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March 31, 2008

Schedule for Ad:Tech San Francisco 2008

Hi, Friends. It’s time to talk about what sessions we’ll be covering at the next search-related conference. This time it’s Ad:Tech San Francisco and Susan is the one who will be doing all the liveblogging while I sit home-side consuming fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them. Ah, how the tides have changed.

Bruce has returned from Australian SEO training and will be moderating the Tactical SEO Workshop on Thursday, April 17th. You can catch him will speakers Aaron D’Souza (Google), Bill Macaitis (Fox Interactive Media) and Stacie Ito (AT&T). It should be a good one, so be sure to catch it if you’re in town.

And because no conference is complete without our extensively awesome liveblogging coverage, below you’ll find a tentative list of where Susan will be during the show.

Why is Susan’s schedule tentative? Because if there’s a session you think she should be attending but isn’t, we’d like you to let us know. If you think that instead of attending a session, she should be having a meeting with you, let us know. If you think she should skip an entire day of sessions to go shopping for presents for me and Virginia in San Francisco, let us know that too. It’s like your very own Choose Susan’s Adventure story. Fun, right?

Day 1: Tuesday, April 15

9:00am-10:30am: Keynote Presentation – This Is Not Your Father’s Kodak
10:45am-11:45am: Keynote Presentation – The Art of Conversation: Building Great Brands in the Digital Age
12:00pm-1:00pm: Follow The Money: The Buyers Weigh In
2:15pm-3:15pm: Futuresearch: Watch This Space (Presented by SEMPO)
3:30pm-4:30pm: Beyond the Pre-Roll: That State of Online Video
4:45pm-5:45pm: The Internet Economy

Day 2: Wednesday, April 16

9:00am-10:00am: Keynote: Consumers, Content and Control – Big Media in the Digital Age
10:00am-11:00am: Keynote Roundtable: State of the Industry
11:00am-12:00pm: Keynote Roundtable: You Don’t Know Jack! Teens Speak Out
12:15pm-1:15pm: Tactical Search: Local & Mobile Search
2:45pm-3:45pm: Digital Ad Networks – Are They Safe For Brands?
4:00pm-5:00pm: Gamer Nation – Exploring Advertising Effectiveness in the Gaming Ecosystem
5:15pm-6:15pm: Trench Warfare in the Digital Age – Relationship Marketing Makes a Comeback

Day 3: Thursday, April 17

9:30am-10:30am: Building Lifetime Value – Acquisition, and Retention Strategies in the Digital Age
10:45am-11:45am: Advertising in the On-Demand Universe
12:00pm-1:00pm: Multicultural Marketing – US Hispanics Driving the Digital Revolution
2:15pm-3:15pm: Making Widgets and Gadgets Work for You
3:30pm-4:30pm: Email 2.0 – The Empowered Consumer and You
4:45pm-5:45pm: Closing Keynote: Internet Superstar, Live at Ad:Tech

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/31/08 at 12:01 PM | Comments (2)
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March 28, 2008

Friday Recap

Hey, hey, Emo Kids. It’s Friday. And there are donuts in the office thanks to my sweet delegating skills. And Susan isn’t here (again. Does she ever come to work?). Life is pretty good.

Well, pretty good considering I have a mental disease. I know, I was shocked too, but according to The Guardian, Internet addiction is a clinical disorder. Darn. I wonder if I can collect money for that. Or get free Wifi?

First things first, some rumors and announcements: Barry Schwartz did NOT join Search Engine Journal. Even if Search Engine Watch reported it. Also, Barry Schwartz is NOT Ann Smarty. They are, in fact, two different people. And genders. SEO is confusing.

The next major announcement: The Internet is dead. Mark Cuban said so. It’s time for all of us to find new careers.

I’m feeling a little feisty today and, if his Debauchery, Douchebaggary & Drunkenness: Being a Twit post is any indication, so is Aaron. Aaron’s blog is awesome all week long, but it’s always especially juicy on Fridays. Kind of like ours!

Danny Sullivan tells us Virgin Atlantic Sucks and then updates us on how his move back to Southern California is shaping up. Just don’t ask what happened to the dogs. Sad times. I wonder if that works with cats, too?

A reader sent me this cartoon depicting the sad death of a Digg comments thread. Heh.

We may not see a mobile Web explosion this year but apparently mobile phones that feel like skin are all the rage. And gross. Totally, totally gross.

Google Blogoscoped reported that Google will extend the search box if you start entering in long, rambling queries. Wow. Earth shattering, eh?

Note: When filling out bug reports, be as specific as possible. About the bug, not which room of your house you’re in.

Matt Cutts has officially lost his mind and is now blogging about daffodils and hidden caves. Personally, I think he dreamt it all.

Joe the Peacock lets us all in on a little secret: Facebook hates you. Aw. I thought we were buddies. :(

StartUp Earth informs us that Ask.com is going after Askpedia.com, an open source Question & Answer based service, for using the word “ask” in its name. Oh please, leave them alone, Ask. Maybe they’ll actually do something with the name.

Neil Patel shares how he got his start into search marketing. Basically it involves him selling pirated CDs as a wee lad and cleaning up vomit. Sexy.

Andrew G. R. gives us the scary news that more and more people are creating blogs for their pets. Oh heavens. If I ever start a Jack Jack blog, please send someone to come get me and lock me in a closet. Life’s just not worth living.

Things I Learned From BoingBoing This Week

• A kitty says I love you with its fur! My kitties’ fur says nothing. Lame.
• I continue to be a sucker for Mario-themed baked goods. Mmm.
• Lots of weird pregnancy stories surfacing this week. Perhaps the oddest was the pregnant transgender man story.
• People can regrow fingers by sprinkling pig bladder powder on the severed tip. No, I’m serious.
• You wear holes in your keyboard from too much typing. And just like that, I have a new life goal!
• Pummeling emo kids is all the rage in Mexico.

That’s it! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Make sure to take time for dessert. And if you find yourself with some extra time, join the SEO Standards debate going on over here on the blog and on Sphinn. We’re hearing some great responses.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/28/08 at 12:30 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Fun Stuff

March 27, 2008

We Do Need SEO Standards

Over at Search Engine Land, Jill Whalen writes that we don’t need industry standards and just like that my inner pit bull wakes up and starts mouthing the gate. It’s like a tic.

As you might imagine, I disagree with Jill. Taking a look around, I think we are absolutely at the point where it’s Do or Die time for SEO standards. We don’t need the perfect search engine optimization How To guide (though I’m sure Mahalo is working on that), but we do need to outline what SEO is and what it means to optimize a Web site. We need to establish best practices, what the risk is for abandoning them, and what all these different terms that we throw around actually mean.

Jill gave the following four reasons for why they industry does NOT need SEO standards:

1. There are too many ways of skinning the SEO cat.
2. We can’t even agree on the definition of search engine optimization.
3. There are already laws to protect people from SEO scam.
4. There’s no such thing as “cheating” in SEO.

That was her reasoning. Now I will destroy it. Muahaha. (Just kidding, Jill!)

Jill is right. There are many ways to do SEO. There are also many ways to cook a pork chop. Just because the same task can be accomplished and approached differently and with different flavors doesn’t mean that guidelines aren’t useful. I’m not saying that SEMPO or another such organization should get together and create the end-all, be-all recipe of how to perform SEO. That would be unrealistic and outdated before it was even finished. I’m saying we need basic guidelines for the search engine optimization process and to document what it is we actually do. It’s something we need for training, for protection and for credibility.

Jill noted that we all know that keywords are important to a search engine optimization campaign even if we can’t agree on how many instances of each term we need in our copy. The fact that keywords are needed to support our subject theme is the SEO rule, the number of instances is the secret sauce that SEOs can experiment and test out on their own. We’re not creating a cheat sheet; we’re creating guidelines.

And as much as I sympathize with Jill’s hesitancy to push for a set of common definitions for SEO, good GOD do we need them. I know the process is going to be majorly not fun and that there will be lots of closed door fighting (bring popcorn!), but without standard definitions we’re all just making this up as we go along and trying to get square spammy techniques to fit inside a round white hat hole. It’s also necessary for newbies just entering the game and for the poor inhouse folks who have to explain and justify things to scary balding men in suits. I don’t need to know the history of cloaking. I just need a basic definition of what it is and examples of it in its most white and most black forms.

Jill’s last two points of contention are that there are already laws in place to protect people from SEO scams and that there’s really no such thing as “cheating” in search optimization to begin with. Back, pit bull, back!

As far as there being “laws” out there to protect people from wheelin’ and dealin’ SEOs, I think that’s up for debate. Yes, there is legislation out there that will make sure contracts are lived up to and that fraud doesn’t occur, but we need to educate people so that they are aware of when they’re being scammed. I suspect most site owners don’t even know that the SEO “professional” who is buying them links and engaging in shady SEO practices is potentially putting them, their site, and their company at risk. And that is scamming them. That is what a SEO standards can help accomplish. It’s about making the entire process transparent, without revealing each firm's specific secret sauce.

When it comes to the SEO cheating argument, I think Jill needs to understand that the best practices and standards we’d be creating aren’t meant for the black hats. I’m not trying to bring anyone over to the light here. What I’m interested in is helping upcoming search marketers learn the ropes and to give them the tools they need to learn to do things right from the very start. We’re creating standards so the next generations of search marketers get a head start and have more than just SEO blogs and forums to learn from. We’re trying to cut back on the amount of disinformation.

And I think it is up to us to police our industry, just like it’s up to us to be good citizens in the town we live in and speak up when we see something that isn’t right.

Obviously, I don’t think it’s my job to “out” people buying links or those using spammy techniques, but as a member of the search engine optimization industry, and a representative for a company known for doing it “right”, I think it’s my responsibility to educate. That is a stance Bruce Clay, Inc. has always taken. It’s why we have our SEO Code of Ethics and started our SEO training and Advanced Certification programs.

For search engine optimization to become a legitimate industry, we need to start treating ourselves as one. Ian McAnerin actually brought up a great point during the Is It Time For Search Marketing Standards panel reminding us that search engine optimization is a form of advertising. It’s not a matter of should it be regulated, advertising MUST be regulated. If we don’t do it, someone else is going to come in and do it for us. I’d rather see us create our own guidebook.

Think of SEO has a baby startup. In the early days, it’s okay when you’re stealing money out of petty cash to pay the rent and maybe not following all those OSHA laws you know you’re responsible for. But as you start increasing your employee count and becoming “legit”, those things start to matter more. You start to become responsible for making sure your organization is playing by the rules. It’s the same thing for SEO.

For us to grow, we have to adopt the official standards that are going to give us the credibility and protection that this industry needs.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/27/08 at 4:36 PM | Comments (30)
See more entries in SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization

Search Headlines – Google & YouTube Edition

In case you missed the memo earlier, all today’s headlines must revolve Google and its related properties. It’s a rule. Live with it.

Google Not Punishing Sites Retroactively…Or Are They?

Search Engine Watch had me raising an eyebrow when they interpreted a post from Dave Naylor to suggest that sites could be penalized for selling/buying links in the past, even if they were no longer engaging in the activity. The rumor was sparked after Dave commented on a friend’s site who was seemingly penalized for no reason. The only red flag was a paid links situation from about six months prior.

Matt Cutts later chimed in to say that the site in question was actually penalized months ago when the paid links were found. It wasn’t retroactive.

I have no reason to believe that Google would penalize a site retroactively for selling links, but does that mean the site owner just now realized a penalty that took place months ago? Aren’t site owners usually obsessive about checking that kind of stuff? Or is the site just now seeing the affect? Enlighten me in the comments.

Either way, just say no to paid links, my friends.

YouTube Gets Analytics

YouTubers were way excited to learn that the video upload site has released YouTube Insight, a free analytics tool that folks can use to learn a bit more about their videos and how they’re performing. Ooo, numbers.

To view your video analytics, click on “Videos, Favorites & Playlists” located under the Manage My Videos header on your Account page. Once there, you can get your metric information by selecting the “About the Video” radio button that will appear on the right of each of your videos. Once you’re in you’ll be able to view your data either by date (days, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months and one year.) or geographic region. Basically you’ll be able to see what locations your video are most popular in, the day of the week they get the most views, how popular your video is compared to others, and similar information.

Google hopes YouTube Insight will help partners evaluate their metrics to better serve their audience and increase ad revenue, while also allowing advertisers to tailor their message to the right viewers. Basically, it’s all about giving partners more data so they can improve their videos and make more money off their ads. Look excited.

Seriously, well played by YouTube and Google. Providing free video analytics is a good way to encourage site owners to choose YouTube over the competition and get everyone optimizing video for blended search.

Site Owners Get A Robots.txt Generator

The Google Webmaster Central blog gave site owners a Spring treat with the introduction of a robots.txt generator that they can use to help eliminate crawling problems. To use the tool, log into your Google Webmaster Tools, head to the Tools menu and click on the Generate Robots.txt link. Danny Sullivan notes that by default the tool will create a robots.txt file allowing all robots to index your site. If that’s not what you want, make sure you specify that. Once you're done, just upload the file to the top level directory of your Web site.

Danny also offers up a mini Robots.txt tutorial over at Search Engine Land so you may want to check that out.

Fun Finds

SEO Optimise asks Should Google Universal Search Be Part Of Your SEO Strategy? I don’t even have to read the post to know the answer is YES. If you’re not playing in blended search, do us all a favor and go sit in the corner. The rest of us will be over here evolving.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/27/08 at 4:33 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization

March 26, 2008

Google Can Keep Its Site Search To Itself

Barry Schwartz commented on a thread from WebmasterWorld that shows at least one site owner is happy about Google’s new search box within the search results idea. According to the WMW member, once Google began displaying a search box next to his SERP listing traffic doubled overnight.

First of all, really? Maybe I’m overly skeptical (or have just read too many forum threads), but I don’t see how that one change would cause a traffic spike of that magnitude unless we’re talking about some highly competitive keyword (or traffic jumped from three visitors to six) and the addition of the search box pushed everyone else below the fold. It just seems…extreme. Who knows? Anything is possible in search.

Regardless of the real story, I think it’s far too early to be posting any sort of definitive “results” based on the new Google “feature”. It hasn’t been around long enough for people to know the true impact and we haven’t heard from nearly enough site owners. Declaring anything now is both a waste of time and misleading.

Personally, I’m not a fan of adding a search box to the SERP. I think it put site owners in a really bad situation and decreases their ability to help users.

First of all, I think it will make sites harder to use and force more users to go away frustrated, without the information they were looking for. The site search Google is offering up isn’t going to be anywhere near as strong as the one you have on your site. Why? No Advanced Search features. Chances are you allow users to search only certain parts of your site (blog vs. whole site) or based on select criteria (by product, date, color, price, etc,), Google’s site search doesn’t allow such fancy features, features that help improve the navigability of your Web site. Basically, Google is helping you to look less helpful.

You know how you’re also going to look less helpful? When users search for products and can’t find them because you listened to Google and noindex’d certain product pages to avoid duplicate content. Google can’t return pages it doesn’t know about, right? Awesome.

I’m also not thrilled about what this does for your ability to mine keywords. One tip we give those who attend our SEO training class is to keep an eye on what users are typing into their site search. This often helps clue you in to the topics visitors to your site are interested in, where they’re getting lost, where you need more content, new products you should be offering, etc. By allowing users to search on Google, instead of your site, you lose out on all of these opportunities. Another chance to appear useful to customers gone. Google, FTW!

I could go on but I won’t. Mostly because there are only 24 hours in a day and listening my many objections would take too much time. Clearly, I’m not a fan.

I don’t think it’s cool that Google not so long ago decided it wasn’t okay for your site search results to show up in their SERPS (which I totally agreed with, BTW) and are now throwing in their own. It takes your ability to earn revenue off a CPM model and shifts it over to them. Way to declare yourself King. Any way you look at that, it’s not okay.

Truthfully, I think it’s Google’s job to help you find the best sites relevant to your query and then get out of the way.

Google, you’ve gotten me to the page I need. This is me politely asking you to get out of the way. [I wouldn't mind the site search so much if it gave me better results. I want it to be more 'I'm Feeling Lucky' implementation. I don't want yet another page of search results. I want the answer.--Susan] I hear you, but I still don’t think it’s Google’s job to give you “the answer” past the SERP. It’s the site’s job. Go there. Google, thanks for getting me this far but get out of the way!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/26/08 at 5:08 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization

What To Look For When Hiring Bloggers

There’s a vicious rumor going around the SEO blogosphere that I have some kind of blogging knowledge and insight on what makes a good blogger. I’ve tried to dispel this myth with my sucky blogging, but it doesn’t seem to be working. The emails from people looking to bring a blogger on board asking for a list of requirements still come in. I suppose with my 10+ years of blogging experience (hey, LiveJournal at 14 counts, right?), I guess I do have some pearls of wisdom worth sharing.

Here are the top traits a blogger should have. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

• Someone Who’s Click Happy: The difference between someone who blogs and a blogger is how many clicks they make looking for news. Bloggers worth their paychecks aren’t afraid to make those extra two or three clicks to check out a link buried at the bottom of the page. They know that sometimes the real gems of the story are the ones hiding in the background and the angles people aren’t covering. Good bloggers are curious by nature. They demand to know more because even if they’re not one by trade, they’re secretly fostering fantasies of being Christiane Amanpour (or, if their goals are less lofty, Barbara Walters). They’re the ones always asking “why” and rolling their eyes at press releases. The truth is, there are way too many people out there trying to make a career off faking it. They read a headline on TechMeme and then guess at what the heart of the story must be. That’s not someone you want on your team. You want someone who knows how to find information and can the turn it around in a useful way.
• Basic Social Skills: I know and I’m sorry. While I’ve surely never been one to advocate maintaining proper social skills and talking to people, the blogosphere is a social place. You can’t be an effective blogger if you’re all alone sitting in a cave. (Well, I guess you can, assuming you can still bring up Twitter and Facebook from there.) Blogging is about embracing the larger community. It’s about responding and adding to the conversations going on around you. It’s about being active on sites like Twitter and Facebook and Digg and StumbleUpon and using them to form connections with readers and other bloggers. And it’s not just those first level connections you’re after. You want to focus on who those people know as well. As much as we like to pretend it’s not, blogging is a popularity contest. (So is life. Stop complaining.) To be cool, you have to already be perceived as cool. And just like in high school, being cool means having friends. The cooler people think you are, the more friends you’ll get. The more friends you have, the more readers you’ll have. The more readers, the more friends. It’s a sweet cycle.
• Knowledge of the English Language: Fine. There have been plenty of polls and “studies” to show that proper grammar and basic writing skills are irrelevant to blogging, but they’re all lying. A big part of blogging rests on your ability to engage readers and tell a story. You can’t tell a story if you can’t write. And I can’t tell you how many good stories have been written and ruined by those who were never hit with the grammar stick in school. Punctuation is not to be feared and Word does come with a spell check. You don’t want your inability to use punctuation and conjugate verbs to distract people from the story you’re trying to tell. Obviously there are exceptions. Michael Gray and Jeremy Schoemaker both have blogs, so clearly high school-level spelling and grammar isn’t a total absolute. ;) Still, I think it helps and I credit most of blogging “success” to the fact that I’m literate. I’m sure SEO blogging is just what my Dad had in mind when he shelled out $120k for my Journalism degree, hee.

• Passion: The biggest reason most blogs suck is lack of passion. We’re very lucky to be in the search space where bloggers are genuinely passionate about the topics they’re covering and about helping readers. That’s not the case widespread. Passion comes from having a strong opinion one way or another about something and demanding to see things done right. Bruce Clay, Inc. is passionate about search engine optimization. I was passionate about Ask.com and I’m still passionate about search and empowering users. When you write with passion you attract people who are passionate about the same things and bring them into your community. If your wannabe blogger doesn’t have a favorite band, a company they’re diehard for, a brand they’d like to see burned to the ground, a Web site they tell all their friends about and a To Kill list that’s ready and waiting, they’re probably not for you. Or this planet. The only people in this world that matter are people with passion. The rest of you are just taking up space. Don’t enter my blogosphere.
• Sense of Humor: Your blogger in training doesn’t have to be eyeing a career in standup any time soon, but they should have some sense of humor or wit. Despite the number of lame news blogs popping up all over the space, most people still expect the Web to entertain them. Corporate blog or not, don’t take yourself too seriously. I’m not advocating acting like a goofball and offending all of your clients and readers, but know that it’s okay to have a little fun. Posting a Friday Recap each week where you link to oddball things isn’t going to flush your credibility down the toilet (or, if it has, please don’t tell Bruce!). Your ability to pick your words and display who you are is going to set the tone and voice of your blog.
• Transparent: Blogging is not for everyone, and it’s definitely not for those who are afraid to show people who they are under the surface. You need to find someone who’s willing to lay it all out there and invite people into their lives – their real life, not the one they pretend to have on the Internet. Total transparency is what builds trust and that emotional connection. There are plenty of bloggers, the only way you’re going to set yourself apart is to be genuine and true to yourself. If you’re the type setting up different “personal” and “professional” social networking accounts, maybe blogging isn’t for you. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but personally, I don’t think you can be a successful blogger if you’re afraid to show who you really are. Susan will probably disagree with me on that. [I'd have gone for 'Genuine' over 'Transparent', personally. Sincerity is everything. I don't need to know everything about a person, only true things. --Susan] That’s because you only keep surface relationships. Others require more.
• Female: Okay, I’m just kidding about this one but if you work in a male-dominated space, it does seem to help. 

That’s my take. What traits do you think are important for competitive blogging?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/26/08 at 12:39 PM | Comments (14)
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March 25, 2008

Local Search Engine Optimization Doesn’t Exist

There are plenty of things about search engine optimization that confuse me to no end. One of the biggest sources of confusion for me is our intense need to coin a million terms to describe the same thing. In my humble little brain, there’s no such thing as local search engine optimization. It’s just search engine optimization. Just because we’re targeting a more niche set of keywords doesn’t suddenly change what we’re doing. Also, why the hell do we need the word canonicalization? Can anyone even spell that, let alone pronounce it? Okay, that’s not the point of this post.

Tim Nash had a post yesterday hailing SEO Nottinghamshire Here I Come, which essentially asked whether or not companies received business from their local area and if they specifically target it.

Personally, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be targeting your local area. Isn’t the point of having a Web site to target everyone? How hard is it to work some geographic keywords and local identifiers into your content? To me, doing that isn’t “local search engine optimization”, it’s straight up smart optimization. Let’s stop with the names. We just make ourselves look silly and create more words people can’t spell. Like canonicalization.

It’s really my hope that in the next 3-5 years we’ll stop thinking about local search engine optimization, video optimization, audio optimizations and all the optimizations individually. SEO and all the practices and techniques that fall under that umbrella will simply be part of a company’s core marketing campaign. It’s not that we’ll stop performing these techniques; they’ll just become a natural part of your larger Internet marketing campaign. Optimizing for local search or making your site blended search-friendly will be second nature (okay, maybe that’s a stretch) as companies wise up and begin taking advantage of all the opportunities available to them. It’s promising to hear that 70 percent of those Tim asked said they were specifically targeting local areas, as well as nationally.

It’s promising, but not good enough. That number should be way higher, like 100 percent. I’ll use Bruce Clay, Inc. as an example just because it’s what I’m familiar with.

We’re a global business, right? We have offices open or in the works in the UK, Sydney, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, China, and obviously in the United States. Clearly our focus is on national and international clients, and yet we still know the importance of having a presence in our own backyard. That’s why if you do a search for ‘simi valley seo’ or ‘simi valley optimization’, we’re right there. It just makes sense that we’d want to show up for these terms.

By NOT focusing and targeting locally, you run the risk of missing out on a lot of great opportunities that just happen to be closer to home and may actually come with a lower cost of conversion. Okay, I have absolutely no hard numbers to support that statement, but my gut tells me that users searching for local terms are more likely to convert than someone who just found us searching for “search engine optimization”. Why? Because it’s human nature to trust someone “like you”, who lives and works in your town. Do you not immediately like someone when you find out they grew up in your home town? Of course, you do.

There’s also some comfort in knowing that you do business with someone who lives downtown that you can head down there and kick some ass should a problem arise. Say what you want, you know it’s true. ;)

When companies maximize these local relationships, they’re able to set themselves apart in a way that competitors across the country cannot. things begin equal, what business do you trust more: The one located 3,000 miles away or the one that happens to have an office in town?

I don’t think it matters how many local clients you currently “get”. Optimizing your site for local queries is just good business. You almost have to purposely NOT target your local audience. And keep in mind that opportunities for local search are growing by leaps and bounds. Just because you’re not seeing much return now, doesn’t mean that won’t increase as the search engines begin working local listings deeper into their SERPs, users begin searching smarter, and we all start taking advantage of mobile devices.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/25/08 at 3:46 PM | Comments (9)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization

SEO Headlines

Matt McGee Offers Very Polite Smackdown

Matt McGee is one of my favorite people in the industry and today he reminds me why with this Google Wants Your Analytics Data Badly (An Open Letter) post. I mean, how many people do you know that can still come off as an adorable, huggable teddy bear when they’re dishing out the smackdown to Google? Not many. Matt McGee is the man!

Matt is calling out Google for being so obsessed with their new data sharing feature that they’ve sacrificed user privacy by making it opt-out instead of opt-in. Even worse, they’re essentially doing everything they can to get users not to even notice that they have a choice. For real. All they’re missing is the giant neon arrow pointing to the “ACCEPT”button. Google really needs to revaluate what they’re doing here. If they want to make this “feature” available for users, great. But make sure site owners know that they don’t have to opt in and that you’re not opting them in without their permission.

Because Matt’s a nice guy, he offers up some advice to Google on how they can stop their evil stripe from showing:

“Make the data sharing stuff a little bigger so I don’t almost miss it, and don’t opt me in by default! What’s up with that? You’re like those awful sites that force me to uncheck a box so I don’t agree to be spammed halfway to tomorrow. Thankfully, I noticed the little “Edit Settings” link and took care of this. (Matt McGee, FTW!)”

Sounds good to me. See, now isn’t Matt McGee your favorite person in search too? I know!

Which is Better: Search Engine Optimization or PPC?

I came across Dave Wallace’s cumbersomely named Search Engine Guide article Which is Better – PPC or SEO? How One Company Increased Traffic 60 % After Ditching PPC for SEO and was left somewhat scratching my head. The article makes the case that while PPC optimization may deliver fast track results, it’s your search engine optimization campaign that is going to offer up the long lasting, steady results you’re looking for.

Fine. I can’t argue that. I totally agree that search engine optimization provides a great long term benefit and in the end, it’s probably cheaper than PPC optimization, I’m just not sure why we have to pick one or the other. It’s not a matter of what comes first. There’s room for both in your Internet marketing campaign. In fact, I think your marketing campaign needs both.

As David is careful to mention in the post (probably because he knows I’d pounce if he didn’t ;)), PPC optimization allows a great opportunity to learn about new keyword opportunities, to set new campaign goals, to help you better understand your searchers, and leaves you with new data that will help you measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. It always makes me nervous to hear people pitching one Internet marketing strategy over another. There’s no reason to start throwing eggs out of your basket. It’s about balance and using data from all the available avenues.

Fun Finds

It must be March because the old “what do I do when my client won’t listen to me because I haven’t set proper expectations” thread has come back up. This time it’s called SEO Clients Not Being Responsive and Tamar is commenting over at Search Engine Roundtable. See, this is why we lock our clients in the storage closet. It makes them much more compliant. I’m kidding. The server room is way warmer. [For more on this topic, make sure you're subscribed to the SEO Newsletter. --Susan] Yes, yes, a very timely article shall be arriving in your inboxes on Monday. So go subscribe!

Mike Blumenthal shows you how to get your video clips showing up in Google Maps by adding it to the Local Business Center.

Barry Schwartz posted How to Set Up Google Ad Manager On Your Site or Blog. It’s one of those posts you’re going to want to bookmark. And drink some coffee before you dive in.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/25/08 at 3:42 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, Pay Per Click, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

March 24, 2008

Worst. Web Site. Ever.

Fact: The best way to ruin anything is to take away the simplicity and intuitiveness of something and complicate it with technology and/or stupidity.

Seth Godin hit on this topic in his recent post about the world’s worst toaster. In case you didn’t know, the world’s worst toaster is the one that requires 10 steps just to burn a piece of bread to a level that makes it edible. I’d argue that law isn’t reserved for toasters.

Think about it.

• The world’s worst email list is one that takes five steps to allow someone to unsubscribe.
• The world’s worst Web site is one that throws unnecessary hurdles in a user’s conversion path.
• The world’s worst brand is the one that makes it hard for users to embrace it.
• The world’s worst boss is the one employees have to go around in order to be creative.
• The world’s worst customer service representative is that one that pulls customers through a chain before giving them what they want.

If you want your site/product/company/life to be great, take out all the unnecessary stuff. Trust me, it works.

All of my most favorite companies and/or sites are those that are the simplest or the most initiative to use. I’m talking about sites like shirt.woot that only require me to say, “I want one!” before prompting me for shipping address. And now that I’ve registered, I don’t even have to do that last part. I just hit “I want one!” and a present shows up at my doorstep 28 hours later. That level of simplicity is dangerous. For serious. I once bought $60 worth of chocolate in less than five seconds from Woot. [And it was delicious. --Susan]

This is what your customers are looking for – instant gratification and no fuss. They don’t want to hold your hand or cuddle with you afterwards. They want you to solve their problem and get out of their way. They definitely don’t want to suffer through 11 clicks on eBay just so they can collect six dollars. At that point, dealing with you is actually costing them money.

When you’re a business owner you often find yourself having to make a lot of hard decisions: What should our Web site look like? Should the navigation go up on top or should it go on the left? Should it be light text on a dark background or dark text on a light background? What kind of employees should we hire? Is experience more important than drive? How can we gain the necessary exposure needed to push our competition?

These are important things to take into consideration. However, the most important decision you’ll make is this: Are you going to make things as easy for user to understand as possible or are you going to make them work for it?

Users will always gravitate for the sites and brands that make things easy.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/24/08 at 4:30 PM | Comments (2)
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Jason Calacanis Is The Devil & SEOs are Children

A week or so before Jason Calacanis was due to give his keynote at Search Engine Strategies New York, search marketers decided to start a movement to “out” him as being misinformed about search engine optimization. The idea was to submit questions to ringleader Liana Evans and then we’d all get to watch Jason squirm and look uncomfortable when we fired the collected questions at him on stage. If you caught the thread on Sphinn, you know my reaction at the time as something along the lines of “really? Are we five?”

And when the Jason keynote came around, something amazing happened – he didn’t act like a jerk. In fact, he was humble in admitting his lack of search engine optimization knowledge, he was sincere about reaching out to the SEO community, and he was truthful regarding Mahalo, admitting that it’s in the early stages and that he’s still trying to figure it all out.

After that keynote and Jason’s appearance at SES NY where he was seen making amends with skeptical SEOs, I thought perhaps we’d see an end to the community’s polarization over Jason and Mahalo. That perhaps we could all act like adults and stop throwing stones. That we could be supportive of one another’s efforts to improve search and maybe even embrace a new way of thinking, one that could someday evolve into a Google competitor.

And then I woke up from my crazy dream world.

Search marketers will never stop beating the Jason Calacanis horse. Mostly because it gets them links. And also because it’s fun to have a common enemy to hate on when we’re feeling a little insecure with our own search engine optimization efforts.

On Friday, Aaron Wall, someone I have an enormous amount of respect for, launched another SEO vs Jason Calacanis attack arguing that according to the leaked Google Internal Spam Documents, Mahalo is spam. Aaron says that if you remove the scraped content, the ads, and the links from Mahalo’s pages, that there’s nothing of value left. Oh, brother. Here we go again. Time to get out our SEO-branded sticks and beat Jason with them! Maybe we’ll get him to say something stupid and then we’ll have a reason to beat him even harder! Huzzah!

Seriously, aren’t you over it? Can’t we be one community united in our passion for search and trying to continually improve the system? Apparently not.

I haven’t spent that much time navigating Mahalo, but I have looked at some of the basic listings and it’s not spam. Perhaps it hasn’t received the full SEO treatment. There are plenty of less than stellar results ranking because they haven’t been noindex/nofollow’d. However, from a user perspective, a lot of those Mahalo pages have value. I wouldn’t use them myself and you probably wouldn’t either, but my mother might if she was looking for information. So would other beginner searchers. It’s basically a poor man’s Wikipedia at this point, acting as a portal page for people looking for links to real answers.

Is it perfect? No.
Does Jason claim that it is? No.
Was it too early to start trying to monetize? Yes.

However, if I’m a user curious on how to bake a potato or on the hunt for Easter Cupcakes, Mahalo’s results are actually pretty relevant for me. [The how to make bacon page is a particular favorite among my non-SEO friends actually. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten emails linking to it. --Susan]

What I find funny is that the same people who argue that Google can’t tell you what to do with your site, that they’re not your mother, and that you don’t have to nofollow those damn paid links if you don’t want to, are now tripping over themselves to get in line and point fingers that Mahalo breaks Google’s guidelines. To be honest, I don’t care about Mahalo. I don’t really even care about Jason (I know. I’m sure he’s totally offended, heh). It’s the SEO attack mobs and our need to continually beat people with sticks to show how “right” and “cool” we are that bothers me. Dude, find a greater purpose.

The truth is, if Mahalo was a site we liked, we’d call it a portal page. Because we don’t, it’s “scraped content”. This polarization in search helps no one. It does no one any good when we set others up to fail. And if we keep bashing every new engine attempt all we’re going to end up with more Google. Do you want to write the Official "Google Gains 100 Percent Market Share" post? I don’t. Move on.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/24/08 at 3:29 PM | Comments (8)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization

March 21, 2008

SES NY 08 Conference Recap

So, we’re back. And I’d probably be really excited about being back here in sunny California if wasn’t so damn tired. For serious. My eyes are on fire, and my body is one giant yawn. But in the end, I realize that the crazy days, the long nights and all that running around were totally worth it.

This past week at Search Engine Strategies NY we were able to meet some wonderful new people, catch up with old friends and help sponsored a totally kickass SearchBash event that gave search marketers a chance to wind down with some beautiful views and outrageous karaoke. And of course, here on the blog we covered a total of 17 sessions in less than four days. Not too shabby.

Our personal successes aside, I can honestly say that this was the best Search Engine Strategies show I have been to in a long time. We saw great new speakers, brand new session topics and both the conference hall and session rooms were packed with excited attendees. It’s a sad truth that a lot of bloggers have been taking shots at SES now that Danny Sullivan’s SMX show is the new shiny new baby, but this week proved that a lot of the backlash SES has been receiving is unwarranted. This conference series is still alive and well, and was kicking butt and taking names all week long. Well done to everyone involved.

Here’s a quick look at the sessions we covered this past week.

Day 1:

Redefining The Customer
Analytics: Data Into Action
Search Around The World – Part 2: The UK & Europe
Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right

Day 2:

Opening Keynote: Nick Carr
Why Local Is Different
Orion Panel: Universal Search
Landing Page Testing & Tuning

Day 3:

Morning Keynote: Gordon McLeod
Ad Testing: Research & Findings
Top Search Trends
Afternoon Keynote: Jason Calacanis
Social Media Research – Informing Search Strategies
Social Search: The Next Step

Day 4:

Morning Keynote: Andrew Tomkins
Staffing Up Search
OldTimers On Search

We hope you enjoyed our liveblogging coverage this week, and again, congrats to all the folks responsible for this week’s SES. It was a really great show. If only we could get some stable WiFi at the next one! ;)

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/21/08 at 3:06 PM | Comments (1)
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March 20, 2008

Staffing Up Search

Hey, hey! Kevin Ryan is moderating with speakers Frank Watson (Kangamurra Media), Kendall Allen (Incognito Digital), Mike Moran (IBM) and Nell Thompson (Full Sail). Wait – Frank Watson speaks at sessions? I thought he just came to, well…never mind. We love Frank.

We’re starting late, which means we’ll end late, which means the 15 minutes I have between sessions is likely gone. My stress level is coming out my ears right now. Yey four day conferences!

Up first is Kendall.

[Kendall’s slides have the date on them. Is it really March 20 already? When did that happen?]

Considerations:

What’s your organization about? Are you a bid agency, a boutique full-service agency, a straight up SEM firm, a client side agency, or a free agent consultant?

Dialing into the role: Weigh different attributes and roles like practice lead, media department or NSO department, client services professional, production, sales engineer, marketing coordinator. How your professionals orient to the work, or which talents and skills they need to apply, will depend on their role within the search delivery mix.

Values and flaws personified – 6 profiles

Polly Pedantic: She’s gets the value of strategy, but stays on her high horse. She doesn’t collaborate with the client. Her ideas are static platitudes but they never make it all the way to tactic or learning. She’s basically outdated.

A strategic mindset is vital, but intelligence must evolve with the industry, the media and market at hand, and within the team and/or through strong organic collaboration. Strategy should be a marketing-tuned dialogue, not a canned replayed marketing speech.

Hamish the Hair-trigger Quant: Rightly views data and analytics as key. Keeps his head in the console and fingers in Excel at all times. He’s obsessed with stats and spikes. He fails to give a campaign enough time to perform. He is quick on his feet but outweighed by his head.

It is essential that even your shrewdest quant knows how and when to pace, evaluate and optimize.

Let’er Rip Leonard: He knows how to play, scopes out the opportunity, picks the most appropriate search engines. He knows how to build a KW list, landing pages, etc. It’s a repeat formula for him – regardless of client business or industry. Puts it up, checks the performance once a week or less, and quickly moves on.

The practical ability and skill to eventually analyze and optimize, working the tools to make the campaign GO are not enough. You have to have a spark and curiosity for the livelihood of the campaign and the promise of the media are essential. Search is very accountable media, give its nature. We want professionals who get this principle.

Dirk the Dilatants: Obsessed with the news. Tries to hang out with industry pundits and gurus. He wants to be rich and jumped into paid search in 2003 after an entrepreneur showed him a copy of “The Golden Search”. He can’t really explain the different between natural and paid search, he just knows he’s in search “media’. He stays at the junior level but goes to all the parties.

You want professionals who are going to dig in and dedicate themselves, nurturing an expertise and integrity over time.

Trina the Tools Addict: Obsessed with constant training, prides herself on the ability to quickly adopt new tools. Constantly testing. Stays pretty shallow and doesn’t really understand the tools because she doesn’t use them at their full power.

Tools are integral to search efforts and are at an extremely advanced state right now. Your professionals should come with or seek mastery but always push thoughtful application.

Real Deal Ronny: Has roots in the search industry but he’s also got a broader perspective, as well. He honors the full equation and always sees it through. He is thoughtful and clearly connects when he talks to clients. Collaboration and communication are his clear strengths. You can see the spark in his eye, he’s really into Search. He’s always bringing value.

Ronne is who we want!

The drivers of talents

1. Roots: Pure-play search roots, with an eye on SEM, SEO, search engine or role in industry. Plus some level of broader media, especially integrated digital media experience. A true personal client base and case history.


2. Intelligence: Ability to synthesize strategy and method. A current and progressive point of view. Business and emotional intelligence. An understand of consumer intent.


3. Ethic: Dedication to the full equation. Devoted to principles of smart optimization, packaging. Attends to the balance of respond to data but giving a campaign room.


4. Style: Exuding curiosity and tirelessness. Ground and obviously smart both on ideas and on the details. Clear client focus. Comfort speaking on business and marketing picture at each and every turn. A telltale spark in the eye when they talk about what we do.

Mike Moran is up next.

If you look at the set of skills people are looking for, you see they are very broad. These people are hard to find, hard to pay and hard to keep. It’s always hard to find every trait in the size team that we usually have. The teams are usually only 1-2 people.

How are you going to find the people you’re looking for?

Your first decision: agency or in house?

It’s usually not an either/or decision. Some things are best done in house (getting pages indexed, optimizing content), others are best done by an agency (diagnosing problems, consulting on strategy).

How to Choose an Agency:

Examine what you need and what is out there. You may need people with paid search experience. Or you may need someone with keyword research or some other tactic. Forming a relationship with the kind of agency that will help train your team will smooth over some of the experience you’re not able to get.

A sure way to spot the spammer (no ethics) is to act like you are looking for one. They’ll be happy to brag about how smart they are. Ethical agencies will talk you out of it.

You find in-house talent by looking at direct marketers, metrics analysts, linguistics, librarians and translators. It may be easier to train someone than to hire someone with search engine optimization experience listed on their resume.

You need folks who can do the numbers. They need to understand about conversion rates. Direct marketer and Web metrics analytics know the marketing material and you can teach them the rest.

You also need people who can do words and who think in terms of language. These people will help you tweak your message. IBM brought in technical writers. Look for a writer who’s bored or a librarian who’s bored. These people will be very interested to jump to someone else.

Don’t overlook the people you already have on board. Sometimes there are people in other divisions who you can move over, like writers, product managers, Web developers, etc. They don’t know SEM, but they already know your business.

Nell is up.

Challenges of acquiring talent:

• Colleges and universities are just beginning to deal with the topic
• No standardization in academic approaches
• MBAS and Marketing Degrees do not cover specific Internet Marketing topics
• Two areas that need to be addressed – IT considerations and Web Design principles
• Every company has a different approach

Challenges with the Search Industry:

• Mixed messages with hard skills
• An abundant wish list of soft skills
• Wants fresh perspective
• Want everything or wants total conformity

Specific hard skills to look for: Strong writing skills, fundamental understanding of Web design, introduction to Web interface and usability, basic IT understandings, Internet business models, and Web metrics and marketing math.

Soft skills: World perspective and cultural studies, Internet consumer psychology, social media intuitiveness, viral marketing understanding, and emotional intelligence (self awareness, self management and relationship management).

For the Student: Look for educational opportunities that balance both marketing and technical considerations. Study technological trends. Know the players in the field and read their blogs.

For the Employer: Conduct think tanks at colleges and universities. Contact Career Outreach departments at colleges and work with them. Join Advisory Boards and give input to the curriculum (Lisa likes this one!).

Apparently Frank Watson isn’t giving a presentation. Kevin does ask him about his own experiences hiring for his new agency. What’s the first thing that you did?

Frank spent five years working in financial services and took the department from 3 people to 32 people in the marketing department. When you’re starving, you’re going to develop very skillful people who are eventually going to move on. They start pushing up on that top end. It’s an ongoing educational process. You’re going to find people at very rudimentary levels. You want to find very creative people and people who can drink. Heh.

Look for the right kind of person. Don’t look for a search person. Look for someone with intelligence and ambition. The stuff search people do isn’t that hard. If you bring the right people in, you can give them that focus and let them go.

You can train someone to do analytics. You can’t train them to be enthusiastic about what they do. Frank recommends hiring journalism students. I totally agree with that. ;)

Frank reminds us that we all work in an exciting industry. He says the fact that we’re all “up at this hour” is proof of that. Kevin Ryan politely reminds Frank that it’s almost noon.

Hee!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/20/08 at 10:33 AM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, sesny2008

OldTimers On Search

Kevin Ryan is stalking me and moderating the OldTimers On Search panel with speakers Rob Graham (Laredo Group), Kevin Lee (Didit), Doron Wesly (Millward Brown Inc) and Stephen DiMarco (Complete). For serious. I have never seen Kevin Ryan as much as I have this week. Not that I’m complaining. Kevin makes me laugh.

Kevin says it’s hard to set up a session like this because he’s known all the speakers for many years. The OldTimers group was started about 10 years ago and it was a group of people who were “social outcasts” in their respective industries and they were old then. One of the requirements was that you had to live in your parent’s basement. It was started as a discussion group for people brave enough to get into the interactive space when it was not popular and when we were not talking about “googling” things. Basically, they were doing this when nobody else was. Today’s panelists are some of the founding fathers of the industry as we know it today. They’re going to talk about search as a brand health metric.

Rob Graham is up first.

We’re often focus on existing brands. We don’t think about “what if I come up with a great idea – how do I test if it would be successful in the market?” He suggests using search in that way.

How do we know what we know about your brands, about our customers, about how our customers perceive the appeal of our brands, and how our brands should be position to achieve the greatest life in brand awareness?

Ask yourself if marketing research asks the right questions. Rob was once questions about salad dressing. They asked him: Do you like this product? Would you consider buying this product in the future? Would you be willing to recommend this brand to your family or friends?

In most cases, the answer is probably “sure”. These questions don’t tell you much. What they should have asked was:

• How often do you eat salad?
• What factors would make you choose this brand over others?
• Would you be willing to go out of your way to find this brand?
• If you intend to buy this product in the future, where would you look for it?
• How important is salad dressing to you?
• Does this dress make me look fat?

They observed consumer behaves very differently from the unobserved consumer. Consumers often tell marketers what it is they think they want to hear. Sometimes the market research doesn’t reveal real consumer intention. People try to be polite.
What marketing needs to think about when introducing new brands: Will my product find an audience? Do I have the right distribution? Will I sell enough?

It’s never cheap to launch a new product or service. Before you do consider the costs involved like – Product Design/ Marketing/ Web Site Development, Distribution, and Staffing.

Use search as a market research tool. Create a report or white paper which addresses the solution you’re selling. Then, create a simple landing page which offers a free copy of the report. Tweak the keywords and ads for the campaign to optimize results. Run the campaign until you have enough data to know if it will be successful.

Effective Market Research:

Hit what you’re aiming at: Know exactly how to position your brand across media. Generate a refined list of keywords to use with search and other campaigns.

Doron Wesley is next. Kevin says he’s one of the most interesting people he’s ever met and to ignore those photos of Doron feeding Kevin a cherry that ended up on Facebook. All right then.

Media weight & Search queries:

What is the interaction between search and traditional advertising? Is that helping our brand health metrics?

1. Search volumes rise immediately after the start of a print campaign.
2. Search volume remains higher after TV campaigns, when the print campaign is continued.

They wanted to ask people what they were thinking as they went through a search engine. However, then they were told that was a bad idea. Don’t interrupt a person when they’re searching. They couldn’t put a survey between the query and the site visitation. What they did was look at the brand health metrics for these companies. They looked for the search volume in the market place. In some cases, it does move emotional attributes. In some cases it opens up considerations.

If a person is researching the new BMW and they don’t have Audi at all in their mind, Audi can change that by having a strong search presence and impacting users consideration set.

We know search does branding and drives traffic; we need to take into account what our objection is and what the cost is to getting to that objective.

Stephen is next to talk a bit about himself. He’s a new guy in the OldTimers. He says I can only blog about the “hazing” process they go through if I agree to go through it myself. I politely tell him I’ll pass.

Kevin Lee now gets to talk about himself. He writes a weekly column for ClickZ. He’s written something like 280 columns.

Kevin talks about the idea of branding and says it was invented by ad agencies. They needed to create something that hypothetical aligned with sales. They came up with these concepts of brand metrics and then they did a lot of work to try and correlate those metrics to sales. Things like brand and message associations.

Internet brands build brands but not necessarily favorable ones. Brand metrics and sales don’t always go together. Brand awareness isn’t always a good thing. Ask Elliot Spitzer. One thing that many brand marketers forget is that it’s not just the SERP that creates brand lift. It’s engagement on the site that moves the needle much further. That’s what influences consumers to get closer to the holy grail of a sale. When you think about branding, don’t just think about the SERP. Think more about the SERP only being stage one. Consider the post-click engagement.

People search because they were stimulated to search. Often it’s media that stimulates them.

Doron calls out Kevin for saying that branding doesn’t work and then saying that branding is what stimulates people to search. He’s contradicting himself.

Kevin tries to clarify and says that branding metrics don’t work alone. That’s what he meant.

Now they’re fighting over brands of diapers. When Kevin had his daughter, he had to decide on Huggies, Pampers or No Frills. He said he knew he definitely wasn’t going to go with No Frills (hee, aw). Doron says that proves brands matter because Kevin thought that Huggies or Pampers would be better for his daughter.

Aw, I like that we’re talking about babies.

Kevin stops the madness. Are we seeing traffic start to decline or seeing people pulling back on money in the search category?

Steven says it's category specific.

Doron says advertisers are rethinking Q2 and Q3 plans. They are spending less. He says he can attest to what Compete has seen and that the threat of a recession is definitely changing behavior.

Kevin says the media dollars are driving search activity and that’s at the core of any brand discussion. Are we going to see the bottom fall out of the business because of this pullback?

Rob says they’re seeing that search as an ad medium is still increasing in numbers. The cost of admission is low. People can get in without a huge amount of money. If advertisers are pulling out because their segments aren’t being met, that just opens the door for other advertisers to get in the game. In any market, there are opportunities on either slide of the swing. As consumers, we’re not going to stop searching.

Kevin says we’re now seeing SERP becoming destinations. How many people have run brand-only search initiatives? Not many people raised their hands.

Don’t put search in a bucket. You can’t say if people don’t click that it doesn’t work. That’s short-sighted.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/20/08 at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, liveblog, sesny2008

Morning Keynote: Andrew Tomkins

It’s starting to feel a bit like Groundhog Day with all these early morning keynotes, isn’t it? Another keynote. Another cup of coffee. Another mysterious headache that feels like there are oompa loompas dancing on my head.

I’m actually curious to see what the turnout will be for this one. I’m pretty sure half of the attendees are still stumbling to make their way home from SearchBash. I’m also curious why there is loud, angry music on at 8:30am when half the crowd is surely hung over. That just seems mean.

Okay, we’re starting.

Kevin Ryan says that Mike Grehan called Andrew the smartest guy in the business. He understands the world of search and everything in it. He can also explain it to dumb people like us.

Andrew wants to walkthrough where he sees search going. What are some of the trends in the industry? He’s going to give us a detailed look. That means lots of typing. Yey.

The Internet has firmly moved from a curiosity to a substrate for life activity. Content is growing, changing, diversifying, and fragmenting, with search evolving in response. Value migrating to ecosystem. Semantics of content unlock the value of the ecosystem.

Getting Things Done

No one really goes online to search. It’s just a tool that they use to do what they really want to do.

For example: I want to book a vacation in Tuscany. I start off by going to Google, which leads me to Yahoo Farechase. I find a site specific to Tuscany. I order a rental car. I’m weeding my way in and out of search. I’m going for information and for services.

I go to Tuscany and come back. I loved the vacation and want to make that sweet Italian coffee at home. I search for how to make great espresso at home. I find an enthusiast site. I go there and come across a really detailed information article. I’m moving from my broad landscape into specific details. I decide I want that machine. I get pricing information and then I look for a merchant. My search helps me find one.

This process can take months or years.

Dawn of search: Navigational queries and pockets of information

Today: Increasing migration of content online. New forms of media only available online. Infrastructure for payments and reputations sufficient for many years.

Things to Notice:

• Long running users’ goals
• Search as a hub – start there, return for resource discovery and at task boundaries, traverse Web broadly to complete task
• Web services integrated into task

Content Growth

Search is going to be less about integrating social and being entertaining, and more about hardcore productivity. Going online to get things done that you need to get done. The Internet is for the important life stuff.

Content Trends:

Published content – 3-4 GB produced every day
Professional Web content -- ~2GB a day
User Generated Content – 8-10 GB a day
Private Text Content -- ~3 TB a day
Upper bound on typed content -- ~700 TB

Metadata Trends

Anchor text – 100 MB of metadata produced per day
Tags – 40 MG a day
Page views – 180 GB a day
Reviews – Around 10 MB a day

Content Complexity

Consumption is fragmented. Nobody owns more than 10 percent of the Web’s page views. No single place will own all the content. Best of breed processing will operate on the Web version. Value transitions to ecosystem.

Content consumption is fragmented across users. They did a study of the interests people self-defined themselves in the context of LiveJournal broken out by ages. The 1 to 3 LJ users (people who create blogs for their baby/pet) are interested in treats, catnip, daddy, mommy, playing, etc. The greater than 57 demographic is interested in death, cheese and photography. Heh.

The thing that stood out in the study was that you can be cohesive within your demographic group and really experience that as the universe without needing to be bombarded by the larger set of topics going on out there.

Content access is fragmenting: He looks at Facebook. We’re not used to dealing with access control on that level. We’re used to info either being private or public. Facebook gives us more segments through networks.

Content itself is changing. It used to be that you go to a page, you open it open, you parse it and you index it. Now, Web pages are increasingly based on AJAX. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. It’s all little fragments of XTML. Crawling it is a hard thing to think about.

The Search Interface

We saw very few changes in search through 2005. Now we’re entering a period of massive change to handle more complex content. Rich media, aggregation, simple task analysis, etc. Moving beyond the stateless query/response paradigm because users need it. Personalize theory.

Rich Media and Search Assistance

In Yahoo, you type in “the game plan” and you get all sorts of neat stuff. You get the Search Assist player, a movie shortcut (shows task level ambiguity – what do they want to know?), etc.

Andrew show’s how Google solves simple task-focused queries like giving out flight times and definitions. Shows Microsoft’s product search results.

Open Ecosystems

Structured database power a vast majority of pages on the Web – Certainly ecommerce catalogs but also UGC. Content owners open to exposing structure, but don’t see how and why. Micro-formats adoption at an all time high, yet it produces much more than is consumed.

Experiments with “pure” structure data aggregation have met with limited success.

The data Web needs a killer app.

What we have announced:

• The Killer App is search
• Wide-ranging support for semantic Web standards
• Vocabulary to surface structure and semantics
• Community tools to evolve standards and vocabulary.

Search as the Killer App: Publishers and search engines are going to collaborate together. The users will see a richer search experience and accomplish their tasks faster and more effectively.

Andrew shows some search results of the future. They basically look very blended.

The industry needs comprehensive support for emerging Web standards. That includes:

Microformats: hCard, hEvent, hReview, hAtom and more as they get adopted

RDFa and eRDF makeup

Open Search

Atom/RSS Feeds

After a site does this, there will be richer information about them in the search engines.

Yahoo Open Search does not modify rankings. Richer abstracts may provide more information to users and draw higher quality/quantity of clicks. They want rich abstracts that give users a better experience.

The Whole Story:

User needs are becoming more complex. Content is growing, change and diversifying. Search is responding by increasing its sophistication.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/20/08 at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in SEM Events, Search Engines, liveblog, sesny2008

March 19, 2008

Social Search: The Next Step

Last session on Day 3. I’m exhausted. I shall summon all of the energy buried inside me to finish this day off. On panel we have Steven Marder (Eurekster), Erik Qualman, Simon Heseltine (Serengeti Communications) and Marty Weintraub (aimClear). [inhales deeply]

Up first is Simon Heseltine:

What is Social Search? It’s that human involvement.

Regular search engines provide algorithmically ordered results. Social search engines use human involvement, are completely human generated, or adopt a hybrid of algorithmically ordered results+ humans to deliver results.

Types of Social Search

• Listing Search
• Q&A / Opinion Search
• People / Profile Search
• Social Aggregators
• Social Media Site Search Engines

Simon picks an example to use to demonstrate all the different types of engines: Elliot Spitzer.

• Listing Search Engines: Anoox (People can vote on listings to move them up. The challenge they have is that their spiders only pull in the home pages of sites. They can’t go in deep.), Sproose, ChaCha, Mahalo, and iRazoo.
• Q&A Search Engines: Tezaa, LinkedIn
• Profile Searches: yoName
• Social Media Site Searches: Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Facebook
• Social Media Aggregators: Twing, Zudos, Friendfeed, Flock

Social Search Issues

• Some sites are slow – low investment in hardware
• Sourcing of data challenges
• Low volume of active users – takes away the Human element & relevancy
• Being found amongst the chatter
• A group with an agenda can hijack a SERP (if controls are not in place)
• Editorial approval?
• Potential Reputation Management Issues

Reputation Management

Reputation Management Problem Sources:

• Disgruntled (ex)Employees
• Disgruntled Customers
• Journalists / Bloggers
• Activists
• Your Competition
• Trolls
• Self Inflicted

Now What?

• Analyze & Assess
• Tone & Context
• What is being said?
• How is it being said?
• Where is it being said?

Now What?

• Analyze & Assess
• Participants & Audience Reach
• Are the influencers talking?
• Are the influencers reading?
• Who do You need to talk to?
• How can You engage the community?

Now What?

• Analyze & Assess
• What are your Goals?: Damage Mitigation? – SERP based OR Damage Control? – Setting the record straight.

How to Respond

• Legal Threats?
• Even if they ‘work’ they rarely work
• May cause more issues than they resolve

How to respond in the world of Social Search

• Community Involvement – be real & not defensive
• Address the issues: If incorrect / invalid – explain why. If valid – explain your next steps
• Put out great content
• Boost other positive / unrelated sites
• If in doubt seek professional guidance

Social Search: The next step

Social Media sites constantly appear and disappear

• Each requires a unique profile
• Each requires time and effort

Aggregators make it easy for you to work, follow individuals, and track buzz across multiple Social sites.

Up next is Steven Marder.

What is social media? It leverages wisdom of crowds, passion of the community to connect info in a collaborative manner.

Why should you care? It will help your company to acquire and retain users, drive action and build/reinforce your brand.

Social media optimization and social media marketing encompasses authoritative info, entertainment, humor and useful applications.

What you can leverage: Power of community, user participation, social media tools, and your brand. You want to leverage the interests and passion of your community. Provide useful tools, apps to let them interact with your brand.

Social Search 2.0: What is it? It’s social media meets search.

• Algo + human
• Blend of intent driven search and discovery
• Publisher guided, community sharing
• Community contribution and collaboration
• Many to many

Social Search for Marketers is leveraging all aspects of social media and applying them to marketers needs.

From here, Steven basically gives users a demo of Eurekster and spends the rest of his time plugging it.

Challenges and Opportunities Ahead:

• The need for a trusted relationship or expert source: Potentially increasing search results relevant by applying the social graph to search
• How to effectively apply the social graph to search: Socially connected ala Friendster vs profiles
• How to create additional high quality content for UGC: Need for community and collaboration
• How can sites owners establish feedback looks with site visitors: dialog and collaboration.

With social search, content is still king. Thus, next generation search will consider the quality of site content and user interaction with the content for ranking and prioritization. While true personalized search is focused on the individual user profile, personalized social search applies the behavior and wisdom of crowds to topical search results

Adding community and generated content adds another layer of content qualification to a search result, as well as an instant feedback loop.

Next up is Marty Weintraub. He has 48 slides to go through in 15 minutes. I can feel the tears forming.

Importance of Social PPC Ad Platforms

Potential customers congregate everywhere and we are there to sell them things. Welcome SMO. We can measure chatter, there are free tools, incredible market insight, you can ID the authorities, etc. Social PPC is the 800lb gorilla.

How do you make money with social media? Google wants money. The fundamental premise of search is that we research people, market to them and then use tools to build ad groups. This is not groundbreaking news.

Buzz Pocket Mining (Organic & PPC): It’s the new KW research because these sites are congregation points for people. There are hot topics that define these communities. Every community has idiosyncratic tools to measure the chatter.

FB Perception = Trendy Stuff There are biting zombies and drinking teenagers and food fights.

Facebook means so much more than this! It’s the millennium harbinger of what PPC will be in the future. Count on it, PPC Ninja-Warriors – You will be using social PPC interfaces.

Marty shows how to advertise/create an ad in Facebook and how to target the social graph. He goes through it lightning fast. The livebloggers are just staring at the screen blankly. He shows how you narrow down your niche. I cried a little.

Don’t piss off Facebook, says Marty. Read the TOS because Facebook is militant. They’ll send you letter that you’re harassing their users. It’s very jagged; traffic comes in waves.

Tao of Keyword Research/Buzz Pocket Mining: Use free tools to measure buzz. Stay abreast of FB, Open Social and other emerging social PPC platforms. More important than Facebook. Recognize that the inevitable future is here.

Last but not least is Erik Qualman.

The belief that social networks are just for kids and are just a fad is not true. Companies often hear this and then either ignore it or they say we’re developing a strategy for it and they’re not learning by doing. Some concerns that you hear about FB are valid – like privacy concerns. However, that stuff is happening without you anyway.

People are developing Facebook groups for your product without your permission. If all your sheep are going to a new pasture, you have to pay attention to them. Otherwise, the wolf (your competition) is going to snatch them up and eat them. Oh no! (I don’t like our calling customers sheep. Maybe it’s me.)

Companies may try and immediately police social networks. Avoid this. For example, John Deere has over 500 Facebook groups and yet there’s no official page. People are using their logos. Don’t bash your users for using your logos with permission, instead create a fan page and give people a place to go to talk about you. Go out and contact the people in the unofficial groups and invite them to the official one.

You can’t ignore this kind of activity because if someone else creates a group for you, then they’re in control of it. Your competition may try to infiltrate your group and cause you harm.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/19/08 at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Pay Per Click, Social Media, liveblog, sesny2008

Social Search: Research Informing Search Strategies

Oh heavens, it is freezing in here. My legs will surely fall off. Hopefully speakers Andrew Frank (Gartner Industry Advisory Service), Jonathan Ashton (Agency.com) and Rob Key (Converseon) will keep me distracted with their vast social search insights and I won’t notice the intense numbing.

Andrew Frank is up first.

Marketing in the Spotlight

Losing: Faith in the power of mass media communication forms, as well as the ability to control the terms of the marketing dialog.

Gaining: Unprecedented quantities of data, visibility in the public psyche and scalable direct consumer dialogs at marginal media costs.

Net: As it masters the data, marketing will adopt a more-strategic corporate role as customer’s proxy in consumer-facing organizations. New voices in product design, investment priorities and partnerships. There’s a new emphasis on transparency and responsiveness.

Are Brand Advertisers Ready to Take The Plunge?

All marketers are not the same. The categories that have driven search are mostly performance-focused. We see a lot of financial services, real estate, auto, etc. We haven’t seen a lot of consumer packaged goods because they are so invested in the idea of sight, sound and motion. Search is part of their marketing mix but it’s not as significant as their media buy. That’s important to understand.

How do we create sustainable brands in the new media ecosystem?

Tapping the voice of the customers

Media mix optimization: Tracking the contribution of each brand exposure. Behavior vs. attitude assessment and planning. Predictive and statistical models. Segmentation Challenges.

Targeting and influence modeling: Media vs. Performance Networks vs. WOM.
Automating the advertising-agency-media relationship to be more transparent and responsive.

The new media marketing organization often has too much data coming from too many diverse sources. They’re getting it from their campaign management software, from portals and publishers, media usage, buzz monitoring and performance.

The new marketing intelligence platforms will be supplied by research firms, advertising agencies, market research specialists, search titans, analytics folks, etc. It’s an opportunity for new companies to come in and go where the more traditional agencies can’t really go.

If we look at the landscape for social media metrics, it’s pretty fragmented. Nielsen is on top of the pack, but that doesn’t mean they have all the answers. Cymphony and Umbria are also strong players. Then there’s Buzzlogic, Factiva, Verisign, and others a little further down.

Simplify and Test with a Phased Integration Approach:

• Portal Integration: Leverage intranet portal development for rapid service, testing and feedback
• Reporting Integration: Develop data dictionaries and tagging schemes
• Model Integration: Custom ETL (extract, transfer, load) and regression platforms.
• Platform Integration: Process automation; cost and risk reduction.

Next: Jonathan Ashton is up to give us some tools and tips for extracting search engine optimization value.

Why care about social networks and 2.0 content?

As search engine optimization gets more competitive, you need to look broadly to find that competitive edge. Social content gives good linkage. It sees trends earlier and faster. Tagging is already influencing strategies. Certain types of search have moved off the search engines and into the social networks.

Can old optimizers learn new tricks?

27 Social Network Measurement Tools (27? Oh no!):

Six types for measuring social networks:

• RSS: Really Simple Syndication. You can integrate yourself with these sources of information and have compacted versions sent to you on a regular basis. Yahoo Pipes is a good way to manage your feed inflow.
• News Feeds: Set up Google News and Yahoo News feeds for your company name, trademarks products, etc. Set up the PR feeds as well. Sometimes that stuff doesn’t get picked up, but it’s published information that’s available to you. Look on sites like Reddit and Newsvine. If you’re allergic to RSS, you can get your Google Alerts emailed to you everyday.
• Blogs: If you want to focus just on blog content, use sites like Google Blog Search and BlogMarks.net to get your feeds. On the flip side, make sure your blogs are indexed here. Technorati is a great resource, as well. They allow you to make scary charts to use when pitching to your boss. BlogPulse helps you to quantify bloggers. They have three great tools: Conversation Tracker, Blog Trends and Blogger Profiles. Tools like Co.mments let you track blog posts and their associated comments. Look for customers and competitors giving insight into your brand. TalkDigger.com allows you to track the backlinks for your posts. Helps you create relationships to the people linking to you. Icerocket is a tool you can install in your blog that will track backlinks, as well.
• Tag Tracking: An interesting way to do keyword research. Its user generated optimization. Search bookmarks and your results are based on the tags. There’s Simply.com, Delicious, Keotag, and Ma.gnolia, to name a few.
• Images: Flickr allows you to keep watching on the posting of images. YouTube adds another layer to the conversation.
• Bigger tools: Andy Beal released TrackUr.com. It aggregates these myriad sources to get concise reports of the conversation around your topics. Copernic allows you to create your own feeds to tell you each time a competitor updates their site. Site Analytics (snapshot into the keywords driving traffic to competitors’ sites) and Search Analytics (looks at specific keywords to see which one are delivering stickiness) are two great tools from Compete.

Rob Key is next. Hopefully he doesn’t have a list of 27 tools.

Rob says they’re mining the conversations that people are having out there and they’re seeing interesting trends emerging.

[Rob talks insanely fast. I want to throw something at him. Or maybe just the screen. I have no interest in inflicting bodily harm on Rob. He’s just talking so crazy fast. I can’t understand him, let alone blog him.]

Community is at the heart of the Web experience, hence the rise of social media. There are dozens of these communities emerging. Brands haven’t been invited into these communities, it’s about individuals. Social media advertising is an oxymoron. It’s not about advertising at all.

As communities diversify, new cultures and languages emerge. Key drivers of culture and language speciation:

Isolation

Group membership

Time

Migration

Technology discover

Words die out and new words emerge. It’s the concept of neologism. Then there’s that text language that no one understands. More acronyms like kpc, fyeo, gal, etc. (A cookie for you if you know what those three mean.)

The Basics: Listen to and participate in the social media ecosystems to learn about them.

Principles of Effective Social Media Engagement:

• Listen first
• Participate after
• Make friends with community elders
• Understand and respect community mores
• Lead with altruism; come bearing gifts
• Discover a community need
• Learn the linguistics
• Value and cultivate the relationships
• Leverage appropriately, and over time.

Rob talks about Sony and how they created a fake blog and it blew up in their face. Don’t create fake blogs. Hire me! Huzzah!

Best in class companies are 4.2 times more likely than laggards to improve their year over year customer retention rates.

There are two kinds of content: Content above the waterline and content below the waterline. What is the conversation below the waterline? Buzz monitoring is conversation mining. You can scour the discussion areas to capture, understand, and report the products, issues, and opinions that consumers share between and among themselves. They can come up with ideas and concepts and companies can now listen in and engage. This includes newsgroups, blogs, podcasts, and social media sites.

[Cries. Slow down!]

Voices and Venues
Influence: Who are the most frequent and visible voices in the brand? What are they talking about and what is their sentiment?

Trending over time provides the greatest insights.

What topics are emerging and which are becoming less popular? How are perceptions of new voices? What is your reputation within SERPs for your most popular terms? What is your visibility within the search engine results for the most important issues?

Create topic associations. Identify new language.

A communication strategy that enables companies to proactively and ethically engage in the proliferating consumer generated media universe to inform, educate, influence and engage.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/19/08 at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, Social Media, liveblog, sesny2008

Afternoon Keynote: Jason Calacanis

Take a deep breathe. You know this is going to be good. Jason Calacanis is giving the afternoon keynote at SES NY, which is an SEO conference. Do I even need to say anything? I’m just hoping no one gets shot. Or if they do, they don’t bleed on me.

[Jason just walked by and said I have to be nice to him in my recap. Why do people always ask me to be nice? Am I really that mean? I have such an innocent face.]

Kevin introduces Jason and asks everyone to keep it PG. Heh.

Jason starts by clearing the air. A few years ago he was here for SES San Jose talking about Weblogs Inc and someone asked him if he did SEO. He said they didn’t; they build sites and make good content and it ranks well. He says he called search engine optimization bullshit and then everyone in the audience gasped. That’s when he realized there was an SEO industry (hee). He thinks what’s changed is the definition of what is SEO, it’s becoming clearer.

Search engine optimization used to mean gaming your way to the top of the engines, because that’s what you heard from the cold callers. Since his fatal comment, Jason has gotten a big education about what search engine optimization really is from people like Bruce Clay (holla!), Michael Gray and Neil Patel. He knows SEO is about making sites that help people and having a good structure. That’s when Jason learned the difference between search engine optimization and blackhat SEO. He thinks blackhat SEO is BS and a waste of time. He likes building long term value. He thinks the whitehat SEO is really important. In some ways, he is an SEO. He’s a whitehat SEO. If SEO is defined as building a site that helps people, that’s what he is.

Hear that? Jason Calacanis is an SEO.

Mahalo was launched on May 30, 2007. The first question he got was, “isn’t this just DMOZ?” It does look a lot like Yahoo and DMOZ; it has that directory-like feel. Yahoo and DMOZ failed. You have to ask yourself: why did it fail? Why doesn’t it exist anymore? Yahoo Directory failed because they sold it out. DMOZ failed because it was neglected by its owner. But they were both amazing in their own time.

How is Mahalo going to Scale?

It will scale with a distributed work force. In June, they launched the Mahalo Greenhouse to let people work from home to create search results. They have 400 people doing it from home currently. It’s the largest distributed work force on the planet behind Wikipedia and (probably) About.com. They’re at 40,000 pages right now. It can scale. In theory, it shouldn’t. In theory, Wikipedia shouldn’t work, but it does.

How are you going to keep it up to date?

Having seen Delicious and StumbleUpon use site owners and people with a vested interest, he knows people will tell them when they make a mistake. That’s why they launched Mahalo Social, which is basically like Delicious. It dramatically lowers his cost of keeping the pages updated. They’re building a trust world.

The engines created the SEO industry so they didn’t have to talk to site owners. If you have a problem, talk to them. The SEOs are the intermediary. The Mahalo discussion boards are kind of the same thing. It allows people to have a discussion in a public forum about something they don’t like.

Jason talks about the Mahalo Toolbar/Mahalo Share and how it helps SMOs. He stumbles trying to figure out what SMO stands for and it’s actually kind of cute. See, Jason’s really not a jerk. He’s just like us, getting confused by oddball industry acronyms!

Where is all this going?

How we (re)search today:

We use machines, experts, our friends and the wisdom of crowds. He’s shows the audience how he’s using the social graph to connect users and information. That’s the future of search. It’s not just machines or the wisdom of the crowds. It’s all of those things plus the social graph. It’s creating semantic relationships between people and objects. The objects are the SERPs. They define states between people and objects. What is the state between you and a book? You could have read it, are wanting to read it, are reading it now. The new PageRrank is knowing if you can trust people through their behaviors. If you can, then you can let them contribute more to your site.

The new MyMahalo will make social graph features more prominent on the Mahalo search results. Page will show pictures of friends that have shown an interest in a specific topic. Reviews will be imported directly onto the page (with user permission). It’s giving users the chance to leverage all of their data into one spot.

One More Thing:

Not everyone wants to give up Google or Yahoo. If you’re doing a search on Google and you have the Mahalo toolbar, they’ll syndicate out some of their content so you can see it in your Google result. They don’t want you to give up your experience on Google.

Question & Answer

Can you define what you think an SEO does?

Jason: My perception has changed radically. The SEOs I’ve met are outsiders in the technology industry. You have this elite group (Digg, Yahoo, Microsoft) and then you have your SEOs and site owners. He’s found that the SEO folks are some of the smartest hustlers, get it done kind of people. (He means hustler in a good sense of the word.) Like Jay-Z (hee!). His mom was a nurse and his dad was a bartender (Jason’s, not Jay-Z’s). He worked his way up. He thinks SEOs are just like that. A lot of them are stuck in short term think. They want to make some money today, but they may be spinning their wheels a little bit. By the time you get a page ranked and you make 10K off affiliate links in a weekend, you basically expended all this energy and you maybe could have built the next Engadget. He thinks maybe they’re more into the gaming then they are of creating something of quality. SEOs are really intelligent people. The blackhats are polluting the Web and that makes it bad for all of us. Then consumers don’t trust the Internet.

Kevin: My experience with the blackhats is different. I tend to try not to piss them off. There’s an element there of let's think a little bit more altruistically. You gotta take it in order to get it, but maybe we could contribute a little bit more.

Jason: Just because you can take the number one spot doesn’t mean you should do it or that it’s right.

You tend to ask for forgiveness rather than permission and I was caught by an example where the Mahalo listings were supplanting paid listings (via the Mahalo Toolbar).

Jason: When the Web page reaches the person’s desktop, it's theirs to do what they please with. If people want to put up ad blockers, that’s their right to do it. If people want to put Mahalo on their page, I’m okay with that. If Google says they have a problem with that, we’ll change it. He doesn’t have a problem with people remixing in the privacy of their own home. He doesn’t think Google will complain.

Is this your model now: The more people get upset at you, the more links you get to your site?

Jason: Are we talking about linkbaiting? What is that?

Kevin: You say something obnoxious and 500 people link to you and it’s basically just a small group of people who are big fans of themselves. (Kevin, 1; Linkbaiters, 0)

Jason: You can only take linkbaiting so far. I like to have a good time but even I know when to call it a day. I don’t want to be at war with the search engine optimization industry. He’s more than willing to evolve the discussions. You can link bait a couple of times until people figure out you’re just schmuck. You get the reputation you deserve over time. You just need to be authentic and real. Don’t make linkbaiting your strategy. He’s turned it on his head. He’s made it affection-baiting. You have to say nice things about him in order to get him to link to them. People should be nice to people.

If you were an online marketer, how would you promote your content?

Jason: The best way to market is to have a great product. Make products that speak for themselves. Then you have to authentically insert yourself into conversations. If you want to engage someone, you write a comment on their blog about something that has nothing to do with you. If people add Jason on Twitter, he tries to go to their site, checks it out and then sends that person a message. Products without human beings behind them will never do as well as companies without them. People don’t want products with no personality behind them. Make yourself available.

Is there a risk for being overexposed?

Jason says he’s the first to admit that he’s overexposed. He has his cell phone number on his presentation slides. A stalker showed up last week at the office.

Kevin says yeah, keep leaving your cell number on your slides. Hee!

What about the long tail? Most searches have never been seen before. What about that?

Jason doesn’t believe that one solution is going to solve the search problem. He thinks it’s going to be a blend of techniques. If you’re looking for the pizza place around the corner or the girl you staked in college, Google is the way to go. But if you’re looking for info on Paris, that’s where human editing comes in handy. Sometimes you need a hybrid and there are those too. The person who will win big and create the next Google is the person who finds out how to blend these different disciples to create a single product. Users do not care how pages are built. They just care if the result is good.

[Jason breaks into a strong NY accent that is…well, it’s horrible considering he’s actually from NY. It’s like movie gangster.]

How do you categorize the traffic relationship you have with the other search sites?

Jason thinks that there are going to be a series of services that are dependant on search engines and some portion of them will be able to convert that traffic into direct traffic. Right now they get a majority of their traffic for search engines. Mahalo is a content company. They’re like Wikipedia or About.com. If they do good original content and they rank us, great. If not, we’re in it for the long term.

Can you explain why you chose not to implement canonical redirect?

He wanted to have URLs that you could type mahalo.com/keyboard. It’s easier for people to remember. It’s a personal preference.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/19/08 at 1:09 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in SEM Events, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, liveblog, sesny2008

Top Search Trends

Hey, hey, happy people. Lunch is over and it’s time to learn about the Top Search Trends. Speaking we have Heather Dougherty (Hitwise), Jeremy Crane (Compete) and Roger Barnette (SearchIgnite). I had a brownie for lunch. It tasted like rainbows and sunshine.

Kevin is making jokes about the SES box lunches and no one is laughing. It’s awkward. He’s dying up there. I giggle at his expense. Affectionately, of course. Who doesn’t love Kevin Ryan?

[20 minutes later: Speaking of lunch – Did anyone have the tuna salad and is now suddenly feeling sick? I’m not trying to cause an epidemic, just asking. I’m not feeling so hot.]

Heather Dougherty is up first.

She works for HitWise and all of their data has been collected by studying 10 million Internet users. That’s a lot.

Google and Yahoo continue to capture the majority of the share of searches – 88 percent combined. Together the four top engines account for 98 percent of the search market share. There hasn’t been much shift compared to last year. Interesting is that time spent on Google has also increased. I noticed from the chart that Ask.com users spend the second most time on site, beating out Yahoo and Microsoft.

How many people are returning to the sites over a 30 day period? Almost 94 percent of Google users return. It’s about 89 percent for Yahoo, 77-79 percent in MSN and mid 70s for Ask.

Besides reach, there needs to be a way to differentiate the search engines by specific objective. They use Mosaic to get segmentation. From there, they compare how the segments translate into the audience of the search engine.

Heather whips out a chart that shows that the majority of Ask.com users are, in fact, female. Which means that if Barry Diller really is turning Ask into a “search engine for married woman” that they would be going after their core market. Whatever. I hate him.

The ubiquity of search behavior drives frequent return visits, creating creatures of habit.

Shopping and Entertainment categories currently benefit most from search traffic, but there is little reliance on specific categories to drive referrals. Using segmentations based upon behavior can help differentiate between the search engines beyond reach.

Jeremy Crane is up to talk about the state of search.

Seven out of ten Web search queries performed in the US are on Google. Ask is the only other engine with year-over-year market share gains.

What about that second click through?

Yahoo searches result in a search referral to another Web site more often than the other major engines. Ask searches are the least likely to result in a referral.

Average search fulfillment: 65 percent for Google, 75 percent Yahoo, 61 percent MSN and 12 percent Ask. Ouch, Ask.

Percentages of Web search queries that result in a referral to another page in the search property domain:

Google – 11 percent
Yahoo – 17 percent
MSN – 5 percent
Ask – 29 percent

The slow death of the 10 blue links: We’re seeing this evolution of the search results page, what it looks like and how people interact with it.

Ask 3D made the biggest impact with blended search. The rollout of blended search has yet to have a major impact on the top 3 engines but the story is different for Ask. The amount of people clicking off an Ask results page plummeted. Shows Ask keeping people in their own domain.

Ask is all about the ladies, or is it?

Among major search engine properties, Ask has the highest concentration of women and Family Oriented users – 55 percent (I love that Google has 51 percent, yet Ask’s bar is about twice the size. Way to not scale things to make them more dramatic.).

Kevin asks the panelists if it’s smart for Ask to target women. Kevin says he’s found that it’s not wise to tell women to do anything. Heh. Heather chimes in that not all women are alike.

Last but not least is Roger Barnette.

Marketer Trends

Marketers are spending more money in paid search in Q1. Same advertiser media spend is up 43 percent. Paid clicks are up 47.2 percent.

Search engine market share is basically flat and has been over the past year with slight gains for Yahoo.

User Trends

On the user side, impressions are up dramatically. Advertisers’ ads are being seen substantially more than they were a year ago. Google is up 60 percent year over year.

Cause for concern: Click through rates declined 18 percent in Q1 and conversion rates have also dropped.

User Engagement: Users are getting smarter and searching. The average number of clicks it takes to lead to a client transaction has gone down 1.43 percent. The average keyword length has declined 6.8 percent to 15.46 percent.

Industry Trends

• Flight to quality in uncertain economic times.
• Beginning of momentum towards blending of search and display campaigns
• Auction media platforms beginning to move beyond paid search in earnest.
• Marketing demand for better cross-channel marketing attribution measurement.

Okay, that was a whole lot of stats.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/19/08 at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Search Engines, liveblog, sesny2008

Ad Testing: Research & Findings

[I’m feeling a bit out of sync in this session at the moment. I’m seated way on the right instead of front and center like I’m used to. It was a strategic decision on my part. With six sessions happening today and only 15 minutes between some, I need to conserve battery power. The power outlets are on the right. I’m smarter than I look, people.]

Jumping right in, we have Andrew Goodman (Page Zero Media), Bill Barnes (Enquiro Search Solutions) and Anton Konikoff (Acronym Media) speaking.

Up first is Anton Konikoff. He’s mesmerizing in a Dracula kind of way. I can’t take my eyes off of him. Anton mentions that Mike Grehan is now part of their crew. I got that memo.

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