Search Engine Optimization

May 12, 2008

SEO Weekend Update

The Social Networks Get More Social

Something must have been in the water this past weekend because Google and the social networks have decided to be just a little bit sweeter to their users.

Both Facebook and MySpace revealed portability options that will allow members to take their information off the site and use it in conjunction with other trusted sites. MySpace's program is called the Data Availability initiative and will allow users to share their public photos, videos and text on sites like Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, Photobucket and beyond. Similarly, Facebook announced Facebook Connect, a program which will allow members to take their Facebook identity and use it across the Web.

Google isn't making user information portable, but they did launch Friend Connect to help site owners add social features to their Web site with just a small snippet of code. Google thinks of Friend Connect as a "shortcut to connections you've built up somewhere else". It will work with OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. Good stuff.

Looks like the future of the Web and social applications will be all about letting people create one Web identity and then giving them the ability to take it wherever they go. We like.

10 Percent of People Say Design Is Part of SEO

A frightening article over at Web Designer Wall signals that only 1 out of 10 Web designers think design should be a consideration to search engine optimization. I suppose that's actually not too surprising considering that 24 percent of people didn't even know what search engine optimization was. Oye.

The article, geared towards design professionals, goes on to explain what search engine optimization is, why it's important, and how certain design and architectural elements may impact the spiderability of your Web site. It's one of those posts you want to bookmark and then send to clients when they get mouthy. I mean, confused. ;)

Seriously though, it's a bit frustrating to see that so many in a related field have no idea what SEO is and continue to make it an afterthought. Search engine optimization should be a part of your site design process from the very beginning. We actually believe that you should know your keywords before you even begin designing. For a good rundown of how we look at SEO design, you can take a read through our How To: SEO Web Design post from a few months back. It explains how knowing what terms you'll need to target is going to determine how your site is structured, how your navigation will come together, how deep it will be, and will influence nearly every design decision you make.

Third Annual SEM Scholarship Contest Launches

Andy Beal has revealed that the 3rd annual SEM Scholarship Contest has officially kicked off and it's promising a prize package worth more than $10,000. Yowsa!

To enter, simply submit an article on your favorite Internet marketing topic between the deadline of May 23rd. From there, the finalists will posted on the Marketing Pilgrim and the five that receive the most traffic will go before an expert panel of judges. Have I mentioned I'm on that fine panel? Yeah, I don't know how my name got there either. :)

It's a great chance to give back to the community and help some new search marketing faces find some recognition. We hope to kick off the third edition of our SEO Charity Contest soon, as well. Good to see so many people fighting for SEO education. Kudos, Andy!

Fun Finds

Matt Cutts tells us what Google knows about spam and says, on the record, that search engine optimization is NOT spam. All hail, Matt Cutts!

The always smart Kim Krause-Berg says the key ingredient for SEO and Web Design is true passion.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/12/08 at 5:06 PM | Comments (1)

May 6, 2008

Actionable Organic Search Analytics

We're back in the search track with Matt Bailey (SiteLogic) and Diane Hoag (IBM developerWorks). Matt is giving me a hard time for going to bed early last night and missing out on all the debauchery that went down after I left. Based on how tired Matt looks, methinks I made the right decision. :)

Mikes moderating and starts off by telling the story about his stick. If you know Mike, you know what I'm talking about. Basically he takes it everywhere and it's been around the world. If you haven't heard the story, ask Mike the next time you see him. He loves to tell it.

Up first is Matt Bailey.

Matt says conferences like this are the 'dump truck conferences'. You come, the conference dumps all this information into your brain, and then you have to go back and apply it.

He says that Plato talked about three different groups. The first were the gods and they already knew everything. The second were the beasts. The beasts didn't know anything. They didn't ask questions. The third group was the people. People are the only ones who can ask questions. We're the only ones with the fundamental ability to ask.

[I know I say this all the time, but I love listening to Matt Bailey speak. He's so animated. He gets people excited!]

We can't look at our dashboards of information and expect them to tell us what to do. They don't function that way. We have to pull information out of the machine data and interpret it.

You start with the data - 34,000. There's nothing you can do with just the number. You have to add a bit of information and context. There's no such thing as complete and true accuracy. If your supervisor is asking for accuracy, you need to let them know it's impossible. Instead, you have to look at the trends and gather the information that's happening on your Web site. Adding context to the equation doesn't make things actionable. What makes things actionable are when you can create a story. Visitors who searched for X stayed on the site for X minutes and looked for Y and converted at a rate of Z.

You want to get beyond knowledge. You want to get to understanding and that comes from people. People are the central focus for adding that understanding and figuring out what to do on your Web site. No program is going to give you understanding. It can only give you information and knowledge. Avinash said that analytics are 90 percent the person and 10 percent the tool. That needs to be your mantra.

Reporting or Analysis?

Reporting just gives you information like path views, path analysis, hits, monthly visitors, etc. That's not actionable.

You can't do analytics on an ad hoc basis. You have to have clearly defined goals. If you don't have goals you don't have measurements. Your goals need to be written down. If there are no goals, there are no insights.

Your goals can be anything. They can be downloads, page views, contact form leads, sales, etc. You have to ask question of the data. That's how you're going to improve those numbers.

He starts talking about segmentation. It's an essential part about beginning to ask questions about your Web site. People are not cattle. They don't come to your site in a herd and move from point A to point B. We don't have a herd mentality. (Matt has clearly never attended high school) People come to your site with vastly different motives. You can't treat them all as one group of visitors.

He brings up the famous Star Trek segmentation example. I'm going to copy and paste it from our coverage of SES NY to save my fingers a bit of retyping.

The Starship enterprise had a crew of 430 people. He knows this because startrek.org told him. There were 59 total deaths in the 5 year mission. That's a 13.7 percent mortality rate (aka conversion rate). Of the 54 deaths, yellow shirts made up 10 percent, blue shirts made up 7.2 percent and red shirts made up 72.8 percent. That's our data but we still have no action. We have knowledge, but no indicator on how we can improve it or make it worse.

Factors that lead to a red shirt death: If you beamed down with Captain Kirk and wore a red shirt, you died 57.5 percent of the time. This is the number one factor that leads to the death of a red shirt. OMG the giggles.

To increase the survival rate: You'll see that if Captain Kirk meets an alien woman, the red shirt survival rate increases to 84 percent.

How often do these factors occur? Capt Kirk has a conquest rate of 30 percent. If you go to a land of [insert name of things that fight Captain Kirk. I'm not geeky enough for this.] and you're a red shirt, you'll probably die. If you go to a land of peaceful women, you'll live 30 percent more of the time. That's segmentation!

Say you have an electronics Web site. You have a visitor who comes and is trying to locate a digital camera. They're looking for price, brand, size, battery life, etc. On the other side of the site, someone is looking for an MP3 player. You need to understand that you can't classify these two people with a single conversion rate. It doesn't tell the story. It actually ignores the story that you have two people looking for two different things on two different sides of the Web site. Each group needs a new conversion rate. People see your Web site differently based on what they were looking for.

Three C's of Analytics: Context, Comparison, and Contrast.

Key Performance Indicators:

• Time on site
• Pages Viewed
• Conversions
• Goals

By Segment:

• Blogs
• Web sites
• In-market links
• Social News
• Search
• Actions
• Content
• Media

Anyone who clicks on a link about you from a blog has a high context for your site. They have a specific expectation and you need to know what that is. On topical sites, you have lower context and a lot of competition. You have to be unique to stand out.

Use your analytics to tell the story. Find out where the Red Shirts are on your Web site. Find out how you can improve your site for all the different segments. Add more context to the situation. And then do something.

Forrester says that bringing in an analytics person will result in a 900-1,200 percent increase in ROI. You can't just collect the data; you have to do something with it.

I'm just going to say that if Matt Bailey was a priest, more people would go to church. He can get you excited about pretty much anything. Seriously.

Diane Hoag is up.

Diane works for IBM and says that in 2005, out of nowhere, their Google referrals dropped off. They started missing monthly targets in June. Analysis exposed search (Google) issues. They went to the Internet (as you do...) to see what was happening and found that in May Google had released the Bourbon algorithm update. It focused on sequence and types of redirects. The intent was to discourage URL hijacking. They don't do any blackhat SEO techniques so they didn't understand why their traffic dropped off. They did more analysis. They finally concluded that it was due from moving to different hosting environments, which led to long redirect paths.

What resulted was that their URLs had incredibly long redirect paths. Some were 7 or 8 redirects long. Sometimes they even circled back and went through the same server a second time. They needed to clean up their redirects.

Steps to Recovery:

• Established canonical URL: www.ibm.com/developerworks
  • Internally: Changed links on their content to the canonical URL
  • Externally: Asked marketers to use the canonical URL
• Cleaned up their redirects: Monitored progress with HTTP simulate textbed of 33 URLs
• Made DNS changes
• Eliminated unnecessary Meta refreshes: Developed a redirect application for Web editors to use.
• Established a unified proxy with ibm.com: Eliminated redirects. The canonical URL appears in the visitor's browser - beneficial for social bookmarking.

She shows how well IBM has recovered and that they're growing their visitors.

Take a look at your own infrastructure and redirects. No matter how bad your situation is, recovery is possible! Aw.

Mike Grehan takes a moment to plug Mike Moran's new book and wants to make sure it gets mentioned in the liveblogging. See, Mike, I got it.

Question and Answer

To Diane: Did Google provide any assistance when you were in this train wreck?

They got a letter from Google because they had a personal contact there. But that was it.

To Diane: What analytics were you using when you discovered the problem?

They used SurfAid, it's an IBM product. They're transitioning to CoreMetrics right now. She pitches SurfAid a bit.

To Matt: Did you actually watch all those Star Trek episodes? (Hee!)

Matt says he watched about half. Sci-Fi has an episode-by-episode recap and they list Red Shirts. He got his "data" from there.

For Diane: After you consolidated those URL, did you notice any changes outside of Google?

Google makes up 90 percent of their search engine referrals and has forever. They didn't notice any changes with the other engines.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/ 6/08 at 2:44 PM | Comments (1)

Essential KPIs for Search Engine Optimization

Time to kick off the Search Analytics track here at eMetrics. Finally something I almost recognize! Brian Klais (Netconcepts) and Richard Zwicky (Enquisite) will be taking charge of this one with Mike Grehan and his famous stick moderating. Curiously, the WiFi that was working yesterday is now nonexistent. Guess that means lots of trips back up to my hotel room on the 6th floor to post. Fun times!

[Note: If you're a crazy stalker, I'm not really on the 6th floor. I'm on the...12th. Yes, the 12th. Are there even twelve floors in the Palace Hotel? I'm not sure.] You fail stealth, Lisa --Susan

Up first is Brian to talk about the 10 essential natural search KPIs.

At NetConcepts they have a technology called GravityStream which helps large Web sites automate the application of search engine optimization best practices. They have a channel management dashboard to give people more control, as well as proprietary natural search analytics. It's the analytics he's going to share with us today.

These are the questions Brian's company is asking itself:

• Is our natural search performance good or not?
• We've eaten the low hanging fruit. What's next?
• How much more upside is there or is this it?
• How do we calculate ROI on SEO initiatives?
• My CEO wants 50 percent growth. Is it possible?

They had to develop metrics to help them answer those questions. There's more to search success than measuring hits and rankings. He looks at KPIs like brand-to-non-brand ratio, unique pages, indexation rate, phrase per page, visitors per phrase, page placement, yelling pages, and engine yield rate.

His goals in the business are to maximize the performance of 100 percent of the pages he's entrusted with. They treat natural search like a direct response channel, not a project. They want to improve as many pages as possible with the least amount of effort. They want to lead data driven decisions.

He brings up a tag cloud that shows us how we search. We're not looking for brand names. We're looking for a solution to our needs. We're looking for "jeans for women with no butts". Hee. It's hard to predict these searches, so how do you make your content rank well?

Essential KPIs for Search Engine Optimization:

1. Brand to Non-Brand Ratio: Traffic driven by brand keywords vs. non-brand. This indicates remaining opportunity. Long tail search = 40x brand search. Ideally your traffic is dominated by non-brand queries.
2. Unique Pages: Non-duplicate pages crawled by the bots. This establishes the size of your Web site and forms the top of the funnel. Think: tonnage or emails sent. I don't know what tonnage means, but hopefully all of you do.
3. Indexation Rate: How many of your crawled pages are actually making it into the index? This tells you your advertising inventory. Example: if Google crawls 26,000 of your pages and Google has 15,400 indexed, that means you have an indexation rate of 58 percent. That's good but where is the other 42 percent? Are they stuck in the supplementals?
4. Yielding Pages: How many of your pages are actually driving traffic? How many searchers clicked on your ads? It measures ad efficiency. Think: Email click through. It helps you identify your non-performing pages so that you can optimize them and get them to convert more often.
5. Phrases per Page: Reflects on page keywords and internal anchor text. Surgical optimization (title, meta, content). Can help you outsource the longtail to your users? Maybe by using UGC?
6. Visitors per Page: Reflects brand strength and rank. Talks about HSN who enhanced their URLs to include keywords. Ended up influencing and increasing the PageRank score. Increased traffic 550 percent.
7. Page Placement: Looks at click throughs as a function of ranking. Where are your pages ranking within the SERPs and how much traffic are you getting from those ads? Quantify the value of Page 1 placement. Develop strategies for Page 2.
8. Engine Yield Rate: Compares return on crawler investment. Shows you which engines you should target based on which return the most searchers.
9. Natural Search Sales: Gives you your ROI.
10. Brand Reach: 114,000 searchers found the brand useful for their query. Won 43,000 unique keyword market battles. How many didn't find the brand? Allows you to back into estimating the market size.

Ideas to start experimenting with: Looking at keyword URLs, tag cloud navigation, PageRank sculpting, alternative navigation links.

Next is Richard Zwicky. The computer just crashed so Mike has to restart it. Richard gives his intro while Mike plays in the background trying to get things up and running. Richard says his office burned down in the past week. For serious? Oh noes!

Using Analytics to Drive Big Wins:

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 by 4550 percent!

Step 1: Identify and monitor which pages are being found for relevant terms by your visitors from page 2 of the SERPS.

How do you do that? First, identify which queries drive valuable traffic. Which Web pages do you listed on Page 2 of the SERPs that get the most referral traffic for those queries? Identify which the queries matter to you and optimize the pages for those terms.

He talks about some rank checking software.

Strengths of rank checking software: These tools allow you to show actual SERP results in reports. You can track competitors. This will give you great insight into precise positioning in results. They allow you to monitor movement/progress

Drawbacks: The weaknesses are that it doesn't always correspond to results in your location. You need to specify terms, pages, etc. There's a risk of violation the T&Cs from the engines, as well if you abuse it. It takes hours to set up properly.

Alternative to rank checking software is using your analytics package. This allows you to look at the terms your customers are using, to see real phrase, understand traffic based on where your customers are located, ID pages to target as opposed to guessing, automatically keep tack of all the long tail variations, and to show you which terms convert. You can do all of this in 30 seconds.

The weaknesses are that it doesn't show precise position on page and that you have to manually build campaign profiles.

Identifying the pages that are underperforming (ranked on page 2) gives you an incredible opportunity. These pages are almost there. You can now focus in, cut to the chase, and that site popped up to page 1.

What to Optimize:

Content: The long tail phrases people are using. Look for the root terms and build out from there. Build targeted content and link it to the target pages.

Links: Where are you underperforming? Get links targeted to your location and topic.

Question & Answer

Mike Grehan: Isn't ranking checking very 1999?

Richard recommends looking at how well you're placed to find opportunities for optimization. He doesn't recommend using it as any kind of benchmark for clients.

Isn't PageRank sculpting just spam?

Brian says no. PR Sculpting is the idea that every certain page has a PR score and you want to maximize how that PR asset gets spent. All pages aren't created equal. You don't want some pages to be diluting your presence so you nofollow the links going to those pages so the bots don't pay attention to them.

If the rel=nofollow tag was developed to say "I don't trust this link" why would you use it on your own Web site?

Brian thinks it's a strategy worth experimenting with. Vanessa Fox is in the audience and advises everyone to go read our interview with her from last week where she talks in depth about PageRank sculpting.

Top Secret Tip From Vanessa Fox!

Vanessa offered up a tip for finding out how many of your site pages Google has indexed. She says that if you submit an XML Sitemap to Google and list all the URLs you want indexed, Google will keep track of how many of those pages are indexed. Basically, it will give you a total number of pages indexed from the site map. So if you list ALL your pages, Google will tell you how many pages are indexed. Great tip from Vanessa!

[If you missed Vanessa's pre-eMetrics interview, be sure to read Six Questions With Vanessa Fox.--Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/ 6/08 at 12:53 PM | Comments (2)

May 2, 2008

Plugging Up Those Duplicate Content Holes

Is your site suffering from unfortunate duplicate content? Do you wake up at night in fear that your perfectly SEO'd pages will be filtered out of the SERPs? Have you suffered any of the following symptoms: Link dilution, ranking fragmentation, important page disappearing, rank checking-induced vomiting? If so, we can help!

Here are some of the common causes of duplicate content and how to best avoid them.

Plagiarism/Scraping

Accept it; most people are jerks. That means many folks out there will have no problem stealing your content and slapping it on their own site to place ads on it. It's up to you to protect your valuable content from these villains. The first step in protecting your site is to mark your territory. That includes using your brand name frequently within the content, sticking to absolute links, and hosting your images locally. People will likely steal your content anyway, but this will make it harder for them to do so and easier for you to spot.

You'll also want to be vigilant about protecting your content. There are plenty of ways to go about this. Copyscape is a good tool to use to go hunting or stolen passages or you can cut and paste a snippet of unique text and use it as a Google Alert. If you find someone has stolen your content and that it has caused Google to trigger a filter, either approach them about taking it down or consider changing your content so that it is no longer duplicated. It sounds like a pain, but it's often the easier recourse and is much better than having your pages filtered out of the index!

Parameter/URL Issues

Any time the search engines find the same page at multiple URLs, you have a duplicate content situation. For example, if you type in the three URLs below and they all bring up your home page, you have a problem.

• www.example.com
• www.example.com/index
• example.com

Your customers may be able to figure out what's going on, but the search engines will see three versions of the same page and pick for themselves which one gets to live in the index. You don't want Google or Yahoo making these very important site decisions for you. Figure out how you want people linking to you and stick to it. 301 the other versions of the page to the lucky URL you decided on.

Sites can also get themselves into trouble when they begin using ugly parameters to track their customers' movements through their site. Not only does this present a duplicate content issue because the engines can access the same page through multiple URLs, but it's also not particularly user-friendly. You also run the risk of skewing your analytics data if the parameter-filled URL gets indexed and users start using it to click through from the SERPs.

If you're going to put parameters in your URLs for tracking purposes, you have a few options. You can block that URL from being spidered by doing a mod_ rewrite or simply redirect it to the URL without the tracking parameter. If you do opt for the latter, make sure it doesn't mess up your ability to track. Sometimes things get buggy.

Multiple Site Issues/ Mirror Sites

Bruce Clay has offices in the United States, South Africa, the UK and beyond. To make sure the search engines recognize that these are different sites even though the content may be fairly similar, we're careful to create content specific to each country, as well as take care of all the technical aspects as well - like using country-specific TLDs, hosting the site in the country it's targeting, specifying that in our Webmaster Tools, etc. Matt Cutts has noted that site owners need not worry too much about duplicate content when it comes to different top level domains. Google is able to tell which site should rank and then filter the dupes.

Along the same lines, you want to be careful of mirror sites that simply republish the same content on multiple domains. For example, some sites have multiple domains like http://www.mydomain.com, http://www.my-domain.com, http://www.mymisspelleddomain.com that are all mirroring the same content. The solution would be to 301 redirect the duplicate domains to the main domain. This not only helps eliminate duplicate content issues, it also makes sure you're not wasting any link popularity.

Product Pages

Product pages are a goldmine for duplicate content because they've very often been built using a single template. This means they'll typically share the same basic description with just a few words altered to tell the customer that the shoe they're looking at also comes in red, black brown and blue, as well as in suede and patent leather. Your customers may love you for all of your available options, but the search engines are likely to get confused as to why you have virtually identical content on several pages of your site. Not that they'll penalize you for it. They'll simply "help" you by "filtering" all the extras.

You really have three options when it comes to this one.

1. Take on a massive project and write unique content for all of your product pages
2. Update your robots.txt so that only one product description (preferably the one that provides the most revenue) is crawled
3. Consolidate your product pages and use another method to show all the different styles and options. Perhaps using CSS or some other fancy hover-type creation.

Block Printer Pagers

It's good that provide printer-friendly pages for readers and customers looking to take your content with them, but there's absolutely no reason why the spiders should have to know about it. These pages may be super usable for your audience but they provide no links back to your site for the engines to follow and they're just going to diminish the apparent uniqueness of your content. Put these pages in their own folder and then disallow it in your robots.txt. It's that simple.

What other forms of duplicate content do you commonly come across?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/ 2/08 at 9:45 AM | Comments (1)

April 28, 2008

SEO Weekend Update

Hey, friends. We've got a busy week ahead here at Bruce Clay, so let's just jump right into some of the big stories of the day. Grab a cookie or something and let's go!

First, Some Housekeeping!

First things first, did you know that Bruce Clay, Inc. now has its very own Twitter feed where you can easily keep up with our daily blog postings? If not, now you do! If you prefer to get your blog updates via Twitter, start following BruceClayInc and hear all about what TheLisa says. ;) [Even when it's not TheLisa posting, I notice. --Susan] Hey, it's automated, give me a break.

Also, I'll be heading up to eMetrics San Francisco next week for another around of "let's see if we can make Lisa's hands fall off!" as I attempt to liveblog three days of Web analytics sessions. Keep your eyes on the blog to see which sessions I'll be covering. As a special treat, we'll also be featuring interviews on the blog with some of eMetrics familiar faces, including Vanessa Fox, John Marshall and Matt Bailey, so keep an eye out for that!

And our last bit of housekeeping news: The SEO Newsletter will be hitting your inboxes Wednesday afternoon so make sure you're subscribed. This month features dueling articles from Susan and myself as we debate why size matters in SEO conferences.

Yahoo To Help You Find Your "Center"

Danny Sullivan talks about a new Yahoo paper about finding the local "center" of search queries and how it may help the engines decide which pages are more relevant for local interests and which have more of a national audience. There are some interesting tidbits in both Danny's coverage and the actual study itself. Danny lists off a number of ways he thinks mapping search results by their "center" could be useful, though I'm not entirely convinced. Let's let users do the search and sites optimize for how they want to show up. I'm not sure I'm okay with the engines moving around my "center" and skewing results based upon it without my permission. I'm a control freak like that. Or maybe I just like authentic results.

I personally love how we need a study to tell us that it's mostly people in New England searching for [Red Sox] every hour on the hour and how the line of searchers typing in [Hurricane Dean] into their search box matches the path of the actual hurricane. Um, thanks for that totally obvious information.

Protecting Your Job With Common Sense

Andy Beal comments on the Washington Post article about When Young Teachers Go Wild on the Web. The Post basically asks if disciplinary action should be taken against teachers with racy MySpace and Facebook profiles. I'm sorry, and this may age me, but I have to go with a resounding "yes" here.

It's not that I think people aren't entitled to a private life; it's that I think if you're going to be working with school-age children and setting yourself up as a role model, I think you should have enough common sense to check the "set to private" on your MySpace profile settings and restrict who can view your Facebook profile.

As Andy points out in his post, the actions and behavior these teachers are being "outed" for is nothing new. People in their 20s, regardless of profession, have been going out to bars, doing stupid things, and then photographing the evidence for as long as the camera has been in existence. The only difference is now these young adults are publishing tracks for their debauchery on the Internetz. And when you're supposed to be setting an example, it's probably worth keeping that stuff behind a locked door. You don't blow up your racy pictures and put them on billboards in front of your house, do you?

You're an adult. Do you want to do, but be responsible about it.

Fun Finds

Four days ago Mack Collier wrote that when it comes to blogging, you can't let the fear win. I've had the window with Mack's post open for four days. It speaks to me.

Over at All Things Digital, Kara Swisher says no one but us tech nerds knows what Twitter is. Well, yes, Kara, but they will! Oh, will they. [And then we'll all leave for the next big thing. --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/28/08 at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2008

Effectively Leveraging Social Networking

Hello, hello. It's day 2. I have orange juice instead of coffee this morning. Lisa's still sick from yesterday. As usual, I blame Susan. I'm going to do my best to make it through today's batch of sessions.

Kicking things off this morning we have Barbara Boser (3 Dog Media), Cindy Krum (Blue Moon Works), Randy Woods (non-linear creations), and Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service). Danny Sullivan is once again moderating. This man is earning his paycheck this week.

Up first is Barbara Boser. Just as a fun fact, if you've never met Barbara, she's probably the nicest woman in the whole world. I'm just saying.

Marketing your Business with Facebook

Pages: You can build a page in Facebook for your business. She looks at DunkinDonuts page because its Greg's favorite. Aw. You can add events and people will get notifications. You can upload photos, start a discussion board, create a poll, etc. Polls are a good way to get answers about products your customers like. You're also able to let people write on your wall and upload their own media. When someone becomes a fan of your company, all of their friends will see that and can join too.

Facebook Social Ads: It's not yet that advanced. You can filter through by age, keywords, place, etc, and narrow down your audience. Good way to target. The ads show up in the users' news feed or on the left sidebar.

Groups: You can search for groups related to your business and then participate in the conversations going on about your company.

Events: Create event pages. People can RSVP and write on the wall.

Sharing: You can share blog posts. Every time you update, all of your Facebook Fans will be informed of that.

Beacon: A little controversial last year because of privacy issues. You put some code on your site and when a FB user completes an action on your site, it gets listed in their news feed.

Lexicon: You can put in a keyword and it tracks how many times Starbucks is mentioned on the Facebook wall across all profiles. Pretty cool.

Apps: If you're on Facebook you probably have a whole list of people wanting you to download an application. Once you join, people will see a link to your company. You want to create something that's viral and that people will want to share with their friends.

How Much Traffic Can I Get?

She talks about Neil Patel's Flixster Facebook application where it compares what movies you like to what movies your friends like. He got 16+ million visits from Facebook. Barbara says that number has already doubled. Wow.

Next up is Cindy Krum to talk about MySpace. Ew, MySpace.

She still believes MySpace has a lot of value if you're trying to reach certain demographics. It still has 80 million users worldwide.

MySpace Whoas (aka the good things):

Flying Dog Brewery: Local Denver brewery with a MySpace page. The have used their page to establish a company voice and personality. They're reaching out to a specific demographic. They're talking to people and creating a community around the brand. They also use it to notify users about events and products.

They're taking paper flyers and putting them on their MySpace page so all of their friends can see they're having a zombie dance party. Wow. A zombie dance party, eh? Snazzy. That flyer is also their new profile picture, which helps to draw attention to their profile.

They also use MySpace Events to promote all of their events. People can type in their zip codes to look for events and the cool things happening in their city.

They use MySpace bulletins. It's similar to the wall in Facebook. You can announce contests, release newsletters, offer discounts to MySpace users etc.

Companies can also put YouTube videos on their page or post the videos on their friends' pages as comments. Because that's not annoying. They've also used their photos as a catalog for their merchandise. They can't buy from the MySpace page, but they can direct them to their real site.

This has search engine optimization value. These pages rank well in the engines.

True: Web-based dating community. Creating brand awareness.

Link to quizzes, badges and fun games from their MySpace profile to engage visitors.

They have a Create a Date game where you can skew pictures of people and then send it to a friend. It's viral. They have a Date-O-Rama game to help you find and plan a date. They've also put an entry way to their site in the corner of MySpace. It gets people where they need to go.

MySpace Woes (the bad things)

Westwood College: There were a lot of people who had self-identified as Westwood Students. They wanted to create a community online. The profile would encourage communication between students and disperse information about classes, events, holidays, news, school closures, etc.

Your MySpace profile has to be a good representation of your brand. You can't just slap something up there. A cool branded profile takes a lot of time and skill - use CSS or MySpace's profile layout tool. Cool profiles have to be updated frequently.

You can't accept everyone who wants to be your friend. You have to manage them and make sure they're appropriate. Get rid of those with questionable photos. Make sure they represent your brand well. She talks about how sometimes friends' profiles change. They had a nice guy in a polo T-shirt join. He was really active and participatory. And then he changed his profile pic of a photo of him in S&M gear. They had to remove all his comments because he suddenly didn't represent them well. (Hmm, not sure how I feel about that, but okay.)

Communication needs to be managed. Will you respond to emails? Will all comments be approved? Will you participate in groups? What kind of blog communication is appropriate for your brand?

Travel Site: They wanted to create a travel widget that would be useful for travelers and travel bloggers. They needed something cool that hadn't been done before. They wanted a widget that would work in all social networks.

Not all Developers are widget developers. MySpace messes with your code. Widgets that work on other social networks may not work in MySpace. And Widgets that work in MySpace/IE7 may not work in Firefox.

Tips for Developing Widgets:

• MySpace converts HTML into its preferred object format before saving
• Links: All links are encoded. Links in Flash won't work at all.
• MySpace bans some widget companies
• Use Flash Version 9 & Action Script 3.0

You can also use Open Social.

Randy Woods is up to talk about LinkedIn.

He starts off with some disclaimers. He's Canadian. Everyone laughs. Most of his clients are in the US. He's also old. His company started in 1995. He's also a generalist. He talks about conference brain. Conference brain means you're hung over. Wow.

He says marketing is being defined in its narrowest sense - promotion. Social media is also important for the other elements of marketing - product and positioning.

LinkedIn - Why Bother

• About 20 million professionals
• Average income: 140,000
• Vampire free
• About 2 million of these at executive level
• 500 of Fortune 500 represented at executive level

Harvard Business School did a study on LinkedIn and found out that 90 percent of people on LinkedIn are relationship managers. Five percent are networks and five percent are contractors. All of the Fortune 500 people you're interested in are in the relationship manager piece. They're only talking to people they know already. They don't want to meet strangers.

But they do want their problems solved. They want to know before they engage with you that you can solve their problems. That's where the Question & Answer service fits in.

You can use LinkedIn Answers to reach influencers. The challenge is that the people you want responding to these questions are your most valuable employees. They're the people who don't have time to be cruising social networks. But if you use Yahoo Pipes, you can combine everything and put it into one dashboard. Or something. Yahoo Pipes is about 10 leagues over my head.

LinkedIn Answers means dollars in your pocket.

Case Study: 11 percent conversion rate for free traffic.

Four Things I Don't Believe:

1. Conversions Don't Matter
2. All Visitors Are Created Equal: I don't care about 20 million people at Digg. I care about the people who are targeted to our business.
3. Don't Write A Thesis: If what you're selling is expertise, you better make sure what you write can sell that.
4. Never Force Registration

Recap: Marketing is more than promotion. No one important wants to hear from you. You have to get their attention. LinkedIn Answers equals dollars. LinkedIn Converts.

Michael Gray will finish things off by discussing Twitter.

Twitter is a microblogging platform. You write short messages and share them with the world. Twitter is what happens between blog posts. Or conference sessions.

Why Marketers Should Care About Twitter

Using twitters as a permission marketing tool to reach bleeding edge customers. It works like RSS. It's pull technology. It allows you to protect/block your updates from people.

Twitter = Traffic

• Use Twitter to drive traffic to your Web site or blog when you post a new update.
• Use Twitter to share news, information, and links with your followers
• Use Twitter to help with your other social media efforts
• Use Twitter to drive conversions and sales
• Depending on your sector and quality of followers, Twitter can have really high CTR.

Understanding How Twitter Works:

Next to everyone's name is a star so that you can save it if you want. There's also an arrow to make it easy to reply to someone. If people reach out to you, make sure to respond back to them. The Archive section allows you to see everything you've ever Twittered.

Tools To Get More Out Of Twitter:

• Web Browser Based - Twitter, twitbin, twitterfox
• Desktop Clients - Twhirl, alert thingy
• Blog Tools - Twitter tools, Loud Twitter, Twit This
• Email - Twittermail
• Smartphone - twitterberry, itweet
• API - Roll it into your own application

Who's Using Twitter?

CarnivalCruise - Sends you to different articles
JetBlue - They're really interacting with people and their community. They're a great example.
AmazonDeals
Woot
TechMeme
Sphinn
Zappos
HillaryMomJeans
Maratriangle

More Tips for Getting More Out of Twitter

• Set up a profile with an avatar
• Have updates
• Don't follow people with a blank profile
• Always reply to your @ messages
• Twitterbots will follow everyone who follows them
• People will follow and unfollow depending on if you match their expectations.

Twitter Tracking and Twitter Search Tools

You can type a word into Twitter and it will tell you everyone who has mentioned those words. If you're a company dealing with the public you should be tracking your company name.

TweetScan

Quotably: Makes @ messages into a threaded conversation. Helps give you context to a conversation

He also points out the Twitter leaderboard.

Twitter Ranks

Jason Calacanis' Twitter feed ranks 4th for his name.
Barack Obama's Twitter profile has a top ten ranking for his name.

Question and Answer

Are there any legal issues to create a Facebook brand profile?

Cindy: You have to be careful of what you say, especially if you're not the brand spokesperson. As far as legal stuff, she's not sure. Treat it like you would treat any other marketing venue.

Age demographics of Twitter?

Michael's not sure.

Seems heavy handed to only let certain people by your MySpace friend. Do you think you're alienating people?

For her example, they were trying to create a community for a private college. They wanted to create a perception of what the brand was. They wanted to control the image. They didn't want people to think that people who went to this school were heavy drinkers or pot smokers. I have so many problems with that answer.

Barbara: On Facebook you can just be a fan and not necessarily have a friend relationship, so it's a bit different. Even if you're not going to use the social profile, you should claim the one for your company before someone else does.

Randy: In a broader sense, there just may be some brands for whom the social networking sites aren't appropriate. I'm not sure if that's a long term strategy.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/23/08 at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2008

SEO Weekend Update

Why Even Hire A Search Engine Optimization Company

There's an article over at Search Engine Journal today that asks why people would hire a search engine optimization company or bother training someone in-house. SEI is nothing more than some tag optimization and link collecting, right? Oh heavens. Not this conversation again.

If you don't think having someone trained in search engine optimization is valuable to your team and that you can do the whole thing yourself with minimal training, well...then you're both delusional and a really bad SEO. It also proves that you've never tried to rank a site for any type of competitive keyword. Get your site ranking for a non made up word and then we'll talk.

SEO isn't easy. Can you save yourself the money and learn to do it yourself? Maybe. Motivated people can teach themselves to do virtually anything. Like how to jump off buildings without getting hurt. However, don't you have a job already? Learning how to do search engine optimization the right way takes a good amount of talent and dedication. That's time that you're not spending on your core business. If you don't realize that and you think SEO is just about optimizing Meta tags then you know even less than you thought.

If you're trying to save money, cutting corners with mediocre SEO isn't the way to go. That may actually cost you more when you fail to capitalize on the target traffic you would have received with a smart SEO campaign. Hiring a good search engine optimization may actually prove to be far more cost effective.

Is Failing At Web Analytics The Key To Success?

At WebMetricsGuru the question is whether failing at Web Analytics is often the key to success later on. It's like a geekier version of the chicken or the egg

I don't think it's "failing" that's the key. The key is using Web analytics. That initial failure is just the natural process of things. You're not going to be perfect right out of the gate; that's how you learn and make improvements and come away with a better Web site.

I don't think you can have a truly successful site without the help of Web analytics. Analytics show you how your visitors are interacting with your site, where they're running into problems, where valuable advertising dollars are being wasted due to no traffic, etc. Web analytics programs give search marketers the ability to track call to actions and to understand the conversion funnel in ways that you can't always see when looking at sales alone. It basically allows you to make tweaks to your site while leaving the light on. You can't fix something you don't realize is broken. And the more stuff that gets fixed, the better your site is going to perform.

Search Marketing Budgets Increasing In Europe

Over at Search Engine Watch, Greg Jarboe reveals that UK search marketing budgets are beginning to increase as search marketers across the pond begin to see the value of a healthy Internet marketing campaign. According to Greg and the UK Search Engine Marketing Report released today, 63 percent of UK businesses plan to increase their paid search budget, while 61 percent plan to increase their search engine optimization budget. I'm sure Rory De Niro and Marie Howell of Bruce Clay Europe are glad to hear this. ;)

Key takeaways from the report:

• One in ten companies surveyed is spending more than £1 million annually on paid search.


• Since 2007, the proportion of companies conducting paid search (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) exclusively in-house have declined.


• Correspondingly, the proportion of respondents outsourcing to an agency for both disciplines has gone up.


• The proportion of agencies offering landing page optimization has increased from 71% to 76%, making this the second most commonly offered service.

Fun Finds

Marc Hausman wonders if it's ethical to follow two of his employees on Twitter. Personally, I think that's territory better left unexplored. Why make everyone paranoid? There's a reason I have my Twitter account protected. :)

The Guardian reports that Google is the most powerful brand in the world. Because we didn't know that already. Thanks.

And just a reminder: I'll be heading down to Long Beach tonight for the SMX Social Media Marketing event that begins tomorrow and goes through Wednesday. If you're in town, make sure you track me down and say hello!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/21/08 at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2008

How You Define Search Engine Optimization Matters

One thing that makes the search engine optimization industry so complex is that it's near impossible to find two people who define SEO the same way. Eavesdrop on conversations taking place in the hotel bar during a trade show and you'll hear people arguing whether SEO is about rankings or conversions, whether link bait is a viable technique or just today's buzzword, what exactly qualifies as SEO, who your site should be geared for, etc. Search engine optimization may not be rocket science but it's not as easy as making a grilled cheese sandwich either.

It's why SEO has this weird reputation following it and why we may never come to an agreement on the SEO standards debate. The fact is, the way you define search engine optimization matters. It forms the basis for your entire viewpoint regarding how you look at SEO, and ultimately, how you create and manage a campaign.

When you talk about SEO do you look at it as a one shot deal, a long term investment, a collection of techniques you can use to steal rankings, a combo of all three?

At Bruce Clay, Inc. we believe in search engine optimization as a long-term Internet marketing strategy. And even that is misleading because it suggests that somewhere down the line there's an "end" to that process. And we don't feel that there is. Search engine optimization will be a part of your life for the entire life of your site. There may be times when you'll have to focus on it more or less, but it's never something you can completely forget about. At least not to us.

But not everyone will agree with that. When you're judging an SEO vendor you can get a quick glimpse into how they view SEO by looking at the kind of tactics they're preaching and the plan they're creating for your site. Before you sign a contract, you better make sure you have aligning viewpoints.

Because we're about creating and SEOing sites for the long term it means that we're more interested in helping our clients to create link magnets and resources, than quick linkbait. Even though link magnets may take more time and are often harder to implement, we believe it creates more value for our clients over time. If you go to an SEO firm and they're talking about getting links quick and don't seem up to the challenge of ensuring those links stick long-term, then they're probably a company who thinks of SEO as a quick fix or something you do in the beginning while still fighting for rankings. That may be all you're looking for, but know that beforehand.

What kind of linking strategy is that SEO firm talking about building for you? When they talk about purchasing links is it about manipulating PageRank or using those links as a traffic source? Is buying links all they're offering or do they have a competitive link strategy with a clear plan for earning you links from noted authorities in your field?

If your vendor views search engine optimization has a long term strategy, they're likely open to teaching you best practices and explaining what they're doing. If SEO is a quick fix to them, then they won't be. What's their level of transparency?

Like I mentioned, for us, search engine optimization is a long-term marketing strategy and that has a huge impact on the way we do things. We're about getting clients off on the right foot and then working with them to maintain that. Before you go with any vendor, ask yourself what you want out of your SEO campaign. Once you know that, make sure whatever principles and views you have regarding SEO are mirrored by those you leave in charge.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/17/08 at 2:05 PM | Comments (3)

April 16, 2008

Big Brands Need Search Engine Optimization Too

The SEM Insight blog started a conversation about the reasons big brands downplay search engine optimization. Laura Callow attributes it to their need for an easy-to-maintain system, personalization and tracking, issues concerning languages and multiple countries, and legal red tape. Personally, I don't even want to hear the excuses big brand companies throw out for not investing in search engine optimization, because truthfully that's all they are, excuses. Stop doing your company a disservice and take a look at what's going on around you. Otherwise, prepare to lose your rankings, your customers and your cushy yacht.

There's a big misconception out there that companies already well branded don't need to invest in search engine optimization because they're already showing up for their branded terms and are in customers top of mind recall. I'm sure this helps top level execs sleep better at night all tucked into their mansions, but it's still a bunch of crap. Wake up, people.

It's true that big brands may have an easier time getting indexed and ranking for their brand name, but is that how you measure search engine optimization or business success? Not in the slightest.

Like we mentioned yesterday, anyone can rank in the top spot for anything - you just have to pick a term no one else wants. And often, your brand name is just that. Sure, New Balance may rank for [New Balance] based off their offline prominence, but that's not going to help them increase sales and conversions by attracting new customers. They need SEO to help them focus their site around category themes like [trail runners], [women's athletic apparel], [fitness], [outdoor sports] and other long-tail type queries to make sure they're showing up for all sorts of searches. This is where your new business is going to come from. Anyone searching for your brand name was looking for you anyway. You haven't "gained" that sale, you just didn't lose it.

It's disheartening when you see big brands out there completely unengaged and uninterested in their users. I know things are slower to move in big business, but as a brand that users already love, there's just so much potential to do really great stuff. To tap into that loyal brand community and to come up with new ways for your users to do the endorsing for you. Think of all the SEM dollars you could save if you didn't have to invest in PPC because your community helped you dominate the SERPs. Think of all the other ways that money could be spent. Like on donuts for everyone!

And I don't care how well known you are, there's always room for improvement. You should never become complacent or satisfied with your traffic and sales to the point where you're sitting on your couch counting your money. Get out there and look for ways to increase your brand's reach, to target new customers, to find new product ideas, to extend your brand's authority. That's the making of a successful business.

The old line of thinking that said big brands didn't have to worry about search engine optimization or advertising is what many are now trying to correct. How embarrassing is it to have users search for your brand or keywords and find a hate site about your company instead? Or how about when someone does a search and a local hobby site is ranking where your multi-million company should be? You don't want to be sitting there with egg on your face and less money in your pocket because you got lazy.

And search engine optimization isn't just about ranking. Companies need to be aware of SEO to ensure they're creating spiderable, usable sites. That they're optimizing their media correctly so that it will show up in blended search results. That they're paying attention to analytics in order to learn how customers interact with their site. An SEO'd site is a healthy site. It's one that performs better, smarter, faster and more efficient.

Big brands, I don't want to hear all the excuses why you can't possible invest in search engine optimization. I don't care about all the red tape or your problems with your IT department or how the executives just don't understand its value. Investing in SEO is vital for a company looking to succeed. As well known as you think your brand is, there's still room for you to extend your reach and build authority. With more and more small- and medium-sized businesses investing in search engine optimization, you can be darn sure that they're coming for you. You can get lazy if you want but realize that if you're not out there defending your brand, your market and your product line, it won't be long before you see Joe's House of Sneakers outranking your Fortune 500 shoe empire. We know because we're the ones helping them do it. ;)

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/16/08 at 4:23 PM | Comments (3)

April 2, 2008

Google Will Sell Performics, SEOs Exhale

Exciting news from The Official Google blog today that reveals Google will stop scaring SEOs everywhere and will sell off Performics, the search marketing company that they accidentally acquired when they bought DoubleClick last year. To avoid the conflict of interest that comes when you’re a search engine selling search engine optimization services, Google will split Performics into two companies – an affiliate marketing company and a search marketing company – and then sell the search marketing half.

Google, FTW!

Google is already getting props from Danny Sullivan, Shoemoney and Donna Fontenot for the decision and really, it was just the right thing to do. Google’s already freaking people out by owning nearly the entire online advertising market; they don’t need to be dipping their toes in SEO on top of that.

Here’s a snippet of what Google had to say:

“It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Perfomics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers.”

Google notes that they haven’t yet found a buyer, but that they have had partners show interest. I’m sure now that the official word is already out, interest will skyrocket.

Way to go, Google.

While we’re on the topic, it’s worth mentioning that the New York Times reports that Google will be laying off about 300 DoubleClick employees as they prepare to merge the two companies. Google hasn’t yet confirmed the number, but we do know layoffs are in the works.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/ 2/08 at 4:31 PM | Comments (0)

April 1, 2008

What To Look For When Hiring InHouse SEOs

Last week I wrote a post about What to Look For When Hiring Bloggers. That post got me thinking about what traits I’d look for if I wasn’t hiring a blogger, but instead someone to join my inhouse SEO team. What qualities are Must Haves and which are just Wants?

Hiring SEOs is tricky because the search engine optimization industry is a unique one. It’s one of the few fields where finding someone special takes more than just recruiting kids out of college and paying them enough to buy a fridge filled of beer and some ramen. There is no SEO major. There’s no Usability major. There are subjects just barely on the cusp of what we do for a living but there’s nothing with a skillset that perfect aligns to search engine optimization. So what do you look for? What are the traits that make a good SEO?

When coming up with traits SEOs should have I left off things like “prior experience in SEO”, “knowledge of the search engines” or “being the brother of Matt Cutts”. It’s not that these things aren’t important (especially that last one), but they’re all things that can be taught (okay, 2 out of 3). Just because someone knows what SEO stands for doesn’t mean he or she is any better qualified than the girl currently sitting in the marketing department who secretly has some mad technological savvy.

With that, here are the traits I’d look for if Bruce ever lost his mind and put me in charge of hiring our SEO team:

• Technical Acumen: Most of what it takes to be a good SEO can be taught in a few months (at least on a basic level), but it definitely doesn’t hurt to hire someone with some technical skills. For example, I know that no amount of search engine optimization training will make me an A-list SEO. I could probably do the basics, but to be honest, I’m pretty technological retarded. I can’t even change my settings in Outlook without calling IT. You don’t want to hire someone like me to run your inhouse search engine optimization department. You want someone who is familiar with FTP programs, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, etc. Someone who perhaps has a basic understanding of Web design, IT understandings and knows Internet business models. I can write you some kickass ad copy, but that’s about it.
• Analytical Mindset: Going along with being technologically skilled, you should also look for someone who is a bit mathy and analytical. Someone who can look at data sets without feeling lightheaded. As an SEO, you can’t be intimidated by numbers or conversion rates or other types of Web metrics. So much of search engine optimization is interpreting the information you already have and then making decisions off that. Gathering all the information collectors in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t have anyone who knows how to do something with those numbers.
• Mad Research Skills: I personally believe (like such as?) that in order to be a good SEO you have to be tirelessly curious and inquisitive. Much of search engine optimization is based on research, tracking down answers, and experimentation that either you have the mindset for it or you don’t. When I look at the amount of time our SEO Analysts spend trying things out and researching the pearls of wisdoms exposed by the search engines, it’s amazing they get any “real” work done.
• A Think Outside The Box-er: Hey, search engine optimization ain’t for dummies and it’s definitely not static. You need someone will be able to soak up the training you’re giving them and run with it. Someone who can read Larry and Sergey’s master plan and pick it apart. Someone who’s able to understand marketing practices and the bigger picture. People who exudes creativity and has that spark in their eye when you present them with a problem with no answer. A good hire will always be able to find that answer or at least spend a week not sleeping trying to find it. I credit the success of Bruce Clay’s SEO team to these people. Our SEO Analytics who don’t see the leaves off the tree, but instead imagine the leaves and somehow make it all come together to form a solid foundation. They’re awesome.
• Ethics: I hate to even go here, but I think it’s important. You have to hire someone who will respect what search engine optimization is all about and not fall prey to the “quick and easy” mentality. The worst thing you can do is hire someone, teach them about SEO, and then watch as their eyes get real big reading less than pure SEO blogs and they start “experimenting” with your site. If you’re going to spend the time teaching someone the principles of search engine optimization, you want to make sure they’re going to stay true to those and not, um, wander. You don’t want your site getting banned because they were overzealous.
• Optimizable: Above all, you want someone who you can train and who will fit inside your organization. It makes no difference how smart they are, how creative, how skilled if they can’t work within your group. Smart people incapable of working in a group setting do nothing but frustrate everyone.

Obviously there are plenty of other traits that can help make a great SEO, but I think these are some of the most important. Would it be nice to have someone who has experience in Web analytics? Sure, but you can train someone how to do that. Would it be nice to have someone who can write and craft really stellar landing pages and ad copy? Yes, but you can outsource that to other departments or teach basic writing skills. These are the traits that your hire is either going to have or be without. They’re what’s most important.

Remember when hiring that you probably won’t find all of them in one person, but as long as they’re common among your SEO team, I think you’re in pretty good shape.

Which traits for the perfect SEO did I miss?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/ 1/08 at 5:32 PM | Comments (13)

SEO Headlines

Celebrating 50 Issues of the SEO Newsletter

Did you get your personalized copy of the SEO Newsletter in your inbox yesterday? We hope you did and that you’ve had a chance to check out the news tidbits, read about Expectation Management and learn a little something about Successful Site Architecture and Web Design. While we were putting together yesterday’s edition we noticed something kind of special. Yesterday we sent out the 50th edition. Yowsa, time flies!

Those of us who have been around for awhile will know that the SEO Newsletter started out as the SEOToolSet Newsletter when it launched back in 2004. Since then we’ve gone from updating monthly to being a bimonthly newsletter filled with news nuggets and a double dose of expert articles each month.

If you’re a subscriber, we hope you’ve been enjoying the newsletter that’s been hitting your inboxes at the middle and end of each month. And if you haven’t yet converted, I think yesterday’s anniversary is just the latest reason to come over to the light. We invite you to check out the newsletter archives, and if you like what you see, consider giving it a whirl. We did mention that it’s free, right?

Rand Gets Ranty over Startup Advice

Rand’s got his offensive yellow shoes all in a bunch because he’s sick of reading startup advice that doesn’t mention search engine optimization anywhere on the page. Rand is so frustrated with the lack of SEO mentions that he’s summoning his inner Rebecca Kelley and throwing a near fit on the SEOmoz blog, swearing included. Poor Rand. He needs a cookie.

I think the reason Rand’s resources are lacking any mention of search engine optimization is because he’s looking at general business articles. They’re not about how to market a company. They’re about how to set it up. How to find a unique selling point. How to treat employees so they don’t leave when you’re paying them in donuts. At this point, we’re not even talking about marketing; we’re talking about how to make your company valuable and keep it above water.

However, I’d be interested to know how many startups are really hiring SEOs at this point. My initial thought would be that the folks eating pizza and working out a basement aren’t likely to shell out a few thousand dollars a month for search engine optimization services. However, I think with the recession upon we’ll see this change. Talented inhouse SEOs are going to start splintering off from their agencies and begin offering affordable optimization services. Once costs come down, I think we’ll start to see SEO fit into the marketing budget for more startups. Sure, we can all say that SEO is worth the investment, but when you’re a baby startup and it’s either optimizing your Web site or paying the electricity…well, I hope you and your best friend can type in the dark.

Does A Faster Server Mean Higher Google Rankings?

Ah, the old “does having a fast server matter?” question. I know for a fact we’ve touched on this topic at least nine billion times, but since it’s coming up in the forums, here’s my quick spiel.

The answer is a definite “sort of”. Being on a faster server isn’t going to take your crappy site and instantly make it rank for all of its highly competitive keywords. However, a faster server does mean that Googleblot will be able to spider more of your site without fear of it crashing. The more pages Google has indexed, the more complete your site themes will be, and the better you’ll rank for your targeted keywords. Makes sense, right? Okay, now stop asking about it in the forums. Kthx.

Cre8asiteforums member EGOL thinks there may also be some social factors coming into play. Check out his response, as well.

Fun Finds

Nowsourcing talks about the different support networks that exist on Twitter. I have to say, being able to cry/vent/affection bait on Twitter is incredibly comforting and effective. You know have no idea the solace that can be had when say, someone steals your online identity and uses it to by random crap and ship it your apartment. Thanks for the virtual hugs, Twitter friends!

Darren Rowse creates a great resource with 20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider.

Danny Sullivan says Search Marketing’s No Place for a Search Engine, Google.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/ 1/08 at 2:36 PM | Comments (1)

March 27, 2008

We Do Need SEO Standards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/27/08 at 4:36 PM | Comments (28)

Search Headlines – Google & YouTube Edition

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

Google Not Punishing Sites Retroactively…Or Are They?

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

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

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

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

YouTube Gets Analytics

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

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

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

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

Site Owners Get A Robots.txt Generator

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

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

Fun Finds

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/27/08 at 4:33 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2008

Google Can Keep Its Site Search To Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/26/08 at 5:08 PM | Comments (2)

March 25, 2008

Local Search Engine Optimization Doesn’t Exist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/25/08 at 3:46 PM | Comments (8)

SEO Headlines

Matt McGee Offers Very Polite Smackdown

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

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

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

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

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

Which is Better: Search Engine Optimization or PPC?

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

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

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

Fun Finds

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

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/25/08 at 3:42 PM | Comments (2)

March 24, 2008

Jason Calacanis Is The Devil & SEOs are Children

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

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

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

And then I woke up from my crazy dream world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/24/08 at 3:29 PM | Comments (8)

March 20, 2008

Staffing Up Search

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

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

Up first is Kendall.

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

Considerations:

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

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

Values and flaws personified – 6 profiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ronne is who we want!

The drivers of talents

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


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


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


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

Mike Moran is up next.

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

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

Your first decision: agency or in house?

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

How to Choose an Agency:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nell is up.

Challenges of acquiring talent:

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

Challenges with the Search Industry:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hee!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/20/08 at 10:33 AM | Comments (2)

OldTimers On Search

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

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

Rob Graham is up first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Effective Market Research:

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

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

Media weight & Search queries:

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

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

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

If a person is researching the new BMW and they don’t have Audi at all in their mind, Audi can ch