU is nice, you can manage a lot of Google friendly sites in one interface.
1:03 Sheara Wilensky:  I also developed a hack to the WP config file a while back, what you can do is modify some code to allow you to have one install of WP with multiple domains.
1:04 Sheara Wilensky:  Don't use a bunch of cheap hosts if you are running a bunch of sites. Don't be slow and crappy.
1:05 Sheara Wilensky:  Scraper protection: A few weeks ago I was discussing the idea of making sure Google knows you are the original source of content, so you can use delayed RSS feeds, or also use links in your feeds so if your RSS is being scraped anyway, you can get some free links.
1:05 Sheara Wilensky:  Navigation Structure: All In One SEO Pack is the best plugin, definitely use it!
1:06 Sheara Wilensky:  Permalink structure: change it.
1:06 Sheara Wilensky:  Block archives - keep your site to it's core-nice focus.
1:06 Sheara Wilensky:  Headspace is a great Plugin as well for SEO.
1:07 Sheara Wilensky:  Make sure you look legitimate: have a TOS, privacy policy, public WHOIS, phone number, physical address.
1:08 Sheara Wilensky:  Frenemy Communication: Do you want to give Google your data? They don't just want to help you out, they have incentives. So it's up to you. I personally use GA and webmaster tools bc I don't have to hide things, but you may want to consider using something different.
1:09 Sheara Wilensky:  Header/Footer is another good plugin. Easily put in validation for GA and Webmaster tools.
1:09 Sheara Wilensky:  Google XML sitemap is another plugin.
1:09 Sheara Wilensky:  A lot of GA alternatives: WassUp, Woopra, Clicky, Mint
1:11 Sheara Wilensky:  Jordan mentioned Insights - excellent plugin! A big part of good SEO is developing content, so that will benefit you. Zemanta is anotherone, so is FeedWordpress, Paginated Comments will break out coments over multiple pages, give you unique page titles.
1:11 Sheara Wilensky:  Cross Linker, SEO Smart Links, Bayesian Top Title Learner is a very cool plugin to manage content.
1:12 Sheara Wilensky:  To manage affiliate links: skaDoogle, Link-A-Dink, Ninja Affiliate is the best but it costs money.
1:12 Sheara Wilensky:  Ongoing strategy for basic SEO: frequently post, it's ok to link to people, site maintenance (run a broken link checker).
1:12 Sheara Wilensky:  That's it, thank you.
1:13 Sheara Wilensky:  Next we are going to hear from SugarRae.
1:14 Sheara Wilensky:  Rae: I dont have my PPT up but you can find it on OutSpokenMedia's website tomorrow.
1:14 Sheara Wilensky:  Create your own URL shortener - instead of giving credit to TinyURL!
1:16 Sheara Wilensky:  How to do it: Link Shortcut Plugin: you can designate if the URL is a 301 or 302. Download, Install, Activate!
1:17 Sheara Wilensky:  But you also need to show your short URLs on the front end.
1:18 Sheara Wilensky:  The Thesis Theme: I am a big advocate of this theme. I do not own it, I have just been using it since the beginning, but it does cost money.
1:19 Sheara Wilensky:  Thesis is a very vanilla WP theme. No design. So what's so special about it? It's more of a framework than a theme. Say you want to add a third column, so you pick a new theme, then you have to edit each page all over again! So with Thesis, you just have to do it once. What's cool is you can update your design without redoing the entire template.
1:21 Sheara Wilensky:  The canonical URLs function is built into the Thesis theme. You can also change all feed links without touchig the code. It has flexible category layouts, you can make your blog look like less of a blog.
1:21 Sheara Wilensky:  It has strong on-page SEO abiliity.
1:21 Sheara Wilensky:  The point of the theme is that it eliminates the need for all the SEO plugins.
1:26 Sheara Wilensky:  The Thesis back end panel allows you to upload say 5 ads and it will rotate them out for you.
1:27 Sheara Wilensky:  You can also add database triggers to posts. Say you don't want to put ads in the face of your regular readers, but someone who finds you randomly on Google, you can serve them ads!
1:28 Sheara Wilensky:  Custom page template: you can specify different layouts for different pages if you are using WP for a real website and not a blog.
1:29 Sheara Wilensky:  If you guys have ever been to Gawker, you have seen the "featured posts" box, you can do that with very simple code.
1:30 Sheara Wilensky:  How to learn Hooks: go to my website http://www.sugarrae.com/thesis-hooks-dummies-tutorial/
1:30 Sheara Wilensky:  I am not a programmer, I can just hack around WP.
1:30 Sheara Wilensky:  http://www.mattflies.com has an ultimate Thesis tutorials list.
1:31 Sheara Wilensky:  If you want to have a blog that's better than everyone else and that's out of the box SEO'd, use the Thesis theme!
1:31 Sheara Wilensky:  Thank!
1:31 Sheara Wilensky:  Now 15 minutes left for Q&A.
1:32 Sheara Wilensky:  Quick side not from Jon - make sure you title your blog posts with KEYWORDS!
1:34 [Comment From dude]
what is the metarobots plugin?
1:34 Sheara Wilensky:  It allows you to add all the meta robots tags to your pages.
1:34 Sheara Wilensky:  http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/
1:36 Sheara Wilensky:  Discussion about tags vs comments:
1:36 Sheara Wilensky:  I mean tags vs categories
1:36 Sheara Wilensky:  SugarRae uses Categories, so does Jon
1:46 [Comment From None]
Does google place more value on tags or categories? does it value tags at all?
1:46 Sheara Wilensky:   Anyone want to take this question?
1:47 Sheara Wilensky:  We are out of time.
1:47 Sheara Wilensky:  You can email any of the panelists for questions.
1:47 Sheara Wilensky:  Thank you!
1:48
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 12:40 PM Comments (2)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Social Media, Search & Reputation Management

Below is live coverage of the Social Media, Search & Reputation Management from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick & Justin Davy of JustinDavy.com.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Social Media, Search & Reputation Management(10/07/2009) 
12:52 Justin Davy:  Brent is up first
12:52 Justin Davy:  It's always a nightmare to get attacked even if you DESERVE it. Brent is going to discuss how you can come out of it.
12:54 Justin Davy:  Social media can come to the rescue.

Professional Networking Sites
  • Linkedin
  • Naymz
Social Networking
Social 'Media'
  • Flickr
Social Aggregation
Informational
12:54 Justin Davy:  Social media is taking over so its good to make sure you have visibility in these sites in general.
12:54 Justin Davy:  Many of the sites in the top 15-20 in traffic are social media websites
12:56 Justin Davy:  With social aggregation sites its about quality. You can't simply submit your "about me" page and think that will work. You need to think outside the box.
12:56 Justin Davy:  Using Social on Social. Submitting Twitter to Social aggregation sites
12:57 Justin Davy:  Sharing the Delta Airlines safety video - tons of views on YouTube (still needs to be interesting however) It all links back to your profile
12:58 Justin Davy:  Wikipedia is a great doorway page. Upload an image and it ties back to your website.
12:58 Justin Davy:  Flickr is recommended for images
12:59 Justin Davy:  You can even write questions and answer them yourself on Yahoo! Answers
12:59 Justin Davy:  Keep it edgy and interesting
12:59 Justin Davy:  Link to your Social Submissions
1:00 Justin Davy:  You see a lot of digg results in Google. Sharing Michael Jackson Death digg submission example outranking MTV in Google results
1:00 Justin Davy:  Launch a social campaign. Ikea Hacker is an example http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/
1:01 Justin Davy:  The idea isn't to create something viral but to think about what users like. People like modifying things for example.
1:01 Justin Davy:  GM FastLane Blog is a good example of ranking well and leveraging social.
1:02 Justin Davy:  Submit 3rd Party Content. It doesn't always have to be yours.
1:03 Justin Davy:  Chris is up next from KeyRelevance
1:04 Justin Davy:  Yikes Chris was in a small taxi cab accident this morning so he's warning us he might spaz :P
1:06 Justin Davy:  There's a few ways to handle rep management issues online:

  • Pushing negative content off page one of SERPs
  • Generating Strong Neutral / Positive Content
  • Filing Complains to remove negative content
  • Link building to push up good content
1:07 Justin Davy:  Seek out strong ranking sites to push down negative content. Leverage wikipedia tied back to a particular subject
1:08 Justin Davy:  Wikipedia Tactics:
  • Article about the company/brand
  • Other articles pertaining to brand name
  • Generate unrelated article for coincidentally identical name
  • Provide wikimedia commons photo
1:09 Justin Davy:  Article about company brand:
  • Subject must meet minimum notability reqs.
  • Ask established wikipedia to author
  • Must be written with Neutral P.O.V.
  • Have reference citations
  • Categories to rank quickly
1:09 Justin Davy:  Again this is all tied back to Wikipedia
1:09 Justin Davy:  Wikipedia articles rank well/fast!
1:11 Justin Davy:  Leverage a well ranking celebrity that may have made references to your brand in the past and link to that page.
1:13 Justin Davy:  If you have a subject that doesn't merit a wikipedia article to itself you could create a bogus article in wikipedia that doesn't tie back to anything. Problem is, it took a life of its own and it ended up being promoted to the homepage of Wikipedia.
1:14 Justin Davy:  If you can add content and value to Wikipedia articles such as images, they look good upon that
1:15 Justin Davy:  Negative Content within Wikipedia

  • Is it Cited? If not, request deletion
  • Is it slanted? Request change due to goal of neutra P.O.V.
  • Is page repeatedly defaced? Request lock on edits
  • Is it minor? Request removable as non-noteworthy
1:16 Justin Davy:  You can also search within Google news for a particular keyword and link build to that. Google has already found it relevant.
1:17 Justin Davy:  Rhea is next up
1:19 Justin Davy:  Sharing example of her old employer making a webpage to make a competitor look bad. Had the competitor name in the domain and it worked well.
1:20 Justin Davy:  It got them a lot of exposure.
1:21 Justin Davy:  Bad things are going to happen "David Letterman" example
1:21 Justin Davy:  Consumers trust in brands has fallen from 52% in 97 to 22% in 2008

Takes 4 years to recover from negative brand perceptions
1:22 Justin Davy:  What they have in common:
  • No line of defense
  • Don't want to speak up
  • No intention of fighting the wrong
  • They're making the problem worse
  • Tough Industry
1:24 Justin Davy:  Some brands want to fix it but are afraid to address the problem. You need to use PR, Search Results, Blog etc...
1:26 Justin Davy:  Leverage citations within Wikipedia, you can see an overnight jump
1:28 Justin Davy:  Online reputation management requires a bit of OCD. Keep checking the search results and work on improving your good and hiding the bad
1:30 Justin Davy:  Use knowem to see if your company name / brand name / personal name is available.
1:31 Justin Davy:  Social Profile Optimization:

  • Use your company name as your username
  • Company name used as the vanity URL whenever possible (anchor text)
1:31 Justin Davy:  Company name/Keywords within the profile page description

Company contact information as well
1:32 Justin Davy:  Use dash-separated keywords in profile picture
1:32 Justin Davy:  Keep profiles active and fresh

  • Add friends
  • Join Groups
  • Leave Comments
1:33 Justin Davy:  Use social profile links (sharing mixx as an example)
1:34 Justin Davy:  As your profiles start populating the search results then start link building to them to help them rank better.
1:35 Justin Davy:  You'll want to monitor and track the comments on your social media profiles for negative comments and not allow things to spin out of control.
1:38 Justin Davy:  Social Monitoring Tools
  • Buzz/trends
  • Blogs
  • Email Alerts
  • Social Conversation
  • Forums
trendrr.com
technorati.com
blogpulse.com
whostalkin.com
keotag.com
search.twitter.com (leverage advanced search which shows tweets based on emoticon)
socialmention.com
tweetbeep.com
boardtracker.com and boardreader.com for forums
1:39 Justin Davy:  Marty is up next
1:41 Justin Davy:  Sharing a recall experience from the U.S. FDA 3 Days to Mobilize
1:41 Justin Davy:  First thing you do is explain personalized search for key executives
1:42 Justin Davy:  Figure out your current assets including Website, Facebook Profiles
1:43 Justin Davy:  Pre-preparred content network targeting strategy
YouTube Channel
PRWire & other press release services
Digg etc..

Plus lots of Money
1:44 Justin Davy:  Define Filtered KW monitoring grid
  • Danger associations
  • Confirm general keyword monitored "brand sucks"
  • (18-24) keyword phrases
1:44 Justin Davy:  Solidify & distribute grid to stakeholders
1:45 Justin Davy:  Let the world know that the brand is listening to those channels and that your there to serve them.
1:46 Justin Davy:  Coordinate across all channels
1:49 Justin Davy:  There should be a d-load link for this presentation at the end. Little hard to keep up with Marty but his information is outstanding.
1:50 Justin Davy:  The most important thing you can do is to have a Defense in place
1:50 Justin Davy:  his website is aimclearblog.com
1:51
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 12:40 PM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz

Below is live coverage of the Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz(10/07/2009) 
10:36 Keri Morgret:  

Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz – Subdomains or subdirectories? Are tracking parameters a problem for search engines? Keywords in the URL make a difference? How about the "level" of a page — is "deep" in a site bad? This session focuses on technical SEO questions of this nature and provides answers. Programmed by Jane & Robot.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
Lena Flanigan, Principal Marketing Manager, AOL LLC
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Rand is up first.

Correlation Data Set

10,000 Queries
Google.com United States Only
Range of head, middle, and tail queries
1-6 word queries
Excludes queries w/fewer than 25 results
Collected Oct 1-3, 2009
10:36 Keri Morgret:  Correlation IS NOT Causation. Gives example of more ice cream vendors when NY is hotter, but doesn't mean that it's the ice cream vendors are causing the heat. Keep this in mind when you're looking at the data Rand is presenting.
10:37 Keri Morgret:  As URL length rises, ranking decreases in close proportion.
10:38 Keri Morgret:  Domain name length appears to barely matter for rankings, but greater than 11 characters may be unwise.
10:39 [Comment From AFS]
Are ISAPI redirects the same as 301's in the SE's mind?
10:39 Keri Morgret:  URLs with query parameters are less likely to appear in top results
10:40 Keri Morgret:  AFS, ask your question at http://searchmarketingexpo.com/ask.php and they'll look at it during the Q&A.
10:40 Keri Morgret:  Root domain that include keyword matches are dramatically more likely to appear in top results.
10:42 Keri Morgret:  Vanessa suggests a study looking at inbound anchor test, then gets excited that she can order studies from Rand!
10:42 Keri Morgret:  Do keywords in a site's subdomain help? Not as much as root domains, but there appears to be some value.
10:43 Keri Morgret:  Do keywords in the URL path make for better rankings? (path = folder names)

They make dramatically less difference than root or subdomain.
10:44 Keri Morgret:  Rand clarifies audience question: results are talking about ranking, not page rank.
10:44 Keri Morgret:  Slight more sophisticated data from this spring suggested that keyword usage in path has a somewhat positive correlation.
10:45 Keri Morgret:  Are keywords in the filename valuable?

Like path, not as valuable/correlated. He wouldn't change the best practice of doing it, but in comparison to root or subdomain, not as highly correlated.

Vanessa also points out that this is looking only at rankings, but not things like clickthrough rate. These keywords are bolded in SERPs when they match query for example.
10:46 Keri Morgret:  What about keywords in a query string? (?id=keywordname)

Also not as positively correlated.
10:47 Keri Morgret:  www vs non-www.

www domains appear more often in top results, but he is loathe to say that because of this that you should worry about non-www. Non-www could be subdomains without as much popularity.
10:48 Keri Morgret:  Is http better than https?

http appears much mroe frequently in top results, but doesn't seem to have much correlation with ranking. But there are so many more sites on the web that are http to begin with.

Do follow best practices for making sure both http and https aren't indexed.
10:48 Keri Morgret:  Fewer folders in URLs have high correlation with better ranking.
10:50 Keri Morgret:  Ranking URL structures based on correlation data.

He shows a list of URLs, best case to worst case.
10:51 [Comment From Stuart]
Our website got index.asp?WEBSITE=TRACKING CODE HERE...now will this affect rankings if those pages get listed how can they track urls without using this
10:51 Keri Morgret:  Stuart, this would be a good one to ask at http://searchmarketingexpo.com/ask.php.
10:51 Keri Morgret:  Lena from AOL is up now.
10:52 Keri Morgret:  She starts off by saying this should be all about the users.
10:53 Keri Morgret:  Looking at URL naming conventions. Again, think about your users when looking at:

  • Multiple domains or one domain
  • canonicalization
  • subdomains or directories
10:55 Keri Morgret:  First case study: Multiple domains vs one domain

Their decision around choosing AOL was that they all targeted same AOL users.

For brand strategy, DO get bounty.com, pampers.com, charmin.com, but don't buy thousands of misspellings of URLs.
10:55 [Comment From Whitespark]
If you have a URL on your site with a few good external links, but it doesn't have keywords, would it be worth it to change the filename to have keywords and then 301 redirect it? Or, don't bother, given the low value of keywords in the filename?
10:57 Keri Morgret:  For questions, you can go to http://searchmarketingexpo.com/ask.php and submit them. Even if you're not in the session you can ask; I'll do my best to cover the answers here.
10:57 Keri Morgret:  Multiple vs. single domain: your decision should be based on what is intuitive and understandable to the users (missed bullet points here).
10:57 Keri Morgret:  Take care of your canonicalization issues.
10:58 Keri Morgret:  Use 301 redirects, canonical tags, webmaster tools. They use this to help the inlinks to all go to the same URL rather than split them between aol.com and www.aol.com for example.
10:59 Keri Morgret:  Subdomains or directories? A need for balance.
10:59 Keri Morgret:  Subdomains are OK for:
Brand strategy
- finance.aol.com
International coverage
- chinese.aol.com
- cinema.aol.fr

Subdomains are not OK for: "I do this because it will help my search rankings"
11:00 Keri Morgret:  SEO implications.

Define URL guidelines
Use consistent guidelines across domains, brands.
11:02 Keri Morgret:  Subdomains or subdirectories. Your decision will be based on:

  • Overall business strategy and technological considerations
  • What makes sense to the users, not search engines
  • Cost, resources, reporting, potential SEO implications, and more.
Focus on user, quality content.
11:03 Keri Morgret:  Final Thought - Findability: All responsible.

User is the king
Good SEO hygiene will help your rankings
AOL never changes URL structure believing it will help with rankings.
11:04 Keri Morgret:  Vanessa is now up and looking at parameter handling, which just launched a few weeks ago.
11:05 Keri Morgret:  http://searchengineland.com/google-lets-you-tell-them-which-url-parameters-to-ignore-25925 is a post Vanessa did about Google's parameter handling.
11:07 Keri Morgret:  This might be a good option for you, though it only works for Google. However, Yahoo has a similar feature that's been out for two years now.
11:07 Keri Morgret:  In her article, Vanessa also addresses the rel canonical tag.
11:08 [Comment From Stuart]
so canonical might be the way to go you think
11:09 Keri Morgret:  Stuart, reading the article would probably help. It's way too extensive for me to cover here with the time available.
11:10 Keri Morgret:  The slides from the developer summit that Jane and Robot did in San Francisco have a lot of information. http://janeandrobot.com/developer-summit/2009-sfo "Tools and tactics for diagnosing technical search issues"
11:11 Keri Morgret:  We're now looking at an attendee's site and go through what may be some of the problems with the current approach.
11:12 Keri Morgret:  The site is homegallerystores.com
11:13 Keri Morgret:  First issue is no canonicalization, at least four URLs for each page of content. This means the search engines are crawling four URLs for each page, also divides incoming link juice.
11:14 Keri Morgret:  Panelists are discussing trailing slash and if it's duplicate content.
11:16 Keri Morgret:  To be the safest, always have a trailing slash.
11:16 Keri Morgret:  Be consistent with your links and make sure you're pointing to the same URL each time.
11:16 Keri Morgret:  Another reason for canonicalization is it really helps in your analytics.
11:21 Keri Morgret:  The site we're looking at also has several different domains as landing pages. Each domain is looking at a separate part of furniture, such as dining room, bedroom, etc. Vanessa is pointing out that by only showing the dining room stuff to a user, you're missing out on the user knowing about your bedroom furniture.
11:25 Keri Morgret:  An audience member bought from this site, notes that she didn't realize that he had all of these different sites. She said it affected the brand credibility as she was wondering why they had all of these different sites.
11:26 Keri Morgret:  Talking about how people find sites. People use several searches to find a site, people don't remember what they searched for, don't always know what you're looking for at first.
11:29 Keri Morgret:  Tood Friesen points out that it's good to have paid search and organic search pointing to the same site / same company name. 87% will click on organic if it appears in both page. If both appear, user gets more of an authoritative sense that it's credible.
11:31 Keri Morgret:  AOL thinks about if people are different types of users for using subdomains vs subfolders, but they do this for user experience rather thank rankings.
11:34 Keri Morgret:  Another factor in subdomains vs subfolders is how much technical support you have to do this. Subdomains involve multiple robots.txt, integrating analytics, etc.
11:36 Keri Morgret:  People watching via coveritlive: it doesn't appear that the speakers are going to go to the URL where people asked questions. There are two more technical sessions today where you may be able to get some questions answered.
11:37 Keri Morgret:  One takeaway from this whole discussion is that there are a lot more factors than just rankings when you decide whether to do a subdomain or subdirectory. Technical, analytics, user experience, etc.
11:39
Are you watching from:
This session
 ( 25% )
Another session
 ( 0% )
Not at conference
 ( 75% )

11:43 Keri Morgret:  Looking at a dive store that is local, but sells nationwide. Advice given to website owner is to make sure that people know they sell nationwide. Also that the online store should still be in the subdirectory.
11:43 Keri Morgret:  If you have a local site, be sure to register it in Google and Yahoo as a local business.
11:44 Keri Morgret:  If you have a thin site, subdomains won't usually also show.
11:46 Keri Morgret:  Large news site is talking about their subdomain hell. People in different areas of company have different views on how things should be done.
11:48 Keri Morgret:  I've heard similar challenges in other sessions.
11:48 Keri Morgret:  Where to put things? Healthcare is now a political issue. Put in health or politics?
11:48 Keri Morgret:  Rand: not worried as much about Google, but worried about users here as where users would expect to find things.
11:50
Twittermannyrivas:  User Friendly URLs. Good article from @bhartzer, parallels the #smx URL focused session I’m in right now http://bit.ly/3vGGhb
11:54 Keri Morgret:  We're over time for the session and finishing up in a moment. Vanessa suggests getting an information architecture specialist to help with this.
11:54 Keri Morgret:  Rand: build a culture of testing.
11:54
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 10:20 AM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Bringing PPC In House: How To Be Successful

Below is live coverage of the Bringing PPC In House: How To Be Successful from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Justin Davy of JustinDavy.com.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Bringing PPC In House: How To Be Successful(10/07/2009) 
10:34 Justin Davy:  It's time to talk In-House PPC!
10:37 Justin Davy:  Sometimes the people in your company can be more effective than the most skilled PPC expert. You know your industry!
10:37 Justin Davy:  In House is typically much cheaper and offers quicker response times
10:40 Justin Davy:  What you'll need for an In-House team:

  • Good Copywriter - there are always aspiring writers in your company - find them.
  • Someone Good With Numbers - have a math person, a pserons good with details and loves analysis.
  • Keyword Converter - understands what people search for, what converts, what gets clicks, and knows keyword tools
10:41 Justin Davy:  There are more companies offering on site training now, but Search Engine Tutorials are also a great option that's FREE!
10:41 Justin Davy:  Google offers some great education in their learning center http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/
10:42 Justin Davy:  If your using analytics tools, typically those companies offer training sessions. Take advantage of that training and work that into your contract.
10:45 Justin Davy:  Hire skills and train about industry
10:50 Justin Davy:  Bill from Siemens recommends putting together a mind map of tasks (daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly)
10:51 Justin Davy:  Daily:
Review PPC management tools and Analytics
spikes in impressions
loss of clicks

keep a journal
new tests
all changes
results of yesterdays changes
this forms good basic habits

Make Quick Daily Changes
  • Based on Obervations
  • Pause ad groups/terms that run away, come back to them later
  • Start/Stop time framed projects
10:56 Justin Davy:  Weekly Tasks
Deeper Analysis of PPC Tool Stats/Reports
  • Number of clicks per avg. cost per conversion
  • Increase Impressions while maintaining CTR
  • Change in Ad Positions (shows competitive landscape)
  • Number of Conversions
  • Daily budget recommendations (could be loosing potential traffic)
  • Review analytics 404 reports for broken landing pages
Improve top and Bottom AdGroup Performers
  • Expand keyword research
  • Add new terms
  • Add New negatives
  • Edit worst performing ad copy to beat the best

Improve Top & Bottom Account Keywords
  • The Google interface is fantastic at filtering, highest cost, highest impresssions with lowest conversion rate or CTR, etc.

Sculpt Adgroups and Campaigns
  • For every word you bid on... sculpt (box out) impressions by adding broad negatives in the other related Campaigns and Adgroups
10:57 Justin Davy:  Monthly Continued...

  • Distribute PPC Reports
  • Schedule Monthly calls with hyper focused internal customers
  • Create and auto send reports to other internal customers
  • Bill back your partners
10:59 Justin Davy:  Quarterly Tasks

  • Go After New Business
  • Plan new PPC projects and expand campaigns
11:02 Justin Davy:  Conduct LIve Scenario Reviews
via WebEx
Review Understanding of Customer Goals

Create a Company eNewsletter

Yearly

  • Budgeting
  • Time/Responsbilities

Put together and build support for your yearly budget
11:04 Justin Davy:  When not to do PPC in house:

Limited budget
Limited resources
  • analytics
  • kw management
No consistency in spend
Large keyword list
11:08 Justin Davy:  Pros & Cons of an agency:

Pros
Research bandwidth
Analytics & reporting
Education
Search engine communication
Competitor information

Cons
Propriety analytics
Off hour control
Delay
11:11 Justin Davy:  Working with an Agency

  • Communication is key
  • Clear goals/objective
  • Single point of contact
  • Budget Allocation
  • Strategy
11:14 Justin Davy:  Staying Informed

  • Talk to the search engine reps w/your agency
  • Pay attention to industry research
  • Obtain industry averages
  • Try new products
11:17
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 10:20 AM Comments (1)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Twitter Marketing Tactics

Below is live coverage of the Twitter Marketing Tactics from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp .

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Twitter Marketing Tactics(10/07/2009) 
10:29 aviwilensky:  Welcome to Twitter Marketing Tactics. Moderated by @dannysullivan.

Speakers - @chriswinfield of 10e20, @tamar of techipedia, @graywolf of Atlas Web Service
10:32 aviwilensky:  Chris is moderating, Danny had to run out.
10:33 aviwilensky:  Chris introduces panel. Will be giving out some free copies of @tamar's new book!
10:35 aviwilensky:  Chris starts his presentation. Discusses how he fields the content from Twitter. Emphasises how you can tap into so many people to gather so much information. Points to example of Woot and Comcast who does an excellent job marketing on twitter, but what works for one company does not work for another.
10:36 aviwilensky:  In less than an hour, gets hundreds of great nuggets of info from all over the world from some of the most brilliant marketers.
10:41 aviwilensky:  Question 1: How do you define marketing on Twitter? @BrentDPayne says it's about the long term. Steady return on efforts. Very rare to get immediate returns. For @martinbowling it's about building relationships and sharing knowledge. For @kennyhyder is about conversions without pissing people off. For @TimDineen it's anti-marking marketing. Have conversation and earn trust. For @davidwallace it's about building the community. For @ylove its about engagement and personalization. Push marketing is probably not effective. For @katemorris it's about conversation and relationships, recurring answer.
10:47 aviwilensky:  Question 2: There's alot of spam on twitter. What's the worst form of it and why?
@ddn says trending topic spam especially on a local level. Abusing hash tags. Hurts the twitter data graph. @bukowsky says stupid games such as the mafia wars. Comes from random people and hard to block. Chris says probably following too many people. If one of his friends sent him that, goodbye - even if its his mother. @audette says spam that steals login creds, like several friends experienced last week. @davewallace porn accounts are a big problem and can damage brand. Be diligent in blocking. @timdineen says false tagging and irrelevant links hidden in shortened urls. Problem with URL shorteners is that you don't know where you are going. Chris says make sure you only click on urls from people you trust. @matthewjbrown says DM spam. @searchbuzz says auto dm's are a big problem.
10:51 aviwilensky:  Question 3 - How are you leveraging Twitter to help you get more links and traffic to your sites/blogs? @steveplunkett says that anchor text via downstream twitter output thru intergrating them into other social media websites. @goodroi says to use twitter as rss feed that i can interact with my followers and using keyword searches to find related writers to connect with. @katemorris says mixing conversation with links. @kennyhyder says to ask people to link to your content.
10:53 aviwilensky:  Question 3: Are hashtags inportant? @yoast uses hashtags for events like this. Very important to connect with people. Great for relationship building. @jasonfalls likes hashtags for specific events. Doesnt like the hashtag spam. @fantomaster uses them to establish authority. Helps structure tweet content, such as Follow Friday. @bukowsky likes to use them for local connections.
10:58 aviwilensky:  Question 5: Is Twitter Search a threat to Google? @brentdpayne rarely googles for products, tech help, or recommendations. he just tweets and gets an answer. people are likely to trust their twittersphere for recommendations, etc. @steveplunkett searches for what people says. @matthewjbrown says its a threat to google. they have the user base already, but hasn't leveraged it. @martinbowling says that real time is a threat. for @factive it's overhyped. @derekedmond says no, google has so many more resources to pull from. @timdineen says yes because its the #1 spot for breaking news. It often becomes the first try search engine. Chris says if they can clean up the spam, it will become a threat. @fantomaster says the real timeness is a threat. @johnandrews says it takes the convo offline FAST leading to less content creation - ie. blogs.
11:03 aviwilensky:  Question 6: How would you convince a company that Twitter is not a waste of time?
@garrettgillas says it helps colleagues and client tool to stay ahead of the curve. talk to your people. @martinbowling says increase in traffic. @bargrainr says find good examples. @tamar says that its valuable to connect with influencers in any discipline. unline facebook people see what you tweet them. @bukowsy convinced his boss to be on twitter and have seen positive results and gets yelled at less. For @charityhistle says se the Georgia Aquarium results - $43k. @nodaybuttoday08 says its free and the quickest way to get info out. @goodroi says low cost. @matthewjbrown says to compare Comcast phone support vs. twitter support. @aviw (me) says to show them the power of twitter search by querying their brand or company name. Follow Chris @chriswinfield and @10e20. Tamar is up next!
11:04 aviwilensky:  Tamar: Participation is marketing. If you are involved in the community, your marketing yourself. Case studies: Graco Baby, Tyson Foods, Home Depot, Jetblue, etc.
11:07 aviwilensky:  Twitter for marketing gain. Need right ideas. Immediate feedback and instant connection. Fast customer serivce. Can communicate with Britney Spears on Twitter but not on FB. API apps are powerful.
11:10 aviwilensky:  Twitter can generate sales. We all know about Dell's twitter success. Can small companies do the same? Mimobot and Namecheap are examples. Mimobot makes cool USB drives in crazy designs. Ran a contest to win a USB key. Has brought arewareness and eyeballs to the company. Saw higher traffic and was worth their while. Namecheap is domain registrar. Also did a contest. Ran several actually. Asked 600 questions over 30 days on the hour - first 3 answers would get a free domain credit. Top 3 winners during promotion won iPods. As of December, they saw a 20% increase in traffic to their site, ton of new links and more signups.
11:12 aviwilensky:  Saturated market example. Apple App store. Convert is an App that came in late to the game. In 1 week they became a top 30 paid app. Twitter gave them access to an older tech savvy demographic. Relevant followers first, messaging later. Offered a freebie that complemented the product. Gave away a limited edition MacBook Pro and they got a ton of followers and saw alot of success.
11:13 aviwilensky:  Twitter is great for customer service. Jetblue helps @tamar all the time, and many others. @ComcastCares is the major case study run by Frank Eliason and his team. Extends to client acquisition too! Story of a person who had problems with verizon cable and vented on twitter. Comcast listened and converted the user.
11:14 aviwilensky:  Twitter for Brand Awareness: Zappos. We learn about their viral culture. Shows twitter.zappos.com which is unfiltered public mentions and employee feeds. Personally thinks Twitter was instrumental in the Amazon acquisition.
11:16 aviwilensky:  Case study: Oh Nuts - a tri state nyc area candy store. Using it for contest and giveaways. Have many products and monitor keywords for biggest products and give advice on helping users. See lots of traffic and purchases from twitter. People call them
11:17 aviwilensky:  Other communications via Twitter: Iran election protests, mumbai terror attacks, hurricane gustav via the homedepot, israel's citizens' press conference.
11:17 aviwilensky:  What works best? Contests. Solid customer services.
11:19 aviwilensky:  Twitter tools: Seesmic, TweetDeck, and many others. Can't name them all. That is all. Buy Tamar's new book here: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596156824
11:19 aviwilensky:  Graywolf / Michael Gray is up next!
11:21 aviwilensky:  Tactics and tools for commercial accounts. When you run a commercial account completely different than personal account. Beware. Lots of goals with a commercial accounts - connect with customers, find industry leaders, do you want dialogue in public. Don't be afraid to confront people who disagree. Can use it as a sales tool and lead gen but difficult. Promote content, and solve customer problems.
11:22 aviwilensky:  How big can you make your account? Southwest has 700k followers. Unless you have that brand, you won't get to that level. But @Everywheretrip has 90k. Just 1 guy. Can grow even if not well known brand.
11:24 aviwilensky:  Tweet stuff that is not self serving. RT the most self serving links of power users in your vertical. Much more likely to RT your stuff. Help solve user problems. @bbgeeks looks at queries for BB users with tech problems and points them to the right place. Solving problems = making friends. Engage with users, especially people who @ you. Not every @ deserves a response. Don't be a robot. Don't only tweet your own content. Be off topic, people like slice of life stuff.
11:26 aviwilensky:  Dig through other people's followers list. Use directories like wefollow, mrtweet, to find leaders in your vertical. Build a master list of A, B, C level people. Mine their followers. Use AUTO FOLLOW scripts with caution. Twitter may ban you, experiment with your smaller less important accounts.
11:27 aviwilensky:  Social media is time and labor intensive. Want to find automation processes. Plugins for blogs are good but must be careful. Want your tweets to go out in prime time. Schedule tweets in the future. Use Virtual Assistants and grunt labor. Repeat tweets for multiple timezones.
11:27 [Comment From @meltduplooy]
not a real threat IMO, but not to be disregarded. no wonder Ggl is doing Wave
11:28 aviwilensky:  Traffic from twitter. Most sites he sees shows Twitter in top 5 or 10. Twitter usually has a much higher time on site and PV's. Often better than Google traffic if you do a good job and target well.
11:29 aviwilensky:  Twitter is good for rep management, ranks well for your brand in SERPs.
11:30 aviwilensky:  Tools of the Tweeter: Tweetdeck - helps with multiple accounts. HootTweet and EZTweets. URL shortners with tracking built in and 301. Bitlly is good. Twitterhawk.
11:32 aviwilensky:  Bitly helps you track your twitter RT's and twitter traffic. Thank people for RT your stuff. RT tips: Make them direct and click enticing. Keep tweets as short as possible - leave 15 - 25 characters empty. Jump start the RT proces with friends. Be aware of multiple time zones. If 30 minutes goes by and no RT's - generally it's not going to go anywhere. RT your older stuff. Blast from the past, archives. Resurect old content.
11:32 aviwilensky:  That is all!!!
11:33 aviwilensky:  Time for Q & A.
11:35 [Comment From Todd]
any suggestions for monetising your tweets?
11:35 [Comment From Barry Schwartz]
bummed i missed it. great coverage.... feels like i am there, even though i am sick at home....
11:37 aviwilensky:  @todd - will ask the panel your question in just a moment - can you be more specific?
11:39 [Comment From Lauren]
What about auto-follow? As a B2C retailer is there a rule to follow or not auto follow? Does having a large following hurt/help authority?
11:39 [Comment From Todd]
Just started using twitterer.. Are there other programs. Is it reccomended to use these programs?
11:40 [Comment From @wealer]
any twitter tool out there to analyze/segment/view your followers?
11:42 aviwilensky:  @wealer http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/80437
11:43 [Comment From Barry Schwartz]
you can see some of those tools in our real time search panel coverage from yesterday at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020824.html
11:43 aviwilensky:  @lauren - becareful with autofollow as Michael said - do not use it on your main account or risk being banned.
11:44 aviwilensky:  time is running out, but if anyone has questions you can ask always tweet the panelists - @tamar @chriswinfield @graywolf
11:45 [Comment From @wealer]
Thanks, Avi & Barry!
11:45 aviwilensky:  Session is over! Thanks to everyone
11:45
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 10:20 AM Comments (1)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Search Meet Display; Display Meet Search

Below is live coverage of the Search Meet Display; Display Meet Search from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Justin Davy of JustinDavy.com.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Search Meet Display; Display Meet Search(10/07/2009) 
9:01 Justin Davy:  Wow 9:00 came around fast! This morning I'm covering Search Meet Display; Display Meet Search
9:02 Justin Davy:  Here's the speaker lineup:

Kevin Lee, CEO, Didit
Robert Murray, CEO, iProspect
Surag Patel, Director, comScore
Antony Taylor, VP, Display Platforms, Yahoo!
9:04 Justin Davy:  Surag is up first
9:05 Justin Davy:  He's sharing "Whither the Click" info from a previous whitepaper
9:06 Justin Davy:  Display ads drive consumers to the advertisers site
9:07 Justin Davy:  Within a week of seeing a Ford F-150 ad, 3.5% of the people would visit the website for the Ford F-150

Over a 4 week period, that rose to 6.6%
9:08 Justin Davy:  These results were similar across all verticals (IE Travel, Entertainment, Finance etc)
9:08 Justin Davy:  Display ads don't just increase site visitation: they also drive consumers to search for the advertiser trademark terms
9:09 Justin Davy:  Of the consumers that saw display ads, many went back and searched the brands at a later time
9:10 Justin Davy:  Consumers do not only increase searches of trademark terms, but also generic product terms (i.e. "Free Shipping", "Hyrbrid", "Web OS")
9:10 Justin Davy:  Rose 47.4% over 4 weeks
9:10 Justin Davy:  The halo effect is also true of search behaviors after seeing a display ad
9:11 Justin Davy:  They not only searched for the advertisers brand but similar competitive brands after being exposed (smaller rate however)
9:12 Justin Davy:  The % that made a purchase on the advertiser site after seeing display only rose 43%, 121% search only, and Search & Display rose 173%
9:13 Justin Davy:  Offline Sales Results - Higher offline sales lifts are seen from search vs display advertising, but combined the synergy provides the greatest lift
9:14 Justin Davy:  For multi-channel retailers, the higher reach of display ads often helps lift total offline sales more than does search. But, synergy gains can be obtained by using display overlaid on a search campaign.
9:15 Justin Davy:  The overall number of peole reached by display ads is typically much higher than search.
9:15 Justin Davy:  Since the greatest impacts are seen by those exposed to both search & display, the greatest overall sales impacts are driven by the relatively small group of consumers who see both search & display ads.
9:16 Justin Davy:  Remember that display campaigns are not all about clicks
9:16 Justin Davy:  Robert is now up
9:20 Justin Davy:  31% of all people they polled would click on a display ad itself
9:21 Justin Davy:  27% would rather just go to the search engine to call up the brand vs actually clicking on the ad
9:21 Justin Davy:  Think of search as an alternative mechanism to respond to display
9:21 Justin Davy:  If investing in online display, leverage search to help capture the demand it creates
9:21 Justin Davy:  Consider search a form of insurance for display
9:23 Justin Davy:  Some hypothesis:

  • Many users don't trust ads, not sure where it will lead them
  • Users not wanting to accept cookies
  • For some search is so mainstream, that search engines are their doorway to the internet
  • Internet users are looking for third party validation of a brand from the search engines (31% of people polled thought that if a brand ranked well naturally they could trust them)
9:24 Justin Davy:  Nearly half (49%) of online display ad respondents EVENTUALLY launch a search for the brand within 6 months
9:25 Justin Davy:  38% of Internet users who responded to online display advertising learn about a brand for the first time as a result of their exposure to such an ad.
9:26 Justin Davy:  14% of the people polled not only learned about the brand for the first time but went on to make a purchase (pretty good for not knowing your brand prior to that)

Jumps to 38% conversion if they already know your brand
9:26 Justin Davy:  Leverage brand awareness to push users to a purchase decision sooner
9:29 Justin Davy:  Kevin is now up
9:30 Justin Davy:  If your simply dabbling in display Kevin recommends focusing on search retargeting
9:32 Justin Davy:  Start with retargeting ONLY your own site visitors
9:32 Justin Davy:  Success at the retargeting level of your existing visitors forms a foundation
9:34 Justin Davy:  The value of running a display ad after someone have visited your site is dramatic and typically inexpensive (showing a display ad via Yahoo Mail as an example)
9:34 Justin Davy:  Exchange inventory is sometimes very well placed (Washington Post Homepage)
9:36 Justin Davy:  Each visitor can have their own unique value which allows you to bid separately

One person might be worth $.75 another $1.00
9:36 Justin Davy:  Don't fall for the "performance deal"
9:37 Justin Davy:  You might end up paying for your own customers that aren't actually converting via their systems.
9:37 Justin Davy:  16% of Internet users generate all the clicks
9:38 Justin Davy:  8% of people generate 85% of clicks (typically younger viewers)
9:39 Justin Davy:  With view-throughs consider below the fold implications as well
9:41 Justin Davy:  Your priority should be cherry picking the best clicks AND impressions
9:41 Justin Davy:  Consider re-targeting if your campaign and site visits are over 40,000 visitors a month
9:42 Justin Davy:  Megan is here from Yahoo
9:43 Justin Davy:  Via RightMedia
9:43 [Comment From jonah]
Wow - 16% of users generate all clicks...are these paid clicks?
9:44 Justin Davy:  @jonah Those are display clicks
9:45 Justin Davy:  Display and search teams must work together
9:45 [Comment From jonah]
ah, got ya...thx
9:48 Justin Davy:  In terms of Search Retargeting, as quickly as 15 minutes a display ad is served across Yahoo! and their network
9:50 Justin Davy:  Consider tagging your clickthrough url:

User conducts a search for "flights to France"

then

User is later targeted "French hotel" displayed ad while visiting another site
9:53 Justin Davy:  Time for Q&A
9:55 Justin Davy:  Good question about retargeting. Once a transaction is completed is the cookie killed so they aren't retargeted. In some cases however you don't want to stop retargeting because they will buy again. (Kevin know's this because of his wife's shoe buying habits)
9:56 Justin Davy:  Look at data before making any decisions about dropping off the cookie. Might want to change bids based on the value of that person.
9:58 Justin Davy:  There's no simple way to do this but there are controlled and measureable ways.
10:05 Justin Davy:  There aren't a lot of tools out there for the little guy. Its recommended to test working directly with the engines in the beginning running both display and search.
10:08
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 8:50 AM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues

Below is live coverage of the Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick & Brian Ussery - Beu Blog.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues(10/07/2009) 
9:01 Brian Ussery:  
Good morning and welcome to SMX East!

Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues – Site isn’t being indexed fully? Experience a huge drop in rankings or traffic? This session provides a step by step checklist to help developers or others diagnose site issues and ensure they’re following best technical practices in SEO. Programmed by Jane & Robot.

Moderator:
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Jennifer Sable Lopez, SEO Consultant, SEOmoz
9:01 Brian Ussery:  We'll be starting in just a moment....
9:05
Expand
9:05
Expand
9:07 Brian Ussery:  Up frist is Adam.... According to Adam, it's important to look for patterns which takes some experience. Problem solving is crucial and equally is taking the time to perfect the craft.
9:09 Brian Ussery:  Adam says diagnosing technical SEO issues is part art and that those with experience follow their "nose" based on experience.

He says it's part science as well. SEOs use tools to diagnose problems...
9:11 Brian Ussery:  SEO audits should include on page factors such as domanins, links, architecture and other.....

Off page factors include backlinks, social media signals, cache dates and toolbar PR.
9:11 Brian Ussery:  Adam mentions gray bar PR which indicates some problem with a site.
9:12 Brian Ussery:  
The Big 4 Factors

URLs
Architecture
Product pages
Latency
9:15 Brian Ussery:  Looking at examples and tools like SEOBook.com tools
9:16 Brian Ussery:  
Adam's favorite tool is GOOGLE (can't believe it:)
Lynx
ySlow
Wave
Web Developer
SEO Book
9:17 Brian Ussery:  
Google's great free tools include site: and inurl:
9:18 Brian Ussery:  seo-browser.com
9:18 Brian Ussery:  more screen shots of various tools mentioned above....
9:20
Expand
9:21 Brian Ussery:  Up next Jennifer Lopez from SEOmoz.org
9:23 Brian Ussery:  
Jennifer says crawlability is the most important part of technical SEO and demonstrates Xenu Link Sleuth.
9:27 Brian Ussery:  
HTTP Status Codes What's the Big Deal

- 200 great
- 404 not found
- 503 Temporary Not found
- 301 Permanent Redirect
- 302 Temporary Redirect

Jennifer mentions her favorite tool, httpfox firefox addon...
9:28 Brian Ussery:  HTTP response issues can also take place and for that reason they're also important....
9:29 Brian Ussery:  Has The Site Been Penalized?

When PR is lower than MozRank it may be penalized according to Jennifer.
9:32 Brian Ussery:  Jennifer's Tools for Quick Wins

- Yahoo Site Explorer (backlinks)
- SEOmoz paid tools

Thanks @jennita :)
9:33 Brian Ussery:  Vanessa takes the stage to talk about common site issues.
9:36
Expand
9:36 Brian Ussery:  
Here is Vanessa's (of janeandrobot.com and google.com) illustration:
9:39 Brian Ussery:  
Vanessa says ranking reports aren't really actionable due to personalization, geo and other...
9:44 Brian Ussery:  Vanessa suggest checking Google Webmaster Tools for crawl information and also Google's webmaster checklists.
9:47 Brian Ussery:  Vanessa is now going to answer questions about sites
9:49 Brian Ussery:  First site has been parked and redesigned with different content.

*Because this is an adult site, I'm not going to post the URL.
9:51 Brian Ussery:  Vanessa says to query long title element text to help determine penalties. Ranking indicates your site may not be penalized.
9:55 Brian Ussery:  Vanessa uses Yahoo Site Explorer to help parse links for analysis.   Jennifer is using SEOmoz.org to show hidden div containing links in the site being analyzed.   Vanessa says these links (hidden in div) may not be high value and for that reason that these links may not be penalized.
9:59 Brian Ussery:  Next site is jewelrydesigns.com but first the question of the title attribute in images and hyperlinks. Vanessa says as far as she know that title attributes aren't used by engines.
10:00 Brian Ussery:  First issue is canonical proplem with the home page. There seems to be lots of txt stuffed in the lower portion of the page.
10:04 Brian Ussery:  According to Vanessa (and W3C I think) the TITLE element is the most important element in any quality page. Vanessa suggests removing extra text.

Adam suggests moving pages higher in folder structure and static.

Jennifer brings up links pointing to main.htm which is a 404 and should be redirect via 301.
10:07 Brian Ussery:  Up next is a site from Canada http://museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/

Vanessa points out navigation isn't availble due to cookie issue and session ids.
10:11 Brian Ussery:  Also this site uses Endeca, a technology which creates multiple versions of each URL.
10:11 Brian Ussery:  Up next marketmerchants.com
10:13 Brian Ussery:  
This site targets keyword terms like Gas grill and gas grill parts....

Vanessa mentions the site's lack of "gas grill" based text.
10:16 Brian Ussery:  Vanessa mentions looking at site content other than template, links and other. Adam suggests CNAME for blog.
10:18 Brian Ussery:  Next question is about pagination for the site but Vanessa mentions canonical issues based on sort order. For pagination, Jennifer suggests using nofollow....
10:19 Brian Ussery:  WE ARE OVER TIME AND THAT IS ALL THANKS AGAIN!
10:19
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 8:50 AM Comments (1)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 7, 2009

Live: Facebook Marketing Tactics

Below is live coverage of the Facebook Marketing Tactics from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Facebook Marketing Tactics(10/07/2009) 
9:07 Keri Morgret:  Sorry for the late start, the wifi isn't reliable yet in this room.

Facebook Marketing Tactics – This session takes a close look at Facebook and how search marketers can tap into the opportunties it offers.

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

Speakers:

Rebecca Kelley, Director of Social Media, 10e20
Will Scott, President, Search Influence
Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear
Dennis Yu, CEO, BlitzLocal LLC


Facebook is NOT adwords.

Facebook lexicon is one way to look for keywords.

There are gender and demographic differences based on keywords being used. "playin" is more likely male, "playing" less like male.

Profile Attributes as Keywords
Use profile attributes as a proxy for keywords. Here are the top dozen Facebook Keywords

1 Simpsons
2 House
3 Family Guy
4 Music
5 Barack Obama
6 Dormir
7 Grey's Anatomy
8 Chocolate
9 Friends
10 Nutella
11 Sleeping
12 Pizza

Facebook is great because you have more demographic information.
9:07 Keri Morgret:  Facebook: It's for Demand GENERATION not Demand HARVESTING.
9:08 Keri Morgret:  FB local advertising
74% of FB advertising in 2009 will come from Local. Traffic is cheap. Some of this is misleading because it's dating ads.
9:09 Keri Morgret:  Discussion of CTR versus CPM basis. He prefers CPM. Use images. Bigger the boobs bigger the CTR.
9:09 Keri Morgret:  May have been CPC vs CPM. My apologies.
9:09 Keri Morgret:  FB = Adwords, Circa 2003
9:11 Keri Morgret:  FYI, Dennis Yu from blitzlocal is current speaker.
9:11 Keri Morgret:  There's not a good external editor for FB. No concept of an adgroup.You have to manually create variations of ads. There is a bulk upload tool if you're spending a couple of thousand of dollars a day.
9:12 Keri Morgret:  Girs with pink have better CTR.
9:13 Keri Morgret:  You can have ad burnout in terms of hours. If you're targeting narrow group and lots of volume burnout can happen quickly. Check back often, esp if bidding CPM, to make sure CTR isn't real high.
9:14 Keri Morgret:  The big secret? Facebook is a giant email autoresponder. Send people to Facebook page. You want them to be a fan. Viral loop -- people join, others see they join.
9:15 Keri Morgret:  Even though email addresses burn, you can still reach via FB.
9:15 Keri Morgret:  FB people give a lot more accurate information than in many other areas.
9:15 Keri Morgret:  Don't send people to the wall by default.
9:16 Keri Morgret:  In the next 12 months they're going to be improving their UI, make it more accessible to agencies.
9:17 Keri Morgret:  Shows fun lexicon result for part tonight vs hangover. If you target hangover meds, go for sunday morning!
9:18 Keri Morgret:  Marty Weintraub is up now, and way too enthusiastic for this hour of the morning.
9:18 Keri Morgret:  Marty's focusing on search via FB.
9:19 Keri Morgret:  Today’s Program

  • FB Search Update & Implications
  • Anatomy of Facebook SERPs
  • When Is Someone Gonna’ Make Some Money?
9:20 Keri Morgret:  Facebook is Almost Unimaginable

Well-Laid Play For Internet Domination
9:20 Keri Morgret:  I’m a Search Marketer, and I Smell Fresh Meat
9:21 Keri Morgret:  FB is a Massive Walled Garden Parallel Internet.

  • Closed Loop Members-Only (Over 300 Million)
  • 120 Million Users Login Every Day
  • 1 Billion Pictures & 10 Million Pictures Monthly
  • Billion Content Blocks, Blog Posts, News Stories & Links Weekly
  • 45 Million “Active” Users Groups
  • Walls, Chat, Tagging, Groups, Pages, Profile
9:22 Keri Morgret:  No External Search Engines Allowed!

  • Just Facebook Internal Search
  • Facebook Search has Always Kinda’ Sucked
  • Until Now…Sort of
  • Smart to Understand & Monitor as Develops
  • Immediately Useful (though kind of an Easter Egg)
9:22 Keri Morgret:  What Does Facebook Have to Index?

Insight as to What’s Searchable in Settings / Privacy/Search
9:23 Keri Morgret:  Users Data Available Facebook Wide

  • Even If You’re Not Friends
  • Links, Status Updates, Wall Posts & Notes
9:23 Keri Morgret:  Links, Status Updates, Wall Posts & Notes

Internal Community Search

Newly Expanded From People/Groups Search

Search Last 30 Days

Of News Feed

Status Updates, Photos, Links

Videos & Notes

Pages Of Which They’re Fans
9:24 Keri Morgret:  Anatomy of Facebook SERPs

Pages and…

…Groups Usually Top

Popular Apps’ Can Trump Pages or Groups

Posts by Friends

Almost ALWAYS web results last
9:25 Keri Morgret:  Still (Classic) Facebook People Search
  • Suggests Mutual Friends First
  • Then Extended Network and Geographic Proximity For Common Names
  • Then Anywhere (Long Tail Names)
  • That Many Guys Named Waldo A?
9:26 Keri Morgret:  Pages SERPS

  • Fan Count Main Correlation
  • Not the Only Factor
  • Tested Freshness, Proximity, Phrase Density,
  • Completely Weird
9:26 Keri Morgret:  Tested to See if Users’ Interests Impacted Pages SERPs. Nothing in Page SERPs
9:26 Keri Morgret:  Groups

  • Crawl Groups Titles & Descriptions
  • Mostly Based on Member Count
  • Group Listings in “All” Search More Erratic
9:27 Keri Morgret:  Cool Group Search Filters

How Users Search Facebook “Should” is a Signal regarding the FB DB.
9:27 Keri Morgret:  Applications

  • Straight Up Popularity Contest
  • Monthly Active Users (not downloads, installs, etc)
  • Keyword in Name First
9:28 Keri Morgret:  Events

  • Geo-proximity. Clearly Other Attributes
  • Indexes GEO & Title
9:29 Keri Morgret:  Web Results

  • Bing is Official Facebook “Web Results” Search Engine
  • One Click Takes Users to Bing
  • Consider Implications of Bing / Yahoo Deal
  • ONLY Indexes EXTERNAL
  • Bing SERPs in FB Not Geo Savvy
9:29 Keri Morgret:  Posts By Friends

  • Strictly Chronological
  • Not Hierarchy, Rankings BS,
  • How Long It Lasts Determined Speed of Space
9:29 Keri Morgret:  Posts By Everyone

  • Liner Fire Hose Effect
  • Not Personalized
  • Speed of Indexing = 30 Seconds Was the Fastest.
  • Timing is Speed of Space
9:30 Keri Morgret:  Open up privacy settings all the way if you want people to find you.
9:31 Keri Morgret:  Best Use is Crowd Mining

  • The Same as It Ever Was
  • Expanded Social Graph, Includes External Channels
  • Geographic Insight By Classic Search Geo-Suffixes
  • Engage, Friend with Purpose
9:31 Keri Morgret:  Leverage Trust Delicately
Find True Connections

  • Friends, Friends of Friends, Networks & Networks of Friends
  • Find Users Chattering About Specific Topics
  • Get Around Limitations of “Pages” With Ambassadors
  • Make Lists! Make More Lists..
9:32 Keri Morgret:  Don’t Pee in The Pool

  • Leveraging Friends is Sticky Business
  • Give Much More Than You Take
  • Unselfish Recurrent Content to Serve
  • Holistic Self Promotion
  • Support the Community First
9:32 Keri Morgret:  Optimization Tips

  • Share Links in FB to Optimized Content
  • Put Most Important Information in Title Tag
  • Drop on Walls, Status. Updates & Notes
  • Optimize Photo Album Titles
9:33 Keri Morgret:  Optimization Tips

  • Gain FB Organic Prominence With App’s
  • Bing Serves Double Duty
  • "People" With KW "Names" Can Index Easily
  • Whatever it Takes, Lift Group & Page Fan-Count
  • Gain Immediate Prominence by Paid FB Search
9:34 Keri Morgret:  Marty gave a great presentation and ran through a bunch of slides. I had his slide deck in advance, so this is mainly a copy of his slides, but didn't have time to add much more information.
9:34 Keri Morgret:  Next up is Will Scott. Glad he talks slower than Marty!
9:35 Keri Morgret:  He's speaking mostly about local traffic
9:36 Keri Morgret:  Sneaky FB opportunities

Target just your fans or people coming to an event with ads. Cool, not mind blowing.

Birthday Targeting. This one is fun!

1:1 communication with event attendees/maybes.
9:36 Keri Morgret:  Birthday targeting: if you're a coffee shop, tell them to register now because it's their BD and come in any time this month for a free coffee.
9:37 Keri Morgret:  Happy Birthday
  • Beat banner blindness with hypertargeted message
  • BD-only offer amplifies immediacy of call to action
  • "offer" redemption often include complimentary sales
  • Great way to attract new customers
  • Excellent for retail/service businesses
9:38 Keri Morgret:  He shows a screenshot of a really interesting invitation.
9:38 Keri Morgret:  If you respond maybe/yes to event, advertiser has explicit permission to contact you via inbox.
9:39 Keri Morgret:  1:1 communiction with event attendees/maybes

For groups/businesses with fan pages vs groups inbox access is limited.
9:39 Keri Morgret:  FB advertising ROI
We've seen huge savings on a cost per lead basis with FB
Leveraging advanced targeting increases likelihood of conversion
Get 'em where they live
9:40 Keri Morgret:  Rebecca Kelley is now up.
9:40 Keri Morgret:  She's speaking on marketing on FB using pages and groups.
9:41 Keri Morgret:  10e20 provides services for publishers, businesses and fortune 500 companies.
Specialize in viral marketing and other stuff I missed.
9:42 Keri Morgret:  FB Groups
9:43 Keri Morgret:  Why join a group?

  • Can find tons of groups related to your business
  • Find target users/demographics/potential customers
  • Promote your brand via comments, shared links, new connections, etc.
9:43 Keri Morgret:  Why start a group?

  • You can run it like your own forum
  • To help people out and answer questions
  • Traffic baby!
  • Subtle branding and interaction
9:43 Keri Morgret:  She shows a FB group example
9:44 Keri Morgret:  Admins on group: one admin can boot another out.
9:45 Keri Morgret:  Be careful who you give admin status to
9:46 Keri Morgret:  Showing a triathlon group. People are asking for advice regarding training partners, wetsuits, etc. Good opportunity for people offering those services.
9:48 Keri Morgret:  Best practices for groups

  • Choose your group name wisely
  • Address a need
  • Be mindful of the size of the group (over 5,000 makes it harder to email)
  • Participate and be helpful; don't join stuff you're not going to genuinely care about/contribute to
  • Update frequently
9:48 Keri Morgret:  FB Pages

Set up for "fans" of something
Consist of pretty much anything -- causes, corporations, actions, objects, people
9:49 Keri Morgret:  Why create a FB page?

  • Branding (can be overt or subtle)
  • To find/communicate with an appropriate audience of like-minded individuals
  • Traffic
  • Stickiness
  • Reputation management
9:49 Keri Morgret:  Reputation management -- one more thing in SERPs to rank for your name.
9:50 [Comment From Scott Clark]
Wish they'd talk about converting old facebook groups/profiles into pages. Best practices.
9:50 Keri Morgret:  Page example of a non-profit cancer center vs Cancer Sucks. First one is too much talking about themselves.
9:52 Keri Morgret:  700,000 fans of the Laughing page. Good at cross-promoting (comedy.com), showing their twitter account, links to other properties at the bottom of the page
9:53 Keri Morgret:  Shows page example of ShoeMoney Tools. Implemented fan page widget on his profile, helped increase fans. Then he sent some promotions in Septembber to fans for a tool, resulted in a 20% conversion.
9:54 Keri Morgret:  Great because these people are already relevant to you.
9:55 Keri Morgret:  Best practices for creating and marketing a page.

Think branded vs. non-branded (Black and Decker vs. "I love girls who use power tools"
Be "n on-commercially" commercial
What appeals to a broad range of people (I need a vacation, I need a glass of wine)
Customize your URL
9:55 Keri Morgret:  Think about the URL, may be able to change it once but that's all. Think about keywords in URL.
9:56 Keri Morgret:  All of these slides are available at the download location, look in the conference program front page for where to download.
9:57 Keri Morgret:  Q&A time. Missed first question.
9:58 Keri Morgret:  Marty uses FB for B2B lead gen.
9:59 Keri Morgret:  Converting groups to pages
10:00 Keri Morgret:  Danny didn't convert to page because group can send email to entire group.
10:01 Keri Morgret:  Groups are stronger than pages right now, but FB will be directing more link juice to pages, pages likely deprecated by end of year. They want to be LinkedIn for peoples' names.
10:02 Keri Morgret:  More pages are going to be exposed. Great for links and in SERPs.
10:02 Keri Morgret:  Throw external links to facebook pages.
10:02 [Comment From Scott Clark]
so... how to convert them. Sigh. This question always gets derailed. (ps: great job Keri)
10:03 Keri Morgret:  If your brand sucks, and you link to your FB page, FB page will outrank you in SERPs.
10:03 Keri Morgret:  I tried. =]
10:04 Keri Morgret:  You might loose a little group feel if you go to a page. Rebecca doesn't think it's a bad way to keep it as it is. If you are forced to go to page, try to transition group over in advance.
10:05 Keri Morgret:  Pages: goes to public feed, but don't have a way to directly message from fan page like you do from groups.
10:06 Keri Morgret:  You can do an update on a fan page.
10:07 Keri Morgret:  Update is not wall status. You can update your fans and geotarget your fans. It doesn't go into the same message box, but it does go into an update. A little easier to ignore, but you do get the notification.
10:07 Keri Morgret:  This is from Claudia D'Arcy, has lots of FB fan pages.
10:07 [Comment From Scott Clark]
many biz set up profiles before pages, now want to convert PROFILES to page, and FB provides no way.
10:08 Keri Morgret:  Why coming to wall is bad: you don't have control over what people see, just last ten updates. Send them to a page where you can get real email address, sign up for a birthday club, you can do html with an iframe. You can choose order of tabs.
10:09 Keri Morgret:  Try to convert people when you're spending the money. This is from Dennis Yu.
10:09 Keri Morgret:  Danny find this complicated, they change everything all the time.
10:09 Keri Morgret:  Both for users and advertisers this is complicated.
10:15 Keri Morgret:  Do I start with a blog on my site or a FB page, since I don't have any social media yet.
10:15 Keri Morgret:  Start by making it known to your customer that you listen to those channels, then listen to that.
10:16 Keri Morgret:  Marty says it's not a choice, you need both your own feed and facebook. Rebecca: it depends on what you have time to devote to, content, etc.
10:16 Keri Morgret:  Marty volunteers to do a facebook page on wine for lots of wine in exchange.
10:16 Keri Morgret:  Facebook has lots of information for advertisers.
10:17 Keri Morgret:  Great session!
10:17
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 7, 2009 8:50 AM Comments (1)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 6, 2009

Live: The Cross Media Attribution Battle

Below is live coverage of the The Cross Media Attribution Battle from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Justin Davy of JustinDavy.com.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

The Cross Media Attribution Battle(10/06/2009) 
4:47 Justin Davy:  The Cross Media Attribution Battle:

Speakers:

Roger Barnette, Founder and President, SearchIgnite
Dax Hamman, Vice President of Display Media, iCrossing
Kevin Lee, CEO, Didit
Alan Osetek, Managing Director, iProspect Boston, iProspect
Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMC
4:47 Justin Davy:  Dax is up first
4:50 Justin Davy:  Dax is sharing different challenges including cookies, analytics, post-click vs post impression and internal agreement
4:51 Justin Davy:  If you can overcome the challenges, the benefits worthwhile. Papers can be downloaded at icrossing.com/research
4:52 Justin Davy:  Effects of Display Media on Search Traffic Study:

13.7% increase in natural search visitors
2.5% increase in unique visitors
14.8% increase in paid search click thru rate
11.2% decrease in paid search cpc
4:53 Justin Davy:  Alan is now up
4:54 Justin Davy:  Key questions you should be asking before putting toegther a program
4:55 Justin Davy:  What type of attribution analysis program will I conduct? Ex. Online exposure only - Display vs Search. Or something more complicated with Online vs Offline.
4:55 Justin Davy:  Why are you wanting to conduct an attribution analysis?
4:55 Justin Davy:  Is it for media optimization, or frequency capping etc..
4:56 Justin Davy:  How? Provide complete visibility into inter-connected Advertising, Respose and Customer Data
4:56 Justin Davy:  Important to look at customer data and the lifetime value of customers as opposed to just frontend cost.
4:57 Justin Davy:  Some challenges include:

  • Universal Tagging
  • Volume of Data
  • Stack of Engagement Touch Points
  • Assigning Appropriate Levels of Credit
4:59 Justin Davy:  Various types of attribution analysis include Channel, Publisher, Placement, Creative, Keyword, Offer, Product & Web page Attribution
5:00 Justin Davy:  One of the most important things to think about is how much of the data set is included in the model. Many are just doing sampling which is about 15% of the data.
5:01 Justin Davy:  You need actionable reporting, not a giant stack of confusing documents
5:02 Justin Davy:  The girl next to me liked that last one :)
5:02 Justin Davy:  Moving on
5:03 Justin Davy:  Attribution Issues:

1. De-duplication
Are you double-counting the same action multiple times

2. Getting beyond last click attribution
5:06 Justin Davy:  Its critical that you get all the data in one location not just a sample to make wise decisions
5:06 Justin Davy:  How:
Centralized tracking and exposure sequencing
Channel prioritization and weighting
Mulitiple exposure attribution
Real time dashboard
5:07 Justin Davy:  Sharing an example between organic search and paid inclusion
5:08 Justin Davy:  Revenue per click was tracked by channel
5:08 Justin Davy:  Paid was receiving to much credit
5:10 Justin Davy:  Proper attribution settings will depend on each unique client situation and marketing mix
5:10 Justin Davy:  Be sure to optimize using both inter and intra-channel data
5:11 Justin Davy:  Tony promises to keep this simple
5:12 Justin Davy:  Fact is that your wasting your advertising dollars and always have. It's also a fact that recouping even a little bit of those wasted dollars is a huge win.
5:12 Justin Davy:  Fiction: With proper attribution you won't be wasting any of your advertising dollars
5:12 Justin Davy:  Don't spend inordinate amounts of time analyzing where the click came from
5:13 Justin Davy:  If you are lead generation - utilize sales force, call tracking and ASK people
5:13 Justin Davy:  Periodic surveys with incentives can provide statistically valid samples
5:14 Justin Davy:  Look at things holistically - what is the overall effect of a shift?
5:14 Justin Davy:  Don't be afraid to move things around and test...
5:14 Justin Davy:  Look for macro trends - not the magic bullet in the haystack. It's different for each business.
5:14 Justin Davy:  Take your time, its a marathon, not a sprint
5:16 Justin Davy:  Built attribution into the campaign from the start
5:16 Justin Davy:  Work your campaigns in this order
  1. Set your goals
  2. Budget
  3. Tracking
  4. Choose your media
  5. Estimate your effectiveness
  6. Execute w/confidence
5:16 Justin Davy:  Something will go wrong. Not everytime but it will
5:17 Justin Davy:  Go back and check estimates - where did u miscalculate
5:17 Justin Davy:  Look for other outside influencers
5:17 Justin Davy:  Get back on the horse!
5:17 Justin Davy:  Call tracking is cheap - and listening to calls can really tell you something
5:17 Justin Davy:  Incentivized surveys are great for finding out what went wrong
5:18 Justin Davy:  Search is not the final answer. TV, Display, Print etc all work together with online
5:20 Justin Davy:  Kevin is up now
5:20 Justin Davy:  SEMPO survey says branding is nearly always an objective
5:20 Justin Davy:  Yet brand lift was rarely a measured metric
5:21 Justin Davy:  Four days after a person gets to a site, their overall awareness lift was much higher. (via Google Study)
5:23 Justin Davy:  Are you taking into account all the non-media marketing attribution. What is the cause and affect
5:24 Justin Davy:  Be honest with yourself. Are you willing to cut a TV budget by 30% in a particular market in order to test?
5:26 Justin Davy:  Consider using viewthroughs
5:26 Justin Davy:  8 percent of users generate 85% of clicks on display
5:27 Justin Davy:  PIggy-back off your competitions media buy
5:28 Justin Davy:  Ex. Your competitor is doing a homepage takeover on Yahoo
5:33 Justin Davy:  Very small % of companies are currently doing this. It's still early but now is the time to at least do more than you were.
5:33 Justin Davy:  Focus on getting data and making smart decisions on that
5:34 Justin Davy:  You could begin small by doing a small survey
5:38
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 6, 2009 4:40 PM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 6, 2009

Live: Ask The Link Builders

Below is live coverage of the Ask The Link Builders from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Ask The Link Builders(10/06/2009) 
4:44 Barry Schwartz:  Starting soon, I think...
4:45 Barry Schwartz:  Ask The Link Builders – PowerPoint Free! Put your questions about link building and external linking issues to our panel of link building experts.

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

Speakers:

Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link
Roger Montti, Owner, martinibuster
Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com

4:50 [Comment From Michael Martinez]
What do they think of pagerank traps, where you put a page on a site that the internal navigation doesn't link to, but which you use as "linkbait" to attract external links so you can funnel that pagerank to the rest of the site?
4:53 Barry Schwartz:  Clearly, Danny is not happy with the Javits Center
4:54 Barry Schwartz:  Internet doesn't work and they don't refill the water
4:56 Barry Schwartz:  Eric Ward was the first person to buy a link from Danny, giving him a $5 check for his how to guide on search engines 10+ years ago
4:57 Barry Schwartz:  Debra Mastaler is celebrating her 19th wedding anniversary... congrats!!! Smile
4:57
Twitterthewebguyfl:  links links and more links #smx
4:58 Barry Schwartz:  Do old paid links from directories hurting me? Rae said as long as they are not 2000 links... Eric said, unless they are not the only links you have.
4:59 Barry Schwartz:  Competitors have links on specific blogs, but when I email them, they don't reply. How did my competitors get those links when they don't reply to me?
5:00 Barry Schwartz:  can be lots of reasons... might be a competitors blog
5:01 Barry Schwartz:  Eric said, try to act like you are a fortune 500 with a huge budget, see what happens.
5:03 Barry Schwartz:  PageRank dilution question.. PageRank is diluted, you don't lose anything but there is dilution.
5:04
Expand
5:04
Twitterthewebguyfl:  Danny Needs a blackberry #smx
5:05 Barry Schwartz:  Rae said: Don't not link out because you want to horde PR, linking out is natural. It is not recommended.
5:05 Barry Schwartz:  Is there something as too much cross linking within your network?
5:05 Barry Schwartz:  Rae said on your brand, but most small companies cannot get away with this. Be careful, 4 sites is okay, but not 400 or 4000.
5:06 Barry Schwartz:  Linking from your blog to your web site is not going to hurt you...
5:06 Barry Schwartz:  Debra says the word "intent" it is about intent. Are you intending to manipulate the search engines?
5:06 [Comment From Michael Martinez]
I would say don't do all the cross-linking at once. Spread it out over months, years. That gives you a chance to build some unique content. Should be fine, then.
5:07 Barry Schwartz:  Danny said newspapers never link out, so that is the exception
5:07 Barry Schwartz:  What is the greatest single thing you can do and worst thing you can do to help/hurt your web site in linking?
5:08 Barry Schwartz:  Eric: Make sure those who click on your links can contribute to your site (user generated content, tweet your content, etc). Take advantage of the users you have on your site and turn them into link builders for you?
5:09 Barry Schwartz:  Rae, contact you competitors links
5:10 Barry Schwartz:  Rae: fix your own internal linking structure
5:11 Barry Schwartz:  Danny: Do not send bad link requests
5:11
Twitterthewebguyfl:  too buy links or not buy links #smx
5:11
Twitterdannysullivan:  @ericward best way to build links is to turn your existing visitors into people who link to you #smx
5:13 Barry Schwartz:  Do not link to bad sites
5:14 Barry Schwartz:  Danny goes on record as sending link requests emails to Matt Cutts of Google
5:15 [Comment From Paddy Moogan]
When crafting content for linkbait, do you craft it for one site to get one link or for a group of sites in your niche to get links to one page from all of them?
5:16 [Comment From Michael Martinez]
Linkbait should be about attracting as many links to the "linkbait" as possible.
5:20 Barry Schwartz:  Email people who are experts in areas and email them to ask them for other resources.
5:20 Barry Schwartz:  That gives you more linking opps
5:21 Barry Schwartz:  Rae said, dont use nofollow internally and dont do it externally, if you don't want to link somewhere, don't link there.
5:22 Barry Schwartz:  Eric said he persues them if they are nofollowed or not, cause Google can use it if they like (google says they dont).
5:23
Twittersmec:  linkbuidling: never ask for links by mail, try to find out who the site editor is, and contact by phone.. #smx
5:23 [Comment From Michael Martinez]
Link building should focus on traffic and visibility, not passing anchor text and pagerank.
5:24 Barry Schwartz:  Rae takes nofollowed links if they send traffic
5:24 [Comment From Michael Martinez]
And please don't call me for links just because I don't want you emailing me. If someone is open to link requests, you should contact them by their preferred method.
5:26
Twittersmx:  @ericward "you can not do a search on google & not get wikipedia. that would be awesome drinking game. wikiquarters" #smx
5:26 Barry Schwartz:  Don't get greedy with Wikipedia.
5:26
Twitterdannysullivan:  @ericward "you can not do a search on google & not get wikipedia. that would be awesome drinking game. wikiquarters" #smx
5:26 Barry Schwartz:  Open Directory Project (DMOZ), what do you think about it?
5:27 Barry Schwartz:  Debra met with the head of DMOZ recently...
5:27
Twitterthewebguyfl:  dont get greedy with wiki links dont piss off the editors #smx
5:27
Twitterandfl:  Always accept a link, wether it is nofollow or not. #smx
5:27 Barry Schwartz:  Debra said, DMOZ said they want to bring DMOZ back to life...
5:28 Barry Schwartz:  Eric said from a ranking standpoint, you don't need the dmoz links. 70% of the links in ODP are orphaned and without editors, keep that in mind.
5:29 Barry Schwartz:  Rae: Submit it and forget it when referring to DMOZ
5:30 Barry Schwartz:  Danny said, they removed you should get directory links from their webmaster tips, for several reasons.
5:31
Twitterfabioricotta:  Rae said that a Dmoz link is not important as it was.... #SMX
5:31
Twitterfabioricotta:  Debra said, DMOZ said they want to bring DMOZ back to life... #SMX
5:33 Barry Schwartz:  See http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/ and scroll to the bottom,notice there is a link to the editors profile... he is using a username, track down his username and track him down. might help you get in.
5:33 Barry Schwartz:  If no editor, go to a higher level
5:34 Barry Schwartz:  It also might be that your competitor is the editor of that category, said Rae.
5:34 Barry Schwartz:  Eric gave the other advice.
5:35 Barry Schwartz:  Best Link Building Tools:
- Debra uses her eye balls :)
- Rae built internal tools, but she normally does it by hand, like debra
- Eric uses his own tools, he named a bunch of tools quickly
5:36 [Comment From Fabio Ricotta]
they should suggest Linkscape or Majestic....
5:37 Barry Schwartz:  Eric said, use Google's advanced search functionality, cause it will tell you what links you should get...

Rae added don't use the link command in Google.
5:44 Barry Schwartz:  Danny said "there is no reputable link building company" because it is against the search engine guidelines. They can be reputable in buying links, but it is against Google's TOS.
5:45 Barry Schwartz:  Can Google catch all paid links?
5:46 Barry Schwartz:  automatically, no, but many. manually, virtually yes.
5:48 Barry Schwartz:  They are going into lighting round... Still not feeling well.. we are almost done, so ending it now. Tune in tomorrow for more sessions!
5:48
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 6, 2009 4:40 PM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 6, 2009

Live: Case Study: Integrating & Measuring Search As Part Of The Marketing Mix

Below is live coverage of the Case Study: Integrating & Measuring Search As Part Of The Marketing Mix from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Keri - Strike Models.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Case Study: Integrating & Measuring Search As Part Of The Marketing Mix(10/06/2009) 
3:18 Keri Morgret:  

Case Study: Integrating & Measuring Search As Part Of The Marketing Mix – Talk, talk, talk about the need to integrate search into a regular marketing campaign. This session gets past the talk and shows you how it was done the right way, in a case study.

Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist, SEMPO President,

Speakers:

Keith Boswell, Director of Digital Marketing Strategy, Kaiser Permanente
Michael Kahn, SVP of Marketing, Performics
Jonathan Treiber, CEO, RevTrax
3:18 Keri Morgret:  Jonathan is up first, with a case study of Jackson Hewitt.
3:19 Keri Morgret:  They're #2 tax service company
6,800 locations nationwide
No e-Commerce
Publicly traded
3:21 Keri Morgret:  Campaign Overview:

JH wanted to do a performance-based search marketing campaign during the 2009 tax session.

31Media, a RevTrax search partner and expert in cross-channel search marketing, drove traffic via multiple search engines to a landing page.

RevTrax design and implemented the landing pages, then tracked lots of data down to the keyword level.
3:21 Keri Morgret:  The offer was a coupon for $20 off tax prep. There was a dynamic promotional-code generation and insertion. There was a send-to-mobile option via SMS.
3:22 Keri Morgret:  Basic landing page (option to print coupon or send to phone).
3:23 Keri Morgret:  Campaign Results:

  • 40% of clicked ads resulted in a printed coupon
  • 22% of printed coupons resulted in a sale
  • 40% of sales were by new customers
  • Average transaction size of $190
  • Average click yielded $17.19 of in-store revenue
3:26 Keri Morgret:  Talking about how the campaign got younger people in the door than their regular market. Mobile coupons had great results.
3:26 Keri Morgret:  Next year, the client is looking to put more money behind search to help create a shift from traditional print to online.
3:28 Keri Morgret:  Michael from Performics is up next.
3:28 Keri Morgret:  Starting with a graphic of search in the purchase funnel
3:29 Keri Morgret:  People are bouncing back and forth between media and experiences.
3:32
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3:32 Keri Morgret:  Key SEM Integration Challenges and Solutions:

Challenge: Using Search to drive in-store traffic
Solution: Integrating offline promotions with search

Challenge: Measuring search's impact on offline sales
Solution: Create an online to offline feedback loop via a paid search coupon strategy

Challenge: Moving from a focus on clicks to a focus on consumers
Solution: Micro-targeting to efficiently deliver and convert audiences of one.


Tightly defined consumer segments increase paid search performance.

One key consumer attribute that is highly targetable is location to a retailer's physical stores, leveraging multi-channel opportunity.
3:32 Keri Morgret:  A multi-channel customer is more valuable than a single-channel customer.
3:33 Keri Morgret:  Cabela's Case Study: Paid search consumer geosegmentation approach.

Cabela's sells premier outdoor clothing and equipment to consumers. They have mega destination stores around the country. They also have catalog mailings and online marketing.

Their objective was they needed to drive traffic to their offline store.
3:34 Keri Morgret:  They also used a paid search couponing strategy to get people into the store for a holiday event.
3:35 Keri Morgret:  Search campaigns with brand keywords and holiday event keywords.

Geo-targeting strategies for stores within x mile radius

Adcopy that offers in-store coupons to the select audiences. Coupon could only be redeemed at the store location during the holiday event.

Construct intuitive landing pages that guide consumers through the coupon retrieval process.

Hard dollars off of a certain dollar amount has been very effective for the speaker across thousands of campaigns for many customers.
3:36 Keri Morgret:  Campaign was successful. 10% of clickers retrieved, 40% of the coupons were redeemed.
3:37 Keri Morgret:  Keith Boswell is up now.
3:38 Keri Morgret:  Integrating Search at Kaiser Permanente (non-profit health care provider)
3:40 Keri Morgret:  Early days at Kaiser (KP):
They did a drop-down navigation that killed the number of pages indexed.
They threw a party when they got their robots.txt in place.
They were forced to do paid search.

(missed the full explanation here)
3:41 Keri Morgret:  Challenges to change:

Offline was king
SEO was misunderstood
Ignorance is bliss. Economy was fine, no worries!
2007 began focus with economy
2008 went through extensive RFP and focused on search.
3:42 Keri Morgret:  Turning Point:

Paid search was the highest ROI
Tests: started at $25k/mo, grew to $500k a month within three months.

Other lines of business have similar ramp up in spend

Google's top spender and performer in healthcare
3:43 Keri Morgret:  Search at KP Today

Most business lines are active
2009 Paid Search > $6MM year
Paid inclusion drives at least one third of conversions
ROI from digital is driving spend
Planning integrated SEO and paid search (new for them)
3:44 Keri Morgret:  Things I've Learned on the Inside:

  • ROI and data rule. He didn't know how much data clients were using to determine ROI, when he was with agency
  • Politics as unusual
  • Decision by committee, even if it seemed simple. Lots of all-day meetings to meet on simple things.
3:45 Keri Morgret:  The future of search at KP:

Mobile and local are growing focus
Improve what we point people to
Making everything searchable
Understanding how search fits. Think of all of the assets as the first touch point.
3:47 Keri Morgret:  10 tips to integrate search:
  • Keyword research. Helps let people know the reality of what language people are using.
  • Tight segmentation, testing to help improve this.
  • Test and apply learnings
  • Create a CPC for SEO -- operational basis + what you're paying agency / organic traffic
  • Analytics are a must.
  • Reporting -- Open Access. Make them available to as many people as possible in the organization.
  • BLOG
  • Leverage your agency properly
  • Change works
  • Stay in sync for success
3:48 Keri Morgret:  Blogging gives them the ability to have constant fresh and unique content.
3:48 Keri Morgret:  Agencies can often be blamed, but it may be because they didn't have enough information.
3:53 Keri Morgret:  Interesting (to me) was that you could track coupon code back to keyword.
3:58 Keri Morgret:  Asking Keith about "rouge search campaigns".

The rogue campaigns perceive that the main office can't react to them quickly enough, they go and do it themselves, then there's mopping up things afterwards.
3:59 Keri Morgret:  Other people have also had this problem.
4:01 Keri Morgret:  Keith from KP is talking about needing a master keyword list and coordinating which properties should focus on which keywords.
4:05 Keri Morgret:  FYI, we're in Q&A right now.
4:08 Keri Morgret:  Michael is talking about overlaying information, such as car travel time to locations and using this to help geotarget.
4:11 Keri Morgret:  Jonathan is talking about how online shoppers don't cannibalize instore shopping.
4:12
Are you in another session while watching this?
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4:13 Keri Morgret:  Question: How do you introduce the "shiny new toy" like Twitter?
4:15 Keri Morgret:  Keith from KP talks about how some divisions have started using Twitter. One concern is violating HIPPA. Another issue of rogue operating when the division may not realize potential problems.
4:18 Keri Morgret:  Keith is asked to elaborate on the problems that the drop-down menus caused. You had to tell the site what region you were in when you clicked on anything.
4:22 Keri Morgret:  The Q&A has ended, and there's a previous about attribution, which is the next session in this room.
4:22
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 6, 2009 3:10 PM Comments (1)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 6, 2009

Live: Video Search Marketing Beyond YouTube

Below is live coverage of the Video Search Marketing Beyond YouTube from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Video Search Marketing Beyond YouTube(10/06/2009) 
4:34 Sheara Wilensky:  

Kevin Ryan: First up is William Leake from Apogee search marketing

William:

Thanks for joining. We know video is really growing. And it’s growing outside of YouTube. Despite more than doubling from Nov of 08 to Aug of09, Google actually lost a little share! And Hulu is the only oneo of the majors that have gained. So the market is becoming more fragmented.

Google has 40% share of videos. But there is still 60% left.

44% of videos are discovered randomly

43% are found via sharing

38% of users who searched Google were served a video

Generation 1.0 – Google video, AOL, Yahoo, Live

Gen 2.0 – used advanced recognition techniques- blinkx, clipblast, videocrawler

Basic options beyond YouTube – Hosted videos. We know the benefits of Posted-YouTube has a lot of traffic, people are already there. So it’s easier to go viral.

Benefits of hosted:

· Control – over related on-page text, encoded meta-data, user experience, etc.

· Control over monetization

· Generate traffic to your website

Website video SEO tips:

- Meta data, and lots of it!

- Offer multiple file formats

- Include keywords in the file name

- Include the video tag in the file name (so you rank where ppl are specifically looking for video- many people look for “kw video” and so take advantage of optimizing on that).

On page elements

- Follow SEO principals for optimizing meta data

- Definitely include contextually related links to articles and other videos

- Consider publishing captions and /or abstracts as additional content

Site Structure:

-use unique URLS

-one video per URL

-use embedded players, not a pop up window

Remember, Video is about sharing!

- Enable comments

- Include social bookmarking tools

- Allow visitors to subscribe to your videos

- Let viewers grab your embed code

Video and Local are the 2 places where the engines currently like to be submitted to. Don’t wait for them to find you, submit your video content. RSS video syndication is the way to go with that.

Thank you!

Next up is John McWeeny

John: We make videos using a network of filmmakers around the world.

25billion videos were watched in the month of august!

Search engines by query volume :

1. Google

2. YouTube

3. Yahoo!

Forrester put out an interested article a few months ago, about the easiest way to get a #1 ranking is to post a video. A video is 50 times more likely than a text page to appear on Google’s first position.

Creating embeddable players is a great way to get your video content shared. Make sure you name your files so they are descriptive and relevant.

I think that good content=more sharing=more visibility!

Example, Victoria’s Secret, has a strong Facebook presence, a video of pretty models has nearly 5,000 visitors and 500 comments!

Sears posted their commercials online, and got only 14 visitors.

So make content people want to watch, specifically for your consumer to engage with.

Good content=more linking=more page rank.

What can you do for audiences? Syndicate video to as many search engines as possible –Tube Mogul is a good site for this. Social media strategies such as FB widgets. Blogs, directories, niche publishers.

Get your message out on hire rankings site.

Build your video the right way: short and sweet! Shorter is better, don’t spend a fortune, include end slates with URLs (driving people back to your site), thumbnail images matter so make sure you freeze the frame on something engaging, like a person’s face.

Video is now showing up in Google Products pages.

Eric Papczun from Performics is next.

Eric:

[showing the most popular web videos of all time]

So the video is under 4 minutes, we have to grab the interest of users in such a short period of time! So how can I do this?

1. Create something interesting

2. Screen it

3. Tell a few friends about it

4. Encourage word of mouth

- How about doing an amazing stunt, or doing it badly?

- Cats acting like creepy humans

- A person kicking a baby

- Family member getting killed by a freak accident

- Random items exploding

- Get your children to take drugs and film the reaction

- Dance, dance, dance!

There is no question about it, people want to be entertained first and foremost.

Have high production values – give each video its own unique URL home, have the video launch from an HTML page, optimize metadata, make sure you use the world video in your filename.

Showcase your work – the thumbnail is very important, grab attention, it’s your call to action. You also want to specify in the XML exactly where the jpg for the thumbnail is so the engines can easily find it.

Promote your work-build internal links with relevant anchor text to the video page, create an MRSS feed, set up a Google XML sitemap.

Use video sharing sites, use tools, track viewership with analytics.

You can also advertise: Yahoo has a beta Rich Ads, which has videos in their ppc ads! This is only right now available for brand keywords, so if you can take advantage it. Early tests show that there is much higher CTR and conversion rate when folks are using this kind of advertising, and it’s not much more expensive.

YouTube promoted videos has a CPC pricing model, which is a great way to exploit the interest in videos that have reached critical mass (i.e. wedding dance video).

Google also has click to play video ads which display in Google’s content network.

Future considerations: Where are we going? Faster mobile devices (4G), flash for mobile platforms, flash embedded apps for iPhones, HTML 5 to allow for embedding videos more easily.

Learn from those who have gone before you!

Thanks!

Last but not least is Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Avi:

Today I am going to show you how to leverage a video for link building!

Safe auto insurance case study- we got a midsize auto insurance company to rank on page one of the Google SERPs by running a video contest that went viral.

Shows how Safe Auto set up a video contest where users can upload their own rendition of themselves singing the famous Safe Auto Jingle.

The first prize was a $5,000 advertising contract. The winner was a church choir in Columbus Ohio which got 100,000 votes. The contest generated thousands of comments over a 90 day period, and the gold was 1800 natural backlinks.

Backlinks occurred within communities, for example the winning church choir generated buzz within the Christian community and so many links on blogs happened there, the second place winner, the Meshuga Notes Jewish Accapella group posted the contest on their own blog, their facebook pages, twitter feeds, etc. so they essentially created the links for us.

We also ran ads in Google’s content network on video contest websites, musician websites, etc. You would be surprised at how many people and websites are dedicated to entering contests all day long!

But most importantly were the communities around the video submissions which were key in promoting the contest and obtaining links.

4:35 Sheara Wilensky:  Now it's Q&A time.
4:39
 

 

posted rustybrick in Search Marketing Expo 2009 East at October 6, 2009 3:10 PM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op Cartoon Barry

October 6, 2009

Live: Paid Search & International Issues

Below is live coverage of the Paid Search & International Issues from the SMX East 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Justin Davy of JustinDavy.com.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Paid Search & International Issues(10/06/2009) 
3:16 Justin Davy:  About to begin Paid Search & International Issues with:

Andy Atkins-Krueger, Managing Director, WebCertain
Anton E. Konikoff, Founder and CEO, Acronym Media
Jennifer Osborne, President, Search Engine People
Dr. Ariel Sumeruk, Head of Business intelligence, clicks2customers
3:18 Justin Davy:  Jennifer is going to kick things off by talking about do's and dont's
3:19 Justin Davy:  International PPC gives organizations the opportunity to have global exposure when in the past they may not have, thanks to search engine technology.
3:20 Justin Davy:  DO use PPC to do inexpensive market testing
3:20 Justin Davy:  Leverage your learnings based off your home country to test small in other markets.
3:21 Justin Davy:  Using Olympics as an example. As it gets closer, competition heats up and they get squeezed out of the market. Their solution was to try another market.
3:21 Justin Davy:  CTR dropped, but conversion rates rose
3:22 Justin Davy:  DO test the trademark rules in each country. (This doesn't mean trademark infringements)
3:22 Justin Davy:  DO Address payment issues.
3:23 Justin Davy:  In some markets credit cards aren't that prevelant for example.
3:23 Justin Davy:  Credit isn't universally acceptable
3:25 Justin Davy:  Sharing a client example in Quebec. The English campaign was performing well but not the French campaign. The problem was when the particular French keyword was paired with something else it meant an entirely different thing.
3:25 Justin Davy:  The removed some keywords, added negatives and focused more on exact match
3:26 Justin Davy:  Don't assume that what works in 1 market will work everywhere
3:27 Justin Davy:  In markets where internet penetration is particular low, ad scheduling doesn't always work well since many can only access the internet at work
3:27 Justin Davy:  DO Act global but think local
3:28 Justin Davy:  Next up Andy
3:31 Justin Davy:  Culture directly affects performance and ROI
3:32 Justin Davy:  Keyword research reflects that culture
3:32 Justin Davy:  But people as well (native speakers)
3:33 Justin Davy:  Shares the difference between "assurance auto" and "insurance auto" for France.
3:35 Justin Davy:  Local search engines are often cost effective - Don't think Google only
3:35 Justin Davy:  Baidu over Google in China for example
3:36 Justin Davy:  Long tail is an important feature in international search
3:37 Justin Davy:  There are also keyboard differences which in French shows how use of accents actually increase the tail
3:38 Justin Davy:  If you were using exact only you could be missing out in that case
3:38 Justin Davy:  Not all languages have consensus spelling due to reforms
3:41 Justin Davy:  Andy also shares how purchase options including credit can vary from country to country so its important to know whats out there in order to convert.
3:42 Justin Davy:  Anton is up now
3:43 Justin Davy:  The keyword driven approach is critical
3:44 Justin Davy:  One common mistake is that once the English campaign is created its replicated into a different language as opposed to creating a scalable structure from the beginning
3:45 Justin Davy:  Consider the differences in Asia for example and all the cultures. China vs Thailand etc...
3:46 Justin Davy:  Important to frequently and thoroughly review and revise your local keyword lists for relevancy in order to improve success
3:49 Justin Davy:  Anton says how native speakers can't do the work as well as native speakers with search experience. Don't think you can find a native speaker and your set.
3:50 Justin Davy:  Example - If there's no direct term that correlates, many times a native speaker will invent something.
3:51 Justin Davy:  He recommends that using only Native speakers with search experience and training. Also their work is reviewed by a company that specializes in translation.
3:51 Justin Davy:  Multiple checks before a campaign goes online, or else there are to many mistakes.
3:54 Justin Davy:  Don't scale to multi-language campaigns if you don't have a landing page built for their language as well.
3:55 Justin Davy:  Recomends giving the user an option for language after they get to your website
3:55 Justin Davy:  There's no such thing as a regional campaign outside of the US
3:56 Justin Davy:  Use a centralized reporting solution to manage campaigns and quickly gain actionable insights
3:58 Justin Davy:  If your using bid management its important to know if they support multiple currencies.
4:00