liveblog

August 21, 2008

Searching For Jobs In Search

Dana Todd is moderating the last session of the day with Frank Watson (Kangmurra Media), Katie Donovan (SEMPO) and Ken Clark (Onward Search).

I was chatting with Frank before the session and he said there are 3 slides and lots of chatter going down in this one. Let's hope these fingers still have some juice left in them.

Dana says the demand is still very high in search. Even though there are massive layoffs everywhere (California has an unemployment rate of 7 percent), there's a huge demand to hire search people. Search also pays pretty well. Because of how awesome we are.

Hiring Criteria/Skills

In terms of hiring, what are the criteria? What are people looking for?

Ken: In our business we're dealing with a lot of companies across the country. The biggest trend is that companies are now focused on what is your experience within the industry or the segment that they operate in. As opposed to are you just a good search marketing or good at SEM? If you're interviewing with an Internet retailer, what they're looking for is proven success within that niche, not just someone who's good overall. It's a natural evolution since there are now people with certain experience in specific niches.

Katie: Companies want to make sure everyone is on the same level of knowledge. It's about evening out knowledge. A lot of people are self-taught and there are holes that need to be filled in. Some people are really strong with understanding keywords but not good with copywriting. In link building, people need the ability not to interact just over email, but over the phone, as well. They see lots of people lacking people skills.

Frank: He looks for someone who's going to be outgoing. You need to have a certain level of confidence. If something is going to put something in your hands, you have to know that they're not just staring into space. You want to look outside of knowing that there's an algorithm or that there's analytics. A the entry level you can always train people, you want to look for people with those other skills - like confidence, who can write, someone will bring a different marketing dynamic.

What do you think is more valuable - PPC or SEO?

Frank: Depends on the market.

Ken: You're looking for people who are left-brained and right-brained. You need someone that has the creative skill set but is also able to deal with analytics. When we talk to employers, that's the term that they use.

How do you determine that?

Ken: There's no test for that. They train their recruiters to go through a lot of due diligence and thorough phone interviews where they're asking a lot of questions that will help identify those traits.

Frank: If you find out that they're musicians, they're usually really good with analytics.

What are employers looking for?

Katie: They're looking for the sales and account managers. Someone to keep the clients happy.

When you're working on a train wreck, are you more valuable as someone who specializes in SEO organic type things or something that has a more shallow knowledge in a lot of different areas?

Frank: You're not going to get hired to cover all of it. People usually have a spot to fill - an Organic spot, an Analytics spot, etc. If you come in with certain skills, you may fit into one of their holes.

Kate: You can look at what's going to pay you the most, but you have the best opportunity right now to decide where you're going to be happiest.

What is your feeling about technical people in this arena?

Frank: You have a skill set that stands out. You can talk to people and understand the technical side and what's going on with your CSS. That's valuable. If you can sit in the middle and get the technical people and the creative people on the same page, that's incredibly in demand.

Ken: I don't think there's a perfect background to be a search marketer. Whether or not you see five other IT folks that went into the business, I wouldn't look at it as a disadvantage.

Are employers looking to see if you've gone through SEO training?

Katie: More and more companies are starting to do their own traditional training classes on-site to make sure everyone is on the same level. They are looking for the go-getter who got training on their own. Those people stand out. You do need to do the work and get some kind of hands-on experience.

Ken: From an employer's perspective, I do think having gone through training gives them an advantage in the marketplace. If you're new in the industry and you're just getting introduced to it, being able to demonstrate some hands on experience is definitely an advantage, even if it's a small project.

Breaking In/Finding Jobs

Where can you find a job?

Frank: Get involved in the forums. There are ads on Craigslist. The more that you end up in places like SES and you network with people, you'll meet people who can help you in the future. It's all about exposure.

Ken: You have to take an active role in managing your brand online. Recruiters do their research. Be on LinkedIn and build out your profile. They use job boards but 75 percent of their candidates come from their networking or their research.

I've been in the industry for 5 years. Where are the jobs for experienced, more advanced positions? How flexible do you have to be? Is there a point breaking into SEO blogging?

Frank: Don't write about SEO. Write about what you have passion in. Create some niche site. It shows initiative.

What about lateral moves? How do you keep your advancement going?

Ken: They see a lot of jobs all the time. A lot of these jobs are everything from SEO Manager to Director of SEO to VP of Search. There is an executive trail.

Frank: You have to be willing to move. You're not going to find a high paying job in Illinois.

Kate: If there are companies you want to target yourself, start networking there.

Search Marketing Training

You talked about training course. What do you think about the Google Training Center?

Dana says it's awesome.

Kate: It makes sense to be certified in Google AdWords because that's what your employers are going to be using. You're going to be more confident.

Yahoo and Microsoft also have certification - is it good to have those?

Ken: It's nice to have. He thinks there are lots of good training programs out there. We have another 2-3 years before the market decides which are the most valuable certifications. There's not a clear message in the community yet as to which one is the gold standard.

[David Temple is in the audience and chimes in to clarify that Google and the search engines only offer "certification" in their tools. He mentions that Bruce Clay is the only training course that offers a certification, because it's for our own ToolSet. The other courses don't "certify" you as an SEO or as a PPC expert, they just give you a certificate to say you completed their course. Good points by David.]

Advancing Your Career

How do you advance your career?

Frank: If you want to advance your career, you have to become more known in the space. Get a moderator job in the forums. You have to get known. He says it worked for him.

Ken: The first thing he would suggest is to ask yourself where you want to be in five years. That will dictate your decisions. You have to say, "do I want to be a generalist or a specialist?" Do you want to be agency or in-house? Do you want to be a manger or an invisible contributor? Those are the first things you have to decide. Once you do that you have to map the job opportunities to where you want to go.

Kate: Tell people what you're doing. That you started a blog. That you attended a conference.

Do you see a lot of burnout?

Kate: We're all going to have 7 careers in our lives, so we're all going to change.

Ken: It's almost cliché to say that search changes every day but it really is changing. Diverse experience is accepted. It's not a negative.

Frank: A lot of times when you're getting the highest-end money, you are the generalist. You're the person overseeing the team.

Is there a 100K opportunity for a sales guy in search?

Everyone says ZOMG YES.

And on that high note...we're out! We hope you enjoyed our SES San Jose coverage. We're off to go catch a plane. See you back in Simi. :)

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 3:46 PM | Comments (1)

Post-Click Marketing: Converting Search Engine Traffic

Whose idea what it to have just a little snack break instead of lunch? I can't work like this. And by like this I mean covered in chocolate from my delicious ice cream sandwich.

This session the moderator is Anna Maria Virzi (ClickZ) and panelists are Carrie Hill (Blizzard Internet Marketing), Laura Wilson (New England Journal of Medicine), Scott Brinker (ion interactive) and Tom Leung (Google).

Our first speaker is going to be Carrie Hill. She thought she was going to have to bribe us with alcohol to get people to this session instead of SEO secrets. The real secret is knowing that Lisa's over there liveblogging it; it's just like being there!

Qualified traffic is the key to good post-click marketing. Buyers know what they want and that's what they'll search for. Use segments to deliver language and interface on those pages that will appeal to your shoppers. Use your trigger words. Buyer use words they relate to in their queries. If they use a word in their search, you should use those words on your page in order for them to see relevance. It should show up in the SERP and on the page.

Example: Free shipping-- Apple doesn't have free shipping prominently on their page so it's easy to over look. Zappos makes it obvious that they have free shipping.

Make sure that your visitors are landing on the right page. The home page is not right for every query. If they're using a word, give them a page that's relevant to it. Give your traffic the trigger word that they're looking for. If they do land on the home page, let them segment themselves.

Carry the message through the segmented path. IF they travel down the 'free' trigger word path, repeat that message.

Remember each piece of PCM can lead to more revenue from your site. Many pieces work dependent upon each other. Remember that halfway is only halfway but every little bit helps. Use Web site optimizer, do tests, let the users design their experience through self-selection.

Laura Wilson is going to present a case study on how this worked for the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Five Key Ingredients of Their Success:
1. Know what the audience is looking for
2. Engage and Convert visitors with relevant content and offers
3. Give the visitors a reason to come back to the site: Videos, beta site, free weekly audio summary and more.
4. Deepen relationships with the audiences: newsletters and subscriptions, information about updates to the site.
5. Optimize conversions through testing

Tactics:
1. Navigation links with calls to action: both home page navigation and global navigation
2. Offers on Sign In Pages -- offers that are relevant to visitor based on the content they're trying to reach.
3. Free trial upsell on the registration confirmation page -- after registering for the newsletter, they offer them a trial to the online version of the journal.
4. Offer in authentication string message -- offers based on level of access.
5. Targeted emails -- welcome e-mail series and a "new features" e-mails. Free trial member will also be getting an email series with a countdown on time left.
6. Promotions in Weekly NEJM E-mail table of contents.
7. Banner ads throughout the site
8. A/B testing, multiple tests

Scott Brinker is discussing segmenting. That's been the big thing this conference that I've noticed.

Two Takeaways:
1. To increase conversions have more specific landing pages.

A/B testing -- for your respondents, it's still just one page. You need to understand who your respondents ARE. Some might think that one thing is more important than others. What you need is more than one landing page to reach more than one audience.

2. Self-segmentation after the click

Some keywords won't give you intent. Have two step landing pages in those cases: "Dinner" -- do you mean "hamburger" or "pasta". You'll speak differently to small businesses than enterprise level pages. Tailor your second landing page to that self-selected audience.

Don't ask them to do too much work though or they'll bounce.

Figure out which ads attract which segment. Then see how well you're converting those segments.

5 reasons that 2 clicks are better than 1:

1. Easy Engagement - makes it easy for them to move forward
2. Self Identification - we respond to self-identification cues, more accurate than forms, sets expectation
3. More focused content - contextually relevant content sells better
4. Signaling - Investment reflects commitment. "If you target me, you much think I'd be a good fit..."
5. Market research - which ads attract which segments? Which segments convert best? How do prospects think of themselves?

Last to speak is Tom Leung from Google's Website Optimizer

In the old days, you just implemented stuff and hoped for the best. Or you listened to the "HiPPO" the highest paid person in the organization. If you were a little more advanced, you'd do a before and after test but that wasn't that enlightening.

Website Optimizers allows you to test different variations of a page to see which version is most effective at achieving results.

This puts power into the visitors and they'll tell you what they like best. Sites can be a living laboratory.

[He quickly goes through how to do testing with Website Optimizer.]

The only opinions that matter are the opinions of the people who go to your site.

Don't assume, make sure that your revisions aren't going to HURT your site. You have to test with a control. Your interesting idea might not work.

Basic questions:

• Does it look legit?
• Is it intelligible with partial attention?
• Is it simple to convert?

Advanced questions:

• Is it compelling?
• Does it handle top objection elegantly?
• Does it provide all the essential information?

If you're thinking about outsourcing:

• How many experiments have you run?
• Referrals? -- screenshots and contacts
• Can you justify ROI?
• What was the average lift?
• Can they work with your IT department?
• Are they willing to tie their payment to performance? (not required)
• Do they have marketing, proj management?

Ask yourself if it really makes sense to show ads on your landing page. Tell people what you're about.

He likes the Netflix landing page: It's clean, legit, informative and not too complex.

Q&A

How do you get buy in?

Laura: We present data and do projections on what the impact could be.
Carrie: We had to do a little bit of free work to show them how to make the lift. Sometimes one test isn't enough. But once you can show them the difference that a little work does, it's not that hard to convince them to do more.
Scott: It comes down to two things: Make the argument about conversion rate. Also web site optimization is a huge task. Landing page optimization is smaller and easier.
Tom: Agrees with Scott. Don't make it a huge plan, just do the simple A/B test and show them the results and the lift. People find it hard to disagree with more conversions for the same money.

How do you use Website Optimizer on your home page?

Tom: Put the goal tags in multiple places and all those are considered conversion OR they'll do a time on page test and consider that a conversion.

How long should a test run?

Tom: Never shorter than one or two weeks. Have about a 100 conversions per combination.

Is it possible to use optimizer against a segmentation page?

Tom: I've seen people run tests where A is the regular landing page and B is the segmentation page.
Scott: It's hard to answer that without sounding like a sales pitch but yeah, that's what our tools do. It's possible to do even with just a simple test. You can at least take a first step in that direction.

[Skipping an asked and answered question and a very specific question.]

[I don't know what his questions was but he said statistically relevance about ten times. I think it involved math. Tom's answer was all complicated and technical too. I'm sorry, I can't even begin to interpret. HOWEVER: Green = high confidence, Yellow: mid level confidence, Red = low confidence loser]

How do I test on low volume keywords?

Tom: Keep it simple. Just do an A/B test. Also, change your conversion metric. Make it time on page instead, so that you can take that as a leading indicator to conversion.

Scott: There's nothing wrong with A/B testing. It works.

Carrie: Don't get sucked into the idea that a conversion is 'they bought something'. It can be moving to the next step. You're testing a path sometimes.

Tom: I'd agree about the power of A/B testing. At the end of the day, people get the best results from very small tests. Small tests make you focus. Multivariate tests can make you lose your focus.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 2:31 PM | Comments (0)

Best Kept Secrets To Search

Back from my ice cream sandwich lunch and we're in the home stretch. This time it's Dana Todd moderating Katee Crawford (California Chamber of Commerce), Eric Enge (Stone Temple Consulting) and Richard Zwicky (Enquisite).

Dana coins a new term called "red hat SEO" which refers to SEO revenge strategies. Heh. Dana, FTW.

Up first is Katee Crawford.

The California Chamber of Commerce is the largest business advocate influencing government actions affecting California business. They provide affordable and easy-to-use compliance products and services. Products include CA employment and labor law compliance, among others.

Their current marketing methods: SEO, PPC, Fall and Spring catalog mailings, direct mail and email campaigns.

7 Lessons to Improve ROI

1. Educate your SEM company on all your marketing materials: The CalChamber provided their SEO company with all their marketing materials, samples of all products, etc.
2. Joint Efforts Produce Better Results: They do all PPC, email and direct mail campaigns at the same time. They've seen a 36 percent decrease in cost per order. Use similar artwork for branding. House email campaign increased their revenue by over 10 percent.
3. Rethink the Norm: Integrated marketing with promotional products moves products. PPC and email campaigns for RNK increased revenue by about 5 percent over direct mail. The conversion rate increased by 3 percent.
4. The "I Deserve It" Tactic Works: An A/B split test was performed through an email and PPC campaign. Two offers were given - get a 10 dollar Starbucks card or 15 percent off. The customers will not always prefer the highest cost savings in a promotion. Everyone picked Starbucks even though it was the lesser value. Good way to save your company money.
5. Action vs Read
6. Track Often and Evaluation Often: Audit your online marketing revenue to test validity.
7. PPC Insider Tips: Don't change your bid more than once ever couple of days. Test special characters in your ad creative. Exact match all combinations of exact matched terms. Test no spaces between words in a multiple word phrase. Test placing phone number in ad. Test adding ".com" to the end of some of your keywords.

Operation Camouflage: If you can identify your top competitors and their location, set up dummy campaigns so they don't see your winning ads and you can hide from your competition.

In 2009 they plan to bid more aggressively on lead generator keywords and on keywords associated with the products feature in campaigns. They'll also focus more on what works and do less experimenting. They'll make every dollar count, printing more catalogs. Optimize ecommerce site for hard hitting sales. Leverage PR campaigns with integrated marketing efforst. And look more into social media.

Eric Enge is up.

Fix Quick Tips

1. Using Syndicated Content to Get Links Can Backfire

The good - it's a great way to get links, lots of Web sites are starved for content, you get to present yourself as an expert and many times you can even specify the anchor text.

The bad - The search engines see duplicate content and they only want one copy.

The ugly - The usually show up as the original author.

The solution - Pay a different writer to cover the same topic. Guide them with key points to include. You will get a very different result. It may cost you 40 or 50 bucks but it buys you "safe syndication".

2. How to Provide Accurate Data to Local Search Engines

Search Engine Challenge: The search engines have a big problem obtaining accurate data. They use many sources like yellow page sites, syndicators such as LocalEze, local review sites and information you provide them correctly. The data provided is often inaccurate or out of date.

Give Them Data Correctly: All three major engines provide you a way to give them authenticated data directly. Give them accurate data because these sources carry the most weight.

The Google Local Business Center lets you submit by location. Feed is useful for large numbers of location.

Keyhole Markup Language: Language for geographic annotation. Search engines find the location of your KML file using your sitemaps file. The means it is authenticated.

Last notes on Local: You want to be listed in many places. Increase data accuracy problem. Invest the time and effort to get this data right. Services like LocalEze helps with this but cost money.

3. Free Links Using Google Webmaster Tools

If you don't have a GWT account, get one. Looking at the Not Found Report in the Web Crawl Errors section, hunt for malformed URLs, an instance where someone has linked to you using the incorrect URL. Then, add to your .htaccess file a 301 redirect from the incorrect o the right one.

Find "lost links". Instances where the media wrote out your links instead of really linking to you. Contact these people and ask them to make it a eral link. Let Yahoo tell you who they are.

Benefit for his site: 2,042 potential links from people who have already endorsed him but just didn't link right.

4. MSN Search Funnels -- Outgoing

Tells you the terms your visitors search on after they searched for you. Get some good insight. You can also go the other way and see what they searched for before your keyword.

How to use search funnels: use to determine search intent and to isolate problems on your Web site.

Richard Zwicky is up.

[Disclaimer from Dana: This is not white or black. It's red hat.]

Page 1 v. 2 and What to Do: A really easy way to improve meaningful traffic - use conversion data to get the full benefit. Over 90 percent of search referral traffic comes from page 1. Identity which Web pages are driving Page 2 traffic. If 95 percent of referral track comes from page one and 2.2 comes from page two, if you can move a page to Page 1, you can increase traffic considerably.

Conversions v. Actions: Do you know the difference? Are you tracking them?

Links - Google

related: Help you to identify sites that are most connected with your own and your competition
intext: Find people who talk about you but don't link.

Links - MSN

linkfromdomain: see all the domains that a given domain has links out to
Regional links: figure out where your links come from and where you have opportunities for growth.

The "trick": learn, learn and learn more. There is no magic. Your competitors are probably lazier than you are.

Reputation Management

[Okay, this is where we get into the "red hat" territory. Proceed at your own risk.]

When to consider going black. Richard says he doesn't do any black hat but he has found that anyone who is really good at search engine optimization knows inside out what black hat is. They know how to do it, and how they should implement it if they did going into it.

Someone is going out and slandering you. They do so anonymously so you don't know who to go after. What do you do?

Getting Rid Of A Bad Site

Use at your own risk. If you do any of this wrong, it will come back to hurt you.

1. Starting off down the path:
   1. Buy a domain: Don't do anything to your own Web site. Don't use your own name. Get a UPS mailbox near your opponent.
   2. Go buy another domain: Again, don't use your own name. Put their address on your site. Go to UPS and get a change of address to make your address theirs.
   3. Go buy yet another domain: Use their mail info as yours but with a different name. Go to the post off and pay for a mail redirect to your UPS mailbox.
   4. Do it again.

2. Do it Again: Try being more sneaky. Host the sites all over the place. Try hosting some where your opponent does.
3. Build Some Good Links : Get some good link going to these sites. Point some random links out to authority sites in your opponents neighborhood. Be nice, don't point to anyone you like. Don't link any of your sites together.
4. Link to your opponent: Ask them for a link, after you link to them. Do not under any circumstance link to your site Get indexed. Start showing up for terms relevant to your site and optimize for your opponents site.
5. Add More Content: Reprint PR from within the industry. Get cheap content.
6. Sitemap: Have a bunch of orphaned pages in your sitemap.
7. Try out every black hat trick you can find. It's okay. It won't hurt you real site, unless you get caught. Copy your opponent's content and build a bot that constantly indexes their site looking for new content.
8. Sitemap: After a while, copy your opponents sitemap into your own ones. Append it to your own. Remember you "look" like them, according to your registration info on one site, address on another. Hmmm, who owns this site?
9. Try Hard to Get Your Site Banned: It's okay. It won't hurt you.
10. Just Before You're Banned: Redirect the URL to your opponent. The bad juice with flow to them.

Result: They'll Get Their Site Reviewed to see if they did anything bad. What did they get caught for? Something you did or something they did? And if they mess up in the future, the threshold for how far they're allowed to go before they banned is really low. It forces them to clean up their action. And now you're playing on a level playing field.

I has no comment on the tactics revealed above.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 2:28 PM | Comments (1)

How to Choose a Search Vendor

Moderator Jonathan Allen, Search Marketing Specialist, VNUnet.com, starts off this session by asking who in the audience is from an agency, who is on the client side, and who is looking to market their own product. It's about five, five and one. This session will be covering the yin and yang of the search for an SEO vendor, as the first presenter is from a search agency and the second presenter is from a company who uses a search agency.

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, DoubleClick Performics is going to use the small group that's showed up as an opportunity to really get to the heart of the issues important to audience members.

Eric is from an agency and will be taking that view for looking for an SEO vendor. He says there are eight factors to look at.

1. Understanding: They should listen to you, understand you, and be patient with you. Stay away from any canned solutions. It should focus on your industry and your goals.
2. Aligned: They should be aligned with what you're trying to do in the coming years.
3. Project managers: The vendor should have the skills of a consultant. That foundation makes them much more effective in their jobs. You want your agency to push you like a task master.
4. Equipped: What you want is make sure the whole team is equipped to represent you and includes a variety of skill sets.
5. Sound methodologies: You might be sold by the sales cycle, but at the end of the day you're working with another team. You want to make sure the thing you were sold on is the same as what you'll be getting.
6. Leaders: You're hiring an advocate for your goals. The agency world has an advantage because they are new to your leadership. When a new voice that you're paying for enters the room, people will often pay more attention.
7. Educators: Competent agencies don't hide. They know there's always something to teach and should be proactively sharing via training sessions and materials. It should be done in a simple manner that can speak to a variety of audiences.
8. Trustworthy: You're hiring a partner that's going to work alongside you. Honesty is important. If anytime you feel they have overstated, oversold or fabricated anything, try to trip them up and call them out. Get referrals and find out what work they have done.

When choosing a paid search vendor, a well-developed paid program requires a custom approach that targets specific consumer segments based on precise and reliable analytics. The right RFP questions ask vendors about three things:

1. People: No generalists, you need an agency with specialists in bid, keyword, copy and landing page management; expertise and experience across all verticals.
2. Technology: Robust technology with direct API engine integration and in-depth real-time reporting and analysis to assist account manager s in making informed decisions.
3. Methodology: Comprehensive campaign management process, including strategic planning, meticulous execution and targeted growth.

A holistic approach to search marketing identifies ways to create synergies between paid and natural search programs to maximize ROI. One vendor for both SEO and SEM who uses a holistic strategy will allow you to:

• Know how paid and natural campaigns perform versus best practices.
• Identify opportunities that can improve performance.
• Optimize ROI across all search channels.
• Combine campaign metrics and reporting.

Now Jeannie Moran, E-commerce Marketing Director, AutoNation, will come at vendor selection from the client side. She's going to share what's worked for her company. In the auto business they are experiencing the perfect storm: the housing crisis, the economic downturn, and the energy crisis.

To set the stage, she's going to start with some general rules of what to look for in a vendor. She says you can't settle for any less. Hiring a vendor is finding a partner. There are five fundamentals to remember

1. Sign a pre-nup: Establish mutual respect.
2. Don't disrespect the family: Is this someone you can bring back to mom and dad?
3. Build trust: Set reasonable expectations. Meet deadlines on your side and demonstrate your behavior as a fair, responsible partner.
4. Be honest about dating others: Working with multiple partners can become dicey. Avoid vendor conflicts. Be honest upfront. If there are other partners, let them know.
5. Keep everyone happy: Make sure it's worth the vendors time and worth your while.

The groundwork for success will be based on several things. Understand what you are buying. Ask the right questions to separate the professionals from the amateurs.

There are several purchasing considerations.

• Never meet with the sales team only.
• Make sure technology is compatible with the applications the vendor uses.
• Confirm capabilities. Does the tool work with all tier one search engines as well as tiers two and three? Does it support a range of products (banners, email, etc.)
• Get all promised capabilities in writing.
• Negotiate a trial period (test pilot).
• Find out if there are hidden costs.

As for the technology issue, ensure that only one application is ultimately utilized for reporting/tracking so that data isn't being duplicated or inflated. Ask if the product works with foreign languages and foreign currency. Verify API status to ensure that fees are included in contract and are not additional. Understand the methodology for measurement. And as for support, there should be a dedicated support team or an 800 general support line.

Now that the generalized rules are out of the way, she'll go into the specifics.

SEO vendor considerations

1. Strong keyword research strategy
2. Strong copywriting and link building
3. Optimization plan for organic pages
4. Measure organic conversion and ROI
5. Proven results (failure/success/referral)

Paid search vendor considerations

1. PPC programs in Google, Yahoo and MSN
2. Web traffic measurement tool to measure your precise return on investment
3. A/B testing of PPC ads and landing pages to identify the most effective campaigns.
4. Account managers that are Google AdWords Certified and Yahoo Ambassadors.

Social media vendor considerations

1. What channels are you currently active in for clients? (StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, etc.)
2. Give examples of how channels might be used to bolster the overall SEM effort
3. Ask for proven results (failure/success/referral).

Take aways

1. Educate yourself to ask the right questions.
2. Invest time to find the right partner.
3. Agree and document the billing model.
4. Start small; test the vendor on a small scale.
5. Monitor, measure and optimize.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/21/08 at 2:13 PM | Comments (0)

Fast, Free, and Easy Tools To Get You Going

Time to talk SEO tools. Jennifer Laycock will moderate this one with speakers Matt McGee (KeyRelevance), Scott Allen (Hybrid6 Studios) and Joe Abraham (SageRock). This should be fun, let's do it.

Up first is Matt McGee. He's like a cute teddy bear. I just want to take him home and place him on my coffee table or something. He's also one of the most personable speakers on the planet. Okay, I'll stop gushing now.

SEO Tools: Firefox and Friends

(Only 10 people in the audience admit to NOT using FireFox.)

• Firefox Web Browser: There are all kinds of add-ons; that's why Matt likes it. It makes it powerful.
• SEO for Firefox: When you're using Google or Yahoo, instead of just getting the plain ten listings, you get all sorts of extra data like the PageRank, domain age, how many links Yahoo reports pointing to that domain, if it has DMOZ listing, etc.
• Search Status: Exists at the bottom of your browser and a pop up comes up when you click o nit. It offers a lot of the same data as SEO for Firefox, but it provides the data as you're looking at an individual link page, not on the SERP.
• SEO Quake: Lots of people like it, but it slows down Matt's browsers.

Keyword Research Tools

• Keyword Discovery: His tool of choice for keyword research. You give it a search term and it spits back all the data that it has on that search term.
• SEO Book Tool: Many search engine optimization agencies swear by this. It provides tons and tons of data about any query you give it. You can compare daily search estimates across search engines.

Backlink Tools: Tools to help you analyze links to your site or to a competitor site.

• Yahoo Site Explorer: The ultimate backlink tool.
• Link Diagnosis: Takes the Yahoo data and rearranges it and adds to it. Will show you the links, the anchor text used, if it's a nofollow link, etc.

Link Building Tools

• Hub Finder: You give it a keyword and it spits back the top ranking sites for that keyword. It then goes out and analyzes the sites that link to those high ranking Web sites.
• Traffic Marks: It has a free and a paid version. It presents the same data as Hub Finder. Matt says the interface is a little cleaner and easier to use.

PPC Tools

• Local Keyword List: Free. You provide a zip code, radius, and a bunch of keywords. It takes the data you gave it, looks that up against a zip code database, and then spits back all the city and town names and adds them to yours.

Domain Tools

• DomainTools: Provides WHOIS info. You give it a domain and it tells you the page title, the Meta description, how many link it finds, additional data like if its listed in DMOZ, what category it's in, what the description is.

Spider Tools

• SEO Browser

Wow, that was a lot of info. Up next is Scott Allen.

Competitive Research Tools:

Compete: Collects data from ISPs and other sources and then gives you info on your competition. You can start with their free tools which let you compare traffic on different Web sites. From there, they also provide premium tools which give you really in-depth tools. Even though the best data isn't free, it's still an important site to put on your radar.

Google Trends for Websites: It's similar to some of Compete's tools but it's less in-depth. You can get what regions visitors are from, other sites they've visited, the keywords other sites' visitors have search for and derive who your competitors are.

Spyfu: Excellent PPC data for competitors. You can find data by domain or keyword. You can see what competitors are spending on PPC campaign and see ad data. Find out what keywords they are bidding on. Gives you the ability to drill down and download data for further analysis. Spyfu UK also recently launched.

Google Insights For Search: Google provides data specifically for marketing based on what people are searching for. Use it to decipher trends. Locate appropriate regional markets.

Competitious: Store data about competitors. Create matrix to compare competitor features/attributes. Pulls in RSS feed and search results. You can click and save anything that looks interesting from search or blog feeds, Setup different profiles.

Using WordPress as an SEO Tool

WordPress is one of the most popular blog platforms out there. It's really well-suited for search engine optimization, especially with a few modifications. One of the great things about WordPress is the great developmental community around it. There are tons of plug-ins around to expand its functionality. It can be used by experts or beginners.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization Benefits: Helps users create basic optimized content even with little SEO knowledge. Once setup, all you have to do is write (for best results 2-5 times a week). You can use it to build links and awareness. Great for social media marketing

Recommended WordPress Settings:

• Search Engine Friendly URLs: Go into Settings -- Permalinks -- Month and Name.
• Indexable by Search Engines: Settings -- Privacy -- Blog Visibility - I would like my blog to be visible.
• Communication with other blogsL Setting - Discussions...

Wordpress Plugins:

All in One SEO Pack: Helps you with your on-page SEO. It helps you will your Title tags. It prevents a lot of duplicate content issues on the site. It generates your Meta description tags automatically.

WordPress Related Posts: Internal Linking Plugin. It's very important to improve internal linking throughout blog. It helps expose users to other content and improves search engine rankings.

Sociable: Good social media plug-in. It makes it easy for visitors to submit your content to social media sites.

RSS Footer: RSS Feeds are published but rarely optimized with out of the box blog factor. RSS Footer adds a copyright notice and a link to your Web site.

WP Super Cache: Caching plug-in. Traffic spikes can cause server to buckle under the load. If your site is unavailable for long periods of time your rankings can suffer.

Joe Abraham is next.

Google Keyword Suggestion: Now gives you the approximate search volume. Lets you search by specific term. You can just type in a URL and see what Google thinks it's about. Do it to your own site, as well.

WordTracker: Good tool but don't go by the search volume numbers.

Microsoft adCenter Labs: Free Demographic tools. Input a URL on a list of phrases and get back predicted demographics. He mentions both the demographic predictions tool and the keyword forecast tool. Type in any URL and get the make up for who's visiting that Web site - gender, age ranges, etc.

XML Sitemaps: An XML file lists all the URLs on your Web site or all the ones that you want indexed. List relative importance of pages. Allows the engines an easy way to find pages. Does not guarantee inclusion. Google, Yahoo and MSN all support this protocol.

SitemapDoc.com: If you have under 500 pages on your site, this will generate all the code you need for an XML Sitemap. You just copy and past the code into a text document and save it as an XML file.

Google Webmaster Central: Once you have all this info created, you can submit your sitemap through Google Webmaster Central. Once verified, you gain access to some Google Data o your site like content analysis, top search queries, and Web crawl stats. Can be added to iGoogle.

You can double check your robots.txt file in Google Webmaster Tools.

CrazyEgg: Heatmapping tool. Creates different visual overlays of site with statistics. Creates a heat map, using color to indicate activity.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 12:36 PM | Comments (2)

Special Kelsey Group Presentation: The 3G iPhone: Local Search Demos

Once upon a time there was a conference blogger. Before she got to the conference she had the schedule of the sessions she would attend all sorted out. At the conference, the organizers handed out a schedule of all the sessions and the rooms they would be in. Since she didn't have the room numbers on her personal schedule, she transferred her scheduled sessions onto the new schedule. Unfortunately, she forgot one.

On the morning of the last day, she was packing and preparing for one more day of blogging. She came across her original schedule and found the session that she had forgotten. It was in ten minutes. She speedily finished packing and made it to the session, but she had been thoroughly thrown off her game.

She went into the wrong room during the next session and ended up covering the same presentation a fellow blogger was already blogging. Her shirt was a button off and she looked like a slob. Her battery was on the verge of death and no one was about to give up a power outlet. It was a very rough morning.

Wasn't that a sad story? I know a happier subject to talk about next. The iPhone! I love my iPhone! Do you?

Moderator Michael Boland, Senior Analyst, The Kelsey Group, says that mobile and local are tied together. Mobile phones are conducive to searching for things locally. It hasn't really panned out before now because the technology wasn't great and there was no mass market appeal. All that is changing and Apple is doing a lot to open that up.

Third party application could do a lot for search, and can be compared to what iTunes has done for consumer music. The speakers today have developed applications and will share that with the audience. Hopefully it will spark some ideas for marketers. Those with a Web brand or site may be able to develop an app that can drive traffic.

Ryan Sarver, Director of Consumer Products, Skyhook Wireless, starts first with his view of the operations behind the scene in developing location-based services. At its heart, the app determines the latitude and longitude. Skyhook uses wireless access points for referencing locations. The key areas are urban areas with a lot of wireless overlap. He sees "consumer ready location" (indoors, urban areas, and time to fix) as the boost behind location-based services. The iPhone is really the first phone to drive the desire for location-based services and GPS isn't the only way to do it.

The rest of the presentations are going to be demos of cool applications. Ethan Lowry, Co-founder, UrbanSpoon, asks how many SEOs working on applications are developing a mobile application as well? He says that UrbanSpoon was a restaurant search site that was giving users reviews and details about restaurants in certain areas. They were successful on the site and are up to 70 cities. But on the mobile side they weren't doing as well.

The challenge was getting traffic on the phone without spending a lot of money. Then along came the iPhone. Location awareness was finally accessible and the app store is still a small enough pool to get noticed, with only around one thousand apps available.

They wanted to develop a game-like application to help solve the dilemma of where to eat. The idea was to create a magic eight ball for finding a restaurant. It's taken on a life of its own.

The way the app works is there are three columns. After the app finds you location, in the first column you can choose the neighborhood. The second column is types of food and the last column is the price range. After you physically shake the phone, you'll be given a restaurant that matches all the categories. The results are skewed toward the most popular and most highly rated restaurants. Reviews are also accessible, and if you don't want to play the game, you can just get a list of the restaurants.

The company of Scott Dunlap, CEO, NearbyNow, finds consumer products in your area. One app they made is shopping mall navigation and all the products in that mall. For this app, check out the video on YouTube. The other app they made focuses on getting people excited about products. They did some research and found that iPhone users were taking pictures of products and sending them to friends to ask their opinion about it, ask where they can find it, and more. As it happens, iPhone users are more likely to buy bigger spenders and fashion forward. The company gets paid for in-store leads.

The way the app works is that it takes the user to the camera. After taking the picture you're asked who you want to send the picture to, a note to friends and the store it was found in. When store owners find out from NearbyNow that their products are being sent around, they get very excited. People usually send the photos to close friends, roommates and parents. A more universal use has been adopted when, for example, people send pictures of other people asking, "Should I ask this guy out?" When a friend sends you something you like, you can find that item at a store near you, similar products, as well as online.

Next is Siva V. Kumar, Founder & CEO, TheFind.com. The company is a shopping search engine and the local shopping search was released at the end of last year. They crawl the Web for shopping Web sites. There are about half a million shopping sites in the U.S. and have over 150 million products in their database. Then they map the products to the store location and have availability data for the stores that provide it. The application has been submitted but is not out yet.

The way the app works is that it first marks your location. Then you are asked to type in the product you are looking for. The stores that carry that product will come up on the map. You can also compare the price of the item to the price of the item available from online retailers.

Sonia McFarland, Head of Business Development, Yelp, tells us that Yelp is a local review site. Restaurants are about one-third of their reviews. Boutiques, spas and more are part of their business as well. She's using "coffe wi-fi" as an example. There's a list of all those locations, with the distance and reviews. Users usually like to spend some time reading the reviews, but in this format you can also see an overview. A map view is also available, as well as a filter feature for narrowing results by things like distance, neighborhood or price range.

Where's the revenue coming from and what's the business model?
UrbanSpoon is an ad model. They have no monetization on the ad model, but they're in no rush and would rather let it grow a while. NearbyNow is mostly based on lead generation, with a smaller amount of data licensing and location-based ads. TheFind uses CPC, CPA and CPM on the Web.

If you guys were to build it for someone else, how much would your apps cost?
Skyhook has a big developer program. It'd take four weeks to get the basics up. The cost would be $80-100 per hour for the developer.

With iPhone usage through the rough, what can we do to create more of a mobile marketing plan for people in transit (airports, hotels, etc.) and be sure it's easy to use?
Make sure that the home screen shows what the immediate value is going to be. The mobile interface doesn't need to have the full functionality of the site. Put some time into those templates and users will come back a lot.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/21/08 at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

Trademark Issues: What SEMs Should Know

Moderator Jeff Rohrs (ExactTarget) are back in the Inside Intelligence track with a new set of panelists. Mark J Rosenberg, Esq. (Sills Cummis & Gross P.C.), April Wurster (Baker & McKenzie) and Eric Goldman (Santa Clara University School of Law).

Why do I keep recapping the legal sessions? I never understand a word! Also, it's cold in here. The next time I decide to wear anything cooler than a parka to a conference, someone hit me. These and other complaints brought to you by the fact that it's the last day of the conference and I'm tired.

Jeff starts us off by telling us that he's a recovering attorney and that's why he has to moderate the legal sessions.

Eric Goldman is going first. He's going to start with trademark infringement.

To establish a claim in court:

• Ownership of valid trademark
• Priority of usage -- first one to use it.
• Use in commerce in connection with the sale of goods or services
  • --TM in ad copy = use in commerce
  • --TM as a trigger for ads = court split

The courts are split on whether or not buying the keyword but not using it in the copy counts. He shows a slide that details decisions by the court on either side. New York tends to think No.

Likelyhood of consumer confusion
--Untested in trial
--JG Wentworth and Designer Skin: Summary Judgement for defense
--Storus: SJ for plaintiff

Again, courts are split on the issue.

Even if all the of above are met there are plenty of defenses still.

• Nominative use "My products are cheap than Trademark owner" -- Tiffany vs eBay
• Descriptive fair use
• Printer...something. He changed the slide.

Other regulations to know:
States have passed anti-keyword law (some question if states can even do that.)
-- Utah Spyware Control Act
-- Alaska SB 140

Neither have ever been tested in court.

-- Utah SB 236 [Tried to ban keyword advertising. Was repealed]

Search Engine Trademark Policies -- not laws, just policies.
Yahoo and MSN, TM owners can block keywords from buys
Google, TM owners can block references in ad copy.

April Wurster is next. She's going to tell us what we need to know from the plaintiffs perspective.

Things to know:
Monitor trademark use
Cease and Desist Letters -- talk to your attorney first. You need a plan. If it's too strong, you could find yourself the defendant if they seek a declaratory judgment in their favored court.
Lawsuit
Search engines, auction sites and ISPs have complaint procedures to allow trademark holder to address trademark concerns without resorting to litigation. -- Cheap, inexpensive and fast ways to stop infringement.

Google policies vary depending on the country. US, UK, CA and Ireland = keywords in copy only. Outside = keywords in copy and buys.

Yahoo has an email for complaints: trademarkconcern-ysm@yahoo.com

eBay: Verified Rights Owner Program -- there's an online complaint form.

If you can't get the problem solved through the engines, you might have to file a lawsuit. Take proactive measures. Register with federal registration.

Common law marks = free, you get what you pay for.
State registration = fairly cheap and fast, most states including California do not recognize state trademarks based on intent to use. You have to be using the mark in commerce to file.

Federal registration on the principle register = strongest and most expensive. Nationwide, can get damages, can get court costs, if you use your mark for five years it can become "incontestable".

How do you use the mark:

• Use proprietary notices -- trademark notice on your materials
• Distinguish the mark in print
• Use as an Adjective
  • -Marks should never be used as a Noun -- this is how they become generic
  • -Marks should never be used as a verb "Xerox your documents" or "Google this search"
• Never change the mark. (Morton Salt girl changes over time but not enough. If she put on pants, that would be a new mark.)

Mark Rosenberg is going to take the other side now. He's got bad news for trademark owners -- marketers can use your trademarks. With limits.

What's the limit? Just don't cause confusion. If someone could be confused that you are the trademark owner or you're linked to the trademark owner, that's not permitted.

Ask yourself: Why am I using someone else's trademark?
Permitted:

• To identify a Genuine product or service
• To let internet users know you're offering a genuine product or service
• To make a comparison between a product you offer and another product.
• To let Internet users know that you're selling a generic version of a trademarked product

Permitted: Nominative fair use: There is not other readily identifiable way of indentifying the trademarked product or service.

Not permitted:

• To get attention (search engine listing, to increase ranking, to get more traffic) when your site has nothing to do with the mark
• To get your competitor's traffic to your site.

Limits: The trademark is used on to the extent necessary to identify the product and can't imply connection to the trademark.

CAN NOT: Use the trademark more than necessary, a more prominent way that necessary. Can't overly disclaim the trademark. Can't cause confusion. Can't use the logo instead of the word.

Don't use someone else's trademark in your domain name, including typos.

He's been seeing people writing articles on a trademark in order to drive traffic to a commercial Web site and he thinks that's probably not cool though there's no case law on that.

Eric: Someone published a press release exactly like Mark's saying and there was a case on it. The courts saw right through that. He doesn't like putting trademarks in Meta tags. There's so much case law that treats it as verboten. He thinks that it's better not to risk it.

Mark: Disagrees and says as long as it's genuine, it's okay.

And now they're quoting case law. Oh heavens.

Jeff: How well versed are judges on search engine law, let alone technology?

Mark: They're not. That's where the split comes from.

Eric: Generally they're not. The real problem is the lawyers who don't do a good job of educating the judges. If you are in a fracas, make sure your lawyer understands the industry and educates the court.

April: It depends on jurisdiction. In NY it's different than CA.

Q&A

What's your feeling on indirect or broad match keyword buys?

Mark: Always follow up on a Cease and Desist. If you're dealing with six million keywords it's probably not worth fighting about. If you're not using it for the same purpose, you're also okay. Lots of trademarks have non-trademark uses.

Eric: there have been three or four cases on broad match. Those have been pretty well educated and so far it's been pretty good. So far it doesn't require negative matching in advance. You might want to do it after the C&D. Again make sure your lawyer is up to speed. One decision did require negative matching going forward. If you're buying a term that you know is going to cause problems, consider negative matching.

Jeff: If you're broad matching you're probably running on trademarks and Google won't tell you about it.

If they're an unauthorized dealer with a genuine project, what can I do as recourse?

Eric: They might still be allowed.

Mark: it's like used goods, you can't make them stop.

April: Look at other forms of copyright infringement. Ad copy or images infringement.

Eric: Even in that case, you might not be able to do it. Make sure you're registered with your copyrights. If your business model is based on suing people who sell your products, you're going to be attacks.

International or foreign marks

Mark: It's a problem.

April'; You have to register your trademark wherever you want to do business. If you're manufacturing in China, register there.

Foreign marks don't help you in the US.

Cease and desists can give the potential infringer a heads-up and they can do an end-run.

What is the law on typo-squatting

Mark: If people are confused, it's infringement whether it's spelled correctly or not. It's a case by case thing.

Eric: In some cases it just confirms that you're trying to steal their customers. It's evidence of bad intent.

An audience member says meta tags and useless and never put trademarks in them. Can you take a state mark to the engines or do they only want federal marks?

April: They don't care, they just want to know what your rights are. It's not clear what Google's policies are.

Mark: If you're not registered in the state where the infringement is taking place you're out of luck.

Eric: I would absolutely filed with Google based on a common law mark.

[I'm skipping a very specific question and a question that was asked and answered already.]

Blogs and fansites that use trademarks in a domain name, is it still problematic if they're not a commercial site?

Eric: Make sure it's truthful and not designed to be confusing. Make it clear that it's a third party commentary and NOT the trademark holder. But it depends on the court and it's a grey area.

Mark: it might not even be intentional. You might think it's not confusing but it might be considered confusing anyway.

April: Even if you think you're okay and your lawyer thinks you're okay, the trademark owner might not. You might still get sued anyway and if you're a smaller company, you might have to just give up.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

Effective Contextual Search Management

Wow. Okay. It's the morning after SearchBash. Let's pretend to look alive, people. Maybe if we do, we can trick people!

Gregg Stewart is moderating with David Szetela (Clix Marketing), Cynthia Tillo (Adobe Systems), and Jennifer Slegg (JenSense.com). Whoever put an advanced advertising session at 9am on the last day of a four-day show...well, we're going to have some words later. Email me.

David Szetela is going to start us off. He's going to show us how to get clickthrough rates in the double digitals with contextual advertising. He also says that the content network doesn't really suck as bad as we think it does. We'll see about that.

Content advertisers lose money when their ads appear on irrelevant pages and get back clicks, when they don't distract attention from site content, and because search and content should never exist in the same campaign.

Contextual is not search. Readers are not searching for you. It's more like banner or print advertising. The first job of your ad is to distract. You have to get them to notice you.

Keywords in content ad groups play a completely different role than they do in search ad groups. They're not discrete entities. There's no more than 30-50 keywords per content ad group. Match types are irrelevant, as are individual keyword bids. Negative keywords are almost the same.

The most important keyword difference: A content ad group's keywords should describe the kinds of pages where you want your ads to appear. Your keyword list equals the words that appear most frequently on the page. It's not the keywords for your product.

Ad Copy Differences: Your ad needs to stand out because people aren't looking for you. Yell, don't whisper. Be more competitive and test everything. You have to lead people into the sales funnel. Don't assume they're already in there.

Ad Position Differences

• Magic positions for search are 1-3
• Magic positions for content are 1-4
• Below 5, impressions drop dramatically
• Quality Score still counts - but not as much.

Quality Score Differences

Keyword-targeted and placement-targeted text: CTR, Ad Text, Landing Page.
Keyword-targeted non-test: Only CTR
Placement-targeted Non-text: Only CTR
Best Bidding Strategy: Start high, go low.

Overall Advice: Always set up separate content campaigns, test lots of multiple distracting ad types and monitor very closely.

Jennifer mentions that Google has the Google Placement performance report which shows exactly which sites and pages your ads are appearing on. You should review this regularly and then use the Site Exclusion Tool to stop ads from appearing on poorly performing sites.

Use declarative statements. Say crazy things. Distract them. Make them notice your ad.

Cynthia Tillo is next.

When most people think about PDF documents they think about their resume, bank statements, tax forms, etc. Would it be so far-fetched to think that one day the government will try and monetize your tax forms? Maybe not.

When Adobe was thinking about all the great things happening in the ad industry and how they could add value, they immediately thought about how to reach a highly-targeted audience which today consumes tons of PDFs. The last search she did, there are over 256 million PDFs floating out there in the wild. Yowsa.

In December, they launched Ads for Adobe PDF. It's powered through Yahoo's ad network. The ads are displayed in a separate panel next to the content in the PDF itself. It's a way for publishers to generate revenue from their PDF content. They've developed some technology that's really good at understanding what a PDF is about.

The ads are dynamically matched. Every time someone opens that PDF a new set of ads will be dynamically matched to that content, which means all their targeting options can still be applied to the PDF content.

It supports a viral mode of distribution. Today the typical PDF experience is that you download a great PDF and forward it on to family and friends (who forwards PDFs?). Now, you're able to maintain the ads as they go from person to person.

They're also letting publishers embed ad placeholders into the PDF itself. A lot of publishers who come from the traditional world think this is great because they can make it look like a magazine. They can place ads anywhere they want in the PDF. They can control sizing and color.

Top 5 uses for PDF ads: Newsletters, digital versions of magazine or newspapers, e-books, digest and compilations, and archives.

If you ever lack inspiration, Lord Thomas of Fleet wrote "As for editorial content, that's the stuff you separate the ads with." Nice.

Jennifer Slegg is next.

Before you get involved with AdSense, ask yourself what it is you want to monetize? There is some way to monetize nearly all content online but you have to explore your options.

Know the instances where you shouldn't monetize. Those include:

• Business site selling products: Why send them elsewhere?
• Business site selling services: Is that consultant, accountant or lawyer wanting me as a client or do they hope I click and go away?
• Any site with content against AdSense policies: Drugs, hacking, hard alcohol, gambling, adult content, designer imitations, weapons, webmaster guideline violations

Are You Leaving Money On The Table

People are too haphazard with how they monetize, and as a result leave money on the table. Ask yourself why did you choose the ad network, why did you put the ad where you did, why did you choose the color scheme, did you consider user experience?

Beyond just your AdSense ad units, think about image ads, video ads, affiliate ads, cost per action, cost per thousand, AdSense for search/mobile/feeds, and other contextual companies,

If you aren't testing, you are losing revenue.

The AdSense Testing Cheat Sheet:

• Placement
• Proximity
• Size selection
• Ad unit colors and borders
• Keywords
• URL filters
• Geotargeting

Are you filtering out your revenue? Be aware that your ad blocking filter list will cost you revenue. Use the filter to block ads that are from competitors, are grossly mis-targeted and for advertising that's inappropriate for your audience. Filtering won't enable higher value ads to appear.

Ad heaviness turns off users. Don't select three identical ads for the same page. Don't make users scroll three times to get to the content. Don't make your visors feel they are only good for clicking an ad.

Don't select ads just because they pay more CPA. You want your CPA ad to be extremely targeted.

Last Minute Takeaways

Always do A/B Testing
Experiment with different placements, colors, sizes, styles.
Consider impact of being too ad heavy
Look beyond traditional AdSense text ads and experiment with other formats.

A lot of people think AdSense is the best for everyone. But if you rely too heavily and AdSense bans you or things change, it can have a major impact. Choose what you think is the best and make sure you have a backup plan if something happens.

Some great advice there from Jennifer and the rest of the panel!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with Your IT Department to Get Stuff Done

Ah, the internal battle of IT and marketing. How do you get the IT folks to actually implement your brilliant vision? I have no idea but our panelists Matt Bailey (SiteLogic), Greg Boser (3 Dog Media), Sage Lewis (SageRock) and Chris "Silver" Smith (Netconcepts) think they do. Greg and Sage are last minute additions and don't have presentations. Moderator Jeff Rohrs (ExactTarget) will force them to reveal the secrets. Matt will do it at ten times the speed of light and make Star Trek jokes in the process while I fail to keep up. Hi, Matt!

Matt Bailey is up first. He's been on both sides of the fence, IT and marketing and knows the joys and pain of both.

Don't go back and start beating on your IT team without first understanding how it needs to be done and how to speak their language. IT people can smell blood in the water, if you don't understand, they'll tell you that it can't be done.

Things you need to know:
Robots.txt -- So many people get this wrong. It's the welcome mat to the site. You don't need to have a welcome mat but if it exists, it needs to be accurate. It's a very simple text file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /test

The asterisk means ANY BOT.

You can sink your entire site by writing Disallow: /

Redirects -- Change of URL
Change of Index page
There are two kinds, permanent detour and temporary detours.

If you redirect using a 302, you might not be getting all of your link juice.

Tool: WebBug -- will tell you where you have redirects and what kind they are.

Fix 302s into 301.

Inconsistent linking -- Pulls up Brookstone's site and thanks Derrick Wheeler for finding the example. Always link to the same version of every page.

Duplicate Content -- Products existing in different categories with exactly the same text. When you duplicate content, you're making the engines choose which is more important and it might not be the one that you want it to be. Getting rid of the duplicates can have immediate benefit.

Good URLs: Words are easier for USERS to understand and they consider it as measure of relevance if they see words in the URL. Do the rewrite not just for the SEO standpoint, but also for the user standpoint.

Use a Favicons for branding.

Diluted Content -- Too much content on one page. You end up scattering what the page is about.

Unclear Instructions -- [Mmm, USB Sushi] Make sure that there's enough information on your page for users to make a decision. That's a marketing problem.

RSS -- Outside of this convention, people don't know what RSS is. If you're expecting people to know what to do with it, you're missing out. Explain.

404 pages -- Do not use default RSS pages. "Error 404 page not found" isn't helpful to a user. Give them a friendly message, a way out, a search box and relevant links.

Know when it's not really IT's fault. Test your site, see if it's really marketing's problem. Try the site, test the instructions, make a good user experience.

More info at the SiteLogic Blog.

Chris "Silver" Smith is next. Like Matt, he's seen both sides of the IT/Marketing divide. He'll teach us to get in touch with our geek side. [I put on my wizard robe and hat...]

Check for problems: SEO Health Diagnostics.

Tip: Browse your Web site like a spider.
Tool: Web Developer Toolbar -- disable JavaScript, disable CSS, disable Images, etc. [http://chrispederick.com/work/]
Tool: User agent switcher -- tell sites that you're Googlebot or Slurp, etc. [Same URL]

Chris shows Coke.com through the eyes of a spider -- not a whole lot there. Just a few links and in the copyright line. This is a common issue.

Redirects that are also bad for SEO: JavaScript redirects and MetaRefresh. It's lazy coding.

Tool: Web-sniffer [websniffer.net] -- if the page redirects but also returns a 200 error, you need to fix it.

How are we today? Ongoing analytics.

Tip: Check visits referred from top 3 search engines.
Track $ conversions from SEO traffic vs other sources. If you're just getting traffic and not converting, that's not good.
Track Bot requests over time. Base it off your log files.

Watch for recurring issues!

CMS hell: Recurring CMS/Legacy issues. Check and recheck SEO factors - Titles, Metas, H1, etc. Don't assume that "once fixed, always fixed". CMS upgrades can reverse changes.

Befriend your IT colleagues:

• Befriend and collarobrate with IT
• Give credit where credit is due
• Understand that improvements can be handled iteratively. Be satisfied with babysteps towards goals.
• Follow standard IT process for prioritizing.

Be nice! Programmer's Day is September 13th!

You need to make your company recognize the value of SEO
1. make a business case for SEO -- use your competitor's success.
2. Equally important to success as user experience, legal requirements, etc.
3. Take every opportunity to educate about SEO

Once the value of SEO is recognized, it can be prioritized along with another project.

It should not take 6 months to make Title changes. If you still can't win, you need to go around them. That's only IF ALL ELSE FAILS.

• Go to another IT department
• Build a parallel system on a sub-domain if you can't get the legacy/CMS system to work. Scrape your own site and put it in a friendly version. It's not efficient from an IT standpoint but it's a patch.
• Use a proxy system.

You need to get started, that's the important thing.

Time for some thoughts from Greg and Sage:

Greg: We require IT people to be part of the process from the very beginning. They don't take the project if IT isn't on board. The thing that screws things up is that marketers go in blazing but don't have the language. Take a slidedeck and explain what is it that you need to do, why you need to do it and give them an example of why it's a problem if it's not done. Do it with the boss around so that everyone gets on the same team.

Sage: He's a big picture guy. His wife plans everything. I think this is going somewhere NSFW.... Marketers are big picture. IT thinks in steps. You need to empathize with the IT people and accept that they're good at their jobs because they're analytics. Make a plan with them that they can understand. Communicate with them the way they communicate.

Jeff: If I'm a marketer and I'm not technical, what training would you recommend to get me started? Is that even helpful having the training.

Matt: "Websites that suck" was a helpful book. MarketMotive, SEMPO, DMA all offering training classes. But the most valuable is getting a partner in the IT dept. The flip side is the IT manager who thinks he already knows everything about SEO.

Greg talks about smacking know it all IT managers upside the head with a phone book. Violence! He likes people who have code experience to be SEOs.

[It's funny, I've always thought of SEO guys as more like IT and less like marketing]

Sage: Figure out what you're using and take a class in it. If it's PHP or Microsoft, whatever. Value their position.

Q&A

What's the best platform if we're building a Web site from scratch?

Greg: Anything that's not Microsoft? Most companies work open source. PHP, MySQL. You can find something free or very cheap that's pretty easy to work with.

Matt: I would agree. Anything that's Microsoft is going to go through iterations and that's going to be hard to keep up. PHP is more scalable and you can always find a programmer to tweak it. Take the two slide decks and build your RFP: I need it to do this and this.

Chris: I don't think that marketers need to learn programming. It's useful to learn some of the basic SEO diagnostics stuff. Also thinks that PHP is the way to go. Look at how the search engines are Unix based, not Microsoft based.

IT changed the shopping cart and now sales are down. How do I find the problem and fix it?

Chris: Check the type of browser that you're getting abandonment issues on. If it's not browser based, it might be something else. Look at your log files. Call an expert on that particular shopping cart.

Greg: Don't think they won't lie about the error log files either. Because they'll cover their tracks in some cases. Ask about what an error means.

Matt: That's a great thing. If you can say 'what's this mean? Why does that happen?" You'll learn so much and it will help you.

[More troubleshooting the guy's problem ensues. Apparently the shopping cart was built in house. The panel 'ahs' knowingly.]

Greg: It is almost NEVER better to build it from scratch.

Jeff: Are there any good third-parties who can test for you?

Matt: Yeah there are. They'll hammer and find your problems in the lab. Finding them is a little tricky. He uses a state resource.

Greg: Use your employees. Send them home and make them test it, take screenshots to give back to the IT department.

Can a good CMS product fix SEO issues?

Matt: you have to define a good CMS product first. Look at it before you build it. Keep the Title and Heading separate. Insist on it.

Greg: Every good CMS system need to give Good URLs, no duplications and individual control over every on page element. They use WordPress a lot because it's customizable.

Sage: Wordpress, I'll concur is a great system. Joomla is a great system too.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 11:17 AM | Comments (1)

Morning Keynote: Dan Heath

Good morning! It's the last day of SES, the last chance to take in all the Internet marketing goodness floating around the conference hall. Let's see if I can transfer any of that to you, dear reader.

Dan Heath is the author of "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die", a NYT bestseller and acclaimed business book. Kevin Ryan says that he spent most of his early days in an ad agency. He said they didn't have enough time to sit around and think about being creative, how to reach outside of the box. One of the things he wanted to do was offer the attendees out of the box thinking. He says that he's pleased to present one of the biggest thought leaders for creative thinking.

Dan's going to drive right in. To understand how to stick, look at the winners: urban legends. The Great Wall of China is the only manmade object you can see from outer space. But let's think about it. What makes the Great Wall remarkable is that it's long, but what width is what's really needed to be seen from space. If that was true, you could see every major highway. Drink eight cups of water a day? Myth. You get it in other things you eat. KFC changed their name because the government wouldn't let them continue to claim they were selling chicken when they were selling genetically engineered birds.

Sticky ideas:
• Are understood.
• Are remembered.
• Change something.

It's not just urban legends that stick. Proverbs do, too. Fables as well. Aesop's Fables have been told for 2500 years. History lessons, marketing campaigns, mission statements - Dan looked at all of these and wanted to figure out why some stuck and others never found traction.

He and his brother discovered six traits that make up a sticky idea:
• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

You don't need all six for an idea to stick, but the more the better. The vast majority of your communication doesn't need to stick. But ideas aren't created equal. Some ideas are special, need to have an impact, need to be remembered.

Simple

It's not surprising that a simple idea would be effective. Here's a case study. Scientists studied college students. They gave them the choice to study at the library as planned or see a visiting speaker. Twenty-one percent decided to go to the library. When they did it a second time they added a third choice, to see a foreign film. In this case, studying at the library surprisingly goes up to 40 percent. Decision paralysis says that the more choices you have, the more likely you are to freeze up go with your default position.

One way to beat decision complexity is to hide the complexity. Pandora radio makes the thousands of songs in their database invisible. They just ask you for one artist or song. When you say you like James Brown, you really like flat out funky grooves, extensive vamping, and groove-based composition music.

A more subtle type of decision paralysis can be seen in a team setting. Everyone needs to have an aligned vision, but everyone's making individual decisions. He's going to give us thoughts on how to make decision making simple. An Australian credit union says "We don't want to be first but we sure as hell don't want to be third." This is a strategic statement that cascades throughout the company and effects all the decisions they make.

A high-concept pitch will help the team coordinate the larger vision. Your role is to beat decision paralysis with simplicity. Create a vision for the team that serves as a beacon.

Emotion

Now Dan throws a bunch of industry phrases on the screen. Link analysis, conversion/ROI, contextual search. When he thinks of these words he thinks "emotion." Uh... Oh, he's being sarcastic. His point is that sticky ideas thrive on emotion.

In the 80s Texas was having a problem with litter. So, the state brought in a team of litter-reduction experts. They found that the litterers tended to be 18-35 year old men that drove pick up trucks and like sports. They called him Bubba. They wanted to figure out how to get Bubba to stop littering. With an idea and an audience in mind, they had to figure out how to communicate to him.

Some possible ideas:
• An owl that says, "Give a hoot, don't pollute!"
• The Native American shedding a tear.

What they did was talk to lots of Bubbas and found that many of them had a strong Texan patriotism. This led to the "Don't mess with Texas" campaign. Texan sports stars and role models would say that by littering you would be dishonoring the state. It worked.

In the consequence model, you weigh the costs and benefits and choose the most beneficial one. In the identity model, the person asks "who am I?" and "What do people like me do in this kind of situation?" The Texas littering campaign spoke to Texan's identities.

The Curse of Knowledge

In the early 90s there was a game called Tappers and Listeners. Researchers gave someone the name of a song on a piece of paper. The tapper was supposed to tap out the rhythm while the listener had to listen. Only 1 in 40 answers were correct. Before the tapping, the tapper said the chance of someone getting it right was 50 percent. Why this gap? The tapper can imagine the whole song in their head, and made it impossible to think without that knowledge. This is reenacted with politicians, with students and teachers, and throughout the world.

Concrete

Dan's friend was always on the road for business. He had some extra time at the airport. At the bar, a woman approached him and asked to buy him a drink. That usually never happens to him, so he said, "Sure!" He takes a slug of the drink and blacks out. He wakes up in a bathtub full of ice. There's a sign that says "Call 911". He calls and the operator seems familiar with what's going on and asks him to check if there's a tube coming out of his back. There is. She tells him to wait there, the paramedics are on their way. He's been gotten by the organ thieves.

This is a ridiculous story, but it sticks because of all the sensory details. Concreteness is the turf of differentiation. Rather than "high-quality coffee", Starbucks says "we brew every 30 minutes." The more concrete description will get more of a response.

Dan went on match.com for an experiment. He saw that people on the site got a picture and a one line headline to describe them. Some of the headlines he saw:

• Hey...
• Friends say I am down to eath
• Looking for love!

These people are trying to cast the net too wide and avoiding anything that would draw someone in. Some more concrete headlines he saw:

• Must love burritos.
• Seekingmy2ndMRS
• Sour-cream and Onion Dip is my Crystal Meth
• Athletic math nerd looking for someone to hum Seinfeld intro music with

It won't attract everyone, but it will attract the right people. That's the mission of market - to get people off the fence.

One guy says "I can make you laugh!" and the other says "The guy above me is married, the guy below me is a stalker." Which do you think is more effective? Push for what sets you apart. There are rules and connections in the marketplace of ideas. There is a way of making your ideas more sticky. Next time, make it simpler. Make it more concrete. Can you find a story? If you try it, tell Dan. You may be in his next book.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/21/08 at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2008

Facebook, Feeds and Micro-blogging

Hey, hey, kids! It's time for some more social media. Hopefully this one is actually on topic.

Kevin Ryan is here moderating a panel that includes some of my search favorites. We have Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim), my buddy Dave Snyder (JRDunn.com), search wonder boy Neil Patel (ACS) and Brian Morrissey (AdWeek).

Up first is Andy Beal.

Andy is going to help us avoid being a twit on Twitter. I wonder if Michael Gray is paying attention. Kevin interrupts Andy's presentation and makes him pose for a picture. We're off to a great start here, kids.

When you first sign up for Twitter, make sure you get your name right. Nicknames are mostly for teenagers. Use your real name. And even if your site isn't ready yet, still secure your brand name so no one else takes it. Twitter profiles get Google-juiced quickly.

Break the monotony. Don't use the default profile template. Get something pretty (shinier, Andy?) to help you stand out from the crowd. You want to pimp your profile or, if nothing else, change the default colors. You can find backgrounds and templates at http://www.twitterbacks.com.

Don't Just Sit There, Tweet

Twitter Basics:

• @andybeal: Directs your message to that user
• D andybeal: Send a direct message to that user.
• #olympics: Hashtags. You can "tag" your tweet for that particular topic.
• Favorite your favorite tweets.
• You can delete your tweets, but they may still end up in someone's RSS feed.
• Change your replies setting so that you can see all @replies.

Don't Use Protection: There's a setting where you can protect your updates so that others can't see them unless you approve them. If you're using it as a marketing tool, Andy says not do make your feed protected.

Learn the Language

You only get 140 characters so you're limited in the way you can speak. You learn to shorten your words.

Common Terms: Tweet (a message), Tweeple/Tweeps (your friends), Follow/Follower, ReTweet (reposting what someone else has twittered).

Follow The Leader

Don't follow everyone. If you follow 5,000, you're going to get updates from 5,000 people and you won't be able to keep up. It's not a popularity contest. Follow peers, press, employers, influential industry people, important customers, etc. Bring people who bring value to your company.

One Big Cocktail Party

Watch for interesting conversations. It's dynamic. Don't send Twitter spam. Use @ conversations to build new followers. Don't always expect a reply. And know that sometimes a direct message will fall on deaf ears.

Start Sharing

Why should someone follow you? Be the first to break news. Live-tweet events. It's 80 percent social, 20 percent business.

Cross promote carefully. Use Twitterfeed.com and combine Twitter with your blog. If you're going to get heavy with promoting your business, then create a business profile where you can do that.

Online Reputation Management Meets Twitter

Your Twitter reputation is YOUR reputation
Don't get pulled into negative conversations
Monitor your reputation on Twitter on http://.search.twitter.com and http://tweetbeep.com.

Neil Patel is next at bat to talk about Facebook.

• What is Facebook? He shows his Facebook profile. It's a place to connect with other people, interact with others, etc.
• Who uses it? It's not just college students. People of all races (73 percent white), people who make a decent living (30 percent make over 100k) and people who have never attended college.
• Why should you care? There are over 90 million people on it. You can connect with others, build relationships, great for branding and you can spread messages to the masses.
• Connections with Others: Neil's part of an SEO group in his area. He can meet up with them and network. It's taken the online Facebook and brought it offline.
• Building Relationships: It tells you when it's your friend's birthday.
• Great for Branding: He shows a picture on Facebook of Chris Hooley kissing him. Heh. You have to be careful of what people put on Facebook.
• Sharing Information: There are feeds that alert people to what you're doing. There are also applications that can connect your blog to your Facebook profile so they know when you update.
• The Facebook Effect: There's a lot that can be done. You can create an application to tie your site in with Facebook and get a huge explosion of visitors.

A heckler is talking about how Facebook is useless knowing there's a Facebook rep in the audience. It's getting combative. Hugs and unicorns, everyone!

Next we have Dave Snyder. He's my favorite. Wait. Now he's talking about Tamar and not me. Hmm, maybe we're not friends, Dave. [pouts]

What is FriendFeed? It enables you to keep up to date on the Web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It's a social aggregator. It's an RSS feed on steroids. It's an RSS feed you can interact with. It brings all the RSS data into one place and lets you communicate with it.

What can you do with FriendFeed?

1. You can create news and content streams that will basically replace your feed reader: With FriendFeed you can easily create News and Content Streams using feeds of your favorite blogs.
2. You can track topics of interest of you: Go to the Advanced Search page, type a search phase and choose "shared by everyone". This will allow you to search your topic as its being discussed on the platform.
3. You can interact with Your Network Information: You can comment on every item in a FriendFeed stream. This allows a real time engagement with a users entire social media Web.
4. Monitor your Reputation. Use it to establish your network, for RSS monitoring, mobile reputation management, creating social media profile for SERPs and building brand advocates.
5. Monitor who is monitoring you: After you login to FriendFeed, go to the Stats Page and you can see a list of people who admire your content.
6. Utilize Third-Party Tools: Help you to manage noise and make engagement real.
7. Mashup videos, photos and other content into your stream, allowing instant engagement with content with feedalizir.

Brian Morrissey is up and will hopefully stop Kevin from his rambling. He has no PowerPoint.

He says everyone has presented really great examples of micro interaction. Twitter is really small. There are maybe a few million people on Twitter. A lot of times we think things are a lot bigger than they are. Facebook has 90 million people. That's a lot larger. But the power of Facebook is in these small networks. The thing that's interesting about these tools is the peer-to-peer recommendations. These tools are helping to surface that.

He's found that in using these tools it's a lot easier to find things. As Google made sorting through a mass of information easier, we're seeing these tools bring a human element to how brands are built.

Brands used to be built through one big thing. Now it's these micro interactions. He talks about Zappos on Twitter.

Andy says that Twitter is an enabler. It's a catalyst for getting the message across. Stories can break into mainstream media very quickly. It's not the size of your network but who's following you.

Question & Answer

Your all coming from self-promotion. I work for a company where I'm not the spokesperson. Advice on how to broaden that? How do you make it not an individual?

Dave: There are some great things going on in the space with people using Twitter. There are some good case studies like Comcast Cares. You can actually sit there with your company's name and see what people are saying about you. Dell has seen revenue come through this stream. Comcast is doing it to fix their reputation.

Brian: It's about figuring out how people are interacting with your company and trying to solve their problems. The least successful stuff is when companies are using it as just another way to put out marketing messages.

Dave: People are engaging with your brand and engaging real-time. That's the takeaway. It's here and it's happening.

[The Angry FB Heckler is given the mic and he starts ranting. He's angry that when someone starts poking him or sending him a gift it's just a nuisance. People are creating applications that are just garbage and it makes the site less useful. He's angry. Someone needs to tell him that you can turn that stuff off. Maybe he'd be less angry and less likely to kick puppies. I don't know.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/20/08 at 5:32 PM | Comments (1)

Black Hat, White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO

One of my most-anticipated sessions is here and the room is now standing-room only. Where will the debate over black hat tactics go today? Moderator Matthew Bailey, President of SiteLogic, tells the panelists to say their name, their company, and the color they represent.

Bruce Clay, President of Bruce Clay, Inc., is representing the rainbow.

David Naylor, SEO at Bronco, doesn't wear a hat.

Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings, is representing white hat.

Greg Boser, President of Three Dog Media, says he plays on both sides of the fence.

Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization of Range Online, having only been in SEO since 1999, wears a green hat.

Bailey says that because none of the panelists admitted what hat they wore, he wants Whalen and Clay to define white hat SEO and the rest of the panel the define black hat SEO...

Clay says that the real definition has more to do with the search engines' definitions than the clients. He says most SEOs play in the middle. In his opinion, people that play out of bounds only hurt themselves. An SEO that causes pain to a client is truly black hat. It's an ethics thing. If you spam in the middle of the forest is it really a bad thing? A big part of the question is how you play the game.

Whalen says that black hat is attempting to deceive the search engines rather than getting results because you're really the most relevant. For most business Web sites, they don't need to use deceitful techniques. It's hard work but the search-engine-approved techniques will generally work. In a space like pills or gambling, that's a different ball game and a space she doesn't play in.

Friesen says there isn't really black or white hat. Things that hurt a client would be black. Read the Google guidelines, worship them every night, and you're a white hat. But in the different verticals, there are different things necessary to compete. Black or white, it doesn't matter if you're willing to be competitive.

Boser says white hat is a code name for SEOs with no game.

Naylor says white hat is trying to catch the monkey, while black hat is, "Weehee! We've got a Porsche." In other words, black hats have no-holds bar, while white hats take each step slowly.

Bailey says that we know there are risks to black hat techniques, but are there also risks to white hat techniques? Jill says that under her definition, the technique is to make a great Web site.

Clay says that if Matt Cutts comes up behind you and your first thought is to close your notebook computer, then you're probably not playing in bounds. He agrees with the concept of deception. If you do something knowing the search engine would fight what you're doing, that's black hat. The people that practice white hat try their best not to color outside the lines so that they don't inflict any harm to their site. Because search engines don't publish rules, even a white hat can find themselves outside of the lines. He uses cloaking an HTML equivalent of an all-Flash site as an example of that.

Friesen asks if cloaking is black hat. A few people raise their hand. Same question for white hat and again a few people. He asks if it's a neutral tactic, more people raise their hand and he says, "Bingo!" It comes down to how it's being used.

Boser says that when he and most SEOs test aggressive techniques it's only for his own sites. The things he learns can be used for the benefit of clients. Anyone who does something without the client's knowledge or participation should be strung up and shot - it's inappropriate.

Whalen says that incompetent SEOs is another category and is worse than all the others. The audience erupts in laughter. Boser says that in this industry there's a whole lot of people that bite off more than they can chew and don't have the skill set to keep the promises they made. He said it happens a lot in the agency world because agencies tend to make promises before they know what the space is like. He says that a lot of companies play on both sides of the fence. He says that he'd love for it to work the way the search engines say. But there are plenty of sites that are equally as good as yours, and the one's that rank are the one's that put in the most effort. Boser has a client that everyone in his space buys links. He could either ask Google to punish everyone and just hope they move up, or they can roll up their sleeves and compete.

Naylor says that there's nothing like working your butt off for a client and then you find out that another SEO is working on the site. History shows that the most common mistakes are done by someone inside the company that's saying, "I'm going to buy links" without knowing what they're doing. The thing that's good about black hats is that they know where the boundaries are. There's many get links quick schemes, but they don't really work. It's a long, hard haul. The link side is the worst side. He can't think of any black hat that when you take away the link side of it is considered black anymore.

Clay says that if you play by the rules it takes three years to get as many links as someone willing to be more aggressive can get in weeks. Before Google, there were no rules so there was no breaking them, no black hat. Whalen says that she doesn't think there needs to be rules. It's common sense what's within or outside of the rules. You know when you're doing something wrong or right. Friesen says he disagrees that it's common sense. If it was common sense there wouldn't be SEO because no one needs to teach common sense. Whalen says that they look at competitors spamming so they think it's what they're supposed to do. In that sense, it's not common sense. There's a problem with the industry that we think that's OK.

Boser says that he takes a two-step approach. Telling the client that a result can be achieved in three years, that's unacceptable. And he can't tell on all the competitors. So he takes a middle-ground approach. If Google ever catches up and can take down the deceptive sites, they'll be on top. But in the short term, paid links can get the client climbing, get the company on board, and then get the buy-in to start doing the harder stuff.

Naylor asks who works on white hat sites and black hat sites. White hats outnumber black hats. He says, obviously black hats aren't winning, so since there's nothing more to talk about let's go to the pub now. Not yet, Naylor, not yet.

Audience Q&A

When you do RSS links, is there any link benefit to links in a reader?

Boser says that in that issue it's more about the scrapers that will come through. Other sites will re-publish your content and you're actually dealing with a high-risk strategy. A more authority site may pick it up and you lose the value. If you're going to syndicate content, put in a single link, keep it simple.

If you build a widget for Facebook will links be picked up?

Naylor says no. Make it for WordPress instead.

When I talk to a client I have a strategy for explaining the difference between a one-month (buying links) and a three-year plan. What's your strategy for explaining it to a client?

Boser says he always starts with competitive research. The first month is spent learning the space and who their competitors are. Then they explain their risk tolerance and the risks of what might help them compete.

Clay says that links, even paid links, aren't evil. Commerce is the Web. If you can justify buying a link as legitimate for traffic, you're not doing anything wrong. If the intent is to buy PageRank and not to buy for commerce, that's when things get crazy. Anyone have a problem getting a link on the front page of Google? Is anyone doing pay per click? Commerce is commerce. Buying links isn't inherently evil. If you sneak under the radar, it probably won't last forever.

Friesen says that the goal is link acquisition. If you're paying for links that can be a short-term kick start. Yahoo Paid Inclusion, Google AdWords, and other middle-ground ways of getting your message out will help you with getting more natural links.

I've heard of affiliates being grouped with spammers.

Friesen says there's a difference between the value-add affiliate and the basement spammer. Boser says that even the spammers think they add value. There's probably no safe way to be an affiliate, but look at the footprint of the space and use that to compete.

Clay says that many of the audience are dealing with major properties where the domain name itself is worth millions and there are lots of links coming in. Doing risky tactics in that sense is much more costly. No established, major brand should ever black hat.

Boser disagrees and says that there's no repercussion for a big brand to spam. When BMW did it they recovered in less than two days. No one walked onto a BMW lot and said "I'm not going to buy your car because you used JavaScript redirects in Germany!" Little guys will pay more for aggressive tactics. You can get torched and no one will know because know one cares.

Friesen says that when BMW did what they did they got tons of bloggers linking to them. If you have a site that you think can handle three days out, then go hard.

Matt Cutts disagrees and want to add a disclaimer. Google takes a lot of sites out, but people don't always notice. He says that there was a very large newspaper that was cloaking and they've been out for a while. They absolutely take action on big sites, they just don't always talk about it. Do you want to take that risk? In-house SEOs are even more at risk because they may lose their jobs.

In response, Boser said that the work done at BMW was amateur. The biggest mistake they made was not doing what they did well.

I thought the difference between black hat and white hat revolved around the searcher, but none of you mentioned the user.

Friesen says that in the early days, lots of deception worked because it was all about the impression, not the conversion. Now, it doesn't matter about the user because people can convert on spammy sites.

Boser says that he looks at a project not wanting the user to have a bad experience, but the user isn't going to look at the source code. Users can still click "buy" and get the product on a spammy site.

Bailey wants to bring up the value of Made for AdSense networks.

Boser says that they're crap. Everyone's trying to make get the content so now there's a lot of junk out there. Friesen says that the Made for AdSense networks are just encouraging scraped content.

What's the best way of going about getting links?

Naylor says that Google knows links is a war. If they can get around that, why wouldn't they want to? Content is one way to get around the linking dilemma. Boser says that if you're paying someone to pay for content and paying the right person to share that content on Digg, aren't you still paying for the link?

Boser says the slippery slope is that Google is trying to devalue the people offering the paid links. Now we're seeing the people who bought the links also getting hit. No one makes you prove you own the site you're buying a link for. This could be used as a weapon.

What's your take on white hat/black hat in the semantic world, given you're not looking at links they way they're used now?

Boser says semantic analysis is something to look at, though he's not sure how much they'll be used now. It's far too link driven to ignore it.

In AJAX sites, the question is what's cloaking and what's not?

Friesen says that the user-experience is again the consideration. The user experience can be really cool, but once you get where you want to go, you can't tell anyone else how to get there. And, while AJAX is cool, there will only be one listing in the SERPs.

Boser says that for these reasons, he doesn't think solving these problems is wrong. Problem-solving cloaking may be the answer there. He used a technical solution to solve a problem.

Whalen says that she doesn't thing that Google would really have a problem with that. Friesen says that the search engines are engaged with Adobe to solve the problem of Flash. The search engines want to figure it out, but it will take time. So you have to figure out what to do in the meantime.

If you take over a client that is using brokers, how do you clean it up?

Naylor says that you should look at link history to find the problem pages. Dump the backlinks on the pages with PageRank 0, because you know they're bad. Go for the "I don't know" links in the re-inclusion request, and explain that you are still working to figure them out.

So now you know!

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/20/08 at 5:31 PM | Comments (3)

Maximizing SEO Returns with User Generated Content

My wrists hurt. So does my brain. And I have no battery power left. But there's no rest for the wicked so time to settle in for moderator Rebecca Lieb (ClickZ) and panelists Mehdi Maghsoodnia (CafePress), Benu Aggarwal (Milestone Internet Marketing) and Kurt Krake (Bazaarvoice).

Mehdi Maghsoodnia is first. CafePress has solely UGC content. Many statistics about CafePress. 6.5m users, 11m unique visits per month, 2000 shops opened on CafePress every day, 150m new products a month, 3m a week.

They're very long tail. That's what they're trying to SEO. They don't really have much in the way of branded terms. They don't invest too deeply into head terms. The long tail, they have to just apply best practices and UGC. Most of their SEO investment in the last two years was building a custom search and retail experience.

There's a conflict between SEO and Marketing to allow for a rich catalog. They allow for User created Folksonomy. The marketplace is "edited" by the community.

They use breadcrumbs, designer info, "share it" chicklets, and "see similar" box so that no page is an island without sacrificing conversions. They use templates to encourage self-SEO by the owner of each shop.

They look at the Top 100 keywords as well as by portfolio. They want to see which pages are appearing (check the engines), which terms are missing (hitwise, comscore). They do A/B testing as well.

Benu Aggarwal is up next. She's going to focus on how you take your reviews and make them convert. She's in the lodging industry and obviously reviews are important there.

They did a study on 1200 consumers who shop online at least four times per year spending more than $500 annually. They discovered that people read reviews and that reviews on third-party sites were considered more credible.

Impact of Customer Reviews on conversions: Increases every time. Some more than others.

How are search engines using Rating and UGC? You can refine by rating in Google Maps, Google Universal shows review counts, etc.

The presentation and organization of reviews encourages consumers to read. Information that is most important to customers should show up on top.

Wow, lots of info on this slide.

Make your reviews visible and display a rating or graphic. Display the total number of reviews, sort by type of reviews, etc.

Incentivize your reviews. Offer them a free drink or coupon. Make it easy for them to post reviews.

IMPORTANT: Define your web site taxonomy (theme) and define your architecture well (siloing)

Are you designed for higher conversion:
Unique selling points?
Important conversion elements are highlighted?
Check out experience is easy?
Search box that works well?
Etc.

Follow best practices. Breadcrumbs, shorter click path.

Make the user experience very pleasant.

Kurt Krake is next to show a case study and how his product works.

They were trying to determine the impact of reviews in three areas:

• Natural search traffic
• Conversion to sale
• Average order value

Customers and searchers are the same people essentially. 77 percent of purchasers use review when shopping online and 76 percent of searchers are doing research.

Reviews are written in natural language. Misspellings happen. Long tail incorporates those. [He explains the long tail but you know what that is. Notes that you can't use Google Trends to see the long tail.]

Contrasts a Product-focused page with a Reviews-focused page. The latter facilitates reviews with rich keywords and optimization of title and meta tags, inbound link anchor text, actual body copy in UGC.

Leads to segmented traffic so that you can also capture the people looking specifically for reviews.

Worldwide query average is less than three words. Review pages receive longer queries on average (3-4 words) meaning they're getting deeper into the tail. There isn't much overlap on the searches.

Product review searches tend to include a retailer name. Review pages were more effective than product pages at capturing new customer searchers. So you're getting people earlier in the research cycle.

They found higher conversion rates and higher average order values.

You can download the study free at http://bazaarvoice.com/whitepapers.html

The most effective incentive that he's found was sending out emails to get customers aware of the ability to post a review and to get people to post one.

Rebecca asks about negative reviews.

Kurt: They "finely moderate" reviews. Okay then.
Benu: If it's on your site and you built the tool, you could moderate the comments. If it's on the third party site, 10 good reviews will overcome 2 bad reviews. Don't worry about it. If it's a problem that's been fixed, you can show that.

Rebecca asks about mislabeled UGC. Save the whale shirts listed as Obama shirts.

Mehdi: They moderate when things become too personal. If the content itself becomes to controversial, that's more difficult and they do it case by case.

Rebecca: What about requiring registration? Good idea, bad idea?

Kurt: Yes, you have to have some kind of registration and credibility. Also says that they don't shy away from negative reviews. Negative reviews lend credibility.

Rebecca: what about third party sites and disgruntled attack reviews?

Benu: That's why I say don't worry about it. Customers can tell when it's just vindictive. Yes, it will impact for a short time but so long as you have positive reviews, it'll work out. Incentive your customers to post good reviews.

Audience comment: We find that people use negative reviews to find things that do or don't apply to them about the hotel. Sophisticated shoppers use it to qualify products.

How do you make sure that people find the product pages if you have review pages?

Kurt: [Rambles a bit and totally doesn't answer the question] This is what we've found as the best solution.

How do you reach your customers?

Benu: We usually have their emails or you can ask them at check out, at the front desk and incentive them.
Kurt: [repeats that email is really the best way to get response and that contests got the most results.
Kurt's coworker Scott: We're trying badging (like Amazon's Top Reviewers). Also when someone reviews one product, saying 'you also purchased these, would you want to review them?'
Mehdi saves the session by saying that your best way to get feedback is to service the customer well and give them what they want. There's too much emphasis on what you can get from the customer and you're supposed to be making them happy. Thank you, Medhi!

Rebecca asks about other types of UGC like Amazon encouraging people to post their own pictures. Also about tagging.

Medhi: That definitely helps. We see that clearly in our site. The level of commitment and sense of ownership goes up when you allow them to get involved. Works better than incentives even.
Scott: you can do ask and answer, let the community answer the questions that other people have.
Rebecca: Why not imbed a YouTube video of some kid playing with it?
Menu: We tried that but it's a low success rate. It's more effective on YouTube itself. Getting people to post their videos and pictures works very well.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/20/08 at 5:12 PM | Comments (0)

Social Media Analysis and Tracking

No time for chatter--let's jump right in. Marshall Sponder (Monster.com) moderates, Breanna Wigle (Military Advantage), Edmund Wong (iCrossing), Todd Parsons (BuzzLogic.com) and Rob Key (Converseon) speak.

Marshall, who we met yesterday in the Analytics 2.0 panel, introduces himself and the panelists. He's got a short presentation to explain the session. It's possible to categorize referrers for social media attribution and find out how much is coming from where. Don't count hybrid sites like a news site with a social aspect. Stick to the pure sites for analysis. You can use ComScore to measure social traffic as well. Just use the conversational media category. It's just meant for research, not actual traffic but you can learn from it. He thinks that we should be able to let Google do it for you as well. Google already knows what sites are blogs and could segment data from a site from Social Media. It would be easy for them. Um, kay.

He repeats that he thinks that CMOs are going to be Web analysts in the future. It's so important to bake in analytics right from the very beginning. Right now Social Media has no set place in most organizations, ROI is difficult but not impossible to prove.

Web 2.0 is about empowering users. Measurement is in conversations/engagement, Traffic/ROI much more subtle but still measurable.

Rob Key is our first speaker. He utters my most hated phrase "I have a lot of slides and I'm going to try and go through kind of quickly." Noooooo!

Stats! Lots of them! 45 percent of adults have created content online. There are 1.2 million blog posts a day! Other numbers as well! [That's all I got.]

Social media is growing and infecting search as well.

How do you design a social media strategy? Listen to what people are saying, engage them, and then measure and optimize.

Listen: Conversation mining helps marketers promote and protect their brand through the measurement of analysis of online...something. Please slow down, Rob.

The conversation is iceberg like. The top twenty results in the search engines are what's above the waterline. You want to mine deeper than that. There's so many avenues out there that aren't ranking that you need to dig into.

Look at:
How are people feeling about our brand?
Who are the most influential voices?
How effectively are we contributing or not to the conversation
Who should we cooperate with?
And more questions as well.

You need to see who the influentials are in the space because then you can see who you need to partner with or counter. Your own contribution is usually about 10 to 12 percent.

What's the sentiment and the tone of the conversation by relationship? Positive, negative? It helps inform conversations and response.

Look at your cloud tags and look at it compared to the way that you talk about yourself. When you do this eh right way you can find out about yourself.

You can't just rely on automated solutions. You need human intervention when you're categorizing it.

How do you use it?

As an extension of customer service. With people complaining about products all over the Web, you can go in and use this as a marketing opportunity to salvage or turn around the situation. Avoid Dell hell type listings.

[About six charts fly by in 30 seconds. Oh help]

Where does this all go? We're still evolving. Trending is the bleeding edge now. It's not just data at the moment, it's looking at how the conversation is changing over time. We'll see some flattening of capabilities. Everyone's going to become better at this in the future. The other thing is that people will start to see the grand unified vision of data and you'll be able to get a bigger picture of your whole organizations.

How do you find the meaning the measurement? That's the next critical step.

Breanna Wigle and Todd Parsons are going to present a case study for Breanna's site: Military.com. They're going to be switching back and forth throughout the presentation.

Breanna goes through some background on Military.com--they reach out through blogs and connecting people. They're trying to enable communities to connect, not trying to create them. They found that social media traffic converts 6 percent better than non-social media traffic and have a higher time on site.

The goal of their campaign was to increase product awareness to new influencers and their audiences and to convert visitors into RSS and Newsletter subscribers. The challenge was the long tail and that it was hard to find the influencers because the fragmentation was very high.

They partnered with BuzzLogic for that. Todd says BL isolates and ranks influential content in social media across topics and serve ads within that influential content. They consider credibility, relevance and more in their algorithm.

Step 1: Uncover conversations.
Step 2: Rank the influencers.
Step 3: Identify influencer networks for ad placement and follow influence paths

In social media advertising, the creative is critical. It must be Compelling, Informative and have a Clear call to action.

Breanna steps back up. Results: 86 percent higher CTR compared to historical average for targeted banner campaigns. Conversions increased 5.3 percent in RSS subscriptions and Newsletter subscriptions. 90 percent were new visitors during the campaign, 60 percent hi