SEM Events

October 6, 2008

SEM for Small Businesses

As much as I love New York, this Cali girl needs her warm weather. Thankfully, for the first time today I'm not freezing cold in this room. Little blogger fingers do much better when not afflicted with the early stages of frostbite.

This session is sponsored by SEMPO and our moderator is Greg Hartnett, Best of the Web. He's going to start the presentations even though one of the speakers is apparently stuck in cross-town traffic. Half the room nods in understanding.

SEMPO is a great resource for Internet marketers with lots of free stuff, online courses and webinars available. If you haven't already, you should check it out.

Lauren Vaccarello, LVLogic, will be presenting on the cheap, free and easy tools available to small businesses. Small businesses don't always have the resources to pay for the new tools coming out. But, they're faster and more flexible than large businesses.

Competitive research is the backbone to every site. Find out what your competition is doing well and what they're failing on. There's no reason to start from scratch when you can learn the flaws and strengths and build from that.

Compete.com has a competitive research tool, but it can get expensive if you're doing a lot of queries. SpyFu.com is a low-cost alternative at about $13 a day. A free option is the SEObook Firefox Extension. You'll find out how many links there are and get an idea of what's needed to reach the top of the rankings for those tools. SEODigger is another free tool that shows the sites ranking for keywords. Xenu gives you you're Alexa ranking, backlinks and ranking pages.

Now that you've got the competitive research done, it's time for keyword research. Wordze is a great tool at about $40 a month and will give you keyword information. A free alternative is Keyword Discovery has a free and paid version. It gives you the volume of search terms.

For backlink tools, SEOmoz Backlink Analysis, at about $50 a month, will give you lots of info. But for a free tool, try Comment Hunt. It will let you know how to get some comment links. Tattler will let you scrape backlinks. Similarly, Link Harvester will tell you the age of backlinks and will give you an idea of who to contact.

For project management, try Solo SEO if you're the only one in your business. This tool shows you the top subpages of a site you're looking at getting a link from. Basecamp is a great tool for multiple people working on a project.

Reputation management is critical because you don't want to start after it's too late. TrackUR, for $18 a month, will let you know what people are saying about your company name, product names, C-level names, etc. Keotag will give you search results for a variety of sources for free. Monitor This lets you subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds to monitor your brand name.

Her key takeaways are to: take advantage of all the low cost resources out there; take advantage of your competitors' mistakes; stay organized; and monitor your reputation.

Avi Wilensky, promediacorp, starts with a picture of a juicy burger on the screen. He's going to do this presentation case study style, using the company Pocket Change as an example. Pocket Change is a luxury lifestyle newsletter and blog covering NYC and LA. They wanted to increase subscribers, page views, branding and new advertisers.

Promediacorp came up with a big idea for going about this. They decided to come up with the most expensive burger ever created and sell it at a New York restaurant. After a while, a few patrons blogged about the "Richard Nouveau Burger" they saw on the menu. Other bloggers noticed the $175 burger on the Menupages. These initial bloggers began the buzz. Pocket Change ran the official story on their Web site and in the weekly newsletter. It included a video they produced for less than $5,000.

Soon, larger NYC blogs picked up the story from the Pocket Change blog and newsletter. Previous bloggers' posts reinforced the story's validity and links and traffic was coming from all over the Web. The story went mainstream as it was picked up by CBS and other news stations. When it got picked up by Yahoo.com, they got tens of thousands of unique page views. The burger story was even featured on the Colbert Show.

Results:

• Record number of traffic and ads served.
• Hundreds of natural backlinks to Pocket Change from high authority sites
• 5,000 references of "Richard Nouveau Burger" on Google.
• Built brand in local market, blogosphere and mainstream media
• Press relationships for future releases
• Increased visibility to new advertisers

Go to http://promediacorp.com/burger.ppt to download his Power Point presentation.

Q&A

Do affiliate links have any value on raising you on organic search rankings?

Greg says that they are valuable because people are directly getting to the site. It's a dampened effect but there's still value. Nofollow links are the same way. He says that as long as they're not going through a third party, there's still an effect.

You obviously don't want to burn the budget on competitive research. What would you suggest for a balance of budget spend on a project?

Lauren says that after the initial research is done, the resources should go to building links and great content. Just because you're a small local business doesn't mean that you can't come up with a great idea, as illustrated by the burger story. Avi says that you have to keep trying because for every burger story there are many stories that didn't go big. There's no set balance, but leverage your resources.

How do we stay on top of the changes that Google makes to the algorithm?

Lauren explains that it's always going to be changing. She doubts even Larry and Sergey know all 200 parts of the algorithm, and there's no way to keep up with every single change. That's the horrible and the great thing about SEO. There's no way to be ahead of the curve, but in general, the only way that Google will know you exist is through links. As much as Google changes the algorithm, there's no way they're going to stop giving value to links. Greg says that his best advice is not to let it be obvious if you're buying or selling links.

For small business folks busy running a business, do you have any tips for how to develop content?

Greg recommends starting a blog and outsourcing it. Freelance writers are a good way to do it. Avi says that good content is all around you. A good example is when he posted a picture of the first outdoor paid public bathroom in NYC that was quickly picked up by larger sites. Lauren says that pictures are golden. People like pictures and people don't see it as commercial so they're eager to link to it.

How does Google view the paid directories?

Greg says that it all comes down to whether Google feels those directories exhibit editorial integrity. That's the difference between a link farm and a worthwhile directory. Are they rejecting sites or are they accepting every site that pays? When you go to the site, how does it feel to you? Does it smell like a link farm? The four directories general Web directories he would recommend linking to are DMOZ, Yahoo, Best of the Web and Buisness.com. Then there are also the industry specific directories.

What do you think of links coming off of social networks, like Twitter?

Avi says that the recent change to Twitter to nofollow links in the bio section was pretty controversial, but as it stands, the Twitter links are now not passing link equity. Greg says that, despite that, a link is a link is a link. Don't worry about the nofollow attribute too much. As far as social networks, outsourcing is the best way to go about it. There are some marketers that have built up power accounts and their effort will go much farther than the efforts of a small business owner just starting up an account. You'll get a better return on your investment if you outsource.

Is there a pay for performance type of arrangement for SEO?

Avi says that they have an e-commerce client that they do this for. Three Dog Media also does this type of payment model. SEMPO has a job board that you can make this kind of request on and vendors will contact you.

As a small business SEO, I'm having trouble managing expectations.

Lauren says that education is the initial step. Explain what paid is, what organic is, what to expect and over what timeline. Setting up ways to track the effectiveness, like click to call or another phone number posted on the Web site, will help set reasonable expectations.

Should I be submitting to a directory like SuperPages?

You absolutely should if you're a brick and mortar. Make sure the data listed in Local.com, YellowPages, etc., is correct because all the directories pull from each other. Google trusts the local listings sites, so you want to be present. Localese, Axciom, InfoUSA are some of the main originating points for local listings. If there's an error in the data, go to them and correct it.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 6/08 at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)
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Search Integration: Are We There Yet?

Welcome to the Big Apple, ladies and gents, for the first annual Search Marketing Expo - SMX East. To kick off three days of search, I'll set the mood with this first session that will cover how well search is being integrated in overall marketing efforts today.

Robert Murray, iProspect, says that integration is key and it's key to offline channels as well. Here's the background. Search marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard this before: integrate or die. What are marketers doing about it? What techniques are they using? And if they aren't integrating with offline channels, why not? These were the questions they asked in a study they did.

An earlier study conducted among consumers found that 67 percent of searchers are driven to search by an offline channel. Once exposed to some form of offline messaging they were compelled to search online. Furthermore, 39 percent of users ultimately make a purchase from the company that initially drove them to conduct a search.

The second study they did was done between April and June 2008 among 289 qualified search marketers. Their objective was to uncover the extent to which search efforts are integrated with offline marketing channels.

The findings:

Only 55 percent of search marketers coordinate or integrate offline channels with search marketing.

• Direct mail: 34%
• Newspaper or magazine ads: 29%
• Television ad: 12%
• Radio ad: 12%
• Outbound telemarketing: 7%
• Billboard or sports venue sign: 7%

The big disconnect: If 67 percent of the audience are driven by offline marketing and 45 percent fail to integrate, there's an opportunity being missed.

What's preventing the integration?

• Don't advertise in offline channels: 24%
• Lack of budget: 19%
• Lack of human resources: 15%
• Simply didn't consider the option: 13%
• Lack of senior management buy-in: 11%
• Separate people manage offline channels: 11%
• Don't see the benefits of coordination/integration: 9%

What techniques are people using when integrating?

• Included company Web address prominently: 84%
• Included company name prominently: 66% (Robert thinks that this technique and the above technique aren't truly integration, but rather coordination)
• Use same colors offline that were used online: 41%
• Used same keywords online and offline: 26%

What does this mean for you? The implication is that failure to integrate is a competitive disadvantage.

So how can marketers make it happen? The CMO is in the unique position to make integration and cohesion possible. The CMO needs to:

• Create a strategic plan
• Break down silos
• Share data
• Reward integration

Sharing data is one thing, but integration gets results and should be rewarded. Even if you're not the CMO, there's something you can do. Walk down the hall and share your findings with your offline counterparts. The offline people need to come to the table as well. They need to share the product messaging and ad copy with search. Think about the time and money saved and the improved results that will come from testing online.

The bottom line is that we're all in the game to win. The marketers that are doing the best job integrating search with all other forms of marketing are the ones most likely to find success.

James Lamberti, comScore, sees how brands are dealing with integration. comScore researches consumer behavior online. So is the search industry there yet?

Advertising is coming from all sides. Offline, digital, social media and friends and family all have an influence on a consumer, but they all come together through search. It's the one place that's left that's simple for the consumer and the marketers. Consumer search activity is on the rise. There has been a 25.3 percent year-over-year increase in queries. If that's the case, why isn't search marketing integrated? How can search marketers make sure that search marketing catches the activity of the offline messaging?

Retail buyers' total searches: 55 percent are generic, 45 percent are branded.

This is notable because the emphasis on the trademark is missing out on the value of generic. Searchers want information and help making a purchase decision. Missing generic means missing your market. There's a huge percent of your market that's never going to search in branded terms. These consumers needed to be treated as a separate bucket.

The CMO can relate to reach, frequency and GRPs. Marketers can make an impression through this common language. Marketers are generally looking at search as a direct response tool. They're starting to see it's also a latent response tool. In 2006, PWC estimated that more than 50 percent of all sales were impacted by search.

Market mix modeling, or attribution modeling, shows that the search data can be modeled into mix model marketing. The results will almost surely show that more needs to go into search.

• Establish common ground: Apples-to-apples GRP, audience composition and ad effectiveness media comparisons are now possible and will engage the CMO.
• Measure the full value: Measuring the link to online sales and the inherent value of impressions is key.
• Measure search as a desired outcome: Training your organization to view search as a logical, desirable outcome will help with integration.
• Treat organic and trademark as unique efforts: Most organizations ignore generic and forget a huge part of the market.

Peter Hershberg, reprisemedia, believes that integration is hugely challenging, especially for enterprise brands. Microsoft will be the example, and we'll be focusing on the Vista product for this demonstration. Vista is being marketed pretty aggressively.

There are multiple products, multiple stakeholders and multiple goals for Microsoft Vista. So how do you even approach it?

Challenges:

• Coordinate efforts of 5,000+ marketers with individual search budgets.
• Create universal process for budgeting, management, and reporting.
• Tie campaign metrics to marketing goals.

Strategy:

• Contributed to Search Center of Excellence to share best practices and processes in search. This is to share the best practices with the whole team.
• Launched "Search 101" training series, tailored to needs of each Microsoft department and its line managers.
• Established a uniform 3-phased approach for taking fully-integrated campaigns from concept to launch over a 5-week period.

While reprisemedia is only working on the search campaign, it's critical to understand and effectively share assets with the other departments. Advanced knowledge about campaigns makes it possible to predict the "unpredictable". Knowing what the new ads were going to be about, they bid on some of the more obscure keywords, like "shoe circus", "warm churro" and "conquistador".

It's important to note that the efforts in search marketing have helped overall corporate communications. There was close coordination of paid search efforts and PR that resulted in improved Vista campaign results.

Aligning goals with the channel must be done through reach and frequency. This is finding answers to the question of "How many of my customers saw my message and how often did they see it?" The goal of reach and frequency must align with site engagement, or "What did my customers do once they visited my Web site?"

By analyzing search traffic and behavior, you can gain insight that can influence the entire marcom mix:

• Marketing messaging: email, banners, on-site
• Media selection
• Communications strategy
• Site experience
• Competitive insights

The lessons learned:

• Educate all stakeholders.
• Establish repeatable process for effectively sharing assets.
• Recalibrate goals to match strengths of the channel.
• Repurpose search learnings to inform overall marketing program.

Don Steele is up next to give us the client perspective. MTVN Entertainment Group is a group of MTVN Brands aimed at adult/male audiences. The sites are both marketing tool for brands and home to original content. They are ad-supported sites. He's not an expert on "Are we there yet?" but they've been working on it and invest a lot in online marketing.

Why they market:

• Branding
• Awareness
• Target
• Interaction and sampling

How they market:
The slide has a picture of the Daily Show billboard that says "Welcome, rich white oligarchs".

Why search:

• Branding: Search engine space is the new billboard and they must be there.
• Awareness: search allows them to gain visibility for shows and content while users are expressing interest in it.
• Target: Deliver a timely and fluid message to users who are expressing an interest in it. Search is much stronger in this area than traditional marketing like billboards.
• Interaction/Sampling: A smart search campaign should encourage interactive behavior where a brand is delivering upon a user's expectation.

Here's an example. TV Land recently got the rights to The Cosby Show. They've been buying the appropriate keywords, and this is the best way to target a broad swath of people. Likewise, the show Chocolate News with David Allen Grier is a new show on Comedy Central. They've centered the campaign around Grier's name and bidding on the keywords is inexpensive.

How they have been able to sell it:

• Core audience
• Reporting
• Self selection
• Evangelism

Reporting is good, but know the audience you're reporting to. Many of the upper-level execs may not want to see a 40-page report on all the search terms people are using. It's also important to be willing to speak to anyone who's interested.

The real challenge is that billboards (traditional) and search (new) are not equal. Don't look at search as one thing to check off the list. It's a fluid medium and the audience's expectations shift.

Moderator Sara Holoubek wants to know if search is really being viewed as a branding mechanism, considering how often the panelists mentioned reach and frequency. Peter says that search is not being used as a stand-alone channel, and when it comes time to allocate advertising dollars, reach and frequency is discussed because it's how execs see the world. James says that the key is the impression has value. Even if they don't click at that point, they've been made aware that that site has something related to what they were looking for. Don says that search is a tool to get recognition of the brand.

Looks like we're just getting started, both in search marketing integration and this great content and info we'll be getting from these conference sessions. I've got my fingers warmed up, so watch for more coming your way!

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 6/08 at 9:11 AM | Comments (1)
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October 3, 2008

Friday Recap

Boy, that feels weird to write. But it's Friday, lads and ladies. And this is a recap. So I guess it's still accurate. You'll have to forgive me, I'm a little out of sorts today. I think I'm coming down with a cold. I've been ODing on Vitamin C since I woke up and the other writers periodically dump disinfectant over me and my desk.

Why can't I be like these crazy healthy ladies over on CNN? Apparently they never get sick. Hmm, tip one is to get a massage? Maybe that's my problem. Does anyone know if my insurance covers this? It's preventative care!

Speaking of health issues, everything's coming up rosy on Twitter as people change their avatars pink to support Breast Cancer Awareness. No jokes here, just a reminder for all our readers that neither youth nor gender exempts you from getting breast cancer.

You know what else is in October? Halloween! I'm so excited! As you all know, Halloween's big around here. No, I'm not going with another Batgirl costume this year. Stop asking, seriously. Perhaps I'll take Keri Morgret's suggestion and win the geekiest costume award when I show up in my snazzy 404 page costume? [Update: The writers decided to go as the Misfits for Halloween! How very scandalous! -Virginia] Break out the AquaNet!

Something I'm totally not doing? Hanging fake tears from my eyes. Ew! Is it just me or is it a terrible idea to put wire in your eyes?

Before we can get to Halloween, though, we've got a lot to do! Next week is SMX East.

What's that you say? You're not ready for the big bad city? Don't worry! Streko's put together a great survival guide to NYC for SMX. Just what all the first time SEMs are going to need. Print it out, laminate it, keep it in your pocket. Just stay safe out there. We want you to make it back home.

While you're at SMX, keep an eye out for the BC team. Virginia's going to be our roving reporter. Watch out for her on the floor between sessions, she'll be looking for people to come on the radio show and give away some pearls of wisdom. Bruce is speaking in the Ask the SEOs session on Wednesday. Make sure you wish him a very happy birthday. Don't bother with a gift; you'll never top what we got him: a new SEOToolset.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Posted by Susan Esparza on 10/ 3/08 at 3:57 PM | Comments (0)
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September 30, 2008

Schedule for SMX East 2008

It's that time again. Bruce Clay, Inc. is gearing up for SMX East. That means people to greet in the expo hall and presentations to liveblog from the session rooms. Oh, and parties. Let's not forget the parties.

Plus, it's not too late to register for the SEOToolSet Training course, being presented for the first time on the East Coast. Bruce will be teaching our time-tested corporate SEO methodology on October 9-10 at The Westin New York at Times Square. That means you can extend your search marketing education to five full days of expertise straight from the brains of some of the most successful marketers in the industry. Sign up for both the conference and the training course and use the promo code "smx20bci" for a value you just can't beat.

Oh, you already registered for SMX East? Why didn't you say so! Here's where you can find me during the day.

Day 1: Monday, October 6
9:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.: Search Integration: Are We There Yet
11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.: SEM For Small Businesses Sponsored By SEMPO
1:45 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.: What's New With Video Search Marketing
3:45 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.: SMX Boot Camp: Link Building Fundamentals
5:15 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.: Keynote - Click: What Search Activity Tells Us About Society

Day 2: Tuesday, October 7
9:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.: Keynote with Google's Tim Armstrong
10:45 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.: Search & The U.S. Presidential Campaign
1:30 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.: Personalized & Customized Search
3:15 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.: Legally Speaking: Recent Legal News About Search
4:45 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.: Googleopoly

Day 3: Wednesday, October 8
9:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics
10:45 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.: Give It Up: White Hat Edition
1:15 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.: Get SEO Into All The Right Places Of The Development Life Cycle
2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.: Ask The Search Engines

Somewhere in between attending and liveblogging those sessions, I'll be recording interviews for SEM Synergy. Broadcast straight from the expo room floor, tune in to WebmasterRadio.FM Wednesday at noon PST to hear some one-on-one from a few of the speakers. In fact, let's make this fun. If you read anything in the liveblog coverage that you want to know more about, post a comment in the blog saying so. Once I know what you want to hear more of, I'll do my best to track down the speaker and see if he or she will answer some of your questions on the air. This shall be a grand experiment! Muwahahahaha! [V, don't scare the nice people. --Susan]

Ahem.

Back to some more of the certainties of SMX East. If during the day you can track my location like clockwork, my evening whereabouts will be just as predictable. I'll be with my SEO ladies on the dance floor at the networking events! And where better to cut a rug than Tuesday night's WebmasterRadio.FM Search Bash! As an employee of a party sponsor, I've been authorized to guarantee a good time. Judging from the last bash, I can't imagine next week's will be anything less than crunktastic. [What's a crunk? --Susan]

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 09/30/08 at 5:28 PM | Comments (3)
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September 5, 2008

Going to SMX East...Don't Forget To Register!

Hey kids, just a friendly reminder that if you've been eyeing SMX East but feeling some commitment anxiety over registering, the Early Bird pricing is valid through Monday, Sept. 8. For those unsure, today is Friday. As in, almost Monday. That means you should go register.

I'll wait here while you go do it.

Back?

The inaugural SMX East is one of those shows we're all really excited about here at BC, as it'll be a great place to increase your SEO skill set and network with the industry's finest. It will be three days filled with more than 50 search sessions, 30 educational classes in the SMX theater, as well as the chance to attend SMX Bootcamp. Of course, the whole thing will end with Bruce Clay, Inc. SMX SEO Training on Oct 9-10, and that's something you definitely don't want to miss.

If you register before Monday you'll be able to take advantage of both the Early Bird discount AND the 20 percent off we can give you with our smx20BCI promo code. That puts the total cost of attending one of the industry's premier search conferences and two extra days of hands on search engine optimization training for less than $1,000. At that price you almost can't afford NOT to go!

Seriously, if you've been considering making the trip to NYC for SMX East, now's the best time to book. They're starting to reveal who'll be speaking on which panels and it's shaping up to be a great mix. Especially noteworthy is the Give It Up: What Hat Edition panel which features some of our favorite white hat SEO ladies like Kate Morris and Kim Krause-Berg and the Ask the SEOs panel with superstars like Bruce Clay, Greg Boser, Rae Hoffman, Todd Friesen and Jill Whalen. You're not going to want to miss them. Guaranteed.

I'm happy to report that we've had a lot of interest in the East Coast SEO training class we'll be hosting after the event, so we're looking forward to seeing some of you guys there. Up until Monday, the cost to attend SMX East alone is $1,195 or $2,990 with Bruce Clay Training. Danny mentioned on the Daily Search Cast today that hotels are going fast, so make sure you book your room. You don't want to be the loser stuck trekking to the convention center from 20 miles away.

And with that, we hope to see you there. :)

Posted by Lisa Barone on 09/ 5/08 at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)
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August 25, 2008

Where My White Hat Ladies At?

Hey, hey, party kids. SMX East is officially accepting speaker pitches for the big October show in New York City. If you have some search smarts in a particular area and you want to speak, submit your idea and let Danny know you're interested.

There are lots of great sessions still up for grabs but my eyes are focused in on one - The Give It Up: White Hat Edition panel.

There was just a touch of controversy after SMX Advanced and the last Give It Up panel so I think it's really important for this one to knock it out of the park, the right way. It's time to show conference attendees that advanced search engine optimization is not, and has never been, about black hat techniques and that we have way more stuff up our sleeves than just social media spamming. The experience level at SMX East has the potential to be a bit more beginner than at Advanced, so that fact becomes even more important. Conference speakers have a duty to unleash trusted information.

Something else totally lacking on the last Give It Up panel were the ladies. Seriously, six speaking slots and not a single female brain? Total oversight. I think we can do better than that. Not being a real SEO, I don't consider myself qualified to step up to the plate, but if you're a woman with some mad white hat search engine optimization skills, please consider joining the crazy and let Danny know you're out there. We can't let the boys have all the fun.

I'm really excited to head to SMX East, both for the show itself and the Bruce Clay East Coast SEO training session that will be taking place immediately after. It's going to provide a great venue for SEOs to share their smarts and make powerful connections, so make sure you're there.

So here's my plea: If you're a rocking, butt-kicking white hat SEO lady, considering "giving it up" in New York. I promise to be there cheering you on.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/25/08 at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
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August 18, 2008

Video Search Engine Optimization

Helping to finish up my first day of San Jose liveblogging is Joe Morin (Boost Search Marketing, Storybids, Inc.) who's moderating this one with speakers Greg Jarboe (SEO-PR), Chase Norlin (Pixsy Corporation), Steve Espinosa (eLocal Listings, LLC), Matthew Scheybeler (blinx) and Gregory Markel (Infuse Creative, LLC).

And because I know you want to know, my toe's blisters now have blisters. Epic shoe fail.

Up first is Greg Jarboe.

Greg lets us know that YouTube accounts for over 98 percent of all videos viewed at Google's sites. In May, Google sites once again ranked as the top US video property with 4.2 billion videos viewed. YouTube accounted for more than 98 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Google sites also attracted the most viewers who watched an average of 50.2 videos per person. 82.2 million viewers watched 4.1 billion videos on YouTube.

Is YouTube the top video search engine or top video sharing site?

YouTube is now hosting 83.4 million videos. It receives 13 hours of new video from users every minute. 57 percent of online video viewers share links to the videos they find online with others. Yowsa.

The secret to getting great rankings in YouTube is to have a video strategy.

The one-of videos are always welcomed, but you want to look for patterns. He talks about a video he had that did really well. They optimized 137 videos for STACK Media. Received 140,104 views. 75 percent of views came from Related Videos section. 13 percent came from YouTube search.

Lesson: People don't watch a video. They watch batches of videos. You want to tap into that
Related Videos section.

They optimized and promoted 131 videos for SES and got 26,411 views. The interview they did with Nicholas Carr had some crazy traffic patterns, with a big spike, a drop off and then another surge. Why?

71 percent of the views came from the video being embedded in players that someone was running on their blog. Is that search? No, but it is views. The fact that it got so many views helped them to be picked up by Universal Search.

The SES video widget combines related videos with an embedded player. You can create a package of videos that will be renewed each time you update it.

You can customize the SES video player widget for your Web site or blog audience.

• Header options: Speakers or bloggers
• Playlist content: Display videos of everyone but with videos of you or your company ranked first
• Widget Format: Vertical or horizontal layout, number of thumbnails and videos.

Chase Norlin is next.

He's going to take a different take and NOT look at YouTube. He's going to talk about the trends in video search.

For video owners, video search engine optimization means free traffic, content exposure and ad revenue. You have to get discovered first. Add rich Meta data. Push out (really great and structured) RSS/MRSS feeds and update them frequently. Then, contact and submit your video the search engines. This will put you in the crawl cue. If you don't, you'll just be put on a list and eventually they'll get to you. By submitting it will make you source that's regularly crawled and will help you to show up at the top of the search results.

Put a video search box on your Web site to create traffic, ad revenue and unique content on your pages. Private label search means more searches, more page views, more ad revenue and more pages for Google crawl.

Stephen Espinosa is up. Everyone please wave. He just turned 21. Aw, babies!

He's going to teach us how to get ranked in Universal Search and how to convert the traffic.

Universal Search and Video

Tips for Creating Your Videos:

• Video length: Each industry is different, therefore each threshold of attention is different.
• Call to Action: For local businesses, calls are more important than clicks
• Ready for TV: If possible, make sure your vides are ready for TV

Optimizing your Video

• File Type: Export videos as swf. Do not use Active X controls
• Video Sitemap: Utilize Google Video Sitemaps and available variables
• SEO: Build a page for each video you produce. Optimize the page (Titles, Tags, Content, Keywords, Filename). Link from your index page to your video page. Consistent video description and title across all sites.

Reporting & Testing

• Analytics: Use analytics to test how long customers are staying on your video page to determine if video is too long.
• A/B Variant Testing: Determine which videos gain the best response and where to place links to your video page from your home page.

Tips: Utilize thumbnails to show your call to action. YouTube makes thumb nails at 1/4,1/2 and 3/4 mark.

Google TV makes TV very affordable and allows you to create highly targeted video.

If you have a video and local listing on the SERP, customers are 3x3 more times likely to visit your Web site.

Matthew Scheybeler is next.

If you index your site on Blink, then your video will show up in other engines like Ask and MSN. Blinkx watches the video to help optimize it. They do a transcript of the video to speech.

Video Search Engine Optimization: Do's

• Provide well-placed, rich and relevant Meta data.
• Use a cleaner to rid your files of irrelevant, distraction Meta data.
• Have just one video per page with a simple textual title and description.
• Ensure filename is sensible and descriptive.
• Take advantage of site maps, starting-point URLs or RSS feeds.
• Submit video to sharing sites and search engines.

Don't:

• Don't tag with popular, but irrelevant search terms.
• Avoid Flash-only and entirely dynamic players.
• Avoid pop-up players.

How do you optimize thousands of videos? Blinx has technology to help. They can understand the video and generate lots of things for you. They can automatically generate the taxonomy and titles, work out the most important tags and they can place the full transcription of the video for you.

Gregory Markel is last. My memory reminds me that he's a fast talker. [rolls up sleeves]

Video search is extremely popular. It's effective for branding and reputation management. It's free! There's no submission cost or cost per click. It provides you with Google.com search engine result presence, many social/viral/community benefits and a mobile presence.

Video is influencing regular search results in Google's blending search results. For the phrase [corvette video], Google doesn't return a single car manufacturer, but does return many videos.

Three submission types for video search engine optimization:

Video on your site: Your video is found on your site: a small number of video search engines like Truveo and Blinkx crawl the Web looking for video content on your Web site and will use the Meta data and traditional surrounding page elements it finds to weight and rank the video for relevancy. Make sure your video has target keyword-infused Meta data added during the video encoding process. It should also be featured on its own page.

Upload/ Video Search Engine: This is now the most common. These types of video search engines require that you upload your file while providing textual information. You want to use keyword infused titles, descriptions and tags and categories. Keyword prominence in each is important for ranking and click thru rates. Analyze competition's approach prior to uploading.

You will not rank well on YouTube based on keyword-rich content. You need to stimulate community attention.

RSS/MRSS Feeds: Probably not too many people using this method unless you have a lot of videos.

TubeMogul allows you to upload to many different video sites at once. Offers agency level tracking and keyword intelligence.

Video Search Engine Optimization Techniques:

• YouTube will tell you what's popular on their site with its search suggestions. It will tell you what keyword related to your keywords are most popular at YouTube. Type a keyword related to your content then sort by "most viewed content" and you will see the most popular videos on YouTube related to your terms.
• Knowing what type of content is most popular with viewers can strategically aid the shaping of your video based marketing plan.
• Submit to many video search engines to get the most visibility, not just YouTube.
• Create a video response to popular videos that are related to your video content in some way and include audio and visual call to action to visit your video. These will appear in close proximity to popular content allowing your visibility to piggy back on the popular video.
• Leaving with an active URL in your description. They're clickable! Conclude your video with an instruction/visual cue to click on the link.
• Use video annotations to convey text information and link to other YouTube videos.
• Add comments on popular videos that include a coded URL call to action.
• Become a YouTube partner channel, get featured, promoted and share ad revenue.
• Allow comments. If you don't, you won't be able to rank well in hyper-competitive areas.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/18/08 at 3:52 PM | Comments (1)
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Mobile SEO: Death of the '.mobi'

Hey kids, it's SES San Jose time and my perfect shoes are suddenly giving me numbing blisers. Huzzah!

Rebecca Lieb is going to help start us off with speakers Dhana Pawar (Yojo Mobile), Cindy Krum (Blue Moon Works, Inc,) and Brian Wool (Localeze).

Rebecca says that every year is hailed as "the year of Mobile", however, this year it's even stronger thanks to the iPhone and the Android platform that's about to emerge.

Up first is Dhana Pawar to talk about what dotMobi is and why it was conceived. Basically, is it dead or not? How can you optimize your Web site to take advantage of the .com extension instead of .mobi?

Dhana defines dotMobi as an alternate domain extension in the same style as .com, .net. or .org. dotMobi was meant to be specially allocated for content designed for mobile devices. These Web pages contained smaller images, reduced graphics, etc.

dotMobi isn't need today thanks to devices like the iPhone and Skyfire. We don't need a different domain name. It's redundant. The iPhone loads an ad the same way a computer does. If the iPhone is just loading a normal Internet ad in a custom size, there's no real need for a special modile ad network.

dotMobile never took off, she says. Today, 84.5 percent of iPhone users and 58.2 percent of total smart phone users access news and information from the hand-held device. 58.6 percent if iPhone users and 37 percent of smart phone users visited a search engine on their phone. She says that 30.9 percent of iPhone users have tuned mobile TV or a video clip from their phone.

[A person in the audience says the info that Dhana is presenting is totally inaccurate He owns 700+ dotMobi says and completely disagrees with how she's presenting the information. dotMobi isn't alive in the US, we know that, so for her to go on about I when it hasn't hit yet isn't right. But dotMobt IS big in Japan and other countries.

Rebecca cuts in on the audience member tirade and says he can address these concerns during Q&A. Things are getting a bit confrontational and I hear from Twitter that the guy just walked out of the session. Somebody didn't get their coffee this morning. ]

Dhana continues and begins talking about MizPee, a mobile bathroom finder to help users find the cleanest bathroom closest to their current location.

MizPee uses the same URL on the traditional and mobile site so that users do not have to remember another URL. This also allows them to keep the advertising on one URL so they can track the usage of both the Web and mobile sites using a single reporting page. They use tools like awstats and Google analytics.

Marketing Success with.com on Web and Mobile

They've gotten lots of publicity with zero PR.

How did they do it?

• They had a good idea which met a real need: Find clean bathrooms, deals around user's current location.
• Sound SEO tactics: As far as the search engine optimization strategy, she advises thinking like a spider. Stick to .com, .net, and .org. Take advantage of your Title tags. They provide the search engines with a guide to your on-page content and are one of the most influential on-site search engine optimization tactics. They're a great place to reinforce keywords.
• Widget on the site/Contests, points system: They created easy-to-share widgets to get people excited. They ran a Flush of the Year award so people can rate the best toilets.
• Right/strategic partnerships: Strategic Partnerships: advertising on sites like AdMobi where you can define the device, platforms, area and specific capabilities of your application/service
• Word of mouth
• Controversial coverage

Cindy Krum is next up.

Why should you care about mobile search engine rankings?

There's mass mobile convergence. Cell phones can do a whole lot more than before. They can send text, take a picture or video, hold email, etc. With all of that, additional functionality is needed. The phone has become the most personal marketing medium ever. Your phone knows a lot more about you than your computer. The only thing more personal than your cell phone is your underwear. With all these things, the phone has become the most interactive marketing medium possible. You can do things with just a click and you have it on you at all times.

Mobile is different. There are different bots evaluating your Web site. There are different mobile algorithms giving preference to different sites based on how they render. You have different usability concerns. The searchers are more sophisticated. Mobile indicates an immediate intent.

Why now?

People get new cell phones every 1-2 years. They're getting savvier phones with each upgrade. Mobile searching is becoming easier. All of the carriers have started offering flat-rate data pricing. There are faster download speeds and more processing power. US adoption has hit critical mass.

Overview: dotMobi is rarely ideal for search engine optimization.

It splits traffic, links and the index size. You risk duplicate content and it can be confusing for users. dotMobis are not necessarily preferred for mobile search. There are no unique assets or features. There's a limited useful life for having two sites. You just don't need two.

Best Practices

• Do a good job following traditional search engine optimization best practices: Follow blended search and local search best practices, too.
• Mobile Search Engine Submission.
• Mobile Research: Understanding of predictive text, transcoding analysis, emulation & testing, and traditional & mobile analytics.
• W3C Mobile Compliance Standards: XHTML & Accessibility Standards. Use external style sheets.
• Browser Detection or Self Selection.

Four Mobile Site Architecture Techniques

1. Do Nothing: Take a look at your site and decide if you think it renders well enough on a mobile phone. Decide if it's worth your effort. Sometimes it's really not. Test your site by finding it in Google search results and see how it looks transcoded. Test it on a true Web browsing phone and on an older phone. If it's good enough for you, it's probably not worth your while to put a lot of effort into it. If you have a .mobi, just redirect it to the .com

   The advantage of this is that it's easy and cheap. You can also say that you're forward thinking and trust that browsers are going to catch up. Heh. The disadvantages is that transcoding only works through search, page URLS and links are transocded, mobile user experience is harder to control, it's risky for your brand and it gives your competitors an edge.

2. Mobile Only Pages: Section off part of your site and create mobile-specific pages. They'll be narrower, have less functionality, smaller images, redo navigation, etc.

   The advantages are that it's just about updating the existing code. Take your site, copy it to the subdirectory and then tweak it to look better on a mobile phone. It allows you to adjust levels of content. The disadvantages are that your traditional home page still has to work on mobile. It means there's an extra click from the traditional home page to the mobile home page. You have two different version of your site.

3. Mobile and Traditional Hybrid Pages: You have one set of content on your site but multiple CSS's. You have a screen CSS for traditional computers and a hand-held style sheet which gives it different instructions. They're pulled automatically by the browser. You can rearrange the content.

   Advantages are that it's just adding another style sheet. It's the same content rendered differently so you don't have a duplication content risk. You can even build this out to device-specific style sheets. Disadvantages are that it's not 100 percent reliable. Sometimes the phone won't display the right style sheet.

4. Dynamic Mobile Pages: Hire a hot shot programmer and have him combine the database with user agent detection to transcode your site on the fly.

   Advantages are that it creates a good experience, it's good for search engine optimization campaign, the database is free and it can give you insight about who's on your site. Disadvantages are that it's a lot of work and it's still not perfect. She calls it a short term solution.

Last up is Brian Wool.

There are 225 million mobile subscribers. If you put that in context, there are only 191 million people using the desktop.

Ten top things people use the mobile phone for:

• Email
• Weather
• IM
• Maps and driving directions
• News
• Local search
• Sports
• Directory assistance
• Gaming
• Financial info

You'll notice that several of those (weather, maps, local search, directory assistance) have local elements to them.

More than 90 percent of businesses are small businesses. The majority of advertising dollars across most channels come from this segment. About 50 percent of small businesses have a Web site OR 50 percent of small businesses don't have a Web site.

iPhone Local Mobile Apps: It's the app, not the Web site. 60 million iPhone Apps have been downloaded. All the content resides with the App.

The Verticalization of the Mobile Internet

The verticalization of online is taking hold in the mobile world. The value of Local Apps is the ability to deliver content. Increased fragmentation. All of this information lives inside your iPhone App.

Online and mobile offer identical results: If you do a search online for [Chicago pizza] and you get the Google 10 pack whether you searched on your phone or from your desktop.

Rebecca says we heard a lot about Google and asks what the other engines are doing. Cindy mentions that the search engine people use on their traditional computer is the engine people use on their mobile phone. MSN and Yahoo have more of a portal feel. They try harder to anticipate what you want. She thinks we're going to start to see a move a way from that so Google is only going to get more dominant in the mobile space.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/18/08 at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
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August 11, 2008

Schedule for SES San Jose 2008

I just get back into town and it's time to get ready to leave again! It's a good thing I have cats instead of children, eh?

On Sunday, all three of your favorite Bruce Clay Writers (I know, just pretend you like Susan, okay?) will make the trip up to San Jose with Bruce and other members of the BC gang for Search Engine Strategies San Jose. Bruce will be speaking on the Black Hat, White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO panel that's taking place on Day 3, along with Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, David Naylor and Jill Whalen. You're not going to want to miss it because with that cast of characters, attendees are sure to witness an interesting debate. You may even see some punches thrown. That Jill is a wild one. :)

Be sure to stop by the booth to mock Bruce Clay East Director Chris Hart on his NY accent and to chat about SEO with other BCers manning the booth.

And accept no substitutes when it comes to your conference liveblogging. Others may try, but no one gives you a better glimpse of what's happening in session than Team Bruce Clay. This time we'll be sending three livebloggers to bring you even more conference goodness than ever before. Three!

Here's a list of where we'll be and when.

Date/Time	Lisa	Susan	Virginia
Day 1: Monday, August 18
9:45am-11:00am	Mobile SEO: Death of the ".mobi"	More Customers, Fewer Costs - Why Marketing to the 'Long Tail' Makes Sense.	Search Around the World - Part 1: Asia/Pacific & Latin America
11:15am-12:30pm	Semantic Search: How Will It Change Our Lives?	Igniting Viral Campaigns	The Next Wave for Online Video
1:30pm-2:30pm		Orion Keynote Panel: How Much Search Is Enough?
2:45pm-4:00pm	Video Search Engine Optimization	Search Around the World - Part 2: The UK & Europe	Storytelling Marketing
4:30pm-5:30pm			Keynote: Lee Siegel, Author of "Against The Machine"
Day 2: Tuesday, August 19
9:00am-10:00am	Keynote: Satya Nadella
11:00am-12:15pm	Landing Page Testing & Tuning	Measuring Success in a 2.0 World	Global Search for the B2B SEM
1:30pm-2:30pm		Orion Keynote Panel: Technical & Informational Giants
4:00pm-5:15pm	Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by Numbers	Re Search Online, Purchase Offline	Search Advertising 101
Day 3: Wednesday, August 20
9:00am-10:00am	Keynote Roundtable: Why Does Search Get the Credit for Everything
10:30-11:45am	Social Media Marketing: What is it and What is it Good for?	Getting Vertical Search Right
1:00pm-2:15pm	Link Building Basics	Search Behavior Research Update	News Search SEO
2:35pm-4:00pm	SEO Rehab & Intervention	Social Media Analysis and Tracking	War of the Search Worlds: Unifying your Global Search Marketing Efforts
4:15pm-5:30pm	Facebook, Feeds & Micro-blogging	Maximizing SEO Returns with User Generated Content	Black Hat, White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO
Day 4: Thursday, August 21
9:00am-10:00am	Effective Contextual Search Management	How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively With Your IT Dept. to Get Stuff Done	The Business Case for SEO Content Development: Turning Words Into Action
11:30am-12:30pm	Fast, Free & Easy Tools To Get You Going	Trademark Issues: What SEMs Should Know	The 3G iPhone: Local Search Demos
1:30pm-2:30pm	Best Kept Secrets To Search	Post Click Marketing Converting	How to Choose a Search Vendor
2:45pm-3:45pm	Search for Jobs in Search: Starting & Advancing Your Career in the Industry	Net Neutrality is for Online Marketers Too	In House SEO: Lessons Learned & Victories Won

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/11/08 at 4:28 PM | Comments (2)
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July 7, 2008

Bruce Clay Housekeeping

[dramatic exhale]

Hi, kids. It's the first day back after the delicious, most relaxing three day break ever which means one thing - OMGZ there's a lot of work to do! With so many nuggets and developments and news bits floating around my head, I thought sharing them with you would help me des-tress and get it all out there.

So, without further ado, here's all the Bruce Clay stuff going on that you need to know about.

We're Hiring!

If you're a content writer, programmer, SEO analyst, analytics fan or any mix of the four, and you want to work for a company that believes, practices and preaches ethical SEO, send us your resume. [Please! --Susan]

All fluff and pitch aside, things are happening and coming together at an amazing pace right now. Maybe it's the recession and companies need to hire an SEO vendor they can trust to get them visibility without encroaching on bad areas, but we have some great things happening right now. Interesting projects are coming in, wall-sized white boards are filling up (next we get to write on the walls!) and we're literally bursting at the seams. As much as new people often scare me, we're hiring. In all areas. Right now.

If you're in Southern California and interested in joining the team, I'd encourage you to check out the Bruce Clay, Inc. employment page and see if you're a fit.

Where In The World Is Lisa?

I'm asked a lot what conferences we're going to next, whether we'll be liveblogging and if Bruce will be presenting. To help put some of those questions to rest (and save my inbox some), here's a short list of where we'll be in the coming months.

• BlogHer (July 18-19): Later this month I get to head up to San Francisco and experience my first BlogHer. I'm quite excited. Not only will I get to connect with other women who blog and share war stories and hugs and bond, but it will be my first face-to-face with Heather Armstrong, the woman who is secretly living the life that I want. You have no idea what represents for me. I hope I'm brave enough to introduce myself to her. The safe bet is that I sit in the front row, stare and then look away when her eyes are about to meet mine.

  Also, no liveblogging. I'll be attending the show like a normal person and reporting on what I learned once I return.

• SES San Jose (August 18-21): Next month is the big SES show and Bruce Clay will definitely be there. I also hear a rumor you'll be getting all three Bruce Clay Writers, so how lucky are you? We'll be liveblogging, Bruce will be speaking, and there will be lots of other team members to talk to and field your questions. We'll also be doing some SES speaker interviews before the big show, so look for that.


• BlogWorldExpo (September 20-21): Two blogging conferences in three months? It's like Christmas! After having way too much fun last year, Bruce is sending me back to BlogWorld to relive it. Again, no liveblogging. I get to be a normal person for a few days. Or at least, try to convince people that I'm a normal person. It's probably good the show only lasts a few days.

  I'm also hoping to have a blog interview with BlogWorld CEO & Founder Rick Calvert, so I'm pretty excited about that as well.

The SEO Newsletter Is Going Monthly

Starting on July 15th, our biweekly SEO Newsletter is going back to its roots and once again becoming a monthly publication. It hurts us a bit to do it, but with all the traveling, conferences and internal projects, we need the lighter schedule to ensure we maintain the quality of the newsletter we put out. I mentioned we were hiring, right?

There are actually two more really big announcements to make, but I'll save them for their own post when the time is right. Yeah, that's right; I'm going to make you wait a little more. ;)

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 7/08 at 3:10 PM | Comments (0)
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June 24, 2008

Advanced SEO is Traditional White Hat SEO

I wasn't lucky enough to attend SES Toronto so I'm still getting caught up on all the feedback and session reviews that came out of the event. In doing that, I stumbled across Andrew Goodman's review of the event where he talks a lot about the lessons that he and SES' Global Content Director Kevin Ryan learned last week.

According to Andrew, the key "thesis" of the event was this: The core stuff works. The core stuff has evolved tremendously. It is vitally important and it is still moving the needle.

In other words, don't be so quick to let go of the traditional search engine optimization techniques in favor of the big Web 2.0 buzzwords. White hat SEO is evolving and is all the advanced SEO you need to rank well in the search engines and bring targeted visitors to your Web site.

I'd also have to agree with Andrew's statement that white hat SEO is being undervalued and underinvested in as search marketers jump ship to experiment with social media and try their hand at buzzword bingo. There may be great value in spending the time and money creating Facebook applications, toying with viral YouTube videos, and seeing if MySpace is filled with anything other than strippers and bands, but that often comes with an awfully low return on investment compared to the traditional stuff. Andrew takes a cue from Seth Godin and says that building the marketing sprinkles on top of your meatball sundae won't get customers into the basic navigation towards key objectives. That Facebook application you just invested 2 months creating may look delicious but it probably won't get your customers headed down that conversion path; however, a site that is technically sound and properly siloed will. Every time.

No one is dismissing the power that can come with social media. I've seen companies and do it well. However, the best way to kill your Web site is to start focusing all of your energy on social media and losing your focus on the core factors like content strategies, natural link development, analytics, paid search, conversion funnel optimization, etc. There's a reason these tactics have stood the test of time. And despite what some "SEOs" will try and tell you, they are progressing, they can compete competitively, and they do work.

Black hat SEO and getting quick links through social media are sexy topics. They're the crowd pleasers at SEO conferences even though three quarters of those in the room could never implement them. I get the appeal. However, the power of white hat search engine optimization has been proven over and over again, even if it is considered boring or square to promote it. White hat works. Every time. Don't discount it.

I found the anecdote below recounted by Andrew especially amusing:

"One delegate approached me nervously about the schedule for late on Day 2. Would the link building session actually focus on link building? Because if he was going to have to hear more general talk about social media, he definitely did not want to attend that session."

Hee. It's good to know that not everyone is addicted to the Web 2.0 kool-aid.

Props to SES Toronto for putting on what looked like a great show that concentrated on the heart of what search engine optimization really is. With any luck I'll get there next year.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/24/08 at 12:28 PM | Comments (11)
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June 4, 2008

Search Marketing & Surviving a Recession

It's a brand new morning and a new day of sessions. We're starting off on such a cheerful note: Search Marketing and Surviving A Recession. Jeffrey K. Rohrs is moderating this discussion-based session. Our speakers are Andrew Beckman, President, Location3 Media; Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning; Russ Mann, CEO, Covario; and Jon Miller, Vice President, Marketing, Marketo.

As an introduction each speaker gives their take on the state of the recession. Andrew says that the recession has been mild thus far, but is trending in the wrong direction. He says that search marketing is a pretty safe industry; however, success comes at a higher cost. Dave is based out of Canada and so says that his view of the impact of the recession is different. He says the biggest effect is due to the value of the dollar. Russ says that rather than half empty or half full, the glass is overflowing. He says that marketing spend is significantly shifting online. Jon is optimistic about the economy, but as a realist, recognizes that some people are struggling.

Are we in a recession?

Dave thinks yes, as evidenced by the decreasing value of the dollar. Russ says that we've been skirting a recession as well as stagflation, more recently. He says that some sectors are doing well while others are doing better. Jon says that the catch is how you define a recession. If defined as 2 consecutive quarters of GDP downturn, we haven't seen that - things have been flat. He says that it's the worst possible non-recession.

Andrew says that the recession is industry specific. Consumers have mismanaged their budgets and are now feeling the squeeze. He says they're seeing a pullback, and so his company is analyzing where the few buys are coming from in order to hone in on where purchases are being made.

What worries you?

Russ says that CFOs are tightening up, scrutinizing purchases and media spend. As an analytics software company, he says that marketing is the least provable and least automated part of the business and so it's often the part that loses budget. However analytics is a good measurement for marketers to be able to argue for keeping their budget.

Jon says that companies with deep pockets realize that times of downturn are actually opportunities to double the spending, whereas small companies cut their spending. He thinks that branding will be cut back. Andrew says that companies need to find the new opportunities and is facing a challenge of convincing clients that marketing should not be cut out. Dave says that organic search is provable. His concern is that the success of his clients is declining, due to no fault of their own.

In this environment, where do you put your first marketing dollar?

Andrew says that optimizing for the correct terms and analyzing with the right metrics are the fundamental mainstays. Dave says that he fully agrees. People need to take a good look at their site, watch what users are doing, and provide what they're looking for. Russ says that the first thing is customer research and strategy. He says that no technology or system is the silver bullet unless you get really strategic with the client first. Jon says that when budgets are tight and clicks are fewer, testing and conversion optimization should be the primary focus and customer relationships should be built.

Jeffrey polls the audience: Do you think it's more important to focus on acquisition or retention? A few more people raise their hand for retention than for acquisition.

Do you expect prevailing macroeconomic conditions to lead to increased consolidation?

He says that first you'll see big companies gobble up tech companies. You'll also see lots of fragmentation on the small end and new companies popping up in the search industry. Dave says that we'll see some consolidation in the industry, but not because of recession. That's just where we're at in the evolution of the industry. The money is there and consistent, so companies are now ready to acquire. Jon says that he's seen an increase spending in offer development, specifically offers targeted at people in the later stages in buying.

What SEM-related strategies or tactics help minimize marketer stress?

Russ says that lifetime value modeling is something he tells clients to do. He says that search can be used effectively for retention and lifetime value and expansion. Again, he says it goes back to understanding your client's business and who they are targeting. Jon is constantly surprised by how small business owners don't understand the benefit of SEO. To minimize your stress, he says you have to find a way to tie what you're doing as a marketer to the impact on growth and activity.

Andrew recommends that when your acquisition strategies are in place, look at the conversion percentage. Multivariate landing page tools are critical and will help you increase your lead or sales value. Nothing will help you increase you leads better than what the numbers actually show. Also, he believes that there is a way for affiliate search is a strategy to consider when moving forward in the recession.

Dave ways that providing analytics information and being able to explain it to a client is good for marketers. He said that before you could build it and they will buy. The recession has forced marketers to take a look at what they're doing, and looking hard at analytics and conversions has helped develop the industry.

How do you deal with prospective clients hesitant to jump into SEM, in part due to the fact that you can't guarantee rankings?

Dave says he does guarantee rankings. Andrew says it depends on the term. However, he would help them see that focusing on the content of the site will be of great benefit. Russ says that test and invest is a proven strategy, seen in previous case studies, that he proposes to new potential clients. Rather than guaranteeing first-page-results, he says that it's a process of working toward success.

Some areas have been more heavily affected by the recession. How does this affect SEM and how can marketers leverage the right areas?

Andrew says geotargeting is the answer. Find the stronger local economies. Russ says to look to Asia, where the economy is booming. More clients are asking about how to market and promote their products and services abroad. They're helping clients be included on Baidu.

What areas of the budget are clients moving their budget from in order to redirect it to search?

Dave says that one of the first actions will have to be analyzing yourself and what are you doing. Find the things that are lease effective, trim those and test. Jon says the biggest area where money is wasted is push marketing, advertising that just shouts at the market. Andrew says that search has the opportunity to be both a direct marketing and branding vehicle at the same time. The foundation of search marketing needs to be placed now because fine tuning is a long term program. Russ says that the most money is wasted on short term activity rather than long term value.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 4/08 at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
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June 3, 2008

Closing the Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead?

Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land, is moderating. Our speakers are Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing; Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Paid Search Services, Apogee Search; John Tawadros, Chief Operating Officer, iProspect; and Lauren Vaccarello, Director of SEM and Analytics, FXCM.

John Tawadros starts off. What if you could tell what your leads are doing throughout the day? He's talking about tracking leads and how much you should track.

What can be done with the information? Search converts 21 percent better if a user is exposed to a banner ad first. 37 percent of the time users look in at least two engines at any given time. There is no impact to conversion beyond 6 touch points. Print ads improve CTR by 33 percent. He's giving us a lot of stats.

Does it make sense? Is data size statistically significant? Expectations - What if you learn nothing monumental? Cal you live with the imperfections? Can you drive every channel through one tracking system? Can you support the investment?

Chris asks if there is a rule of thumb: Is there too much you can track. He says it depends on how much you want to spend, but for him, there's never too much because you just don't know what you don't know.

Alissa Ruehl is talking about tracking past the lead and into the sales funnel. What does your company really want out of your marketing efforts? Is it sales? Top line revenue? Bottom line revenue? ROI? What metrics are you currently using to measure your success?

All leads are not created equal, so how can you separate the good ones from the bad? Integrate your paid search system with CRM. Pull paid search info into your CRM system. Report on sales instead of just leads.

She's got three case studies.

1. Client 1: ROAS by keyword
   • They found that keywords could generate leads, but not sales or revenue, and it went the other way around, too. Hidden treasures and shallow successes were outed.
2. Client 2: ROAS by engine
   • Yahoo was not generating leads as well as Google. Looking at the CRM system, they found that the cost per sale in Google was over $750, while for Yahoo was under $350. This changed the client's first intention to cut back on Yahoo spend.
3. Client 3: ROAS by Web site
   • The new design had a slightly higher click to lead conversion rate. However, the new design actually had nearly double the cost per sale.

Research of data was needed to uncover what superficially looked like a success but was really a loss, and vice versa.

How is this done?

1. Create custom fields in your CRM system for the info you want to capture, for example, keyword, engine, campaign, referring URL.
2. Update tracking URLs. If you're already capturing this info in your analytics system, you can use the same variables.
3. Set cookies to capture these variables. Put it on all pages, not just landing pages.
4. Add hidden fields for each of these variables to all of your forms. These should pull values from the cookie rather than user input.
5. Test and report. Make sure the process is working. You should see leads coming through with paid search tracking info, as well as basic contact info from the form. Set up reports in your CRM system to list sales or opportunities.
6. Compare this data to your paid search spend, just as you do with your lead data.

Caveats to remember:

• Pay attention to statistical significance.
• Take your sales cycle length into account.
• Look at junk leads as well as sales.
• Consider an intermediate step of looking at cost per opportunity.

Adam Goldberg agrees that all leads are not created equal. In fact, that's what he'll be talking about. He says that if the cost per lead is too high, it's considered bad. If it's too low, then it may be because of high leads per sale. But this thinking can be very misleading because the high costing lead could be the highest profit generator.

Next he's using a basketball metaphor. This will be interesting. Points = sales and shooting percentage = conversion rate. If you take out the player with less points, you may be taking out the person who's providing valuable assists.

Stages of the customer buying cycle:

1. Problem recognition: banner recognition and emails
2. Information search: your paid search ad
3. Evaluation of alternatives: they look at your competitors or other options
4. Purchase decisions: they go back to the search engine with the specific brand
5. Purchase: cha-ching

You could think of allocating your profit equally among all the steps OR you could put more money into the steps that put the product into the customer's mind, not step 4 where they already know what they're going to get.

He has a slide of an advertising ecosystem. At the top is Advertising Sources, pointing down to Capture Advertising Analytics. This points down to four options: No Sale, Call, Submit Lead Form, and Purchase. Both Call and Submit Lead Form point to CRM Software.

Lauren Vaccarello is up to the podium next. She says that people working in e-commerce don't really need to listen because they get the data from shopping carts, whereas lead gen people should listen.

The benefits of integration:

• Bridging the gap between sales and marketing
• Remedy the size fits all conversion tracking
• True conversion tracking

You have several options for integration:

• Omniture
• HBX (Visual Sciences via Omniture)
• Clicktracks via Hotbanana
• WebTrends
• Google Adwords
• Custom programming with your solution or Google Analytics

One potential obstacle is sales objections. The solution is bribery. Give the better lead lists to those who are on board.

Another potential issue is poor planning. The solution is do your research first, set your goals before you start, and define and add fields before integration.

Strategies to increase ROI:

• Go after the low hanging fruit. Build campaigns with highest conversion rate reports.
• Build Time to Sale reports.
• Create marketing campaigns geared toward long sales cycle leads.
• Get your highest ROI by campaign report.
• Stop wasting money.

Takeaways:

• CRM integration is not for everyone.
• With integration you can garner true conversion tracking.
• You have a variety of integrating options.
• Do your homework first.
• Prioritize your leads.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 3/08 at 4:33 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, SEM Events, liveblog, smxseattle08

Creating Value In Your SEM Business

It's time for our first session in the brand-new Business Track. Moderating this next one is Chris Elwell, President of Third Door Media, Inc. Sean McMahon, President, EngineWorks; Matt Naeger, Executive Vice President, Operations, Impaqt; and our very own Bruce Clay, Bruce Clay, Inc. are speaking.

Before officially beginning, Bruce takes a straw poll of the audience. He wants to know who owns their own business, who's been around for more than three years, who's got more than 10 employees. It's all the same six or so people. Then he asks who's making more than $2 million revenue a year. It drops to like 2. I guess he wants to know who he's speaking to.

Sean McMahon kicks off the presentations. He says that he hopes to give the audience value by seeing what he's done to be successful.

What is value? "Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep." -Ayn Rand. He says this means value requires actions. He'll be giving us insight on the actions he took to build value in his companies.

At his former SEM company, TrafficLeader, the challenge was getting clients' indexed. They decided to go to the search engines and pitch the creation of paid inclusion listings. They met with Inktomi, who was obviously skeptical. Sean proposed to them that paid inclusion could monetize their business. TrafficLeader became the first paid inclusion partner with a search engine, and they followed through with a number of other search engines. By building value for the search engine, they brought value back to their client.

Several years ago, Sean patented a product he invented. It was a water bottle with an attachment for fitness machines. He first went to fitness centers and told them that they could give out the bottles to new customers, and could say, "By the way, the bottles only fit in our machines." This would keep customers coming back to their gym. This was valuable to the fitness businesses.

A client of his current SEM company, Lisa Kline, came to him for search marketing services. They found that the original keyword focus was a little off. Instead of Hollywood fashion, it should have been celebrity fashion. With this change there was a 59 percent increase in search revenue through a 12-month organic campaign. This new model of marketing is now driving all channels of Lisa Kline's marketing mix.

Focus everyday on building value in your client engagements and the value in the marketplace will take care of itself. You can't make someone buy you, but you can position yourself as highly valuable so that someone will want to buy you.

Bruce Clay is up next. Go Bruce! Bruce is going to use the history of BCI to help illustrate the valuation timeline. He started in '96 as a one man show. At 5 people, he had people do things for you. At 10, he had to delegate. At 20, he was able to specialize. At 50, an employer is federally regulated. Over the last five years there has been 40 to 70 percent growth in revenue.

The high-value assets are staff, tools, and training. The philosophy of the company is knowledge transfer. Clients are required to undergo training because an educated client won't fight recommendations and the project goes faster and smoother. The result of high-quality service is consistent growth, a solid reputation, and clients come to us.

If you're looking to set a value for your company, consider what analysts walk in and ask for:

• Client list and a phone number
• Procedure documentation
• Accounting Info (audited 3 years)
• Employee audit with HR interviews, especially top executives and key rmployees
• Business plan
• Sarbanes-Oxley
• Retention / renewal / satisfaction is key

Valuation is commonly 4.3 x Revenue or 11.3 times EBITDA
The value to Bruce: Priceless (awww!)

As the final speaker, Matt Naeger says he's going to follow the earlier speakers by answering the question "What does it all mean?" and by highlighting some of the mistakes he made along the way to building value.

Ask yourself:

• Who do you want to be as an agency? Enterprise, SMB or boutique?
• What are you comfortable managing? Only take on clients that fit the size of your company. Keep your reputation in mind. If you take on the big client that walks in the door, your inability to service them could ruin your agency.
• Don't be afraid to share your knowledge, both with clients and the industry. Post on blogs. Write articles that give real opinions. Tell your clients what you know, even if it isn't related to the project. A whole new line of services could come out of your communication.

In 1999, when Impaqt first began, the client target was anyone that willing to talk about search. The business grew by educating clients in the sales process, not by saying we're the right company for you. As the industry grew, they built their brand through industry events and networking with analysts. He echoes the fact that the people in the company are one of the greatest assets and they have a 90 percent employee retention rate. Along the way, the major challenges were growth for growth's sake and too many clients in too little time. The challenges were the worst and the best thing to happen for the company.

Q&A
You all mentioned the value of employees. How do you keep staff?

Bruce says that early on in the company, they sometimes discovered newly hired SEOs were spammers. Instead, they started bringing in young people, recently out of school, and put them in mentoring environments. What was created was a community of friends that support each other. It also helps that they don't have a vertical, so a variety of projects keeps things interesting.

Sean says that employee skill set is the number one advantage when getting a new company off the ground. Salary isn't going to be the key enticement. Instead, they carved out ownership for employee stock incentives.

Bruce, can you shed some light on the methodology of valuation?

He's seen consistent numbers, like 11.3, in newsletters and articles. He's seen the number go as high as 20. It's going to matter if it's been consistent and how long it's been going on, as well as other factors, but that's the average.

When your name is on the door, how do you address the issue to a potential buyer that you are the star?

Bruce says he's been trying hard to make it less of a one-star organization. Through delegation, he says that the company will be ready to be acquired if he can be out of the office for two weeks every month and still see things running smoothly.

What percent of your time do you spend thinking about valuation in the company?

Bruce says that he does not spend a lot of time thinking about that. Matt's in the same place, saying that he's not looking to get out of the business and so doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about valuation. Instead, it's determining whether they can afford to continue being the company they want to be. He says he thinks about value rather than valuation. And Sean agrees, saying that he spends 90 percent of his time thinking about the value of the company.

Is the demand for SEM reaching a plateau?

All the speakers agree that at least 60 to 70 percent of the potential clients haven't thought about SEM or aren't doing it right. Upcoming growth may be seen in local and mobile.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 3/08 at 3:28 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Branding, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, smxseattle08

Organic Track: Bot Herding

Back from lunch and Rand Fishkin is moderating a star studded panel. We have Adam Audette (AudettaMedia), Hamlet Batista (Nemedia S.A.), Nathan Buggia (Live Search Webmaster Center), Priyank Garg (Yahoo Search), Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Evan Roseman (Google) and Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts).

[Ooo, we're rocking the Tears for Fears. It's pretty sweet. SMX always pulls out the good stuff. I'm really loving the Organic room this time around. The first row is literally two feet from the stage. I could totally throw my mini bottle of water and hit Adam Audette square in the face. Not that I would. I really like Adam. Maybe I'll take out Rand instead?

Holy Jesus. I almost just kicked over the big projector that the speakers watch. Blogger Fail.]

Rand gets this whole show going. He says he's moderating. He's wearing a tie. I don't think I've ever seen Rand wear a tie. Up first is Michael Gray.

Michael says that when you first buy a house you're poor. Over time you make more money and can afford to air condition your house. But no matter how much money you have you'll never air condition your mail box because you have a better use for your money.

Similarly, you have a Web site. You don't have a lot of links. You don't have a lot of Page Rank. You're not going to send that PR to your Contact page because it's not a good use of your resources. You want to send your PR to the pages that make the most sense for you. You want to send it to the places that will give you the most sales and the most leads.

PageRank and link equity, how much do you have: Many Web sites, especially smaller or new Web sites, don't have a lot of PR. They have to use and maximize what little they have and direct it to the right places that make the most difference.

Deciding What to Sculpt Out

Who wants to rank for privacy policy, terms of use or contact us?

Locations: Unless you are multi-location business, put your address in the footer and sculpt out the Locations page.

Company Bios: Unless you are involved in reputation management scandal, sculpt them out.

Site-wide footer links, advertising stats, rates and legal pages.

How to Sculpt:

• Nofollow: Quick and easy, but may be a signal to search engines that an SEO or advanced webmaster is involved.
• JavaScript: Old school, relies on client side technology, currently bots don't crawl it but this may change in the future.
• Form pages, jump pages, redirect pages - More complex to implement and maintain. Search engines currently don't follow them but that may change

Be Consistent. If you're going to nofollow something, do it with all of your links and then do it in your robots.txt. Don't block them one way and then allow them in another. This will account for outside links and any spider or search engine quirks. He says that he's seen most benefits on mid-level sites where they sculpted out blocks of 20-50 non-conversion based pages.

Do it now or wait for a rainy day? He says do it now. If you have any critical or serious issues this can take a backseat. Otherwise, unless you have a large or very complex site, PageRank sculpting is a 1-2 day project at the most for any CMS or template based site. It's easier to get it right now than to get back and fix after you launch.

Adam Audette is up to give us 8 arguments against sculpting PageRank with nofollow. He used to do it but he's now starting to slow it down. They use it far, far less.

More Control: Have a mechanism at the link level to control spider behavior is good. However, we don't know enough. We don't know how much PR we have on a domain. We don't know how much we have on a page or how much a link takes off a page. We're attempting to control the flow of internal PR but we don't know how much we have. We don't know how much it fluctuates. It's imprecise. It's like using a precise surgical tool while blindfolded.

It's a Distraction: There are a lot of things we can do to make our sites better. Matt Cutts has said that sculpting with nofollow is a second order effect. It can also mask other issues - focus of a page, keyword dilution, user experience, etc.

Management Headaches: When you have a large site you may have many departments working on a page. What rules are in place? It's confusing. Why are 5 links nofollow'd on this page? How do you preserve it?

It's a Band-Aid: People are using it to try and address a symptom they're seeing on a site. They're not taking care of the problem.

Where's the User?: Think of a site with tons of PageRank feeding that into mediocre places, thereby raising those pages in the SERPs. Are we giving more power to high authority domains?

Open to Abuse: Every tool is open to abuse, but you can think of all kinds of creative ways to use nofollow. When will nofollow start being abused and how will the search engines react? Matt Cutts says it's okay, but there are good and bad ways to use a technique. He may look at your site and think you're using it in a bad way.

Too Focused on Search Engines: Advanced search engine optimization has always been about what's right for your users and what's right for search engines. Too much use of the nofollow puts too much focus on search (specifically on Google). Does this help your users? Would you do this if the search engines didn't exist?

There's No Standard: There are multiple definitions for nofollow and each engine may treat it differently. Nofollow started for blog comment spam. Then it went to paid links. Now it's to control your internal PR. What's it going to be next? It moves too much.

[Rand shares a detail but says you can't ask him how he knows it. He says 5 percent of pages on the Web currently have a nofollow'd link on them and 85+ percent are using it internally.]

Stephan Spencer is up.

Duplicate content is rampant on blogs. Herd bots to permalink URLs and lead in everywhere else. (Archives by date, category pages, tag pages, home page, etc). You can use optional excerpts to mitigate that a bit. [Whatever that means.] It requires you to revise your Main Index Template theme file.

Stephan says to include a signature link at bottom of your post/article. Link to original article/post permalink.

On ecommerce sites, duplicate content is rampant because of manufacturer-provided product descriptions, inconsistent order of query string parameters, guided navigation, pagination within categories, tracking parameters, etc. Selectively append tracking codes for humans with white hat cloaking or use JavaScript to append the codes.

Pagination not only creates many pages that share the same keyword theme, but it also creates very large categories with product listings not getting crawled. Thus lowered product page indexation. Do you herd bots through keyword-rich subcategory links or View All links or both? How to display numbered links? You have to test because your mileage will vary.

PageRank Leakage: If you're using Robots.txt Disallow, you're probably leaking PageRank. Robots.txt Disallow and Meta Roberts Noindex both accumulate and pass PageRank.

Stephan talks about the magic of regular expressions/pattern matching and I'm not even going to pretend that I followed any of it.

Some expressions I did manage to catch:

Mod_rewrite specifics
Proxy page using P flat
QSA flag is for when you don't want query string parameters dropped.
L flag saves you on server processing

Got a huge pile of rewrites? Use rewritemap

He talks about conditional redirects. It's way black hat. I'm covering my eyes.

Error Pages: Drop them out of the index by returning a 200 status code instead so that the spiders follow the links. Then include a Meta robots no-index so the error page itself doesn't get indexed. Or do a 301 redirect to something valuable and dynamically include a small error notice.

Hamlet Batista is up to talk about white hat cloaking.

Good vs. Bad cloaking is all about your intention. Always weigh the risks versus the rewards of cloaking. Ask permission - or just don't call it cloaking. Don't call it cloaking. Call it IP Delivery.

When is it practical to cloak?

The main idea of cloaking is about making more of your content accessible to the search engines. Parts of that can be because you're using a search unfriendly CMS, if you have content behind forms or if you're a rich media site. It can be that you're a membership site (free vs. paid). He's also going to talk about using it for site structure improvements, geolocation/IP delivery, and multivariate testing.

Practical Scenario 1: Proprietary Web site management systems that are not search-engine friendly.

Regular users see URLs with many dynamic parameters, but the search engines see friendly URLs. Your users will see URLs with session IDs, but with simple cloaking the search engines see URLs without session IDs. Your users will see URLs with canonicalization issues. The search engines see URLs with consistent naming convention. Your users see missing Titles and Meta Descriptions. The search engines see automatically generated tiles and Meta Descriptions.

Practical Scenario 2: Sites built in Flash, Silverlight or any other rich media technology.

With cloaking, you can give users a completely Flash site and the search engines will see a text representation of the graphical, motion and audio elements.

Practical Scenario 3: Membership sites.

Search users see a snippet of premium content on the SERPs and when they land on the site they are faced with a reg form. Members see the same content the search engine spiders see.

Practical Scenario 4: Sites requiring massive site structure changes to improve index penetration.

Regular users follow the structure designed for ease of navigation. Search engine robots follow a link structure designed for ease of crawling and deeper index penetration of the most important content.

Practical Scenario 5: Geotargeting

Practical Scenario 6: Split testing organic search landing pages.

How do we cloak? In order to cloak you have to ID the robot and then deliver the content. You can do that via a few methods:

• Robot detection by HTTP cookie test.
• Robot detection by IP address
• Robot detection by double DNS check
• Robot detection by visitor behavior

Hamlet runs out of time and Rand nearly yanks him off the stage. Poor Hamlet. He didn't get to finish his presentation, but Rand was just doing this job.

Priyank Garg is up.

Robot Exclusion Protocol: Allows publishers to tell Robots access permissions for their content.

Robots.txt: Introduced in '90s. Defacto standard followed by all major search engines. Allow site level directives for access to content.

META Tags: Page level tags. Allow finer controls.

What is the standard? Does everyone work the same? Priyank says the engines are working together to make standards across all engines. The engines all support page level tags like HTML Meta, noindex, nofollow, nosnipper, no archive, noopd.

They want to have all the engines come out with this at the same time so there is no confusion.

In the Q&A, Evan Roseman says they don't view uses of nofollow as some type of "flag" for SEOs. They're standard of nofollow has not changed over the years. People have simply begun using it in new ways.

Nathan Buggia says a nofollow'd link is viewed as any other link. MSN Live does not support nofollow. [Update: Nathan retracts his statement later on, much to the disappointment of bloggers everywhere.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 3/08 at 3:00 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Microsoft, SEM Events, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, liveblog, smxseattle08

Blow Your Mind: Link Building Techniques

We're jamming to Avril Lavigne in the Organic Track room and the man, the myth, walks in. Matt Cutts strolls in with a Red Bull and big smile. It looks like he really enjoys these gatherings. We'll be seeing more of him later at the You&A tonight. Until then, how about some mind blowing link building techniques?

Greg Boser is moderating this one. The speakers are Jay Young, Owner of Link Fish Media; Stephan Spencer, President and Founder of Netconcepts; Roger Montti, Founder of Martinibuster.com; and stepping in for the absent Rae Hoffman, Todd Friesen, aka Oilman and VP of Search Strategies for Range Online Media.

Greg is welcoming everyone and says it's good to see some familiar spammers in the audience.

Roger Montti's up for the first presentation. His presentation will focus on .edu link hunting. He says .edus are always white hat because you can never have too many. The two main link building initiatives are finding industry heavyweight backlinks and charitable opportunities. To find the big guys, do a Goole search on Adwords to find who's bidding.

.Edu links are not special, Roger says. They aren't better than others and he'd rather buy a high ranking quality link than get a handful of .edus. However, the benefits of .edus is that they are usually in good neighborhoods and they are free. Disadvantages are that they may not be authoritative and the page may be a total link fest.

To find possible industry heavyweight backlinks, check the backlinks of the largest, most important companies in your sector. Try the commands linkdomain:example.com site:.edu"bookmarks" and linkdomain:example.com site:edu "links". In these results, look at the context, see where your link would fit, and contact the author. Look out for outdated pages.

The commands linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "favorite sites" and linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "your product or services" will also get you a list of some situations where you might want to be included.

For example, if you're looking for charitable opportunities, type the following into the search bar: linkdomain:example.com site:.edu sponsors. If you give a few hundred dollars to the organization you could be represented on the page with your logo and a link.

Jay Young is introduced as the award winner for the coolest shirt. It's magenta and purple and lime green. Jay says his shirt is going to be louder than he is. He says that everyone's aware of the moral controversy that is link building, but putting that aside, he's going to let us know what works.

His first mind blowing tip: grow some balls. You'll need them. Profound, Jay. When you're looking to buy links, he says directories are always the place to start. Despite the big hits taken by some directories recently, he says that there are still a number of strong, trusted directories: Best of the Web, Yahoo, Dmoz, Joe Ant, Blog Catalogue.

He also looks for links from non-profit sponsorships. Like Roger said, they are arguably editorial, tax deductible, normally in good neighborhoods, and help a good cause. "SEOcialists" are another place to look, like Digg, Reditt and Stumble. If you get a good Digg campaign going, you can create thousands of organic links.

As another method, Jay says that brokers have had some stigma attached to them, but that using big name text link brokers works. Blog advertisers, smaller brokers, specialty brokers and amateur brokers can all get you links. He knows that some SEOs are skeptical and Jay says his main goal is enacting attitudinal change in the industry.

The next slide says this: "Link Bait. Call Rand." No joke. He says the recent story of the guy who's made up news story that got picked up by major news outlets was brilliant. He says that when you became a marketer you gave up morals. Ha. [Heh but ew too. --Susan]

He says buying links is essential to the success of a competitive campaign. Be as relevant and natural as possible (but don't kill yourself over it). Vary your anchor text and use co-citation. Co-citation is a technique that he's most recently adopted.

Now Jay's moving on to "darker methods (that still work)". Comment spam, trackback spam, reciprocal links, three ways, and link farms. He's getting a lot of laughs. Disclaimer: Bruce Clay, Inc. in no way endorses this presentation. I've censored the details for your own good.

Next are good techniques that are out of the box. Widgets, template sponsorship (find the most popular WordPress templates, contact the creator, and pay him to put your link on the bottom of the template), contests (give away an iPhone!).

Jay's got some bonus tips for us. Hire bartenders. They're hard workers, technically inclined, and can make you a drink... Avoid buying links from forums. Avoid any site with hidden links by scanning the source code. Use moderation and common sense. If the competition is too clean, mess it up a little by pointing dirty links to them. Uh oh.

Last slide: "Stop being afraid of this guy" with a big photo of Matt Cutts. Ya, that first bit of advice he gave us is not in short supply with this guy.

Stephan Spencer's up now. He's a big follower of PageRank and doesn't really buy that it's fairy dust. He recommends building a link building spider. He's talking fast and flipping back and forth between slides.

He recommends looking for sites that are one-click away from Google as well as sites with very high PageRank. Don't forget to link build your existing links, as well. Mine your existing backlinks for opportunities to revise the anchor text. There are some good tools for locating backlinks, and then you can start building that relationship.

Comment on blogs that allow follow of comment links, like Blogmaveric.com. Submit to blog carnivals, host one or start a new one. (That sounds fun!) Contribute to a group blog or be a guest blogger. Unlike the last speaker, this guy's eager to get cozy with Matt, saying that the next tip is not his own and could be considered gray. Look for bloggers desperate for cash, and buy a link on their site.

Along with networking online with bloggers, register and attend conferences so you can network in person, too. Contribute to conference wikis of conferences you've attended. Give free talks at libraries and campuses or get involved with local meetups and get a profile page on that site. Invite the W3C to speak at your event and get a link from them to your event.

Contribute to Wikipedia and other wikis. Contributing top or creating a prominent entry will give you credibility. You can also create your own wiki. Viral videos are another good way to build links. Maybe try quizzes, personality tests, and again, widgets. Write a WordPress plugin. Write a Firefox extension. Release software as Open Source. Many, many suggestions -- so what are you waiting for?!

Stephan's detailed and info-packed Powerpoint can be downloaded from www.netconcepts.com/learn/blow-your-mind.ppt.

In the Q&A Todd says that a major thing to remember about getting links is that you don't want to stand out in your market/vertical. You just want to be a little bit better. So if your competition is very aggressive in getting links, you should be too.

Phew! Not bad for my first time, eh? [Nicely done, V. --Susan]

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 3/08 at 12:25 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in SEM Events, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, smxseattle08

Winning From The Start: Getting Ad Copy Right

And suddenly I'm in PPC land and totally bitter about it. I had such a sweet seat on the Organic side and had to give it up. I'm knocking people over to reclaim it later. Huzzah!

Jeffrey K. Rohrs is moderating this morning's panel of speakers that includes Benu Aggarwal (Milestone Internet Marketing), Jason Dorn (Yahoo, Inc.), Mona Elesseily (Page Zero Media), Brian Kaminski (iProspect) and David Szetela (Clix Marketing).

Up first is Jason Dorn.

When it comes to creating compelling ads there are three things to focus on.

1. Ad Group Structure: Poor ad group structure and keyword selection make up about 90 percent of the failed creatives. The keywords have to match what's being said. Don't target the term [mothers day] when your ad is about dog poop removal. The more numerous and dissonant the keywords in a given ad group, the more difficult it will be to write compelling creative or to receive meaningful dialogue.


2. Thinking about your engagement as a dialogue with the searcher: A searcher does a query and asks a question. You have two seconds to make an impression. It is crucial that your creative looks like you spent time and energy creating it. It should be clear, relevant and call out a competitive edge. Most clarity issues stem from carelessness. Even simple errors can cripple your ability to compete. Consider the lawyer who spelled it as "lawer" in his creative. What message does that send?


3. Tactical Stuffs: Be as specific as your searcher about your offer - match the scope of their interest. Only narrow scope to qualify clicks. Make it relevant to their query. Use Alt Text to smooth over areas where including the keyword is not feasible.

Call out a competitive edge. Your competitive edge isn't always what you think it is. Determine what it is by looking at the competition. If everybody is talking about the same "edge", than it's not an edge. A differentiator is only important when it's important to the searcher. What "bonus" is in it for them?

Use all the tools at your disposal to win.

Mona Elesselly is up to look at the agency side. She asks if people are enjoying the Seattle rain. Actually, Mona, yes, yes I am.

Understanding Your Market

Go in the search engines and search for the terms that you're bidding on. Look at the ads actually coming up. You want to differentiate yourself. Do they all have free shipping offers? Play with your wording and see if it makes a difference. Testing is key and you really want to set yourself apart from your competition.

Some tools to use:

• MSN Labs Search Funnel Tool: Allows users to see the terms that were searched before or after a query. If someone looks for "sofa", you may find that after they searched for "furniture", "chair", etc. It tells you what other terms to include in your creatives
• MSN Labs Seasonality Tool: Get a gauge as to when consumers are most tuned in to getting marketing messages.
• SpyFu.com: Find out how much competitors are spending on advertising. The tool provides a lot of information.

Tip 1: Cater Ads to Different Buyer Needs -- Try testing price, information that reassures buyers, and time-sensitive offers.

Tip 2: Ad copy should b