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December 27, 2007
Ultimate Search Conference: Day 4
Day 4: Thursday, December 27, 2007
Keynotes for the Day
Keynote with Jim Lanzone – SES San Jose
Closing Keynote with Matt Mullenweg -- BlogWorld
Blogs, Vlogs & Automobiles Track
Top Takeaways
- If you only buy one accessory, buy a good tripod. People were not made to hold camcorders stable.
- The goal of producing YouTube videos is to get them back to your Web site to view ads and explore your other content.
- If you want videos to rank you have to surround them with HTML.
- There is an absolutely compelling reason for search marketers to start podcasting – Universal Search.
- Eighty-two percent of local search users make contact after viewing a business local advertisement.
Getting in the Video Game – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Brett Tabke, Robin Liss and Michael McDonald
Video Search Engine Optimization – SES San Jose
Speakers: Sapna Satagopan (moderator) Gregory Markel, Jeremy Clem, Sherwood Stranieri and Stephan Baker
Podcasts & Audio Search Optimization – SES San Jose
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Daron Babin, Amanda Watlington and Rick Klau
Local & Mobile Search – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Gregory Markel, Alex Portal, Dan Perry, Brian Gil, and Eswar Priyadarshan
A-List Blogger Training
Top Takeaways
- Building relationships is about people, not selling.
- Use your company blog to keep fires on your own site. Don’t allow them to break out all over the Web.
- Not everyone should blog. The blog isn’t going to change your culture. It will just expose you.
- Blogs are great conversation tools because they give you the illusion of an individual conversation.
- Corporations aren’t blogging because of the fear of being criticized and the fear of losing control, but when you have your own blog, you control it.
Building Relationships with Other Bloggers -- BlogWorld
Speakers: March Harty and Brian Solis
Corporate & CEO Blogging -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Paula Berg, John Earnhardt, Pete Johnson, Jennifer Cisney, and Brian Lusk
How to Use Digg to Assplode Your Blog -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Jeremy Wright, Tris Hussey, Aaron Brazell
Creating Conversation With Your Readers -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Alex Hillman and Jake McKee
SEO Survival Tips Track
Top Takeaways
- To maintain a positive working relationship between yourself and a client, set business goals up front.
- Clients are coming to you looking for trust, performance, strategy, thoughtful leadership, and technology and tools.
- The best way to learn about SEO is to absorb all the knowledge you can from books and SEO blogs, and then apply it to an actual site.
- For work from home businesses, coworking is the next evolution of the work place. It’s like a café that doesn’t kick you out.
- When your hobby because your job, you’ll have to work to find new ways to unwind.
How to Make Friends & Influence Clients – SES Chicago 2006
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Ed Kim, Scott Orth, and Rob Murray
So You Want To Be A SEM? – SES San Jose
Speakers: Misty Locke (moderator), Dan Perry, Pradeep Chopra, Jessica Bowman, David Wallace and Michael Gray
SEM Pricing Models – SES San Jose
Speakers: Misty Locke (moderator), Rand Fishkin, Lance Loveday, Ken Jurina, and Mike Murray
Survival Tips for Network Bloggers -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Leora Zellman and Mary Jo Manzanares
Lisa’s Top Picks Track
Top Takeaways
- Go through your content looking for the holes. Then write content to fill them.
- As a blogger, you write for one person and one person only – Yourself.
- Don’t try and control the blogosphere. It won’t work and you’ll just build resentment.
- In blogging, popularity is about consistency and being brave enough to plow forward.
- The Chinese version of Google uses a guided search format since there are so many characters in the Chinese language.
Don’t Fake It: The Secret to Writing Kickass Content -- WordCamp
Speakers: Lorelle VanFossen
Trench Warfare – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Rohit Bhargava (moderator), Karl Long, Jeremiah Owyang, Kent Nichols and Steve Hall
One Billion Searchers – SES San Jose
Speakers: Mike Grehan (moderator), Stephen Noton and Bill Hunt
The Future of New Media Publishing Tools -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Anil Dash and Leo Laporte
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/27/07 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Best Of Search Cons 2007, SEM Events
December 26, 2007
Ultimate Search Conference: Day 3
Day 3: Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Keynotes for the Day
Morning Keynote with Marissa Mayer – SES San Jose
Keynote: Steve Berkowitz – SES New York
Social Media 2.0 Track
Top Takeaways
- Universal Search changes the way users scan from an F shape to an E shape. Users notice images before text so they scan where the picture is, then the text next to it to see if it is relevant.
- Personalized search results increase the amount of time users spend on the SERP, the fixations and the percentage of clicks.
- With personalization, SEO becomes more about studying things like search patterns, current tasks, Web history and social patterns than keywords.
- Create something viral that draws people in but then have something else that keeps them there.
- If you’re not experimenting with link bait, you’re already behind.
Universal and Personalized Search: This Changes Everything – SES San Jose
Speakers: Jake Baillie (moderator), Gordon Hotchkiss, Bill Slawski, and Greg Boser
Personalization, User Data and Search – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Chris Sherman (moderator), Jonathan Mendez, Richard Zwicky, Dave Davies, Gord Hotchkiss, Tim Mayer and Sepandar Kamvar
Monetizing Social Media Traffic – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Rand Fishkin (moderator), Vanessa Fox, Michael Gray, Alexander Barbara, and Laura Fitton
Linkbaiting: 96 Strategies – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Jake Baillie (moderator), Todd Malicoat, Andy Hagans, and Bill Hartzer
Advanced SEO Track
TopTakeaways
- Empower brand evangelists and give them the resources to do the link bait and viral stuff for you.
- Paid links that pass PageRank violate Google’s guidelines and must be disclosed.
- “Google’s campaign is about creating fear and uncertainty and doubt. They’re trying to convince you that by buying or selling paid links you are breaking the law or being unethical. Google is not the government.” – Michael Gray
- It’s not enough to be on the first page when it’s only the first result that is above the fold. In today’s world, content is more than copy. There are tools and other media to worry about.
- If someone comes to your site after an “allinanchor” query, they’re probably not a legit user. It’s your competition coming to check up on you.
Better Ways – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Alex Bennert, Greg Boser, Jim Boykin, Christine Churchill, Todd Friesen, Cameron Olthuis and Aaron Wall
Are Paid Links Evil? – SES San Jose
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderating), Michael Gray, Matt Cutts, Todd Malicoat, Greg Boser, Todd Friesen and Andy Baio
Give It Up! – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Matt Cutts, Jennifer Slegg, Mike Grehan, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Todd Friesen, Greg Boser, Bruce Clay, Stephan Spencer, Shari Thurow and Jill Whalen
Competitive Intelligence – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Jake Baillie, Andy Beal and Larry Mersman
Advanced PPC Track
Top Takeaways
- Day parting allows search marketers to target ads based on their customers' actual buying cycle and habits.
- Google’s Website Optimizer is a good tool for testing new traffic sources.
- The search marketers who are getting the most out of their pay per click campaigns are utilizing syndication, geo-targeting, keyword match type and day parting.
- Be cautious of dumping all your long tail phrases into one bucket. By doing so you’ll lose the detail of your info by putting them into arbitrary groups.
- The reason behavioral targeting is so effective is because prior actions are key. What a consumer does is far more important than where they live or who they are.
Pump Up Your Paid Search—SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderator), Brad Geddes, Ben Perry, and Matt Van Wagner
Advanced Paid Search Techniques – SES New York
Speakers: Jessie Stricchiola (moderator), Jon Kelly, Sharon Crost and Eduardo Llach
Paid Search & Tricky Issues – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderator), Bob Carilli, Mona Elesseily, and Michael Sack
Post Search Ads – SES San Jose
Speakers: Misty Locke (moderator), Kevin Lee, Dave Carberry, Michael Benedek and Richard Frankel
SEO/SEM Issues Track
Top Takeaways
- If you don’t set client expectations early on, the client will manufacture their own that are unreasonable, which just propagates the idea that SEOs are unreasonable.
- Distinguishing between click fraud and badly performing ad is tough. The data looks very similar and requires human judgment to examine what’s going on.
- Use statistical analysis to look at multiple data points for your clicks. Don’t rely on ROI.
- Bid management tools have a place in SEM, however, you can’t just automate your campaign and forget it. It’s not just the consumer path. It’s also the marketing intent.
- If you’re going to buy links, stay off the radar and don’t piss off Google.
SEO Reputation Problem – SES San Jose
Speakers: Jeffrey K. Rohrs (moderator), Shari Thurow, Kristopher B. Jones, Jennifer Laycock, Jonathan Hochman, and Kathleen Fealy
Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues – SES New York
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderator), Shuman Ghosemajumder, Tom Cuthbert, Reggie Davis and John Marshall
Debate: Is Bid Management Dead – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderator), Robert Ashby, Peter Hershberg, Misty Locke, and Chris Zaharias
Link Buying – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, John Lessnau, and Aaron Wall.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/26/07 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Best Of Search Cons 2007, SEM Events
December 25, 2007
Ultimate Search Conference: Day 2
Day 2: Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Keynotes for the Day
Keynote: Satya Nadella – SMX Seattle
Roundtable: Content is King! (Again?) – Ad:Tech San Francisco
SEO-friendly Content & Design Track
Top Takeaways
- Good site design is invisible because it’s seamless and just “works”. Bad design is noticeable because it’s clunky, makes people squint and is altogether frustrating.
- Don’t get your keywords from your CEO or from a spreadsheet, get them from your audience.
- Search engine friendly design does not mean that the sites have to be ugly.
- Good content isn’t mysterious. It’s the regular pages on your site.
- Teach your writers about social media and encourage them to become knowledgeable of social media sites and their demographics when writing towards them.
Stay Invisible With Good Design -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Liz Danzico
SEO Design & Organic Structure – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Todd Friesen (moderator), Mark Jackson, Lyndsay Walker, Paul Bruemmer, Alan K'necht
Effective Action-based Copywriting – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Brian Clark, Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen
Content Creation: Cranking It Out – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Ted Ulle, Robin Liss and Rae Hoffman
Understanding Analytics Track
Top Takeaways
- Search marketers must look beyond the last click or the last ad seen in order to find a richer story.
- Track robot and spider activity to find out how many days it will take for your pages to get indexed.
- Don’t use redirects to hide tracking URLs. They may help make your URLs look pretty for users, but they wipe out your ability to track.
- Don’t assume anything.
- 82 percent say that Web analytics is poorly understood and/or not used in their organization.
Measurement & Metrics – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Rick Bruner (moderator), Young-Bean Song, Chad Parizman, Darren Stoll, and John Squire
Web Analytics & Measuring Success – SES New York
Speakers: Allan Dick (moderator), Laura Thieme, and Stacy Williams
Issues in Analytics – SES San Jose
Speakers: Alex Bennert (moderator), Eric Enge, John Marshall, Avinash Kaushik, and Jonah Stein
Analytics Tracking Performance: Beyond the Page View -- PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Joe Laratro (moderator), John Marshall, and Scott Orth
Intermediate SEO Track
Top Takeaways
- Search Information Marketing uses search data and intelligence to improve marketing. It entails using users' own words to get a better understanding of who they are, what they’re looking for, and what’s important to them.
- Spam is about the intent and the extent to which you use a technique.
- Test a small number of variations: Rule of thumb is less than 100 conversions per combination.
- Apply different weight to different actions. Downloading a white paper is more valuable than looking at a banner. Identify when the action took place. When you convert, those drivers are calculated in different ways.
- With personalization, the engines are trying to better match a page to users’ interests. You must give them enough information to determine the topic of your page.
Putting Search Into The Marketing MixM – SES New York
Speakers: Gord Hotchkiss (moderator), Bill Mungovan, Curtis Dueck, and Misty Locke
Penalty Box Summit – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Peter Linsley, Aaswath Raman, Tim Mayer, and Matt Cutts
Multivariate Testing & Conversion Tweaking – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Gillian Muessig (moderator), Tom Leung, Glenn Alsup, Philippe Lang and Rand Fishkin
Personalized Search: Fear or Not – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Matt Cutts, Michael Gray, Gord Hotchkiss, and Tim Mayer
Paid Search Boot Camp Track
Top Takeaways
- Know what your company is doing at all times. You don’t want to get into a situation where you’re outbidding yourself. There is no SEM’s Dumbest award.
- The lifecycle of an API is only 6-9 months at most. If you’re going to adopt an API program, there is a cost involved.
- Evaluate second tier PPC engines based on a cost/benefit analysis.
- Consistent reporting is key to successful PPC management and optimization.
- Track only what is important to you and forget the rest.
Benchmarking a PPC Campaign – SES New York
Speakers: Alan Dick (moderator), Cam Balzer, Mike Moran, and Martin Laetsch
Search APIs – SES San Jose
Speakers: Anne Kennedy (moderator), David Flesh, Dan Boberg, Julienne Thompson Hood and Jon Diorio
Beyond the Majors – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeff Rohrs (moderator), Scott Greenberg, Matthew Greitzer, T.J. Kelly, Anton E. Konikoff, and Tom Paraboschi
Contextual Ad Programs – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Brian Axe, Jay Sears, and Tony Wills
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/25/07 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Best Of Search Cons 2007, SEM Events
December 24, 2007
Ultimate Search Conference: Day 1
Welcome to Day 1 of the Ultimate Search Conference! Below you'll find your agenda for the day. So, go grab a bagel and some coffee and jump in. You have a long day of sessions and great speakers ahead. Enjoy!
Day 1: Monday, December 24, 2007
Keynotes for the Day:
You&A with Matt Cutts – SMX Seattle
Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan – SES NY
SEO for N00bs
Top Takeaways
- Make it easy for the search engines to find, spider and index your content by getting rid of any unnecessary roadblocks.
- Good directories are human-edited, offer static links, aged and have high quality backlinks. Avoid all others.
- Use content to build links. When you produce interesting content, people will naturally want to link to you.
- There is no penalty for duplicate content, it’s a filter.
- Help protect your content from scrapers by using your brand name, absolute links, and hosting images locally. Take legal action when necessary.
SEO Advanced Q&A – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Bruce Clay (moderator), Aaron D’Souza, and Sandor Marik
Linking Strategies – SES NY
Speakers: Justilien Gaspard, Greg Boser, and Jim Boykin
Duplicate Content Issues Duplicate Content Issues – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Aaron Shear (moderator), Rahul Lahiri, Derrick Wheeler, Evan Roseman, and Priyank Garg
Converting Visitors into Buyers – SES London
Speakers: Mike Sack (moderator), Sarah Bubb, Alex Bennert, and Brian Clifton
PPC Basics Track
Top Takeaways
- The 4 Pillars of PPC: Positioning, Test & Learn, Standards, and Integration.
- Determine what your metrics are before you start and decide if you have the knowledge level to optimize PPC campaigns inhouse.
- Quality Score is a way for search engines to rank ads based on a variety of factors. There are two Scores—one that affects your minimum bid and one that affects your rank.
- It’s users who ultimately define the quality of an ad, not the search engines.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment with the look and feel of your ads in order to make them more “clickable” and increase conversions.
Pay Per Click Strategies – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Dana Todd (moderator), Daina Middleton and Mike Solomon.
Meet the Search Ad Networks – SES NY
Speakers: Rebecca Lieb (moderator), Doug Stotland, Stewart Easterby, John Kannapell, James Speer, and Brian Schmidt
Ads in a Quality Score World - SES NY
Speakers: Gord Hotchkiss (moderator), Joshua Stylman, Andrew Goodman, and Jonathan Mendez
Optimizing your Site for Contextual Ads – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Matt Daimler, Jaan Janes, and Aaron Wall
Social Media Overview Track
Top Takeaways
- Social search includes things like shared bookmarks, tagging engines, collaborative directories, personalized verticals, social Q&A sites, etc.
- The future of search is the integration of social knowledge to guide you to the right community.
- Social search gives site owners a chance to open up the deep pages of their site and expose the stuff that’s not getting attention.
- Link bait helps your site rank by giving it global authority, topical popularity, trust metrics, temporal influence, PageRank, anchor test, and topical relevance.
- Viral is an effect, not a cause. It’s about others evangelizing your content.
Social Search Overview – SES NY
Speakers: Chris Sherman (moderator), Grant Ryan, Tomi Poutanen, Apostolos Gerasoulis and Seth Godin
Linkbaiting & Viral Success – SES NY
Speakers: Rand Fishkin, Jennifer Laycock, Chris Boggs, and Cameron Olthuis
Viral & Word of Mouth – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Daniel Stein (moderator), Jamie Byrne, Benjamin Palmer, Gaurav Misra, and Sean Carver
User Generated Content in Search – SES San Jose
Speakers: Rebecca Lieb (moderator), Andrew Goodman, Matt McGee, and Lee Odden
Branding 101 Track
Top Takeaways
- We’re moving from a world of interruption to an environment of engagement. We have a consumer that is no longer ‘I’ shaped but “T” shaped, they’re broad and deep.
- Users gravitate towards companies with strong communities because it allows them to have a deeper interaction with that company.
- You no longer own your brand. Your brand is a conversation.
- Buzz monitoring involves finding the discussion areas to capture, understand, and report the products, issues, and opinions that consumers share between and among themselves.
- Anything negative out there is a risk. Don’t think that just because it's not ranking yet doesn't mean that it won't.
Is Advertising Really The Solution? – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Pete Blackshawn (moderator), Scott Wilder, Beth Thomas-Kim, Paul Woolmington, and Tip Rose
Word
of Mouth Marketing – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Brett Tabke (moderator), Louise Rijk, and Greg Hartnett
Buzz Monitoring – SES San Jose
Speakers: Chris Sherman (moderator), Rob Key, Andy Beal, and Jonathan Ashton
Brand Management – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Joe Laratro (moderator), Jessica L Bowman, Lauren Vaccarello, and Matt Tuens
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/24/07 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Best Of Search Cons 2007
December 21, 2007
Friday Recap
Happy, Friday, happy people!
The BC office is abuzz with excitement today. Why? Because Santa came and visited and there were presents to open and delicious treats to enjoy! I knew you guys wouldn’t believe that Santa took time out of his busy schedule to visit us, so I made sure I got some pictures. [Excuse me? Who got pictures? --Susan] Here are a couple. You can see the rest on the Bruce Clay, Inc. Flickr Page.
Barry Schwartz was first to inform me that it was snowing over at Ask. Snow! I heart snow.
NBC5 in Dallas/Fort Worth compiled a list of The Most Annoying Christmas Songs of All Time. Typically I enjoy these sorts of things very much, but what crazy person added Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree to that list? Blasphemy? Not only is that a superb Christmas song, it’s also the best part of Home Alone.
While we’re talking about lists, eMomsAtHome created a list of the 10 Most Influential Dads in the Blogosphere, including familiar faces like Jeremy Schoemaker, Darren Rowse and Scoble. Best of all, the list comes with pictures of babies! Yay for babies.
Another list: 11 “Don’t-Tell-The-Wife” Secrets Men Keep. Number 9 is my favorite.
A big thanks to the always dreamy Pat Sexton who brought the Fish ‘n Flush to my attention. Now when I go to conferences, I’ll just leave the bathroom door open and the kitties will have food for a week!
The BBC reported on a giant rat found in a remote area of New Guinea. According to the article, Uber Rat is five times the size of rats commonly found in most New York apartment buildings. Gross.
WebProNews continued its quest for a Pulitzer with an expose on the methods people use to end relationships. Fifteen percent of people say they’ve had a relationship ended via text message. I suppose that’s better than 4 percent who’ve had their partner mysteriously disappear. People are freaks.
Worst Idea Ever: Having the cops pull people over good drivers and award them with Starbucks gift cards. Also, isn’t that illegal?
Dear Macy’s, people shop online to avoid standing in line and dealing with people. Please get your site fixed. Kthx. Love, the Internets.
Joe Peacock had me in giggles with his story about espresso beans. [I wouldn't have survived school without chocolate covered espresso beans. --Susan]
Here are some pics of Nintendo NES-influenced weddings. My all time favorite has to be the one with the guy wearing the power glove. That’s just an amazing amount of awesome right there. [I like the ninja attack. Everything is better with ninjas. --Susan]
Yoda pizza is extra delicious, but not as delicious as a bacon flowchart.
Things I Learned From Boing Boing This Week:
- Bad things happen when a man loses his glasses at the car wash.
- If the stress of the holidays is becoming too much, why not try laughter yoga?
- No! Don’t put the baby in the blender. Bad. Stop it!
- A heartwarming photo of a crocodile carrying around a severed arm in his mouth.
Programming Note: We’ll be closing down the offices for the next week due to the holidays approaching. Make sure you keep an eye on the blog next week for our Ultimate Search Conference series. It’s going to be a blast! And if you need me, too bad. I’ll be in New York. Huzzah!
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/21/07 at 4:43 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Fun Stuff
The Cat Post
[Hi. If you’re looking for anything at all search engine optimization-related, you may want to skip this one. There’s no SEO here. Just cats. Bruce, you may also want to look away.]
Susan promised me, and I promised you, that today there would be a cat post. I’ll try and contain my excitement but I’ve been waiting two years for this. Huzzah! [Wait! I didn't say they could have their own post! How did we get to one post when I said one picture? I blame Matt Cutts for this. --Susan] Quiet. We’re talking about my cats.
Here, I want you to meet my babies.
This is Swat.
She’s the older of my kitties and is what most would affectionately call “a lap cat”. Like an infant, Swat cries at you until you pick her up and shower her with love and affection. Careful, though. When Swat gets overly excited, she’ll try to bite your face. Chins are her favorite.
This is my Jack Jack.
Jack is my sweet, sweet baby who escapes through windows, darts out doors, gets trapped in the fridge and breaks things in his spare time. Now that he’s learned how to open up cabinets, nothing in the apartment is safe. Don’t tell Swat, but Jack and I have secret morning cuddle sessions where his purrs reach jackhammer levels. I would never admit to having a “favorite”, but if I did, it’d be him. Isn’t that right, Jack Jack?
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/21/07 at 11:21 AM | Comments (5)
See more entries in Fun Stuff
Best Conference Ever
Today we’re announcing the best conference of the year. It’s Bruce Clay Inc.’s Ultimate Search Conference and it’s happening next week! [It might just be the greatest con of the year. --Susan]
Don’t worry, for the Ultimate Search Conference 2007, you won’t have to take time off work, shell out money for airfare or even sell your unborn child for a room at the Wynn. You just have to tune into the Bruce Clay blog all next week.
We’ve attended and liveblogged an amazing number of conferences this year, covering everything under the blogging and Internet marketing umbrella. With all these conferences under our belt, we thought it’d be fun to take a look back at the best Internet marketing conference sessions of 2007 and compile our favorites into our own virtual Ultimate Search Conference. So, that’s what we did.
On Monday, December 24, the Ultimate Search Conference will kick off with four tracks, 16 sessions and 2 keynotes each day. The fun will last four days (Friday is the traditional “networking” part with all the alcohol; feel free to get your drink on at home) and will include sessions pulled from the SES, SMX, PubCon, BlogWorld and WordCamp conference series. Only the best sessions with the best speakers have made it into our virtual show. Each morning, we’ll be posting a daily agenda to help you navigate through that day’s scheduled panels. We’ve also included Top Track Takeaways in with each agenda to help you get the most out of your virtual conference experience.
If you want a sneak peak at what sessions we’ll be offering, check out the full at-a-glance agenda. Pretty sexy, eh?
Damn straight! And make sure to check out the Lisa’s Top Picks track taking place on Thursday. Shockingly, that’s a list of some of my favorite sessions from the entire year.
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Date/Time |
SEO for N00bs |
PPC Basics |
Social Media Overview |
Branding 101 |
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Day 1: Monday, December 24, 2007 |
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9:00am – 9:45am |
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10:00am-11:00am |
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11:00am-12:00pm |
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12:00-1:30pm |
Lunch |
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1:30pm-2:30pm |
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2:30pm-3:30pm |
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3:30pm-4:00pm |
Afternoon Break |
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4:00pm-5pm |
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Date/Time |
SEO Design |
Understanding Analytics |
Intermediate SEO |
Paid Search Bootcamp |
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Day 2: Tuesday, December 25, 2007 |
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9:00am – 9:45am |
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10:00am-11:00am |
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11:00am-12:00pm |
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12:00-1:30pm |
Lunch |
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1:30pm-2:30pm |
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2:30pm-3:30pm |
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3:30pm-4:00pm |
Afternoon Break |
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4:00pm-5pm |
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Date/Time |
Social Media 2.0 |
Advanced SEO |
Advanced PPC |
SEO/SEM Issues |
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Day 3: Wednesday, December 26, 2007 |
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9:00am – 9:45am |
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10:00am-11:00am |
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11:00am-12:00pm |
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12:00-1:30pm |
Lunch |
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1:30pm-2:30pm |
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2:30pm-3:30pm |
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3:30pm-4:00pm |
Afternoon Break |
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4:00pm-5pm |
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Date/Time |
Blogs, Vlogs & Automobiles |
A-List Blogger Training |
SEO Survival Tips |
Lisa’s Top Picks |
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Day 4: Thursday, December 27, 2007 |
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9:00am – 9:45am |
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10:00am-11:00am |
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11:00am-12:00pm |
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12:00-1:30pm |
Lunch |
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1:30pm-2:30pm |
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2:30pm-3:30pm |
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3:30pm-4:00pm |
Afternoon Break |
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4:00pm-5pm |
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Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/21/07 at 9:00 AM | Comments (5)
See more entries in Best Of Search Cons 2007, SEM Events
December 18, 2007
Do Your Customers Know You Exist?
Check out the pretty pie chart and you tell me if you were surprised.
That’s right, a recent NPD Group study found that 73 percent of the 600 Internet users surveyed had no idea that Google Docs or other Web-based office suites even existed.
See, that’s not good. Because, as really smart and experienced marketers will tell you, in order for people to buy or use your product, they need to actually know about it. I know; it’s a complicated principle but try hard to wrap your head around it if you can.
I’ve read some commentary on the study and I’m hearing a lot about how Web-based office suites need to come with bar codes and be packaged better if anyone is going to give Microsoft a run for their money. That’s all well and good, but truthfully, I’m not at all interested in that. I was more intrigued by this from a brand perspective. I mean, how bad do you and your promotional abilities have to suck for 73 percent of users not even to have heard of you? Granted, the study was based off a very small sampling of Web users and may not be 100 percent representative of the current market, but still. That’s an alarming number.
One of the reasons mainstream users don’t know about Google Docs is because Google hasn’t done much to promote it. They have a habit of throwing stuff out there to see if it sticks, and then if it shows signs of life, they’ll go back, clean it up and make a more public launch. If you’re Google, you can afford to do that. If you’re anyone other than Google, you can’t.
I think it’s important for businesses to realize that regardless of what product or service you’re trying to launch, it’s your audience who will decide whether or not it will be successful. You can give it all the bells and whistles and upgrades in the world. If it doesn’t meet their needs and get them excited, you’re not going to go anywhere. It’s your job as a marketer to get them excited. And I think that’s a process that starts long before the product is even released.
Research Your Audience: Your first step in all this is to research your audience. Know who they are, know what kinds of advertising they respond to, know where they hang out online, know what they’re doing offline, know what problems their facing. You should be able to identify how the product will work inside your brand and in your community.
Use Email Newsletters To Build Buzz: Yes, it’s very 1990s, but it works. If you’re getting ready to launch a new product, make sure your audience knows about it. Once the product is in stable development and there’s little chance of the whole thing being scratched, start talking to your customers about it and get the buzz going. Don’t wait until launch and then spring it on them. The earlier you bring them into the development process, the more connected they’ll feel to the product and your company, and the stronger brand evangelist they’ll be. If you’re creating an email newsletter, you may also find it beneficial to create separate newsletters for different customer types, which can be grouped by demographics or purchasing authority. If you have a company blog, you’ll obviously also want to build buzz there.
Target The Loudmouths: Who are the people most vocal about your industry and company? Identify them and make sure they know what you’re working on. This group doesn’t necessarily have to be the early adopters or biggest bloggers. If your company has a strong community around it, reach out to the community leaders. Advanced publicity and promotion can be the deciding factor in whether your product succeeds or fails.
Put Someone In Charge: If I’ve only learned one thing in my short working life, it’s that a leaderless project will fail. Someone has to be in charge of keeping everyone on task and getting things off the To-Do list and onto the Completed list. Dedicate a Web promotions person or team to reach out and get the conversation going. Sometimes this one little thing makes all the difference in the world.
Post Launch Email: You’ve researched, you’ve launched, you’ve promoted—but did anyone notice? Send a post-launch email to help gauge customer feedback and reactions. It will give you the opportunity to see what worked and what didn’t, while also allowing you to put out fires that may have sparked.
Unless you’re Google, you can’t afford to launch products and then realize after the fact that no one noticed. Be pro-active enough to take to take the steps necessary to get your product in your customers eyesight from the very beginning and keep it there.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/18/07 at 2:16 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Branding
December 14, 2007
Friday Recap
Hey, hey!
If you’re following my Twitter feed (and for that, I’m sorry), you may be aware that we had a slight crisis here this morning. Well, I just wanted to let you know that it has been handled. Eventually Susan and I were able to find someone to procure us with some donuts and things were okay again. It was pretty rough for a moment there, though. Susan was beside herself. Here, I shot a video of her. Scary. [That is the second time you've used that cat to make a joke about me. Get new material, Barone. --Susan] Yes, but it’s the first time I’ve used it on the blog. The last time it was on Twitter!
First off, some search engine optimization humor courtesy of Richard Ball. Head over to Richard’s site and check out the sweet Meta tags Burger King is touting for their Whopper Freakout campaign. Hot.
GSINC is running a fun charity contest. You vote for the five people you think were the most influential in search this year and the winner receives $500 to donate to the charity of their choosing. Finally, a vanity contest where everyone wins! Go vote and help spread the love.
Xfep.com compiled a list of 15 Amazing Women in Blogging. The list includes faces like Gina Trapani, Dooce, Lorelle VanFossen, Liz Strauss, Wendy Piersall, and many more. Check it out.
I’m not sure why this sent me into giggles, but Dave Rohrer felt the need to rant this week about grounding children and how today’s youth will someday regret the mischievous photos and videos they’re uploading onto the Internet. Wow. I never realize how old and cranky Dave was. :)
Here’s some important information for the SEO men and Rae Hoffman to enjoy: A list of where you can go to watch NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL games online.
Singing and dancing dimpled 7-year-olds are supposed to be cute, right? So then why is little Anthony terrifying? [Make him stop winking at me! --Susan]
As if surgery wasn’t scary enough, the Consumerist tell us that 1,500 patients have surgical objects accidentally left inside them every year. Fifteen hundred!
Nathan Weinberg opened up his feed reader and found my biggest nightmare. Luckily, it was only a glitch. Otherwise, OMG, feed overload!
I know Matt McGee thinks user-generated content is the best thing since sliced bread for small businesses, but what happens when you allow users to submit reviews and they use that area to write love sonnets about the Bic pen?
Airport security told a nice German man that he couldn’t bring his liter of vodka on the plane with him. What did he do? Oh yeah, he drank it. All of it. He was then rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Dude, just get a drink on the plane!
Priced at just $40, can you afford NOT to have the Pedal Exerciser under your desk? I don’t think so. Also, that reminds me: People, please take the time to double check your URLs to make sure you’re not misspelling important keywords. What’s a “pedla”?
In what is probably Wikipedia’s greatest accomplishment ever, a 16-year-old boy used the site to pass through enough security checkpoints to almost get him a personal meeting with President Bush. Unfortunately for him he ended up meeting with the local police instead. You win some, you lose some.
In case you were wondering, it is possible to have too many cats. They’re like giant cockroaches. Oh, and some people have really sick senses of humor. Sounds like something Susan would do. Poor, Tom.
To continue our cat theme, here are some signs you’re having a bad day.
Some lessons learned from watching Judge Judy. I wish I knew about that co-signing a lease thing last year. I’d be a few thousand dollars richer right now!
Things I Learned From Boing Boing This Week:
- Cops are helping thieves locate cars filled with holiday goodies for easier stealing. What? That’s totally what they’re doing.
- W00t is officially a word. [W00t! --Susan]
- A vibrating bracelet that alerts me of an incoming phone call? Now that’s jewelry I’d actually wear.
- And I thought my little brother had big ears.
- Crème-filled bananas? Why even bother with the banana? Just stuff your face into a vat of marshmallow already.
- The Atlantis space shuttle was attacked by a giant spider. Do not want!
Big Announcement: Matt, are you listening? Due to popular demand, next week’s end of the year Friday Recap will include photos of my Jack Jack and my Swat. It’s taken two years to finally break down Susan, but we’ve done it! Huzzah! [I said one photo, that's it. --Susan] No way! You said I could display both cats. You never said they had to share a photo.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/14/07 at 3:37 PM | Comments (5)
See more entries in Fun Stuff
December 13, 2007
Competitive Search Engine Optimization
One of the objectives we lay out in our SEO training course is that to be successful in search engine optimization and earn your rankings, you have to make yourself equal to, and then ultimately better than, your competition. I think is a pretty logical goal. If you want to rank higher than your competition and get your site seen by users, it makes sense that you would have to better than they are, right? Right!
But there’s a learning process involved. You can’t be better than your competition without knowing who they are, what they offer and what’s important to them. For that, you have to do a little digging.
I had the chance to attend last week’s Competitive Intelligence session during PubCon. Overall, the session was great and I came away with a lot of super information. However, you may remember that I was just a touch uncomfortable when one of the speakers began advocating techniques that would leave me unable to sleep for a week, things like staging phone calls to the significant others of your competition in order to find dirt. As a result, I thought I’d present my own list of angelic ways to keep tabs on your competition.
Go Digging for Holes!
What’s the easiest way to be better than your competition? Fill up all those holes they’re unknowingly leaving behind. And you don’t need to go stalking ex-employees to do that, that’s why the Internet was invented--so that one day we would have the Google. And Ask.com! Whatever your engine of choice (coughAskcough), go conduct some searches and set up news alerts for your competition. Read what people (customers, the media, niche bloggers, etc) are saying about them, what they’re up to and what the conversation around them is like.
Once you have your data, use it! For example, maybe consumers are complaining that your competition, a vintage clothes seller, doesn’t carry enough merchandise for the 20s. Or maybe someone left an angry review because there wasn’t a book on how to get the perfect ‘20s bob in the entire store (Sorry. Our ‘20s-themed holiday party is approaching.) Competitive intelligence is a great way to find new product or service, offering opportunities to win over customers your competition is neglecting.
Or maybe the conversation has nothing to do with products and everything to do with the complicated nature of your competition’s Web site or how their customer service department sucks. If that’s the case, highlight how easy to navigate your Web site is or include customer testimonials touting how helpful your staff is. Help the alienated users of your competition find a new home with you.
Identify Where Their Rankings Are Coming From
There are tons of competitive intelligence tools on the market for search engine optimization. Some are useful and others just throw lots of data at you without really explaining what it means. Here are just a handful of my favorite tools:
- SpyFu: If you want most of the good stuff you’re going to have to subscribe, but even the free version gives you some good nuggets. SpyFu is a fun tool that allows you to input the URL of a competitor and find out their daily ad spend, if they own any other domains, how many sub domains they have, what their average PPC position is, who their top organic competition is, and what they’re ranking for. It’s also a good way to find out which terms your competition has dropped out of their PPC campaign due to poor performance or other reasons.
- Copernic: Allows you to track changes to your competitor’s Web site. Why is this useful? It gives you a glimpse into your competitor’s mind and a hint at where their business is going, what they’re focusing on and if there are any surprises from them in store. For example, maybe they just got rid of all the information regarding their consulting services. Could they be downsizing? Is there trouble in paradise? Or instead, maybe they just added a section about the new consulting services they’re starting which will put them in direct competition with you! You may also find that they dropped a whole section of content for keywords that weren’t converting or that they’re hiring a new blended search intern. Lots of goldmines can be uncovered just by monitoring your competitors’ Web sites.
- SEOToolSet’s Competitive Research Tool: There are a lot of great tools inside our SEOToolSet, but our Competitive Research Tool will tell you your top competitors across all the major search engines, how many pages they have indexed, how many inbound links, etc. To can combine these results with data generated by our other search engine optimization tools to get an in-depth keyword analysis of each top-ranking Web site, and comparative link analysis & comparative keyword analysis of your top competition.
- Yahoo! Site Explorer: If you want to know why your competitors are ranking above you, the first thing you should do is take a look at their links. Yahoo Site Explorer will not only tell you who’s linking to them, but it will give you the links in order of importance.
- Trellian’s Competitive Intelligence Services: Trellian has made a full launch into the competitive intelligence space to help users improve their search engine optimization efforts. One of the tools at your disposal is the Search Term Intelligence Tool that shows search marketers exactly what terms their competitors are targeting. There are lots of tools out there that will help you do that (HitWise, AdGooRoo, KeyCompete, etc), or you can do it by hand, but I find Trellian to be the most user-friendly and intuitive. Whatever tool you want to use is fine with us, but use something! You absolutely must be aware of what keywords your competition is targeting, which ones they’ve forgotten about that you can capitalize on, where you can capitalize on geographic terms, etc.
If you haven’t really played around in the field of competitive intelligence, it’s time to start. I’d recommend outlining what it is you’re looking for before you start and then using a series of different tools so that you can capitalize on the strengths of each. Doing so should allow you to stay abreast of your competitors’ movements without making you sacrifice your soul in the process.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/13/07 at 4:10 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization
December 12, 2007
Scrolling Ads, Word of Mouth, Email Spam & Fun Stuff
Scrolling AdSense Ads? Why Not a Ticker?
News broke today that Google is testing a new scrolling ad format that allows users to scroll through ads by using little up and down or left and right arrows. gSpy has screenshots and a video detailing how the whole thing works. Go check it out and then come back (don’t forget to come back!).
Good? Sweet.
I just have a question for Google. What planet are you living on that you think people want to scroll through ads? Fine, some people don’t mind ads and will click on one when it seems unusually relevant or interesting. But that’s very different than having users manually click on more ads. Why would they search through ads when they have a fresh search results page staring them in the face? I’m just not sure how successful this is going to be.
It would be interesting to get some numbers on how many click-throughs the “See More Ads” link that Google places at the bottom of AdSense text ads get. Does that button see much traffic? My guess would be that no, it does not.
I get that Google is always looking for ways to increase advertising and encourage people to interact with ads. However, I’d much rather see them do what Quigo was doing where there’s a block of ads and then every few seconds one ad drops off and a fresh one comes on. At least that does a good job of attracting eyeballs thanks to the slow movement. Also, it allows Quigo to run more ads without relying on users to take any type of additional action. To me, that makes much more sense. Or maybe they already do that and I just haven’t seen it?
Do People Care About Blogger Opinion?
The findings of a soon-to-be published study are said to prove that old fashioned word of mouth is more effective than having the backing of “highly-connected influencers” like bloggers.
I was suckered in by the title but, unfortunately for me, the little press teaser contains no actual statistics or data to back up that assertion in any way. It would interesting to know what criteria they used to come to this conclusion. Did they ask people who they trust more, their friends or Robert Scoble? Did they track how quickly information was passed along? Or did they test how many people heard about X from Y and then converted in some way? I’m hoping it was something more in line with the last option.
It makes sense that people would trust their friends and family more than Jason Calacanis or Mark Cuban, and therefore be more inclined to convert. I’d still like to see some data on how exactly the study was conducted. I guess I have to check out this month’s edition of the Journal of Advertising Research. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be online.
Really, though, all this “study” does is prove what we already know – that consumers trust information more when they hear it from someone they know. Good. Take that information and design your product to make your customers happy, all of them, not just the elite. Pamper everyone. Ask for feedback from everyone. Make every opinion count. Do that and you should have no problem gaining some positive word of mouth, regardless of who it’s coming from.
All Email Is Spam!
Okay, maybe not all, but according to Barracuda Networks, as much as 90-95 percent of email is spammy and it doesn’t look like that number is going to die down any time soon. Yikes! The Barracuda Networks study is said to be based on an analysis of more than 1 billion daily e-mail messages sent to its 50,000+ customers worldwide.
Can that really be true? Is 95 percent of your email spam or is Barracuda, “a leader in email and Web security” trying to be sensational for their own good? I’m not sure. It’s worth nothing, though, that Symantec estimates the amount of spam to be more like 71 percent, which seems considerably more likely.
What does your inbox look like? Once you take out all the Twitter notifications and Facebook friend requests, is there anything left?
Fun Finds
Scott Karp explains why he stopped using Twitter. And then the blogosphere went nuts. W00t!
A super, super post from Chris Garrett on How to Generate Post Ideas When You Are Stuck. This post is filled with great stuff!
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/12/07 at 2:54 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, Email, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, Search Engine Optimization
Practical Tips To Lift Your Conversion Rate
Hey, guys! I didn’t get nearly enough liveblogging last week, so I thought I’d sit in on this morning’s (or afternoon, depending on where you live) MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook seminar. Something about sitting in on the Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking session last week has me dreaming about landing pages. And chocolate. However, the chocolate dreaming is a pretty natural occurrence for me. I don’t think it had anything to do with last week’s session.
Okay, enough of my rambling, we’re starting.
With us today are Marketo VP of Marketing John Miller, MarketingSherpa Research Director Stefan Tornquist and MarketingSherpa Senior Analyst Tim McAtee. We’re going to be covering findings from MarketingSherpa’s recently updated Landing Page Handbook.
We’re told that the data included in the handbook was gathered from surveys of 4,213 marketers, 3500+ consumers, lab tests and partners research, ‘best of’ research from 650+ third party organizations and 800+ Sherpa case studies.
What kinds of landing pages work best? Below is a screenshot of some of the top tests:
Tim and Stefan go through examples of the different types of landing page tests you can do.
- Dynamic Search Copy: We’re shown a B2C example for a site selling music equipment. They adapted their search page to reiterate what users typed into the search box (“you searched for: Stratocaster guitar on Google”) and increased conversions 48 percent. It’s so simple but it orients the user back to their search. It tells them, “hey, this is relevant content for the search you conducted”.
- Registration From Tests: Your marketing doesn’t end when someone gets to the form. So many organizations do a great job getting customers into the conversion funnel, but then they abandon them with a bad form. There is no golden rule for how many questions to put on a form. Sometimes it makes sense to have a lengthy form, for other business it doesn’t work well. The more complex the question, the greater degree of invalidity.
When you ask people about budget or the number of employees in their organization, over 50 percent of people said they don’t give accurate answers. Most of the time it’s because they don’t know the information yet, not because they want to lie to you. If you require those questions you’ll get bad data and get more people abandoning the process.
Stefans shares that 22 percent of those surveyed said they still have a “reset” button on their form sitting next to the “submit” button. There is no good reason to have this button! People will hit it accidentally, get frustrated, and then leave. You find this legacy programming a lot on B2B sites.
- Creative Elements: As a creative rule of thumb, make eyeflow easier. Anything you can do to simplify and clarify a landing page will produce better results, unless you’re serving Asian countries.
- Eyeflow and Columns: Most people use 1-2 columns on email ads and search landing pages. You want as few columns as possible. The more columns you have, the harder it is for the human eye to consume your content. The panelists noted that landing pages coming from an email ad are typically simpler and easier to read than landing pages found via search. Often times what happens is that people who come from email ads are going to a very specific page that was designed to be a landing page. That’s not always the case with search. It’s not as coherent. What makes a landing page effective is its focus around a single topic.
- Eyeflow and Typeface: Conversions require more than hip graphics. Your designer may think white text on a black background works well, but your customers will be rubbing their eyes. Verdana 10pt is the most popular font/size combination on the Web even though it’s too small for most people over 40 to read. Make sure your text is black and hyperlinks are blue, otherwise people will have a hard time reading your copy.
- Eyeflow and Buttons: Don’t say “submit” say “add to shopping basket”. Don’t say “click here” say “click here to buy X”. The bigger the item is, the most likely it is to get clicked and to get eyeballs. If someone stands across the room and can’t read the button, it’s too small. You want it to be obvious what you want users to do.
- Organic Search Landings Optimized: Most users (79 percent) who search organically end up on your interior pages, not your home page. You have to be aware of where people are coming into your site.
- Redesign for Mobile: We’re shown the Secrets of Success home page to see how it looks on the PC Web vs. the Mobile Web. Who’s on the mobile Web? The corporate executives who are taking the time they spend in airports and in limos and putting it towards work use. They’re looking through their shortlist of vendors and accessing the sites from their mobile phone. If you make it hard for them to view your site, they’re going to lose interest and move on to one of your competitors. You don’t need to have a mobile campaign, but you do need to worry that your key audience can make sense of your page on mobile devices.
If you can do nothing else, budget for analytics and testing:
- 48 percent of those surveyed say they don’t do any A/B testing.
- 40 percent only test at launch and leave forever.
- 16 percent don’t share test results with agency.
And the scariest data point of them all: 18 percent of those surveyed said that no one even knows their landing page results. Yikes.
Tip: Measure landing pages based on final KPIs, not interim clicks. They mention the SEOmoz landing page contest and how they went about finding their new Premium Service landing page. Found that the long, scroll forever page got less clicks but higher conversions. You have to look at the second stage metrics.
From here, Stefan and Tim take a look at some user-submitted landing pages and basically pick them apart. I’ll share the important stuff that may be applicable your site.
- Test your landing pages, but don’t over test. Having too many test versions means it will take a long time to get anything even remotely looking like accurate results.
- Don’t pass a lead to sales before it’s ready. Manage your leads:
- Score leads so you know who’s ready for sales
- Nurture leads that aren’t yet ready.
- Hand leads to sales at the right time, with value-added information.
- Modify programs as new requirements are found.
- Don’t use a lot of extraneous navigation. You don’t want to distract people from the primary action.
- Place important content, including your action items, above the fold.
- Include multiple points of contact.
- Lay off the long URLs.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/12/07 at 12:23 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization
December 11, 2007
AskEraser, Yahoo Increases Support & A Facebook Upgrade
Ask Gives Users Control With AskEraser
There's lots of buzz today regarding Ask.com’s launch of AskEraser, a new (and very welcome) feature will allow Ask.com users to search anonymously.
If you head over to Ask.com right now (you know you want to) you’ll see a link for AskEraser in the top right hand navigation. Clicking on that link will allow you to activate the feature.
Once enabled, AskEraser will no longer keep track of your search queries or the information related to them. They won’t keep any reference to things like your IP address, User IDs, Session IDs or the actual text used for the query. Unless you go ahead and manually disable it, Ask will hold on to this setting for 24 months.
It’s probably worth noting that when AskEraser is enabled, you won’t have access to personalization options like the fancy home page skins or your MyStuff. So, if you’re a big personalization junkie or emotionally attached to your MySTuff folder, you may or may not want to activate this feature. It’s a decision every surfer must make for themselves: What is more important – search with pretty trees in the background or protecting your privacy on the Web?
Andy Beal exhibited just a touch of Susan’s killjoy mentality when he asked “what’s the difference” considering Ask.com holds only 5 percent of the market share? It’s a valid question. Clearly, the announcement would have more pizzazz if it was Google making it, but the fact is, Google hasn’t made it. Neither Google, nor Yahoo, nor MSN, has agreed to give users the kind of privacy control as Ask.com has. And that’s both notable and worthy of praise. And of course, now that Ask.com has stepped up to the place, it somewhat pushes the hand of Google and the rest of the engines to do the same.
On the other side of the coin, Seth Godin makes a good argument that searchers don’t truly care about privacy. It’s worth a read.
Yahoo Adds Support for X-Robots Tag Directive
I’m a little slow to report this one, but my BFF Tamar made sure I saw the news that Yahoo is now supporting four types of exclusion tags in the robots.txt file. The four new additions are: [drum roll please]
- X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.
- X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to display cache link in the search results page.
- X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display summary in the search results page.
- X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.
Still Searching for Tamar Palgon on Facebook?
Well, if you are, you may actually find her now! Keri Morgret let the world know via Twitter that Facebook is now allowing users to offer up an alternative or maiden name to make it easier for users to search for them. To offer up an alternate name, head over the Relationship section of your profile information and enter it in.
A quick search for [Tamar Palgon], the unmarried version of our own Tamar Weinberg, shows it's already working.
Yey for the married people! [I wonder if this would also work for nicknames. Can I put in “The Lisa”?]
Share Your Gmail Story
If you’ve logged into Gmail recently and see the link to Share Your Story, you may be wondering what that’s all about. Bigmouthmedia tells us that Google, along with One Laptop Per Child and UNICEF, has launched the new Stories platform as a way for people around world to share their stories about their experiences using the Internet.
You can learn more about how to get involved by visiting Google’s Stories portal page or reading through the Google Groups thread.
Fun Finds
The SEO 2.0 blog created a chart to illustrate the differences between traditional search engine optimization and SEO in the 2.0 world. Is it on point?
Nathan Weinberg shows us how to make a holiday card with any YouTube video. My favorite YouTube video of all time will always be the mom singing on the beach to Boyz II Men. What’s yours?
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/11/07 at 2:22 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization
December 10, 2007
Weekend Update
Should You Be Marketing On YouTube?
While a good number of us were misbehaving in Las Vegas and/or Chicago, there was an important discussion taking place on my email list of choice, LED Digest. The question at hand was whether or not search marketers should be using YouTube to reach their audience.
If your audience is ingesting video, then yes, you should absolutely be using YouTube to connect with them and gain visibility. Just because you’re on YouTube doesn’t mean you’re posting videos of yourself falling down the stairs (email me those privately). You can be smart about it. As David Spahr commented in the thread, if you’re a company that sells tea, create a video demonstrating how you brew the perfect cup. There are plenty of ways to make YouTube work for you. It’s also worth noting that even if you put videos on your site, it may also be beneficial for you to upload them onto YouTube as well. It’s no secret that Google and YouTube are BFFs.
I read four days of LED comments on the topics, but it was marketer Jesper Brantberg’s comments that really made me stop in my tracks. Jesper wrote:
“Well, NO! If you run a legitimate business I think your business can be damaged if you try to "sell" your products on YouTube. YouTube is not a serious way to do business. I personally would never buy something from an "ad" shown on YouTube.”
Reading that over, I guess I somewhat agree with Jesper. I don’t believe that marketers should use YouTube as a way to “sell”. YouTube should be used the same way you use your blog. Use it as a way to interact with your audience and connect with them in their environment. Video’s allow marketers to provide step-by-step tutorials, brand themselves in a new way, and humanize their persona. This is not your chance to record a sleazy commercial with big “Buy Now” logos or suddenly get really pitchy. Use your video to complement the content on your site and then direct users in. It’s more a branding and informational channel than a sales tool.
Embeddable Charts from Google
Today is one of those days when I wish I was nerdier than I actually am. Google has released a new Google Charts API to help users embed pretty charts right into their Web pages. I was going to create a fun chart that shows how my level of awesomeness compares to Susan’s (it’s way bigger), but alas, I am unable to figure out the system. Maybe someone can do it for me and leave it in the comments!
Anyway, as Search Engine Journal nicely explained to me, the Google Chart API allows users to embed maps by returning a PNG format image for several different types of charts, including line graphs, pie charts, bar charts, Venn diagraphs, and something called a “scatter plot”. For a moment I wished I had paid more attention in Math class so that I would know what all of these things are, but then I remember that Math is useless.
Once you get the magic code string, you can paste it directly onto your page via a tag and, viola! A chart! Fun.
Fun Finds
YouTube opened up its YouTube Partners program to everyone, meaning people may actually make money off those awesome fence plowing videos!
Lee Odden was able to track down, kidnap and tie Adam Audette to a chair long enough to conduct an interview with him. I’m a big fan of Adam so it was great to put the name to the face and listen to him talk about search and LED. Kudos to Lee for making it happen!
Matt McGee provided some great PubCon and SES coverage despite the fact that he wasn’t actually there. Well done, McGee!
A quick journey through Flickr shows me that we were on all the same page in Vegas. Did you see that bathtub? Pure heaven! I woke up 20 min early every day just to enjoy it!
Also, Pat Sexton gave the best PubCon recap ever.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/10/07 at 4:28 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media
Blog Council Demonstrates How NOT to Blog
Right before I left for PubCon last week, I was bombarded with emails asking me what I thought about the new Blog Council that was created (and set up as a dot org) to explore blogging best practices and create policies that corporations can use to help them learn about blogging. I didn’t have time to touch on it then, but I do want to make a few quick comments about it.
I think it’s ridiculous.
And I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks so. In fact, I know that I’m not. Lots of people were quick to realize that this whole thing makes no sense because the creators of the Blog Council have done nothing but trip over their own feet since launch.
I suppose the idea is a noble one: Let’s give executives and corporate bigwigs advice on how to blog. Super. It would be great if these cold corporations learned to be human; however, I don’t think a blog council is the solution to that problem. You can’t ask a group of wannabe elders how to best connect with the people who are important to you. The only person who can tell you how to best use your blog to leverage the power of your users is someone who knows about you and the people you call your audience. I don’t care how many CEOs you stuff on that blog council, if they haven’t been able to figure out this blogging thing for themselves, they’re sure as hell not going to be able to help you.
And they haven’t figured it out. In its 4 days of existence, the Blog Council has shown that this blogging thing is completely foreign to them. They’ve set their site up as a blog and yet there’s no way to interact with them via comments, the trackback numbers are off, and of the two posts they have, one is a press release and the other is an FAQ. I’m sorry, but I’m pretty sure that posting a press release is rule number one of what NOT to do on your blog. The FAQ, however, was interesting. This was my favorite part.
6. Will the Blog Council be blogging?Not much. Our job is to provide a community for corporate bloggers. We're not a publisher and we're not promoting a specific point of view. Our members are the ones leading the conversation; our job is to support it. It's less about the Blog Council's voice than helping our members have a stronger voice.
So it’s a blog about blogging with no posts? Oh, this is going to be totally good!
They’ve also already done themselves a great disservice by taking somewhat of an elitist attitude. According the Blog Council Web site, they’re “the community for large companies’ blogs”. I guess those of us who don’t work for a giant corporate can just go back to our corners now. They’re not interested in our opinion. But that’s okay because, as every blogger knows, the blogosphere is all about creating a hierarchy of voices. Yup.
The other major problem with this council of elders approach is that it’s being fronted by people with no track record of blogging success. Getting blogging advice from Coke, which is most famous for its outed flog, is like hiring me to run your SEO campaign. I can spell SEO, I can even blog about it, but that doesn’t mean I know how to do it. We have smart people for that.
During last week’s Search and Blogging Reporters Forum, Andy Beal commented that he found it irksome when unqualified blogs tried to offer advice on becoming a top notch blogger or monetizing blogs. For me, this feels like the same thing. Hearing companies without successful social media histories try and tell others how to use their blog or develop a list of best practices rubs me the wrong way. Especially when so many were doing just fine without their help.
If you want to learn to blog, abiding by the rules set out by this council isn’t going to help you. You don’t learn to do something by hanging out with others who are just as clueless as you are. You learn by doing and by hanging out with other people who are successful. If you want to learn to blog, read other blogs. Create your own blog council made up of voices that you trust and individuals who have a track record of success.
For me, if the Blog Council wants to be successful they have to do one of two things. Either they have to promote their site as a place for bloggers of all shapes and sizes to have an open discussion about the things important to them or they have to focus solely on enterprise blogging and how its member base of only large corporations can use blogs to foster internal dialogue. That’s the only way I see this site having a chance of surviving and being useful. But what do I know? I’m just a small-time blogger.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/10/07 at 12:23 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding
December 7, 2007
Friday Recap
Hi.
Are you feeling as tired and nonfunctional today as I am? I hope so. It will make this Recap far more enjoyable for all of us. So will looking at Matt Cutts’ cats. His Ozzie looks identical to my Jack Jack, who also happens to enjoy destroying playing in artificial Christmas trees. I’d post a picture of Jack but Susan won’t let me. She doesn’t have a soul.
With both PubCon and SES Chicago taking place this week, you may be feeling a bit run down. Perhaps you’re exhausted from reading all the blog coverage, maybe you lost some money at the tables, maybe you were “networking” too hard or maybe you’re just burnt out from all the mad scootering you did. Either way, don’t let yourself get down. You’re still great. We’re all great. Right, Ze?
Feel better? Yeah, me neither. Maybe I’d be feeling better if I'd gone to SES instead of PubCon. They got snow. Snow makes everything better. Snow is made of magic and fairies. [Lies. --Susan] It’s true. I read it on the Internet!
Lee Odden was at PubCon and snapped a cute picture of the adorable Robin Liss. But let’s face it, it’s really my Ask.com bag that’s the star of that picture, don’t you think? Or maybe it’s Michael Gray’s innocent face.
Michael from Solo SEO put together a list of the best schwag from PubCon 2007. Somehow the famed Bruce Clay tangle made it on the list. I was personally a fan of the digital dice and the funky T-shirts handed out by Sure Hits.
Just a note, if I were you, I’d stay away from Barry Schwartz. Birds seem to drop dead around him. That can’t be a good sign.
Evan Carmichael posted the top 50 SEO posts of the year. Ironically enough, it seems most of the posts he mentioned weren’t actually from 2007. Also, I had no idea that Bruce wrote The Lisa’s Problem With Wikipedia Explained. You would think he would have written about his own problem instead of stealing mine! :)
Problogger outlined the 7 Unhealthy Eating Habits of Unproductive Bloggers which perfectly illustrates why I have gained 50lbs over my two year stint as a blogger. However, the post failed to mention the badness that occurs when you hit up the buffet at the Bellagio and eat your weight in seafood and desserts. Not that I would know anything about that.
The makers of this scale are awesome. Not because they aim to give you your weight in terms of an animal, but because they don’t hide the fact that unless you live in Ireland or Europe, you’re just the “rest of the world” to them.
These people have way too much time, and paint, on their hands.
That is one rebellious bird. You show them, dude!
I thought Tamar had a big mouth, but this guy totally trumps her. She still probably has more schwag though.
Proof that beer is divine. If you turn up your speakers, you can hear the angels in the background.
Susan and I made paper snowflakes when we decorated the office for Christmas. We were pretty excited by our awesomeness. Then we saw these 3D snowflakes. We suck at life.
Life Lesson #983: Be on your best behavior during the holiday season or your parents will sell your Christmas gifts on eBay. Ouch.
The first rule of the slap fight: Make sure everyone knows the rules of the slap fight. Otherwise, you may get a roundhouse kick to the face.
Things I Learned From BoingBoing Today This Week:
- They make ghost towels for those too lazy to cut holes in cloth.
- A chart to help you detect lies on the Internet.
- Feet don’t just come in sizes, they also come in backwards.
- Wikipedia now comes in an edible form.
- A new way to power your Christmas tree.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 7/07 at 3:59 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Fun Stuff
December 6, 2007
Word of Mouth Marketing
Brett Tabke and I rush over next door for the next session (and my last for the day. Lisa and I planned on covering them all but our flight home wouldn't allow it. Bummer.) Anyway, the last session of my Pubcon experience has speakers Louise Rijk, Advanced Media Productions, Inc. and Greg Hartnett, Best of The Web here to talk about how to market via Word of Mouth, hereafter WOM.
Louise Rijk is up first and she'll walk us through what WOM is. Much of what she'll cover is related to social media.
WOM marketing definition: It's the oldest form of marketing. WOM is the act of consumers providing honet information to other consumers. It's driven by influencers with large social networks. Organic WOM is when people naturally talk about something because they're happy about it. If you've got satisfied customers, they're going to talk about it. Good customer feedback helps with WOM. Amplified WOM is when marketers launch campaigns to accelerate the spread of WOM. Social media today allows you to build communities around your brand. You can motivate the right people and they'll become your evangelists. You can use advertising to create a buzz as well. Black Friday is advertising that also spreads via WOM.
How does WOM marketing work? It happens when people are given a reason to talk about a product or service, online or off. It's driven by customer satisfaction, two-way dialogue and transparency.
Online conversations include using tools to spread ideas about products and services through social networks. It's growing.
WOM marketing is based on the principles of influencers to spread a message. People think that online WOM marketing is inexpensive but it really isn't. The success of a campaign is how many people you reach, not how many convert.
How do you recruit influencers? 10 percent of the influencers are the power influencers who reach a lot of people. 90 percent of the rest of the people are moderate influencers. They reach fewer people but there are more of them. You shouldn't ignore that part of the market.
There are four steps that influencers go through: Awarenss research personal experience recommendations
Start by listening online about what people are saying about your product in order to get the unfiltered experiences. There are listening services that will do that for you as well. BuzzLogic is one of them and it returns actionable items for you. [This is similar to brand management research.]
Don’t forget to tap into your in house customer service. You can find your loyal customers that way and reach out to them.
Develop or create something that gives people something to talk about. Target the authority influencers first and their communities. Honesty is key, you have to be part of the community and engage it.
Differences in Social Media Marketing: it's an aspect of WOM marketing. It's online only unlike WOMM which is only 15-20 percent online. It can spread by itself instead of relying on influencers. Not always brand relevant. Message must be outrageous instead of just having a great product that inspires excitement.
Major brand marketers are moving from testing WOMM to including it into fully integrated marketing campaigns.
A WOM campaign generates more online buzz when supported by traditional paid media buys. Greater paid media spend equals greater online buzz. 64 percent of moderate influencers do online research after seeing offline promotions but only 30 percent will transition in the reverse. TV is still a good way to reach influencers but even that is fragmented.
Integration of WOMM and traditional advertising requires extensive planning, integrated execution and comprehensive effectiveness measurement. It's not a one time fix, you can't just send out a single press release and call it a day. You have to stick with it.
I wish she would leave her slides up longer. I can't get more than half of them down.
Reaching the Influencers:
Identify
Motivate
Sustain motivation
Track and Measure
She describes a campaign they created for one of their clients. They started with a free offer as a motivation then started in the social media sites including Flickr and YouTube. They looked out for other influencers as well, bloggers in the space, etc.
They selected 50 influencers and then asked them to complete some other step in order to pass the buzz along--blogs, photo projects in Flickr and videos to YouTube.
It's a matter of carrying through the whole process in order to make an impact.
Greg Hartnett says they basically built the company by WOM and so he's going to use them as a case study. You know why I like case studies? We don't blog them. I'll just take out a couple highlights where it doesn't overlap with Louise's.
He recommends reading Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz and Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell.
Who are your influencers/happy talkers? Happy customers, online talkers, sweet swag (the people wearing your t-shirts or grabbing things from your booth. Note: Some of them are just swag junkies), eager employees, fans or hobbyists, professionals.
What will they talk about?
- Have a Great Product or Service. Think of Google--they grew entirely by WOM.
- Specials or Discounts.
- Extraordinary Customer Service -- turn that frown upside down.
- Partnering with a Charity.
How do you get them talking?
- Ask for the referral
- Newsletters/Email -- anything that you ever do through WOM you should have an email for
- The Social Network effect
- Blogs
- The power of swag
Don’t put a big cartoony logo on your shirt, try to put something on there that people will actually want to wear. Try to be cool and edgy without being offensive.
He likes Google's Blog search to monitor what people are saying. I have no idea why since it sort of sucks. Has he not ever seen Ask's? He also mentions Technorati. No argument there.
You have to take part in the conversation. There is probably nothing more important than honesty and transparency. If you're in the forums, you need to help, not deliver hype. No one wants to hear what you have to say if your post ends with a pitch.
Have your own blog but also have someone empowered to go out and comment on other industry blogs. Taking part in the overall conversation is important.
Ultimately it's about having happy customers. Focus on it 100 percent. Lead your team by example with respect and ethics. Send thank yous to people. Under promise and over deliver. Make a habit of going above and beyond.
Brett tells us that our name tag holders turn into sunglasses holders. Okay then.
No Q&A, I think everyone is too tired for questions.
And that's it for me! Thanks everyone for reading. We'll be home tomorrow and Lisa will give us some kind of Friday Recap...probably.
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 4:03 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, Social Media
Startup Costs – Getting in the Video Game
We heard in the brand management session that it's important to get into video, so what does that take? Now that another delicious boxed lunch has been consumed, it's time to find out. Brett Tabke pulls double duty here as moderator and panelist alongside Robin Liss of Camcorderinfo.com and Michael McDonald of iEntry Inc.
Brett jumps right in by asking Mike how they got into video.
Mike says they saw an opportunity to jump right in and be a forerunner. Pubcon last year was their first big event that they did video for. Some of their big hurdles were format, resolution, platform, how to imbed and what content management system to use.
It was a lot of trial and error to decide on all those elements. You have to think about what the most common, most popular formats are and try to offer those. You also need to think about offering them in multiple sizes for different connection speeds. He says it was easier for us to figure out how we could embed them on our own and then allow other people to do the same. We wanted it to be easy for someone we interviewed to be able to put it on his site as well. It's more of a branding thing.
It's been commerically viable in terms of paying for itself and putting it on at shows. Google is a big sponsor of conference coverage. It hasn't paid for itself in terms of office space and equipment, however.
They have approximately 6 full time video people. He notes that it's nice to be able to use your designers to supplement your video content, so it's not just two guys sitting there talking. Designers are handy for helping them look dynamic and interesting. They edit using Sony Vegas 8 because 7 doesn't work with Vista (it did a few weeks ago, but doesn't anymore.)
Okay, Robin's turn.
Their number one rule is that it's got to be interesting. Video is an illustrated medium, you need to use video to illustrate things. Three minutes of someone talking isn't interesting. They use video as a marketing tool, as a content piece--they don't sell ads on the videos very much. They do direct sells but mostly they do contextual ads.
They've been doing videos for seven or eight years now. Because the site (CamcorderInfo.com) was about camcorders, they wanted to use videos to show it. They started out using Flash and now they're using YouTube.
She takes a quick poll on how many people have camcorders and how old they are then quickly disclaimers that her recommendations are editorial based and not ads.
CamcorderInfo.com is, in her opinion, a must read. She started it 11 years ago and they do lab testing for their reviews. As she mentioned before, all their reviews are editorial based and not paid for by the manufacturers (though they do sell ads to them.)
Robin notes that the reality is that almost any entry level camcorder is going to be good enough for the internet. If you have a limited budget, $7-800, use about half for accessories. You probably won't need the performance if you're going to be doing Web content because the compression factor is going to ruin it anyway.
You're looking for video and low light performance. In fact, you want low light performance, low light performance, low light performance. The average room is DARK for a camcorder. There's no standardized measure so you're doing to have to look at reviews.
A lot of people are moving toward HD right now and she doesn't think you need it yet. Again, the compression on the Web is such that you're going to be paying for quality that you just never see.
When you're making video online, audio is more important than video. It's the number one mistake that people make. AUDIO is half the equation. People will sit through shaky video but they'll leave if it's terrible audio. So many people just buy the camcorder and shoot something. But if you can't hear something, you're not going to keep watching. People will put up with a shaky or grainy picture but not poor audio.
Manual control is very important as well. Once you really get into making videos, you're going to want to have more control over all the options.
Handling--you don't want your videos to shake. As much as it's tempting to buy your camcorder online, you need to go handle the camera and hold it in your hand. When you're holding two or three lbs out for ten minutes, you're going to need something comfortable.
Editing Workflow
$5-700 is going to get a good enough camcorder for most people.
The compression for online video is incredibly lossy.
Have we mentioned: low light performance? Because low light performance, low light performance, low light performance.
If you're not doing any editing, hard drive camcorders are fine, but tape and HDV is much better if you plan to edits. Any post-production should be tape as far as she's concerned. You'll also save money in the long run and archiving is easier.
You need to buy a camcorder with a mic jack. They won't recommend cameras without it and manufacturers have added them back in as a result. There are NO good on camcorder microphones. Even the $5000 ones are worth it.
Headphone jacks are important too because you're also going to need good and tight headphones so that you can hear the audio no matter what. She likes IFBs because they're a tight fit (and she gets to look like a secret service agent.)
If you only spend $250 on a camcorder, you're still going to get better than any digital camera. Buy a camcorder if you're doing videos.
Recommendations:
Canon HV20 - $900
Sony HD96 - $520
Canon hg10 - $1300
JVC MG130 - $1300
If you only buy ONE accessory, buy a good tripod. People were not made to hold camcorders stable. Plan to spend $150- $300 on tripods. They'll last forever. Spend a lot of money on it. Look for a fluid head, it'll make your panning look smooth. Camera tripods aren't good enough. If you're doing walking shots, you might want to invest in a steady cam like SteadiCam Jr.
Buy long life batteries, the largest possible. And buy a bag that can handle a lot of tape and batteries. If you're doing full day shooting, consider a battery belt. Video is a one shot deal, if you're out of batteries, you're out of luck.
Make sure your camcorder has a shoe. Sony requires a converter for the camcorder shoe.
Mics: If you're only going to have one, buy a lavalier mic. $15 wired, $200 wireless. Conference halls are SO loud and full of ambient noise, you're going to need a lavalier. It's the only way to get good audio. Other kinds of mics: Shotgun mics are the long ones with the fuzzy covers. Booms are similar but they're on the long pole. Handhelds are...hand held.
Kits: Sennhiser has a great $300 wireless kit. Look for the frequency. You don't want two As or they'll compete with each other.
Use a left/right 1/8in Y adaptor to mix two mics cheaply. That way when you go into post-production, you can edit more easily.
Have an interesting set. White backgrounds are boring. Make an effort. Green screens work great but even lighting is critical.
The world is a dark, dark place. Get lights. Lots of lights. If you have a studio set, you're going to use three point lighting. You can use household lights or buy a $500 light kit.
Filming Tips:
The rule of 3rds: someone's eyes are never going to be entirely centered on the screen. You're going to usually be on the upper bar and probably off to the left or right. This makes more sense with her illustration.
Two camera setups make for great videos. If you're doing an interview, cut in things that are related as B-Role. Ten seconds for each B-Roll shot.
Never interview someone who is looking at the camera. Have a conversation instead and have the camcorder off to the side.
You can fake it by re-recording the questions after the interview earlier.
Keep panning and camcorder movement to a minimum. Don't zoom in your videos. Unwind your body instead of winding if you MUST pan. It just looks better. [She demonstrates.]
Generally speaking the $50 software is going to do you just fine. [Brett disagrees, more on this later.]
NO WIPES, No page turns. Cuts only. Fade only to black. It's a sign of bad video and terrible editors.
Use news tricks like lower 3rds, over the shoulder shots, intros & outros, put your logo in the corner of the video (test it because the compression is terrible.) Saying the site name works much better than graphical reps but use both. Music is great but make sure you have the rights.
You can get pre-made backdrops and graphics from Digital Juice.
Make sure you write people's names down when you shoot.
...wow that was a lot. Awesome.
Brett jumps in now. He starts off by saying not all the cheap products are you going to do you. His presentation isn't working so he's working around it. They built a mini-news studio and he's going to tell about how they did it.
Think about where you're going to use the camera. If it's in the studio and no one will see it, anything is okay. But the bigger, fancier looking ones are better for the conference floor because of the bling factor. The Web is really forgiving, so just about anything will work.
He's repeating a great deal of what Robin said. He notes that the lights are very hot. Be aware. They also get expensive.
[Robin says that their lights are upwards of $20,000. Don't buy a reflector, buy foam core. But be careful of fire.]
He emphasizes how important audio is as well. It's been their biggest money pit.
Software: Adobe Premier, Sony Vegas. Sony has the lower learning curve. It's about $450-$600. For graphics editing: Photoshop and Illustrator.
Spend the time doing the research. Spend a lot of time doing research.
If you're looking at a real studio, it's $25k up.
As for talent? They're difficult to find, highly competitive, have a high turnover rate --every job is a stepping stone to the next job. It's expensive for highly qualified help. The cheap alternative is to get college kids. Also very expensive? The tech help--$80 to $100 each.
[Robin says even they hire editors because it's not efficient for their staff to do it themselves even though they have the expertise. They also take 10 hours to produce 3 minutes of film.]
Biggest mistakes: Not really appreciating how much overhead this was going to require both in time and equipment.
Q&A
Teleprompter
Robin: You can build them for about $100 or buy them for about $200. If you're doing studio, it's a great investment.
Brett says they spend about $1500 on theirs.
YouTube is probably your best friend for learning how to. There are tons of videos on everything.
have you done much with transcribing the videos?
Mike: We hand transcribe them if we do them at all. I like the concept and I want to do more of it.
Robin: We don't do it.
Brett: We've got the script so we just post that. You can hire transcribers cheap as well.
How long is optimal?
Mike: Three to five minutes.
Robin: Oh no, three or less. It's really hard. That's only 200 or 300 words. You can do multiple segments.
Closed captioning
Robin: There's no standard yet online. If you're doing it for broadcast you have to do it legally. Online, you can post a transcript.
Audio: is it worth it to look for an onboard XLR?
Robin: It's for long distance. Frankly if you're going to be posting on YouTube, it’s not going to matter. In her opinion, the best to buy if you have the money is the Canon 8-1. (May not actually be what she said...)
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 3:59 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, Social Media
Competitive Intelligence
[Coverage Note: Susan and I will NOT be covering the last session of the day for a very important reason. If we do, we’ll miss our flight back to California and will be forced to spend the night camped out in the Las Vegas airport, where we would very likely end up gambling away our huge Bruce Clay salaries and make poor life decisions. You don’t want that for us, do you?
It’s possible that I am very, very tired.]
We’re almost done folks. It’s time for the Competitive Intelligence panel with speakers Jake Baillie, Andy Beal and Larry Mersman. Jake will also be acting as moderator. He must have mad skillz.
Jake asked for cookies and people in the audience randomly got up to give him some. Does that really work? I want a puppy. And over the knee socks.
Up first is Andy Beal to go through some tools for spying on your competitors. Fun!
- Domaintools.com: Collects a bunch of information about a Web site, like is it listed in Yahoo directory, registration details, etc. It also tells you other sites that are on the same IP. Some SEO companies put their clients on the same IP.
- ranks.nl/tools/spider.html: Check out keyword densities for your competitors. Breaks it up into 2 word, 3 word and 4 word combinations
- sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com: Check backlinks for your competition. Yahoo puts the most important backlinks first.
- seomoz.org/tools: Page Strength Tool – You can see how many times they’ve been put on Digg/Delicious/etc
- soloseo.com/tools/indexrank.html: Allows you to see how many pages are being indexed by Google over the past year, 6 months, or 2 weeks for a site. You can see how strong the site is.
- copernic.com: Track site changes.
- Technorati.com: Find out who’s talking about your competition.
- google.com/alerts: Use Google News to monitor references.
- searchanalytics.compete.com: You type in the domain name and Compete will give you an approximation as to what key phrases are bringing traffic to your competitors Web site.
- touchgraph.com: Helps you find your competitors’ hubs. Visually shows you where their links are coming from.
- google.brand.edgar-online.com: Keep tracking of public companies’ FCC filings.
- seekingalpha.com/transcripts: Scan through transcripts.
- google.com/patents: Keep track of patents of your competitors.
- oodl.com: Keep an eye out on whether or not your competitors are hiring and where.
Keep an eye on your competitors employees. Watch their blogs. They may reveal a lot of information about what’s going on internally.
Larry Mersman is next.
The definition of competitive intelligence can mean many things depending on the channel we are dealing with. For the most part, it is the gathering of information from several sources relative to the target competitor.
Sources of information can be newspaper articles, blogs and online articles.
Information can be collected several ways and from many sources. The most typical data pools are Internet Service Providers, user panels and Web site Search history.
Do your legwork. Find your online competition using services like HitWise or comScore. Or, you can do your own research using the search engines.
Now that you know who your competition is in your space, find out how they got there and where their traffic is coming from. Look at referring domains/backlinks. Who is sending them traffic? Look at the keyword data. What keywords are actually being clicked on to get the user to your competition? Traffic can be coming from search engines, banner ads, blogs, etc.
Knowing what keywords your competitor is targeting is important, but knowing which keywords are getting clicked on by the user to get to their site is key. Knowing a keywords performance, both paid and organic, will help you optimize your site around proven data, possibly streamline your spending and increase your ROI.
Many companies will optimize their Web site around the keyword they think they will bring users or that customers will type into their search box to find a link to their site. In the end, it’s users that make the choices that drive the traffic and the money to your site.
Maybe Larry has a plane to catch too because he went through that presentation awfully fast!
Jake is up last.
The best webmasters already investigate their competition. Search engine optimization is a game. Know more than your competition and you win. Most novice webmasters have no idea. Use this to your advantage.
WHOiS my competition?
Designed in the 80s (me too!), WHOIS was originally intended to be contact point for technical issues. Evolved to be the “legal documentation” of who owns a domain. Can be forged with very little technical knowledge or even anonymized.
Novice webmasters enter in their real contact information, which makes it easy to find out who they are. Intermediate webmasters will use an anonymizing service. Advanced webmasters will forge the information. Good WHOIS information: www.whois.sc.
Regional IP Databases
First step to social engineering. Use nslookup to find the IP address of the Web site. Plug in the IP address to completewhoisl.com and find out who the ISP is.
Social Engineering:
Social engineering is getting someone to tell you something they’re not supposed to. You would be stunned at how often it works. It’s okay to lie (cover your ears, kids), especially with someone who won’t bother to investigate.
There are lots of people to talk to about your competitor’s site, including:
ISPs
Company Marketing Department
Upstream Providers
Significant Others
Estranged friends/coworkers
[Jake is coming off kind of scary right now. I don’t know him personally but now I’m scared.]
Jake presents a script for getting information out of people. (OMG this is so creepy! I don’t even want to write it! Here goes…)
The Script:
- Introduce yourself as someone you’re not.
- Be friendly. People love friendly people. Never become confrontational
- Learn from the travel industry. If you don’t get what you want the first time, hang up and call back to talk to someone else.
Allinanchor returns all Web pages linked to with that target term. It’s good for discovering networks. Take five keywords from one site and run them all through allinanchor. Find the similar sites that appear. Chances are you’ll be able to find site that have the same “look and feel”.
Google them! Find out where all their links are coming from. You can pretty much tell an SEO’d site these days by a visual link inspection.
Search the damn Internet. It’s all there.
Find out if a competitor is coming to your site. If someone comes to your site after an “allinanchor” query, they’re probably not a legit user. People who type “link” in Google are not your target visitors. People who come through the SE cache are also not your target visitors, not are those who visit your site 20 times in 2 minutes. People who come in from whois.sc are competitors.
If you find out your competitors are continually visiting your site, serve them a 403 access forbidden. Or better yet, porn!
Instruct your employees that they are to talk to no one about your site. Find a trustworthy ISP – most intelligence is gathered at this point. Tell your significant other not to take any business calls at home.
Anyone else feel like they need a shower after all that?
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 3:35 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Search Engine Optimization
Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking
Back from lunch. That was one yummy chocolate chip cookie! This time we’re at the Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking session with panelists Tom Leung, Glenn Alsup, Philippe Lang and Rand Fishkin. Moderating will be Gillian Muessig, aka Rand’s mommy.
Gillian isn’t wasting any time. She introduces Glenn. Hi Glenn.
Glenn talks about qualitative vs. quantitative data
Qualitative researchers: Reject the idea that social sciences can be studied like natural or physical sciences. They feel that human behavior is always bound to the context in which it occurs. And it’s usually personal and subjective.
Quantitative researches: Argue that both the natural and social sciences are testable and confirmable theories. They also do lots of other stuff I didn’t have time to get down. Sorry. There was a lot of text on that one slide.
Glenn says qualitative is Gods Fuel:
They look at:
Goals
Overview
Description
Scenarios
And get:
Finding
Usability Issues
Effects on Goals
Lessons Learned
It’s effective to look at this as a sales funnel. Identify all your drivers – Offline, Online, Explicit and Extract. Then take the data and group attributes based on filters.
Look at the stages in the funnel. Weight them by the value of that event. Downloading a white paper is more valuable than looking at a banner. Identify when the action took place. When you convert, those drivers are calculated in different ways. You want to increase conversions by identifying the right mix of marketing drivers.
Tom from Google is next to talk about smart testing. I have a feeling he’s going to talk about Google’s Web site optimizer.
Ooo, I’m right! Tom asks: What do you do when the visitor lands on your site and what can you do to get them to convert?
Driving traffic is just the beginning. You invest in search engine optimization and SEM resources for 100 percent of visitors. Your pages may lose more than half their visitors in seconds. Most that do stay choose not convert. (Industry average for converting customers is 2-3 percent.) Why bother bringing more visitors to a site that convert poorly?
Evolve with continuous improvement. Drive the right traffic to your site. Measure & analyze site activity. Test changes and implement winners. Repeat steps 1-3 until conversation rate is 100 percent.
How Testing Works
Visitors arrive on your site. They’re shown a random version of your site and the testing tool will tell you what percentage of users converted based on what version of your page.
He shows an example of a page Google uses their Web site optimizer on. It’s the home page for Picasa. In the first version of the page, it uses “free” a lot and is very picture and action oriented. They found that the second page, on that is cleaner, includes a Try button and states a clear value proposition converted 30 percent more.
How do you set up a test?
Most of the testing tools involve copy and pasting a piece of JavaScript. The control on top tells you that someone is trying to load the page. The tracking script on the bottom tells you that they saw the page, and then you have another code on the conversion page which tells you they converted and what version of the page they were looking at. If you do a test, each version of the page has a unique sticker for you to identify it by. After the test runs for awhile, Google will populate reports for you.
Best Practices in testing
- Test a small number of variations: Rule of thumb is less than 100 conversions per combination.
- Test big changes: If you can’t see difference between two combos in 8 seconds, visitors probably won’t either.
- Consider early indicators if you don’t have enough conversions: If you’re selling a $100k software package or a small business with modest volume, optimize for conversion indicators such as request info, view product details, etc.
- Don’t jump to conclusions: Less than 2 weeks is no good, focus on absolute conversion difference, don’t get too excited by sliver of green.
More Testing Ideas:
Conversion Cocktail: Headline/Image/Call to action. Those are the best three sections to test.
Trust seals?
Which testimonials
Inspirational or fact-based pitch
YouTube video
Navigation bar
Philippe is up next.
Analytics provides you a ton of data about visitor behavior on your site. This information is very valuable but it can be hard to interpret. Your customers also provide you valuable information when you talk to them.
What if you could see in real time what your visitors are doing on your Web site? Start a dialogue with those visitors. Listen to them. Understand what they are doing and why. It’s like a usability test in the real world.
Things to look for when you monitor your Web site: Visitor referrer information like search engine used, marketing campaign, geolocation, and navigation behavior like page views time on page, shopping cart content, and shopping cart abandonment.
Merge the two sets of data (real time monitoring and feedback) by engaging specific visitors into a chat or leverage the customer support chat transcripts (what if you don’t offer a customer chat feature?). Try to see the patterns or trends that are coming out.
Ultimate Feedback Look
- Start by monitoring visitor on your site
- Identify visitors with unexpected behavior
- Engage visitors by listening to them
- Convert customer feedback into action
- Refine and optimize your Web site
Phillipe presents two case studies. The first is about a university offering an online degree.
Problem: High abandonment rate in the online inquiry form
Cause: Customers annoyed by specific question about the age of applicant. Customers abandoned the form instead of answering the question.
Solution: Removed the question
Result: 20 percent increase in form completion.
Online retailed focused on outdoor gear
Problem: Low conversion rate on sunglasses
Cause: Customers were confused by the sizing chart for the sunglass
Solution: Redesigned the sizing section
Result: 25 percent increase in conversion rate and 20 percent decrease in product returns.
The morale of the story: If you know what’s wrong, you can fix it!
Testing helps companies increase conversion rates, improve the sales process, increase average order value and builds relationships with customers.
Last but not least is Rand Fishkin.
Rand opens by talking about the landing page contest SEOmoz ran a few months back. They let blog readers submit landing pages to them. They got lots of submissions and ended up testing 10 of the 40 entries they received. Rand shares the stats for each page. It’s exciting. Ultimately, the page where you had to scroll forever to get to the end of the page converted the best. That’s why you see so many of those pages.
Once the contest was over, the SEOmoz crew tweaked the winning page to make it convert even better.
Takeaways
- If you think it will work, it probably won’t
- Landing page design is not universal
- Testing is the only way to get better
- Doubling your conversion rate is far easier than doubling your traffic.
Question & Answer
How much did you pay for Offermatica?
He thinks its $10K a month and up.
Rand, it looks like you tested a handful of completely different pages. Can you tell us how Offermatica fit into that? What page elements did each have that helped it convert better?
Rand doesn’t actually answer the question and just says that they were doing A/B testing (testing two different pages), not multivariate testing where you test different images or different headers or different layouts.
I always thought that I should change pages incrementally so that Google wouldn’t think it was a different site. Is that right or am I paranoid?
Rand: Basically conversion testing is a legal form of cloaking. What you’re really doing is showing a bunch of different versions to people to find the best one, but you’re only showing one version to the search engines.
Tom: With Google, the spiders don’t look at the JavaScript content so the source code will look consistent. And even if the layout is different, the spirit of the content is similar.
Glenn: Typically you see smaller changes.
Multivariate testing about pleasing more of the people more of the time. When visitors come back to the page, is there any way to ensure that they see a different version of the page?
Tom: When the experiment is running, users will continue to see the same version of the page they saw the first time to protect the integrity of the experiment.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 2:42 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Search Engine Optimization
International and European Site Optimization
Another quick intro: Dixon Jones is moderating this panel which includes Michael Bonfils, SEM International, Andy Atkins-Krueger, Web Certain Europe Ltd, Thomas Bindl, ThomasBindl.com, and Kim Frederiksen, Addvisors Copenhagen.
Got all that? Good, here we go with the session of cool accents. Michael Bonfils isn't here yet. He thought this session was at 3. Oops.
Kim Frederiksen is first up.
When it comes to marketing you need: More business. Better business. Cheaper business.
He brings up a luxury condo site. They did a good job stateside and locally but it was hard and expensive. So they discussed how they could get more, better, cheaper business.
More business:
There are a great many millionaires who aren't in the US. They're a hot market because a lot of them invest in real estate and 30 percent of those are investing in overseas property. They have 23 percent more buying power as well because of the weakness of the dollar. They can afford more expensive properties as a result.
Better business:
The traffic was 65 percent from the US versus 35 percent from the rest of the world but 40 percent of new clients can from the US and 60 percent in new clients. US clients averaged about $400,000 less in sales than International clients.
Cheaper business:
Strangely there weren't a lot of competitors. Averaging $.40 per click, they got position one in Denmark and Russia but for $3.00 per click on average they only ended up in 4th position on average in the US. So they were able to get the business cheaper and it was better business.
Thomas Bindl is next. He wishes us a good evening. He's from Germany and it's nearly 11pm there. He also speaks quickly, softly and kinda mumbles. I feel sorry for the people in the back.
He puts up a map of Europe pointing at Germany. It's in the middle, y'all. Very good beer and food. There are 82 million people living there. Their GDP per capita is about $31,400. They have 52 million people online and they spend about 46 billion Euros spent online. Lots of opportunity there.
Google is incredibly dominate there, even more than here. About 93 percent marketshare. CPCs are usually a little lower but not much.
Of course, you should always speak the language. For language, make sure your translations are accurate: A nice car and a nice tree have only ONE word in common, not two.
11 million .de domains. If you're thinking about going into Germany get a .de, don’t use a sub-domain. You'll need a local contact but there are companies out there.
Credit cards are just becoming popular in Germany (also Italy and France.) Make sure they have an alternative way to pay.
Get familiar with the legal requirements for ANY international market. You want to build trust and not get sued. Put your addresses on there.
The late (well, tardy) Michael Bonfils is up next to cover Asia for us. He doesn't have a cool accent but he does say that the being late thing is typical. He goes over his bio which I linked above.
Like any one campaign, you start with an assessment then you plan then you implement and organize.
Assessment phase:
Step one: Assess the usability of your translated site. Pay international college students in pizza to review your site. What works here, might not work in Asia.
Step two: Analyze your competition
Step three: Research the Asian market
- China: 162 Million users, 45% female, 54% male and overwhelmingly 18-24 in age.
- Japan: 69.9 percent of the population online--89.1 million people. Women, 20-35, have 80 percent of the purchasing power.
- Korea: Incredible infrastructure, most are online.
Planning Phase:
For ecommerce, start with Japan then Korea and China. If you're branding, start with China then Korea then Japan. You start with China because they'll create a knock off otherwise.
In Japan, Yahoo has a much better reach (65 percent) with lower quality conversions.
In China, it's all about Baidu
In Korea, Naver and Yahoo have 80 to 85 percent of the marketshare. Google has 1.5 percent market share.
KEY: Make well-localized keywords, adcopy and landing pages! Do not use an unnatural mix of English and the local languages. Think of how funny but not trustworthy "Engrish" signs are.
Trust building and face to face interaction is HUGE. Putting a face on the brand is very important.
Monitor your local competition. You're starting at a disadvantage. Look for an edge.
Implementation Phase:
For Japan: Use Yahoo/Overture Japan and Google. Get a .jp domain (co.jp, or.jp, ne.jp). Hosting there is good too. Include contact info. Be international but Japanese.
For China: Start with Google through their interface. For Baidu, They have a minimum implementation fee of $3-5000. WIRE prepayment of funds is the only way to pay. They only have Chinese speaking support. They have a tough validation process. Definitely get .cn (.com.cn if you can). You need to host in China. There are gateway issues otherwise.
Analytics-wise, Baidu and Yahoo provide no impression results. Google Analytics is available. On Baidu, the paid listings are mixed in with the organic and studies suggest that the users don't know the difference.
Korea: Make it complicated. Google and iPods do terribly in Korea because they aren't complicated enough. Get a .kr domain. If you want a North Korean domain, it's .kp but...good luck.
Andy Atkins-Krueger is up next to wrap everything up. Yay!
He offers a few mistranslations. Again, be careful how you do translations!
There's rapid growth all over the world. Don't underestimate Africa. Kenya is providing free broadband access.
Which markets should you enter? Do an analysis: Is it feasible, how competitive is it? What's the audience? And what's the market? If you look at those three, you can pick the more promising first.
Do your keyword research first, them build a glossary for the translators, THEN do the translation so that the keywords are built in.
Think about navigation issues for languages. Local companies for Arabic speaking countries switch the navigation to the right side because of how the language is read.
What do you do if there is no direct translation? Make sure that you're conveying the message even if you have to give up what your word is?
When do you run in English or the local language? If you're using English keywords, you can do a local language creative but NOT vice versa.
The long tail still applies outside of English speaking countries. From the shortest tails to the longest by language families: Romance, Scandinavia, English, Dutch/Germany, Portuguese. (also toward the end, French Canadians.)
You need local links. You NEED local links.
Google's new geolocation tool isn't really working yet in their experience.
The number of people who use the "Pages from" radio button depends by country and query. In some cases it might be VERY important to have that local ccTLD.
[Envision a cool slide of search engine market shares mapped by country in Europe. Google is everywhere.]
His theory is that social networks aren't going to go global with quite the same ease that search did. They don't translate as easily. Social sites tend to be locally based and not known outside their area.
Q&A
Will English become the global internet language for commerce?
Andy: He doesn't think that's going to be the case. There are more speakers of other languages than there are English. What happens more is that words get adopted with different meaning.
Thomas: China is going to be going in the opposite direction. The Web used to be mostly English, now they're creating their own content. People like interacting in their own language.
Better tools for keyword research internationally?
Pretty much they all agree that Google and Yahoo work best overall with a slight preference for Google.
Kim: For Europe, Google's sandbox is the best.
Michael: Asia, too.
If you're shipping internationally from Germany, would you recommend still having the .de domain or should you have a .com? What sort of links should you be targeting?
Thomas: If you're looking for people who already have interest in Germany, the .de makes more sense, I think. If you're trying to get people who aren't aware, try a .com. I don't think there is a 100 percent solution.
Andy: I'd be inclined to go with a .de domain because I think people associate the domain with the language. However you can't pick .de as English in Webmaster tools so maybe go with a .com instead.
We have a Bavaria-based client. We have a .de but we wonder if we shouldn't get a .eu?
Thomas: I'm not a big fan of .eu domains. I'd secure it but wouldn't use it and I'd stick with .com instead. It's just not popular enough yet.
Andy: "I wouldn't touch a .eu with a barge pole."
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in International, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization
Search and Blogging Reporters Forum
It’s time to talk search blogging with Andy Beal, Lee Odden, Michael McDonald and Rand Fishkin. I’m not going to lie. I’ve been waiting for this session for months. Let the heckling begin!
(But hey, where are the lady bloggers? Don’t be pretending you don’t know we exist! Me, Jane and Tamar are all sitting in the front row.)
Michael starts with blogs becoming a primary news source. It’s getting to be a big thing. Lee says blogs make it easy for journalists to subscribe to centers of influence to keep them up to date on their own terms instead of getting pitched to. It’s a great tool for businesses big and small.
Rand says he opened up his email this morning and saw an email from a reporter with Inc. Magazine asking him about the paid links session that happened this week. Rand was mentioned in a blog post about it and the reported wanted to follow up.
Andy says 52 percent of journalists read blogs to get story ideas. Andy says bloggers get to the news first and because we can share our opinions, we craft how the story goes.
Michael says at the same time the mainstream media will often discount blogs as a primary source for news. They listen to us but they don’t trust us. Andy says sometimes they don’t want their readership to know they’re getting their big stuff from bloggers. Lee says with over 7K journalists losing their jobs, a lot of them are a lot more progressive at leveraging technology than they used to be.
Michael says that when mainstream media talks about bloggers, they say that they make mistakes and that they never get the story right. But if you think about it, every newspaper has a corrections section that they hide in the back section of their paper. When bloggers make a mistake, they make the correct visible.
How can the audience take advantage of how blogging and traditional journalism intersect?
Lee: You want to market your site and gain thought leadership in a category. Leverage blogs as a platform to talk about what’s unique about you. Use it as a way to make their job easier to find industry experts. A lot of times you write a good blog post and a journalist will see it and ask you to write an op-ed as an extension of that. Use a blog as a place to point to. When you pitch to mainstream media, include a link to your blog.
Andy says journalists want to know what they’re getting into. They want to know how your CEO is going to look on camera. Put up a video of yourself speaking at a local conference to show the media that your boss isn’t going to be stuttering a lot and that they can handle themselves on camera.
[Andy takes a shot at Rand about why he’s on TechMeme all the time and Rand’s not. The audience “ooohs”. ] Truthfully, the reason Andy gets on TechMeme is because he posts about news. Rand is more of a discussion site with a community. He can write about what he did last weekend and get 100 comments.
How do people become A-list bloggers?
Lee says if you’re just starting out, find a really specific niche about something you’re fantastic about. Become known for that and then expand.
Andy says an industry is never saturated. Pick something you’re passionate about and you can make it work. Lee says there’s a formula for success. Interview other people, write content, present things in a way other people aren’t. There are a lot of ways to distinguish yourself.
Rand: Use your business. If you’re selling handbags, write about what celebrities are using your bags.
Search engine optimization blogs: How much of that is really reliable in terms of being fresh? Or are people keeping the good stuff for themselves?
Andy says Rand is really secretive about what he shares about his company. Heh.
Rand says if you’re talking about white hat practices or advanced social media techniques, 90 percent of it is out there and 10 percent is behind the curtain. Not everything is out there but you’ll find that in every industry.
Lee says it depends on the purpose of the blog. Some people are more liberal than others. The point of the blog is really important. Give away enough information to show expertise but don’t give away the farm.
Personally, Andy doesn’t hold anything back. Rand doesn’t seem to believe him. Andy says he can talk about things on a generic basis.
Optimizing your blog and getting it to rank in the search engines
Rand says blog CMS’ are really search engine optimization-friendly by nature. WordPress and Movable Type are both very friendly.
Andy agrees but says it’s possible to make them SEO friendly, but they don’t come like that out of the box. You have to work for it.
Is it possible to rank well if you’re not updating every day?
Rand says it’s possible. He’s seen blogs that do well even though they only publish every week or so. Todd Malicoat is the best example of this. Greg Boser is another one.
Michael says you don’t have to update your corporate blog every day. (Really? You don’t? I’m taking next week off!)
Andy says you have to take into consideration what you’re looking to get out of it. Are you looking to establish yourself as an expert or to make money?
Question & Answer
Lee did a post on Monday about PubCon. Can you talk about how effective that way?
Lee says he’s been playing around with tapping into communities. Lee thought his Why PubCon Rocks post was valuable. He pinged people and aggregated the responses into a single post. He got a lot of positive outside emails from people. He also got feedback from people saying it was spammy and blatantly promotional.
Rand had a similar problem. They did a post about a small event that some friends of their friends threw and people commented asking if it was a for-pay post.
What are the essential WP plugins?
Rand says to go to Bill Hartzer’s blog. There’s a list there.
Lee talks about the SEO plugin that Stephan Spencer created.
Andy says you just have to be aware of the posts.
Rand says they do testing and found that with all the search engines the first link that points to a blog post is the one that counts. What he means is that if Rand writes a post that links to the same page twice, the anchor text he uses in the first instance will count, not the second. (if you nofollow the top link, it’ll count for the second link.)
An audience member says that she was told if she puts a posting into more than one category that it would be perceived as Google by duplicate content?
Rand says blogs can definitely have major duplicate content problems. The content of every blog post is on your blog page and in the archives. You have to use a nofollow so that the permalink page ranks.
When you’ve got a corporate blog and it goes popular, do you feel like you have to create a personal blog to really be yourselves?
Andy says its goes both ways. Robert Scoble can do it. For Andy, Marketing Pilgrim is his business blog and he has AndyBeal.com to do all his personal blogging. He doesn’t think you have to follow that path but, if you don’t, you have to be careful about what users will tolerate.
Lee says you should plan for your blog to wildly successful. You have to set the framework for the blog and anticipate issues. Lee says to have multiple RSS feeds for your categories. This way people can get the cat posts if they want to. [Susan, can we do that? We need a Jack Jack category!]
SEOmoz has faced this a lot. Rebecca will write a lot of inner circle-type posts and people will leave angry comments. He also mentions that time Mystery Guest wrote a personal-type post and it got a bunch of thumbs downs and negative comments. Once you create an expectation and you don’t meet it, people get upset. People are there for the information.
Some of your readers don’t realize they can skip posts.
If you look at the Technorati Top 100 blogs, there’s a ton of people telling other bloggers how to be bloggers. They’re giving away awesome tips. If you do that you’ll get a lot of links and become people.
Andy says he hates that. It’s okay for Darren Rowse, but most people don’t know what they’re talking about. But people buy into it. He’d rather focus on delivering a great experience than pandering to what’s going to make him popular quickly.
What’s your take: RSS full text or partial text?
SEOmoz does full text. Danny Sullivan says to do partial text. Full text if you want more people to be aware of you. Partial text if you want more visitors.
How do niche blogs support themselves and create interest when there isn’t a blogosphere to do that for you?
Lee says to link out to other blogs and do stuff offline to support online efforts. Rand says to reach out to the big blogging industries and make your content appeal to them.
How important is adding multimedia?
SEOmoz has Whiteboard Friday every week. They get about 1,000-1,500 views every week. But then you look at the blog readership and they get 3,000 page views per post. People aren’t consuming video the way they’re consuming text. There are limitations. However, in terms of branding, it can be one of the best things you can do.
Andy says people keep asking him when he’ll be doing more Marketing Pilgrim Live videos.
Michael says video can be really, really complicated or really, really simple. It depends what you want to put into it.
What is Google going to do with the data they get from Google Reader?
Rand says that Matt would call it potentially noisy data because it’s easy to scam.
In terms of Universal, does it matter where you upload your videos to?
Absolutely. When Rand looks for video online, all he sees are YouTube videos.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, PubCon Las Vegas 2007
Brand Management
Last day, first session. I'm going to make this intro short because we're all anxious to get to the content. Here's the lineup. Speaking are Jessica L Bowman, Yahoo! Inc., Lauren Vaccarello, Forex Capital Markets LLC, Matt Tuens, CKMG Inc. Joe Laratro moderates.
Lauren Vaccarello is up first to discuss building, maintaining and defending your brand.
What is branding? It's what your company is associated with, it's your search results and who are you.
What's your story and why should I as a consumer care? People do I buy Jif because choosy moms choose Jif and that works for me.
Competitive research is one of the most important thing to do. You have to know who you're up against how they're telling their story.
Build your keyword list, find out who are your competitor, build a list of the 5-10 biggest competitors and learn what their stories are, discover the holes in their brand and use those to make yours better. SEObook as a good competitive research tool. Look at the social media stories, find out what stories are ranking well and selling. At the end of the day, no one is going to link to you if you're not compelling.
Once research is done, sit down and build your content. Tell your story.
Monitor your brand, learn the popular forms, blogs. Find out where your audience lives. No one can read every RSS feed, newsletter etc. So use Google Alerts to aggregate it for you. Follow not just your own brand but key terms, players and your competitors.
Defending your brand:
Respond to negative publicity in a timely way. Buy YourCompanySucks.com. Fight back. It's easier to get someone from 13 to 3 than it is to come from nowhere so empower your affiliates and partners. Create buzz and get things linked together. Push the hate sites down.
Never feed the forum trolls. If there is a valid, negative complaint on a forum, then have someone --just one person-- empowered to respond. Make sure you're not talking to them like you're the CEO and they're nothing. Talk to them as equals, listen to them and respond.
Empower your loyalists. In a crisis, don't pretend they don't know what's going on. Talk to them and let them do your defense as well. Back them up. They'll do your work for you in a lot of instances.
She notes at the end, if you're doing a presentation on brand management you should use branded slides. (She didn't.)
Matt Tuens is up next to explain this equation: Brand Management = Content Management
The importance of content has been discussed far and wide but very few people take full advantage of its power. The people who have done it well are awesome: Edmunds.com, About.com, Wikipedia.com.
Content:
- Extends brand coverage
- Drives your customers
- Delivers your messages
Brand management is communicating and maintaining the brand messages, strategic development of the brand to maximize its market value.
Content is crucial to brand management
Negative postings are HUGE opportunities, not just to defend your brand but to promote and extend your brand to audiences and demographics that you haven't reached before. You can put a face to your company that gives them that certain je ne said quoi about a brand that makes people like you. People like Apple because of the personal brand.
Increased perceived value leads to increased revenue and industry traction customer loyalty, and tremendous increased to the market value overall.
A significant and complete content strategy is crucial. Brand management is necessary in all aspects of the brand. All the words should be carefully chosen to portray your brand. Information is the
The brands that have the most information about an industry are usually the ones generating the most traffic. The good news is that you don't have to start from scratch. You can build on a long-term brand and take it to new audiences.
Content has four pronged value:
- Generate high quality organic traffic
- Establish trust with your visitor
- Maximize the monetization of each page
- Simultaneously each page of content is another opportunity to spread and reinforce your brand message and value.
Content is responsible for multiple levels of brand awareness. Search engines rank by information, bloggers and forums link to quality content, if you're writing articles then each article can rank for multiple terms and every one of those is an opportunity for you to extend and shape your brand.
Build your site to be informative and you'll also start to build a relationship with people, they'll trust your information and learn to rely on you as a resource. When you're improving all your landing pages with information, you're improving your Quality Score and conversions. That's instant ROI. The nice thing about content is that you only have to write it once but if it's good quality, it'll be evergreen and pay off for years.
He talks really fast.
Just how much content should you strive for? Really the way you want to be thinking is how can I make my site as usable as possible for people. How can I answer every single question they have? That's the approach that successful brands today are taking. Look at the long term value of that. Consider iVillage, as much as they're worth now, think about how much more they'll be worth in five years with all of that content.
If you were looking to buy something, wouldn't it be great if you stumbled across one site that had answers to every single question you had about that product? People don't have time to look at 25 sites, they just want one. That's what you want your site to be--why aren't you that company in your vertical.
The key is to diversify your content. You're going to want all sorts of content, some shorter facts articles for the people who are just looking for that, longer ones for people who need more depth, interviews with other experts so they know you're not in a bubble, authoritative articles from the CEO. With blogs, people feel like they're on the inside, like they're getting tips that other people aren't getting. He highly suggests getting into video.
Maintaining your brand--now that you're the best, you should go out and do the same on other sites. Don't just live on your site, go out, be on Facebook, on MySpace. Set up other sites and blogs from your employees outside of the corporate blog. Update often and be out there, in your face.
This leads in well to protecting your brand. If you go in and respond intelligently and caringly to a complaint then you can turn a negative into a positive. If I see someone posted something negative and the company actually goes out and respond to try to make things better, I have more respect for that brand and I'm even grateful because I feel like they're educating me.
And...he's done. Wow, there was a lot of information there to dig through.
Tony Wright is next. He's going to be getting all Sun Tzu on us with brand management and the Art of War. Awesome.
He says that it's a cliché but it works. It doesn't have the horrors of war but brand management does have its own horrors. As in war, winning goes to the prepared and many times, the goal is minimal damage--you don't want to blow everything up.
Know the battlefield: You have to know your brand. There are a number of ways to do that Google, Yahoo, SERPs, Social Media, even hiring reputation management services but you have to do it. If you're missing intelligence on what's going on, you're going to be hit by crisis.
Avoid the War: Obviously, the best way to get out of rep problems is by not getting into them in first. You want to keep your customers happy. Don't screw your ex-employees. Don't screw partners. Practice good business. Practice good customer service. And admit your wrongs when you're wrong. But through the proper channels. If it's one customer, deal with them individually. If it's a bigger problem, speak more broadly. [And don't speak to other people before you talk to your customers. They're going to be irritated if the press gets a statement before they do. --Susan]
Train your soldiers: Your employees should know how to deal with a crisis. Keep them in the know. If you don't tell them when there is a problem, they could get blindsided and end up saying something they shouldn't. Provide drills, discuss how your companies. Prepare for EVERY situation but also be prepared that you won't be prepared. He worked for American Airlines during 9/11. No one expected it but they had
Keep your Mercenaries Happy: Your affiliates are your mercenaries. Transparency is still key. You have to treat them with respect and equality. The guy who brings in the most should get the same respect as the least. Have policies for dealing with rogue affiliates so that you don't get them turning on you in the crisis. Get the button pusher (the one who can create meltdown--usually the lawyer) involved before something happens. If they come in after, there's going to be huge damages. Keep them informed but NOT in charge. Lawyers might save you legally but they're going to do huge brand damage. Cease and desists will end up on blogs. Listen to their advice but don't let them make the decisions. You want to use them as a last resort.
Know your friends and enemies: Monitor your ex-employees, especially the disgruntled ones.
He's got a 3 hour seminar on x-train.com on brand management
Jessica Bowman is up next as the in-house SEO for Yahoo.
She asks how many people are engaging in brand management already--a few hands go up and she's pleased by the number. She's less happy by the number who are now considering doing it now after this session--it's not a lot.
Brand management for search engines should maximize traffic and revenue for brand search terms while simultaneously hedging against negative content and competitors who are trying to rank for your brand.
Leverage all your properties to rank for your brand. Your main site is going to have two listings maximum in the search engine, don't leave the other 8 on the page to chance. Dominate the SERPs as much as possible. Use multiple properties to reach different kinds of audiences.
Coordinate your SEO/SEM campaigns. Make sure all your other marketing efforts are on the same page as well. One message, multiple forms.
Recognize threats from competitors, unfavorable reactions and develop proactive and reactive strategies. Make sure that you stay on top of the tactics that people are using for unfavorable reactions. Hate sites are popular, forums, even recordings from customers that get posted on the Web.
Anything negative out there is a risk. Don’t think that just because it's not ranking yet doesn't mean that it won't. Someone on page three might end up on page one. Any Web savvy customer can rank for your brand and be a problem for you. Don’t just think that it's only your brand that's at risk. Your employees are going to affect your brand too. A photo of an employee with a caption describing her as rude could become a universal view of your company.
"You might be the only person in your company who can fully comprehend the rish that your company faces." Make sure that you bring it up when you see it. Identify threats, get legal involved (but not letting them make the first move), they will champion you.
Takeaways: Look at Brand Management in the SERPs holistically. It can make you money and it hedges against risk. Respond to issues but don't get sucked into online debates. Be proactive. Squat on your brand before unofficial squatters do--not just domains but social media sites too so that you don't have to be reactive in that area.
Q&A
For Lauren: what companies do you use for helping your research?
Lauren: SEObook's competitive research tool and Technorati.
What other sites do you get involved in to protect your brand?
Tony: Pligg, Mix, Flickr, YouTube, a ton of places out there show up in the SERPs. Get involved.
How would you go about getting something off page one?
Jessica: You want favorable things to rank above it. Link to things that support you: news articles, blogs, etc.
Tony: Like matt said, create new content. Contact the people and see if you can't help and fix it. If it's four years old, they might not care anymore. Just talk to them. Have everyone in your company create a Linked In profile; they rank well for company names.
Matt: Use third party sites, create new profiles. Also contact other people who might have something good to day.
Any horror stories?
Jessica: I know of one. A famous blogger had a bad experience, he'd paid for premium service and when he needed it, it wasn't there for him. The company didn't do anything about it and they didn't respond. Then other bloggers picked it up and it became a huge thing.
Tony: I had a former client; they were a start up, got a bunch of press. They had a disgruntled ex-employee post horrible things on a blog and they mandated that everyone in the company respond with something positive. At the same time--every comment was one minute apart. That company isn't in business anymore. They went overboard on a good idea.
Matt: If you have a problem and successfully resolve it, put it on your site. Get the word out that you made a mistake and fixed it. People love when you admit that you're human and you make mistakes because we all make mistakes. Don't just ignore it.
How do you combat bad reviews on things like TripAdvisor?
Tony: Try providing incentives to loyalists. If someone has a great stay, offer them 10 percent off on their next stay if they'll post a review. You can't beat TripAdvisor, they rank for everything. Remember that people expect to see a couple bad reviews. It's when you're in great volume.
Jessica: If the company won't provide the incentives, show up with your laptop and your Verizon card and ask people to review their stay right there.
[An audience member warns against a bunch of reviews coming from the same IP address, someone else suggests posting them through AOL instead. Hee.]
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media
Effective Action Based Copywriting
Seated at the Effective Action-Based Copywriting session with speakers Brain Clark (I will admit to being a huge Brian fangirl), Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen. I’ll be sure to take extra careful notes today to prove to Jill that not all liveblogging is inaccurate. ;)
Heather says today is going to be a different format. It’s not going to be a lot of talking heads. This session is going to be very PowerPoint light. Most of the session will be Q&A and site reviews.
Heather is not only acting as moderator, she’s also our first speaker!
Content is not only important for search engine purposes, it’s also a must for users. The way you write your copy can make the difference between getting a so-so sale or having tremendous success.
Five Six Tips:
- Learning to love key phrases: Optimize for three related key phrase per page. Chances are you’re going to be focused on one key phrase per page with tertiary terms thrown in their, as well. That’s okay. It’s only natural for one term to be your money maker. How you focus your key phrases depends on the page type (Home, product, resource). As you get into the inner pages of your site, your key phrases will become more specific. Don’t fear key phrase overlap, it’s a good thing!
- Work with your word count: Words are wonderful because that’s what the search engines are indexing. It’s good to be able to provide information. Heather recommends using about 250 words per page. If it’s a product page, you can write less. If it’s an ecommerce site, you can write more. Heather doesn’t believe in key phrase density. As long as you can look at a page and see that it’s relevant for those phrases, you’re cool.
Power key phrase positions: Put keywords in the main body text copy, top to bottom, headlines and sub headlines, and in your hyperlinks.
- Pen tantalizing titles: The first opportunity for conversions is the on the SERP. When writing titles, think clickability, create unique titles for every page, include each page’s main key phrases, don’t necessarily target your company name (that’s something to test for clickthrough) and write each title to be between 50-75 characters. Heather says that key phrase rich content + Key phrase rich titles = search engine love.
- Mastering Google snippet trick: Place your benefit statements near your main key phrases. When Google takes your snippet for the SERP, the description will boost your benefits. It lets you control the description as much as you can. Google won’t always use the description that you wrote. This gives you another opportunity to make sure your benefits are front and center.
- Leverage lots of content opportunities: Content is not just your blog or product copy. It can be reviews. It’s anything you want to write about a product or service. Help people find you in a lot of different places. It helps to brand you as an expert.
- Remember what search engine optimization copywriting is and isn’t: Adding key phrases into content isn’t that big of a thing. Search engine optimization copywriting is the same as direct response copywriting. It makes arguments so convincing that customers can’t help but want to buy the product being advertised. It’s not the Easy Bake Oven approach where you throw in some key phrases and call it good. You write for you customers, not the search engines.
Jill Whalen is next.
Jill says this topic is near and dear to her heart. Back in 1994-6 people were talking about how to put the words on the page and trying to hide them. She used to see that all the time. She says she was the first person really talking about getting words on the page in a way that helps users.
What is Good Content?
It’s the regular pages on your site. It’s not mysterious. Every page should have content. It should speak to your target audience and describe what you do. It solves problems, answers questions and provides information. People are at your Web site because they’re looking for something, especially if they came from a search engine.
Content that is king is content that is written for your users, while keeping the search engines in mind. It’s all about balance, much like the see-saw image Jill’s is touting on her PowerPoint slide.
Good content starts with keyword research. You have to find the key words that people are using to try and find a site like yours. Base your copywriting around those words. Answer their search on your Web page.
Choose Keyword Phrases
For the home page, use the more general terms. The ones that describe your whole business in general. These are the more competitive phrases. As you get deeper into the site, use the more specific terms.
The engines have to be able to see your content. You don’t want to hide it. Avoid graphic headlines, all Flash or all graphic sites, and using technical programming that traps spiders. She uses the Web site for her son’s school as an example of how pretty, all graphical sites are nice, but Google can’t see them.
Search engine optimization writing tips:
- Be descriptive: Not “our product” or “our service”. Use keyword phrases like “our Toronto event planning services”.
- Edit your current text: Find generic words and replace them with descriptive ones.
- Don’t optimize for single words: Expand into phrases. “Marketing’ can become “Internet marketing strategy”, “Marketing your business”, “opt-in email marketing”, etc.
- Fix your Site: You don’t need to add useless articles. Write clearly and descriptively to target your audience.
Content is indeed king. It brings highly targeted visitors that want exactly what your offer and converts them into customers.
Copyblogger’s Brian Clark is next.
Brian says he’s a lot like us. He builds Web sites. He’s not a professional copywriter.
How can you create a piece of content that attracts links and encourages conversions? No one is going to link to your sales page because a sales pitch has very little independent value.
Attention and Persuasion Checklist
- Independent Value: What can you offer customers to make yourself valuable? He mentions How To or tutorial content. This approach allows you to naturally create a story that leads to the action you want people to take.
- Headline and Hook: The headline is the title. The hook is the angle. It’s the beginning of what kind of story you’re going to tell. You have to create content that engages people, gets their attention and gets them to read. If you’re on the first page of Google, you’re competing with 9 people. There has to be more there than just repeating keywords.
- Scannable Content: People run their eyes right down a page. You need to chunk up your content in ways that allows you to communication your story even if people aren’t ready every word.
- What’s the Story: Ties everything together.
Example: You want to sell a product or something to that relates to people who want to sell ebooks. You find out your most relevant keywords are [create ebook] or [sell ebook]. He uses an article about ebooks that he wrote for Copyblogger as the example.
It’s hard to get people’s attention. He breaks down his content to show how it uses the Attention and Persuasion checklist he outlined above.
Selling Tips from Aristotle
- Opening: You’re trying to structure a story that has an opening statement. This is where your hook is.
- Empathy: You have to show people you understand their pain.
- Solution: The solution appears. You tell people what it takes to solve the problem.
- Action: You present your call to action.
It’s very hard to get people to link to something that’s selling something else. But it can be done. You just have to show that the value is there. It’s almost helpful to think of yourself as an affiliate marketer even if you’re selling your own stuff. It keeps your from touting your own horn. Look at is as a pre-sale.
Heather stresses the importance of the emotional component. You have to find people’s emotional button. Know what they like about working with you and what they don’t like about working with you.
Heather: When writing content, don’t be a bad date. If you’re always talking about yourself and telling people that you’re the best and the greatest, you’re going to push people away. Back it up with facts that show your expertise.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEOToolSet, Search Engine Optimization
Keynote Coffee Chat with Matt Cutts
Coffee? Did someone say coffee? Why is the Starbucks closed downstairs? I bet Bruce paid them to close it. Or maybe it was Susan. Yeah, it was probably Susan.
I love that the PubCon people are trying to wake us up by blasting “Shiny Happy People” and the theme song to Ferris Bueller. Fine, it’s maybe working. [taps foot] Hee, Matt Cutts is on stage all out dancing to Smashmouth. People have lost their minds in Vegas.
Getting back on topic, we’re seated at yet another Matt Cutts on the hot seat keynote. Poor Matt. How many times can you put one man on the hot seat? Does he even have any secrets left? I guess we’ll find out.
Brett gets things started by offering up some housekeeping stuff. Yey for sponsors. Yey for exhibitors. Yey, yey, yey.
Okay, onto Matt.
Matt says he’s glad to be here and that he’ll be here all day and all day tomorrow. Matt loves how friendly and open PubCon is. True that.
This all question and answer, so let’s do it! [I’m going to try and lump questions together so it’s easier for readers to follow. Hope that helps – Lisa]
Matt and Google-specific Questions
How did you get to Google? What’s a typical day for you look like?
He was in grad school studying computer graphics and needed to take some outside classes. He ended up taking two Information and Library Science classes and they were about search engines. This was 1999 and the class was about Northern Light. He sent the Northern Lights people an email and asked how much they paid. They said they don’t pay unless they’re in active negotiations with someone. They called Matt back a few days later and asked if he’d like be in active negotiations. He said yes.
Matt says that you never know what the day is going to be like when you walk in. You have a plan. You come in with priorities. But then you get in and PC World or John Dvorak has written about malware on .cn domains and you have to investigate it and figure out what’s going on. It’s exciting because you never know what’s going to happen and its fun. It’s the sort of thing where you can sit around a pool table and say, how do I fix this problem? What’s going to be the next big thing in search?
What’s your employee number? There’s a rumor that it’s 69.
Matt says that’s not true. It’s in the first hundred.
Linking/Paid Links Questions
A million years ago we learned that links are important but you can’t link to a “bad neighborhood”. How does someone identify what that is?
In general, what he likes to say is use your gut. People have pretty good intuition. This is a very smart group of webmasters and SEOs. If someone writes you out of the blue and asks for a link exchange, you have to realize that that’s kind of strange. Especially if they can’t even spell your name.
Trading links is a natural thing around the Web. Natural reciprocal links do happen but if 50 percent of your links are coming from link exchanges it begins to looks like you’re trying to build and artificial reputation and bump up the amount of links you don’t have. For times when you don’t know if you can trust a link, use a nofollow. If you think a site is a great site, link right to it. If you’re worried, just use a nofollow.
Speaking of links, there’s been a lot of talk about paid links. What’s the deal?
A few years ago there was another search engine called Overture where you would go to that engine and typed in a term and the SERP was sorted by money, not relevance. If you typed in Harvard, you’d get test prep companies, not Harvard University. It showed him that you don’t want a search engine that’s sorted by pocketbook. Recently they did a blog post where there gave a timeline of what they’ve been saying for years about paid links. Then, he put up some screen shots on his personal blog. People don’t realize that if you’re just trying to buy a review, the people taking that money aren’t the most interested in relevance. The danger of paid links is that it biases the search results and gives users something they don’t want. They’ve tried to be pretty clear about their policy. He talks about the article Andy Greenberg did about paid links and how all the search engines agreed it was something they were working on and trying to eliminate. This is not a Google-only issue. All the search engines have agreed.
Going back to paid links, where’s the link between linking to manipulate the algorithm and just selling advertising?
A lot of people make the argument that Google sells paid links, but the fact is those links don’t pass PageRank. He takes the feedback, though.
What’s advertising and what’s paid links? If you’re getting paid for the link and it passes PageRank (manipulates search engines) then that’s bad. There are paid links and then there are paid links that affect search engines. He wants to have a clean index and accurate search results. He has no problem advocating things that would cost Google money, like pushing MFA sites off the Web.
International Issues
Google recently purchased a domain in China G.cn. Can you elaborate?
If you’re in China and you speak Chinese, even remembering the word Google is a little hard. They wanted to make it really easy for Chinese users to remember. They have a Google.cn and G.cn and a Google.com and they all work. If you go to Google.com, you get the main search results. He wishes they could go to G.com.
Back to the China affair and the backlinks. Looking at competitors, we’ve seen that they often buy a lot of links that come from specific regions of the world. So essentially, the very good link popularity they have is because they have backlinks from high PR pages located in Russia and China. Have you thought about investigating this?
It’s a good question. (He’s looking around trying to find the person he’s talked to about this.)
If you look at the .cn domains, a lot of the spam is not in Chinese, it’s in English. And the backlinks are all from Japan. That starts to look a little suspicious. Sometimes you see spammers and they have backlinks from every TLD. At the same time, sometimes you do get cross TLD backlinks. Google will try and continue to do a better job. He agrees that looking at that kind of signal is important. There’s always more Google could do.
Advertising Questions
Google makes a lot of money on the content networks, but more than half of park domains are typo squatted names. What are Google’s feelings about trying to block these people or shutting them down?
Matt puts in his disclaimer that he’s not an expert in this area and this is his personal opinion.
It’s weird because even the simple approaches can be difficult. Suppose you want to say I’m going to stop all typo squatting and eliminate all domains that are one letter away. But then you’d have a problem with BBC and ABC.
Back in the day, domain related advertising could get really skuzzy, it’s not like that today. In a lot of ways, Google legitimized domain related advertising. He’s really heartened to see that SER has written a few articles about how you can email Google and ask your ad representative not to put you on any domain related advertising. They’ve always talked about features that Google is trialing where you don’t have to show up for domain related advertising. In his ideal world it would be easy to opt-out of things like that and he says Google is moving in that direction. They listen to feedback.
Technical & General Search Engine Optimization Questions
If I’m on a VPS, I want to know if I have a neighbor doing some shady stuff. Can that poison the entire subnet?
Matt says not to worry about that. The spammers are smart. If you are domain one and there are 24,000 porn domains and there’s nobody else nearby, that’s odd. In general, it can’t hurt your reputation. The only time they look at IP subnets is if people are hitting them with a lot of queries.
In terms of 301 redirects, if I have a site and I redirect a certain amount of files, is there a rule about when I can redirect those again to maintain the juice?
Matt says he’s never been asked that before. To the best of his knowledge, there’s no limit. You can do a 301 and change it 2 weeks later and you’ll be totally fine. He doesn’t recommend doing a chain of redirects that at some point the bot gets tired and has to lay down. If you have five 301s chained in a row, that’s a little high and things may get lost in the cue. At that point, update the original 301 and make it point to the final location.
When you’re changing servers, is there any issue in regards to how long you should keep the old server up?
Lower your DNS time to live to five minutes. What that means is whenever somebody does a search they’ll have to recheck the IP address every five minutes. Bring up the site on the new IP address, switch the DNS to the new IP, keep both the old and the new live and as soon as you see Googlebot fetching to the new IP address, you’re completely fine in Google. Google tries to be smart about how it crawls and how many fetches it needs.
Regarding scraping: We’re seeing a massive increase of our blog content being copied and being put on AdSense Web sites. Is there a better way to report that to Google?
The answer is we listen to feedback. The general way to do it is to do a general spam report. Tamar Weinberg has done a good walkthrough telling you how to report spam. When you see a spammer with AdSense, click on Ads by Google. At the bottom of the page you’ll give a give feedback to Google link. It brings up a form that allows you to report different types of bad content. Click on the one that says this is a bad publisher.
What’s your take on directories? Is it worthwhile to pay to get in?
Matt has been going back and forth on this over at the Google Webmaster blog with a guy named Jeffrey.
As an SEO, you need to access the quality of a directory. There are absolutely interesting directories out there. You have to find out what the value is. Is there spam in it? Your SEO spidey sense has to help you find the good neighborhoods. Look at the directory, See how long its been around. Look at the sites in it. That will tell you if it’s worthwhile or not.
Don’t people just to submit to directories because they know Google values the links for certain ones?
Matt says no.
Let’s say I have multiple domains and I’m going to repent my ways. What’s the best way to tell you that? What if I want to buy some of those other domains with misspellings and not look like a spammer/
Do a 301 to your one brand site. If you’re only trying to buy a domain because these domains have some preexisting links, then Google doesn’t necessarily want you to get that credit for free. People should earn links.
Are there times where a 302 is interpreted as a 301?
They try to pick the prettiest domain they can. Do you want to go to RedSox.com or mlb.com/teams/redsox?
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 10:58 AM | Comments (1)
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December 5, 2007
SEO and Big Search
Okay, so now that lunch is over (I almost had food. It was exciting!) we're going to be hearing about how the search engines tackle SEO for their own sites. Moderator Joseph Morin jumps right in by introducing the panellists: Melanie Mitchell for AOL, Dave Roth for Yahoo! Inc, and Maile Ohye, for Google.
Melanie Mitchell is up first.
When you're talking about SEO it's not about the engine itself, it's how you manage it across the whole huge site. How do you optimize when the corporate culture and the site aren't aligned. You can't succeed without the support of the corporate culture particularly in the case of a large site?
How you do align the organization and how do you build a strategy that works? More importantly, it's about how you go about making a search marketing program work at a company without losing your mind.
AOL has over 100 million pages. It's an organizational and corporate challenge. You have to organize and track properly.
She brought the discipline a search marketing to the disorganization of the company. When she came to AOL in 2004, they were very disorganized. They weren't designed for search because they didn't have to be. They were a walled garden so they didn't have to think about search bots. They weren't set up to be search friendly, everything was disparate and in its own kingdom. So she had to come up with an SEO plan to change everything.
She got the CEO on board but the people who were supposed to impelement it just ignored it. She didn't allow them to ignore her however and when up the ladder to sell it to everyone. "Vive le roi". Roi in this case not being King but in fact ROI.
They had the information to show that the content available to succeed, they just didn't yet have the way to put the content out there in a way that would pull people in. [I have no idea what her slide means.] Their titles were poor, their linking wasn't good and their structure wouldn't support it.
They laid out the data in a way that showed the gaps between AOL and its competition in order to show why Yahoo was doing better than they were. They had to show that even thought they both had 10 results, it was about the quality of those results.
Here's the potential. Put it up front and sell the value. What is the revenue mix? What are the estimated page views and visits of the respective leaders in the space? How much would we make if we were as good as the leader?
That'll sell.
Once the brass bought it, she told them that they needed to back her up one this and make it clear that Search engine optimization was important to the company. Everyone in the company needed to understand that their part of the company had to work with the SEO plan. It needed to be in the company DNA, not just responsible of the "SEO Team".
AOL took SEO very seriously. They started rolling it out last year by putting it in the top 3 goals for the company. When people go out onto the web, they go to search, so AOL had to be there.
Where do you start?
- Create core search team -- SMEs: these are the ones who are the experts on SEO. They keep up on the industry and keep everyone on course and up to par. Systems architects: Design the silos Tech lead: Translates for the engineers. Front Liners: SEO leads, silo leaders. Program Managers and Project Managers: Someone's got to keep the project on track. Program is the overseer, projects are the detail watchers.
- Set priorities, goals and incentives -- Puts the teeth in your plan. Make things urgent or things will just slide by the wayside. AOL made search referals their metrics. Goal: 20-30 percent from search. They tied it into bonuses as incentives.
- Train, Train, Train -- They created SEO certification. Take the test, pass the test, get certified. Fail the test, time to find a new job.
- Set Internal Standards -- Know what is important SEO wise, set up best practices and define who is doing what.
- Provide Tools -- People can't do their jobs without tools. Free tools if you need them. Internal wiki to share resources, keep a running FAQ.
- Measure and Track (and adjust) - pages indexed (by percent), search referrals (is it growing month over month and by comparison to industry growth), User behavior (abandonment, return visits, page consumption)
Creating a dashboard--- search referrals, progress, how everything is going. Where are the weaknesses and strengths? Search referrals/overall visits, page views/visit
Final thoughts: You can't ignore search. You have to have executive buy in. If there is no accountability, there will be no success. Be transparent with your data. Be willing to do what it takes, even if it means being the Wicked Witch of the West instead of the Good Witch of the North.
Dave Roth comes up next to tell us all about Yahoo. His middle name is not Lee. Sad times.
He says that there's a new breed of exec out there. There weren't VPs of search and SEO and SEM at the big companies. It says a lot about the industry and its future.
Disclaimer: the numbers in the presentation are made up.
Search Marketing at Yahoo!
Why do they do it? They've been the biggest site for a long time. They do it the same reasons everyone else does. Traffic, revenue. It's the best way to get customers. They do SEO or SEM for just about every one of their properties. They do it among a number of business models -- subscription, ad supported, transactional...just about everything but straight e-tail. They use a lifetime value method. What the present value? What's the acceptable profit margin? It's a little different for SEO, you need to make some assumptions but it still works pretty well.
If you can't attach value to it, you can't get it done.
Central groups provide training, standards, best practices, reporting. Other teams do well. They don't get special treatment from yahoo search (aw.) but they do get limited data. They use tools like Yahoo! Buzz. And they work with YSearch for internal tools to try to make tools to better spider.
Quantifying Opportunity -- Their team says "If you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist."
- Establish predictive models for SEO traffic. The goal is to get the executives to say yes.
- Built virtual SEO 'clickspace' for properties.
- Compare 'virtual' performance against SEO competitors.
- Identify gaps - Find out who is beating you where.
- Attach value - use life time value to get to the 'Show me the money' space.
- Rinse and Repeat.
Infusing SEO into the Process -- Phase one Concept: competitor research, strategies for attracting traffic and links, partner and affiliate SEO possibilities
Phase two Wireframes: site architecture considerations, URL structure internal linking structure planning, SEMantic setup and benchmarking
Phase three Design: Wording& Use of keywords, AJAX Flash and CSS, contention distribution and layout
Etc
Each stage of product development has its own steps so that any team working at any stage knows what they have to do in order to serve SEO functions.
Organizing around SEO -- SEO program manager SEO product development manager SEO property managers SEO producers (keeps an eye on what's published) and SEO analysts (keeps an eye on the value).
Measuring Success -- they use an SEO scorecard internally to track how successful they are. They built an index based on the same methodology as the predictive model and track it over time. They refine it as necessary.
Again, there is an executive dashboard that gives at a glance data so that you can see things in an easily consumed way.
They're doing basic SEO on a very large scale.
Quantify it and value it. Train everyone, hold people accountable. Attach it to people's personal revenue -- bonus or salary or pay. Infuse SEO into the development process.
Maile Ohye is up next for Google. She's a support engineer for webmaster central. Aw, she's all like speech class practiced. And she's....not talking about SEO at Google. She's totally off topic. Hrm, I'll take notes but just be warned that she's not going to actually say anything particularly helpful.
SEO how not to's: Common mistakes [the following is a pitch for Webmaster Central. If you read this blog and aren't using it, hi, welcome to the internet.]
Translate content without modifying site structure to international sites:
--using IP delivery can lead to German content getting shown on an English site.
Using the same URL to serving Googlebot different content from users = cloaking and that's against their guidelines.
Search ranking can be influenced by information relating to URL's language and location.
Users/browsers have language preference to respect. Just because someone lives in Germany doesn't mean they don't want English content.
When designing for IP delivery, keep the content largely the same. Make the dynamic portion small. If the change is substantial, create a separate URL.
Webmaster Tools just came out with a geolocation tool. You can use that.
[This is so not at all what this session is supposed to be about. Just FYI, Google, if you want to hit these points, awesome. Do it some place appropriate next time, please.]
Flash/AJAX are pretty but not properly crawled. (See previous session notes regarding designing with Flash.)
Opportunities in video/book/local/etc -- submit your content at Webmaster Central to all the verticals.
They're using video to reach people (this is almost on topic!). Matt's videos are a viral way to reach out to users and webmasters.
Fundamental SEO truths -- They design for accessibility and speed and easy navigation.
She shows the 'what if Google actually did SEO on their site' presentation. And yeah, not pretty.
For Google, their SEO is delivering great service. [Their other SEO strategy? HAVING 60 PERCENT MARKET SHARE. No wonder they don't have an SEO person. It's good to be the king.]
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 5/07 at 2:43 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in AOL, Branding, Design, Google, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo
Hosting Issues and SEO/SEM
Back from lunch and back in action. We’re at the Hosting Issues and SEO/SEM session with panelists Derek Vaughan, Scott Henderson and Ben Fisher. Jake Baillie will be acting as moderator.
Derek is walking around the audience saying hi and shaking hands with everyone because there are only about 10 people in the room. Hee.
Up first is Derek Vaughan and he thanks everyone for coming. You’re welcome, Derek! My eyes are burning. I think it’s from all the smoke in the casino. I’ve actually been forced to put on my glasses.
Search engine optimization vs. search engine marketing:
Search engine optimization is way harder. With Pay Per Click, you can just buy your way in. SEO is exclusive and creates a brand halo. The processes are similar, but search engine optimization is longer lasting and more impactful.
Tools for generating keyword lists: WordTracker, Yahoo! Search Suggestions, Google’s Keyword Tool, Google Trends, and your competitors Meta tags. Derek really likes Google Trends. You can type in a set of words separated by a comma and they will show you the relative ranking at Google of those words. It showed him that “hosting” is a higher traffic word than “Web hosting”.
Where do searchers look on the Google results page?
He talks about the eye tracking study dong by Enquiro and Did It and the idea of the golden triangle. Shows you’re better off ranking organically then paid.
Tips for registering domains:
- Use the search phrase in the domain name. Dashes are better than underscores.
- Register a “.com” domain name. Survey says that .com TLDs rule the SERPs.
- Register a domain name that is age.
- Register the domain for 10 years.
He disagrees with the keynote this morning where Richard said that .tv TLDs and .com TLDs are equal. The latter tend to rank better because they’re aged.
Types of Web sites and Search Engine Optimization
He’s a big fan of using more traditional sites with traditional HTML. Any site that gives you complete creative control over the architecture of the site. That’s what you need. The challenge with blogs and forums is that they set you into a rigid architecture that is hard to depart from. They’re developed to be cookie cutter. You can still rank well; it just makes your life more difficult.
Derek says you can rank well using a dedicated server or a shared account, though he recommends using a dedicated server. Avoid anything that has to do with free hosting.
Other Hosting Considerations:
Static IP: He likes them, others don’t.
Spreading the hosting around (networks)
Downtime can ruin your rankings
Bad host reputation can hurt
High host rank may indicate search engine optimization knowledge.
Your key to search engine optimization via hosting is anonymity. He quotes Jim Boykin’s Link Buying presentation yesterday where all he said was “Stay under the radar and don’t piss off Google.” He said that’s the most insightful thing he’s heard at the conference.
If there is a network, whether you own it or someone else owns it, you want anonymity. Search engines are looking at your network to see what’s going on and they’re studying links. If they’re seeing that all the links are registered to the same person and they’re all on the same IP block, they’re likely to just discount those links. Better would be for everyone to be on different IP blocks, with different registrants and different Web hosts. Derek says he’s not advocating black hat, but if you have two valid content sites that are excellent, he doesn’t see why you shouldn’t link between them just because they’re owned by the same person.
Scott Hendison is next. He has 1,000+ domains.
He says to ask yourself, “What do you need for your business and your Web hosting?” Consider business requirements, developer recommendations and budgetary requirements.
True or False?
Using a separate IP address for each domain means you’ll rank better: FALSE. If you do a search for competitive phrases, you’ll find that a lot of the top results were all shared IPs, not static. Scott doesn’t think having a static IP is a huge factor.
Shared hosting hurts your search engine visibility: FALSE.
If you have multiple sites, you must have multiple Web hosts: FALSE. Unless you’re doing a lot of crosslinking and trying to hide something.
If you ARE trying to hide something, use private domain registration to hide your identity: FALSE. He says it’s a big red flag to the search engines.
There’s no cheap and easy way to keep site backups and ensure uptime: FALSE
Server response time can affect your search engine rankings: TRUE. Test your own server and if you see a return of 60ms or more, you may have a problem.
Windows Hosting is fine: TRUE – With ISAPI Rewrite. Your host should install.
Things to remember:
- Listen to your developers and get what they need
- Shared hosting and shared IPs can be find on responsive servers
- If there’s a reason to hide, then you’ll have to be pretty clever, because they’re going to find you!
Jake Baillie is up.
Jake’s presentation is called Dynamic Web sites Suck. He’s being sarcastic. He likes dynamic Web sites. I feel better now that that’s been clarified.
The URL is all powerful. Jake says that the mod_rewrite changed a whole generation of SEOs. So did LSD. Um, Jake! With mod_rewrite there is no requirement that a URL has to correspond to a physical file server location. We can make the URL say whatever we want and the server will do what you tell it to do.
Things you can do through mod_rewrite:
- Keyword specific toll-free numbers: Jake says this is good for “old people” who get confused easily. Hee.
- Multivariate content and price testing
- Delivering appropriate content to clients
- Subdomain aliasing as a form of user-friendly input.
- Mining search data.
Jake shows examples of some companies using mod_rewrite for testing purposes. These companies are serving content transparently in different ways to different devices. Jake says to be mindful of your user agents.
Your destiny lies under the hood. You have to mine search results. What mod_rewrite can do is a lot of times if you can’t find a page, you can tell mod_rewrite to pipe the click into an intelligence script. (I hope you all know what that means; I don’t.)
If you can test for it, you can act upon it. Mod_rewrite can give you the following information about your visitors:
Type of browser
Time of day
Length of visits
Number of visits
Moods
Jake talks about content lifting and scraping. He said it’s a common problem that sucks. He lists the nicknames he calls competitors. They’re all very mature, I assure you. He then spent 10-15 minutes explaining how to be a jerk and do bad things to people who are doing bad things to you. For maturity’s sake, I’m going to skip that part. No offense, Jake.
Ben is going to sum things up for us. He doesn’t have a presentation because he didn’t know he was speaking until yesterday. He says that you can use keyword-rich subdomains to help increase rankings. The reason mainly is because subdomains are treated as separate domains. He agrees with Scott that you don’t need separate IPs in order to rank well.
Another thing about dynamic sites: If you’re going to be looking for a CMS, look for one that has a separate type of navigation for every section of your site. You want to be able to customize things; this way even though it’s running off a template system, you can make changes and make it look natural. If your navigation is always the same, it’s very easy for any kind of algorithm to discount blocks of similar text.
That ends his nuggets.
Jake jumps back in and opens it up to the panelists to talk about their experiences with shared vs. dedicated IPs. What are the pros and cons of each?
Jack starts off saying that the con of shared IPs is that you have no control over who you’re sharing it with. There’s always the rumor of guilt by association. Ben says that whenever he looks at his dedicated server company, they ask once a month for a new IP. When they get it, they do a background check to see if it has ever been blacklisted. They run the IP through several different tools to see if it’s clean.
The con of a dedicated IP is the cost. If it costs a few extra dollars and you have a thousand domains, it can add up.
Scott uses a dedicated IP for competitive intelligence reasons. It gives you anonymity.
If you could recommend a host, who would it be?
Derek: HostMySite.com (his company)
Scott: [It sounded like Scott said “Webbers” but I can’t find a hosting company by that name. Can anyone help me out? – Lisa] Weberz.com (Thanks for clearing that up, Scott!)
Jake: JohnCompanies
Ben: HostMySite.com or Rackspace
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/07 at 2:41 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Search Engine Optimization
SEO Design and Organic Site Structure
Ah, finally a session I know something about. Let's get going.
Todd Friesen is our fearless moderator this time around. He's just a little hungover. But the panel looks ready. Here they are. Mark Jackson, President / CEO, VIZION Interactive, Inc., Lyndsay Walker, WestJet / Lyndseo, Paul Bruemmer, Red Door Interactive, Alan K'necht, K'nechtology Inc.
Mark Jackson is first. He begins with the Golden Rule of site building. You want the site to succeed on all levels.
He's covering Keyword Research, competitive analysis and content.
Keyword Research: Most people don’t do it well. They start with the just most popular term. You need to learn your audience. Target words that matter to them. Don’t' get your words from the CEO, get them from your users. Once you've developed that list, then go back and decide relevancy. Put it in a spreadsheet so you can figure out what your words really are.
Know who you are and be real. Don't go after words that you don't have a shot in hell of getting. Know what it will take to compete and then build for success. Make sure that you have content to support your rankings.
Organize yourself and develop a process.
Search engine friendly design does not mean that the sites have to be ugly.
- Avoid JavaScript, Flash, Image navigations.
- Allow space for content
- Use images reasonably
- Include "alt" and "title" attributes in images [Uh, I disagree on the Title attribute. Worthless. But definitely use your alt attributes smartly.]
- Static URLs are preferred
Have a reason for what you're doing.
He's showing TripAdvisor as a good example. Um, there are a lot of links on the page. Can't we get some nice tasty regular content? Heh, someone in the audience agrees.
[black screen] = what your site looks like to the engines.
He just saw a site that was built to be SE friendly....with a flash intro and entirely an image on the homepage. Nice.
Write content that is engaging to readn and conducive to you SEO strategy.
Use opportunies for internal linking (too often people get obessed with external links and forget internal-
Avoid marketing fluff. Call it what it really is not what your marketing team "brands" it to be.
Blogs are great for the long tail words.
Do your research before you get into your design and make sure you're using it. Design for usability and SEO, almost in that order.
Todd says Nike is a perfect example. They rank great for footware and not running shoes because they never use the word.
Alan K'necht wishes us all a Happy Chanukah. Yay!
He's talking about linear design. You've done your information architecture now you're ready to put it into code. Preferably XHTML with CSS. He talks about the problem of tables. [see the table trick for how we solved that in the 'bad old days'.]
SEO a linear approach. You place the candles on from right to left and light them left to right on a menorah.
Search engines care about words, words, words. They also care bout the position of the words. They value things at the top more than the bottom. That means you should be putting words first.
Separate the content from the presentation. Organize content logically. Use CSS to position graphics logically. Give the search engines the words in the code first then use CSS to show the users a pretty page.
Newspapers use a linear presentation. Headlines come first. They contain important words. Where are their links? At the end, when you're done with the article and ready to move on.
Important elements much come first. Ensure these elements contain your targeted keyword phrases.
Put graphical non-essential items lower down in the code.
Stick JavaScript at the end or off page and just include it.
Use Firefox with the developer plugin. Turn off CSS and look at results. How far down does the engine have to go before it gets to the content. You should get to content FIRST. Not navigation first. Decide what's important. What should be seen first?
Make your site "search engine usable."
Lyndsay Walker is next. WestJet is a low cost Canadian airline. 70 percent of their bookings come through the Web site.
Design for your visitors, she says. Remember what you want them to do on your site. Are you focused on brand, on content? What is going to make it for them? You need to have a clear navigation for users and for search engines.
AVOID FLASH. She doesn't think that can be said enough. There's so much you can do with XHTML and style sheets that can mimic flash. The same can be said of images vs text. Nothing is going to beat fresh content.
Divs are your friend.
Use your stats. You have so much data. Learn from it, discover what people are looking for, where they're going.
When you're designing, test everything in Firefox. If you design for IE, it'll look great and then it'll fail in Firefox. Design for the compliant browser and then tweak for IE. It's weird and non-standard. Keep in mind mobile design as well. It's not an IE world anymore.
Landing pages are key. You can design a fantastic home page but that's not all of your content. People will land on the site in other places--
Must haves:
- Title tag - has to be unique
- Meta Description - shows in the SERPs. Make it worth it and unique to the page. Target it to the specifics of the page.
- Header tags - Put the emphasis on the most important words
- Strong code to content ratio - are you all about
- Externalize JavaScript and CSS - you don’t need it on the page
- DIVs vs Table - Structure with DIVs!
- Don't forget to use your keywords - your content is useless if it doesn't use your keywords
- Links - don’t forget internal linking.
She shows a couple of pages from her sites to demonstrate what she's been talking about. Lots of emphasis on text.
Don't publish before you're ready. Have a test site. Your test pages shouldn't be on your live site before they're done.
...she's going to sing a song. Apparently they sing it on WestJet flights. Nice!
Paul Bruemmer's turn.
He gives a little bit of his background but that's all on his bio so you can check it out there.
They've had success with Flash pockets. They can use Flash in pockets and still rank organically.
His organic site structure:
- Server configuration - pain points: robots.txt, redirects, 404s, internal broken links, duplicate content, dedicated IP address, Alias URL, transfer of keywords
- Web Site Architecture -- pay attention to inclusion ratio, directory structure and naming conventions, internal linking structure, dynamic and persistent URLs, Site Maps (HTML), privacy statement [He's got a graphic here for how you silo. Somewhere around here, I have a similar one, I'll see if I can't find it.]
- Content Generation -- you have to be equal to or better than your competitors [wow, I'm having déjà vu]. Think about content promotion while you're generating it.
- Content Optimization -- See Lyndsay's must haves.
- Natural Link Profile -- Make sure that your links look natural. You're in a neighborhood and you want to be in a good one.
Your deep link profile is your ratio of your links to subpages in comparison to your links to homepages overall.
Additional considerations: Feeds, Paid search, Local Search/Mobile search. Staff - hire good people and make sure they're all on board. Training = Quick Wins. Training your staff, obviously great. When you train your clients, their accounts will do better. [As you know, we TOTALLY agree.]
Q&A
Just completed a redesign. We have a form on every page, is that bad duplicate content and what can we do if it is?
[My answer: It's not probably but iFrame it.]
Lyndsay: Probably not a problem, put it lower in the code if you can.
Multiple URLs due to tracking--how do you avoid duplicate content?
[301 if you need the link pop. Meta Robots or Robots.txt out if you don't.]
Todd: You're getting links to duplicate content, then you need to 301 everything to one canonical page.
Paul: If you can even find all those pages. You might have to just write it off.
Todd: You should know who your partners are and be able to manage the redirects.
Lots of duplicate content questions. That session was yesterday, dudes.
Alan: You can build a brand as an aggregator and get links that way without original content.
Mobile search--do the mobile browsers render top to bottom?
Alan: Blackberry doesn't ready your style sheets so yeah, it just gives it to you linearly. [Boy do I know it.] Linear design gives you benefits in mobile.
Paul: AOL.com and Weather.com both have very good mobile.domainname.com sites.
Localization of domain extensions. Value of sub domains
You can specify in Google which countries you're targeting.
Subdomains are good for getting more SERP real estate.
How much has theming helped your site?
Whoo, Paul and the question asker both give props to Bruce for being their mentors in siloing. You may have noticed that we have just a couple articles on that subject.
What's spam?
Lyndsay: Ask yourself, is it good for the user? At the end of the day, that's the point.
Todd: The internet is not an equal opportunity world. TripAdvisor can get away with more. BMW can. There's no absolute line.
Why don't Flash sites work and why do people build them?
Alan: You can charge more to build Flash sites.
Paul: There are ways to use Flash appropriately.
Todd: Nike is one of the top 25 brands in the world. You can't convince them that their site shouldn't be in Flash. It's who they want to be. If you're going full Flash, have unique URLs. Cloak if you're doing full Flash. Serve the exact same content to engines and cloak the other.
Alan: But if you're not a Nike, you have a problem. They rank on links. Have a Flash alternative. If they have Flash, give them one thing. If not give them the alternative.
Paul: Look at Forecast Earth on weather.com if you're planning on doing videos. They do a great job and they're ranking.
Alan: Make sure you're using all the fields for your videos -- title, meta data.
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 5/07 at 12:41 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Design, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization
Local Search Optimization
In case you didn’t get enough local search information from the last session, it’s time for another one. This time we’re here with David Klein, Joe Laratro, John Coronella, and Jennifer Black. Melanie Mitchell, whom I’ve never met but Simon Heseltine talks about all the time, is moderating.
Looks like we’re jumping right into things. David Klein is first.
David says he’s a chiropractor posing as an SEO. He also says it’s okay to laugh and heckle during his presentation. Apparently, we’re all looking very serious. It’s probably because half the room is hung over and the other half is asleep. What?
A brick and mortar business is a business with walls and customers inside. David says he asked current and potential customers if they searched for his company, what would they search for? In his case, the main term was [San Diego chiropractic]. Using that information, what they did was create a really simple site with lots and lots of text. Google likes sites that tell a story. They talked about chiropractic and put up lots of success stories. He says he likes to make sites look beautiful. Um, if that’s the case, someone needs to tell David that 1997 called and they want their site design back. He says they made an 80 page cartoon book about chiropractic. (I wish David would stop making me spell chiropractic. It breaks my rhythm.)
David’s goal was to be number one for [san diego chiropractic]. To do well, you need lots of links that are relevant to your page. Dave got links to his site by doing lots of things, including posting a letter from the University of California Dan Diego (testiominal), the cartoon linkbait they did at WordCamp (which is one of Matt Cutts’ favorite how-to-get-links example as of late), they gave the firefighters chiropractic services during the recent San Diego fires and brought them food, he posted a photo of Dave and Matt Cutts on his blog, and they set up a site for the SEO Poker tournament they’re throwing tomorrow night.
What can YOU do to get links?
If you have a hardware story you could donate hammers to build homes for the homeless and then take photos and write about it on your site.
If you have a florist you could donate flowers to the funeral of someone well loved and write about it on your site.
If you have famous customers, you can take photos and write about them on your site (with permission).
Do those examples may anyone else feel kind of sleazy or is it just me? Donate to the homeless because you care about other people and have a soul, not to get links.
Jennifer Black is next. I can’t stop coughing. Melanie is going to ask me to leave, I know it.
“Local search is actually the process whereby users seek information online with the intent of making an offline transaction” – Greg Sterling
Where do you start?
You have a listing. Actually, you should have lots of listings. All the major engines already have your business listed. Most off self-service tools allow you to verify and update your information in about 5 minutes. There are many data sources. Make sure your listing is correct and complete in all of them. Doing this will assist you in building backlinks (which will help with search engine optimization) and allow you to be found by local prospects.
Customers will see your profile page on the local search engine. Your profile should include hours, service area, payment methods, photos, logos and more. You can have someone do all the work for you for a small monthly/annual fee. Submit once and get distributed across the Internet. Again, she restates that this is great for search engine optimization.
If you’re not ready for PPC, you can try paid subscription listings. It works under a flat fee and there’s no risk of spending too much money on PPC. She calls it’s a simple and painless way to start.
She mentions Pay Per Call where a customer 800 number is assigned to your business and then you pay whenever a customer calls you. If you’re going to do this, make sure you answer the phone when it rings! Heh.
She talks about PPC, testing different landing creatives and using a good analytics program to track what’s going on. I’m not sure how this relates to local search, but it’s good advice nonetheless.
Welcome, Joe Laratro.
Ooo, Joe is coming into the crowd. He’s shaking things up and asking for some audience participation. Please don’t call on me. Please don’t call on me.
He provides proof of the long tail search. He pulls up some data on his friend’s Web site which shows that users visited the site by querying 272,022 different keywords. This is important because in local search there are so many keywords that you can target. If you’re a plumber, you take your basic keywords and then figure out your geotargeted keywords. Think about how people refer to your specific area. Once you have those, can focus on specific keywords, geocentric + broad keywords, and geocentric + specific keywords.
Joe asks the audience what they doing for a living so he can give them content ideas.
An audience member says she does real estate in Thousand Oaks, California, which is in Ventura Country (and right near the BC offices. Shout out!). He talks about creating testimonials where people will naturally use the keywords she’s looking for. You can also then go in and edit those testimonials to make them more keyword-robust. Joe asks the audience member how many pages her site has. It has 48. Joe says that’s nice, but what if your site was 140 pages? Then it would be 5 times as nice?
Form pages don’t work. You can’t target 50 different states by using a form page and then only changing that one word. You need more content. Think geo and writing. Your clients aren’t going to think geo when writing testimonials, but you are.
Track your success. Review your analytics. Look for increases in the amount of keyword and search referrals. Is there traffic going to the new pages you’ve created? Make sure Google has indexed your new content. Stay committed to adding content. You can’t just add 5 pages a year. A 10 page brochure Web site will not rank well for lots of content. The low hanging fruit today (the long tail) may not be there in five years. Do it now, don’t waste any time.
John is up.
John says he asked to go last and now everyone has already said everything he was going to say. He can’t find his presentation on the desktop cause they’re all named “PubCon”. Heh.
Local search is interesting because it’s a way to take a couple of big databases and get a lot of keywords from them. But there are some tricks and it’s hard to do. As a local merchant, if you understand how the local search sites put together their sites, it helps you use them to your advantage.
Local Search is Dead. The tactic of taking geographic terms and expanding your keyword set has been around for ever. It generates lots of ‘long tail’ queries. There’s a low barrier to entry. The challenge is not to be ‘just another search result within another search result’.
He does a search for [plumbers in Medford, Mass]. You see big portal sites, the IYPs, the small truly local directories, the industry verticals and a lot of other crap.
When you’re marketing your local business, content is key. You want to be in Google’s Universal Search. Make sure your information is updated.
[He’s flipping through his slides really fast and not reading them. I’m getting nauseous.]
How do you build your local search?
When most people build their sites, they start with the state pages, then they drill down into city pages, and after those they have their 15 million business listings/profile pages. This dilutes your PageRank and makes it really easy for people to take over your results.
What you want to do is optimize your site, get into all the data providers and then optimize those listings.
Own your own SERPs and your town. Insert yourself into the local listings and optimize. Provide them content for your business. Buy/Send them links and rank you.
What? I have no idea what just happened. Okay, it’s lunch time.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/07 at 12:32 PM | Comments (7)
See more entries in PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Search Engine Optimization
Domain Names and Trademark Legal Issues
First session! Joe Laratro is moderating this session with speakers John W. Dozier, Jr., Esq., Dozier Internet Law, P.C. and Clarke Walton, Walton Law Firm. Thank heavens for that coffee because I'd be in trouble otherwise. When it comes to legal stuff, my brain doesn't compute. But hey, it follows nicely on the keynote, right? Right. Stephen Sturgeon got snowed in and couldn't make it.
Clarke Walton starts us off because it's his hometown. He's going to be sharing some basics about internet law and then going over a case study.
Three things to get from this presentation:
- Differences between UDRP and ACPA.
- Register your trademark and stay away from the trademarks of others.
- You can't hide -- Domain privacy services won't protect you.
UDRP is the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. It was enacted in 1999 and was created by ICANN to help resolve domain name disputes. It's a binding form of arbitration. Less formal. Benefits: fast (30-60 days), works well internationally, has a fixed cost-- filing fee is less than 1500 and the attorney fees are 2500-5000. Downside: all you get back it the domain name, no damages or fees.
ACPA is the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protect Act. Also from 1999, it's part of copyright law. It's federal court, very formal. Benefits: Get domain name, recover damages (up to 100000 per domain name), recover court costs and attorney fees. Allows for temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions to protect the domain. Downsides: takes long and is much more expensive.
Three likely outcomes with ACPA: Settlements (80-90 percent of the time), Default Judgement (10-20 percent) and a verdict at trial (less then 1 percent of the time.)
He goes into the case study on PartnerWeekly to recover PartnersWeekly (note the S). I'll hit the highlights: You need to have something to prove trademark. File early so that you have something to prove if you need to.
Step one: Cease and Desist letters. It's cheap and fairly quick.
Step two: Choose between UDRP and ACPA. They went ACPA for the temporary restraining order protection and the chance to recover damages.
Step three: File for restraining order, temporary injunctions.
Step four: Serve the defendant with the suit. This can be difficult for slippery people. If all else fails, you can take out a print advertisement in the classified section in order to serve the summons. (Takes five weeks of publication)
Step five: Ask for what you want out of it.
Took 6 months from start to finish. Be aware that other domain names can be at risk as assets in a judgment.
John Dozier Jr is next. He says that if you use the UDRP again a big company and you win, you're probably going to find yourself in court. Awesome.
His first helps people protect their domain portfolios. He's going to give ideas on monetizing other trademarks. Um. He mentions that it's risky and some people might not be comfortable with it.
When you acquire a domain name that is the trademark of a company, it doesn't mean you can't use that domain. Unless they're famous (Coca-Cola), they only have rights in their industry. Caesar's Palace might not be able to stop you from opening a non-gambling/hotel/entertainment related business.
You can't lose a UDRP or lawsuit if you have a legitimate interest in the domain name. So savvy domainers grab a close but not exact name to a trademark and then look at ways of establishing rights to it. After long enough, you can establish a common law trademark. The shorter version is the registration of a trademark but it still takes a long time. You can get your trademark in a state trademark or international trademark. State trademarks can take less than 30 days. Once it's registered, you can go to the search engines and ask them to protect it from bidding.
Build your business up for a while before you go head to head with a trademark holder.
AdSense on a parked domain names--you don't choose the ads so your close to someone else's trademark might show their competitors. If you've established rights to that name, you have a strong argument that your parked site isn't infringing.
The third exception is that you can protect domain names under the freedom of speech part of the constitution. Instead of monetizing it, you can use it to voice an opinion about a company or set up a forum. Depending on the arbitrator (UDRP), you could win or lose, depending on how they interpret free speech. Why do this? At some point the owner of the close trademark is going to want your site. Hopefully you can come to a mutual beneficial solution.
International issues: Who gets precedence? Where do you file? What happens if something is trademarked in another country but not the one you filed for a trademark in?
Final point: Demand letters you'd like to think are the first step to dealing with it. When you send a demand letter to someone, you're inviting that person to take some steps so that you'll never get the domain name. You're giving them an early warning. They'll transfer it away to someone else--you can't prove bad faith on the new owner so you'll never win. He doesn't suggest that you not send cease and desists but he does say that his firm doesn't usually send them. [Has anyone else seen the Legally Blonde musical? I've got one of the songs in my head now. Lisa, stop making that face.]
Joe wants to know which side each represents:
Clarke: Defense cases are more fun but he does about half and half.
John: We represent more domainers than businesses (more defense.)
Is time relative if a domainer sets up a domain before a business registers their trademark
Clarke: yes. Let's say someone registers Zizu.com. (he picked it because he figured no one had it. Guess he's not a World Cup fan.) Later you want to start this business Zizu. After you build up the business, you want the domain but the law says, no, you can't have it.
John: You see it in mergers a lot. So people buy both domains and then once the merger goes through, they're a new business and someone else has the domains.
Should you be looking for someone to register Zizu.net so you can prevent it?
Clarke: Trademark rights are the first user in commerce. If they're already using it or have an intent to use filing, it's too late. (Adsense counts as commerce.) You can only protect it for the class of goods and services that you're using it in.
John: If you buy a domain name and someone else launches a business, you're a lucky guy. They can't get your domain name. There's also something called trademark infringement. You might own the rights to the domain but they can still sue you for trademark infringement.
Clarke: Let's say you're going to use Zizu.com for apparel and Zizu.net starts doing apparel first, you can't use .com for apparel or their trademark will be infringed even if you owned Zizu.com first. You can still use Zizu.com for something else.
Do we file the suit in our city or where the domainer might be?
Clarke: Depends on the case. I got jurisdiction because it was an active web site but if it's passive you might have to go to them. If they're not in the US, it might make more sense to file UDRP proceeding.
John: Some grant jurisdiction on a tort. Other states don't.
Trademarked 1997 in Arizona, someone else filed in Federal after him. is he in trouble?
Clarke: I think state trademarks are worthless. Not worth the paper they're printed on. They don't go through any examination. In Federal, so long as you've been using it longer, you can file a petition to cancel their registration because you've established common law rights.
Is there a difference from Google's standpoint on state vs federal trademarks?
John: as of last week, no, they don't. They might now that they've heard this.
Clarke: Google does pay attention to state registration. They'll listen to a common law arguments too. I think they're going in the direction of Federal trademarks. (Gets that per a speech from Google's general counsel last year.)
John: Google doesn't understand how complicated it is yet.
What about TrademarkedNameSucks.com?
Clarke: Totally protected in the US. Don't monetize. If it's just a gripe site, you're okay.
John: If you can prove economic motivation, you might not get free speech. Economic motivation could be a refund even. 90% of gripe sites aren't legitimate. They have economic motive.
Clarke: Adsense on the site? You definitely have a problem.
Can personal names be trademarks?
Clarke: They can, it's hard but they can. All the same rules apply if it does happen.
John: Yes, you can buy people's names. California has very very broad protections on this, you have to be careful. But Springsteen lost his case in the 1990s.
What if your name is more generic like ChairFinders.com?
Clarke: Trademarks have different levels of strength. Fanciful are the strongest. Generic are the weakest. Descriptive and suggestive like Chairfinders are in the middle and harder to protect. Depends how much you've put into the brand.
John: You might think it's fanciful here in the US but it might be a word in another language and you'll never know it. Be careful of that.
What's the registrar's role?
John: the best are going to stay out of any situations that are disputable.
(from the audience, moniker.com: Registrars are not supposed to play judge or jury. We're supposed to follow protocol and procedure. We put disputed names that we've been notified on in a special category. If there's illegal activity and spam, then we can do something.)
Is it either or with UDRP or ACPA?
Clarke: You can appeal UDRP with a federal
Hotels.com?
Clarke: Not trademarked. They're never going to get it.
if they had?
Clarke:
John: what you're really asking is how close can you get to a trademark without a problem? No one knows really. You just know it when you see it. Let's assume Hotels.com got it. Could you get Hotelsss? Maybe not. Hotelsxr.com? Maybe.
Do the judges understand the nuances of internet law?
Clarke: In Nevada, they really do because of the casinos. But it depends on what jurisdiction you're in.
John: The judges can handle the law, it depends on understanding the facts. So they turn to their internet savvy first year law clerks. Be careful where you're bringing your lawsuit.
I published my book on my Web site and then I took it down later. Someone else has it up with someone else's name
Clarke: Sounds like a copyright problem. The best solution is probably a DMCA takedown notice. Section 5.12F.
Basic tips? Should we register misspellings?
John: There are articles on our Web site. Misspellings, also all possible spellings of your company names, dashes, underscores. Then all your negatives YourCompanySucks, etc.
Clarke: Check your log files and buy the domain names that match how people are finding you. Especially misspellings. Also .com, .net, .org.
John: I think you should go deeper. Used to be .biz and .info were spammer TLDs but not so much anymore.
Can a third party buy a domain name that was established BEFORE it became someone else's trademark and have that protection?
Basically they agree that they can if it's done properly.
Clarke: Bad faith could apply to the third party.
John: I think there's an argument that equity could be built up and transferred.
(There is a lady behind me who is WAY excited by this question. She's practically at 'Preach it, brother!' stage.)
Can you sue again if you've gone to court once and lost? (as per Springsteen)
John and Clarke both think Bruce Springsteen could sue because his first case was a UDRP proceeding.
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 5/07 at 12:14 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Branding, Design, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization
Local and Mobile Search
Hi all! I know Susan was in charge of recapping this morning’s keynote with Richard Rosenblatt, but can I just reiterate how awesome that Carson Daly video was? Because it really was totally, totally awesome. For a second it was like I was 14 years old again and watching TRL. I miss my boy bands.
I wish you were all here. If you were I would tell you the story about how I had to talk Susan out of buying an $81 brush in the Wynn gift shop this morning. I swear, for a smart girl…
Anyway, I’m kicking off Day 2 at the Local and Mobile Search panel with moderator Detlev Johnson and speakers Gregory Markel, Alex Porter, Dan Perry, Brian Gil and Eswar Priyadarshan. Oh, how I hope I never have to spell that name again. And also, if memory servers, Gregory Markel is a super speedy talker. Let’s hope I can keep up.
Speaking of my buddy Greg Markel, he’s up first. And he’s shouting. Oh no. Why are we yelling? Stop it! Susan!
Local Mobile Search is a very cute but nascent marketing channel. We are in the early days and we’re all about to see a big change. [cue dramatic music]
Today, mobile search is the GPS device that finds the nearest pizza place. It’s a call to Google or TellMe to order pizza. It’s a mobile browser-based request for “pizza 93065’. It’s a Yahoo! Mobile local “send to phone” request. It’s a Google Maps “pizza” request on an iPhone. It’s a mobile carrier/device Ad Network that knows where you are and serves you appropriate ads and offers. It’s the upcoming Google Phone OS (Android).
But wait, there’s more and it rhymes with “Moogle”!
There is Google Maps with My Location. Whether or not your handheld device has GPS, they’ll be able to locate you and help you find things that are near you (like my car? Can they tell me where I parked my car after a long day of shopping). You can do this without first typing in your starting location.
[Gregory shows a Google-created video explaining how Google My Location works. Suddenly it’s an infomercial! Sweet.]
Gregory calls this a major event because one of the gorillas in the space has addressed user pain in having to take multiple steps to get a result in local search. It’s also taking away pain of the advertisers because you can bet this will soon be monetized with targeted ads.
Why the slow adoption?
Both US Internet consumers and advertisers are slow to embrace local mobile search thus far. What’s the hang up? Well, there is slow process download speeds, tiny screens, awkward processes with often disappointing results, and low volume for mobile advertisers in most cases.
Gregory asks how many people have used local mobile search in the last week? (a handful) Month? (about the same.) How do we make this a better experience for people?
The change agents to speed adoption:
Consumer:
GPS: Remove steps/work in typing/searching
WAP must die.
Increased data speeds: 3G/Wifi/imax
Larger screens/True Web/Better visuals/integrated technology
Free phones & service (ad supported)
MID Adoption Intel Moorestown/Wimax
Advertisers:
Ease of campaign inclusion/tracking
More granular targeting
Successful case studies
What’s the outlook for local mobile search?
- Project 900 million global users by 2011
- $920 million revenue in 2011
- 55 mil US mobile search users by 2001
- Major advertiser migration led by Travel/Entertainment/Adult
- Physical retailers/bars/restaurants will be able to broadcast promotions to those opted in based on proximity.
- “Free”- ad supported mobile phone service.
Marketers should stay awake and involved. There are current early adopter opportunities by keyword, category and advertisers. Stay vigilant. We’re nearing a tipping point. A few more iPhone-like events and technologies over the next 24 months and its Gold Rush time.
Alex Porter is up and says we’re going to talk about what’s going to happen with local search in regards to the search engines.
Local search usage is on the rise. Companies need to take advantage of map listings to reach customers actively searching for their business. Map listings are used to power search engines, Internet yellow pages, review sites, mobile searches and in-car navigation results.
- 63 percent of Internet users performed a local search online in July of 2006.
- Users made 808 million local/Internet yellow page queries.
- 82 percent of IYP and local search users make contact after viewing a business local advertisement.
- 47 percent of local searchers visited a local merchant as a result of search behavior.
He shows some screenshots for local search examples. We see a shot of the Yahoo SERP for when you type in [pizza Denver, CO]. We see the map shortcut. The same search on Google gives users a large local result, including a map and reviews. The Superpages result isn’t impressive. The Live result is basically a giant map.
Where is the data coming from for Local Map listings?
Alex says that the physical phone books that we use to prop kids on (hee) are being shipped overseas and personnel are data entering each business location (address, phone number, etc). It’s then going to the 3 main data providers that push this information everywhere. It’s basic information, not 100 percent accurate, no keywords or categories, no enhancements.
How do you make sure your information is accurate?
Directly submit to each engine for a free basic listing. Utilize submission services to submit multiple properties.
- For Yahoo’s Map Listings: You can get information in within 24 hours but you have to do it manually. Allows you to enter in all your basic information. You have to manually update each location. Okay, if you have 5 locations, not good if you have 5,000.
- Google: There are two options – Postcard Option and Bulk Upload Option. You send a Postcard in with information and then in a few weeks Google sends you your Pin. Enter it online and in a few weeks (hopefully) your listing goes live. He found that the Bulk Option works the best for getting up in a timely manner but the information isn’t as robust.
- MSN: Also running a Postcard system.
- Superpages: Has Bulk Upload option.
To calculate your ROI, utilize call tracking, employ trackable URLS and implement tracking coupons (Google only). However, realize that these listings are most conducive for consumers to pick up the phone or get in the car. Therefore, ROI is not directly measurable.
The great thing about submitting to all these engines is that it allows you to receive multiple listing exposure through map and organic listings. [Yes, it helps brand you as an expert, while also pushing your competition off the page! – Lisa]
Dan Perry is up! He works for Cars.com and sends me funny emails sometimes. We like Dan.
The mobile opportunity has helped Dan to extend the Cars.com brand, deliver the best of Cars.com content and functionality optimized for the mobile environment, and develop an advertising channel for future growth.
They did a soft mobile launch in April and began promoting it on the home page of Cars.com in May. He says that traffic has increased significantly – they’re up to 1.5 million page views per month.
He shows some screenshot of Cars.com’s mobile product. They’ve added advertising and there are about 8 different avenues or channels that users can go down. They present the stuff that users would find most valuable. There are no drop downs because they’re a pain for users to navigate. It’s much easier for users just to “thumb down” the page.
They found that there are two categories of people searching:
1. On the lot: Late stage shoppers looking at car listings, used car values, dealer location and the payment calculator.
2. On the train: Early stage shoppers looking for reviews, their blog, photos, top ten lists, etc.
They’re presenting a unified brand on all channels with consistently used URLs. They’ve optimized the channel for any device and have streamlined the content.
Delivering on Local Search
Zip code based search provides access to more than 2 million local listings with videos. Users can sort hundreds of makes and mobiles by price, mileage and year.
Manufacturers are hungry for opportunities to reach in-market shoppers in the mobile environment.
Dan says to make it valuable. If you were in the mobile environment, would you think your mobile content adds value? Use drop downs sparingly. Consider the different types of users. Consider different types of users and added sophistication. Continually tweak.
Welcome Eswar. He says there will be a quiz on how to spell his last name later. Heh, notice how I left it out. ;)
Why Get Mobile?
245 million US mobile subscribers.
41 percent of subscribers use mobile data services
Rich devices are on the march
Google, Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone all throwing tech & Huge $$ at smashing mobile content barriers. Eswar says to get going on mobile now!
Lessons Learned: What doesn’t work?
- Squishing Web site into a lowest common denominator experience.
- Assuming that the big wired page/site will work on a full-browser phone.
- Providing a mobile only URL.
- Minimal content with a few headlines and stories
- US-centric view of devices and network capabilities
- Static sites
Lessons Learned: What does work?
- Adapt and create content for the mobile audience.
- Tailor content to device capabilities. Take advantage of rich media where possible.
- Keep content fresh.
- Integrate display and text ads above and below the fold.
- Target ads by device and demographics
- Implement both carrier and portal SEO mechanisms
The GetMobile Solution
GetMobile is a self-service portal where advertisers and publishers of all shapes and sizes are empowered to build a premier mobile Web presence.
Publishers can build a mobile site from their wire site URL. If they don’t have a wired site and they have a template or an RSS feed, they can build from that as well.
Once you enter your URL, they spider your site. They have special algorithms that can detect your page size and content. They figure out your logo, navigation, where your content is, etc. Once they’ve spidered you, they display your site for mobile and you can decide if you like the way it looks or not. You can see what it looks like on a variety of devices. They try to “start a conversation” with publishers. They show publishers what their site would look like and let them fix it up. You can set different background colors and styles. They “widget-tize” all your content.
After GetMobile picks your content, you have the option to select and replace various content sections. They call this process “juicing”.
Can You Mobilize My Blog RSS Feed?
Yes! You give them your blog URL, they’ll give you your site, and then you can use their editor to make it look the way you want. You can paginate your entries to make it easier for users to digest.
They also offer an ad landing page builder, yada, yada yada. Suddenly this session became a pitch for GetMobile.
Marketing Programs for your Mobile Site
- Implement a Mobile Redirector: Detect that a mobile device is accessing your WW site and redirect to your WAP site.
- Implement Mobile SEO techniques
- Implement text to WAP
- Implement Web to WAP
- Place your site across mobile SEM and Ad Networks.
Yahoo Local’s Brian Gil is up next.
He says we’re seeing a transformation in the mobile search industry. It’s now global, we’re thinking outside the PC, its opening up to UGC content, and it’s allowing for detailed information to be published by business owners. All of these things are happening in local and translating into mobile, as well.
Yahoo’s goal is to provide users with Instant Answers related to the entry point. You (marketers) can benefit from that by getting your business information correct. If you can do that, Yahoo can distribute it to its users. Each entry point is optimized directly but leverages the same set.
To optimize for local, encourage merchants to solicit customer feedback to nurture and manage their online reputation. Include details on special services and products carried.
He showcases the new Yahoo Local site, which I have to admit, I’ve used and it’s pretty awesome. The page is welcoming “kryssa21”. I wonder who that is.
When Yahoo determines the intent of a user to be local they’ll provide expanded information specific business and provide local business categories. They shortcuts have a very high click through rate.
They believe the mobile opportunity is tremendous. They think the mobile market is going to surpass the PC market. Most people are looking for maps and directions.
Mobile local search multiples the needs for strong fundamentals. Things like comprehensiveness, depth, accuracy and relevance. If you lose users once, you’ll lose them forever.
Users want results that matter, content that actually works, no more “click and wait” and easy access and navigation. Relevant results and instant answers specific to where they are. Hee, everyone used [pizza] for their screenshot examples. Pizza is delicious.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/07 at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Search Engine Optimization
Keynote Address by Richard Rosenblatt
Good morning, happy people! It's Wednesday and Lisa and I have acquired coffee. We skipped the dodgy mess that is the shuttle and therefore made it to Starbucks in front of the crowd. I have three shots of espresso in mine and believe me, I need every one of them.
We return again to the very cold exhibit hall/keynote area for this morning's keynote with Richard Rosenblatt of DemandMedia. It's 9 am but there is no sign of this show getting on the road. Are we in the right place? There are a lot of people here...oh, here we go. Okay.
Carson Daly is on the video screen right now, talking about how Richard screwed up a keynote at HostingCon. I...have no words. Why is Carson Daly on the screen? I guess he's a business partner for DemandMedia? His sister is Richard's assistant.
Ah, there's Richard. He says that Quinn Daly is actually in charge of all their PR and isn't, in fact, his assistant. That's reassuring.
"Welcome to PubCrawl 2007." There's a little bit of a skit with Richard joking about being at the wrong conference again before he brings up Justine of iJustine (previously seen in Lisa's recaps at BlogWorld). She's "lifecasting" this.
Richard jumps right in with a little lesson in building brand. Back in the early 1990s, it was about infrastructure. In the late 1990s, it was all about big money marketing (pets.com sock puppet). And now it's about Content. Big money on ad campaigns was how they used to do things. Content IS your marketing is the new message.
Richard says that we live in a Google search driven world. It used to be Google and YouTube but now, Google owns YouTube, so now everything is Google. Preach it, brother.
In the old days, if someone took your content you sued them. Now you let it go. There's a new model: set your content free. Justine has 15 web sites and her content is everywhere.
He talks so fast.
When you type iJustine into Google she's not just the first result, she's all 10 entries because she's made herself ubiquitous. She tapped into the long tail.
In the old days people couldn't afford to create or promote content but now there are so many ways to drive traffic with user generated content, wikis, social media.
Content is King again and where there is content there is Advertisers. The VCs are funding UGC applications like crazy. The key is that content is valuable in all forms because Google indexes it. And if even one person comes to you through Google instead of you having to buy them, y ou're ahead.
Most content is worthless. You need to produce or buy the RIGHT content.
Content is king...but only if users can find it.
[I feel like I'm being sold something. Like an infomercial.]
Search is becoming more granular. Queries are getting longer: one word, two words, three words. People are getting more specific in order to find what they want.
Google can find the long tail but it can't always fill it. If no one has produced USEFUL content, there's an opportunity there for you to create it. All the traditional media companies are focused on editorial content for the big topics. Politics, sports, careers. You should focus on the longer tail terms, the granular terms that will reach fewer people who are more passionate. Harness the power of users to create your content. Use video to drive traffic.
You can do this without money. Yes, 320 million dollars helps [Ya think?] but you can do it with no money.
Case Studies:
- eHow--added 100,000 new articles, traffic grew by 60% and they ended up with over 1,000,000 visitors.
- Expert Village-- over 20,000 videos on Youtube that are all how to videos. They suggest topics to filmmakers and then revenue share. No studio cost to them. The most popular video on ExpertVillage is a floating card trick explained. They've got the number one spot for several key terms. It paid for itself in 8 days.
- Airlines.net-- A good example of leveraging the passionate community. They have 80 volunteers to do most of the work and 3 full time staff. Otherwise it's 40000 photographers.
The old model is owning a generic domain name (pets.com). The new is that the search engines don't care where you are. Get a one or two word domain on a nontraditional domain. Target the wide body and the long tail.
People are buying domains faster than ever, everyone is offering domains to users. You have to get in there and be a part of that.
He goes into another case study of ChannelMe.TV. They optimized it for search. He's very big on search engine optimization. I swear this guy uses real facts to sell smoke.
Focus on the long tail. Select valuable content. Be mindful of the pitfalls of raw UGC leverage video and always keep SEO in mind.
They show a video of Justine flying in yesterday and getting to Pubcon. It took her 45 minutes to make it. It looks like it. But she's got a fanbase who will eat up anything. You can sell anything to some people. That's the power of the long tail.
Okay, done. Time to post and run to the next session. Later, party people.
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 5/07 at 9:50 AM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Branding, Google, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media
December 4, 2007
Analytics Tracking Performance – Beyond the Page View
Here we are, last session of the day. Let's make this one simple and clear, okay? Mostly because I can't manage anything else. My wrists are killing me and my battery is dying. Moderating this session is Joe Laratro. Speakers: John Marshall, of Market Motive and Scott Orth, of GTS Services will be teaching us all how to make the most of an analytics program. Steve O'Brien from Unica Corporation couldn’t make this session because he got stuck in London.
John Marshall begins. He's got a fantastic accent. He's going to be dissecting a single click. Hopefully, he'll do so very slowly. He founded ClickTracks and was constantly asked about accuracy and tracking and all sorts of questions with complex answers. This presentation is about answering those if he can.
He's making a few assumptions for the purposes of this presentation. This is going to be a fairly average scenario, it's a PPC ad with a functional Web site using a modern Web analytics tool. He's not covering ROI breakage--it's really complicated--or cookies and cookie deletion.
So to begin: We click the ad. The browser goes and GETs the page. At that point, Google counts the click. Then you get redirected to the destination URL of the site with the full URL.
Error can occur here--1% of the time the browser drops the requests.
When you go through a redirect, the referrer is supplied by the browser. When the server redirects and 301s the DNS lookup happens "almost certainly". It's already at Google so there doesn't have to be a DNS lookup there. Your site as the advertiser isn't stored in the browser, so they have to do a lookup. In one percent of the cases, the DNS fails. It relies on their ISP not your server.
The referrer stays the same when you go through a redirect. It's always the page the human being saw.
Site redirects again to hide tracking URLs. If it's a JavaScript redirect then 100% you've broken your tracking. If it's a different kind of redirect then there is a 1% browser drop failure.
Browser requests the landing page now. 5% cached pages error here leading to a total of about 8 to 10 % error from Google's tracked clicks.
(For JavaScript, it grabs the elements, does another DNS lookup, execute tracking JavaScript, another DNS lookup on the data collector. The total error rate for JavaScript is probably about 10% compared to Google's tracked clicks.)
Y'all, I understood about three words of that.
Scott Orth comes to my rescue with something less technical. Scott is starting with this statement: "Don't Assume." And he's got a video for us, yay! I don't have to blog that! (It's that TV commercial about...oh I'll just link it from YouTube later. Ameriquest commercial 1)
82 percent say that Web analytics is poorly understood and/or not used in their organization.
Behavior models matter. You need to think about all the steps. Understand how your site fits within the comsumer cycle. Don't assume that you know the steps because it's your site, you might be missing something. Doing a behavior model helps figure out how people are using the site.
Questions to ask: What are your Corporate Goals? How does your Web site support those goals? What are the Web site's goals? Are they aligned with the Corporate Goals?
He has several examples of how to align goals, I'll just pick one: Corporate goal is to increase revenue so the Web site goal would be to increase online sales.
KPI Assignment
Key Performance indicators break down goals into smaller organized targets. "KPIs are always rates, ratios, averages or percentages. Never raw numbers." Show things in relation.
KPI examples for the increased site revenue goal
- Increase search engine ranking/presence
- Increased visitors
- Increase conversion rates
If things fall apart, you can go back to those three things and figure out what went wrong.
(another video. I promise, I'll link these later. Ameriquest commercial 2)
Results may be different than they appear. Look at them by comparison. Is there a percent of increase or decline? What is it compared to this month, last month, etc.?
Do summary reports. Drill down into each KPI and figure out WHY things happened.
Analytics are important but knowing how to use them is more important. Use KPIs to track and report analytics.
(another video.)
I'm skipping Q&A, my battery is basically dead. Sorry, guys!
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 4/07 at 5:26 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Google, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events
Link Baiting – 96 Different Strategies
True story: on the flight in yesterday, I was joking with Bruce that this was just going to be a list of 96 items with follow up articles to come in the weeks and months ahead. I should know better than to say things like that. I have a feeling he thinks I meant it and I just promised to write a hundred new articles. Maybe I'll make Lisa do it...
Okay, so this session has the best summary ever so I'm going to repeat it here for you:
Link baiting is a topic that makes some people snicker when they hear it. However, the complexities and subtleties are fascinating. Did you know that there are 12 types of links? Moreover, there are eight types of link bait to get those 12 types of links? That means there are 96 different strategies to get links. This session will look at the eight and the 12.
Moderator Jake Baillie and I have moved next door for our next session. The above Eight and Twelve Equal Ninety Six will be explained by speakers: Todd Malicoat, Meta4creations, LLC; Andy Hagans, Text-Link-Ads; and Bill Hartzer,Marketnet, Inc.
Todd Malicoat
Hook combinations for successful linkbaiting.
Viral distribution for links is what we're talking about here. Apparently some guy named Be Real is the poster child for this. And now Todd is quoting Kid Rock. I’m SO CONFUSED.
He gives the obligatory nod to the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Self-perpetuating buzz to links to traffic... Some linkbait is going to bomb, you just have to accept that.
It's a 2 step process
1. Target the distribution channel, get peoples attention. You have to appeal to the Diggers or Reddit users, etc first.
2. Target (link markets) Webmasters, keep their attention
There are several distribution channels available to you: blogs, email, social media, other sites, and of course traditional media. Use them all.
Nine hooks mentioned in the summary are: News hook, Contrary hook, Attack hook, Resource hook, Humor hook, Ego hook, Incentive hook, Picture/video hook, and Sex hook. Use them wisely. Combining hooks is the one two punch. You have to get your message out there and then deliver on what you promise. Have the webmaster mentality in mind when you're creating the content.
As a great example of the Ego + Resource hook, see Michael Gray's Local search interviews. Another example is picture sites (aka work wasters) = Humor hook plus Picture hook plus resource hook. Things like I can has cheeseburger. Editorials= contrary + news, Awards = resource, incentive and ego (Webby's, Web 2.0)
Know your hooks, distribution and target market.
The 12 Types of Links
- Presell page
- Authority
- Directory
- Run of site
- One way links from friends or related sites
- .edu and .gov links
- Radio television
(I know there are only 7. Todd talks too fast and the guy next to me leaned forward every time I needed to see the screen.)
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: You can't expect Diggers to love Microsoft and hate Steven Colbert.
Stretch relevancy--a new twist on an old topic is the only way to get an old topic new eyeballs.
You can get really popular on Digg and forget relevancy. Don't do that.
Todd shows a post he has with 1500 links. Begging those links would take forever. Don’t get discouraged by not hitting a home run every time. You have to be persistent. It's worth it in the end.
Andy Hagans comes first. He's from Texas. Pretty much all he does is linkbaiting and social media traffic. You have to get into this, he says, or you're behind.
Any time you're getting into this, you're targeting something. Learn their attitudes, lingos, etc. Become part of the community frist so that later you can manipulate that community because you understand.
How to target Digg users: know they're 16 year old virgins. They're very sensitive to anything that even smells "spammy" or "SEO'd". They'll kill anything that even looks slightly off to them, like say, having advertising on the page. Tech stuff will do well, a little politics, a little weird stuff.
Reddit: Political junkies hang out here. More mature (he said smarter too) They're interested in
the environment, conspiracy theories and, for some reason, Tasers. He doesn't know why. This audience doesn't really overlap with Digg's.
Delicious: Target audience: Librarians and infor junkies. The resource hook works wonders--101 XYZ. It's the easiest to manually spam. You only need 10 manual bookmarks in a certain period of time. They don't take a lot of work.
StumbleUpon: I'm bored, waste my time. They'll make a split second decision about whether or not to stay. Make it pretty, pics above the fold, formatting etc. Make sure there's a call to action at the end of whatever the page is and hopefully they'll think before they click the stumble button again.
Niche social sites:
- Tweako - how to anything nerd
- Hugg: anything green
- DZone: Hardcore developers
- Sphinn: Think like an SEO
Baiting outside of social media groups Blog communities, forums, etc. The ego hook works very well on bloggers. Top 100 Pet Bloggers for example. It doesn't require social media, just a little ego boosting.
Quick Tips for Success: Put up the social media buttons.
Launch everywhere at once, don't spread it out over a week. You want them all to work together, not individually
Baits flop all the time. Commit to doing them regularly. At least 50% flop (probably more when you're just getting started.)
Inspiration sources:
- Mashable--Delicious Bait
- eBizMBA: Digg bait
- YouTube: StumbleUpon Bait
- The media sites themselves -- see what shows up repeatedly and then capitalize on them.
Bill Hartzer is next. He was next door speaking because he's just that popular of a guy.
He likes using breaking news as link bait.
Target the group in your sector or topic. Tell them something that will help them do better, something they need to know. Point out a problem with the industry "My Funniest PPC Keyword Mistake" for example.
Target sites that naturally link out. There are a lot of sites that give out links all the time. He says the Blogstorm Tracker is a cool tool. It tracks which sites get links. You can click in and see it from Yahoo. Search Technorati and other blog searches in your niches to find ones that link out.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel. You can create a new twist on an old idea. You can update older stories link to the previous article and talk about new developments. Press releases in your industry are good sources of inspiration. Set up google and yahoo alerts in your industry that you can use for inspiration.
News works well as linkbait if you're ready for it--have a blog, post quickly, submit to social media sites, then go back and edit and update the post or article. Add pictures, photos, logos, screen captures. This strategy helps you get "market share of links" which is good for organic search. Speed is of the essence.
Pick a great headline. Cornwall SEO has a great post from women's magazines. Think of things that are going to catch the eye and compel clicks.
Combining Linkbait, social media and organic search is the most powerful. You have to participate and be part of the community. Daily voting, commenting, submitting is key.
Look at things in your industry that you can twist. He shows some slides from a furniture company that did a post on tidy desks.
Q&A
Is it worthwhile to get Dugg then buried?
Todd: Pretty much, no. Digg is the jump off point, if you're not popular long enough for people to find you, you're out of luck.
Bill: You'll see results in Google
Women's social media sites?
Bill: Sk-rt.com is the biggest one.
No one can come up with any others. So Todd advises that if there aren't any out there, grab Pligg and build one. [Pligg is an open source media site that allows you to build Digglike sites.]
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 4/07 at 5:18 PM | Comments (6)
See more entries in Branding, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Social Media
Link Buying
Detlev Johnson is moderating the last session of Day 1 with speakers Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, John Lessnau, and Aaron Wall. Let’s do it.
Detlev says that link building is something that has become very important to search engine optimization. It’s become fundamental. Google has popularized it, but all the engines have to calculate this.
But, says Detlev, there are a lot of people in the search engine optimization industry who have learned how to game links. Today we’re going to talk about whether or not you should buy links and talk about motivations webmasters have for buying links. What type of site you are is going to help you determine whether that’s a rational idea or not. Having moderated many sessions on this topic, Detlev says things are normalizing.
John Lessnau is up to start the mayhem.
He gets asked questions every day about whether or not people should buy links, what they are, do they need them and will they get banned.
Should you buy links?
It depends. How old is your site? How many links do you have now? Are you happy with your traffic? What is your risk tolerance? Do you get natural links? Is your site under the radar?
Sites buy links because often it’s the only realistic way to get decent links. It’s a short cut to better natural rankings. They provide instant gratification and reduce hopelessness (aw!). It helps them keep up with their competition and curb PR envy.
The main thing isn’t whether or not you should buy links, but what kind of links you should buy. You don’t want to buy links on sites that include clumps of paid links or on sites completely unrelated to your niche. You want to buy links on pages where your link will be nestled nicely into the context.
His mantra is purchase links in the existing content of Web sites related to yours that don’t openly advertise they sell links. Both the buyer and seller win.
Links in content are naturally relevant, they’re the type of links that created the Web, they help the search engines understand what your site is about and you can sleep better at night. You don’t want your site listed in a large clump of paid links in the footer or sidebar of a Web page. That kind of link isn’t going to bring you any value.
Next up is Aaron Wall.
Alternatives to buying links:
Syndicate content on other sites: This builds authority, sends traffic, and flows PageRank
Barter: Give stuff away. Give discounts for certain sectors.
Buy competing Web sites
Social Interaction
Public Relations campaigns: Pump your publicity.
He talks about the Bloggers Guide to SEO he wrote, which got approximately 50,000 page views in the first week.
While people are talking about you, you want to follow that up with more public relations stuff to keep people talking about you.
Often when sites buy links, they forget about encouraging the organic links and the other stuff important to their company, like creating a regular editorial voice, community participation, showing social proof, having a beautiful site design and showing signs of credibility (about us, etc).
In 2007, Google killed a lot of directories. Only buy in if the Page Rank is where you expect it, the cache dates are recent and the list quality is decent. He likes niche directories like JoeAnt and BOTW. He likes a lot more but he doesn’t want to tell Matt about them. Heh.
Other ways to get links:
AdWords Ads for Linkbait: Create industry leading content for authoritative easy-to-link-at topics. Buy AdWords for a wide basket of related keywords.
Clean bought links: Blog about new Google products and wait for someone from Google to blog about your blog post. Use Google Checkout. Sponsor events and advertise. Contest and award programs. Donate or give stuff away. Affiliate programs.
Dirty Links: Try to get links hidden in content or organic looking links without disclosure
Run really dirty stuff through your affiliate program.
Jim Boykin is up and says he doesn’t have a presentation. He doesn’t want to get any search engineers upset. The main thing he has to say is stay under the radar and don’t piss off Google. That’s it. Excellent.
Rand Fishkin is up next and accidentally flashed a private presentation. I don’t know what it said but Rand got all red and flustered. Time for the real presentation. Rand is going to talk about how to buy links and get away with it.
Rand says Aaron is one of the best minds in the industry but people don’t see it because his style is so “mountain man”. Hee! Best quote of the day! Rand says you won’t find a better source of information for Webmasters.
Rand says we’re kidding ourselves if we say that paid links don’t impact an ideal link graph of the Web. Yes, some of those links would exist anyway, but it’s an unnatural link arrangement. From an engineering perspective, paid links create a worse SERP. The engines who have the most success against manipulation will win market share.
Paid Links the Search Engines Catch
- Brokers who don’t cover their tracks.
- Brokers who display their inventory.
- Links that appear on the Web in an unnatural way.
Paid Links the Search Engines Have Not Yet Caught
- Direct, one-to-one purchases.
- Very, very smart link brokers
- Business relationships where links are a secondary part of the services.
A Chat with Search Engineers on Paid Links:
Google and Matt Cutts on the Toolbar PR Changes
The toolbar update was intended to reduce visible PageRank based on sites selling links. Google DID NOT visibly reduce the TBPR of all sites that they caught, and Matt was hesitant to share a percentage. Going forward, Google is likely to continue this practice of visibly showing some portion of sites where it feels the owners have violated link selling protocol.
Matt Cutts on Paid Link Reporting:
Do it because it’s in your best interest to see your competition receive lower rankings
Do it because you want the Web to be a better place and make the search engines’ jobs easier
The argument of “honor among thieves” is a fallacy – no one can/should legitimately believe that paid links made the Web a better place.
Send reports through your Webmaster Central account for faster response time.
Matt Cutts on Potential Penalties for Link Buyers and Sellers
TBPR losses are only one of the potential penalties link buyers and sellers might incur. Other include:
Remove the ability of the links to pass value, but don’t show anything visible
Remove the ability of the links to pass value and downgrade the visible PageRank in the toolbar
Remove the ability of the links to pass values AND penalize the rankings of the sites/pages being linked to AND/OR the sites selling links
Etyan of Live on Paid Search
The vast majorities of paid links that we see is not beneficial to the user experience and in fact take away from it. The most recent example I came across was someone advertising mortgages on a Wisconsin dells Web site. The goal is to take these parts of the page into account and to give more weight to thinks that are actually useful to customers. With regards to publicity, Live isn’t at the point where they’re talking publicly about their spam efforts. This may or may not change in the future.
A Solution of the Issue of Paid Links
Editorial Reviews = Search Engine Worthy Links
I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
Does the directory reject URLs? If every ULR passes a
A marketplace for site owners who want to link and buyers who want to connect.
Step 1: Buyer of links submit a page you want to have reviewed
Step 2: Interested parties could take a look
Step 3: The reviewer writes about the page on their blog. If you liked it, link to it with a nofollow. If you loved it, link without the nofollow. And if you didn’t like it, we’ll pay you but you don’t have to write anything.
[Matt Cutts told Rand he wasn’t thrilled with Rand’s idea.]
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 4/07 at 5:17 PM | Comments (3)
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Universal and Personal Search – This Changes Everything
Whew, okay, lunch over. And by lunch, I mean mad scramble to write up the morning sessions. Not that it mattered since I couldn't post them. Also, what's up with the press room not having wifi? How am I supposed to prove that I'm worth anything? (Quiet, Lisa.)
Next up is an awesome panel of speakers: Gordon Hotchkiss,Enquiro Search Solutions; Bill Slawski, KeyRelevance; and Greg Boser, WebGuerrilla LLC. Moderator Jake Baillie will be keeping them in line as they dig into the topic of blended search. (I know the title says Universal but that's a Google product and I like to at least pretend the other engines matter to SEOs. You can stop laughing.)
Gord Hotchkiss is up first with a look at the user's perspective. He begins with the Golden Triangle--the famous eye-tracking study that shows if you aren't number one, you aren't anywhere. The biggest variant is how relevant the top ads are.
When you add universal search, things change quite dramatically. "Chunking" took place instead. You notice something is different. You notice images before you recognize text so you start your scan at where the picture is, then the text next to it to see if it is relevant. Very seldom do you scan one result and then click. Instead, you look down, look up and then scan across. It's an E shaped scan instead of an F shape scan.
Within half a second, there is a difference between the universal and regular. Images get more attention and then the result next to the image. Two seconds in, the attention is still on the result with the image.
Images create boundaries on the page. You don't usually scan lower than wherever the image it. It created a mental "fence" and thus the hot spots appear above the image.
Switching over to personalization, does it work? They did a survey and tracked people researching the iPhone. Afterwards, they personalized the third, fourth and fifth results. Versus the non-personalized control search, they saw an increase in time spent, fixations and clickthroughs. Personalization gains attention and it will move scanning patterns.
When combined, the universal search with the image still gets first attention, then they move to the personalized result. What does it mean to the PPC side? The lowest listing became the hot spot. You're changing the focus away from the top of the page. Eventually the improvements will have to catch up on the paid side but they aren't there yet.
Personalized search scanning is much more diffuse than the non-personalized. Your search strategies have to change from query based to user based.
They have a webinar next week with a bunch of bright people. Register on their site.
Bill Slawski is up next for the webmaster's side. He's going to talk about the stuff behind the scenes. I'm ready to not understand anything.
3's of Universal and Personal Search
Search processes: crawl, index, & serves
Data Types: structures, semi-structured and unstructured
Query Types: informational transactional, navigational
Data collection: Users queries results
Data selection: users queries repositories
Profile building: searchers, site and queries
Profile types: implicit, explicit and contextual
Crawling and Extraction: Not just about keyword number but also about facts and information. Not just about individual words but going to be more about the whole context, parts of pages instead of word to page to document
Indexing: User information, web history, browsing information, feeds, more information from a broader base.
Serving: Aggregated user information may influence what you see. Like spelling corrections
Data Types: Structured Data-- it's database built. You see this a lot in local search. Usually a rigidly defined format, like a phone book.
Semi-structured data -- requires more work to figure out. Things like associating you with your phone number without explicitly saying so but you could be found in a directory.
Unstructured Data -- your information is contextually based. It's on your web site, perhaps but it isn't in the same kind of structured form as the first two kinds.
Most query types are informational in nature. You have to think about how people are looking for you and formulate keywords that way. Personalization can help figure out what a user means when they search for an ambiguous word (Java = programming, coffee, an island.)
A search engine can figure out that people who search for a certain type of thing, might also appear in other things. They might compare that one query returns the same sort of things as another query and then determine that they're related. Sites can build profiles too--category types, traffic volumes, good and services offered, keywords, locations. This information can come from ads shown, analytics, search tracking.
Profile creation methods--Explicit--filling out a form, specifically request alerts.
Implicit--serch engine derives information from search sessions, search and web browsing history, clicked ads
Contextual has more to do with the information other than what was entered--what time of day, what location, what your intention was.
Bill asks "Do any of you have ecommerce sites? Do you ever Google your customers after they buy something?" (Greg says "Stalker." I agree. Leave me alone, I gave you my money now go away.)
Choose your keywords before you make your videos and choose your images. Think about each of the three types of queries and strive to hit them all. Write for a search engine like it's a third grader. Make it really easy for a search engine to extract the data it needs.
Focus on the people who will you’re your products instead of the products themselves.
Greg Boser wraps it all up.
The biggest issue really has to do with the fact that there isn't even a consensus of what blended search should look like. Ask is much more about giving you lots of options and where and when and how. Google is more father knows best, it's still 10 things they're just slightly different 10 things.
Greg says Google needs to commit to it full fledged and just go for it. Give up the tabs and just let my use personalize it over time. Trying to figure out what made something pop up is nearly impossible because it's still so random.
He's been spending a lot of time at Ask because he thinks their approach is going to win out. Their results are kinda crap and their market share is too low right now but the UI is right one.
Go do Marissa Mayer's three favorite Universal searches on Google then go do them on Ask and see how much better it is.
Do searches in each vertical and learn how they work. The idea that you can just throw it up and will work isn't going to work. You need to play with it. Get into how each thing works. Use Ask to learn. When you use Ask, you'll get more non-typical results and you'll see what your competitors are doing better.
You can ruin your whole life obsessing over this mess that is Google Universal and Personalization.
In reality personalization isn't spying on me from afar. Greg points out that he does searches all the time that he doesn't click on. That doesn't make it a not successful search.
Gord: I 80% agree with you. Ask can afford to mess around with the interface because no one uses Ask. They built a type of search that works very for one type of search.
Greg goes off for a bit on Google lying about being a portal.
Q&A
Why is there an Ask ad on Google?
They bought it? No one seems to understand the question. Now we're fighting about whether or not every query is discover. No Greg, it isn't. I'm sorry.
Will we get used to personal/universal and then the Golden Triangle will return?
Gord: If its relevant to you, you're going to look at it, whether it's image or video or whatever, sponsored or not.
Follow up: Do you think users will look where the information is, not where the triangle is? Maybe the triangle is BS.
Greg: It's trained behavior. The SERPs have been the same since 1996. Maybe it'll revert back, maybe we'll learn something new. Sometimes the best solution is hurry up and wait.
I've been seeing a lot more related search lately. Do you have any comments?
Greg: That's back to the arrogance again. Going to page 2 is a failure for Google. You can't do personalization and not get my input. Yahoo's doing it too, they're suggesting it as you type.
Gord: I think it goes back to the Ask philosophy of we're going to give you options right away whereas Google is more incremental.
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 4/07 at 5:15 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Ask, Google, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines
Optimizing Your Site for Contextual Ads
You know what's fun? Making it from one session to the next in five minutes while finishing a blog entry. Honestly, you all should try it sometime. For extra fun, lug around a 40 pound laptop. I call it the Tabke Workout in honor of Webmaster World's Fearless Leader and the guy who forgot that high school is long over and we're too old to run from period to period with a heavy backpack.
Where was I? Oh right, this session we're talking about optimizing for contextual ads and, call me a nerd, but I'm excited. Detlev Johnson will be moderating this panel with speakers Matt Daimler, The Guru Group LLC; Jaan Janes, Pulse360; and Aaron Wall, SEO Book. Ready? GO!
Jaan James is up first. He mentions the Cowboy Christmas conference on the other side of the convention center. There are no computers over there. ...I don't get it, how do they communicate? What do they do with their free time?
Pulse 360 is the publisher services side of Kanoodle. For them, the three things that make a difference are Relevancy, Revenue and Relationship.
Relevancy: We don't scrape keywords--Google does, Yahoo does but they don't. We focus on the consumer and who they are, not because of what they are doing at the time. They don't need to dive to keyword
MSNBC is a partner, they're not looking at the content of the page, they're looking at the mindset of the consumer than the subject of the article.
When relevancy fails? News stories about gun violence lead to non-lethal stun gun, drugs busts lead to ads about drug selling.
A recent study rated newspaper ads over internet ads. Jaan thinks the problem is clutter. You have to be mindful of bombarding the user with ads. It becomes annoying instead of useful. Unreasonable sites with unreasonable amounts of advertising lose business.
If you're working with sponsored links, make sure you SHOW the ads. What's the point of burying them in the bottom of the page? Make the ads visible and focused on the audience. Sponsored links are not an afterthought.
Transparency is really really key.
Color: There isn't any one answer. Don't be afraid to experiment. Don’t scream 'I'm an ad, click me!' but don't be afraid of color. You can experiment and increase your click rate sometimes.
Placement: Again, experiment. Lower right, lower left, background, no background. However, bottom of the page = bottom of the barrel.
Next up is Aaron Wall.
Optimization vs Overkill-- you need to balance longevity of the site vs monetization of the ads. If your ads are too aggressive, the ads are going to cost you links and they'll turn away users.
A few spots up in the organic rankings make a big difference. Invest in SEO. Most publishers play in the long tail and you should own your important terms.
Social media traffic isn't terribly good for ad clicks. Keep your core pages clean. Use ad channels to determine where the $ is. Make sure that your site structures support the top earning pages.
Analytics are your friend--find out where you're ranked and capitalize on that.
Longer pages will match more keywords. Think about how you can expand pages to give yourself a broad base for the ads to match.
Some advanced tips:
Members can turn ads off
Date-based ad inclusion/ad positioning
Link building -- Buy a few links pointing at the best earning pages. [Just for the traffic, though, not for rankings --Susan]
Matt Daimler is up next to tell us the story of Seat Guru. He started in 2001 when he was traveling a lot back and forth to Europe. In 2003, they added AdSense and went from $200-300 a month to $200-300 a day. The initial design was fairly plain and built in tables.
When they added ads, they took a couple of actions--they consulted "view bids" tool to understand what the CPC buyers wanted and trying to add a little more content or keywords around though.
Challenges with the initial 2003 layout: 1. Very little content for Google to base ads on. 2. Only 1 Google Ad per page allowed, no wide skyscraper, yet.
In 2004, they redesigned with new content, new airlines and added more color. The goals for this redesign was a repetition of keywords like 'first class' and business class, etc. They wanted the Google skyscraper ad to show on 800x600 resolution and to keep the Google ad location right in the heart of the activity.
Challenges from this layout were that they were still only one ad per page. That changed in September of 2004 when they were allowed 3 ad blocks per page. They thought 'great, we can add more and triple our clickthroughs!' but their clickthrough rate dropped and the CPM rates also dropped (from $10-$25 DOWN to $2).
Limited ad inventory lead to a depletion of the "good" ads sooner which left worse, lower paying ads to show up on the network. To supplement, they went to direct advertisers by picking from the best advertisers that showed up in Google AdSense. Few Google ads and more direct advertisers increased sales.
They had to learn to balance Google ads with direct advertisers, as cutting out Google ads in favor of the direct advertisers
In 2006, they redesigned again to XHML strict and CSS for higher keyword density and SEO. They added new features, new menu systems, additional content and worked in supporting more ad units--four or five on page. (They tried Link Units integrated into the navigation but it didn't work for them.) Clickthroughs went down as did CPM rates but overall they went up.
A couple of things they didn't do include trying different ad networks-- they stuck with Google exclusively and try out the many options that Google offered -- colors, sizes, types, number of ad units, varying the location, etc. He mentions that Pubmatic is a new company that produces reports on which would be the best for your web site rather than having to try it himself. He's not affliated with them; he just likes them.
Q&A:
When you started direct advertising on Seat Guru, how did you validate traffic?
Matt: Most of the direct advertisers that they serve use third party servers. They adjusted pricing for the big ad servers that often get cut out by ad blockers--he estimates they lost 15% of views because of that. They tended to charge 2x as much for a direct advertisers which isn't really making a lot of money because they require a lot of work. Most people say that up to half a million in sales you can stick with places like Federated Media. After that, hire your own sales people.
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 4/07 at 5:13 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, Google, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events
Content Creation - Cranking it Out
Things are running behind so let’s just jump right in. We’re in the Content Creation panel with Ted Ulle, Robin Liss and Rae Hoffman. Actually, that’s a lie. Rae Hoffman isn’t here yet. She’s still being mobbed from her session next door. She’ll be here soon. Maybe. You never know with Rae. :)
Up first to talk about content creation is Ted Ulle.
Work flow must support your priorities. You’re aiming for a simple and seamless experience for the end user and for your maintenance. Simplicity is a discipline. It’s not easy.
It’s about clarity from the start.
He presents his workflow for creating content that supports your business purpose. The formula looks like this:
Content – Ideas
Back end and metrics
Information architecture
Content – full copy
Graphic Design
Web Edit in html
Through this process you want to document every change that you make.
Other things to think about:
Menu and Navigation: Menu labels are content. If you don’t realize that, your site won’t be successful and people won’t find your articles. Menu labels tell people where they are, what they can do, etc. A lot of people are moving towards single word menu labels. Those are better used for applications, not Web sites.
Final Web Edit
Content interacts with layout
Consider CSS – Web typesetting
You can kill good content with bad layout. Or you can boost weak content with good layout. He recommends people study print typography and read the book Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.
Showing off on your site works against your business purposes. The typical culprits are graphic designers. Don’t let them take your visitors’ eyes away from your content or distract them with eye candy. Watch out for the fancy programmers. Sometimes they want fancy features and to show how well they can code. The programmers are there to support your content. Don’t let them grab your throne. IT folks shouldn’t write copy. (heh.) IT people probably write all kinds of things that are copy on your site. Do your error messages communicate clearly? What does the code look like? The creative people should be writing the auto responders. Make sure the message that’s going out is what you want to say. These things are a big part of the user experience because they can turn people off quickly.
Code geeks should not write copy. He offers up some examples:
Yahoo Directory: Recently, he filled out a form where he forgot to enter in what kind of credit card he was using. The error that came back was “invalid payment instrumental data”. What the heck does that mean?
Six figure video investment: Programmer used the anchor text “open demo” instead of “watch demo” or “view demo”. He talks like a geek. Your customers don’t.
Despite all your planning, realize that your data queries can be slow, your copy may break the template, your search engine optimization mangles the message, your CMS mangles everything. Know ahead of time that things will go wrong. This is the process.
When things go wrong, thou shalt not kludge. It’s better late than lousy. Expect to make tradeoffs. Keep your priorities straight by referencing the workflow Ted outlined earlier.
Robin Liss is up. And in case you’re worried, yes, Rae finally showed up.
She talks about Reviewed.com. It’s a site that produces reviews.
Just like a car maker, you manufacture a product. What lessons can be we learn from traditional manufacturing?
- You can’t build a car without blueprints
- Mr Ford’s assembly line rocks
- Good tools save you money
- Specialization= economic efficiency
- Bottlenecks must be destroyed
- Quality control everywhere
- Measure everything
Design your final product with care:
- Who’s your target audience
- What’s the purpose
- Topic Area?
- Article Structure
- What does the first draft producer need
- What supplemental content will accompany
- How frequent
- Length?
- What voice?
- Objectivity vs Subjectivity
- Deadline and delivery schedule
Writing the article or filming the video is only the first step in content production. You have to budget time and money for the rest of the process. That’s where Mr. Ford’s assembly line rocks.
The typical Content Creation Cycle looks like this:
Article is assigned, people get materials, create first draft, supplemental materials created, first edit and feedback, 2nd draft creation, 2nd edit. After that it goes to Content Production where they’ll look at CMS Load & html-ization, copy editing, SEO edit, final edit, take live, marketing and finally, revisions and update.
You need to know who’s going to take what step in the content creation process. How long is it going to take? What steps can be removed? What can be outsourced? How much time does each step take? You’re designing a model where you can plug resources into and it will grow.
She talks about blogs having a modified pipeline so the process looks like this:
The piece is assigned, they get the information, they write the first draft, they take it live, they market it and then they update it, if needed. On a blog, each person does all the steps, this is why it’s so efficient. Blogs have “long” form posts that have more editing and more process. With this pipeline there is no outside quality control or editing, but many argue that this is what defines blogs.
Another example where there’s a modified pipleline is when you have 1 Writer & 1 Editor/Boss. Everyone, regardless of how good of a writer you are, should have an editor. It will improve the quality of your content and allow people to focus on their core task.
She also highlights a 6 person pipeline which is color-coded to the point where I’m afraid I’m going to launch into a seizure. Seriously.
Good Tools Save Money:
Content Management System
WYSIWIG tools save production time and money
Dreamweaver
Plone
Moveable Type
Own your CMS
Investing money in your CMS is going to reduce editorial costs long term
Work Flow Management Tools
Google Calendar
Lots of spreadsheets.
Find the right writer for the right task. Know the difference between Short Form vs. Long Form, Journalistic vs Opinionated, and Edgy vs Straight. Switching tasks takes time. When doing large projects, different parts of the article might go to different people.
Find an online copy editor to pay per word, find a basic HTML guru to do the CMS input, and hire a part time or full editor to improve your quality and manage workflow
Destroy Bottlenecks
- Time in minutes, hours or days that each step in the workflow takes
- Constantly track these times and look to improve them
- Create an “article flow” or “article patter” by reducing bottlenecks
- Ways to create an even flow
- Add more staff to a bottlenecked area
- Outsource a bottleneck area
- Have staff to double duty
- Reduce the staff time spent on a the over-producing area
- Make sure that there are article in every step of the pipeline, track this with Excel and Google Calendar.
- Give deadlines not just for when the article is finished, but when an article needs to move through the content creation process.
Quality Control Everywhere
Robin says her reviews are syndicated on the WashingtonPost.com. They better not mess up!
Error free content = credibility
Grammatical, factual, and analytical errors should all be watched for
More eyes – less errors
User comments are a great way to find errors.
Measure Everything. Measure all processes. Measure the time each step takes. Measure word count. Measure when people hit deadlines. Measure average number of articles produced y day, week, month. Measure what content gets high traffic.
Robin says when hiring contributors make sure to make it clear that you own all the rights to all the content. Put plagiarism protection clauses in your contracts. Be as specific as possible, try to put those blueprints in the contract. You get what you pay for. Cheap original content will cost more money in the long term when you have to edit it. Try your best to be original in your content, produce what others aren’t. Blogs are a great way to dip your toe into original content production
Quality, quality, quality
Next up is Rae Hoffman.
[Disclaimer: Rae Hoffman is the fastest speaker in the known universe. She also mumbles. I think I got every 5th word she said. My apologies.]
Rae’s company is looking to create content to get links. She’s not trying to get into the Washington Post yet. She calls content is the single most effective ways to differentiate your site from the masses, develop traffic and develop good inbound links that will proper your sit to the top of the engines and keep it there.
Good content published on a regular basis can get you links, develop traffic, help position your site an as authority, help develop repeat feed increased subscribers, increase your chances of traditional media mentions, help your mentions in social media, and much more.
[RAE, SLOW DOWN!]
There are three main ways Rae gets content developed for sites:
Freelancers
Pros: Cheapest, no commitment, use as needed.
Cons: Trial and error for quality, availability issues, no commitment
Full Time Remotes
Pros: No overhead costs, dedicated, more skills for less money
Cons: Distance management, training barriers, just a paycheck
Full Time In House
Pro: Easier to manage, easier to train, dedicated
Cons: overhead costs, more expensive, must have long term needs.
Find good freelances at elance.com, writerfindcom, seo-writer.com, guru.com, gofreelance.com
Find good full time remotes at Craigslist, Problogger job board, SEOmoz marketplace, local papers, local job boards, tjobs.com
Find good full time in house: local paper, job boards, Monster, Craigslist, Careerbuilder or Workopolis.
Knowing what to look for in a content developer will depend on the type of content you plan to develop and what type of industry you work in. They should have good organizational skills, ability to work independently, ability to follow instructions, can think for themselves, good to stellar writing skills, ability to hit deadlines, basic HTML skills, the right writing tone for your site, a great sense of humor, expertise in a certain area, journalism specific skills, basic promotional skills, etc.
Training Content Developers
People need to know that your content exists. Train your writers to promote their own work as much as possible. Develop media lists for the topic area your writer is working on for them to be able to push their best pieces to. Encourage your writers to become active in the community by interacting with others in their industry. Teach your writers about social media and encourage them to become knowledgeable of, if not involved with, social media sites and their demographics when writing towards them. Encourage writers to pitch stories to traditional news outlets within the niche to get exposure for your site. Train writers to link out when it makes sense and to follow up with notifications to companies or people who have been mentioned or citied in the article they’ve written once it has been published. Explain to your writers how to use Google News alerts to stay abreast of important happenings.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 4/07 at 5:04 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Blogging, PubCon Las Vegas 2007
Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization
Back from a moderately scary lunch (I think my sandwich would be classified as “chicken”. I’m not sure) and seated in the Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization panel where Christine Churchill will do her best to keep the likes of Ken Jurina, Larry Mersman, Wil Reynolds, Stoney deGeyter, and Natala Menezes in line.
Christine gets things started saying that keyword research is the bedrock of search marketing. If you do it right, your search engine optimization campaign will work really well. If you don’t, you’re going to have some problems.
Up first is Ken Jurina. Huzzah for Ken. Ken notes that there are mouse cursor patterns in the rug so he knows he’s in the right place. Haha, I never noticed that but he’s totally right! I wonder if Microsoft put those there.
What should keyword research really be? It should be used for data mining all possible keyword search behavior around your online offering targeting hundreds of thousands of phrases from multiple sources. Eliminating skewed results including inconsistencies, non-seasonal irregularities, and obvious data flaws. Identifying core relevance/irrelevance of phrases by demographic, geographic, usage & other defining target market parameters.
Uses of Advanced Keyword Research
- Business Research: Product research, competitive intelligence.
- Social Research: Political topics, publish issues, celebrity brand.
- Brand Equity: Find the relevant words for your niche. If you’re selling television sets, learn what sets are popular. What are people looking for?
- New Product Ideas: What are people looking for? Find new opportunities.
- Consumer Feedback: What problems are people having? What parts are they looking for? Customer service issues?
- Celebrity Brand: Find PR issues.
Case Study: Music Store
Situation: Client is a brick and mortar music equipment store. Online presence is limited.
After doing keyword research, they found demand for new product lines, demand for new vertical, seasonal demands, as well as searches for discontinued products
The result: $90,000 sales/weekly nationally, up from virtually zero. Dominant rankings on over 85 percent of key phrases
Conducting Advanced Keyword Research:
Use multiple sources – WordTracker and Trellian. Determine keyword difficulty by searching for the keyword in Google and seeing how heavy the competition is. He highlights the keyword research tools offered by SEOmoz, We Build Pages and Trellian.
Free Keyword Research Tools
- Google Trends: Gives good comparative data on phrases. Breaks it down by region, date range, language and identifies news stories related by trend. Lets you see historically things are being searched. Find peaks and valleys.
- Microsoft adCenter: Keyword Forecast, Demographic Prediction.
Larry Mersman is next.
Keyword research is one of the most important parts of search engine optimization. It’s about identifying keywords and search phrases that your customers use to find your site, products or services.
He presents a case study for NeedMoreBeer.com.
He says the site was originally optimized for the [finest beer in Germany online]. However, after doing keyword research, they found that the phrase [German beer] had far more searches performed. Updating their content to reflect this change increased sales by over 200 percent.
- Keyword Discovery Phrase: Compile your keywords list, including misspellings.
- Evaluation Phrase – Prioritize your keyword list so that more relevant terms receive more attention.
- Implementation – Use the terms on your site.
- Optimization and Performance Tuning – Tweak your content.
Make lists by brainstorming, using customer feedback, looking at competitors, using Web site log files, combing many keyword research tools and from exhaustive keyword generators.
[Larry talks super fast. My fingers don’t give him justice.]
Use keyword research to find related search terms, identify alternate spellings and misspellings, learn which terms your competitors think are important, etc. It’s also good for competitive intelligence and finding what terms others are using and using well.
Next up is Wil Reynolds.
Wil makes things interactive and asks select attendees to write down what terms they would use to search for a collection of images he has up on the projector. He then makes everyone read their answers, illustrating that people don’t search the same way. Point taken. Let’s move on.
Unless you plan on buying your own product to stay in business, you need to be in tune with what your users are searching for. He uses Mercedes as an example, saying they never wanted to call their pre-owned cars “used”, but that’s what searchers type into their search box so they had to adjust. You have to get in the mind of a searcher.
Picking the wrong keywords is very bad for your career. Keyword development is different. He highlights some companies that were replaced when they didn’t evolve.
Tabloid vs Perez Hilton
Home Depot vs Tim the builder
Business 2.0 vs TechCrunch
AAA vs Mapquest vs Google Maps
He lists some of his favorite tools. He likes MSN adLabs’ Search Funnel for trying to find searcher intent. It shows you what people type in AFTER they type in your keyword. Helps you find associated words and to understand the intent of your users. He thinks it’s the best tool for finding intent, even though it doesn’t have enough data yet. It’s better for broad, big terms than it is for smaller, niche stuff.
Tips for AdLabs: Stay broad, check back for updates, try incoming and outgoing, drill down.
Another tool he likes is Yahoo! Suggest, which he says is superior to Google’s. If you begin typing in[foot], Google will only pull up terms starting with those four letters. Yahoo removes that bias and shows you the top searches containing those letters, for example [BBC football].
Stoney is up next to talk about the process of gathering, sorting and organizing keywords for a search engine optimization campaign.
Phase 1: Gathering Keywords
Figure out what your core terms are. A core term is a unique two or three word phrase that accurately represents the focus of any given page on your Web site. It’s what you do. When you’re doing your core research you want to sit down and brainstorm. What do you know about your site? After that, go to your Web site and search Meta tags, content, server logs and link structure to find core terms. Use keyword research tools.
Once you have your core terms, you want to sort them and find out which ones are important to you. Which terms are going to be useful for your target audience? Which terms are users typing into their search engines? Which products or services provide you the highest profits? Can you meet the demand of specific products or services? Which keywords get the most volume?
After that, look at the actual phrases that are represented by those phrases. It’s basically your core term with added qualifiers or stemmed variations. Don’t analyze too much. You’re going to end up with 100s or 1000s of search phrase results. You just want to bring everything in. You’ll do the analysis later.
Phase 2: Sorting & Selecting
Keep any keywords that are going to help you convert users into consumers. They have to be able to draw your customers in. The term must apply directly to your content, not somebody else’s. Use specific phrases, no broad terms. Put aside the “info” queries for later.
Look at the search volume of the terms. Keywords must be actively searched for. Long tail and short tail, included. If they bring traffic and convert, then optimize for them. Too specific gets no searches and therefore no conversions. Good rule of thumb is 2-4 words.
Phrase 3: Organizing Process
Determine searcher’s intent and segment words accordingly. Are they research terms, shopping terms or buying terms?
Identify key pages. Determine which pages of the site are most suitable for which groups of keywords. Every page has a specific purpose. If you need more pages, create them.
Group keywords together by similar themes. Your keywords must work together. You can’t match [elegant] and [cheap]. Let your site pages be your guide.
Last but not least is Natala Menezes from Microsoft.
She mentions some initiatives going on at adCenter. They want to give users access to real data and easy to use tools. She talks about the Keyword Service Platform. It’s a treasure trove of keyword information. Algorithms to extrapolate new terms from a set, define categorical relationships. Access to real data. Developmental platform.
They have a team of industry experts helping them to provide advertisers with insights.
Better Together: adcenter + Excel 2007. They build an application on the Excel platform because they know that search marketers spend a lot of time in Excel. She says that keyword research shouldn’t involve so much “cut and paste”. You don’t have to be an expect in Excel or SEO to use these tools. They focused on keyword research, forecast and monetization.
She gives a quick overview of what the Better Together tool looks like. Sadly, I can’t copy and paste her presentation into the blog. Go bug her. Maybe she’ll share with you.
Natala is short for time, but if you’re in town, stop by the Microsoft booth and catch her there.
[I want to apologize for the minor amount of commotion I caused in session when I tried to leave the room without first unplugging my laptop for the main projector. I am a genius.]
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 4/07 at 2:44 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Search Engine Optimization
Duplicate Content Issues Duplicate Content Issues
I know someone thinks the title of this panel is clever and...okay, it is, but it is also a very mean thing to do to someone as compulsive as I am. I keep wanting to correct it and it's painful to just leave it like that. Duplicate contents hurts more than your rankings, people; please, think of the obsessive compulsives!
Tackling those tricky issues today are representatives from the four major engines: Rahul Lahiri, Ask.com; Derrick Wheeler, Microsoft; Evan Roseman, Google; and Priyank Garg, Yahoo. Aaron Shear moderates.
Aaron introduces Rahul Lahiri first as being from "Ask Jeeves". Rahul is quick to correct him, "Ask.com". Heh. Everyone still misses the butler.
Rahul says he's going to go quickly. Oh dear, I haven't had any coffee yet. This could be a problem.
He begins with the standard definition of duplicate content: Same content on multiple URLs. Why don't search engines like it? It impairs the user experience and consumes resources that could be better served crawling content that's unique. Duplicate content carries a risk of losing valuable votes because your links are spread out over multiple URLs instead of on the expert page. At Ask.com, duplicates are eliminated at all stages: crawling, indexing and ranking.
Contrary to belief, it's not a penalty; it's more similar to not being crawled. It's performed on indexable content, templates aren't included. It's not a concern for supported ccTLDs, like for example a site used in UK only search. (Same web sites on different ccTLDs are okay.)
They filter when the confidence factor is high. They have a low tolerance for false positives.
Some sources of duplicate content:
- Multiple URLs with the same content
- Printer Friendly pages
- Dynamic pages with session IDs/URL variant
- Content syndication
- Localization
- Mirrors
Scraping is the big concern. He asks for a show of hand of people who have had their content scraped--practically the whole room raises their hands.
Duplicate URLs might be necessary for Branding but avoid meaningless parameters and sub-domains if you can.
Rahul urges webmasters to act on the areas that they're in control of, particularly in the area of printer friendly pages. Block Robots from printer friendly pages. Even though many printer friendly pages are quite useable, they're not going to hold visitors because they present no path into the rest of the site. So block it and make sure that the in-site page is the one presented. Aaron asks when you're blocking from printer friendly pages: how do you do it? Rahul says put it in its own folder and robots.txt it out. Otherwise, make sure it's in the head section Meta Robots.
How do you make content unique? He puts up two nearly identical pages with one image name different and one word different in the title. It's nearly impossible for a spider to tell which is the original. Add unique Titles and Meta Descriptions. Add value to syndicated content to make it unique.
All JavaScript pages are a challenge for Ask.
He says you need to make it hard for Scrapers. Mark your territory--use your brand name, use absolute links, host images locally and take legal action when necessary.
If your content gets tossed for duplication, you need to content them for a re-inclusion request.
Evan Roseman is up next. He's going quickly too. Woe.
Why is Google so down on duplicate content? Users don't like it, it uses resources, it uses resources on your server and they're concerned with original authorship --they want it from the person who created it instead of secondhand.
He says URL like a name. Earl. Go ahead and imagine that every time I type it, okay?
Much of what he covers is similar to Rahul. He does point out that www vs non-www is not as much of an issue for Google as before and mentions that you can specify in the webmaster tools. Session IDs and URL parameters can split the PR between them.
Google's goal is to serve one version of the content in search results.
Hmm, interestingly his slide says that dupe content is generally just a filter and it won't destroy your site. I guess that means occasionally it isn't and it will? Now he says it's 'definitely not a penalty'. So which is it? Definitely or generally? Inquiring minds, Evan.
For exact dupes, use a 301, like in the case of tracking URLs and www vs non-www.
For near duplicates, use noindex/robots.txt such as clones of other sites. If you syndicate content, he repeats, make sure you're adding value.
Domains by country:
- Different languages is not duplicate content
- Use unique content specific to the country
- Use different TLDs (also specify in Webmaster Tools) for geo-targeting
Put data which does not affect the substance of the page in a cookie instead of in the URL so that they don't have to try to figure it out. URL parameters are problematic and can cause duplicate content.
What can you do if another site takes your content? Include an absolute URL. If you're syndicating, send out different content than what you keep.
Don’t worry about scrapers or proxies too much, they don't generally (there's that word again) affect your rankings. [Please tell blog search that, they seem to trust everyone else more than the original author.] If you're concerned, file a DCMA against the other site.
You can let them know about any issues at the Webmaster Help Discussion Group
If you're having trouble with your RSS replacing your rankings, let the discussion group know and they'll help.
And then the mics go out, so I get to catch up, yay!
And we're back. Priyank Garg is up next. He skips back about five slides because they're repeats of the other two.
He mentions a few reasons why search engines WOULD want duplicate pages:
- Site restricted queries
- Back ups
- Alternate document formats
- Multiple languages
Some other kinds of duplicate content:
Accidental duplication like session ids in URLs (a URL is a URL is a URL to search engine) and soft 404 errors -- make sure your 404 errors return a 404 error not a 200 okay. [See also our tedious explanation of the same.]
"Dodgy" forms of duplication:
Replicating content across domains unnecessarily
Aggregation of content found elsewhere
Identical content on the same site.
Approximate dupes may be filtered (real estate sites that just change out the city/state.)
Weaving and stitching (mixing and matching phrases, sentences paragraphs, and sections from different sources to create 'new" content) is also duplicate content.
Basically the same tactics work for Yahoo as for the other engines in keeping duplicate content out (robots.txt, meta, 301 dupe pages.) They support wildcards in robots.txt. Site Explorer allows you to Delete URLs or paths from authenticated sites.
Use Robots-nocontent <div>tag on non-relevant parts of the page. The tag can be used to mark templates or syndicated content that's useful in context for the user but not for search engines. (More information on the tag can be found at Ysearchblog.)
Dynamic URL rewriting available: ability to indicate parameters to remove from URLs across the site. Leads to more efficient crawling, better site coverage, more unique content discovered, fewer crawler traps and cleaner URLs that are better for users to read.
The trouble with all these engine specific solutions is that they are engine specific. I like it better when they get together and come up with standards. Sure you can rewrite your URLs just for Yahoo but then where are you in Google?
Last up is Derrick Wheeler. He's adorably brought his own mouse and mouse pad. His job is in house SEO for Microsoft.com but he says that he expects to get questions about Live Search, Office, why things don't work. He doesn't know the answers though, so it won't help.
Aw, today is his one month anniversary with Microsoft. Happy anniversary!
Major accomplishments:
- Signed up for benefits
- Find the cafeterias
- Return to his office without getting lost
- Can finally remember a couple people's names
There are over 27 million pages on Microsoft.com--it took three weeks to discover them all. It's just a little site, really. They've indexed about 7 million of them. In Derrick's view, every duplicate content page is keeping one good page out of the index.
Review your site and make sure that you know what's there. Find duplicate content there before the spiders get there. Know your parameters and which you can drop for search engines. Do a regular crawl report that includes referring URL, fetched URL, redirect path with type, landing URL with status code, Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords. Sort by Title then landing URL and review them for dupes.
Ew! He's got a picture of spiders in a trap. EW.
Detect engines and strip out parameters that you don't need. He doesn't consider that "bad" cloaking. Remove session IDs. Smartpages.com stripped out session IDs and went from 1,000,000 pages indexed to 10,000,000 pages indexed. (A few months later, someone turned them back on and their page count fell. Whoops.)
Look for things that might be causing problems, like dynamic breadcrumbs, related products, etc. They might be helpful for users but you're probably going to get into trouble.
Q&A
Aaron: When you make changes in your rewriting can you fix it easily?
Yahoo: We validate and let you know if there's a failure. The returite starts ttaking effect in the system over a period of time. In the first few months, it's reversible, after that it gets hard.
If I did a 301 to clean this up, how soon do I expect results?
Yahoo: as soon as we start seeing it--a few weeks but it can take a while to percolate
Google: Same thing, as we recrawl, we'll incorporate. Up to a couple months.
Ask: Same.
Microsoft: Derrick's experience is 6 months to a year for full effect if you're 301 to a new site.
If you do a site: command in Google to find www vs. non-www and you come up with different counts, should you 301 the smaller number to the bigger?
Evan: First he wants to emphasize that the site colon estimates are just that, very rough estimates. He wouldn't take them as the golden number. Very very rough. Aside from that, pick whichever form you like better and they'll take it.
Is Google planning on following Yahoo in how their tools are developing?
At Google, we try to do the best we can detecting these things (that Yahoo allows webmasters to correct) automatically. Can't say when or if they'll be following on the allowing webmasters to specify.
Do breadcrumb navigation with a cookie instead of URL parameters. Aaron says that you can detect search engines and strip out parameters. Evan jumps back in to say that Google requests please don't do something special for us. Let us figure it out and if there's a problem contact us.
On what scale do you think Proxy sites (sites entirely duplicated with just a phone number different so they can track PPC calls) will affect your organic results?
Evan: In most cases, they're not outranking the original sites. They're not that popular. We do see them. If they're causing a problem for you, contact Webmaster Help.
What is the line of near-duplicate/duplicate?
Evan: I think you're looking at it from the wro9ng direction. Create unique, useful content and you'll be fine. [The room laughs. That requires work!]
Derrick: It's like the Supreme Court decision on obscenity; you know it when you see it.
Can I report copyright issues through the spam channels?
Priyank: Spam is more subjective. The DCMA is the right channel.
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 4/07 at 1:02 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Ask, Blogging, Google, Live Search, Microsoft, PubCon Las Vegas 2007, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo
Monetizing Social Media Traffic
[People are seriously mad about the lack of WiFi in the session rooms. This means in order for the livebloggers to give PubCon all the awesome press it deserves, we have to make a mad dash to the press room in the 0-5 minutes we have between sessions, wait for the incredibly slow speaker/press WiFi to load, post the entry, and then try and get back to the sessions before we miss anything. Crazy, right? Yeah. We all think so too.]
Okay, onto the topic at hand. The always adorable Rand Fishkin (who accused me of not loving him earlier. Blasphemy!) is moderating the Monetizing Social Media Traffic panel with Vanessa Fox, Michael Gray, Alexander Barbara, and Laura Fitton. Vanessa just made me promise to be nice. I don’t know what she’s talking about. The Lisa is always nice!
Up first is Vanessa Fox. Yey Vanessa. We all love Vanessa. Vanessa is pretty. (Is that enough nice?)
Vanessa says that page views don’t mean anything unless you’ve manage to set up a CPM ad model. If you have, that’s awesome. A lot of times with social media, you get all these page views of people coming into your site and then leaving. If you focus on page views alone, you can lose sight of the importance stuff.
Vanessa shows the page view stats for her sites. On September 6th, her page views skyrocketed. She was excited but it turns out what happened was that was the day the Vanessa Hudgens scandal broke. People were looking for naked pictures of Vanessa Hudgens, not Vanessa Fox.
Vanessa says the best thing to do is hook ‘em and keep ‘em. Create something viral that draws people in but have something else that keeps them there. Make sure the viral piece of content you have is interesting to the type of people who are going to visit your site. You want to attract the kind of people who are going to stay.
Turning visitors into customers
- Keep your viral marketing relevant for your site.
- Make it easy for visitors to see what your site has to offer.
- Provide multiple links to other pages on your site.
- Think about what your goals are and funnel users into a conversion path.
Social media users won’t convert as well as search users because the users’ reasons for visiting are totally different. Search users came because you were relevant to their needs. Social media users came because of link bait.
Next up is Michael Gray. Watch out.
Using social media for sales and conversions is an advanced tactic. It should only be attempted after you have a solid understanding of the intricacies of how social media works.
What types of Products Work?
- Products (physical or virtual) generally do better than services.
- Consumer goods almost always do better than B2B products.
- Impulse purchase.
- Low or “door buster” prices.
- Technology related items.
Examples of Social Media for Products:
- ThisNext: They have products on their blog. They created a gift guide.
- TechieDiva: Targeted Cybowe Monday.
- Style Dash: Tells you how to get the same clothes celebrities wear for less. Links to actual shopping pages with affiliate links.
Some pitfalls involved in monetizing social media: Not being clear about your offer, especially restrictions or quantities. Not anticipating demand and having inadequate stock levels. Failing to deliver your product. Not monitoring what people are saying about you.
Manage expectations for long term success. Decide if a hybrid or dedicated delivery channel is optimal. What is right for your audience? What will they expect? What will they stand for? Let customers choose method of delivery. Use trends and current events.
Use video and podcasts. Try and experiment, but be sure you understand the space before you get started.
Up next is Alexander to present a case study.
The site he marketed on Digg was a brand new site. It was a few months old when they started marketing it. It’s a site in the health and wellness niche targeted towards females. They put together a targeted campaign with list-type articles and targeted it towards Digg and gave it their all.
They submitted articles on a Wednesday afternoon and a Monday morning. It took 38 Diggs to make the first one popular and 57 Diggs for the second one. The first one got 28,000+ over five days, the second one got 19,000+ hits.
One of the things to think about is can your site handle the traffic? When you get on the first page of Digg you’ll get 60-100 hits per second! A lot of Webmasters, if you’re on a shared host, they’ll freak out and shut down your site because they think someone is trying to attack your site.
If you have a problem with your server, he recommends redirecting your traffic to other sources. Use mod_rewrite a temporary redirect to send traffic to a static page. You can take a tremendous amount of traffic that way. The other thing you can do is link to the Google cache. This means you’ll have to post your content a week or so ahead of time. A third option is to use Coral Cache, a free caching service. They crawl your site when you first visit the URL.
[Rand is making silly faces and bopping in the background. I have no idea what he’s doing. It’s distracting and funny.]
Digg users don’t click on ads so it’s not worthwhile to put ads on your site when you first submit. He recommends pulling ads for a day or two and then putting ads back on your site on day three. You’re likely to convert better.
He offers up a graph of the RSS subscribers on his site. When his story hit Digg, his RSS subscribers increased 5x over. Most of those subscribers left after a day or two, however. It’s a very unique behavior.
When it comes to monetizing traffic, you can try and do it directly or indirectly. If you do it directly, you can try targeted offers like AdSense, but the CPM model really is best. He thinks indirectly monetizing traffic is the way to go. You’ll get more subscribers and more traffic coming to your site. Not to mention all the links.
What We Learned:
- You need to understand your audiences – the Digg audience and your site audience. Find the commonality in order to tailor your content to appeal to both groups.
- Choose your monetization method wisely.
- Be prepared for the traffic.
Next to present is Laura Fitton. She’s going to tell us how to build lasting value through social media.
She says that ads are ailing. Right now a lot of people make their money selling or helping people sell. In the future, you’ll make more money helping people buy. The reason social media is working for her business is because she’s helping people understand what she can do for them. When they want to buy, they can find her.
The most important thing for people to learn is to listen. Markets are conversations. Conversations suck if you don’t listen. If your brand has any kind prominence, people are talking about you somewhere. Are you listening?
What if people are out there saying your company sucks? Well, if they’re saying that you suck, then you need to know and you need to fix it. Set up Google Alerts to monitor the conversation,
Social media drives traffic, but it’s not necessarily the boon people think it is. It’s also beside the point, because if it’s just curious traffic, they’re not there to buy. They’re just there to see. She doesn’t know anything about SEO or SEM. But just the fact that she’s always out there has helped brand her.
Social media makes money, but more importantly, it builds value and business. What value does your business bring to the world and how can you enhance it in social media? It’s the “teach a man to fish” game. If you gimmick people into visiting your site, that’s great, but then its over.
She says that social media is nothing new. It’s a lot older than any of us. And understanding it not just as a technology. Twitter is a group of friends of hers.
There are no tips, tricks or shortcuts. Gaming won’t pay. In social media, your customers are the ones writing the rules. If you piss them off, they’ll go away.
She talks about Facebook Beacon. They’re the poster child of social media and yet they messed up by making it opt out instead of opt in. They pissed off everyone, including Move On, Charlene Li, their channel partners, everyone. Someone went through and found out Facebook was violating all their partners Terms of Service and now they’re going to get sued. Good job, Facebook.
You have to focus on what really matters and what really lasts. Be useful. Help others. Love matters. Love lasts (aw). That’s why Perl didn’t die. Because its users love it and they love the connection they have with others because of it. Building love around what your value is will last.
[Rand, seriously, what is with the faces over there?]
Learn to seek control, don’t be afraid of it. People are already saying you suck. Control it. Don’t be afraid to fail.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 4/07 at 12:41 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in PubCon Las Vegas 2007, Social Media
Contextual Ad Programs
Detlev Johnson is moderating this morning’s Contextual Ad Programs session which will take a look at things from the vendors perspective. Our fine list of speakers include Brian Axe, Jay Sears, and Tony Wills.
[This session is totally empty. Everyone appears to be in Rand Fishkin’s Social Marketing 101 panel. Truthfully I was just in there, as well. Then I realized I was sitting in the wrong room. Such is my life.]
Detlev starts things off saying that in regards to contextual ads, this is a really important area where all the networks, specifically Google, have created a significant size revenue channel for advertisers.
All that is a nice segue for our first speaker, Brian Axe from Google.
Google views themselves as an ecosystem enabler. The evolution of Google started with users in Google search. From there they built the advertising and publishing platform. Google provides value to the various groups.
He outlines a few of Google’s different ad opportunities:
- Google AdSense for content: Leverage Google’s thousands of advertisers to monetize your page inventory. Freshness and relevancy are vital to performance.
- Google AdSense for search: The Google auction maximizes revenue. Placement targeting bids compete in our ad auction against keyword content targeted bids, maximizing total revenue for you. This is something Google continues to innovate on. They have a long way to go. You have to have a predicted clickthrough or conversion rate. Advertisers can use CPM or CPC.
- Targetable custom channels. Define custom channels and make them available to advertisers as placements. Advertisers can target specific placements within your site.
Brian lists some AdSense resources including the AdSense Help Center, as well as the Inside AdSense blog.
New Online Ad Formats from Google:
- Gadget Ads: Deliver customized solutions. Rich media platform built on Web 2.0 open standards. They range from video to menus, forms, transactions, mashups, feeds, user-generated and context-aware.
- AdSense for Video (text overlay product details: They’re engaging, highly relevant ads being pulled from Google’s enormous advertising network. They’re flexible -- User initiated advertising expertise. Ability to filter out unwanted advertising. They’re also far reaching.
- AdSense for Video (graphical overlay product details): CPM auction pay model.
Animated Ads run in the bottom 20 percent of the viewing area.Content Distribution: Transform AdSense into the leading content distribution and monetization channel for their publishers.
Video Units. Streams syndicated YouTube content to your site, in a specialized YouTube player. You can also become a YouTube partner and syndicate your content to your sites and thousands of others.
- AdSense for Feeds: Brian highly recommends this. Inserts a text ad within a feed as content moves between a publisher and subscriber.
AdSense is in line with Google’s mission to organize the worlds information and making it easily accessible.
Jay Sears from ContextWeb
A lot has happened this last year. ContextWeb quietly launched the ADSDAQ advertising exchange on October 17 of this past year. He doesn’t consider the ADSDAQ exchange as an alternative to Google’s AdSense program. He thinks it’s a compliment.
ADSDAQ is not “yet another ad network”. It’s not a revenue share network. It’s an exchange where as a publisher you set your CPM price, you can work with multiple networks and its self service with service. Jay says he’s going to walk us through the system.
What happens is you can go in and name your own CPM AskPrice. Publishers are already working with AdSense or YPM and have already identified what they’re CPM is. You can go in and ask to clear inventory at $1.25. What the market will do is ask you for your backup networks and either determine that the market can clear it at the higher price or, if the market can’t clear it, they’ll trap it and serve your backup networks as designated.
They asked people what they wanted out of an advertising platform and people kept telling them they wanted control. Control manifests itself in any number of ways – control about blocking competitors, control about blocking creatives you don’t like, etc. What they decided was that publishers were most concerned with pricing control.
Jay says ContextWeb’s ad platform is a very intuitive database. It’s graphical. No integration needed. Online reporting updated hourly. Easy to traffic through ad servers or directly on page.
It’s a contextual exchange. They’ll actually tell you how your site is contextualizing according to their real time engine. Typically, they’re clearing on average 50 to 60 percent of all impressions sent to the ADSDAQ exchange. It’s pretty incredible considering the pricing is all in your control.
Tony Mills is up.
Quigo’s Mission: Pioneering performance marketing solutions for premium publishers and advertisers. They offer publishers control and transparency.
AdSonar is a premium ad network providing publishers and advertisers with a private label platform supporting multiple targeting options, pricing mechanisms and ad forms. They sit in between advertisers and publishers.
Their value proposition is to provide increase revenue over a blind network. They offer greater control and transparency. For advertisers, they believe they’re a must buy.
Unlocking the value of premium inventory. Advertisers target the brands, pages and topics they want. Premium publishers get the values their brands deserve.
They have a new product they’ll be announcing shortly called AdLinks Plus. It bundles in text links and graphical text links that have both fixed placement and run of site placement. From a local basis with five small publishers, they’ve acquired an excess of 200 local advertisers. These advertisers were acquired by the local publishers sales force.
They’re also indexing local video from the site and syndicated video to show publishers exactly what video is bringing in what kind of revenue.
Question & Answer
In the early days of AdSense, a big part of optimizing the ad was to get the color right and the positioning on the page. I’ve given up on that. Is Google going to help advertisers break out their CTR?
Brian: That’s why I’m here. To hear these pain points and bring them back to the office. It’s not a matter of us not wanting to show this transparency, it’s about trying to get the features out. It’s about prioritization.
[Matt Cutts has left me with a tremendous amount of guilt over having to duck out of these Q&A’s but the next session is about to start. I promise that if the conference organizers give us some more breathing room that I’ll cover more of the juicy question and answer. Really.]
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 4/07 at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Pay Per Click / Online Ads, PubCon Las Vegas 2007
Kickoff Keynote with Craig Newmark
Okay, after surviving the registration line from hell, Susan and I are both seated at this morning’s kickoff keynote with Craigslist creator Craig Newmark. She’s going to follow the advice I laid out in my guide to liveblogging and pre-write some entries while I shell out some of my insightful recap coverage. Or something. I’m actually not sure what’s about to happen. I wasn’t provided with coffee this morning.
Brett Tabke is up and already taking shots at Chicago. Heh. Ooo, and now he just dissed premier sponsor Microsoft saying they’re doing a great job “trying to get in the game”. Methinks Brett isn’t winning friends this morning.
Brett says Craig doesn’t need any introduction. He’s Craig from Craiglist. He’s “one of us”. He built a site and stood by it all these years. And with that, Craig is up.
He says he’ll be talking a little bit about Craigslist and what he’s learned by doing Craigslist. How it fits into the whole concept of what’s happening on the Internet. He doesn’t feel that what Craigslist is doing is noble or altruistic. They’re providing a community service. They do it the way they do because it feels right. It’s not noble. They’re not a nonprofit. They’re a weird for profit community service.
Craig says he’s okay with people liveblogging. Um, good, because I had no intention of stopping. ;)
Craig starts off talking about Craigslist and says that in 2000, people let him know his management skills were not adequate for the job (heh). At that point, he decided to step down and focus solely on customer service.
The deal with Craigslist is that in 1994 he was at Charles Schwab. He was evangelizing the Web and saying that any kind of brokerage is largely an information service. This was the direction a lot of businesses would go. The Internet would be the platform for a lot of this stuff. He looked around and saw people were helping each other a lot. By the time 1995 rolled around, he started a simple mailing list using an old email tool called Pine where he was telling 10-12 friends what was going on in San Francisco. He didn’t know what he was doing but he was using a CC list to tell his friends about cool stuff. Word of mouth started and the list began growing. Over time, people would ask him to list things for sale (apartments, jobs, products, etc). It happened naturally.
[Tangent: Craig says he represented the nerd stereotype in high school. He had a plastic pocket protector, thick black glasses taped together and the social skills to go along with that. He says that you can learn social skills, but you never forget what it feels like to be like that. To be socially disenfranchised and isolated. Aw. That’s kind of sad. And why people adopt cats.]
In the middle of 1995, he was looking for a name for his email list. The people around him told him that they were already calling his list “Craigs list” and that he should continue using that. It guaranteed that it would always stay quirky and unique. That was his first lesson in branding and identity.
Around that time he got an email from someone suggesting he use tags on his emails to identity what kind of product or service the email was about. If it was an apartment, put “apartment” in the subject line. It was a great idea that Craig had never thought of.
During this time, Craig was plugging away as an overpaid software contractor. He was working on home banking at Bank of America. It was interesting stuff but the site he had created from the email list (I think we missed a step…) was getting bigger. In 1997, the site hit a million page views per month, folks from Microsoft Sidewalk approached him wanting to run banner ads (he declined because it didn’t feel right), and he was asked to turn the site into a nonprofit volunteer operation. In 1998, they started charging for job postings.
He began taking control of the site, and in the first few months of 1999, he started making Craigslist into an actual company. If you’re working freelance or consulting, at some point, what was once a hobby becomes an actual business. He did some hiring. As a manager, he says the suckage was considerable. Ha. He did one thing really smart. He hired a guy name Jim Buckmaster and he’s been really good. Shortly after that, Craig taught himself Perl and rewrote the code for Craigslist. Since then, he hasn’t done any significant programming to the site.
Craig says people often refer to him as the Paris Hilton of the net because of his George Costanza magnetism.
It’s been a slow, continuous growth for Craigslist. They’re the tortoise in the tortoise in the hare. Neither him nor Jim are MBAs. They’re programmers. They make things up as they go along. Their business model hasn’t really evolved. They charge for job postings in 11 cities and they charge for apartment listings in NYC. The people who they’re charging asked them to charge them.
He goes to NY a lot and when he’s roaming around the neighborhoods he drops in on real estate agencies. The reaction is disbelief, panic and then photography. Hee! He says many of the people don’t believe that he exists and he likes to encourage that. (Susan is the same way.)
He does customer service, not management, because that’s what feels right to him, Only recently have people asked him why he thinks Craigslist is successful. They just keep plugging away. The technology keeps improving. His guys do remarkable work. They’ve written their own caching system which they hope to open source once they hire more programmers. They’re running on a server farm of 120 Linux machines. The majority of their desktops and notebooks run Linux with a splash of Mac and a little bit of Windows. As things evolved, the usual email tool is a highly advanced email tool (look for Susan’s duplicate content session recap next!)
People keep asking him why they’re taking the path that they have. He says they have no intention of selling the site. They’re charging for less than 1 percent of it. There’s nothing noble about it. They’re just doing what feels right. They run the site based off the idea of shared values. People believe they should give each other a break every once and while. The deal is that everyone seems to believe in the notion that you want to treat people the way you want to be treated. That’s why the site works. He’s been doing customer service for a long time. People in our community are overwhelming good and trustworthy. Yes, there are bad guys, but they’re less than 1 percent of the population. The reason you hear more from extremists is because the more moderate people have stuff to do. If you trust your community, they’ll respond in a trustworthy way. That’s why they allow their community to flag stuff for removal.
When you think about the role that the Internet is playing in our culture, you get the sense that something big is happening. Everyone in this room is part of something big from a historic point of view. He’s been reading a lot about the history of the Internet lately. He says Johannes Gutenberg is the guy who invented the Internet back in 1452. Martin Luther was the first blogger. He invented the first “killer app” and caused a lot of change. Thomas Payne was another blogger. [What is going on? I’m so confused. – Lisa]
The Internet is everyone’s printing press. It’s pretty good and pretty democratic, but how do you get people to pay attention to your stuff? Ordinary people are getting together and changing things on a massive scale. The changes that we’re seeing these days are kind of like what we saw in 1776, except they’re affecting everyone.
There’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These guys are standing up for our rights online. They’re doing the best work when it comes to wireless wire tapping. They’re fighting the telco amnesty bill.
There’s a lot of other stuff going on. The theme is that moderates are getting together and actually changing things. .
Question & Answer
How do you call Craigslist and get Craig on the phone
Craig: I do take some liberties. I mostly handle abuse questions.
How can people do business on Craigslist? How can search engine marketers ethically use Craiglist to build links?
Craig: It’s simple common sense stuff. You go to our site, you look at the categories, decide what city you want to do business in. The idea is that every site has its own culture. Every site is a place in a virtual sense. You do as the Romans do. There’s a great temptation if you’re an SEO to place a lot ads with links of them. But if you do that, people will catch on and they’ll start to flag you, You’ll get an irritated note from Craig or Jim. They’ll reason with you12
Unfortunately, we’re going to have to jet out of the Q&A early (sorry, Matt). It’s not our fault. The next session starts in 5 minutes.
You can email Craig at craig@craigslist.org. He doesn’t run a spam filter because he was getting to many false positives and he is interested in pills to help him enhance in sex life. His phone number is listed but most people don’t call him.
[Sidenote: I would apologize for the scatterbrained-ness of this recap but it’s not my fault! That’s how the rest of us felt too. I was just trying to keep it authentic. :) ]
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 4/07 at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in PubCon Las Vegas 2007
December 3, 2007
A Guide for Liveblogging a Search Conference
Hey, kids! It’s almost time for me and Susan to say goodbye to the Bruce Clay headquarters and head to Las Vegas for 3 days of liveblogging. The liveblogging scene has gotten pretty competitive in the past year, as companies send out teams of bloggers in the hopes of providing readers with information session recaps and maybe getting some link love in the process.
One of the questions I get asked the most at conferences is, “how do you guys liveblog like that?” Well, I’ll tell you. Below are some tips and advice on how to liveblog a search conference.
Before the Show:
- Don’t Forget The Hardware!
I know, you probably think my reminding you not to forget the laptop and power cord is ridiculous, but believe me, people do it. All the time. Unless you want to be the Matt McGee of Pubcon/SES, I’d also recommend that you remember to bring a spare battery or two. There’s nothing worse than watching your screen turn black right in the middle of a speaker’s presentation or power down right as things are beginning to get juicy. Isn’t that right, Matt? :)
Perhaps just as important as the laptop and laptop juice, is the WiFi card. If you’re going to be doing some serious liveblogging, I highly recommend investing in one of these puppies. Conference WiFi is unpredictable at best, and making a quick stop in the Press Room between sessions isn’t always feasible. Liveblogging means publishing in the moment, and your ability to do that is 100 percent tied to your ability to access the Internet. Also, as fun as it is to hangout in the Press Room, it’s not really conducive to getting work done. Mostly because as you’re typing, you’ll have Tamar poking you asking you if you’re done yet. Or at least that’s what happens to me.
This isn’t something we typically do, but you may also want to come equipped with a videocamera and a regular camera, as well. And if you do, make sure you don’t forget that little uploady cord thing. Leaving it in your hotel room/suitcase/car/office is going to make you look like a liveblogging n00b.
- Plan ahead
Yes, you’re liveblogging, but doesn’t mean you should wait until you’re in session to take a look at the itinerary and who’s speaking. Arrive at the conference with a game plan. Know which sessions you’re going to cover, what rooms they’re in and who’s slated to speak.
Give yourself a head start and a guaranteed 30 seconds of downtime by pre-writing intros, researching speakers and hunting for relevant links before you arrive. I typically take care of all my pre-writing duties before I leave for the event. For example, I’ve already pre-written my 15 entries for Las Vegas. There’s not much there, but I have a title, a quick intro paragraph and the names of all the speakers listed. This helps me to jump right into the session when I finally get seated.
However, if you do pre-write parts of your entries make sure the speakers you said were there are actually the ones presenting. Sometimes speakers get sick or have last minute scheduling conflicts and have to be switched out. You don’t want to write about Bruce Clay’s presentation at SES Chicago when everyone just saw him in Las Vegas.
- Bring Snacks
Liveblogging a full day of sessions often means starting at 8am and staying well after 6pm. Sometimes livebloggers even have to sacrifice lunch in order to get necessary laptop charging time. If you don’t bring snacks, you’re going to be a grumpy, dragging blogger by the end of the day. Make sure you throw some granola bars, fruit and water into your laptop bag before heading out in the morning. You’ll thank me later.
- Expect Sudden Weather Changes
The inside of a conference room is like New England in the Spring. You never know what to expect. It will be warm and toasty one minute and then freezing and frostbite-inducing the next. Unless you can type with blue fingers, dress for both. And if you can, ladies, wear closed-toe shoes.
During the Show:
- Find Your Map
Once you pick up your conference badge, you’ll very often be handed a totally heavy, and ultimately worthless, conference tote. As Rebecca Kelley also advises, dump it. The only thing of value inside is the “At A Glance” agenda. And that puppy is worth its weight in gold.
The “At A Glance” agenda gives you a quick look at what sessions are being offered for the day and where they are. I typically go through my agenda and box each session I’m going to. I do this partly because it helps me to visualize how my day is going to be spent and when I’ll need to jump rooms. I also do it because I’m a geek and it makes me feel important.
- Claim Your Territory
Everyone has their personal favorite place in the room to settle down and blog. Some like to be in the front row, others like to sit in the back, some like to sit on the aisle and others make best friends with the wall outlet. Find what works best for you and get to sessions early so that you can claim your territory. There’s nothing worse than having to bunk elbows with the person sitting next to you because you spent your session break dillydallying in the hallway.
(Oh, and don’t dillydally in the hallway. If you’re a blogger, you’re in a hurry. Find the holes and navigate through them. If you’re not a blogger and are walking at a snails pace while you talk to your friends and eat your conference pretzel, get to the side. If you get in my way, you’re going to get an elbow to the ribs.)
Personally, I like a good front row aisle seat. This allows me to be close enough to the projector to actually read it, it gives me a solid view of the speakers’ name cards (to prevent misspellings) and gives me quick access to the door should I need to slip out to finish my entry and get to the next session ASAP.
Sitting in the front row also allows you to partake in some pre-session banter and networking with the speakers.
- Tune Everything Out and Type
Once the session starts, it’s time to settle in and type. Everyone liveblogs differently, but for me, I tend to tune out the rest of the room and just focus in on the person speaking. Because I type super fast and speakers are guaranteed to throw in a few “ums” and “ahs” and normal silences, this usually allows me to keep up with what the speaker is saying in real time.
Try and format the post as you’re going so that you’re able to quickly post as soon as the session ends. Many livebloggers use the Question and Answer portion of a session as a cue to stop listening and begin editing their entry. There are pros and cons to doing this. Typically, I only include the Q&A part of a session if someone asks a question that is particularly noteworthy. Otherwise, I skip it. I’m not trying to be rude, it’s just that I only have a certain amount of time to get my entry up. Did I mention that there are 0-5 minutes in between Pubcon sessions this year?
- Just Post It Already
Typically bloggers get something like 15-20 minutes in between sessions (unless you’re at Pubcon, apparently). Use this time to read over your post, clean up it up, and then post it. Don’t spend an hour trying to edit your post and get it up. As much as we all want to be perfectionists, liveblogging is very rarely perfect. If you let yourself become consumed with one post, you’re going to find that the rest of your entries suffer. Write it, edit it, publish it, and then get it out of your mind. You have work to do.
After the Show:
- Review the Days' Posts
Don’t obsess, but give your posts a read through once you get back to your hotel room. If there’s anything horribly offending (a misspelled name, the result of a page copy and paste job, etc) fix it.
- Celebrate!
Once you’ve ended your long day of liveblogging it’s time to celebrate! Find out where the parties are and go get your network on. If you don’t know where the cool parties are, head down to the happening bar and wait for people to tell you. Either way, you’ve survived a hard day and you’re entitled to some down time. Take it.
Liveblogging a search conference can have a tremendous impact on your company’s brand and authority level, especially if your work is so revered that people actually start expecting you to be there. Use your recaps to have a little fun, provide your readers some detailed accounts of each session, acquire some delicious link juice and network with your peers.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 3/07 at 11:45 AM | Comments (8)
See more entries in Blogging
Virginia Nussey
Susan Esparza
