WebmasterWorld 2004 Las Vegas Archives

If you want to know what you missed or did not miss and my session coverage did not do it for you, then check out the three threads below that have attendee discussion on the last WebmasterWorld conference.

- WebmasterWorld
- SearchEngineWatch
- V7 Forums

New Orleans will be where the next WMW conference will be, based on audience vote. They are now going to give away the iPOD. They are also planning on having an other WMW conference here in Vegas in a year from now. And here they go, they are pulling out the winner now, Jessie picked it and the winner is.... Daniel Dent from Omega, happens to be sitting in the front row, congrats! 888.com is giving away a portal DVD player, the winner is Chris Kramer. They are setting up drinks now in the other room. This afternoon they are going to NY NY, there is a pub there that they will having the PubConf. Joseph Morin from Boost Rankings helped select it and set it up. He then thanked the panelist from the last session, and he thanked everyone for attending.

This is the last official session of the day, after this everyone goes to the bars. I don't - I head back to NY. Brett thanked all the speakers, the exhibitors, he thanked Matthew who is his new right hand man. This session is about people who started small and made it big (well not fortune 500).

Christine Churchil from KeyRelevance who sold net mechanic way back, was up first. The good news is that you can compete against big guys but you also go up against amazon types. Pros of small companies are; leaner, nimbler, more resilient, enthusiastic and ingenious, and grassroots understanding of business sector. Corporate negatives; slow to change, bureaucratic, fights turf wars, lack of communication, and risk averse. Some advantages of big companies include; distribution, resources (people/money), infrastructure, and brand recognition. What can a little guy do?

(1) Build Trust through, site design, address and phone, trust seals, privacy policy, customer testimonials, product reviews and awards, and guarantees.
(2) Build Relationships; maintain a dialog with existing customers, sell more products to current customers, offer valuable content, email newsletter, and soft-sales.
(3) Automate Everything; online help, make transaction process simple, confirm email receipt automated, and use third part software
(4) Improve the Customer Experience; usability matters, fix site errors, easy navigation and clear pricing.

Jessie Stricchiola from Alchemist Media Inc was next up, glad to see she is doing well. Back in 1997 she did SEO while in school, and had a small company. She then got hired to work in house in California and then later on started her own customer. She has three people and outsources a lot. She is a small dog and will share her small dog experience. If you do not have a big operation then you a probably dealing with the following elements; (1) reliance on word of mouth lead generation, (2) lack of top 10 rankings for SEO related terms, (3) limited cash flow/lack of marketing budget to spend on other marketing. She will give us some small dog, dog tricks. Success of your business is dependent on your relationship with your customers. SEO-CRM is dependent on expectation management (no standards in this industry and constant change, cost variation due to the lack of commoditization, client issues (design teams, external agencies, ego issues). Major components of SEO -CRM are client selection, expectation management and communication. Client Selection; clients understanding of the SEO industry, prior SEO engagements, development resources, commitment and availability, and financial status and account process. She then goes through her real life examples of these issues. Communication & Expectations; what you will and wont do, the risks involved, influential factors out of your control, what your expectations are of their team throughout the project and consider incorporating these elements into your agreement.

Finally Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink. She said small business need to work with each other to succeed. Build strategic alliances. Make sure to protect your reputation, they do not sub contract their core competencies. Choose clients carefully. Match the solution to the problem (not a one size fits all). At the same time, don't overplay your hand. Remember even when you get it all right, its still a dog's life.

That covers all the sessions. I hope to write up a short recap for you all later on.

George Kepnick from LocalLaunch was first up. He will tell us mostly how to hire someone internally to build links. Why do you need a link builder? It can save you time, its a profitable addition to your company, it is scalable. Strategic examples of link building, directory, geo targeted and industry specific links. How do I start? You need an email account from the client's address, computer, excel, browser. Compensation methods; hourly, per link, per PR, and internships. Where do you find link builders? online (craigslists), college/high school, word of mouth. What do you look for? Internet users, computer savvy, excel skills, blogger skills. How to train? The basics; be careful with long dynamic looking URL, check backlinks on the url of the page you request the links, excel is important (columns; type of links, free, recip, paid, PR, number of outgoing links, submission date, approval, submitted to page, and page your listing should be on. The list of keywords is important, then search for "add url + keyword" stuff like that. How to motivate your link builder? tell them they are important and what they are doing is important, offer bonuses, experience will help, foot in the door. RoboForm helps save time, and WMW Subscription helps you learn.

Next up was Roger Montti from martinibuster. He breaks down sites into categories based on competitiveness. Leverage personal networks, directories, paid links and buy other websites for inbound links. He said he called some guy who had a hobby site that was ranking very well and he bought it for $800. He sometimes searches on "temporarily down for maintenance" and calls the web site owners and tries to buy them. Don't worry too much about DMOZ, submit once and then walk away, you do not need DMOZ. Some long term strategies include; build your own backlink network, build your own directories, and blog away. Link development for highly competitive topics like casino, you need to be very aggressive text link buying, aggressive domain name purchases and automated link exchanges. Consider outsourcing link development but be careful with price (a good price is 5 - 7 per link) and the quality varies. Built an attractive links page, do not hide it.

Q & A:

Q: What do you recommend for automated networks and link exchanges?
A: Roger said he personally doesn't like them, but he partners with people who do. He doesn't recommend it for the average Web site.

Q: Do we need to be worried about lots of link exchanges (reciprocal links)?
A: Mikkel said do not put all your eggs in one basket, there are other types of links. Reciprocal link campaigns can only go so far. Build viral pages (tools, articles, etc.) that people want to link to you - one way. Mikkel gave an example of little online movies they made, and they are very viral, they are jokes. Build unique tools that are useful. Then give it away, for a link.

Q: Someone asked, I have 27,000 links but I want to pay someone to pay to give me more, how do I know if they are duplicating the links I already have?
A: It is very hard, almost impossible. Mikkel recommends using the API and George recommends GoogleAlert.com.

Q: IP addresses and Class C - how important to separate them out?
A: If you are aggressive about it, then you need to watch you back. You can track it down easily if someone or something raises a red flag.

Q: Which programs should you stay away from and which should you use?
A: Roger, you really have to learn the software before using it. Do not go on all automated mode. ARELIS is good for finding link partners. Mikkel, said if you want to go back hat, then build your own systems. Its ok, but if your going to do it, make sure you do not leave a footprint and the only way to do it is to build your own tools.

The room is pretty empty, I guess most of the people stayed late at the Yahoo! party. He first offered the keynote to Sergy, then to MSN and then to Tim O'Reilly. So he decided to just talk about WebmasterWorld and where it is going to go. He asked if anyone here has not visited WMW, and a few people raised their hands. WMW does what they can to build a community, through the focus of a webmaster target. Brett says he hasn't changed much, he predicts over the next 6 - 9 months, he will be changing things. Everyone can have their own personal blogs at WMW, they are not sure how exactly its going to work. He is going to try to actually sell the WMW software, 98% done. WMW is going to move to CSS shortly, he is going to bite the bullet and do that, mainly because of the bandwidth savings and code clean up. They are going to spin off some new domains, new forums and sub domains to make it easier for people to find things. They are going to expand to more forums, like databases, specific search engines, break down the european forums. He then asked how many people are members of the supporters forum, most raised their hand. WMW is hiring perl programmers and general 'net techs' (people who get the picture), he said they do not want to turn into what SearchEngineForums turned into.

Q & A:

Q: John from ClickTracks asked, he said he is a vendor and he avoided participating in WMW because he didn't want to "pitch" his product? Any advice.
A: When questions come up, Brett said that we want you to come in an answer them. He said, often people ask questions just to pitch. Its a touch call.

Q: Do you see WMW becoming more politically active like SEMPO, etc?
A: No, we will leave it alone.

Q: What is the scope on the newsletter?
A: If they can hire someone to free up some of his time, they will do it. It takes a full day out of a week to do he said.

Q: Will there be a PubCon this afternoon?
A: Yes, this afternoon they will announce it.

Q: Will there be printed books coming out?
A: He is half done with a book, he contributed to Google Hacks and an O'Reilly book.

Q: Will you be video taping these sessions?
A: No, most the search reps will not allow it anyway.

I just got back from the Yahoo! Search party that took place at the Palms Hotel & Casino's Rain Nightclub. By the way, it was not easy to find the hotel's Web site, I had to search several times - the search phrase that worked well in Google was palm hotel and casino as opposed to palm vegas or others like that. Anyway, back to the party...

WebmasterRadio.FM co-something the event, when I got there they were discussing the shows they have planned. They even announced that in early 2005, Tim Mayer and Jeremy Zawodny will be guests on the show. Seems like this will be a very interesting and educational talk show, so check it out.

The club was interesting, I did not bring a camera, but I am sure you will be able to find pictures from your buddies. I believe Jeremy Zawodny will be posting pictures at his blog entry named Come to the Yahoo Party at Webmaster World, where he invites his Apache Con friends. In fact, before the conference, Jeremy presented at the Community Building, Blogs and Forums session where he talked about a review he posted at his blog on the Motorola Bluetooth phone, which I happened to have purchased just about a week ago. So I spoked to him about some of the integration issues/solutions (if any) between my car, my mac and the 5% bluetooth phone.

Back to the party...

Tim Mayer came over to me, when I was sitting on some sofa, kind of off in the corner. I asked him he they (Yahoo!) hires top notch spammers in an effort to combat spam. You know, like how governments and large companies hire hackers to prevent being hacked. Tim said they have not, they just hire 'engineers'. Which got me thinking, what if the Yahoo! people decided to pass some special gas through the air at this party. The gas contained a drug that turned spammers into the extreme opposite of a spammer (just a note to readers, I am not using the word 'spammer' in a derogatory fashion). I told Tim, that if they had this solution, it might solve a huge chunk of the spam issues they have overnight. Of course I was joking, everyone at the party were clean, white hats.

After that I decided to walk around a bit to 'mingle'. But due to this bad head cold and the very loud bass vibrations coming from the speakers, I just had to leave. Wish I was feeling better, but what can I do. Overall the party looked to be very fun, people were having a blast, everyone was play gambling and the SEOs were chatting away.

Yahoo! - Great Party!

Community Building, Blogs and Forums - WMW Conf 7

Roger Dooley from Compstar was first up. He brought up two books, Into Thing Air and Touching the Void. He discussed how these books received lots of good feedback from online reviews. 40% of American's participate in online communities, that is a big number. Types of the communities include, "shared interests", "commerce", "social business" communities, etc. He then put up a cartoon saying "Aren't you a little old to have imaginary friends", Web communities have real world impact (we are at this conference, aren't we). Online communities include, reviews, forums, blogs, email lists, chats, and wikis. Forum community benefits include; (1) communicate company message, (2) first hand customer feedback, (3) content and traffic, (4) community and "fans" (apple customers are fans, sometimes obsessed). Forum Communities Costs; (1) time and effort to built critical mass in a forum, (2) frank feedback cuts both ways, (3) inevitable criticism, (4) legal issues (5) continuous management (24/7 year round). Build your community; (1) establish a mission for your community, (2) review internal strengths and determine what to outsource, (3) allocate adequate resources, (4) keep expectations in check, and (5) monitor and adjust course. If people who are building the community are not having fun, then it wont work. Is there a formula for a profitable forum? He then put up a long mathematical equation, which got a laugh - but it was a real formula from MIT.

Next up was Jennifer Slegg, Jenstar Mod at WMW. Building a community requires; finding and choosing mods, getting members, encourage quality posts, avoid empty forums and stop spam. Getting good mods is one of the hardest things to find she said, I agree. One thing she also said about mods was to find mods that are unbiased - it helps. And you need at least one mod who you can trust, so you can leave the keys of the forum to that person. Ways to keep moderators happy;pay them, free advertising, moderator only perks, involve them in the decision making whenever possible, discuss the goals of the forums with your mods, and avoid stepping on their toes whenever possible. What type of power should you give the mods? Those are things you need to think about. Finding members, to do so, make sure your forum is spider-able, you want to make it easy for new members to view and post in threads, encourage word of mouth referrals, advertiser your forums. Avoid the empty forum syndrome by keeping the number of forums low at the beginning, have easy post threads, pad the forum with multiple user names, keep threads on topic, and offer posting incentives. Setting initial ground rules, make sure your faqs are clear.

Amanda Watlington was next up, she spoke at the SES San Jose session on this topic. So far it looks like the same info, so view my coverage of that session named Web Feeds, Blogs & Search. She showed some stats of how much traffic some blogs get. There are many blog tools; blogger, live journal, typepad, diaryland, movable type, aol journals, etc. Which one should I use? Depends on the features you need and your technical background. She explains how RSS works a bit and showed some RSS reader examples. Blogs are great for link building. She said blogs increase perception of thought leadership within the community, deepens customer relationship, boosts media relations and enhances your relationship with your committed audience. She then rants on some poor blogs and talks about some good blogs in regards from an SEO view.

Finally was Jeremy Zawondy from Yahoo, he is referred to as one of the most famous bloggers out there. He quickly showed how the Web changed over time. He shows how blogs are growing incredibly, something like 12 blogs a minute or so. He then shows a chart on "Weblog posts per day" and you see if major things happen in real life, more posts are on that day (see the US conventions time lines). Big Media vs. Blogs, they looked at inbound sources and you see that blog penetration is huge. Comment spam has been crazy in the last year or so. Comment spam is killing the community aspect of the blogs, because people are adding moderation systems and closed communities. Content quality is all over the board, so it is kind of a bad thing. Weblog traffic; he splits it into two groups. (1) The regular reader (subscribers) and they visit often, daily. (2) Search engine referrals; which takes a few days (not immediate), the searchers have very specific goals, he said product reviews are his most popular blogs (check my sunbeam review at my rustybrick blog, i must have 50 comments). Advertising; there is a decreasing resistance to commercial messages (product endorsements, comments get hairy with ads, contextual ads are spreading) and link exchanges are not popular.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo was up first. Yahoo gets about 1.76B pageviews per day, 325 million unique users, 157 million active registered users, 7.6 million unique paying relationships. People sometimes ask if Yahoo! has different data centers (like Google) he said they pretty much deploy test changes all the time, that is why you see changes. They released My Yahoo Search and the features within it (Save, Store, Remember searches, block sites, folders to save pages within, you can also publish your saved pages to an XML feed or MyYahoo. In addition, you can sort the results, see how you found the results in the past. He said my.search.yahoo.com currently points to a Malaysia search by mistake. He then showed how you can easily add xml feed to yahoo through the SERPs (if its available) and to go to add.my.yahoo.com/rss. They support RSS, RDF in the crawl, they support ATOM in My Yahoo but not the crawl. 99% of the index is free, to get in, get a link from a page already in the Yahoo index (then goes through some other SEO basics). http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request/ is a way to submit your site for free, but be careful using it - dont spam it. Then talks about the robot.txt stuff. They will be trying to merge all the robots they have (normal slurp, multimedia, shopping, news, etc.

Redirect Handling By Yahoo. All this stuff should be working ok in two weeks. Redirects from one domain to another will index the "target" rather then the "source". Meta Redirects: > 1 sec treated as a 301, < 1 sec is treated as a 302. Redirects internal will keep the source as the main link. This will be launched shortly, and you should see stuff happening in the next four weeks. This should fix all the issues discussed in the forums.

Next up was Dan Boberg from Overture, part of Yahoo. Was a bit funny at the beginning about WMW jokes. He is going to review five marketing segments. (1) We know that consumers value search and we know how they search. Research is the number one reason why people use the internet., then entrainment and then to find things they heard about via word of mouth. 80% enter more then one word when searching, 47% enter 3 or more words. (2) Customer segmentation is about dividing up your customer base. He discusses about the buyer's life cycle; discovery, research, comparison, and purchase phases. (3) Web business models include; e-commerce, lead generation, content, customer service - then you need to measure each model differently. (4) Then we move into Branding, which is important. Paid listings in addition to organic help with branding. (5) Customer experience best practices, multiple channel awareness.

Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves was up next, he said that Paul Gardi (who normally gives these presentations) is now too important to give these presentations, and followed up that joke about saying he will give us spam tips. He talked about how Ask Jeeves grew, is growing, yada yada. He said although that they are larger, he said its probably not worth trying to manipulate the results of Ask Jeeves - stick with Google and Yahoo - of course that got a laugh and applause. He then went into what makes Ask Jeeves great. He talks about subject specific popularity and communities, hubs and authorities - all topics discussed here a few times. He said same subject links are very popular, they like text links.

Matt Cutts from Google is up next. Spoke to him right before the session to say hi. Although he is worth a lot more then the last time I saw him, he still looks the same. :) In addition he has cant talk well, he lost his voice, I wonder how he is going to give this presentation. He said he loves the WebmasterWorld community is very lovable. He started off saying that it was the one year anniversary of the Florida, and he said GoogleGuy was posting, but he said he doesn't want to announce anything big at this conference. He said he is very excited about AdWords Professional program. Google's mission statement, "organize the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful." They do not want to limit themselves on the search engine business only. He went through the new features, 8 billion pages, they now have a date on every cached page (he is proud of that), Gmail just added email forwarding and pop3 - they have no plans to charge for it. They have no plans to charge for Froogle inclusion. Google desktop search, lots of internationalization and a whole big list. Google is doing a better job with expired domains. Doubled the amount of link data which he explains to be better. They broadened out more accessibility to those links. He is a good politician. They keep the lines open he says AdWordsAdvisor has 1,750 posts and GoogleGuy has 2,400 posts. How does Google handle spam reports? He started saying that you should not rely on CSS Z layers or cloaking anymore. To be reindexed send an email to webmaster@google.com with "re-inclusion request" in the subject line and in a few weeks you should be reincluded in time. He then showed examples of a cloaked site for "cheap airplane tickets", he showed the cloaked page versus the user page. He then shows off some templates where you replace keywords into templates, same content over and over again but just swap out several keywords. He then showed some guest book spam, comment spam, forum spam, link exchanges, etc. He finished off saying SEO will get easier, but spam will get harder.

Q & A:
Q: Can a site be both a hub and authority in the Teoma world?
A: Yes but most are not, but it is possible.

Q: Does a site get tagged to be in a community in Teoma?
A: He started off saying, why are people asking me questions, they should ask Google or Yahoo. He said sites do not get tagged.

Q: An other Q for Ask Jeeves. Are you guys ever going to move your AdWords ads out of the way?
A: He said AdWords is so great, they want it front and center. He said they are always looking to enhance the user experience. They are looking for ways to improve that.

Q: Ask again, how about killing the Ask frame?
A: Might happen soon, its possible.

Q: An other question for Ask
A: Michael, Ask, said the rest of the panel can go home.

Q: The question continues, back a while ago he did the PFI to Ask and he got lots of impressions but zero clicks. Only clicks he got from Ask was from AdWords. The Ads are in the way and they dont see the natural results.
A: He said it is hard to comment on a specific example. He said it seems like a odd situation. Michael could not answer the question, he needs to see his example.

Q: How do the engines handle "DBA" (doing business as VS. database admin)?
A: Google praised Ask refinement tools, Ask thanked them.

Jessie Stricchiola is not feeling well, she was recently sick, so I hope she gets better soon. She was suppose to be on the panel and is a great speaker.

Adam Jewell from Net Plus Marketing was first up. He started off with explaining that since it is your business, you are most experienced in your industry and you know your product best, you know your seasonalities, why people buy your products and the keywords your customers use to find you. If you can provide your expertise on your site, then it will help people link to you and buy from you. SEO is one of the most overlooked marketing areas for most companies. When using AdWords, opt-out of content syndication initially, include a call to action and your keyword in the title, match keywords & copy to landing page, buy exact, phrase and broad match initially, and track everything. He then shows examples of some basic how tos with AdWords, and landing pages.

Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink was next up. She will start off with real case studies. She recommends bartering for expertise you do not have, she swapped ad space for keyword research with the chamber of commerce. Optimize for niche markets, Lobster company gains sales from only organic results. Launch with good links, regional hotel site launched with links from the chamber of commerce and convention which helped rocket them up within days in the SERPs. She then listed some resources including; SEO Book, Digital Point's Tools, she recommends web trends, click tracks and conversion ruler for tracking purposes, she then goes through some directories like dmoz and yahoo and she provides an other list (these are posted at the forums and in this blog somewhere anyway). She then discusses Search News sites such as Yahoo! News and Google News, these sites are huge.

Next up was Brett Tabke to talk about Traffic Beyond the Search Engines. Direct Navigation accounts for more traffic on average beyond the search engines. He estimates that 60 - 80% of site traffic comes from "traditional means". 20 - 40% come from search results, both paid and free results. Traffic can come from reciprocal link exchanges, strategic alliances, topic directories, contests, guest books, commenting at blogs, affiliate programs, do a story on a site and they will link back, email newsletters, mailing lists, email a friend. He then showed the hamsters site (if you do not know what I mean, ask me). Usenet and forums are good. Coupons work, go to conferences and trade shows. Start a weblog, classified ads, trade mags, etc.

Bruce Clay was up first, bruceclay.com. He said most people who do linking campaigns are doing it in an ad-hoc fashion. He said there are three components to ranking; technical, expertness and copy-writing.

Inbound linking considerations;
- IP Numbers should be different (he said this is natural)
- PageRank is important, natural structure is good
- Anchor Text, he said using different anchor text is important, its more natural
- WhoIs Name, its good to make them different
In these areas, they need to be managed. Don't take any link, just because you can.

Outbound linking considerations;
- Reciprocal links c an be incestuous
- "Fuzzy up" the island boundaries, link out to those sites even if they don't link back to you

He then talked a bit about themed links within your own site, and called it "silo" linking, which helps you rank well for both generic and specific keywords. Personally, I am not too sure about that.

He then said, it seems like PDF documents and not filtered by the search engines. So links in PDF documents can be worth a ton.

Jim Banks from WebDiveristy, was next up. Changing your mindset, back in the "gold digging days" everyone was trying to beat the rush but many failed. Types of Visitors; accidental tourists, browsers, evaluators, shoppers, buyers and repeat visitors. The selection process; its not one size fits all, different strategies for each type of visitor, just measure ROI each step of the way. Testing ground; AdWords is a great test area, keyword selection and categorization based on type of visitor, 3 titles/3 descriptions in a 3 x 3 grid, take off the auto optimize option, run test with one keyword as an exact match with 24/7 coverage, measure your CTR versus ROI, run test for at least 2 weeks, evaluate total spend versus CPS versus sales volume to establish the optimum time to spend organically. Results at the end; know the starts and dog keywords, 2 weeks to gather the data, hunt your links and provide anchor text based on what you know will work - but for the transactional keywords expect and be happy to pay for the links. Trying before you buy; you can refine your strategy in weeks, time costs, PPC will give you the data you need to make informed rational decision, if successful you can always fund the organic link activity with PPC profit, be prepared to go through some drawing boards.

Greg Boser now made a few follow up comments. He said the most under used tool for link building is PPC for the keyword research. "You are what your links say you are." Once you get those links, its very hard to shift those links later on. Try to stay under the radar at all times. He said pace yourself with link buys, getting 20,000 links in one week, stands out. Don't worry about getting low PR links, good anchor text is more important - uninstall the tool bar he said.

Q & A:
Q: Guestbook links have 0 pagerank, tell us about that?
A: Guestbooks do give off nice anchor text weight, even without pagerank in Google.

Q: Speak to blogs, the side bar links in the blog, in text blogs, and other links in a blog.
A: Greg said the links that show up in the paragraph of the blogs are/will be better then the links on the side bar. Not that it is this way today.

Q: What are your thoughts on outsourcing your link building overseas?
A: Jim Banks said that he used people overseas and the quality is questionable. Bruce Clay said he has been approached by overseas companies, his problem is that it doesn't always fit into his managed link development process. Greg says he focuses on push; good content, good tools, good feeds and more - this way we do not have to ask for links, they just come.

Q: Can Bruce expand more on "Silo" linking?
A: Basically he is a strong believer of themed internal linking. This is kind of shocking to me, I am surprised he is saying this.

Noel McMichael, CEO of Marketleap, will be giving the keynote address. He said he did adapt his presentation from the last SES show, he will be adding and moving into the black hat/white hat debate topic. He said if your going to thrive, there are seven things you must do, which he will discuss in his presentation. He described how Marketleap started in November 1999, out of a two bedroom apartment with business class DSL. They focused on Web development projects and a few months later they decided to contract a CFO and lawyers - he said never go cheap with this stuff. Then in March 2000 they hired internal dedicated developers, the NASDAQ was diving, NBCi went out of business (Marketleap's largest client). In January 2001 they decided to go viral, building tools to help people come back time and time again. Then in March 2002 they had a need for cash flow, so they got a line of credit of 100k from the bank. In July 2002 they hired two more people and grew to 5 people, hiring Keith Boswell and Derrick Wheeler. He then shows a chart of the "ecosystem" of the search marketing industry and went off on a bit of a tangent about spammers. So where did Marketleap align itself with the search engines? They went into the paid inclusion reseller business (with inktomi in sept. 2002). Then Singing reseller (which then got bought out by AOL) then AV reseller (Overture bought AV), then Fast reseller and overture buys then, then Overture reseller and Yahoo buys them and then infospace resller (no one bought them yet).

June 2003, they have a reseller meltdown. Ink/Overture cut XML paid inclusion reseller from 24+ to 4. They kept Marketleap, which was huge for them. He said he remembers when Inktomi put a big heart on a big van and drove it around Yahoo!'s headquarters saying "Will You Be Mine". Then August 2003 they grew from 7 to 10 people with no office, just virtual people. 2004 came along and search became huge and the VCs came in. They were getting 2 to 3 calls a week, and he disliked many of the VCs. Then in July 2004 they were acquired by Digital Impact, a huge email marketing company. So they grew from 10 to 284 employees, Noel now has an office and there are 6 different locations. They are now in four different ecosystems (search, email, interactive and digital print). Noel's job is to watch over his alignment in the search ecosystem with Marketleap.

Seven imperatives for success in the SEM ecosystem:
(1) Define ecosystem directions and values
> Share directions and values (see Linux, eBay, Microsoft)
> Align interests wherever possible
> Involved SEO providers in business planning and innovation
(2) Foster Open Relationships
> transparency enables and trust
(3) Focus all participants on the end customer
> who is the customer
> your immediate customer may be the next link in the value chain
(4) Treat employees, partners and vendors as investors of human capital
(5) The search engines must define governance and the rules of engagement
> its not for SEMPO
> standards and guidelines are very gray always
(6) Leverage Knowledge and Innovation of External Entities
> drop the "not invented here" syndrome (he looks at the Google API limiting you to 1,000 query limit
(7) Evolve or Become Extinct
> Abandon change management
> Change is constant, embrace it and accept it
> There are always opportunities for First Movers

He then added, hire outrageous individuals that contradict the norm, and put up a picture of Mikkel. :)

I think, officially, Webmaster Radio launched yesterday. I guess this means that there is competition for SEO Radio, which never hurt the public.

WebmasterRadio.FM is lifting the "veiled curtain" called the Internet to bring the business community together through an interactive, Internet based radio network. WebmasterRadio.FM offers an all-star line up of radio shows hosted by the most respected names in the Internet business world. Here on WebmasterRadio.FM listeners can find programming with a vast appeal to anyone looking to be a part of a community destination and learn industry specific information from the most successful marketers and technology experts in the world. The LOUNGE (formally the chat room) is open 24/7 allowing listeners to communicate with each other, from around the globe in real time.

Our new show line up includes:

- Next Stuff Now hosted by Chris Tolles, VP of Topix.net
- Domain Master with Monte Cahn of Moniker.com
- RainMaker hosted by SEGuru (Daron Babin) and Brandy Shapiro-Babin
- SEO RockStars with hosts: Todd (Oilman) Friesen and Jake (bakedjake) Baille
- Hats Off with Jessie Stricchiola, President of Alchemist Media Inc.
- Cover Story with Brandy Shapiro-Babin and David McInnis, President PR Web
- Affiliate Marketing Today with Haiko de Poel, Jr. President AbestWeb.com
- Wizards of Web hosted by Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg, Future Now, Inc.

Its been almost a year since I attended a session of this nature. I was not too impressed last time, so I am hoping things have changed within the year. Brett introduces the panel, by saying its the first time WMW is doing this panel.

Ted Ulle, WMW Admin, was up first. His slide says "The Vegas Diet", basically how you can trim down your <body>. He looks at the text to code ratio, the more you reduce the code in your files the smaller the file the easier it is to spider. Its not an algorithm thing, Google doesn't look at the ratio for ranking purposes. But it does make it easier to maintain, fewer errors. Fewer packets, less bandwidth needed to serve to the user and the spiders. He discusses how he removes indents, they waste space and less bytes (now that can be argued). Your information architecture does not need to match your directory structure. Just because the click trail is long, it doesnt mean you need to make a longer URL. He says why use an /image directory, throw everything in the root (this might make some of the readers sick). A no brainer is putting CSS and JavaScript in external files. Don't do inline styles, and dont need the span tag. Some of the real magic of CSS; you still can use tables for basic structure, the two most underused CSS (1) style elements such as p tag, h tags, li tags should all be defined and (2) you can declare multiple classes in one declaration, i.e. <p class="c l r". He uses a CSS toolkit, which makes much sense for many reasons.

George Shaw who will discuss from a Flash point of view. Why should you use flash? Flash provides for motion, more then a gif or other technology. It also provides for a very good method of delivering sound. Also advanced interactivity, and scalability (fits a screen dynamically) and load control. If none of these items are important, then your best bet is to not use Flash. Problems with Flash, content is not readily crawlable, flash pages are not seen as multiple pages (often). Full site flash is bad for SEO purposes. Flash and HTML together is a better solution. He is working on a method to come up with a solution to build an all flash web site SEO friendly, without deploying cloaking. They try to break the content up into layers, basically HTML pages which is fully searchable and then they take a Flash layer and sit that on top of the content layer. The only issue they have now is the trust issue. The search engines need to trust that the HTML layer is accurately displaying the Flash layer content.

Next up is Gregory Market from Infuse Creative asked how many are SEOs versus Flash people versus Marketing people. A year or so ago Macromedia allowed many to download the Flash SDK, asking the search engines to use the SDK. Google now does read, index, and rank flash sites. He then adds, has it made a difference? Do a search on "hubble" and the # 7 site is a flash site, but this is do to inbound anchor text. But Google is crawling and navigating through Flash navigation. But we do not know how Google weighs the embedded flash elements. As of today, the Flash SDK has been turned off. His big Macromedia announcements: that Macromedia is working on it. :) Now for some best practices "workaround" solutions. Problem, only one page is indexed. Solution, build a secondary html site or build a flash movie for each page. Do not detect flash compatibility on your index page, your index page is where search engines learn about your site. Often flash sites do not have titles or descriptions. Most flash pages have little text, add more text to your flash documents and mix in flash and html. www.searchguild.com/seflash.html will show you what the SDK shows. Don't use pop ups or framesets. Make sure your pages are linked well, navigation is key when you have broken out your flash pages. He then goes through some general SEO tips. He then goes into some of the grey workaround methods. Invisible text, noscript tag or css hidden z layer, or IP delivery. He went through a case where Google allowed NPR radio to cloak the audio files in text, Danny Sullivan has a good recap article on that. Checkout RichMediaSEO.com.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo was next. The beginning the speech will be very basic, so I will just chime in with notes as it gets interesting. Not that Tim is not an interesting person, :). If you are using Flash at this point, that you will rarely get a number one listing. They are trying to get Flash publishers to put more information in the meta information but its a matter of trust. They are trying to extract more information from the swf file, its had to do. They are extracting the links from the swf files - which might be most important. He then posted some sources, were-here.com and Jakob Nieslen's view on flash.

Calum I. Mac Ceod was first up. He discussed how Google used to rank pages (title and pagerank). Now its a bit more complicated, with proximity and linkage data. He goes through the various on page factors and describes how most are not too important anymore. He then goes into PageRank and how sites some times have PR 0 or gray PR. He also discusses how some pages that do not pass PR. He then moves on to anchor text and its importance. Google has done strange things with redirects. He then goes into geo-location very quickly. Content is of course important. To be honest, it is very hard to understand the presentation - I am bad with accents and the slides are a bit poor. That is the evolution of Google. What can we see next? localization you should see and better spam detection.

Next up was Keith Petterson from Red Zone Global, he just got married. He says SEO is a bit like gambling with the rushes he gets from ranking high and the downs he gets when he gets when his sites get banned (not sure if his pages do get bad). He describes how he first got into SEO, probably like most of you (client asked them to get traffic). He said he had the number 3 spot on Excite for the big "S" word on the Internet, then in 99 AOL dropped Excite. "Write good content and you will naturally obtain good traffic." He said he heard from many webmaster's who feel they have good content but bad rankings. He said its not all about content, obviously. Develop a strategy, where am I now and where do I want to be tomorrow. He said you need to keep track of your rankings. He thinks of an algorithm as a puzzle. A mix between on page and off page factors. He said its important to know what will and wont get indexed by search engine. He tracks rank over time, he says he is extremely analytical. "Scalpel versus hatchet", he believes you make small changes and do not destroy a site and rebuild it.

Daron Babin SEGuru, he started WebmasterFM, he said he has been in the game since before it was an industry. He discussed how every 10 minutes you were resubmitting and your rankings improved and then your competitors did it, etc. He gets a bit into the black hat and white hat discussion, today your ok and tomorrow your not. He is happy to see that the wall is down between SEOs and the Search Engines. He then goes into how the forums are a tool, it used to be where people used to say, here is a new bot IP address. He mentioned cloaking and how he got caught, or he might be joking. He said would take a slice of the pie, Google, AV, Excite, etc. and would extract 5000 listings and compare all the title tags and measure them using a statistical model (think he said linear regression trend analysis). He analyzed every factor by hand in the past, it took him two weeks to built the perfect page. He said he built a cloaked page and the search engine won because the searcher got the page he wanted and he won because he got the sale. The searcher was happy he said, because "he made his wife happy" - that made a laugh through the audience. He recommends writing a page of content and pulling out the keywords, then give it to someone and ask them to figure out what they keyword is. He said its about the other words on the page, its that important. If the keyword is "apple" is the page about computers or fruit? :)

They called out Matt in the back of the room and he waived. :)

Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla was next up. He said he started back in mid to late 1996. He built it and they did not come. So he stumbled upon Danny Sullivan's article - he said he had to mail him a check (before e-commerce). He said he is not ashamed, he optimized for algorithms and not for terms of service. Back in the earlier days, it was more about generating eye balls, because he could put up banner ads at high CPC. He said it was very on page and meta tag driven SEO. He described how he met John Heard who makes a product named "IP delivery" and discovered cloaking. The purpose was to stop his competitors from stealing his code and he had a ton of fun, because he gave the competitors weird tags to mess them up. He called these pages "poison pages". He said any content provided by the government is free to use. So he took content from these pages and then did find and replace on the keywords in the Web page with the other keywords. He fed it to the engines to see how the engines ranked them and figured out keyword density that way. He said search engine like their own search results a lot, so the SERP pages have good content. He said he is still a big fan of IP Delivery, even these days. Cloaking turned into a way to custom tailer each page to each individual engine. InfoSeek used to swap between 3 algorithms, so every Sunday at 11am they switched from domain A to domain B and got back to the top of the rankings. Then linkage data became very important with the rise of Google, Inc. So over time they built software tools to look more at linkage data. He didnt trust anyone, he tested everything himself. He sees IP technology is coming back with Yahoo, Google, and MSN all competing for the same landscape. He says he deploys IP Delivery based on the user's perspective, he doesnt care if the search engines dont like it, as long as the customer is ok with it - then its a win - win situation. He said, technically he is a spammer - but real spammers dont have conversion rates. He came out and said MSN loves side wide links (I have seen this to be true) whereas the others do not like site wide links as much. It will be interesting to see how text ad purchasing becomes more advanced.

Q & A Time:

Q: What are your thoughts on hosting a network of sites on the same IP or C-block?
A: They all say get them all on a different IP address. He said don't make it easy for the search engines to find all your sites.

Q: Do you see any changes happening as the holiday season comes up?
A: They said, do you have an AdWords account? :) He said he wants MSN out there, he misses those days. You need to prep yourself for the algo changes. Right now its just Google, it helps to have more engines in the game. He said use your PR to your advantage, public relations - PR. They then get into Florida and he said it was brutal and the most hideous thing he has seen before. He said, dont buy that car until January, because you might need it for AdWords. If you go in brute force, you must have your back up plan. Then Greg gets into spam reporting on the forums, he said he never reported anyone in any way because that is where he learned it (Google Cache).

Q: How do you displace a competitor from the rankings?
A: No real answer. Just out rank them was offered.

Greg doesnt compare his spam to email spam or adware, spyware. "We" typically, SEM for us is targeted, unlike other spam. Government has some time to regulate SERPs and spam. AdWare is malicious and is different. Blog spamming is an http request, very little damage, less then a bot crawling your site.

Q: What do you think about redirect hi-jacking?
A: Greg said it is sad to me that it works. He said it is probably the biggest flaw in the search engines today. Daron said "Do onto others as you want them to do onto you." What you can try to do to prevent it, is redirect the redirect.

Greg Boser is the moderator and he introduced the panel. The first man up was Jim Stobb from PositionTech. He discusses what paid inclusion is: (1) new sites are usually indexed within 72 hours (2) existing pages are recrawled every 48 hours. Two programs (1) Direct Submit (pay per page, flat 12 month fee and plus a CPC and (2) Trusted Feed (pay per click, and designed for sites with 200 or more URLs). Trusted feed key features are; (1) its trusted because they are from a feed and are reviewed by the engines (2) ultimate control over the site content and updated 48 hours and can do geo-targeting (3) click through reporting. Trusted feeds show up in natural results and they are not for everyone. Large sites/commercial sites are good for trusted feeds, so are database driven sites, CMS sites, and flash/multimedia sites. He showed an example of staples.com's search terms and clicks for its trusted feed program (hope he got approval). When producing the feed they require a destination URL, product name, manufacturer, product description, part #, tracking URL are all important to capture. He showed a screen capture of a staples product and highlighted the data on the page that is being requested in the trusted feed. I wonder if people understand that feeds are normally in csv or xml format and that a bot doesn't try to determine what criteria is used to figure out what the page is talking about. I think the point is getting across, most people do not look puzzled. He then discusses the value of choosing PositionTech to manage your trusted feeds. Then he goes into how they use the data dump and the crawling process, then showed a sample final feed format.

Next up was Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Greg introduces him as the first search rep to post at a forum under his real name. Tim's task is to support the much debated Overture PFI programs. He reasons that this gives the web-master a support line when it comes to ranking issues. The next slide is named "Why do we need a feed program?" Less then 1% of the index is PFI content, this is a premium service. He said the more Yahoo crawls the less unique content they find (maybe they are looking in the wrong place - just kidding). This program, he admits, is somewhat controversial, but has lead to a dialog between the SEO and the engines. PFI offers higher redundancy - ensures your content is always in the index even if your site goes down. Then discusses Site Match and Site Match Xchange (which is for larger sites). Pros include content inclusion across all networks, frequent refresh, quality review and interaction with the engines and detailed reporting (ROI stuff). Tim clarifies that PFI doesn't mean that your rankings will improve (or at least that is how I interpreted it).

Joe Laratro from MoreVisibility.com was next up, he said he was from Florida (good to know). He defined PFI and XML feeds - PFI is a pull of data and XML trusted feed is a push of data (good explanation to start off with). He then goes over the guidelines; subject to editorial review, subject to strict algorithms, typical requirements (title < 70 characters, description < 180, keywords < 3 to 5, body text), category CPC card rates, ability to use 3 feed types (RLD, category and product). He goes over the benefits of using trusted feeds; all covered earlier. Pitfalls to avoid; duplicate content, keyword stuffing, artificial geo targeting, repetitive titles, keyword duplication on the titles (search engine optimization, search engine placement and search engine marketing - you repeated search engine three times), and product not found pages. Candidates for PFU; 20+ pages, dynamic sites, not crawlable sites, sites not in the index, and and if your willing to guarantee to be index.

Dave Roth from Razorfish, a pretty big Web design company and very well known. Dave will discuss how they manage and optimize these feeds. They call themselves the largest SEM in the industry now. They target all types of companies, no niches here. They deal with a lot of e-commerce site customers, and they are lacking optimization. One of the biggest problems the clients have is that there is not enough data to make an informed decision, which results in negative ROI. You need to know price, margins, profitability targets and track by all types of levels. They apply forecasting models to client's data to see what they should expect in ROI on a very detailed levels. He then goes through the pyramid affect of keywords targets and conversion based on that (generic keywords have higher volume but less conversions, specific keywords have lower volume but higher conversions). He shows a sample excel document with the formulas used to analyze a feed and forecasting model. He said, don't try this at home - basically call Razorfish to do this (or an other firm).

Some Q & A:

Q: Can you put price in the feed?
A: In the description yes, not in the title. And they don't recommend including part # in title (that seems weird to me), they explain that it often brings back weird results.

Q: The banning issue...Greg Boser asked this.
A: Tim said, Yahoo will check to make sure your content is not banned. They are very focused on comprehensiveness. They feel its important to rank relevant sites first in the SERPs. PositionTech said if you submit it will enable Yahoo to re-review the site. Most of the time these penalties can be corrected and put back in Yahoo.

Tim said, most of the WMW stickies he gets about being banned are actually not the site being banned, but other issues such as SEO design issues.

Q: Greg then brings up click fraud. He said he knows Google disallows certain proxies for AdSense ads but doesn't apply that disallow list to AdWords. In addition, he knows, based on 'click frauding' his own stuff that the companies do not find and refund all fraud.
A: Razorfish says you probably have to rely on 3rd party tools to track it and then bring that data to Overture, Google, etc.
Tim said they do and are working on preventing click-fraud. As always, its a constant battle between spammers and the content providers. Its an area they need to focus on.

Roger Dooley from CompStar was up first, his forum name is "rogerd". He first goes into the question about building the software yourself or using a pre-built software application. The first question you need to ask is "is your business really that different?" When using pre-built software, especially open source, look at proven install counts, look at feedback and requests by the current user base, and most of these have features that you will need down the road - things you did not anticipate. So open source is good for small budgets. But once you have it, you will probably need to make modifications. Software designers rarely design for search engines or what they have done is no longer important (i.e. meta tags). Encouraging signs that new open source applications are SEO compliant.

He then goes on the topic of adding features through outsourcing and goes through some of the points you should look at when selecting a company. Well developed freelance marketplaces, reputation aids, escrow protects buyer and coder, prepare specs carefully, communicate clearly and often, graphics & design can be outsourced too and check that wish list. I personally hate outsourcing any development tasks, I have in the past and it stinks. I only now outsource design projects.

He said its important to remember that there is life beyond search engines. The other PR, press releases. He is a personal fan of online press centers (company background, bios, past press releases, past press coverage, unique products or services, story ideas, mailing lists and contact info. Make sure to make your site media friendly (not just search engine friendly). He then discusses some of the types of "viral marketing" (I love this topic), such as email a friend features, add to favorites, most popular, print this page features. I have some good examples (as some of you do) on this topic. If you add a comment to this entry, it will remind me to discuss it after the conference. Some entries at this blog where I discussed Viral Marketing include; Subservient Chicken - Viral Marketing by Burger King and Orkut Viral Marketing Success & Down Briefly at 8:25AM (EST) (the last one I was mistaken, sorry). But I have my own case study which I can share with you later. He then went into the branding component of a Web site, consistency is critical! He said it all starts with your logo, your logo can define your business. This will increase conversions on your site - so don't take it lightly.

Next up was Ted Ulle from Mews Group, his slide started off with the "Complete Package". Make your workflow support your priorities for your site. Every Web site has a goal, and make sure its simple and seamless for the end user. He says, "Simplicity is the Discipline". He said the first thing you do after you know your goal is your Web Strategy (SEO), then your back end choices, then built metrics, the info architecture, then menu and nav, then graphic design and then copy and calls to action. He takes a shot that if you start with design, then it will blow up on you. He said its critical to document all key decisions as you go. (A) The Web strategy and SEO part: Mine your market's languages through forums, email and keyword neighborhoods (this is to find out what real people use to describe your business). Then research the market's concerns in addition to the languages. Build a process and not a product. (B) Back end choices: You have choices, the technology is your bedrock. (c) Build in your metrics, already know the business goals, define the key metrics, look at data that you can action on, too many metrics will blur the picture, the logs are not enough normally. (C) Information Architecture - just learn something about the field and he listed a few threads at WMW. (D) Menu and NAv: Tell a story in your menu, single words or longer phrases, too many choices on your menu is like no choices (his rule is no more then 7, the sweet spot is 5). (E) Graphic Design comes now and not before (he hits on designers now again - humor). It must obey all the decisions you made up to this point, the design must respect the medium (i.e. html). (F) Write Copy and Call To Actions. No time to be timid, a good copy writer is worth every penny he says.

So where do "seems" come from? "Showing off" works against your business. Graphic designers try to show off, or server side spaghetti, client side feature overkill, print mindset, IT folks is writing copy (for auto-responders you see it often). Keep your balance between technology and aesthetics - the whole balance is marketing. He said accidents will happen and showed some funny images of accidents - he also listed some examples of problems that occur.

Next up was Jen Weeks from Future Now, Inc. Persuasion Architecture is the methodology they use. Many people call her to maximize conversions, concerned about rankings and maximize ROI on keywords. Her case study is RAD-Direct who wanted a redesign to increase conversions. Persuasion Architecture; persona, keyword research, and uncovery, wire-framing, story-boarding prototyping and development. She went through what each stage means. "Uncovery" is defining the potential traffic. Wire-framing, if you don't know, is the detailing of what pages you need. Story-boarding is the copy development stage. She then went though the specific issues with the old site and what they did to improve it, hard to explain - sorry. One thing of interest is that she calls "bounce rates" -> "drop off rates", just interested me.

Then Brett discussed a bit about what he put into WebmasterWorld. His first concern was compatibility with all browsers. He tested every browser, ran every validators and he said it pays off now because it runs on phones now. He said he can run his whole site from his iPaq. In addition, he said he wants to make sure its easy to use. He tries to keep the content way at the top, as high as possible. He said his pages are very simple looking, just like Google. He said he doesn't really have a logo, he said the most important branding point on the site is the URL (keep the user on the site as long as possible). He said the Google Cache might be the most important thing they did, because it keeps users there. With WMW they have a rule where first time posters, the mods try to welcome and engage them right away. He said he was the first forum to allow for private messaging, so they come back to check their "sticky mail".

Brett started off explaining how the conference began in pubs and bars and now it has grown to this (looks to me to be about 1,000 attendees here). He thanked Matthew for all his support, he then thanked Todd (oilman) who handled all the exhibitors (over 30 exhibitors) - he also attended all of the WMW conference (maybe the only), Erika - his finance - getting married in three weeks, thanked Neal Mashall the main webmaster at WMW, he thanked the sponsors (infosearch (also known as trafficlogic), Google, Yahoo, and GenieKnows.com), he also thanked some of the press that showed up Wall Street Journal, NY Times and many others (he even mentioned my name - thanks), he thanked the moderators of the sessions. He said he will ship the ppt slides on a CD to all attendees, will give away an IPOD to one person. He then highlighted some of the upcoming sessions. He said also that Google will explain the new AdWord Professional program tomorrow at lunch. And Yahoo will be having a party tomorrow night. He then discussed about the new Webmaster Radio show which is launching today at WebmasterRadio.FM. He explained what "Super Sessions" and why there are no other sessions at the same time besides for the super sessions. When will the next WMW conference take place? Probably after April 15th, place is still unknown for sure.

FYI - Got WiFi working, a bit slow, but working. Also a bit expensive at $25 per day.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be attending the WebmasterWorld's Conference. I hope to be able to provide the conference coverage I have in the past for this conference, I actually plan on it, so stay tuned. The conference begins tomorrow morning and ends Thursday afternoon. It looks like the wi-fi access is not to be found, so that means I hope there will be a press/speaker room with net access or I will have to run back to my room to post the session information - I did it before, but the trips between the session rooms and the hotel can get tiring.

People are of course discussing this conference at the WebmasterWorld Community Center and also at Search Engine Watch Forums.