WebmasterWorld 2005 Las Vegas Archives

The WebmasterWorld Pub Conference 10 went very well, I am skipping out on the "pub" portion of the "pub con" but here is a run down of my coverage. Oh, don't forget, SES Chicago in about two weeks, we will have triple coverage of that event.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

• Keynote: Robert X. Cringely
  
• Intro to PPC
  
• Microsites and Niche Marketing
  
• Affiliate Site Marketing and Optimization
  
• Super Session : Blogging for Fun and Profit (kinda)

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

• Coffee Talk with Senior Google Engineer : Matt Cutts
  
• Paid Link Advertising
  
• Organic Site Reviews (see related)
  
• Contextual Advertising Program Issues
  
• Super Session : Search Engines and Webmasters

Final session of this PubCon 10, nicknamed the Search Engine Smack Down, modded up by Brett Tabke.

Rahul Lahiri, Vice President of Search Product Management AskJeeves. He explains a lot of things have not changes in his presentation. Your site should not have any content, just pictures and links are bad for you (kidding). He goes over the basics, I won't type them here. Don't get me wrong, I love Ask. I just have the coverage already here from New Orleans. If your site is banned, they don't revisit it unless you ask them - so if your banned, make sure to let them know you fixed the site.

Eytan Seidman, Program Manager, MSN Search Microsoft Corp. was next up. They made relevancy improvements, added new "answers", msn search api, virtual earth, msn adcenter, simple feed search (feed: and hasfeed:) and desktop search for enterprises. 301 redirects, they use destination url is the canonical url. 302 redirects, source url is the canonical url. Meta refreshes are the same as 302s. MSN Search API launched in September, they allow 10,000 queries per day and they give 50 results per query. Relevance: He brought up Google and MSN. He plugged in 5402 East Lincoln Drive was entered into both engines. Showed how Google had a PDF as the first result. Everyone laughs at this. Next epana particelli; and Google's results are supplemental. Then he taxi seattle; he compares the local results on both. Calories in vodka is the next search, and shows how MSN gives an answer. He makes fun of all the engines again. He mentions the Search Engine Relevancy Challenge I did, nice of him (even though MSN is in last place).

Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management Yahoo! Search. I hear he has some new slides, we will see. Find, USe, Share and Expand --- covered in last session, see above. They are also focused on site owners, not just search users. They added local info into the SERPs when applicable, and also have navigational links (quick links). He then shows site explorer, which many are disappointed in. He site explorer counts are much more accurate (the right count he said is at site explorer). They may redirect the site command at Yahoo! search to this site explorer tool, when it comes out of beta. He then shows My Web 2.0 beta. He shows flickr also, then Y!Q, then Mindset.

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Google Inc. New today; Google Analytics, Google Sitemaps, better communication, update jagger, cracking down on spam, improved infrastructure, Google desktop search 2.0, maps api, local, remove result, blog search, reader, talk, and google base. He shows off Analytics. Then Google Sitemaps, blogged on it earlier. He talks about Jagger's time line and reaction a bit - nothing crazy. Stay clear of thousands of subdomains on your site he said (about.com?).

Battery almost dead, any interesting Q&A, I will post later.

I asked Matt about About.com and subdomains, he said as long as if that content is not dynamically generated by spam tools, then your ok. It has to be unique content, he said.

Kim Malone, Online Sales & Operations, AdSense Google first up. She goes over the "internet ecosystem" I think I covered this before. Ok, anything new I will write, but for now, read this or this for past coverage from Google on this topic. They use click-feedback to deliver high performing ads, and they test this on Google.com and not our sites. 21 languages, and 100+ countries for AdSense. She goes over site targeting, allowing advertisers to target specific sites, cpm bidding method and creative ad formats. Site targeting and keyword targeting maximizes revenue. Why is site targeting good for the ecosystem? Because more competition leads to more relevant, interesting ads. Because advertisers can meet more of their marketing objectives and reach customers in all stages of buying cycle. Because publishers can make more money. She then goes into link units. Then AdSense for search...all covered in the past.

Jay Sears, Vice President, Business Development and Publisher Relations ContextWeb. Past coverage at the New Orleans show. Since that show, financing of $9 million series B funding, products contextual targeted graphical ads and publisher white label product offering; distribution includes 50 of the top 200 web publishers and updated its publisher TOS. Eliminated bad debt deduction and minimum requirements.

Doug Perlson, Chief Operating Officer Kanoodle. Again, see the past show. He said all the slides are the same. :) I like the guy, seems very honest. Recent launch was BrightAds Cookies, ill cover that. BrightAds Cookies... They know if you are on a site on their network about XYZ and then where you went elsewhere on the network. So they allow publishers to set cookies on their pages, and when a user goes to a different site on the network, they can serve up an ad and share in the revenue. Its not competitive with other programs, because you are not serving up the ads - just stringing along user data to Kanoodle for the other networks to use. Pretty cool but a bit scary.

Yaron Galai, Co-Founder and SVP, Product Management Quigo, Inc. Same deal with this one, check out past coverage if you like. AdSonar. Like AdBright they allow you to click on a link on the ad to add your own ad. However, it is white labeled - so no one knows who runs it. They now offer pagematch and sectionmatch (bidding on sections of a page).

Will Johnson, Vice President & General Manager Yahoo! Publisher Network Online from the SES Show in San Jose. Its a beta program to extend our relationships with a broader set of quality pubs,. Provides opps for pubs to build content, acquire traffic and make revenue. YPN wants to give publishers the maximum control. They just launched RSS ads. They do both contextual matching through crawling your site, as well as ad categories. They have about 2000 publishers. Adding direct deposit in Q1 2006. Moving towards broader release in early 2006. Maybe outside of beta???

I am sitting in this session simply because I thought the panel would be exciting. The panel includes; Jake Ballie, Barry Lloyd, Bruce Clay, Tim Mayer and Matt Cutts. They are basically reviewing audience submitted Web sites. I am waiting for something funny. So far Jake introduced the panelists, and when he introduced Matt Cutts, he said he was from Ask Jeeves.

Honestly, its painful watching people give over the names of their sites. Then see all the spam issues with them, and have Matt and Tim write them down for de-listing later. Painful.

I'll keep you guys posted... :)

Session link, this puppy is moded by Todd Friesen.

Patrick Gavin, President Text Link Ads, Inc. starts off. What is link buying? He explains the difference between static html links and links like AdWords links. Direct Traffic + Link Popularity + Branding + Spidering. Many variables the influence value and cost of paid links. The theme of the site makes a difference, you want on topic links, you want links that will send traffic through clicks. Traffic is an other influencer, you can look at alexa (even though its not a great measurement) a better indication is a media kit. How many pages will your link be on, that is an other traffic metric that is important, more links more chances you'll get traffic. But on a link pop standspoint, at the more the better? Incoming links to the page, you can look at PageRank and the linkdomain yahoo search command. Make sure to look at the outbound links, if the outbounds are spammy, then stay away. The location of the link on the page is a factor, the higher the more visible, also within the body of the content in the middle of the page works well. Spiderablity of the link is very important, check the cache of the page to ensure the search engine sees the link. Anchor text is critical. The overall strategy is to be as natural as possible. In the end its about evaluation, measure traffic and search rankings.

Todd Mailicoat, VP of Sales and Marketing for WeBuildPages with his Link Ninjas slides. The link buying process; becoming a link ninja; train, hunt, examine, refine, audit, pruchase, examine. Train; develop a link training process, know what you are looking for and hot to get them (authorities, resources, directories, recips, ROS, edu and gov, media links, press release, article bios, rss.blogs). One way links from authority site is best, and blog spam is the worst. Hunt; weapons (directory.google.com, back link anaylsis tools, link harvester, hub finder, search combo tool, SEO links, yahoo link domain, search status ff plugin, etc.), know where to start, brokerages, friends, allies, resourceful thinking, and creative queries. Refine; competitor quality backlink list, establish prospective sites, and buy best links first. Audit; cache date, age of site, inbound links to page, etc. Purchase or barter, buy, borrow, beg, bater. re-example, watch your rankings over 90 days, etc.

Philip Kaplan, Co-founder, CEO. AdBrite. He doesn't sell static links. Everything they do is so uncontroversal until Monday. He brings up a site holyshnikes and keeps clicking around the site and it doesnt work. So he then goes to adbrite.com to show it. The intermission ad, is a new product they launched. a full page ad, that brings up the actual landing page of the site within the other site, as an intermission ad. It costs a penny a user. He said its a little crazy and not for everyone. This example is on screensavers.com.

Roger Montti, Founder and Owner martinibuster.com is last up. Paid links enters mainstream, alternative traffic sources, lead gen and no direct link - no problem. Finding sites to buy links from; online magazines. Sometimes you main need to acquire the entire domain name to get the domain. Download link sleuth, attack your favorite directory, look for country code top level domains.

Brett introduces the day and this session.

This session is where we pound Matt Cutts with questions, or not... we will see.

He explained that in 99 or so, he posted a thread telling the search engines to come talk to us (the webmaster). So Matt Cutts came into the forums and posted, it shocked the forum. It has completely changed the industry. Matt is known for writing the adult content filter at Google. Then he calls Matt up. He was drinking a red bull at 9am in the morning.

Q: How do you like working for Google?
A: It is a lot of fun, it is still a lot of fun.

Q: What is your employee number?
A: Within the first 100.

Q: How does Google feel about SEOs, SEMs, Webmasters?
A: At times there is an element of conflict. In Matt's mind, its best to work with Webmasters. He thinks as SEO and spam as two different things. Spam is outside of their guidelines and they don't like that. Anyone who is whitehat or tweaking keywords or making a site navigation more crawlable are good. SEO is not spam, its only when you go against guidelines, when it is spam. There is a large online publisher that wasn't doing well in Google. They changed the robot.txt file that said, no search engines can crawl the site. That is why. Changing your robot.txt file is not spam.

Q: Can we get a tag that lands all search engines except for Google? There are so many exceptions that can be put in.
A: The wonderful thing about SEO is that you can test so many things. He thinks that if you put in disallow * all, then add allow GoogleBot, GoogleBot may (he thinks) crawl - it may look for the more specific rule. He allows wildcards as well.

Q: 301/302 redirect issues, sandbox, supplemental results...Where are we with all that?
A: We are better off today, we are making progress. We brought 20 engineers to New Orleans and we got your feedback. Same at SES Google Dance. We are working towards a framework where we are indexing the destination. He compares the Yahoo slides (ill try to bring them up). They are testing this at a datacenter, not sure which IP its at.

Q: Is that is what with Jagger?
A: No, that is something else.

Q: Does the sandbox exist?
A: Matt said here comes the audience part? How many feel there is a sandbox? How many feel there is no such thing as a sandbox? SEOs normally split down the line. There are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn't apply to all industries. He knows it works to keep some spam out.

Q: DMOZ; are you guys going to take it over?
A: Matt doesn't want to predict the future and he is just an engineer. If he had to predict, he would think no.

Q: Duplicate content, stolen content. What can we do to protect ourselves?
A: We watch what people are saying about this. They have projects on the way to determine who first wrote this text, its not a 100% done, but its on the radar.

Q: Blogs...Its the internet version of the vast wasteland. Is Google doing anything specific to clean up this index?
A: There is a lot of stuff we are looking at. Splogs are bad. The Web spam team has been working with Blogger, and have made lots of progress with that. Volume of spam decreased.

Q: Do you guys ever do hand tweaks of the results?
A: For the most part, we let the algorithm do all the work. However, Google News uses editor trust. PageRank uses hyperlinks by humans. Google does not have the ability to hand boost any site, or hand boost any pagerank. They can penalize sites if they are spam, manually. Legal reasons and spam reasons for penalizing sites (also viruses). They try not to differentiate large sites versus small sites, they remove both. Our goal is to return the most relevant results.

Q: Microsoft introduces Smart Tags and it was a loud outcry. Google came out with AutoLink which is essentially the same.
A: He brings up an example of how it is useful. They did not want to do Smart Tags, but it was not perceived from the public as that. So it backfired, in a sense. He gave examples of had to make it better.

Q: What is the day like you at the plex? Has it changes?
A: A typical day is that he goes on thinking he will work on something and always works on something else. Either there is a fire or something new comes out and he needs to look into it. Since August of last year, he still goes in and works with top notch people. He still works with nice people, but the perception has changed from the outside. People think Google is going to be the next Microsoft. Its almost like they want Google to become less personal. So what can they do? They give more products, i.e. Google Analytics.

Q: When are you going to let Larry and Sergy out of their box?
A: They are still working hard. He will pass it on.

Q: Google is in the process of building the largest data storage out there. Where do you see all this going?
A: Matt wouldnt work at a company that he feels would use the data to abuse users or their trust. If you talk to the chief data officer at Yahoo, they collect 10 terabytes of data every day. Google knows a lot less about the specific user then Yahoo or MSN. Google does its very best to protect user privacy. He says the broad mission statement. If you want to take relevancy to the next level you need to know more about the user, not at the specific user level but on a more general level. They want to return the most relevant results, period. The nice thing is, if you have people sign in, you can give more personalized results (i.e. remove result).

Q: New features; gmail, maps, etc. didnt all work with all alternative browsers? Has there been a change of Google policy on that?
A: Matt doesn't know. Matt uses ancient versions of Netscape which helps him spot more spam and CSS. You want to support every platform as much as you can.

Q: Google launching Google base, what is it all about?
A: Its a searchable data store. You can specify fields in this data source and search them. You should be able to upload any data you want to make it searchable (like recipes and so on). You can upload via RSS, CSV, etc.

Q: There is an embargo being releases soon, can you spill the beans?
A: He said come to the Smack Down session, its something for the Webmaster. He said he wants to make it easier for SEOs and harder for spammers.

Audience Questions:
Q: Aging delay? Is there?
A: Its like the sandbox Q. Just because a patent application is released, it doesnt mean they are using it.

Q: CSS positioning? How does it affect ranking.
A: Good question, I don't know. If your doing an include, it probably wont matter either way. In his mind, positioning text at top or bottom, is over rated. But try it.

Q: Do you use the toolbar to figure out what to crawl and how often?
A: Nope. Its all pretty much based on PageRank.

UPDATE: Does the toolbar changes the priority of something to be crawled? No -- I messed up on this Q & A

Q: Can you talk about Google Analytics and costs with AdWords not using it?
A: Matt is trying it out on his blog. It used to be Urchin software. They made it free. Its free until you get 5 million page views per month, then you need to sign up with AdWords but you do not have to spend money with AdWords. He is not sure if there are issues outside of the US.

Q: Google Analytics, can you confirm that Google will be using that data in the search engine?
A: He cant confirm, but he can deny it. :) Matt as a Web spam team member, does not have access to this data. He wont even ask for it. If it becomes a concern, he will post it on his blog. People will always be concerned, so don't use it.

Q: Do you guys feel affiliate sites with good content is spam?
A: He said that they think of spam as what is the value add of this site. He explained how some sites make unique tools that make a value add. Just slapping up content from a feed, doesnt do it. Reviews, etc. need it.

Q: How do you think going public change Google. And how has the quadrupling of the stock changed Matt's next worth?
A: He said it has quadrupled his net worth. :) There are people who had fun and who have left the company. But not many. Now, whenever he finds a book he likes, he buys it at amazon, he doesn't think about it. His day to day life hasnt changes much. But as Google as a whole, he doesn't think it hurt Google as a whole.

Q: Let's go back to text links.
A: Best links are earned, not sold or traded. You may not get what you pay for. He said, if someone is selling text links, they should give you a free test trial to make sure it works. They have both manual and algorithmic approaches to detect paid links. He said Google.com gets emails asking to trade links. The guy who came up with the pixel homepage thing, that was creative.

I was unable to cover the Super Session : Blogging for Fun and Profit. Here is a link to my powerpoint as a pdf (5.8MB).

If you have coverage of this session, please let me know. I hope it went well with mine, I loved the other presentations.

Thanks.

The affiliate session moderated by Cat Seda.

Adam Jewell, Search Engine Marketing Specialist NetPlus Marketing Inc. is first up. How can affiliates adapt to the changing marketplace; pay attention to seasonal and lifestyle trends, find new merchants to hot markets, promote niche merchants, bid on low volume high conversion keywords, promote expensive products, get the merchant to grant permission to use their TM, build your own site with unique landing pages. Affiliate keyword and creative strategies; buy tens of thousands of very specific keywords, use exact match extensively, link to product level pages, buy every misspelling you can, only bid what you can afford to pay. AdWord Creative Development Strategy; create singular and plural keyword groups, group keywords by length, develop a short call to action, mass produce ads that read as if a human wrote it. What should merchants consider when making policies? Prohibit bids on brand terms with direct links to your site, consider allowing bids on brand terms with affiliate landing pages, restrict amount affiliates can bid on brand terms, consider allowing direct links for all other keywords, consider opening up TM use to trusted affiliates. What's the bottom line? AdWords affiliates can still mint money in some areas, find unique ways to promote expensive products, exploit every possible special, discount or coupon, merchants can generate significant incremental sales, not every industry is suited for this type of affiliate marketing, affiliates should start building sites with unique content and landing pages for long term growth, and ppc straight to the merchant site helps to identify keywords to target before investing time and effort in building sites.

John Coronella, OnlineMarketer is a full time affiliate marketer. The freedom of affiliate marketing; you have no brand to protect, URL's cost $7, banned = penalized it doesnt matter, so have some fun. His best programs and sites: I-will-never-tell-anyone.com etc.... He is private about the sites he owns. Find killer affiliate programs; CJ is the best place to start because they list merchant by pay out, Overture - hunt for bids and volume, who is buying text links, spam in your email inbox, what is rumored to pay big - usually does. It's all about quality content that adds value to the user, naturally collected backlinks, no sneaky redirects, and avoid keyword abuse. He then made a joke and said, if you look at the slide (previous line I used) and you will see its cloaked and scraped from someone elses presentation --- funny. Volume, keyword volume, # of sites, content volume. Risk versus reward; he shows a chart with low risk versus high risk, and site life time. Lifespan of a spammy site; yahoo average 3 to 6 months, MSN TBA, and Google 2 years ago 3 months, 1 year ago 3 weeks, and now 3 days (nice job Matt). Affiliate content; self/employee/contractor generated, user generated (ratings/reviews/ etc), merchant generated (datafeeds, apis, etc.), summarize other works, auto generated. Datafeeds and duplicate content; datafeeds sites do not last long. Cloaking; increase your conversions 1000%, can decrease the life of your site accordingly, many types (javascript, css, ip, referer, useragent). Link building; where do you get your links? Text Link Ads (paid), friends, directory listings, blog spam. Build on your success; try the same product from different merchants, multiple networks with same merchant, ask for higher payout, aff managers have a wealth of information.

Elisabeth Archambault, Freelance Affiliate Marketer Buckworks next up. Advantages of affiliate marketing over e-commerce direct. You can get paid for clicks, leads, and sales. Promote other people's stuff or sell your own? Page design, site design, graphics, copywriting, seo and so on overlap with non affiliate stuff. You do not need to know everything, any skill you can find, someone out there has it. Ecommerce requires inventory management, physical plants, order fulfillment, staff management, customer service, credit card fraud, and higher cash flow needed. E-commerce is tangible, more hassles but often and often has higher margins. Affiliates can work anywhere, anytime, no boss and no limits - freedom. Its easier to diversify and expand, freedom and flexibility, not tied to a specific location. Affiliates have narrower margins, income fluctuations, bands dont understand affiliates and none else understand them either. How does content serve an affiliate; content is not a king, its your best servant. Content is key to long term web presence. Content is real info for real people, entertainment works too, quality does count. Content helps with link development, more spontaneous links, more offline merchants and more spider food. Good content does get stolen, watch for theft, and learn the DMCA process. How to monetize; banners (dont overdue it), text links are more effective, contextual ad programs, and link to product/promo pages. You need to understand how pagerank flows, what spiders like, accessible design and semantic markup. Relevancy is key, thousands of merchants have lots of choices, promote by product and demographics. It all boils down to targeting.

The micro and niche site session moderated by Ted Ulle, Partner The MEWS Group.

Chris Raimondi (I sat with him for a while at SES San Jose, I think - nice guy). Why do I come to pubcon? To get ideas, get concepts and combine the two. Today Iw ill attempt to help you find your own ideas and concepts. Two notions equals and idea. He uses Froogle's recent searches, as an idea pool for himself. There are still plenty of good ideas out there. In the space of a few months an enterprising british guy came up with a $1 per pixel, MillionDollarHomePage, idea. He has is to $585,000 today for a one page Web site. He uses research papers. The anatomy of a large scale hypertextual web search engine and pagerank citation rankings (to figure out Google). People dont read them because its hard to find, etc. but the main reason they dont read it because they see these crazy equations. Don't let it scare you, ignore it and read around it. (I personally do). He figured out Google's algorithm based on those papers, he showed a 3 by 4 celled worksheet with the answer you all want. :) Once you read the paper, you come up with an understanding on how Google "worked." It changed in 2002 or so. PageRank is extremely important, title, anchor text and position (is? was, still?). Advantages of Research papers. Unbiased information, usually given background and other references, based on science and testing, can be applied to other areas with some thoughts and further testing. Three ways to make money; work hard, find a unique angle or idea and exploit inefficiencies (he said he isn't in to the first one). Unique angle or idea; something very few people are using, interesting approach, style or method. Be the first to try a new product or service. Exploit inefficiencies in the marketplace; when people or companies tinker with supply and demand (ebay and products like pokemon (limited supply, limited distribution, no change in price, limit is sales) also (with PPC bidding systems that are not efficiently prices)). What to research; wording, niche, emotions, media, target market. How to find papers; Google Scholar, filetype:pdf in Google.com. He then goes through many examples of how it all works with research papers and ideas.

George Kepnick, Project Manager Geosign to talk about niche marketing. Horology; science of measuring time. The art of making time pieces. Used by collectors/buyers. Four people are advertising on horology. Why bother with a niche market? little competition, large gain on higher conversions and more leads. Content niche tips; create a site around your interests, choose a topic of your writers interest and let them become an expert, have numerous authors write about a subject they are familiar with, discussion forums. Ecommerce niche tips; research your main competitors, research the super store, fellow trends (sunday ads, amazon top selling). Agency niche tips; geo vertical = city x industry, vertical specialization = root term x expansion. Page creation; make it look official, gain the users trust using (images, descriptive text, and targeted copy). Get contact info quickly, lead capture forms should be short and sweet, the less info required the higher the conversion. Getting it out there; PPC is quick, precise, inexpensive, and measurable also use SEO. Keyword expansion and other tips; heavily research competitors; spider the entire site for meta tags, scrap keywords using in house tools or googspy.com and use google news alerts for your competitors site/s.

Ted Ulle, Partner The MEWS Group to talk about this topic. Direct mail: The wonderful world of long copy. Important to measure, run split run tests, longer letters gave better results. Marketing's Golden Rule; write to your best prospect, write "tight" and not "wide". Target Audience, know these people well, write to the peak of the bell curve, get more conversions from the side. Benefits from viral marketing; happens best when you convert your best target, great example is corey rudl, study mailloop.com (aimed at experienced the emailer, names frustrations and promises a fix). Copy Writing for the long page; writing s the essential skill - not length itself, have something engaging to say. Build a flow in your writing; watch the connections between paragraphs, between sentences, end with a question will help with this, Or hint at what is coming next. You want to stop the skimming and encourage the reading. Write some poetry, he recommends... Rhythms and Suggestion the Erickson Handshake, first avoid distractions to gain focus, build a rhythm and then subtly break the expected flow (use the near-cliche to establish rhythm and ease). Write for the screen; respectable font size, thin text blocks, fixed content width, etc. Read "Strunk and White" The Elements of ...". Things to avoid; doubling both the verb and it's objective, making the reader crarzy any information in their head, too much punctuation

Jeff Libert, CEO DirectoryCompany.com is last up to give a domainer's view. Take away for today; there is a market inefficiencies in domain prices now. The revenue they are using to value their domain is the revenue share from PPC company. They are not valuing the full cost of that click. I.e. they are not getting the full amount the advertiser is paying, only a share of it. The most valuable traffic you can get is direct typed in traffic, he says. He said that is without building a Web site, you can get more out of your site with a site. Get those domain names now, he said.

Moderated by Jake Ballie, he explains this session is very basic overview of PPC. Should be fun. :)

First up is Cat Seda of Seda Communication. She did a search for las vegas wedding and showed where they show up in Yahoo. She explains you pay per click and they start as low as $0.10 and up to $100. MSN can go up to $999.99. Most engines work, where the highest bid gets the highest rank, outside of Google and MSN. She explains where Yahoo and Google and so on are syndicated. PPC is easy, its instant and cost-effective. Make sure to use ROI tracking tools, she names a few examples. The big three in PPC are Google, Yahoo and MSN. She said the rest of the engines, do not matter - she means it. $5 activation fees across the board. The number one bid does not get the number one position on Google and MSN. Google uses max bid x CTR and MSN uses max bid x CTR x more. Character count for MSN and Google are 25 for title and 40 for Yahoo. She then goes over Kanoodle, Business.com and SuperPages.com as the vertical players in this market. Kanoodle is contexttarget and behaviortarget. Business.com is PPC ads and directory listings. Super pages Free and enhanced business listings. 5 Simple steps for PPC. (1) choose your keywords, (2) write ad copy, (3) assign landing pages, (4)set up campaigns correctly, (5) and track your results. She shows one client, Fire Mountain Gems - she explains keyword groups and landing pages. You organize your campaigns by keyword groups. Keyword research tools (overture, Google, WordTracker) are critical in your keyword research process. Keyword Match Types; new advertisers should get as specific as possible (standard / exact match) and quickly goes through the others. How much is PPC going to cost me? The engines give you tools to figure it out. The engines give you monthly estimates. She then says, do not start in the number one position. What not to do with PPC? (1) Do not set it and forget it. (2) Dont forget to change your ads when the offer is no longer valid. (3) Dont change your destination URLs without changing them in your PPC campaigns. (4) Dont accidently delete the PPC tracking code from your Web pages. (5) Dont yell "click fraud" until you confirm your team is not clicking on your ads.

Joe Agliozzo from BetterPPC to talk about copy testing. A key to succeed with PPC is to have the right ad with right keywords, also to have multiple ads and to test to find the right combinations of keywords. Why test? 86% chance of improving performance, performance increase from 30-50% on average, possible gains of up to 400%, with Google, decreased CPC as CTR rises. He explains you have only a couple seconds to persuade the customer to click through to your site. He shows dynamic keyword insertion, {KeyWord: default text} rest of ad (that is how to do it in Google, the keyword would be bolded). "Credibility" Words are important, such as Guaranteed, authorized reseller, large selection, lowest price (be careful with guidelines from google). Be different, think different, he shows the think different Apple posters. Overall, he is stressing that you test. He then goes over a case study for Team America Movie. They tested a bunch of different concepts. He shows some more case studies, one for a book he wanted to promote, which doubled the ad performance (CTR). He explains that you can increase your ad rank by using keyword groups, instead of lumping them all together. When you are testing widely different keyword copy, be creative. Credit card industry is very competitive. They tried low API, build credit history and for emergency reasons, you need a CC. They tried these different messages. The results were interesting, which I didnt fully get. They made ads like, Need credit for pizza and books (to target that niche) and it worked. Test keywords, credibility words, keyword segmentation, various combos, and interrupters. Most importantly do your testing. BetterPPC has software that automates this, the sales pitch which is cool.

Brad Geddes is last up, aka eWisper at WebmasterWorld. Bridging the gap, search query to conversion. When you are talking about ad copy, you are talking about screen real estate - so we have three to five seconds to grab attention. You must know why you are advertising before you write the copy. Branding, Conversion, Total visitors. USP Unique Selling Point. What is your angle. Whats unique about your product? Often these are similar for all products, but you need to make a difference. Features & Benefits; feature is a component or function of your product or service. A benefit is something your product will do for the consumer. User identification is important, you cant identify with everyone! You must leverage your knowledge of the user. Based on search query you may be able to figure out who the user is, also based on geo-location and so on. Call to Action - Direct your visitors where they should go. Copywriting tips; emphasize benefits, write for your target audience, satisfy your audience. Standard Google Ad Copy (user benefit, product feature, call to action, display url). Effective landing pages; extension of ad copy, seamless transition from ad to landing page, they should go to a specific landing page (give it to them now). Converting landing pages, remove barriers, products with 1 click to add to cart, easy nav to related items, easy to find shipping price/ delivery time, detailed product info within 1 click. Measuring conversions; measure everything, ROI, CPC, Conversion rate and so on. Advanced measurements; high CTR & low conversions versus low CTR and high conversions, etc. Measure profit per impression. Ads bridge user query to landing page. Landing pages are bridge from page view to conversions. Ads and landing pages should work together.

Brett Tabke started off by talking about the last conference in New Orleans and wishes all the best. He then goes over what is going on today at the conference.

Robert Cringely is now up. He has been an internet user since April on 1977. He was working in Lebanon as a reporter. He then moved to California and joined a computer club and met Steve W. and Steve Jobs. And they offered him a job at Apple computer. He was offered stock and not much money. He then got fired and worked at Stanford. He then went back to Apple and worked on Lisa. He worked on the GUI of Lisa and invented the trash can icon. He said he was working on a thing and hit one key and it was all gone. He went to the help desk and asked for the backup. There was no backup tape. So he determined that his role was to save users from themselves. So he worked on the trash can, you put something in the trash and then you must empty the trash (two step process now). He makes jokes about the recycle bin, people laugh. He said he first built a little fly that flew around the trash can when it was full. Only issue, if you turned off the fly, the computer was twice as fast. Then they fired him again and he went back to Stanford. He then came back to Apple in 1984. He worked on file sharing solutions at Apple, named Apple Link. They sold the Apple Link code to AOL. He built into that, the ability to send email and then change your mind (like trash can). Then they fired him again, because they checked the mail before he was able to take it back. :) He then worked for his assistant who started Cisco. They went to Stanford and asked if they can sell these routers. The issue was, Sun was in the same building. He then goes into this story on how Sun and Cisco came up with selling these things and who to sell them to. They went to IBM to have them build these routers for them, but they turned the offer down. Sun and Cisco used the same motherboard. They waited 18 months to make a decision on how to sell these things. They started financing the company with credit cards. He then worked with Excite, he helped them find the first customer and first venture capitalist. He was able to my a ton of them for peanuts, but didn't. He now writes a lot for PBS and runs NerdTV.

He writes a weekly column on PBS since April 1997. He kept track of his accuracy rate, he is 85% accurate, which is pretty good. Often we get so caught up about today and tomorrow, we forget about the more long term. He said vagueness is the key to this, no one laughed (I did, internally). He salutes the Webmaster because the environments around us have a major impact on us.

AOL is kinda in limbo, we do not know if its for sale, if its not - what is going on with the company. He said, he doesn't even think that AOL knows. He feels it will be broken up, between its ISP and its portal and its search service. Lots of companies are talking to AOL. They have lost momentum, because they are thinking of bailing.

Microsoft has recently made a play for Web services for Windows Live and Office Live. He said no one really understands what they are. He said they are place-marks, for MIcrosoft to say that we have these areas, so dont mess with us there. He believes they leak these things on purpose. He said M$ makes their money from Windows and Office, they know it. These products exist to exist and they exist to cost money (they need to show expenses). xBox cost them $4 billion, and its a major success. They have $2.5 billion in revenue and more in cost. This way they can get rid of these businesses, so they can be in a position to, one day, make money. That is how you run a monopoly. They will always think of Office and Windows. They are not a leader, they are a deep pocketed and quick follower.

So AOL and Microsoft to not affect the Webmaster space.

Google and Yahoo we need to worry about. Yahoo has a more content orientation today then Google. They are both very dynamic organizations, run by strong minded people. Yahoo is more media minded now, then Google. But all of this is in flux. Where is this going? Yahoo and Google will handle it in different ways.

What is Google doing? They sold $4 billion in stock. What do they need the money for? Because they can do it, so they do it? He believes they have something to spend it on. The question is what? Dark fiber rumor? He said he thinks Google is going to smoke the dark fiber. Is it really happening? They bought 30 acres in Oregon. He said, Google is screwing with us and they love it. They introduced Gmail, 1GB and now 2GB of storage. Gmail has 3 million users. Yahoo at that time at 150 million users. Who will that hurt more? It costs so much more for Yahoo to match that. That is the "Google distributive mojo." Google will take your business and turn your business upside down. Google makes the competition react to this. Microsoft didn't do anything, waited a few months and added some more space and knew it was enough. Yahoo made the mistake of matching, where Microsoft did not make that mistake. Microsoft labeled Yahoo as a media company, so Yahoo is not a competitor. Which is a mistake. Microsoft only wants to go after one competitor at a time, which is Google.

Google wants to become the internet. How they want to do this, is not clear. But it will be very different. It will be geeky, open source, web services. The nature of the distributive cluster is different from the way the others handle the hardware. It is different and an advantage over the competitors. He believes the dark fiber think. ISPs are not doing well. Google can buy up all these companies for almost nothing. He feels Google will come to control this network. When they extend their clustering technology into this, they will embrace more and more what it is to "be the internet". Microsoft positioned itself to be your friend. Google is not as sophisticated about this, they are too busy trying to impress you with how big their brains are. Google has a slight image problem. Google is going to take this infrastructure approach and in doing so offer to provide a playing field for you to function. He feels Google will win. Google will win. He said, Microsoft will lose. Yahoo will transform itself into something different then Google or Microsoft. Yahoo will win too. But Google will define the internet. The Google internet will just work. He said he sees this happening in the next two years, tops.

He then explains that his NerdTV costs him $2,000 per week. About $0.02 per download. How does he make money from it? He has no income and a cost of $2,000 per week. The more successful you are, the more bankrupt you can get. Problems with video podcast, people subscribe to more then they watch. So effectively he can triple his bandwidth expense and not increase his audience. These are the new problems with these media companies - how do we make money? He asks the audience for ideas.

Today's sessions covered with hopefully be;

(1) Keynote with Robert x. Cringely
(2) Intro Into PPC
(3) Micosites and Niche Marketing
(4) Yahoo YPN Lunch
(5) Affiliate Site Marketing and Optimization
(6) Blogging for Fun & Profit (should be interesting, covering a session where I am on the panel).

That is what you can expect today.

Ready or not, live coverage of the WebmasterWorld Pub Con Vegas 2005 will be taking place. I will attend sessions that interest me, if there are no requests made in the comments area of this blog entry. So feel free to make requests.

One thing, I will be speaking at the super session tomorrow, so I will try to post my slides and also cover the other speakers if possible.

Hope to see you there. :)

Are you going to PubCon next week? If so, you may not want to miss this opportunity to post a question for Matt Cutts to be answered live at the Coffee Talk with Senior Google Engineer : Matt Cutts.

The forum thread at WebmasterWorld is named Questions for Matt Cutts?

P.S. I'll be the first speaker up at Tuesday's super session on Super Session : Blogging for Fun and Profit. Oh and expect full coverage of the pubcon sessions, by me personally. I may even try to cover the session I am speaking at, if my typing isnt too loud. :)

Looks like I will be giving a little chat at the WebmasterWorld Pub Con in Las Vegas this November. I agreed to chat on the "Blogging for Fun and Profit" session, see the session I covered in New Orleans last PubCon. Now, I have no agenda at all but it will be with a fun group of people including; Jeremy Zawodny, Andy Beal, Garrett Rooney, Chris Pirillio. It turns out to be the one of two "Super Sessions" on the session grid. A super session is a session given during a time slot, with no other sessions. Brett set this up, because he feels the super sessions are sessions everyone (95% of attendees) want to see anyway, so he only has one session at that time, as opposed to the three sessions at one time. The other super session is "Search Engines and Webmasters" with Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN on the panel.

As I said, I have no agenda at all. I was thinking that I chat about how I run this blog. How I spot good threads... Why I started the blog... How I have adapted my writing style (if you call it that) for you guys... How I handled my first advertiser... Show you what software I use for all of this and maybe post in real time...

Any other ideas? Comment here or email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Thank you.

Continue reading "Ideas for "Blogging for Fun and Profit" Presentation?"

For all of you who have been eagerly awaiting the announcement of the upcoming WebmasterWorld Pub Conference, its live now.

Brett switched the old home of the conference page from webmasterworld.com/conference/ to a sweet looking domain name, http://www.pubcon.com/. Discussion about the domain name is at WebmasterWorld Community Forum. The sessions and speaker list has not been posted yet, expect it by September 1st.

When: November 15-17, 2005
Where: Las Vegas, Nevada
Hotel: Renaissance Las Vegas
Keynote: Robert X Cringely

More information to come, and stay up to date on what is going on at the WebmasterWorld Conference Blog.

Also make sure to check out our past coverage of the WebmasterWorld conferences for WebmasterWorld 2004 Las Vegas & WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans.