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February 28, 2008

Search Marketing Expo West: Day 3 - Recap

It's Day 3 of SMX, the final day. It's made me think about what I got out of my very first SEO conference... Further knowledge about the new media environment. Valuable insight into what to expect from the future of search. And Lisa snagged me a free shirt!

Wonder Twins: SEO & User Generated Content
Top Takeaways

• When optimizing a forum, your goals are to attract more users via search, improve user friendliness, and improve the site's usefulness. To do this you should remove the fluff, use targeted keywords, and moderate with search and users in mind.
• Advantages of user generated content are that the set-up cost is low, while the content is exactly what search engines and users are looking for. Plus, you'll get link love from the high-quality content.
• In implementing UGC, create buzz first, maybe even exaggerating your membership numbers. As new sections launch, acknowledge and promote them.
• Monitoring UGC will be different for large and small sites. Smaller sites usually use an in-house moderator to approve or deny content waiting in the queue. Larger sites usually use a flagging system and moderate as necessary.
• Remember these tips when managing your UGC: be objective because too much control can lead to user hostility; optimize Title and Header tags and use friendly URLs; include badges/widgets and a link back to user profiles.

Search 4.0: Just Behave — A Look At Searcher Behavior
Top Takeaways

• People have different relationships with different brands. We associate feelings with brands. When making a decision, those feelings and opinions come into play as we narrow our choices to four or five (bounded rationality).
• Through transactive memory, individuals serve as memory aids to each other because everyone remembers something different. You don't have to remember everything you learn because there's a collective brain forming.
• Search is part of transactive memory. It acts as an expert by bringing in the experts (news, video, images) and anticipating users' needs.
• People form different categories of themselves (work-you, home-you, family-you). Each category has different requirements and experience within that context. Businesses must consider the niche of their audience and the context in which they're searching.
• Usability studies show that expressing a need in a single-line query is hard for people. So, users look for familiar brands, familiar sites, and familiar navigation.

Keynote: Generation Next — Search In the Coming Decade
Top Takeaways

• Will search as we know it survive? Search as we know it will be the foundation upon which the future is built. But traditional search will disappear as search becomes more pervasive and ingrained in the whole user experience.
• Do ads need to become louder to get noticed on a richer interface? Yes, you need to adapt and fit in to the changing model. Creativity and quality are improving, providing more value to the user. All the tools you need to experiment are available to you.
• What do you see happening to the balance between keeping ads relevant and satisfying users' needs via search? Ads will stay relevant, even as the bar gets higher, because paid search is harder to spam and there's still a lot to be gained in terms of meeting user intent.
• Search marketers seem to have less influence in where their content shows up. Is this a threat to conventional SEO? It's actually opened up more opportunities to show up, but SEOs will have to go beyond traditional methods and look to new venues.
• What features do you want to see developed five years from now? Vertical search, improved access and functionality in all technologies (like mobile search), and a better connection between the user and the content.

Web Analytics Roundtable
Top Takeaways

• Key issues of analytics data quality include: tracking visitors over time; knowing how long visitors spend on each page; knowing where visitors go when they leave; counting robots.
• Key capabilities of dimensional reporting include: collecting visitor and visit distribution as variables; cross-tabulating all reporting variables; tabulating multi-dimensional variables; exporting N-Dimensional Tables to Excel; applying visitor segments to N-Dimensional Views; distributing N-Dimensional Views; eliminating data cropping on high-cardinality variables.
• Key capabilities of management reporting include: combining and tailoring data views; exporting data to Excel; integrating real-time segmentation with Excel Automation; reporting data through an API.
• Key capabilities of analytics for SEM purposes include: tracking results by search terms used and search terms purchased; tracking content match scores; reporting day parting and time parting; flexible attribution models; collecting cross-attribution reports; collapsing search terms for analysis as a unit; viewing performance of SEO and PPC side-by-side; cross-tabulating geography by keyword.
• When planning your use of analytics, remember that good implementation is difficult to achieve. Web analytics can't happen without proper tools and resources. There is no safe approach to Web analytics, so think about what you're really getting for your efforts.

Industrial Strength SEO
Top Takeaways

• It's important to define your SEO standards and best practices. To do this, create consistent processes and written standards, provide comprehensive training, and create communication and collaboration protocols and expectations. Creating a style guide is also recommended.
• Also, remember to monitor pages that rank for specific keywords, create a monthly to-do list of pages to audit and optimize, and manage the workflow by focusing on the highest value keywords and pages first.
• Yahoo! measures the success of their SEO efforts with an internal scorecard. Using an index that follows the predictive model, they are able to track SEO efforts over time. They also use a dashboard to view an overview and compare their work with their competitors.
• In your SEO campaign, DON'T: wall-off content; under-communicate success; forget to communicate with other departments, like IT, design, and ad sales; expect too much too soon; forget editorial oversight; forget to implement necessary changes. DO automate the Meta Keywords tag.
• Possible solutions to improve poor inter-linking include Omniture, WebTrends, and Organic Search Insight.

SEO Q&A
Top Takeaways

• What are some primary things to do to SEO your Web design? Include RSS, have a good CMS, use a flexible platform, include keywords in text links, and have a way to measure performance indicators, and most importantly, build architecture around keyword research.
• What are some of the best SEO tools available to the public? Keyword Discovery, Firefox Web Developer Toolbar and search status, Google Webmaster Tools, SEOToolSet, TouchGraph, and Thumbshots Ranking Tool.
• What tools can be used to measure rankings? InQuisit is a good one, but the majority of this panel recommends not focusing on rankings.
• How many words should be in the Title tag? There's no specific number. One recommendation is up to three keyword phrases. Don't include commas in Titles. Avoid overstuffing keywords into Titles tags because that can dilute keywords. Make the Title something people want to click.
• In light of the paid links war, have SEO methods changed? When buying links for ranking, be judicious, consider the risks, and disclose everything to the client. Be sure the other organization fits your mission and is compatible. Links are easier to get when there's high-value content on your site.

In House Issues
Top Takeaways

• When implementing an in-house SEO program, consider how much your company currently leverages search and what you can viably handle. If you have to make a case for in-house transition, explain what the current program lacks and present the value addition and cost benefits of moving the program in-house.
• A few tips to remember if you do SEO in-house: choose your model based on your company and industry; get executives on-board by teaching them about paid and organic search and showing them a SERP; go for small wins to build confidence.
• When forming an in-house SEO program, consider your budget, the size and complexity of your Web site, the current organizational structure, and the challenge of recruiting.
• When presenting to executives: avoid jargon and use stories to make points; time presentations for milestones, such as before budgets are submitted; show them the competition; emphasize investment rather than spending.
• To integrate branding with SEO, have an organized plan and present yourself as an ally. Search has branding elements built in, so accomplishing core competency could yield branding progress.

Linking Q&A
Top Takeaways

• What are ways to prevent losing traffic when moving a site to a new domain? Permanently 301 redirect your site. To play it extra safe, move one part of your site first and if the rankings are fine, you should be good to go. Be conservative with changes to content and layout. Getting new links after implementing the 301 will help engines sort out the change faster.
• Google recommends disclosing paid links. What do the other engines want? Live Search recommends using nofollow on paid links. Yahoo! thinks paid links are not useful to users and looks out for them.
• What's the definition of a paid link? A rep from Live Search says the spectrum is very broad. On one side there are irrelevant, bad links, and on the other, there are sites like the American Veterinary Association that gives links to paid members. Search engines really care about the irrelevant ones.
• What difference do outbound links make? It's more important to think about outbound links as something to help your visitors. Most of the search engines do consider who you link to as a reflection of your reputation.
• Does Google consider siloing or sculpting manipulative? Yes, but Google is only against bad manipulation. Before worrying about advanced techniques like sculpting page rank, be sure the basics are covered.

SEO & Usability: They Can (And Should) Coexist
Top Takeaways

• When optimizing for usability: use and validate your users' language; communicate a sense of place; include both textual and graphical cues; structure your information architecture; make sure your interface supports the architecture, not the other way around; promote user confidence.
• Do your keyword research first. Include important keywords in the site's information architecture and interface.
• SEO and usability must work together for the best ROI. SEO gets the traffic and usability converts the traffic.
• If you want to include Flash on your Web site, don't design the whole thing in Flash; create Flash elements instead. Also, provide important content displayed in Flash in way search engines can read as well.
• Some of the most major SEO considerations are usability considerations as well. Keywords should be used in titles, descriptions, body copy, and links for both usability and SEO considerations.

Phew! My girls accomplished an incredible feat these last few days. After that, our BC bloggers deserve to let loose. Lucky for them, their ideal celebration plans are already in motion.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 02/28/08 at 5:00 PM | Comments (1)
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Linking Q&A

Okay, time to answer all of your linking questions. Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) will be moderating a rowdy list of speakers who include Nathan Buggia (Live Search), Matt Cutts (Google), Priyank Garg (Yahoo) Rae Hoffman (Sugarrae Internet Consulting), Peter Linsley (Ask) and Todd Malicoat).

Rae says if I comment on how fast she speaks she’ll cut me in the parking lot. Saying nothing.

I want to move my site to a new domain, how do I make sure I don’t lose traffic?

Priyank: 301s from your old location to your new location.

Matt: That rocks. In addition to that, if you want to be very safe, consider moving one part of your site first. If you move those pages over and your rankings are fine, you know you’re in good shape. If you want to, lots of places give you a way to look at your backlinks. Write to those people and tell them you moved.

Peter: Try to be conservative with the content and the layout, keep it the same.

Rae: Getting new links after you do the 301 will help the engines sort it out a bit faster.

Nathan: This is a great place to engage a reputable SEO. There are a lot of things that can go wrong when moving a site over. Don’t do it yourself without experience.

How important are .edu or .gov links?

Rae: She goes for older links before the .govs and .edus. You can have a crappy link but if it’s been there for 8 years, it will be more helpful than an .edu link that you got 3 days ago. She’d be really surprised if the engines haven’t found a way to identify user pages on .edu pages as opposed to links coming from the core domain.

Matt: You used to see this question being asked in regard to DMOZ. The value in those links is that they typically have higher PageRank.

Peter: …And one of the reasons for that is because spam doesn’t exist on .edu domains.

Would Ask.com tell Google why the nofollow attribute is not necessary?

Hee!

Peter: I wouldn’t go as far as to say that. I think the concept is sound but the reality is a lot of paid links will not be disclosed that way. As a search engine, we still have this fundamental problem of trying to work out the value of each link. We support it on the page, not link. Not each link is created equally at query time. This algorithm is fairly good at filtering out paid links.

Google recommends disclosure about paid links, what do the other engines want?

Nathan: We recommend using nofollow in the event of a paid link. The definition of what a paid link is, is the gray area. He’s not going to talk about what a paid link is. ;)

Priyank: Paid links have been found to not be useful for searches. We tend to look at these things more on a site level and take relative points of view. That’s the kind of variation of the Web we look out for.

Danny: It sounds like the preferred method is to go with a nofollow.

What’s the definition of a paid link?

Matt: I understand the inclination to go for the gray area, but you have to realize that the vast majority of time when we’re talking about paid links, we’re talking about “here’s some money, here’s a link”. Those links are not the most useful to searchers.

Rae: The search engines created currency in links. You created the value of a link and I wish you would take more responsibility for the problem that you created instead of putting the responsibility on me to fix it. [Huzzah for Rae – Lisa!]

Matt: Every search engine tries to make their algorithm robust. Some people rant about nofollow, but the idea is that it’s a tool you can use so that the search engines don’t have to come in and run the algorithms. If someone wants to sell links, here’s an easy way to not flow PageRank – use nofollow.

Nathan: There are two spectrums of paid links. In one the link is totally irrelevant and obviously bad. On the other side, you have the American Veterinary Association where you have to pay to be a member but you’ll get a link. It’s very much a spectrum right now.

Priyank: We have been fighting irrelevant links before nofollow was there. All these mechanisms are a way for webmasters to provide us with better signals. Site owners do what they do and we lose control.

If someone has a question about a gray area with paid links, where can they go to get an answer?

Matt: We have our Webmasters group that will answer your questions. You can also ask on the Webmaster Central blog. You can ask on his blog, too. In general, it’s not a bad idea to ask yourself, well if a competitor walks in the room and looks at my site, are they going to consider is strange?

Priyank: Go to the Site Explorer discussion board.

Peter: Leave a comment on our site or send a message to support. When Bruce Clay was in the last session, he said that if you can explain why you have that link on your site to Matt Cutts, that’s a really good test. The opposite is true, as well. We should be able to tell you why you’re getting a ding.

Nathan: Ask in the webmaster forums. They don’t have an automated way.

Why do the link counts on Yahoo Site Explorer fluctuate?

Priyank: There was a period when there was an error and things when out of kilter. That’s all taken care of now. You should not see much fluctuation but what does happen is sometimes there are machines that go up and down.

We have a lot of link baiting going on. What’s the quality of UGC linking? At what point could they go bad?

Matt: Some links are higher quality because they come from high PR sources and you have to think of the effort and the value of a link. If you got a link because someone copied and pasted your widget, that’s a link a search engine doesn’t consider useful. A lot of social generated content sites spend a lot of time thinking about how they’re going to create a high quality link. The best thing a UGC site can do is to monitor for spammy links.

Todd: If you sit on enough linking panels, you’ll wind up getting the idea that the last links that are going to count are Harvard, Stanford and CNN. The truth is, there’s gotta be a balance. As long as there’s a balance in the links that you’re getting, you’re okay. If all your links are from UGC site, you’re going to tip off a filter.

Concerns that if I use a 301 I’ll use some of my link value. Do those links count less?

Priyank: A 301 is not the same as a link. In terms of Yahoo, 301s carry all the link juice forward.

Matt: For the most part, they carry the same link juice. If you use 30 of them in sequence, Google is going to get dizzy. He still recommends moving a small portion of your site over first.

Peter: Make sure the content is fundamentally the same thing so that we know the links you had before can vouch for the new site.

Nathan: If you’re using 301 in your site and it looks like a relevant page, then you’re golden.

Link sabotage: fact or fiction?

Rae: Fact. I think that a lot of it has to do with the balance. I don’t think I can go out and take CNN out, but I think I could take another site out by changing the balance of their links to be in favor of something Google doesn’t like.

Todd: If we can do it accidentally sometimes, you can certainly do it on purpose.

Matt: The thing I would say is that Google has made it really, really hard for one site to hurt another site. We make it very hard for someone to negative SEO someone else’s site.

Peter: People can hack into your site and pop up links in directories you didn’t even know existed. And then if they link to you, it looks like you’re participating in a reciprocal linking circle.

Priyank: If you’re checking your site in Yahoo Site Explorer and find links that you think are bad, you can report them. It goes into their analysis queue. It’s a way for you to see who’s linking to your site.

Matt: That’s a great feature. Matt asks how many people want to be able to disclaim links. Lots of people raise their hands.

Rae: If you make that feature, are you going to penalize me if I don’t patrol my links?

Matt: Matt basically says yes. Heh. Here we go again.

Peter: If you suddenly see all these incoming links, you have a right to be very suspicious. It could be a sign that someone is trying to hurt your site. It’s worth keeping an eye on your access logs.

Outbound links: Make a difference to a Web site?

Todd: Outbound links are probably one of the lesser discussed and more important things these days. It’s a good way to get someone’s attention to link to the 100 top bloggers, but you’re also linking to the right places, so you’re associating your site with other experts.

Rae: You’ve gotta link out when it makes sense for the user. It’s not even a search engine thing.

[The engine reps applaud her. Hee.]

Matt: Google agrees with that statement. Your users appreciate it when you link to high quality stuff. You can’t control who links to you, but you can control who you link to. It’s about reputation.

Priyank: We do look at your neighborhood.

Peter: All of the above. Linking to a bad neighborhood is not a good thing.

Todd: Don’t be a scrooge with your links. It’s like Progressive. They’re rates aren’t always the cheapest, but they still show their competitors rates so users can decide.

What about this PR sculpting thing?

Matt: Worry more about the overall health of your site. When you’ve got that down, then worry about sculpting your PageRank. You want to put your best pages first. Why wouldn’t you put your best selling products and put links to those top ten products right from your home page? It’s going to get the most link juice, they’ll get crawled, etc. All you’re doing if you’re using nofollow is pushing the juice to the most important pages. People have been doing that from the beginning of time. It’s an advanced technique. Pay more attention to the basics before you start worrying about that.

Rae: You’re not against sculpting, but technically it is manipulating things, right?

Matt: Well sure it is. Any time you put a link on a page, it’s manipulative. Google is only against evil manipulation. Deciding how you link around on your site, sure it manipulates, but it’s not a bad thing.

Rae: Do you think it could be abused and then we’ll have to change it?

Matt: People always do dumb things on their Web sites. The search engines don’t need to crawl your Contact Us page. In any normal usage, you’re not going to have to worry about it.

Nathan: Microsoft agrees with that statement.

I’ve got a Web site, then some company buys it and the domain name registry changes, will you still pass the credit or are we starting at stage one?

Nathan: No.

Rae: We did that recently when we had to move 20 sites from one company to another company and we didn’t lose rankings.

Matt: In the general case, no one needs to worry. It’s completely normal. However, as with anything on the spectrum, you can go all the way to the edge. Suppose you’re buying thousands of expired domains and you want to link them around. You wouldn’t want that to count. That’s the case where it’s not okay.

Rae: If you buy 15 smaller niche sites and redirect them to your site, is that a problem?

Matt: If it’s 3 or 4, it wouldn’t a problem. At 15, that’s a bit high. It’s a spectrum.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/28/08 at 4:04 PM | Comments (3)
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SEO & Usability: They Can (And Should) Coexist

I'm running so late. Okay, here's the next panel: Moderator Gord Hotchkiss (Enquiro) who I have seen so many times this week. Speakers are Shari Thurow (Omni Marketing) and Lance Loveday (Closed Loop Marketing). This is presentation only because the site clinic is next session.

Shari Thurow is up first and my fingers start hurting preemptively.

She's going to be establishing a common vocabulary for us all and some key concepts of search usability.

What is usability? She provides Jakob Neilsen's.

People should be able to get the scent of information before they get to the actual web page. Usage-centered design is a focus on the use of the product, what you're doing, trying to accomplish. Search usability is usage-centered, not user centered.

Search does not mean query. It also addresses refining, expanding, foraging, pogosticking, browsing/surfing, negative search behavior, etc.

There are at least three types of query behaviors but the majors are navigational, informational and transactional. Your Web pages need to accommodate all of these types.

Usability affects search engine visibility.

Key Concepts:

• Using and validating the user's language - search engines do this by highlighting the words used in the query.
• Sense of place
• Scent of information
• Information architecture
• Interface
• User confidence

There's a lot of swearing that goes on in usability testing. Ahem.

Headings are important not just for ranking but also for user confidence. It validates their search.

Sense of place answers the questions: where are you, what page are you viewing whose site are you visiting? what content is this page focused on? is this the information I was looking for?

Scent of information:
Is makes of textual and graphical cues. You need to have both.
Ensures that visitors will be successful in finding what they need
Answers the questions: is the information you desire on the page, what can you do? Where can you go? How do you get there? How do you get back? Where have I been? Nothing irritates a user more than messing with the link colors.

Information architecture:
How Web content is organized and grouped
How files are arranged on a Web server
How Web content is categorized
How Web content is labeled

Interface always FOLLOWS after architecture.

Navigational labels and cues should be written in the users' language whenever possible and applicable -- often contain keywords

The interface should always support the site architecture

Pages will end up more focused.

Reinforce your primary navigation with your secondary navigation.

Keyword research always comes first. Important keyword phrases should be a part of a site's information architecture and corresponding interface which means that effective search engine optimization begins before a site is being built, not after. Search usability addresses all search behaviors, not only querying behavior.

Usability testing and a focus group are not the same. It's task oriented, not focus group questions. The goal is to balance between user expectation and business goals.

She goes through a case study.

Just because something isn't your particular taste, doesn't mean that it won't convert. Get over your preconceptions.

She finished her presentation in exactly 25 minutes. Gord is impressed.

Next up is Lance Loveday. He's got his own lavaliere mike. It's keen but a little feedback.

Let's start with some philosophy: Some Web sites are better than others. Better Web sites make more money. ROI depends on making your content visible and effective. You need to get traffic and convert that traffic. In other words, you need SEO (get traffic) and you need usability (convert traffic).

Extreme design can get in its own way. Extreme usability can be equally oppressive. Jakob Nielsen's site is both very usable and very search engine friendly but it's boring as heck.

MYTH: Applying SEO to a site limits design flexibility and inhibits usability.

We want to think that there's one right way to do things and there's got to be a number one. The reality is that there is no inherent tradeoff between the three. It's just more work to do it.

First, remember what the engine is seeing. It's just the HTML. There's a separation between content and interface.

A word about Flash: You can still design in it but it's more work.

What people say to defend Flash: "Having a deep immersive experience is more important that search engine rankings" "We'll sacrifice search engine rankings for the experience."
What they mean: "SEO is boring." "We want to use Flash."

What people say to defend Flash: "Usability needs to be balanced with design, branding and user experience objectives."
What they mean: "Usability is boring." "We want to use Flash."

[Gord: It's funny because it's true. Quicksand is an immersive experience too.]

All Flash page/site can't be crawled.

Options:
1. Ideally, don't design entirely in Flash. Use elements instead.
2. Provide important Flash content in alternate manner visible to search engines using Progressive Enhancements. (HP's site is a good example of this.)

Major SEO Considerations:

• Title
• Description
• Copy (length, keyword density)
• Links

None of these are usability conflicts.

URLs:
SEO -- Use keywords in the URL and use static appearing URLs
Usability -- doesn't matter Matters.

Recent Marketing Sherpa results: "Long URL Length contributed to more clicks on… the next ad down the page. Those viewing the listing on the long URL clicked on the listing immediately following 2.5 times more than those viewing the listing with the short URL. The long URL repelled the click as it was interpreted as being less relevant. The long URL may act as a visual wall, directing attention to the next ad."

Lance shows a few sites that are doing things right.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/28/08 at 3:44 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, smxwest2008

Search Engine Optimization Q&A

Lunch is over and it’s back to blogging. Or dancing in the aisle if you’re Danny Sullivan. Hee. This time it’s a search engine optimization Q&A which means I’ll be typing and sweating like a crazy person while the panelists speak in circles. Sigh.

Danny Sullivan will moderate the panel of speakers that includes Greg Boser (3 Dog Media), Bruce Clay (Bruce Clay Inc.), Todd Friesen (Visible Technologies), Stephan Spencer (NetConcepts) and Jill Whalen (High Rankings). Stephan is a late addition so he’s stuck at the end of the table on a sucky chair. Poor guy.

Danny wants to jump right to it.

What are the most important factors to consider when trying to rank well in Yahoo? Are there any differences between the engines>

Greg: Crappy links work really well for Yahoo. There’s a difference in the amount of time and quality stuff. A lot of times we have separate strategies for Yahoo. New sites will get traction in Yahoo long before Google. Strong on anchor text. High volume, low PR pages still rank.

Stephan: Paid inclusion works really well (giggle). And of course there’s no ranking benefit (scoff).

Todd: The nice thing about paid inclusion on Yahoo is that it’s a 1/3 of the click price of PPC.
Suggest 3 or 4 primary things you should be doing when designing a Web site to be successful in search engine optimization?

Greg: RSS, RSS, RSS. Search engines love feeds. It helps you get your site crawled quicker and more often. Don’t do the static HTML thing.

Jill: Do your keyword research first and then build the site architecture off of that. Don’t build the site and then try to SEO it. Get the keyword research in. Good CMS is important.

Bruce: He agrees with Jill. Start with keyword research and then organize the site on themes. The biggest ranking problem is not being able to get spidered. We’re seeing less than 10 percent of pages getting spidered for a lot of large sites.

Todd: Use a platform that is fairly flexible. You don’t want things hard coded. You want to be able to manipulate elements.

Stephan: He’s fan of keyword-rich text links. You can make them specific to the page. Have some sort of way to measure key performance indicators like comparing how many unique URLs are getting spidered versus how many are in the index. Monitor that over time. Look at long tail metrics. What are you measuring – page yield, keyword yield, etc?

[Check out our How To: SEO Design blog post too – Lisa]

Advice for sites using iframes or AJAX?

Greg: Cloak. AJAX is great for cleaning the toilet but not for search engine optimization. You want to make sure you have workarounds. The biggest thing about IT and development is that they don’t think of search engines as another user that they have to accommodate. AJAX is great but if you have multiple pages of content being served with AJAX it’s not getting spidered and indexed. There are a lot of different ways to work around that, but you have to do it.

Todd: The other problem with AJAX is that you lose a lot of your metrics. You don’t get page views because you have nothing passing through the URLs. It looks great, but at the end of the day you’ve had a million visitors to your home page and that’s it. You can do workarounds but it’s expensive.

Bruce: AJAX isn’t as rewarding for an end user as you think it is. When users go through your site, they lose the functionality of their back button. It presents a usability issue.

What’s your favorite publicly available SEO tool

Jill: Keyword Discovery, Firefox, Google’s Webmaster tools. Realize that tools aren’t going to do your SEO for you. They just help. There’s no tool out there that you can just push a button and have your site SEO’d

Bruce: Bruce likes his tools. There are plenty of tools out there. Some of the tools from SEO Book are really good. He thinks tools should be appropriate to the mission. If you’re looking for info use Site Explorer. Analytics is going to become one of the most important SEO tools out there. Pretty soon ranking isn’t going to mean much, especially as behavioral search and personalization kicks in.

Greg: Bruce likes Bruce’s chart. He uses his own internal tools. He likes Keyword Discovery too. Pay attention to the ratio between keywords.

Todd: Firefox Web Developer Toolbar and search status. That’s for the really quick analysis. HTTP Live Headers tracks redirects.

Stephan: There are tons of great tools out there. He likes the wow factor of TouchGraph. He likes the Thumbshots ranking tool. You can compare search results between search engines. It shows a visual circle for each search result for the first 100 results across the two comparisons and connects a line between the common results.

What tools do you use to measure rankings?

Jill: You can’t use rankings as a measurement anymore. I would encourage you to get away from that.

Todd: We’ve always tried to move away from rank reporting. Clients want to see some form of it, but at the end of the day you end up on a call with a client and they’re going off because you’re not number one for the big money term.

Stephan: Enquisite is pretty cool.

Greg: The thing with automated reporting is that Google bans him ten times a day. And he runs stuff really slow but they’re really sensitive to the automated thing.

Aside from WordTrack and Keyword Discovery, are there any other keyword research tools you like?

Todd: Enquisite exposes a lot of long tail stuff that you wouldn’t normally see yourself getting traffic from. You can slice and dice the data. A client found out they were getting 25 percent of their traffic the UK and optimized their site around that. Able to really increase revenue.

Stephan: You can see by city what your rankings are, which is really cool. A lot of people don’t realize it’s not just the data center that results can vary by, but by city.

Jill: Using your site search to see what people are searching for on your site.

Bruce: He optimizes his site for about 20 keywords. He’s not doing much more than trending over time. He looks for things where all of a sudden it’s broken and that triggers him to go deeper. At the end of every day, he gets about 800 different combinations of words that people used to find him. If you add up all the keywords that are being used a few times a day, it actually exceeds your top keywords.

Bruce offers up the SEOToolSet for 60 days.

Danny: He likes Compete’s tools, which will show you your competitors’ top terms. Hitwise can do that for you, also comScore.

Todd calls Bruce the industry’s version of a crack dealer. No comment. ;)

How many words should you put in your Title ta? Is changing the h1 tag better or bad for rankings?

Greg: Put as many words in there as you can possible fit. (he’s kidding) Having proper structure to your site is important. It’s not the holy grail to SEO, but if you follow W3C you’re going to perform better because it’s easier for the engines to spider. You want to reduce the chances that Googlebot will make a mistake.

Stephan: H1s are useful. It’s a synergistic effect of everything working together to get out the theme of your page. You want a consistent keyword theme to come through. If the H1 tag helps drive that home for Googlebot, great.

Jill: For title tags, there’s no specific number of characters. She goes for about 11 or 12 words. You can get 3 keyword phrases in there and it still looks good.

Greg: Don’t put commas in your titles. And don’t stuff too many keywords in there. You don’t want to dilute your keywords. Think about clickability. Create a listing that will make people want to click through to your site. Your description can’t read like you’re a five year old.

Stephan: Keep the H1 tags relatively short.

Bruce: We’ve gone though and have analyzed groupings of pages that rank for certain terms and found that there are entire groups where the best ranking pages have 7 words in the title. It isn’t clear that there’s a magic number for title tags, we think it’ s more important to act in a natural way and be compelling in a way that people want to click on it. If it’s not important enough to be in your title, it’s not important to rank for it.

Seeing anything change in how you’re doing SEO now that the paid links war is happening?

Jill: I’ve never bought or sold a link so it hasn’t changed anything for me. If you do it, do it underground.

Bruce: We don’t buy links for PR at all. If you’re going to buy an ad it should be for traffic.

Todd: He goes first and says yes, I do buy links for rankings. You have to be very careful and very judicious. Yes, there are risks associated with it. It’s all about disclosure to your client. If you tell your client what you’re doing and what Google’s stance on it is and they’re okay with it, that’s fine. There are still places you can go to do that.

Greg: If you want to torture a competitor, come to one of these sites and claim your site is there site and have Matt look at it. Hee. You need to look at your space. There are some areas on the Web where to compete you have to buy links. Until Google finds a way to enforce their policies evenly across the Web, you’re really in a situation. Every link on the Web is paid for in some way or another.

Stephan: Think creatively. A paid link could actually be PR if you’re thinking in terms of there are non profits that I could get involved in and volunteer with. It’s like karma, stuff comes back to you. Think in terms of organizations that fit your mission and are compatible with you.

Matt’s not real keen on sponsored blog posts, but if you get involved and have interesting things to say and meet up with people, you’re going to be on their radar.

Jill: You do have to have something worth linking to though. It’s easier to get links when you have something of value on your site.

Bruce: If you’re doing something on your Web site, think what you would do if Matt Cutts suddenly looked over your shoulder. If your first thought is to shut the computer, you’re probably a spammer. If you cannot say “this is why I have the link”, you’re spamming.

If you had to link building or onpage SEO, which would you do??

Jill: Onpage

Greg: It depends on the age and history of the site. Onpage factors from a trusted site will trump anchor text on a nontrusted site every time.

Todd: If you’ve got the right CMS, you can do all your onpage stuff in an hour. You don’t have to choose. You have to do both.

Bruce: In any circumstance you have to do both. Even if it’s a new site, in five years from now it won’t be. If it’s only going to take a few hours to do onpage stuff, why not just do it now? Get your house in order.

Can you talk about using keywords in URLs and domain names. Should I separate them with dashes?

Greg: Don’t use underscores, use dashes. Google does recognize keywords in domains that don’t have dashes. Having your name in the domain name is great. Don’t go out and spam.

Stephan: Putting keywords in the domain definitely helps. Don’t have hyphens in the domain name because it looks better to humans. In the rest of the URL, hyphens over underscores.

Todd: Using keywords in the URL is one of those things if you can do it, do it. It’s a resource issue. The reality is if you’re trying to rank for plasma television, there really are more than ten sites that are perfectly relevant for plasma televisions. Get your house in order. That might be the one little thing that gives you that tip over the edge. You want to prioritize things. Getting keywords in the URL is pretty far down the list.

Jill: If you already have a site that’s not using the keywords in the URL and it’s ranking well, don’t go changing the site just for that one thing.

Bruce: Understand that content is not just text. It’s also images. We’ve found images ranking with 14 hyphens. Those things are showing up. If you’re dealing with other forms of media that are also content, I think you’ll find that sometimes hyphens are okay. We agree that keywords will help, we’re not saying it will cause you to be number one.

If you’re already ranking well with underscores, should you go to hypens?

Danny: No.

Stephan disagrees.

To what extent can the engines detect duplicate content?

Greg: They’re pretty good at it. It’s a big issue now with mashup sites. Helping companies interject unique UGC and add it to that mashed up thing where we can convince an algorithm that it is relevant content.

How important is domain age to SEO?

All: Very important.

Any top search engine optimization tips to share?

Jill: Sign up for her newsletter

Bruce: All the reports and all the things you’re going to be doing is going to based on data that you observe from analytics or rankings. The best thing you can do is get properly trained.

Greg: Prioritize. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with data.

Stephan: Consider sculpting your PageRank. Pass PR to important pages.

Todd: The reason SEO doesn’t get done is because there are resource issues and the IT dept is never in the loop. The tip out of that is you go visit your clients. Include IT. Bring them with you. Take them out to dinner.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/28/08 at 2:44 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization, smxwest2008

In House Issues

Back from lunch. I'll miss these lunches when I'm home tomorrow and I have to eat soup from a can instead. But enough about me. Moderator Jessica Bowman (Yahoo! Inc.) had a great line up of speakers ready for us. Let's meet them. My buddy, Paul Bruemmer (Red Door Interactive), Bill Macaitis (Fox Interactive Media), William Scully (Siemens), Bob Tripathi (Discover Financial Services) and last but not least, Lisa proclaimed hottie Derrick Wheeler (Microsoft).

Now that you've learned everything you need to do to SEO your site, how do you take that back to your IT team? That's what this panel is going to answer.

Bob Tripathi is up first. Is everyone excited for the last day at SMX? Yes, Bob, we totally are.

Discover isn't just a credit card company, they have a lot of different business units that all need search engine marketing. He's covering what to do when you're just getting started or in your first or second year of your program.

Study the Landscape
What is the current state of search?>
How much search is currently being leveraged?

Areas of Search to bring In House
Weigh your options, figure out what you can handle in house versus hiring outside.

Make a case for transition
What your search program currently lacks
What will be the value addition
What will the the cost benefits.

TIP: Competitive Intelligence can be a great boost.

Be a Thought Leader
Help stakeholders expand their universe with search
Bait them with ideas
Provide updates, changes, etc, in the search world

TIP: Generate ROI and cost benefit working

Design your Search Organization
Centralize all functions of search?
Center of Excellence model?
Weigh Pros and Cons of each model

TIP: Choose your model depending on your company and industry

Get them "on-board"
Educate your executives
Get yourself the exec audience
Watch the "trickle down" effect

TIP: Makes them familiar with Paid vs. Organic search. Show them a SERP.

Go for Small Wins…build confidence
See where you can make a quick impact (see last session)

Get looped into the process.

TIP: Educate the Project Managers on Search

Treat each unit as a client

Make search easy for them
Keep them updated
Make success a priority.

Don't get attached to any one department. Treat each as unique and look at a holistic view. Be the Buddha.

Jessica: Getting the right introductions is so key. I wrote a series on that at seminhouse.com. Go check it out tonight.

Derrick Wheeler is up next to explain the difference between agency and in house.

He used to be agency side and saw problems:

• Opportunities vs resources
• Sales vs production
• Internal marketing
• Client Fires
• Blogs and articles -- educating your clients without you.
• New services
• Enough brain power and time to get stuff done

He developed a wonderful dream of working on just one site. So he went to Microsoft. Today is his four month anniversary.

Major accomplishments:

• Signed up for benefits
• Find TWO cafeterias
• Return to his office without getting lost
• Can finally remember a 15+ people's names
• Identified a few duplicate content issue

Learning the language is hard. Everyone has their own jargon and acronyms that you have to learn. So he had to learn Microsoft language and has to teach MSers to speak SEO as well.

Microsoft is hundreds of Web sites all under a single domain that have their own teams and issues and styles but they affect each other.

Implementation used to be not his problem in an agency scenario. Now it's entirely his problem.

Driving change requires more than just strenuously objecting. It requires spunk and an understanding of the organization - processes, politics, personalities.

You need to watch out for inconsistent agency execution. They can't do it all themselves so they need standards.

Decide how your team needs to be structured

• Size
• Roles - not everyone needs to be an SEO expert, just enough to understand
• Outside help? - Agency vs Freelancers

Factors to consider:

• Budget
• Size and complexity of your Web site
• Current organizational structure
• Recruiting Challenges.

Find the right in-house team based on strengths from Strength Finders 2.0. You can have a three person team with all the right strengths.

Bill Scully is up next for SEO to get visibility, getting clients, getting noticed and getting budget.

General considerations:

• Who holds the purse strings
• Who is faced with the burden of planning
• Who are the stakeholders (R&D, etc)

SEO/SEM may be looked at as a threat

• Change is difficult
• Budgets shirt
• Very measurable
• Log of budget control

SEO/SEM is a long term commitment

Make a list of stakeholders and a short list of budget holders. Rank search fans v early adopters. Get on their schedule for a 15 min presentation. This meeting is about them not you. Show them how they can benefit from search.

Get away from the curse of knowledge. Stay away from SEO speak and use stories to illustrate the use. Talk to them in a way that they will be able to understand and relate to.

Time your initial presentation for milestones like a month before or after budgets are submitted/approved. 1 sales cycle before each financial milestone. As soon as you hear that someone's sales are down or there is a new competitor, that's an opportunity to change.

The pitch:
Show them their competitors. Your main message is invest, not spend. Show them value through PPC. Go through some sales training to learn how to sell to people based on their types.

Emphasize that when they're deciding on the best media mix, SEO/SEM is always complementary. Online drives offline.

Getting noticed:

• Get invited to the strategy and budget table
  • Share your KW research to inform them of market items
• Reach out to R&D and New Product Teams
• Get into the Company Sales & Marketing Planning Meetings
• Introduce yourself to Acquisition Teams
• Become a resource to the PR Team
• Offer Offline KPI tracking (the real goal is to compare Offline/Online ROI)

Bill Macaitis and Paul Bruemmer are SEO Geeks here for the questions and answer sections. Bill works on big business. Paul is all about natural search.

Q&A

Where do you go for competitive research?

Bob: In our industry we have comscore data. There are sites that have information.

Derrick: You can do your own competitive research.

What do you use to provide the ROI on SEO?

Bill S: It could be the number of landing page hits, the number of downloads, etc. You can work with the sales force to see how many convert. It's a surrogate number because people won't believe you. I use pennies instead of dollars or visitors because people won't believe you.

What are some things you recommend to overcome people not believing you?

Paul: We do a needs assessment and come up with an action plan.

Bill M: Sometimes you just have to get them to trust you. Take em out to lunch. Some are really competitive; show em how you can beat someone else. Identify how you're going to sell to them.

Jessica: When I worked at Yahoo, I would train people. I would throw up their standards on the board and show them that they needed to be updated.

How do you integrate branding with SEO?

Paul: Good luck. Branding is off in la la land. It's one of the hardest thing to do. Brand is almost another division. That's a loading question. You need to work on getting core competencies done first.

Bill M: You need to get organized first. Present yourself as an ally. Search has branding elements to it. Brand recognizable sites have equity in them. [Yesterday someone mentioned that big brands do better to rely on their brand while smaller brands should rely on their keywords.]

If you only have one person, where you do start?

Derrick: What's the nature of the business and your keyword market? that's what's going to determine your

Paul: Identify your goals and go and get budget.

Bill M: You can do it. I started one person part time and we're growing every year.

What's your one liner elevator pitch to your C-level?

Bill S: I drive traffic. I increase conversions.
Bill M: 6 billion searches every month is like the tide. If you don't get yours, it's going to your competitor.
Derrick: If you go to Google or Live Seach and type in spreadsheet, you won't find Microsoft. You'll find Google Docs. That gets their attention.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/28/08 at 2:25 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, smxwest2008

Industrial Strength SEO

Mornings at SMX go so fast. Just a keynote and one session then it's off to lunch. In this case, the session is industrial strength SEO and so we've got some industrial strength speakers Martin Laetsch (Covario, Inc.), David Roth (Yahoo!, Inc.) and Marshall D. Simmonds (The New York Times). Don't worry, moderator Detlev Johnson (Search Return) is industrial strength too. He'll keep everything in order.

We're kicking things off with Martin Laetsch. The reality is that if you've got a small site, the basics are not that hard and you can optimize it pretty easily. But for a very large site or sites, with hundreds or millions of keywords, there just aren't enough hours in the day. How often do you do an audit of your site? Once a year? Twice? Monthly?

What you did yesterday for SEO isn't sufficient today. The algo is changing, your competitors are changing, your own site is changing.

You need well defined policy and procedures. Standards and best practices should be planned. Step one should be a detailed audit of your site. You should be looking for your weak points and problems. Are there template problems? Look for major issues. Get a baseline so that you know where you've been in addition to where you need to go. Look for coding traps, spiderability. Map your keywords to content pages. It's not enough to rank for A page. You want to rank for THE RIGHT page. Audit your site semi-monthly or monthly. You should be on top of any potential problems.

Define and Deploy your standards and Best Practices:

• Create consistent processes and written standards
• Provide comprehensive training to all key shareholders
• Create communication and collaboration protocols and expectations.

If you're working on a large site you MUST have a style guide. You need to be able to hand your style guide ot an experienced designer and have them know exactly what it means to do SEO in your organization.

Collect and share your best practices with the whole team.

Ensure continunous improvement. SEO doesn't stop. Do page level audits. Use tools and technology to keep up. On a very large site, you CAN NOT do it by hand. You need to use tools. Be able to pull out the points and say 'fix it'.

Searchers only give you three seconds to decide if you're the right choice for them. Make sure they're landing where they need to. You'll have to have analytics for this.

Define and Deploy a Tool Framework for Analytics Management Reporting

You need to prove that what you're doing is worthwhile and you have no way to do that unless you're measuring and reporting your progress. You need to report at least once a month. Make it macro level and tell them what it's doing right.

Monitor pages ranking for specific keywords
Create a monthly to do list of pages to be audited for optimization
Workflow management focusing on the highest value keywords and pages first.

David Roth is our next speaker. I've seen his presentation at Pubcon. It was pretty darn good but he's taken out all the Van Halen jokes. (so he says.) I encourage you to check out that link for more information on how big sites do their SEO.

Search is still the best way to get new customers. They use Lifetime Value to determine the value of optimization. They determine what a customer is worth across the life time of their conversion.

They just launched Yahoo! Buzz and the SEO team at Yahoo gets access to that as well as pairing with yahoo search on certain tools.

Yahoo is a very decentralized company. His team works on getting the training, education, best practices and standards implemented. The actual work is done elsewhere. (This goes back to making sure your standards and practices are exceptionally well-defined.)

[Commentary: Overall, I think people need to realize that big sites are going to be doing a lot of very basic SEO. They need to do it really really well and build it into the bones of the sites but at its heart, they rarely have the bandwidth or need to do the more high-level stuff.]

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. Dashboards are helpful for giving an at a glance view of where you are and how your doing against your self and your competitors over time.

If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

The companies that do really well with SEO have it built into the culture. You need to get everyone to believe in it, believe in the value of it. That's really the ideal spot.

Marshall Simmonds is going to tell us about SEO at the NYT. Hee! Detlev called him MDS. We're going with that. Ooooh! MDS's team is responsible for removing the login for the NYT. I love you, MDS!

There's actually a lot more to this than just the NYT really. NYT has a huge number of sites that require SEO. And every site requires something different. There's no SEO out of the box solution. Everyone should be able to optimize a title tag and move the company name to the end, that's easy. But there's not SEO 101, then 202.

Oh my god, MDS, slow down! He mentions everything from SEO to Social Media to branding as concerns. Seriously. EVERYTHING.

For the NYT, they had some things they needed to do:
*Get the SEO Basics down
*Template optimization
*Pull down registration wall (PREACH IT!)
*Expose archives
*Monthly network-wide communication -- Tell people about successes. Build momentum and get buy in.

NYT's growth because of these small changes has been very good. He doesn't agree that you need to audit every month but you do have to do it regularly and you have to put checklists in front of people so that they understand their roles and their part in the process. Know what your IT department is doing. They're trying to be more efficient but it can screw up SEO as well. Make sure writers and content creators know SEO and can create for it.

He goes through several case studies for ToysRUs, TVGuide, Time Inc Interactive. I'll skip it because he's going really fast and it's not really relevant.

[Commentary: It's all well and good to say that you need to build company awareness but how about something concrete about HOW you do that?]

Find one person in each department that can be your evangelist. Make it their responsibility to build enthusiasm.

What to Avoid:

*Walling off content
*Under-communicating Success
*Not checking in with IT/Production/Design/Ad Sales
*Meta Keywords Tag -- automate it if you can. Just be done with it
*Implementing the changes-- know who is doing the actual optimization and talk to them the whole way through, not just the project managers but the actual people.
*Excessive expectations: timeframes, growth -- It takes a long time. Build in that expectation.
*Lack of editorial oversight: If you're automating the Title or Meta Description tag, stop.

For tracking, give information back but give it back in a way that makes sense to the level you're speaking to. Give a high level as well as the ability to dig down.

The search "life cycle" is always changing within a company. Your search/promotion strategy is going to be messed up. Plan for it. Lastly, tracking.

Aw, he finished with a picture of babies! Hi, babies!

Q&A

What are your suggestions for coming in after the site is built?

MDS: Identify the quick wins first, open up the site and start building into the DNA and training.

Martin: I agree with that completely. Auditing and reporting, getting things in front of the right people to get buy in. Use the carrot and the stick. Show them who is doing well and who need things done.

David: The only thing I would add is that most Web sites is that companies have IT/Web developers. You should be converting them

Detlev: Be the benevolent dictator and get them to buy in.

Good backlinks and terrible inter-linking. How do you fix it?

No one really seems to have a direct answer. David says site maps are good, they do a lot of internal linking as well. [I suggest siloing--we've got lots of articles on it, go check them out.]

[Much pushing of getting analytics. Do it. Do it now. I'm serious.]

Solutions mentioned:
Omniture
WebTrends
Organic search insight -- designed for big sites, extremely expensive

When you have millions of pages, do you go for flat or deep architecture?

[Have I mentioned our siloing series? It's really good.]

MDS: NYT site architecture is automated. They use Teragram(?).

Detlev: Think about how you want to distribute your linking in a pyramid.

MDS: We always say no more than three and if you say that to IT they'll throw things at you but it's not really necessary.

Martin: The engines WILL penalize you for deep directory structures. They look at how far down it is and they'll say this isn't important. Think about what's easier for users. Shallower is better.

Marshall, what are the top technical issues you face with wireframes and CSS, etc?

MDS: Excessive JavaScript. We had to do a triage. Where would we have the biggest effect? Movies got picked first. We've consolidated the templates.

Martin: The problem isn't technical it's that the agencies are designing things based on looks not on search. Flash is fantastic but you can't have an entire page in it. If you want Titles, they've got to be H1s, not an image.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/28/08 at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, SEO, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, smxwest2008

Web Analytics Roundtable

Hi all. I has a question: Why do conference organizers always schedule Web Analytics sessions first thing in the morning on the last day of the conference? Don’t they realize how tired and nonsensical I am at this point? Seriously. Think of the bloggers! Or maybe just think of me.

Jim Sterne (Web Analytics Association) is moderating this one where Gary Angel (Semphonic) will be the sole person presenting. Wes Funk (Omniture), Brett Cosby (Google Analytics) and Richard Zwicky (Enquisite) will be on hand for the Q&A.

Now for Gary Angel.

[I wish I had my glasses on. It’s way dark in here. Also, it smells like hash browns. Mmm, grease.]

Gary starts off saying that there are two main “flavors” of Web analytics: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) systems implemented using tags and software you can run in-house that processes files called Web logs (and sometimes tags). Each of these can provide similar data and capabilities.

Tag-based SaaS systems tend to be easier to implement and have better data-quality out of the box. If you have a lot of internal data about visitors (from a gated site, for example) it can be easier to integrate with software you run in-house. The most popular systems on the market are SaaS-based.

Gary notes that Web analytics data is notoriously unreliable and that even at its best is never a “system of record”. The idea that “trending” data protects you from data quality problems is only a half-truth. He thinks all data is extraordinarily messy, though, it’s not just Web Analytics.

Key Data Quality issues include:

• Tracking visitors over time
• Knowing how long visitors spend on each page
• Knowing where visitors go when they leave
• Counting robots – automated agents as real visitors

Web analytics systems will never reconcile.

What Really Matters With Web Analytics Tools?

There’s no one tool that you should definitely use, it will depend on your personal needs. It will be your measurement needs that drive real world requirements. Some of the key factors that really matter are:

Visitor Segmentation: Things to consider when selecting your tools:

• Can Segments be created without tags?
• Can full logical operators be used to define segments?
• What data can be used to define segments?
• Can external data be used natively and combined with Web data in segment creation?
• Can Segments be created via data-drive techniques like neural networks?
• Can Segments focus on visit or visitor behavior?
• Can Segments be defined based on time and event sequences?
• Can distributions be produced on key behaviors to assist in segment creation? (How many came to your site once, twice, three times, etc…)

Segment Methodology

• Are Segment samples or against all data?


• Are segments created in real-time or delayed?

Dimensional Reporting: The ability to take one variable and look at it against another variable. N-Way Cross-tabulation (Viewing the counts of variable by one or more other variables) is an ESSENTIAL part of analysis.

Key Dimensional Reporting Capabilities:

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

Management Reporting: Every online business spends time on management reporting. It is an essential element of telling the business story to key decision-makers. Ask yourself if you can get the information out of this tool easily and in a way that you can distribute it to your organization. Some tools make it easy for you to do this; others make it a lot harder. Find out what your tool can do for you before you buy it.

Key Management Reporting Capabilities:

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

Setup: Building a tag is not rocket science. Many Web analytics packages do require a fair amount of work on the tag if you want to take full advantage of their system. The more things you have to put in the tag, the less flexibility you have and the more tedious it is to fix when you make a mistake.

Key Setup Capabilities:

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

Data Integration (online AND customer): Most businesses will ultimately need to combine online and offline data AND Web site and other online data. Think about what kind of data you’re going to need. Not everyone does email or banner ads. Think about your own specific data integration needs and press your vendor about what they offer.

Key Integration Capabilities:

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

SEM Capabilities: Search engine marketing has its own unique demands and requirements. Here are some of the key points if your primary Web analytics interest is in search.

Key SEM Measurement Capabilities:

• Track results by both actual search term used and search term purchased
• Track content match scores
• Day parting and time parting in the web analytics reporting
• Flexible attribution models
• Cross-attribution reports (how much of Campaign X overlaps with Campaign Y)
• Ability to collapse search terms and analyze them as a unit (important for analyzing the tail)
• Side-by-side performance of SEO and PPC
• Cross-Tabulation of geography by keyword

Additional SEM Measurement Capabilities:

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

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

Summary: Thinking About Fit

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

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

What you should worry about:

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

Question & Answer

Why should I spend money on a Web analytics tool when I can get one that’s free?

Wes: Sometimes the data you’re collecting is fairly deep and it needs to go and connect different data systems. In these cases, not only is it important to easily see the user flow from an email, to a search term, and to your site (and how it might interact with a CMS), but you also want to get the next generation of that interaction, beyond those corollary relationships. You want to be able to act. When someone comes in via an email campaign, you want to recognize that in your CMS. You want to understand that this person answered a survey that came from another partner. You get stronger data connections so you can action them and treat users in a more holistic manner.

[So what we’re saying is that Omniture is more sophisticated and Google has trouble with relationships? – Lisa]

When do I need to move to a more sophisticated tool?

Richard: Seventy five percent of our users also use GA and another 20 percent will use Omniture. He says that the features in Gary’s analytics wish list are actually offered by his company.

Gary: Search marketers are spending a lot of money. If you can get a relatively small advantage from a software solution, it’s worth it. When you’re spending money it’s important to think about how you can leverage these products more effectively. He thinks there are a fair number of companies where Google is more appropriate and there are companies where Omniture is more appropriate, regardless of the cost. Anyone who uses a Web analytics tool well can improve their search engine marketing program. Economic figures into every decision, but you also have to look at the benefits side. Money should not be the deciding factor in which tool you use. You have to use the right tool for you.

Do you have recommendations for how to communicate to Analysts who still talk in terms of hits?

Jim: Acronym for hits = how idiots track success.

Wes: Ask them the questions that they should be asking and help them understand it’s not just about hits. Ask the questions that are going to drive success.

Richard: It’s an educational process. Give them a number and then explain the context for them.

Brett: If you can show someone a very simple equation and how it makes them more money, that’s the way to do it.

Gary: He believes search marketing people will struggle with this less than other people. He says that senior execs know what matter to the business, it’s the analysts that don’t. Search engine marketing has helped people sharpen their focus to Web analytics because it is about marketing and the dollar. You have to talk dollars and what matters to the business.

What are your thoughts on Nielsen’s move towards time on site? Will engagement ever be anything more than a vague idea? Will it be quantified and what will that look like?

Brett: That’s the exact opposite of what Google is trying to do. We want to get people in and out as quickly as possible (Apparently no one introduce Brett to Universal Search…). As far as the term “engagement”, it’s such a vague term. Nail down what that means. What is the goal of your Web site? You want to define that goal very clearly and get people to do that.

Wes: They’re about helping people to ask the right questions and finding the segment that is the most interesting to them. That’s what they want to action. Is it time on site? How fast users get off the site? What part of the funnel are you looking at and what are you trying to optimize?

Gary: Not every company has to care about branding, but it does matter and it’s important to find a way to measure what matters. You can’t just rely on traffic. That’s not a good measure of a program’s effectiveness. If you’re trying to build branding, you have to focus on engagement. It’s not about traffic.

Could each of you give one example of where a customer used their Web analytics data to make $50,000.

Richard: They have a customer who sells tours through Africa and they used the geographic segmentation feature to find out where users were coming from. They found out a lot of users were coming from the UK and then made changes to their site that incorporated British English to target them.

Brett: He has a company in the surf apparel industry. He was looking at this geographic map in Google Analytics and found that sales were dropping. His analytics showed him that everyone from the middle of the country to East had suddenly dropped off! It showed him that they had misconfigured the server to block all IP addresses east of the center of the country. Heh. Another way is that you have clients who look at bounce rates. With just a bit of tweaking you can really increase the number of conversions.

Wes: When you notice that the search term came from Google Spain, you may not be able to put your whole site in Spanish, but you can add a banner attracting and engaging those users.

Gary: Natural search people generally don’t convert nearly as often as people who come directly into the site. We see a lot of people go through fairly expensive natural search programs and then not get the returns they expect. We did an analysis of people coming in from SEO terms and looked at what they did next. They realized that they were coming into different places in the site than other users. They were going directly to article pages and were missing out on all the engagement factors. What they did was add some of the engaging stuff into the article templates so that natural search people would see it. Natural search is a huge driver of traffic, with just a few tweaks you can take advantage of that and get some of that traffic to stick.

Gary also had a client who had 600 Web sites to manage. They wanted to be able to identify which sites to get rid of. They focused on the true value of the Web sites and found which sites were worth keeping and which they could drop. Saved them lots and lots of money.

Wes, in your role as Online Marketing Director, you’re actually doing this stuff. How do you value your search traffic? What are you looking at?

Wes: How many people do we creatively force? How many download a white paper or attended a webinar? One of the important things we’re doing is looking at our keywords and understanding what groups of keywords do what things. That’s really constricting. We’ve done to SEM what Gmail did to Email. Instead of filing things, they’re tagging terms with different attributes (ie. this is a branding keywords and it’s for Product X). If you have all of those keywords tagged with one of those attributes, we can then go in and see how much you spend on your brand keywords. How much money are we spending on a certain product?

How can we best integrate Web analytics information with offline marketing dashboards to show how our offline activities correlated with online activities?

Brett: The easiest way to do this is use a unique landing page for offline stuff. Allows you tell which ads are having an effect. A lot of times you’ll see an increase in traffic anyway since not everyone will go to that specific URL. If you’re running a newspaper ad or a TV ad in a specific location, you can look at your data to see if visits increased in that location. This is a good way to test creatives.

With offline, one of the interesting things is that you can’t be telling people to come down to our dealership this weekend. You have to tell them to go to your Web site to perform an action so you can measure.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/28/08 at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)
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Keynote: Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade

Lisa's still sleeping away, lucky girl so it's just me and Tamar in blogger central today. Breakfast had both bagels and juice this morning, so call it a win.

Our topic this morning is the same as the last part of yesterday's keynote. What's the future of search? Where are we going? Will there be flying cars? These questions and more will be answered by representatives from the four major engines: Brad Goldberg (Microsoft), Dr. Larry Heck (Yahoo!) and Peter Norvig (Google). Chris Sherman (Search Engine Land) and Gord Hotchkiss (Enquiro) will be moderating to prevent an all out brawl.

Gord introduces and gives a short bio on each of the speakers. Chris takes things back for the first question:

Will search as we know it survive?

Brad: Tells a story about how last night the cab driver was telling him about how bad search is. You click and go back, click and go back. Users are getting more sophisiticated. Search will survive, it'll evolve to become more and more useful.

Peter: I agree with most of that. I think in some ways search will disappear as it becomes more and more ingrained in what you're doing. It'll be integrated more into what you think of as a core life.

Larry: What's going on in the background is a foundation that we're not going to throw away, we're going to be building on that. What's going to change more is going to be from the user's experience. The way people are accessing the information. It'll become pervasive. Right now it's just PC but it'll be going mobile and further and each will require

How do we interact with this huge score of information?

Larry: The way we access information is going to change based on the interface and that's going to change things down deep in the stack. Right now it's based on expanded queries but it's not going to be that way. [He's really hard to hear. Someone fix his mike.]

Peter: Your average query will be longer on PCs. ON the other end it'll be hard to get the results back because we all take advantage of having space for ten results. If you have a tiny little cellphone with a one inch display, having your result at 4 or 5 isn't a good experience.

What about voice activated queries? Changes in Search marketing?

Brad: The biggest changes that we'll see won't be in the algo or results. It'll be in the way that advertisers are taking advantage of it. Right now, mobile search is a fairly narrow reach.

Peter: We as an industry need to get more sophisticated.

Have we been using relevancy in place of usefulness? Are we going to see the artificial division between listings go away?

Brad: I think we need to keep the division between paid and organic. People want to know where things are coming from in the algorithm.

Larry: I agree with that. As you go through a ssession it becomes clear to the search engine that you're going to buy and it makes sense to move the results in a commercial way but you still need to keep the separation between organic and sponsored.

Back when Vista was still Longhorn, you guys talked about implicit vs explicit queries but that sort of went away. Will that come back?

Brad: We'll see that become more out of the operating system and more in the context of the application. We'll start to see search playing more and more of a role in the foreground and in the background.

Do you see search evolving into a research assistant?

Brad: I'm not bullish. I think it's an interesting concept but it's technically an incredibly hard challenge. Not in the next 10 years.

Peter: We're all very good at the 3 second response. Then there's the 3 minute, sorting through possibilities, we're pretty good at that. But three months or three years, we're not good at supporting you there. The whole point of search is about what you don't know. In that way, personalization is a bad thing.

Larry: Search is about making the user more efficient. Having search go off and do it for you isn't as good. The reach and memory is better for computers but humans do better putting it together. The user is going to be intertwined. I'm not so sure that you have to personalize to one person. Research done suggests that community is better in that single session. In that moment over the series of searches you’ve made, you're trying to complete a task. It's probably better to socialize it in that moment.

How smart can search get in the next five years?

Peter: I think we're just getting started. We'll get a lot better at understanding the content and I think we'll start getting better content. Books and magazines are just starting to be searchable.

Brad: I wonder about how much the first SERP after you do a query will dramatically evolve. That's really where it starts. I think a lot of changes will come back to the users. The number of users who click on the tabs on the front page is so small even though that's so simple.

Larry: More a question of how much more effective are people going to be rather than how much more effective will search be. How much more effective will the interaction be.

Are we expecting too much from humans in using their options?

Brad: Most search is horizontal but most results are verticals. I think we need to get over into verticals better.

Local search has been held out as a promising vertical but it's still horrible. How close are we to good local search?

Peter: We've got to tknow about it first. There's a little bit of yellow page information.

Larry: not a fundamental shift in technology required. It's having the mom and pop shop understand that there's a utility to this information.

Peter: One of you (audience) needs to come up with a business model to get local to sign up (via high school student door to door.)

Do ads need to get more engaging or louder on the page in order to be noticed as the interface gets richer?

Peter: I think the whole web is getting louder. You need to change with the times and fit in.

Larry: You need to provide the most value to the user. I don't think the search engines are going to need to push very hard. But they need to keep up in terms of creatives and quality.

Brad: Searhc is successful because it's quantifiable. I think we'll see a lot of experimentation because you can see what's working. We'll see a lot of diversity in ad types. All the ingredients are there for someone to experiement quite freely.

Are we looking at a Darwinian approach to ads? Just seeing what sticks?

Brad: I think that's fair.

If you improve search to the point where it satisfies users needs, it makes ads irrelevant. How do you balance that?

Larry: There was a good session the other day that pointed out that it's hard to spam paid search.

Peter: as algorithmic results get better, the bar will get higher but that's not that hard.

Brad: I think there's still a lot more than can happen based on user intent.

I understand why personalization is hard, how good does personalization have to be in order to

Peter: there are a lot of parts to it. One of the things is that persists over time but most searches are new. It's not like amazon where if you like jazz one week you're not going to suddenly switch over to hip hop the next week.

Larry: We don't need to use the signal so strongly. If we can identify what the person is trying to accomplish, we can make it feel personalized by pulling from the user experience.

Peter: Like horoscopes.

It seems that search marketers have less and less influence where their content is showing up. Is this a threat to traditional SEO?

Peter: I think it's more arenas for them to show up.

Brad: You're seeing a lot more companies using video. I think people are going beyond SEO and looking at other venues. It's about who can exploit it in the right way so that it doesn’t feel like atmosphere. It's some SEO and some how marketers think about what things are available to them. I think in 5 years we'll look back and think it's quite crude. There's a lot of surface areas being created and a lot of opportunity. It's quite difficult and a little Darwinian.

Larry: As the SERPS become richers, it's going to move back to traditional internet marketing instead of the very spare search marketing so far. More like a homepage.

Gord: It's opening up opportunities that search marketers haven’t been playing in so you need start thinking about how to create a relationship with a customer like you haven't before.

Are you creating tools to help search marketers to reach international/non-english speaking audiences?

Peter: we're focusing more on the algorithmic side, the translation.

Brad: you need to think about the scenario in which someone searches. Mostly it's research oriented. So you need to think about what sort of ad you place on that kind of content.

Larry: I agree with Brad it's a marriage between the incentives (like machine translation) and the search marketers.

Gord: What research area is particularly interesting when you look at this interface between humans and the Internet>

Peter: The mobile space and getting away from being chained to the desktop. (Gord: You said that the browser platform is kind of a roadblock.) Peter: I think we've got a ways to go in terms of opening up.

Larry: Openness in terms of leveraging, and opening up the platform in order to best use the content. What we really aught to be doing is opening up in terms of utilizing that expertise. There's an imbalance between the author of the document and the understanding of the intent. I think on the user side we're going to be facilitating what task they want to complete and what their intent is.

Brad: In the car what will happen, when you've got all the single purpose devices that are very good, there will be a convergence. Right now that's an untapped area.

Chris: Five years from today what one feature would you kill to have working?

Brad: You're asking the ones that are developing it. We just want to ship it. I would say more and more enabling people to search in a verticalized way. Whether that happens on the homepage or on the SERP.

Peter: I want to really focus on the connection between the user and the content.

Larry: I want access and functionality wherever I'm going. From the computer to the car. I want to be able to access that tools and technology no matter where we are.

Gord: How do you see that kind of ambition going up against the music and entertainment industry that don't awant to lose control.

Brad: I think search engines are going to have to be very clever about how they give you content. Snippets that lead to the original content, on their own site and with their own player.

Peter: It’s an opportunity. Rather than publish a book and try to get it on the top ten, you'll be able to reach smaller targeted audiences. I think publishers will get that.

Gord: I don't think they will. I'm cynical about that.

Chris reminds us that there's coffee in the exhibit hall.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/28/08 at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
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February 27, 2008

SEO & User Generated Content

Last session of the day, thank the good Lord. And what do you know, I have been sent here to cover a session where little Becs Kelley is speaking. Muahaha, let the evil commentary begin!

Vanessa Fox is moderating this afternoon with speakers Andrew Goodman (Page Zero Media), Rebecca Kelley (SEOmoz) and Roget Monti (Martinibuster.com). Chris Winfield (10e20) will be acting as Q&A moderator.

Up first is Roger Monti. Lots of claps.

Optimizing a Forum

• Goals:
  • Attract more users via search: Make your community site more useful. You want to bring in new users, not just cater to the lifers. Optimizing will help you improve ranking ability, improve long tail phrase performance, raise CTR with better title and description, make your site easier to research and browse, and improve user retention.
  • Improve User Friendliness: Moderate topic titles. “I’m a noobie” doesn’t help you rank. Optimizing your titles makes it easier for people to do research and improves site navigation. Remove all links to fluff. Again, this will improve the navigation and helps to keep users focused on content creation.
  • Improve Site Usefulness: Too much fluff distracts.
• Remove Fluff: This includes links to site visitors stats, links to member profiles, and from moderator profiles. Direct the bots to pages that matter. You want to maximize PR flow and help pages rank better. Also tightens focus of topics. Remove sub forum links as well. The exception is when member pages have useful content and encourage members to become more productive.
• Target KeywordsAssociate topic titles with title tag and the Meta Description. It won’t do that out of the box. Moderate topic titles so they contain descriptive text/keywords. Hard code pet keywords into main page of your forum.

  Fun Forum Hacks: Site Map Generator for phpBB (http:://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/4902) and RSS Feed Generator.

• Moderate for Search and Users

Andrew Goodman is up and my fingers are burning. I can has cookie now?
It’s hard to get noticed these days. The bar has been raised

If Yelp has 400,000 relevant inbound links, 1,000 semi-relevant links aren’t going to cut it. Getting indexed doesn’t help you rank…think of how much “duplicate content” is out there on things like raw business listings.

First Generation UGC: Examples

• Open Directory Project
• Army of volunteer editors categorize content.
• Supposedly overcomes the scalability problem of directories
• Directories then fell out of favor
• Issues with quality control
• Outcome: Must more widespread awareness of value of “crowdsourcing” – before anyone called it that.
• Trip Advisor
• Users write reviews about their experiences
• Epinions
• Among other things, blazed a trail of legality of opinions.

UGC 1.0 Prototype: TripAdvisor

• Search visibility and tactics: check
• Risky? Nope
• Feeds Google, doesn’t compete
• Result: Millions of top ten rankings! Long tail poster child. To evolve they’ll have to tackle credibility and trust issues and work on the appropriateness of their recommendations, matching thinking users.
• Lesson Learned: ODP was bought for $50 million, TripAdvisor bought for $200 million. Now everyone’s doing it.

Is it really 2.0? Not really. Not much has changed. Positive developments are about understanding the incentive for why people would want to use such a system. Adding social media components. It’s not 2.0, maybe 1.9.

Advantages of UGC: It ducktails with your search engine strategy because it gives the engines what they want. Doesn’t complete with the engines, just feeds them. It’s often just what users are looking for, too. Low cost to set up. It’s relatively easy to get link love as its quality content. It solves the long tail weakness of editorial driven media.

Cut of personality opinions vs wisdom of the crowd: What are the real shortcomings of traditional media?

Old: Famous restaurant reviews
New: Epicurious

Old: Customer advocacy messiah
New: Online neighbors, WOM

Old: Consumer reports
New: Reviews by actual consumers

UGC sites he likes are Yelp, Plenty of Fish, and Squidoo.

Rebecca Kelley is next. Lucky for her my fingers are burning. The snark will be minimal.

Why UGC? Because it’s free. It’s a simple way to create fresh, unique content for your site. More content equals more crawling.

If you’re thinking about implementing UGC on your site, ask yourself what you want it to accomplish. How can you make it relevant to your site? Are you able to effectively monitor UGC?

Implementation: If you’re going to launch a UGC section on your site, create buzz beforehand. Considering fudging the numbers a bit – no one is going to join a dating site with a population of 1. Acknowledge UGC sections after launch. You can’t just forget about it and expect it to stand on its own.

Monitoring: If you’re a smaller site you’ll be using an inhouse moderator. Someone submits content, it goes into a queue, and then if it’s worthy it gets promoted, if it’s not, it won’t. If you’re a larger site, you’ll probably have a flagging system that you can moderate as you go.

Tips for Dealing With User Generated Content

• UGC Tip #1: One Man’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure Be as objective as possible with UGC. Controlling the community can lead to hostility.
• UGC Tip #2: Don’t Forget to Optimize
  This means Title tags, Header tags (profile names/blog times in h1 tags), and using click-friendly URLs.
• UGC Tip #3: Badges
  Play to users’ vanity. Make easy to share/display widgets. Include a link back to their profile or that section on your site. Don’t be spammy!

Case Study: Yelp

Recommended URL changes for location and user URLs.
Title tag changes: “Restaurant – San Francisco -- Yelp” became “San Francisco Restaurants”

Results: Their rankings improved for searches across the board. Bumped up to 4 million monthly users. Added “Yelp Bling” widget for Web sites/blogs.

Case Study: Drivl

Had 250 page views/month & 90 inlinks to start. They wrote and then moderated stores and created a widget to share articles.

Results: Have had 529 stores submitted, 409 of which were UGC. There were 2400 user signups, 3,1000 comments, 210k page views in June 2007, with 116k monthly uniques and 24k links.

Case Study: YOUmoz

Launched in February 2007
Benefits: Drive visitors to your blog/site, build personal brand and get input from the search engines/other marketers.

Results: Had 435 posts to date. Hundreds of mentions from other sites. Established a strong community.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/27/08 at 5:57 PM | Comments (2)
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Search Marketing Expo West: Day 2 - Recap

Today's conference menu features nine more fresh sessions. But here you'll find two of yesterday's leftovers plus seven hot and juicy selections from Day 2, rehashed into an easily digestible form. Too far with the food metaphor?

Is It Time For Search Marketing Standards?
Top Takeaways

• In order to sustain growth and establish authority, SEM professionals need to develop industry standards (kinda like our very own SEO Code of Ethics). Standards offer guidance, credibility, and protection as they point us in the most mutually beneficial direction. SEMPO, IAB, and DMA are developing guidelines or standards.
• One model for industry standards defines SEO and SEM tactics and provides a risk rating of each. Risk ratings would be based on community feedback.
• Under this model, the process would include: defining tactics by an authoritative committee; adopting the definitions through a series of beta releases and feedback; establishing a rating system; publishing and promoting the final results, with ongoing review and evolution.
• We need to be aware of pitfalls, like: restraint of innovation; loss of control or unfair concentration of power; blurring morals and ethics with standards and guidelines; a too broad or narrow application; enforcement and authority.
• A code of ethics should be clear to practitioners, researchers, and the public. Standards should be more specific than ethics and must be measurable.

Search 3.0: Online Retail & Blended Search
Top Takeaways

• Blended search gives you more opportunities to show up in SERPs, creates engagement, builds traffic, and generates buzz.
• Video is a major blended search opportunity. For best results, house your own videos and make sure you include analytics, optimize the page, and get inbound authority links.
• Use blended search to get your products in shopping results. For best results, use product names rather than product numbers, put the product name in the title, target specific long tail queries rather than general ones, and include images.
• Implications of the rise of blended search: organic search becomes a stronger research and branding vehicle; SEO changes focus from keywords to relevance.
• Tips to getting into blended search results: create quality content; recognize trends and act on them; respect sources; become a reference; test your material.

Keynote by Louis Monier: Past, Present & Future of Search
Top Takeaways

• The past: When the Internet was developed, the need for search was obvious and unanimous. Search results in the early leader, AltaVista, featured links. This gave rise to the SEM industry. Early search engines gave weight to the query words on the page.
• The present: Search engines today weigh anchor text and linking information. The difference between then and now is that users want to access not just a few select sites but all relevant sites.
• The future: Human powered search via directories, personalized, social and vertical search, natural language processing, and semantic search are on the horizon.
• Already search engines are being used for more than their navigational purpose, i.e., spell checker, aggregator. A better search engine will act as a research assistant by going out, doing analysis, and returning a report.
• Right now we have no choice but to accept the narrow definition of search as it stands. But, realize that search engines are making your choices for you and may cut out information that you're looking for.

Wonder Twins: Landing Pages and Multivariate Testing
Top Takeaways

• The two kinds of landing pages are reference landing pages, that provide information, and transactional landing pages, that allow shopping. They can be either static (HTML), dynamic (JavaScript), or application-based (API).
• To optimize your landing page, implement A/B testing, multivariate testing, and targeted content delivery. Contrary to some suggestions, tests show that navigation on a landing page is fine.
• Fractional factorial and full factorial are the two types of multivariate experimental designs. In fractional factorial you need less data but you only look at part of the page. In full factorial you'll be sure not to miss anything but you need a lot of data.
• If you have time constraints when conducting multivariate testing, start with a plan and have a goal. Think about whether the page is worth testing, understand who your visitors are and where they're coming from, and don't cut corners on design.
• The process for multivariate testing is to: identify page elements with the greatest impact; develop a simple hypothesis for each; test a few variations; repeat.

Search 4.0: The Personalized Search Revolution
Top Takeaways

• Personalized search is primarily based on Web history. It helps find the most relevant results for an individual user and provides subtle ranking changes in results.
• When marketing for personalized search, create compelling content and appeal to your niche users. The search experience and marketing needs are simplified, so SEOs don't really have to change marketing plans (maybe).
• The challenge of marketing for social search is creating and finding high-quality user-generated content.
• Yahoo offers some great but limited innovations in search. Pinpoint has a slider to dynamically change Yahoo! Shopping search results. Search Monkey is an open source to which you can add applications and input your preferences for prominence of certain results.
• There are no stats available on conversion rate for personalized search, but search engine reps think it works. Google won't disclose the percent of users using personalized search, but says it's large.

Search 4.0: Will The Social Graph Change Search?
Top Takeaways

• Types of social search: shared bookmarks and Web pages (i.e., del.icio.us, MyWeb); tag engines (blogs, RSS, i.e., Technorati and Bloglines); collaborative directories (i.e., Open Directory Project, Wikipedia); personalized verticals (i.e., Google Custom Search Engine); social Q&A sites (i.e., Yahoo! Answers); collaborative harvesters (i.e., Digg, Sphinn).
• Problems of social search: vastly expanding scale and scope; tagging ambiguities and misuse; emerging spammers.
• The ultimate in social search will combine algorithmic and people-mediated search within trusted networks. Increased personalization and user preferences will control result filtering.
• As always, content is key to avoiding pitfalls of social search marketing. Make sure the content comes across as authentic and is easy to recommend.
• Don't spread your SSM efforts too thin. Focus on one or two sites if you find it difficult to manage many accounts among the various social media sites available.

Wonder Twins: SEO & Social Media Marketing
Top Takeaways

• Many link techniques have been diffused in efforts to wipe out spam. Now, a good bet for spreading your content and gaining links are through social networks.
• Hitting it big on social media sites takes daily commitment. First, learn what's popular in the different communities. Then, build a reputation. Make sure your profile isn't similar to any of the top users' profiles. Choose a unique name and avatar and use across all sites. Finally, don't get caught promoting yourself.
• More guidelines for social media success: start networking with the top users; add supportive friends; avoid high maintenance friends; vote early; leave a comment; submit from a variety of sources; write titles that match the community; list your other site profiles and IM; don't submit more than three stories a day; don't take comments personally.
• Benefits of Twitter as a marketing tool: reach the outer edges of your audience; users voluntarily subscribe; there's great potential in pull technology.
• To get the most from Twitter: build your profile before you try to build friends; decide on the balance between information and sales messages; use tools to post and automate whenever possible.

Wonder Twins: SEO & Blogging
Top Takeaways

• Competition among blogs is fierce. It helps to focus on a niche, have a bias, have a smart format, filter, give opportunities for interaction, post regularly, monetize, and use push marketing.
• When formatting your blog: use a clean design; adopt a positive and reinforcing tone; include an About Us page; include a way for press to contact you; use pictures, video and sketchcasting; use simple words and short sentences; take advantage of bulletted lists, headers and subheaders.
• When monetizing your blog: don't put AdSense above content; sell branded ads or affiliate offers; offer your own products; raise prices to maintain high visitor counts; don't monetize too early.
• More recommendations for your blog: ask questions to entice readers and encourage interaction; optimize titles and headlines to make it easier for people to find you; hold writing contests and invite guest authors.
• Blogs are a reputation management tool, enabling you to react to problems. They are also research tools that collect professional commentary. And, of course, they're also a sales tool, a platform on which you can publicize products or services.

Search 4.0: Search Ads & Behavioral Targeting
Top Takeaways

• When optimizing for behaviorally targeted search ads: build segments and affinities; hypothesize relevance; create and develop; test and validate; monitor.
• Think about who your audience is, how they reached you, and how many times they come around.
• If you see a lot of traffic coming in from a particular area, landing on a particular page, customize that page to reach them.
• When targeting a specific user profile, ignore the demographic and psychographic markers and instead look at what they're doing, what they've searched for, where they've gone, and what they've bought.
• Upside: the more you know about a user, the more they convert. Downside: the more you know about a user, the lower your rate of interaction.

I suppose not many people read these meat-and-potato recaps, what with the whole feast just a link away. Still, I've enjoyed adding my own flavor to the first and last bit.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.


Posted by Virginia Nussey on 02/27/08 at 5:41 PM | Comments (0)
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Just Behave, A Look At Searcher Behavior

My brain is completely behaviored out at this point. Consider this your warning. I apologize in advance to the speakers. Please don't judge them by my blogging. Speaking of which, the line up is moderator Gord Hotchkiss (Enquiro) with speakers Michael Ferguson (Ask.com), Laura Granka (Google) and Ben Hanna (Business.com).

Gord says this panel's going to be a little bit different. I have fear. Oh, no. This is going to be mostly Q&A? No fair!

We have different types of memory. Long term memory is like writing something in your personal journal. We rewrite memory every time we recall it. There's another type of memory called working memory which is short term. There's not unlimited capacity in working memory [See the previous explanation of how many things you can track at a time from yesterday.]

We use search to fill up our blank slots. We have relationships with brands and different brands mean different things to us. Each triggers something that we associate with that brand. It's not just a blank slate when you see brands on a search page, there's already baggage attached.

When we start down the decision making process, we have thousands of options open to us. We like to think we're rational beings [again, see yesterday] but what we do is cut it down to four or five. That's bounded rationality.

[Actually, just assume you can go read the Search Marketing and Personas panel from yesterday for Gord's presentation.]

Michael Ferguson is up next.

He explains that we don't see everything in reality, we throw out a squadrons of simpletons and that interprets reality into a shorthand. The brain really only looks at one trillionth of things at one time. If we had to take in everything, we'd never cross the street or get out of bed.

Transactive memory (theory by Daniel Wegner) is knowing what other people know. It's that you don't need to remember everything or learn everything because there's a collective brain forming. For example, each of your friends is good at something, so you can do to them for their level of expertise and you don't need to do it all yourself. [It's like they say. Surround yourself with smart people and get out of their way.]

[I enjoy that the Ask guys are always all about theory and big ideas. It's not practical but it's always interesting.]

Search is becoming part of transactive memory. The engines are taking more chances and taking on the role of experts. They're bringing people in and trying to anticipate needs. He shows the Google page for the Rolling Stones, it's got a news, video, image result. He also shows off the Ask results page, also with their information.

They're moving towards giving you more information up front but there is still a lot they don't do. The next step is social networks. They're fun and goofy but they're also good ways to find other people who can be your memory.

A lot of what we're seeing is that individual pages need to evolve to be more like a person. Even for quick transactions there should be a personality, it should be trustworthy, it should be distinctive and helpful. It needs to be approachable and referable.

Ben Hanna from Business.com steps up to the plate and says he doesn't have the same production value of the last presentation. Hee.

He's going to cover the difference between B2B and B2C and share some observations from his perspective. Two things to keep in mind. People are people and peope are influenced by content.

People are people: You're the same person that you when you're at work or at home.

On the other hand, people are influenced by context. We can't see or do everything so we kind of just respond to what's salient. Social situations create discontinuity in thought and behavior. We might be aware of it or we might not.

Context can affect:
-risk taking vs. conservatism
-being action-oriented vs. passive
-Persistence on a task
-Beliefs about others (Stanford prison studies.)
-Beliefs about our selves
-sense of time
-speech patterns
-and much more.

At the end of the day you end up with multiple Mes. You have work!you, home!you, family!you, chef!you. etc.

What this means for search behavior is that you're affected by context. In a work context, you're under higher pressure, you've got a higher average risk, you're looking at a rationalized and formal process. Your experience is higher, your requirements are more specific.

More information helps people that are less expert. Google helps in an earlier phase but more expert users might go to a more niche site. Think about your audience and the context in which they're searching.

Laura Granka rounds out our short presentations.

They do usability studies, eyetracking, field studies diary studies. They use anonymized search logs.

Online search is an acquired skill. They have to meet several challenges.

Expressing needs as a query is hard. They can express themselves in a paragraph but they can't boil that down to a single line query. They usually start too broad. They're starting to add refined queries at the bottom to address this.

Rephrasing your search needs is not always intuitive. Even if you know what you want, you can get stuck in a rut and not get to the right wording.

Familiar brands matter. They search for familiar sites. Navigational queries are failures for Google (?)

They ran a little experiment reversing the top ten results, sticking number one at number ten to see if anyone would notice. Not so much, apparently. Selecting a good result is hard.

Users don't always know what's searchable online. Particularly true of local search. People don't expect their local services to have any kind of presence online.

Sometimes people just want a quick answer. Weather, time in another part of the word, simple facts.

[Once again, I'm going to skip the Q&A. Barry's over at the other table, maybe he'll cover it.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/27/08 at 5:33 PM | Comments (0)
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SEO & Blogging

Things are getting testy up in here. If Tamar bumps into me one more time I may have to take her. We’ll hold a death match right on the stage. And upload it to YouTube. Huzzah!
Fine, getting back to business.

Vanessa Fox (Search Engine Land) is moderating the SEO & Blogging panel with speakers Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim), Michael Gray (Atlas Web Services) and Aaron Wall (SEO Book).
Up first is Aaron Wall.

Blogs let you get attention in the marketplace. You just have to be opinionated and original.

They help you in the world of infinite competition

• Smarter algorithms and aggregators
• Social media
• Outsourcing
• Better, cheaper, and faster publishing tools
• Ad tracking increasingly precise
• Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin – an article about how ranches